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ISBN: 9781537823126
ON LOVE
OF LOVE
MY AIM IS TO COMPREHEND that passion, of which every sincere development has a character of beauty.
There are four kinds of love.
1. Passion-love—that of the Portuguese nun, of Héloïse for Abelard, of Captain de Vésel, of Sergeant de Cento.
2. Gallant love—that which ruled in Paris towards 1760, to be found in the memoirs and novels of the period, in Crébillon, Lauzun, Duclos, Marmontel, Chamfort, Mme. d’Épinay, etc. etc.
‘Tis a picture in which everything, to the very shadows, should be rose-colour, in which may enter nothing disagreeable under any pretext whatsoever, at the cost of a lapse of etiquette, of good taste, of refinement, etc. A man of breeding foresees all the ways of acting, that he is likely to adopt or meet with in the different phases of this love. True love is often less refined; for that in which there is no passion and nothing unforeseen, has always a store of ready wit: the latter is a cold and pretty miniature, the former a picture by the Carracci. Passion-love carries us away in defiance of all our interests, gallant love manages always to respect them. True, if we take from this poor love its vanity, there is very little left: once stripped, it is like a tottering convalescent, scarcely able to drag himself along.
3. Physical love. Out hunting—a fresh, pretty country girl crosses your path and escapes into the wood. Everyone knows the love founded on this kind of pleasure: and all begin that way at sixteen, however parched and unhappy the character.
4. Vanity-love. The vast majority of men, especially in France, desire and have a fashionable woman, in the same way as a man gets a fine horse, as something which the luxury of a young man demands. Their vanity more or less flattered, more or less piqued, gives birth to transports of feelings. Sometimes there is also physical love, but by no means always: often there is not so much as physical pleasure. A duchess is never more than thirty for a bourgeois, said the Duchesse de Chaulnes, and those admitted to the Court of that just man, king Lewis of Holland, recall with amusement a pretty woman from the Hague, who could not help finding any man charming who was Duke or Prince. But true to the principle of monarchy, as soon as a Prince arrived at Court, the Duke was dismissed: she was, as it were, the decoration of the diplomatic body.
The happiest case of this uninspiring relationship is that in which to physical pleasure is added habit. In that case store of memories makes it resemble love a little; there is the pique of self-esteem and sadness on being left; then, romance forces upon us its ideas and we believe that we are in love and melancholy, for vanity aspires to credit itself with a great passion. This, at least, is certain that, whatever kind of love be the source of pleasure, as soon as the soul is stirred, the pleasure is keen and its memory alluring, and in this passion, contrary to most of the others, the memory of our losses seems always to exceed the bounds of what we can hope for in the future.
Sometimes, in vanity-love habit or despair of finding better produces a kind of friendship, of all kinds the least pleasant: it prides itself on its security, etc.
Physical pleasure, being of our nature, is known to everybody, but it takes no more than a subordinate position in the eyes of tender and passionate souls. If they raise a laugh in the salons, if often they are made unhappy in the intrigues of society, in return the pleasure which they feel must remain always inaccessible to those hearts, whose beat only vanity and gold can quicken.
A few virtuous and sensitive women have scarcely a conception of physical pleasures: they have so rarely risked them, if one may use the expression, and even then the transports of passion-love caused bodily pleasure almost to be forgotten.
There are men victims and instruments of diabolical pride, of a pride in the style of Alfieri. Those people who, perhaps, are cruel because, like Nero, judging all men after the pattern of their own heart, they are always a-tremble—such people, I say, can attain physical pleasure only in so far as it is accompanied by the greatest possible exercise of pride, in so far, that is to say, as they practise cruelties on the companion of their pleasures. Hence the horrors of Justine. At any rate such men have no sense of security.
To conclude, instead of distinguishing four different forms of love, we can easily admit eight or ten shades of difference. Perhaps mankind has as many ways of feeling as of seeing; but these differences of nomenclature alter in no degree the judgments which follow. Subject to the same laws, all forms of love, which can be seen here below, have their birth, life and death or ascend to immortality.
OF THE BIRTH OF LOVE
This is what takes place in the soul:—
1. Admiration.
2. A voice within says: “What pleasure to kiss, to be kissed.”
3. Hope.
We study her perfections: this is the moment at which a woman should yield to realise the greatest possible physical pleasure. In the case even of the most reserved women, their eyes redden at the moment when hope is conceived: the passion is so strong, the pleasure so keen, that it betrays itself by striking signs.
4. Love is born.
To love—that is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, feeling, through all the senses and as near as possible, an object to be loved and that loves us.
5. The first crystallisation begins.
The lover delights in decking with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love he is sure: he dwells on all the details of his happiness with a satisfaction that is boundless. He is simply magnifying a superb bounty just fallen to him from heaven,—he has no knowledge of it but the assurance of its possession.
Leave the mind of a lover to its natural movements for twenty-four hours, and this is what you will find.
At the salt mines of Salzburg a branch stripped of its leaves by winter is thrown into the abandoned depths of the mine; taken out two or three months later it is covered with brilliant crystals; the smallest twigs, those no stouter than the leg of a sparrow, are arrayed with an infinity of sparkling, dazzling diamonds; it is impossible to recognise the original branch.
I call crystallisation the operation of the mind which, from everything which is presented to it, draws the conclusion that there are new perfections in the object of its love.
A traveller speaks of the freshness of the orange groves at Genoa, on the sea coast, during the scorching days of summer.—What pleasure to enjoy that freshness with her!
One of your friends breaks his arm in the hunting-field.—How sweet to be nursed by a woman you love! To be always with her, to see every moment her love for you, would make pain almost a blessing: and starting from the broken arm of your friend, you conclude with the absolute conviction of the angelic goodness of your mistress. In a word, it is enough to think of a perfection in order to see it in that which you love.
This phenomenon, which I venture to call crystallisation, is the product of human nature, which commands us to enjoy and sends warm blood rushing to our brain; it springs from the conviction that the pleasures of love increase with the perfections of its object, and from the idea: “She is mine.” The savage has no time to go beyond the first step. He is delighted, but his mental activity is employed in following the flying deer in the forest, and with the flesh with which he must as soon as possible repair his forces, or fall beneath the axe of his enemy.
At the other pole of civilisation, I have no doubt that a sensitive woman may come to the point of feeling no physical pleasure but with the man she loves. It is the opposite with the savage. But among civilised peoples, woman has leisure at her disposal, while the savage is so pressed with necessary occupations that he is forced totreat his female as a beast of burden. If the females of many animals are more fortunate, it is because the subsistence of the males is more assured.
But let us leave the backwoods again for Paris. A man of passion sees all perfections in that which he loves. And yet his attention may still be distracted; for the soul has its surfeit of all that is uniform, even of perfect bliss.
This is what happens to distract his attention:—
6. Birth of Doubt.
After ten or twelve glances, or some other series of actions, which can last as well several days as one moment, hopes are first given and later confirmed. The lover, recovered from his first surprise and, accustomed to his happiness or guided by theory, which, always based on the most frequent cases, must only take light women into account—the lover, I say, demands more positive proofs and wishes to press his good fortune.
He is parried with indifference, coldness, even anger, if he show too much assurance—in France a shade of irony, which seems to say: “You are not quite as far as you think.”
A woman behaves in this way, either because she wakes up from a moment of intoxication, and obeys the word of modesty, which she trembles to have infringed, or simply through prudence or coquetry.
The lover comes to doubt of the happiness, to which he looked forward: he scans more narrowly the reasons that he fancied he had for hope.
He would like to fall back upon the other pleasures of life, and finds them annihilated. He is seized with the fear of a terrible disaster, and at the same time with a profound preoccupation.
7. Second crystallisation.
Here begins the second crystallisation, which forms diamonds out of the proofs of the idea—"She loves me.”
The night which follows the birth of doubts, every quarter of an hour, after a moment of fearful unhappiness, the lover says to himself—"Yes, she loves me"—and crystallisation has its turn, discovering new charms. Then doubt with haggard eye grapples him and brings him to a standstill, blank. His heart forgets to beat—"But does she love me?” he says to himself. Between these alternatives, agonising and rapturous, the poor lover feels in his very soul: “She would give me pleasures, which she alone can give me and no one else.”
It is the palpability of this truth, this path on the extreme edge of a terrible abyss and within touch, on the other hand, of perfect happiness, which gives so great a superiority to the second crystallisation over the first.
The lover wanders from moment to moment between these three ideas:—
The most agonising moment of love, still young, is when it sees the false reasoning it has made, and must destroy a whole span of crystallisation.
Doubt is the natural outcome of crystallisation.
OF HOPE
A very small degree of hope is enough to cause the birth of love.
In the course of events hope may fail—love is none the less born. With a firm, daring and impetuous character, and in an imagination developed by the troubles of life, the degree of hope may be smaller: it can come sooner to an end, without killing love.
If a lover has had troubles, if he is of a tender, thoughtful character, if he despairs of other women, and if his admiration is intense for her whom he loves, no ordinary pleasure will succeed in distracting him from the second crystallisation. He will prefer to dream of the most doubtful chance of pleasing her one day, than to accept from an ordinary woman all she could lavish.
The woman whom he loves would have to kill his hope at that period, and (note carefully, not later) in some inhuman manner, and overwhelm him with those marks of patent contempt, which make it impossible to appear again in public.
Far longer delays between all these periods are compatible with the birth of love.
It demands much more hope and much more substantial hope, in the case of the cold, the phlegmatic and the prudent. The same is true of people no longer young.
It is the second crystallisation which ensures love’s duration, for then every moment makes it clear that the question is—be loved or die. Long months of love haveturned into habit this conviction of our every moment—how find means to support the thought of loving no more? The stronger the character the less is it subject to inconstancy.
This second crystallisation is almost entirely absent from the passions inspired by women who yield too soon.
After the crystallisations have worked—especially the second, which is far the stronger—the branch is no longer to be recognised by indifferent eyes, for:—
(1) It is adorned with perfections which they do not see.
(2) It is adorned with perfections which for them are not perfections at all.
The perfection of certain charms, mentioned to him by an old friend of his love, and a certain hint of liveliness noticed in her eye, are a diamond in the crystallisationof Del Rosso. These ideas, conceived during the evening, keep him dreaming all the night.
An unexpected answer, which makes me see more clearly a tender, generous, ardent, or, as it is popularly called, romantic soul, preferring to the happiness of kings the simple pleasures of a walk with the loved one at midnight in a lonely wood, gives me food for dreams for a whole night.
Let him call my mistress a prude: I shall call his a whore.
IN A SOUL COMPLETELY DETACHED—A girl living in a lonely castle in the depth of the country—the slightest astonishment may bring on a slight admiration, and, if the faintest hope intervene, cause the birth of love and crystallisation.
In this case love delights, to begin with, just as a diversion.
Surprise and hope are strongly supported by the need, felt at the age of sixteen, of love and sadness. It is well known that the restlessness of that age is a thirst for love, and a peculiarity of thirst is not to be extremely fastidious about the kind of draught that fortune offers.
Let us recapitulate the seven stages of love. They are:—
Between Nos. 1 and 2 may pass one year. One month between Nos. 2 and 3; but if hope does not make haste in coming, No. 2 is insensibly resigned as a source of unhappiness.
A twinkling of the eye between Nos. 3 and 4.
There is no interval between Nos. 4 and 5. The sequence can only be broken by intimate intercourse.
Some days may pass between Nos. 5 and 6, according to the degree to which the character is impetuous and used to risk, but between Nos. 6 and 7 there is no interval.
MAN IS NOT FREE TO avoid doing that which gives him more pleasure to do than all other possible actions.
Love is like the fever, it is born and spends itself without the slightest intervention of the will. That is one of the principal differences between gallant-love and passion-love. And you cannot give yourself credit for the fair qualities in what you really love, any more than for a happy chance.
Further, love is of all ages: observe the passion of Madame du Deffant for the graceless Horace Walpole. A more recent and more pleasing example is perhaps still remembered in Paris.
In proof of great passions I admit only those of their consequences, which are exposed to ridicule: timidity, for example, proves love. I am not speaking of the bashfulness of the enfranchised schoolboy.
THE CRYSTALS OF SALZBURG
CRYSTALLISATION SCARCELY CEASES AT ALL during love. This is its history: so long as all is well between the lover and the loved, there is crystallisation by imaginary solution; it is only imagination which make him sure that such and such perfection exists in the woman he loves. But after intimate intercourse, fears are continually coming to life, to be allayed only by more real solutions. Thus his happiness is only uniform in its source. Each day has a different bloom.
If the loved one yields to the passion, which she shares, and falls into the enormous error of killing fear by the eagerness of her transports, crystallisation ceases for an instant; but when love loses some of its eagerness, that is to say some of its fears, it acquires the charm of entire abandon, of confidence without limits: a sense of sweet familiarity comes to take the edge from all the pains of life, and give to fruition another kind of interest.
