Part 31 (1/2)
”Sentiment has a peculiar place between thought and feeling, in which it also approaches the meaning of principle. It is more than that feeling which is sensation or emotion, by containing more of thought and by being _more lofty_, while it contains too much feeling to be merely thought, and it _has large influence over the will_; for example, the sentiment of patriotism; the sentiment of honor; the world is ruled by sentiment. The thought in a sentiment is often that of _duty_, and is penetrated and _exalted_ by feeling.”
Herbert Spencer sums up the matter concisely _(Psych_., II., 578) when he speaks of ”that remoteness from sensations and appet.i.tes and from ideas of such sensations and appet.i.tes which is the common trait of the feelings we call sentiments.”
It is hardly necessary to point out that in our Baghdad girl's love-affairs there is no ”remoteness from sensations and appet.i.tes,”
no ”illumination of the senses by the soul,” no ”intellectualized emotion,” no ”thought made affectionate, sympathetic, moral.” But there is in it, as I have said, a touch of sentimentality. If sentiment is properly defined as ”higher feeling,” sentimentality is ”_affectation_ of fine or tender feeling or exquisite sensibility.”
Heartless coquetry, prudery, mock modesty, are bosom friends of sentimentality. While sentiment is the n.o.blest thing in the world, sentimentality is its counterfeit, its caricature; there is something theatrical, operatic, painted-and-powdered about it; it differs from sentiment as astrology differs from astronomy, alchemy from chemistry, the sham from the real, hypocrisy from sincerity, artificial posing from natural grace, genuine affection from selfish attachment.
RARITY OF TRUE LOVE
Sentimentality, as I have said, precedes sentiment in the history of love, and it has been a special characteristic of certain periods, like that of the Alexandrian Greeks and their Roman imitators, to whom we shall recur in a later chapter, and the mediaeval Troubadours and Minnesingers. To the present day sentimentality in love is so much more abundant than sentiment that the adjective sentimental is commonly used in an uncomplimentary sense, as in the following pa.s.sage from one of Krafft-Ebing's books (_Psch. s.e.x_., 9):
”Sentimental love runs the risk of degenerating into caricature, especially in cases where the sensual ingredient is weak.... Such love has a flat, saccharine tang. It is apt to become positively ludicrous, whereas in other cases the manifestations of this strongest of all feelings inspire in us sympathy, respect, awe, according to circ.u.mstances.”
Steele speaks in _The Lover_ (23, No. 5) of the extraordinary skill of a poet in making a loose people ”attend to a Pa.s.sion which they never, or that very faintly, felt in their own Bosoms.” La Rochefoucauld wrote: ”It is with true love as with ghosts; everybody speaks of it, but few have seen it.” A writer in _Science_ expressed his belief that romantic love, as described in my first book, could really be experienced only by men of genius. I think that this makes the circle too small; yet in these twelve years of additional observation I have come to the conclusion that even at this stage of civilization only a small proportion of men and women are able to experience full-fledged romantic love, which seems to require a special emotional or esthetic gift, like the talent for music. A few years ago I came across the following in the London _Tidbits_ which echoes the sentiments of mult.i.tudes:
”Latour, who sent a pathetic complaint the other day that though he wished to do so he was unable to fall in love, has called forth a sympathetic response from a number of readers of both s.e.xes. These ladies and gentlemen write to say that they also, like Latour, cannot understand how it is that they are not able to feel any experience of tender pa.s.sion which they read about so much in novels, and hear about in actual life.”
At the same time there are not a few men of genius, too, who never felt true love in their own hearts. Herder believed that Goethe was not capable of genuine love, and Grimm, too, thought that Goethe had never experienced a self-absorbing pa.s.sion. Tolstoi must have been ever a stranger to genuine love, for to him it seems a degrading thing even in marriage. A suggestive and frank confession may be found in the literary memoirs of Goncourt.[122] At a small gathering of men of letters Goncourt remarked that hitherto love had not been studied scientifically in novels. Zola thereupon declared that love was not a specific emotion; that it does not affect persons so absolutely as the writers say; that the phenomena characterizing it are also found in friends.h.i.+p, in patriotism, and that the intensity of this emotion is due entirely to the antic.i.p.ation of carnal enjoyment. Turgenieff objected to these views; in his opinion love is a sentiment which has a unique color of its own--a quality differentiating it from all other sentiments--eliminating the lover's own personality, as it were. The Russian novelist obviously had a conception of the purity of love, for Goncourt reports him as ”speaking of his first love for a woman as a thing entirely spiritual, having nothing in common with materiality.”
