Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian. Volume 2 (of 2)Alger, Horatio, Jr.
General
Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian. Volume 2 (of 2)
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
Forrest, Edwin, 1806-1872
Even of its victims few clearly understand the ingredients and essence
of jealousy. In the catalogue of the passions it is the impurest, the
insanest, and the most murderous. Every composition whose elements blend
in harmony is pure. Earth is pure and honey is pure, but a mixture of
earth and honey is impure. So in moral subjects. Loyalty is pure, being
consonantly composed of reverence and obedience; conscious disloyalty is
impure, being inconsonantly composed of a perception of rightful
authority and rebellious resistance to it. Now, no other passion is
composed of such an intense and incongruous combination of intense
opposites as jealousy. In it love and hate, esteem and scorn, trust and
suspicion, hope and fear, joy and pain, swiftly alternate or
discordantly mix and conflict. It is these meeting shocks of
contradictory polarities repulsing or penetrating one another in the
soul, rending and exploding in every direction in the consciousness of
its victim, that make jealousy the maddest and most slaughterous because
it is the most violently impure passion known to man. In every one of
its forms, when strong enough, it is a begetter of murders, has been
ever since the devil first peered on Adam and Eve embracing in Paradise,
and will be until it is abolished by slowly-advancing disinterestedness.
It is an appalling fact that the murders of wives by jealous husbands
are tenfold greater in number than any other single class of murders.
When we add to these the husbands murdered by their wives, and the
despatched paramours on both sides, the wild and deadly raging of
jealousy may be recognized in something of its frightful fury.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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