Are you deserted?—Crystallisation begins again; and every glance of admiration, the sight of every happiness which she can give you, and of which you thought no longer, leads up to this agonising reflexion: “That happiness, that charm, I shall meet it no more. It is lost and the fault is mine!” You may look for happiness in sensations of another kind. Your heart refuses to feel them. Imagination depicts for you well enough the physical situation, mounts you well enough on a fast hunter inDevonshire woods. But you feel quite certain that there you would find no pleasure. It is the optical illusion produced by a pistol shot.
Gaming has also its crystallisation, provoked by the use of the sum of money to be won.
The hazards of Court life, so regretted by the nobility, under the name of Legitimists, attached themselves so dearly only by the crystallisation they provoked. No courtier existed who did not dream of the rapid fortune of a Luynes or a Lauzun, no charming woman who did not see in prospect the duchy of Madame de Polignac. No rationalist government can give back that crystallisation. Nothing is so anti-imagination as the government of the United States of America. We have noticed that to their neighbours, the savages, crystallisation is almost unknown. The Romans scarcely had an idea of it, and discovered it only for physical love.
Hate has its crystallisation: as soon as it is possible to hope for revenge, hate begins again.
If every creed, in which there is absurdity and inconsequence, tends to place at the head of the party the people who are most absurd, that is one more of the effects of crystallisation. Even in mathematics (observe the Newtonians in 1740) crystallisation goes on in the mind, which cannot keep before it at every moment every part of the demonstration of that which it believes.
In proof, see the destiny of the great German philosophers, whose immortality, proclaimed so often, never manages to last longer than thirty or forty years.
It is the impossibility of fathoming the “why?” of our feelings, which makes the most reasonable man a fanatic in music.
In face of certain contradictions it is not possible to be convinced at will that we are right.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE BIRTH OF LOVE IN THE TWO SEXES
WOMEN ATTACH THEMSELVES BY THE favours they dispense. As nineteen-twentieths of their ordinary dreams are relative to love, after intimate intercourse these day-dreams group themselves round a single object; they have to justify a course so extraordinary, so decisive, so contrary to all the habits of modesty. Men have no such task; and, besides, the imagination of women has time to work in detail upon the sweetness of such moments.
As love casts doubts upon things the best proved, the woman who, before she gave herself, was perfectly sure that her lover was a man above the crowd, no sooner thinks she has nothing left to refuse him, than she is all fears lest he was only trying to put one more woman on his list.
Then, and then only appears the second crystallisation, which, being hand in hand with fear, is far the stronger.
Yesterday a queen, to-day she sees herself a slave. This state of soul and mind is encouraged in a woman by the nervous intoxication resulting from pleasures, which are just so much keener as they are more rare. Besides, a woman before her embroidery frame—insipid work which only occupies the hand—is thinking about her lover; while he is galloping with his squadron over the plain, where leading one wrong movement would bring him under arrest.
I should think, therefore, that the second crystallisation must be far stronger in the case of women, because theirs are more vivid fears; their vanity and honour are compromised; distraction at least is more difficult.
A woman cannot be guided by the habit of being reasonable, which I, Man, working at things cold and reasonable for six hours every day, contract at my office perforce. Even outside love, women are inclined to abandon themselves to their imagination and habitual high spirits: faults, therefore, in the object of their love ought more rapidly to disappear.
Women prefer emotion to reason—that is plain: in virtue of the futility of our customs, none of the affairs of the family fall on their shoulders, so that reason is of no use to them and they never find it of any practical good.
On the contrary, to them it is always harmful; for the only object of its appearance is to scold them for the pleasures of yesterday, or forbid them others for tomorrow.
Give over to your wife the management of your dealings with the bailiffs of two of your farms—I wager the accounts will be kept better than by you, and then, sorry tyrant, you will have the right at least to complain, since to make yourself loved you do not possess the talent. As soon as women enter on general reasonings, they are unconsciously making love. But in matters of detail they take pride in being stricter and more exact than men. Half the small trading is put into the hands of women, who acquit themselves of it better than their husbands. It is a well-known maxim that, if you are speaking business with a woman, you cannot be too serious.
This is because they are at all times and in all places greedy of emotion.—Observe the pleasures of burial rites in Scotland.
This was her favoured fairy realm, and here she erected her aerial palaces.—Bride of Lammermoor, Chap. III.