And now follows Goncourt's confession:
”In all this, the thing to regret is that neither Flaubert ... nor Zola, nor myself, have ever been very seriously in love and that we are therefore unable to describe love.
Turgenieff alone could have done that, but he lacks precisely the critical sense which we could have exercised in this matter had we been in love after his fas.h.i.+on.”
The vast majority of the human race has not yet got beyond the sensual stage of amorous evolution, or realized the difference between sentimentality and sentiment. There is much food for thought in this sentence from Henry James's charming essay on France's most poetic writer--Theophile Gautier:
”It has seemed to me rather a painful exhibition of the prurience of the human mind that in most of the notices of the author's death (those at least published in England and America), this work alone [_Mile. de Maupin_] should have been selected as the critic's text.”
Readers are interested only in emotions with which they are familiar by experience. Howells's refined love-scenes have often been sneered at by men who like raw whiskey but cannot appreciate the delicate bouquet of Chambertin. As Professor Ribot remarks: in the higher regions of science, art, religion, and morals there are emotions so subtle and elevated that
”not more than one individual in a hundred thousand or even in a million can experience them. The others are strangers to them, or do not know of their existence except vaguely, from what they hear about them. It is a promised land, which only the select can enter.”
I believe that romantic love is a sentiment which more than one person in a million can experience, and more than one in a hundred thousand.
How many more, I shall not venture to guess. All the others know love only as a sensual craving. To them ”I love you” means ”I long for you, covet you, am eager to enjoy you”; and this feeling is not love of another but self-love, more or less disguised--the kind of ”love”
which makes a young man shoot a girl who refuses him. The mediaeval writer Leon Hebraeus evidently knew of no other when he defined love as ”a desire to enjoy that which is good”; nor Spinoza when he defined it as _laetetia concomitante idea externae causae_--a pleasure accompanied by the thought of its external cause.
MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE
Having distinguished romantic or sentimental love from sentimentality on one side and sensuality on the other, it remains to show how it differs from conjugal affection.
HOW ROMANTIC LOVE IS METAMORPHOSED
On hearing the words ”love letters,” does anybody ever think of a man's letters to his wife? No more than of his letters to his mother.
He may love both his wife and his mother dearly, but when he writes love letters he writes them to his sweetheart. Thus, public opinion and every-day literary usage clearly recognize the difference between romantic love and conjugal affection. Yet when I maintained in my first book that romantic love differs as widely from conjugal affection as maternal love differs from friends.h.i.+p; that romantic love is almost as modern as the telegraph, the railway, and the electric light; and that perhaps the main reasons why no one had antic.i.p.ated me in an attempt to write a book to prove this, were that no distinction had heretofore been made between conjugal and romantic love, and that the apparent occurrence of n.o.ble examples of conjugal attachment among the ancient Greeks had obscured the issue--there was a chorus of dissenting voices. ”The distinction drawn by him between romantic and conjugal love,” wrote one critic, ”seems more fanciful than real.” ”He will not succeed,” wrote another, ”in convincing anybody that romantic and conjugal love differ in kind instead of only in degree or place”; while a third even objected to my theory as ”essentially immoral!”
Mr. W.D. Howells, on the other hand, accepted my distinction, and in a letter to me declared that he found conjugal affection an even more interesting field of study than romantic love. Why, indeed, should anyone be alarmed at the distinction I made? Is not a man's feeling toward his sweetheart different from his feeling toward his mother or sister? Why then should it be absurd or ”immoral” to maintain that it differs from his feeling toward his wife? What I maintain is that romantic love disappears gradually, to be replaced, as a rule, by conjugal affection, which is sometimes a less intense, at other times a more intense, feeling than the emotions aroused during courts.h.i.+p.
The process may be compared to a modulation in music, in which some of the tones in a chord are retained while others are displaced by new ones. Such modulations are delightful, and the new harmony may be as beautiful as the old. A visitor to Wordsworth's home wrote: