Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys ripens
into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the first
sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which shall lose all
particular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is
in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of
human life; which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at
one period and works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race,
pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy
into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds to
his character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and gives
permanence to human society.
The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the blood
seems to require that in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth
and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing experience, one must not
be too old. The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savor of a mature
philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore
I know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those
who compose the Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable censors
I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this passion of
which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes not the old, or
rather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged
participators of it not less than the tender maiden, though in a different and
nobler sort. For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook
of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart,
glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women,
upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all
nature with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt to
describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it
at the first period will lose some of its later, he who paints it at the last,
some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that by patience and the
Muses’ aid we may attain to that inward view of the law which shall
describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it shall commend
itself to the eye, at whatever angle beholden.
And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and lingering
adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in
history. For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of
man is not, to his imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certain
stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go
back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have
given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas!
I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the
remembrances of budding joy and cover every beloved name. Every thing is
beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour,
if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In
the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—dwell care,
and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the
rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to names, and
persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.
The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of
personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to
know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the history of this
sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over
these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and
nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any
passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them
before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or
betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and
take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a
lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are
nature’s most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in
the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the
school-house door;—but to-day he comes running into the entry, and meets
one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, and
instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from him infinitely, and
was a sacred precinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one
alone distances him; and these two little neighbors, that were so close just
now, have learned to respect each other’s personality. Or who can avert
his eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who
go into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk
half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the
village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in, and without any
coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty
gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between
them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations, what with their
fun and their earnest, about Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to
the party, and who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school
would begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by
that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a
sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident to
scholars and great men.
I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the
intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost
shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are
love’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the
young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted
to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts.
For though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those
of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison
and putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see after thirty years, yet
the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a
wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seem
to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in
their life’s book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein
affection contrived to give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its
own truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking
backward they may find that several things which were not the charm have more
reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But
be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the
visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things
anew; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face
of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied
enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and
the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of
memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one
was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove,
a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary
and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in
his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him;
for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like
other images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, “enamelled in
fire,” and make the study of midnight:—
“Thou art not gone being gone, where’er thou art,
Thou leav’st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart.”
Thou leav’st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart.”
In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of
days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish
of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter who said of
love,—
“All other pleasures are not worth its pains:”
and when the day was not long enough, but the night too must be consumed in
keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the
generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever and the
stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and the air was coined into song;
when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to
and fro in the streets, mere pictures.
The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and
significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings
now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have
faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass and the
peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with
the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In
the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men:—
“Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
A midnight bell, a passing groan,—
These are the sounds we feed upon.”
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
A midnight bell, a passing groan,—
These are the sounds we feed upon.”
Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet sounds and
sights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he
soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of the
violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and he talks with the brook that
wets his foot.
The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love
music and verse. It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses
under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other
circumstances.
The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment;
it makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and
abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have
the countenance of the beloved object. In giving him to another it still more
gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener
purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer
appertain to his family and society; he is somewhat; he is a
person; he is a soul.
And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is
thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now
celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases
everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover
cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower,
so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself; and she
teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her
steps. Her existence makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other
persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by
carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that
the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues.
For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to
her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or
her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance
except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of
birds.
The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the
nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched
with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this
dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the
imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to
any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as it
seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of
transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and
foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline
doves’-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the
most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all
attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify,
when he said to music, “Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which
in all my endless life I have not found, and shall not find.” The same
fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then
beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of
criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but
demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of
doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition
from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is
not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. And
of poetry the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it
astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning
it Landor inquires “whether it is not to be referred to some purer state
of sensation and existence.”
In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself when it
dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it
suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the
beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he
were Cæsar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the
splendors of a sunset.
Hence arose the saying, “If I love you, what is that to you?” We
say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It
is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself and
can never know.
This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient writers
delighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went
roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own out of which it
came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and
unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which are but shadows
of real things. Therefore the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul,
that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the
celestial good and fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex
runs to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and
intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of that
which indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.
If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross,
and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow; body
being unable to fulfil the promise which beauty holds out; but if, accepting
the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the
soul passes through the body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the
lovers contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then they
pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and
by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by
shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation with that
which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to
a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he
passes from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one
beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true
and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he attains a clearer
sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted from this world,
and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able,
without offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give
to each all help and comfort in curing the same. And beholding in many souls
the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is
divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends
to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on
this ladder of created souls.
Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The
doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius taught it,
so have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition
and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words
that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so
that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when
this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the
hope and affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing
but a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no other aim.
But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In the
procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like
the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays
of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses
and domestics, on the house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household
acquaintance, on politics and geography and history. But things are ever
grouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood,
size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and
effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the
circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the
step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even
love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every
day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who
are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual
intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new,
quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the
irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance
to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth
and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly
embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled:—
“Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought.”
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought.”
Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine.
Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more, than Juliet,—than
Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are all contained in
this form full of soul, in this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in
endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone,
they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that other
see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same
emotion, that now delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and adding up
costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discovering
that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beautiful,
the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of
humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to
all. Love prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power in behalf of this dear
mate. The union which is thus effected and which adds a new value to every atom
in nature—for it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of
relation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter
element—is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry,
protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that
dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and
puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul which is
in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities,
defects and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise,
expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of
loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed.
They appear and reappear and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits
the sign and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection.
Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of
all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each and
acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature
and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each
other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly
wrought into the texture of man, of woman:—
“The person love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it.”
Like manna, has the taste of all in it.”
The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that inhabit
this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also.
By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known
as such; they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in
either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a
thorough good understanding. They resign each other without complaint to the
good offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time,
and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a
cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each
other’s designs. At last they discover that all which at first drew them
together,—those once sacred features, that magical play of
charms,—was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by
which the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and the heart
from year to year is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first,
and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at these aims with which two
persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up
in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not
wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early
infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower,
and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody
they bring to the epithalamium.
Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor
partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of
increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby learners.
That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections
are but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the
affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the
affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person
or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again,—its
overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves
and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character and
blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we
can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the
end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must be
succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.