A GIRL OF EIGHTEEN HAS not enough crystallisation in her power, forms desires too limited by her narrow experiences of the things of life, to be in a position to love with as much passion as a woman of twenty-eight.
This evening I was exposing this doctrine to a clever woman, who maintains the contrary. “A girl’s imagination being chilled by no disagreeable experience, and the prime of youth burning with all its force, any man can be the motive upon which she creates a ravishing image. Every time that she meets her lover, she will enjoy, not what he is in reality, but that image of delight which she has created for herself.
“Later, she is by this lover and by all men disillusioned, experience of the dark reality has lessened in her the power of crystallisation, mistrust has clipped the wings of imagination. At the instance of no man on earth, were he a very prodigy, could she form so irresistible an image: she could love no more with the same fire of her first youth. And as in love it is only the illusion formed by ourselves which we enjoy, never can the image, which she may create herself at twenty-eight, have the brilliance and the loftiness on which first love was built at sixteen: the second will always seem of a degenerate species.”
“No, madam. Evidently it is the presence of mistrust, absent at sixteen, which must give to this second love a different colour. In early youth love is like an immense stream, which sweeps all before it in its course, and we feel that we cannot resist it. Now at twenty-eight a gentle heart knows itself: it knows that, if it is still to find some happiness in life, from love it must be claimed; and this poor, torn heart becomes the seat of a fearful struggle between love and mistrust. Crystallisation proceeds gradually; but the crystallisation, which emerges triumphant from this terrible proof, in which the soul in all its movements never loses sight of the most awful danger, is a thousand times more brilliant and more solid than crystallisation at sixteen, in which everything, by right of age, is gaiety and happiness.”
“In this way love should be less gay and more passionate.”
This conversation (Bologna, 9 March, 1820), bringing into doubt a point which seemed to me so clear, makes me believe more and more, that a man can say practically nothing with any sense on that which happens in the inmost heart of a woman of feeling: as to a coquet it is different—we also have senses and vanity.
The disparity between the birth of love in the two sexes would seem to come from the nature of their hopes, which are different. One attacks, the other defends; one asks, the other refuses; one is daring, the other timid.
The man reflects: “Can I please her? Will she love me?”
The woman: “When he says he loves me, isn’t it for sport? Is his a solid character? Can he answer to himself for the length of his attachments?” Thus it is that many women regard and treat a young man of twenty-three as a child. If he has gone through six campaigns, he finds everything different—he is a young hero.
On the man’s side, hope depends simply on the actions of that which he loves—nothing easier to interpret. On the side of woman, hope must rest on moral considerations—very difficult rightly to appreciate.
Most men demand such a proof of love, as to their mind dissipates all doubts; women are not so fortunate as to be able to find such a proof. And there is in life this trouble for lovers—that what makes the security and happiness of one, makes the danger and almost the humiliation of the other.
In love, men run the risk of the secret torture of the soul—women expose themselves to the scoffs of the public; they are more timid, and, besides, for them public opinion means much more.—"Sois considérée, il le faut.”
They have not that sure means of ours of mastering public opinion by risking for an instant their life.
Women, then, must naturally be far more mistrustful. In virtue of their habits, all the mental movements, which form periods in the birth of love, are in their case more mild, more timid, more gradual and less decided. There is therefore a greater disposition to constancy; they will less easily withdraw from a crystallisation once begun.
A woman, seeing her lover, reflects with rapidity, or yields to the happiness of loving—happiness from which she is recalled in a disagreeable manner, if he make the least attack; for at the call to arms all pleasures must be abandoned.
The lover’s part is simpler—he looks in the eyes of the woman he loves; a single smile can raise him to the zenith of happiness, and he looks continually for it. The length of the siege humiliates a man; on the contrary it makes a woman’s glory.
A woman is capable of loving and, for an entire year, not saying more than ten or twelve words to the man whom she loves. At the bottom of her heart she keeps note how often she has seen him—twice she went with him to the theatre, twice she sat near him at dinner, three times he bowed to her out walking.
One evening during some game he kissed her hand: it is to be noticed that she allows no one since to kiss it under any pretext, at the risk even of seeming peculiar.
In a man, Léonore remarked to me, such conduct would be called a feminine way of love.
I MAKE EVERY POSSIBLE EFFORT to be dry. I would impose silence upon my heart, which feels that it, has much to say. When I think that I have noted a truth, I always tremble lest I have written only a sigh.
