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
“Except I be by Sylvia in the night,
There is no music in the nightingale.”
Thus we see that there are three stages in the evolution of Sympathy:
the first, in which cruelty neutralises it; the second, in which this
universal enjoyment of cruelty, with its attendant lack of imagination
and altruistic feeling, compelled moralists to lay more stress on the
virtue of compassion than on the refining pleasures of mutual enjoyment;
the third, the epoch of Romantic Love, in which the positive side of the
emotional partnership is specially emphasised, so that a lover cannot
pour forth a song of happiness except in the form of a duo.
And this brings us back again to a question left unanswered in the
section on Jealousy. A rejected lover’s deepest anguish is the thought
that “She will now be happy in another’s arms.” To hear that she has
entered a convent and will never enjoy the pleasures of Love denied him
would be his only consolation. Is this an aberration of Sympathy, or
does it mark its climax—its remorseless logical consistency? The answer
lies in the second suggestion. Were Love an altruistic passion, it would
be otherwise. _He_ would delight in _her_ happiness under all
circumstances. But Love is selfish—a double selfishness; and its sense
of justice demands that each side be considered. “If I cannot be happy
without her, how can she without me?” The lover does not consider that
the passion is one-sided—he cannot fathom that mystery—cannot understand
why his flame, which reduces him to ashes, is not strong enough to set
her on fire, and were she a stone image.
_Pity and Love._—According to Darwin, one of the chief mental
differences between man and woman is woman’s greater tenderness. Of this
feminine tenderness the world has been able to judge on a vast scale
during the last two or three years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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