Part 14 (1/2)

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!

O anything, of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears; What is it else? a madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

In commenting on Romeo, who in his love for Rosaline indulges in emotion for emotion's sake, and ”stimulates his fancy with the sought-out phrases, the curious ant.i.theses of the amorous dialect of the period,” Dowden writes:

”Mrs. Jameson has noticed that in _All's Well that Ends Well_ (I., 180-89), Helena mockingly reproduces this style of amorous ant.i.thesis. Helena, who lives so effectively in the world of fact, is contemptuous toward all unreality and affectation.”

Now, it is quite true that expressions like ”cold fire” and ”sick health” sound unreal and affected to sober minds, and it is also true that many poets have exercised their emulous ingenuity in inventing such ant.i.theses just for the fun of the thing and because it has been the fas.h.i.+on to do so. Nevertheless, with all their artificiality, they were hinting at an emotional phenomenon which actually exists.

Romantic love is in reality a state of mind in which cold and heat may and do alternate so rapidly that ”cold fire” seems the only proper expression to apply to such a mixed feeling. It is literally true that, as Bailey sang, ”the sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love;”

literally true that ”the sweets of love are washed with tears,” as Carew wrote, or, as H.K. White expressed it, ”'Tis painful, though 'tis sweet to love.” A man who has actually experienced the feeling of uncertain love sees nothing unreal or affected in Tennyson's

The cruel madness of love The honey of poisoned flowers,

or in Drayton's

'Tis nothing to be plagued in h.e.l.l But thus in heaven tormented,

or in Dryden's

I feed a flame within, which so torments me That it both pains my heart, and yet enchants me: 'Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it, That I had rather die than once remove it,

or in Juliet's

Good-night! good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.

This mysterious mixture of moods, constantly maintained through the alternations of hope and doubt, elation and despair,

And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng

as Coleridge puts it; or

Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet; Where pleasures mixed with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear

as Swift rhymes it, is thus seen to be one of the essential and most characteristic ingredients of modern romantic love.

COURTs.h.i.+P AND IMAGINATION

Here, again, the question confronts us, How far down among the strata of human life can we find traces of this ingredient of love? Do we find it among the Eskimos, for instance? Nansen relates (II., 317), that

”In the old Greenland days marriage was a simple and speedy affair. If a man took a fancy to a girl, he merely went to her home or tent, caught her by the hair or anything else which offered a hold, and dragged her off to his dwelling without further ado.”

Nay, in some cases, even this unceremonious ”courts.h.i.+p” was perpetrated by proxy! The details regarding the marriage customs of lower races already cited in this volume, with the hundreds more to be given in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader that primitive courts.h.i.+p--where there is any at all--is habitually a ”simple and speedy affair”--not always as simple and speedy as with Nansen's Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and play of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains. Fancy the difference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I., 161), ”thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn,” and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the inferno because a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him so happy that he would not change places with a king, unless his beloved were to be queen. Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguish and rapture, because they have no imagination. It is only when the imagination comes into play that we can look for the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, that help to make up the sum and substance of romantic love.