IN PROOF OF CRYSTALLISATION I shall content myself with recalling the following anecdote. A young woman hears that Edward, her relation, who is to return from the Army, is a youth of great distinction; she is assured that he loves her on her reputation; but he will want probably to see her, before making a proposal and asking her of her parents. She notices a young stranger at church, she hears him called Edward, she thinks of nothing but him—she is in love with him. Eight days later the real Edward arrives; he is not the Edward of church. She turns pale and will be unhappy for ever, if she is forced to marry him.
That is what the poor of understanding call an example of the senselessness of love.
A man of generosity lavishes the most delicate benefits upon a girl in distress. No one could have more virtues, and love was about to be born; but he wears a shabby hat, and she notices that he is awkward in the saddle. The girl confesses with a sigh that she cannot return the warm feelings, which he evidently has for her.
A man pays his attentions to a lady of the greatest respectability. She hears that this gentleman has had physical troubles of a comical nature: she finds him intolerable. And yet she had no intention of giving herself to him, and these secret troubles in no way blighted his understanding or amiability. It is simply that crystallisation was made impossible.
In order that a human being may delight in deifying an object to be loved, be it taken from the Ardennes forest or picked up at a Bal de Coulon, that it seems to him perfect is the first necessity—perfect by no means in every relation, but in every relation in which it is seen at the time. Perfect in all respects it will seem only after several days of the second crystallisation. The reason is simple—then it is enough to have the idea of a perfection in order to see it in the object of our love.
Beauty is only thus far necessary to the birth of love—ugliness must not form an obstacle. The lover soon comes to find his mistress beautiful, such as she is, without thinking of ideal beauty.
The features which make up the ideally beautiful would promise, if he could see them, a quantity of happiness, if I may use the expression, which I would express by the number one; whereas the features of his mistress, such as they are, promise him one thousand units of happiness.
Before the birth of love beauty is necessary as advertisement: it predisposes us towards that passion by means of the praises, which we hear given to the object of our future love. Very eager admiration makes the smallest hope decisive.
In gallant-love, and perhaps in passion-love during the first five minutes, a woman, considering a possible lover, gives more weight to the way in which he is seen by other women, than to the way in which she sees him herself.
Hence the success of princes and officers. The pretty women of the Court of old king Lewis XIV were in love with that sovereign.
Great care should be taken not to offer facilities to hope, before it is certain that admiration is there. It might give rise to dullness, which makes love for ever impossible, and which, at any rate, is only to be cured by the sting of wounded pride.
No one feels sympathy for the simpleton, nor for a smile which is always there; hence the necessity in society of a veneer of rakishness—that is, the privileged manner. From too debased a plant we scorn to gather even a smile. In love, our vanity disdains a victory which is too easy; and in all matters man is not given to magnifying the value of an offering.
CRYSTALLISATION HAVING ONCE BEGUN, WE enjoy with delight each new beauty discovered in that which we love.
But what is beauty? It is the appearance of an aptitude for giving you pleasure.
The pleasures of all individuals are different and often opposed to one another; which explains very well how that, which is beauty for one individual, is ugliness for another. (Conclusive example of Del Rosso and Lisio, 1st January, 1820.)
The right way to discover the nature of beauty is to look for the nature of the pleasures of each individual. Del Rosso, for example, needs a woman who allows a certain boldness of movement, and who by her smiles authorises considerable licence; a woman who at each instant holds physical pleasures before his imagination, and who excites in him the power of pleasing, while giving him at the same time the means of displaying it.
Apparently, by love Del Rosso understands physical love, and Lisio passion-love. Obviously they are not likely to agree about the word beauty.
The beauty then, discovered by you, being the appearance of an aptitude for giving you pleasure, and pleasure being different from pleasure as man from man, the crystallisation formed in the head of each individual must bear the colour of that individual’s pleasures.
A man’s crystallisation of his mistress, or her beauty, is no other thing than the collection of all the satisfactions of all the desires, which he can have felt successively at her instance.
FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF CRYSTALLISATION
WHY DO WE ENJOY WITH delight each new beauty, discovered in that which we love?
It is because each new beauty gives the full and entire satisfaction of a desire. You wish your mistress gentle—she is gentle; and then you wish her proud like Emilie in Corneille, and although these qualities are probably incompatible, instantly she appears with the soul of a Roman. That is the moral reason which makes love the strongest of the passions. In all others, desires must accommodate themselves to cold realities; here it is realities which model themselves spontaneously upon desires. Of all the passions, therefore, it is in love that violent desires find the greatest satisfaction.
