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
"From the looks and gestures of the beloved individual they draw the
inference that they in return are not regarded with indifference. With
astonishing rapidity they lose their self-possession. The most harmless
incidents are regarded by them as signs of love, and an encouragement to
draw near. Even newspaper advertisements relating to others are supposed
to come from the person in question. Finally, hallucinations make their
appearance, by the aid of which the patients begin to be conversant with
the object of their love. Illusions also supervene; in the conversations
of others the patient fancies he hears references to his love-affairs.
He feels happy, exalted in his estimate of himself....
“At last the patient compromises himself by acting in consonance with
his delusion, thus making himself ridiculous and impossible in society,
and necessitating his confinement in an asylum.”
THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE
The insane freaks of erotomaniacs, and the analogous, ludicrous
exaggerations in the expression and conduct of lovers, may be regarded
as the pathologic and the comic sides of Love’s Language.
Normally, Romantic Love has no fewer than three languages:—Words, Facial
Expression, and Caresses, including Kisses. It will at once be seen that
this classification involves a crescendo <, from the weakest form of
expression to its climax in kissing. Kissing, indeed, though it comes
under the head of Caresses, is of so much significance that it may be
regarded, if not as a separate language of Love, at least as a special
dialect—perhaps the long-sought world-language intelligible to all?
I.—WORDS
Though the greatest poets have striven to become virtuosi in the art of
expressing Love in written language, yet words are the weakest and least
trustworthy mode of expressing the amorous emotions. Least trustworthy,
because the male flatterer, as well as the female coquette, constantly
use language to conceal their thoughts and real emotions. Weakest,
because words are less eloquent even than silence. For—
“They that are rich in words must needs discover
They are but poor in that which makes a lover;”
And
“Silence in Love bewrays more woe
Than words though ne’er so witty.”—RALEIGH.
Cordelia’s love was deeper than that of her sisters—too deep to be
expressed in formal words. And King Lear scorned her and favoured her
sisters; even as shallow maidens constantly look down on silent, awkward
adorers of deep affections, and throw themselves away on shallow,
fickle, loquacious Lotharios, because they do not understand the real
Language of Love, which, according to a stupid old myth, every woman is
supposed to know by intuition or instinct.
II.-FACIAL EXPRESSION,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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