Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities — John Shaqi
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
Jealousy may be defined as a painful emotion on noticing, or imagining,
that some one dear to us loves another more than us. Unlike affection in
general, and like sympathy, it therefore necessarily refers to a
sentient being and a possible reciprocation of affection. It is a form
of rivalry, of which there are two kinds: rivalry for the possession of
an object or a position; and rivalry for the first place in a person’s
affections. The first is not incompatible with friendship, for two rival
candidates for a political office or a college fellowship are not
necessarily personal enemies. But the second kind, which, when allied
with doubt is called Jealousy, is a deadly enemy of good-will; and there
is probably no cause that has broken so many friendships as the
“green-eyed monster,” among women no less than among men.
Modern psychology agrees with St. Augustine that “he that is
not jealous, is not in love.” There can be no love without
Jealousy—potential at any rate, for in the absence of provocation it may
perhaps never manifest itself. But there can be Jealousy without love,
_i.e_ without sexual love; for that passion is often aroused in
connection with other kinds of affection—parental, filial, etc. Stories
are told of dogs practically committing suicide by disappearing or
pining away if displaced by a younger pet in the affection of a family;
and those who have seen specimens of canine jealousy find nothing
improbable in these stories. Yet as a rule all these general forms of
jealousy—as when a husband is jealous of his wife if the children show
her special favour, or as when a mother is jealous of a visitor loved by
her children—are mere trifles compared with sexual Jealousy, romantic
and conjugal. It is in painting this form of Jealousy that poets have
exhausted the strength of language. “Of all the passions in the mind
thou vilest art,” says Spenser of this “king of torments,” “the injured
lover’s hell.” With this, when once the lover’s mind is affected—
“’Tis then delightful misery no more,
But agony unmixt, incessant gall.”
“But, O, what damnéd minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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