There are certain general conditions of happiness, whose influence extends over every fulfilment of particular desires:—
1. She seems to belong to you, for you only can make her happy.
2. She is the judge of your worth. This condition was very important at the gallant and chivalrous Courts of Francis I and Henry II, and at the elegant Court of Lewis XV. Under a constitutional and rationalist government women lose this range of influence entirely.
3. For a romantic heart—The loftier her soul, the more sublime will be the pleasures that await her in your arms, and the more purified of the dross of all vulgar considerations.
The majority of young Frenchmen are, at eighteen, disciples of Rousseau; for them this condition of happiness is important.
In the midst of operations so apt to mislead our desire of happiness, there is no keeping cool.
For, the moment he is in love, the steadiest man sees no object such as it is. His own advantages he minimises, and magnifies the smallest favours of the loved one. Fears and hopes take at once a tinge of the romantic. (Wayward.) He no longer attributes anything to chance; he loses the perception of probability; in its effect upon his happiness a thing imagined is a thing existent.
A terrible symptom that you are losing your head:—you think of some little thing which is difficult to make out; you see it white, and interpret that in favour of your love; a moment later you notice that actually it is black, and still you find it conclusively favourable to your love.
Then indeed the soul, a prey to mortal uncertainties, feels keenly the need of a friend. But there is no friend for the lover. The Court knew that; and it is the source of the only kind of indiscretion which a woman of delicacy might forgive.
OF THE FIRST STEP; OF THE FASHIONABLE WORLD; OF MISFORTUNES
THAT WHICH IS MOST SURPRISING in the passion of love is the first step—the extravagance of the change, which comes over a man’s brain.
The fashionable world, with its brilliant parties, is of service to love in favouring this first step.
It begins by changing simple admiration (i) into tender admiration (ii)—what pleasure to kiss her, etc.
In a salon lit by thousands of candles a fast valse throws a fever upon young hearts, eclipses timidity, swells the consciousness of power—in fact, gives them the daring to love. For to see a lovable object is not enough: on the contrary, the fact that it is extremely lovable discourages a gentle soul—he must see it, if not in love with him, at least despoiled of its majesty.
Who takes it into his head to become the paramour of a queen unless the advances are from her?
Thus nothing is more favourable to the birth of love than a life of irksome solitude, broken now and again by a long-desired ball. This is the plan of wise mothers who have daughters.
The real fashionable world, such as was found at the Court of France, and which since 1780, I think, exists no more, was unfavourable to love, because it made the solitude and the leisure, indispensable to the work of crystallisation, almost impossible.
Court life gives the habit of observing and making a great number of subtle distinctions, and the subtlest distinction may be the beginning of an admiration and of a passion.
When the troubles of love are mixed with those of another kind (the troubles of vanity—if your mistress offend your proper pride, your sense of honour or personal dignity—troubles of health, money and political persecution, etc.), it is only in appearance that love is increased by these annoyances. Occupying the imagination otherwise, they prevent crystallisation in love still hopeful, and in happy love the birth of little doubts. When these misfortunes have departed, the sweetness and the folly of love return.
Observe that misfortunes favour the birth of love in light and unsensitive characters, and that, after it is born, misfortunes, which existed before, are favourable to it; in as much as the imagination, recoiling from the gloomy impressions offered by all the other circumstances of life, throws itself wholly into the work of crystallisation.
THE FOLLOWING POINT, WHICH WILL be disputed, I offer only to those—shall I say unhappy enough?—to have loved with passion during long years, and loved in the face of invincible obstacles:—
The sight of all that is extremely beautiful in nature and in art recalls, with the swiftness of lightning, the memory of that which we love. It is by the process of the jewelled branch in the mines of Salzburg, that everything in the world which is beautiful and lofty contributes to the beauty of that which we love, and that forthwith a sudden glimpse of delight fills the eyes with tears. In this way, love and the love of beauty give life mutually to one another.
One of life’s miseries is that the happiness of seeing and talking to the object of our love leaves no distinct memories behind. The soul, it seems, is too troubled by its emotions for that which causes or accompanies them to impress it. The soul and its sensations are one and the same. It is perhaps because these pleasures cannot be used up by voluntary recollection, that they return again and again with such force, as soon as ever some object comes to drag us from day-dreams devoted to the woman we love, and by some new connexion to bring her still more vividly to our memory.
A dry old architect used to meet her in society every evening. Following a natural impulse, and without paying attention to what I was saying to her, I one day sang his praises in a sentimental and pompous strain, which made her laugh at me. I had not the strength to say to her: “He sees you every evening.”
So powerful is this sensation that it extends even to the person of my enemy, who is always at her side. When I see her, she reminds me of Léonore so much, that at the time I cannot hate her, however much I try.
It looks as if, by a curious whim of the heart, the charm, which the woman we love can communicate, were greater than that which she herself possesses. The vision of that distant city, where we saw her a moment, throws us into dreams sweeter and more profound than would her very presence. It is the effect of harsh treatment.
The day-dreams of love cannot be scrutinised. I have observed that I can re-read a good novel every three years with the same pleasure. It gives me feelings akin to the kind of emotional taste, which dominates me at the moment, or if my feelings are nil, makes for variety in my ideas. Also, I can listen with pleasure to the same music, but, in this, memory must not intrude. The imagination should be affected and nothing else; if, at the twentieth representation, an opera gives more pleasure, it is either because the music is better understood, or because it also brings back the feeling it gave at the first.
As to new lights, which a novel may throw upon our knowledge of the human heart, I still remember clearly the old ones, and am pleased even to find them noted in the margin. But this kind of pleasure pertains to the novels, in so far as they advance me in the knowledge of man, and not in the least to day-dreaming—the veritable pleasure of novels. Such day-dreaming is inscrutable. To watch it is for the present to kill it, for you fall into a philosophical analysis of pleasure; and it is killing it still more certainly for the future, for nothing is surer to paralyse the imagination than the appeal to memory. If I find in the margin a note, depicting my feelings on reading Old Mortality three years ago in Florence, I am plunged immediately into the history of my life, into an estimate of the degree of happiness at the two epochs, in short, into the deepest problems of philosophy—and then good-bye for a long season to the unchecked play of tender feelings.
Every great poet with a lively imagination is timid, he is afraid of men, that is to say, for the interruptions and troubles with which they can invade the delight of his dreams. He fears for his concentration. Men come along with their gross interests to drag him from the gardens of Armida, and force him into a fetid slough: only by irritating him can they fix his attention on themselves. It is this habit of feeding his soul upon touching dreams and this horror of the vulgar which draws a great artist so near to love.
The more of the great artist a man has in him, the more must he wish for titles and honours as a bulwark.
SUDDENLY IN THE MIDST OF the most violent and the most thwarted passion come moments, when a man believes that he is in love no longer—as it were a spring of fresh water in the middle of the sea. To think of his mistress is no longer very much pleasure, and, although he is worn-out by the severity of her treatment, the fact that everything in life has lost its interest is a still greater misery. After a manner of existence which, fitful though it was, gave to all nature a new aspect, passionate and absorbing, now follows the dreariest and most despondent void.
It may be that your last visit to the woman, whom you love, left you in a situation, from which, once before, your imagination had gathered the full harvest of sensation. For example, after a period of coldness, she has treated you less badly, letting you conceive exactly the same degree of hope and by the same external signs as on a previous occasion—all this perhaps unconsciously. Imagination picks up memory and its sinister warnings by the way, and instantly crystallisation ceases.
In a small port, the name of which I forget, near Perpignan, 25th February, 1822.
THIS EVENING I HAVE JUST found out that music, when it is perfect, puts the heart into the same state as it enjoys in the presence of the loved one—that is to say, it gives seemingly the keenest happiness existing on the face of the earth.
If this were so for all men, there would be no more favourable incentive to love.
But I had already remarked at Naples last year that perfect music, like perfect pantomime, makes me think of that which is at the moment the object of my dreams, and that the ideas, which it suggests to me, are excellent: at Naples, it was on the means of arming the Greeks.
Now this evening I cannot deceive myself—I have the misfortune of being too great an admirer of milady L.
And perhaps the perfect music, which I have had the luck to hear again, after two or three months of privation, although going nightly to the Opera, has simply had the effect, which I recognised long ago—I mean that of producing lively thoughts on what is already in the heart.
March 4th—eight days later.
I dare neither erase nor approve the preceding observation. Certain it is that, as I wrote it, I read it in my heart. If to-day I bring it into question, it is because I have lost the memory of what I saw at that time.
Bianca and Faliero