Romantic Love and Personal Beauty - Henry T. Finck

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wonder if Horwicz could read the following exquisite prose poem of Turgenieff without feeling ashamed of himself:—

      "We two are sitting in the room: my dog and I. A violent storm is raging without.

      "The dog sits close before me—he gazes straight into my eyes.

      "And I too gaze straight into his eyes.

      "It seems as if he wished to say something to me. He is dumb, has no words, does not understand himself; but I understand him.

      "I understand that he and I are at this moment governed by the same feeling, that there is not the slightest difference between us. We are beings of the same kind. In each of us shines and glows the same flame.

      "Death approaches, flapping his broad, cold, moist wings. …

      "And all is ended.

      "Who then will establish the difference between the flames which glowed within us two?

      "No! We who exchange those glances are not animal and man.

      "Created alike are the two pairs of eyes that are fixed on each other.

      “And each of these eye-pairs, that of the man as well as that of the animal, expresses clearly and distinctly an anxious craving for mutual caresses.”

      It is a vicious trait of the human character that it soon grows callous to caresses, and that the unmasked expression of tender emotion is regarded as undignified and in “bad form.” It is the absence in the dog’s mind of this ugly human trait that makes him such a delightful friend and companion. However much you caress and fondle him, he will always be anxious and grateful for the next gentle pat on the head, the next kind look, and will never despise you for any excess of fond emotion lavished on him.

      The greatest flaw in Christian ethics is, that it takes so little account of this capacity of animals for affection, and our duties towards them. The duty of kindness towards animals is indeed, as Mr. Lecky remarks, “the one form of humanity which appears more prominently in the Old Testament than in the New.” “Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn,” is a precept which deprecates even a very modified form of cruelty to animals. Had this precept been given in a more generalised and comprehensive form, what an incalculable amount of suffering might have been saved the animals that had the misfortune to be born in Christian countries, as compared with those in the Oriental countries.

      According to Mr. Lecky, Plutarch was the first writer who placed the duty of kindness to animals on purely moral grounds; “and he urges that duty with an emphasis and detail to which no adequate parallel can, I believe, be found in the Christian writings for at least 1700 years.” Some of the earlier Greek philosophers had based this duty on the doctrine of the transmigration of human souls into animal bodies; and it is related that Pythagoras used to buy of fishermen the whole contents of their nets, for the pleasure of letting the fish go again. Leonardo da Vinci, from less superstitious motives, used to buy caged birds for the same purpose; and similar traits are told of other men of genius who were sufficiently refined to recognise the evidences of emotion in animals. In our times, finally, we have a man, Mr. Bergh, who devotes his whole life to the object of establishing the personal rights of animals to kind treatment on legal grounds.

      But, after all, the most influential friend animals have ever possessed was Darwin, who, by establishing their relationship to man on grounds which no one who understands the evidence can question, for ever vindicated for them the privilege of personal affection. The very grammar of our language has been affected by Darwinism. Formerly, it was customary to write “the dog which jumped into the water to save a child.” Now we say, “the dog who jumped into the water.” In other words, animals are no longer regarded as “things,” or animated machines, but as persons.

       Table of Contents

      Within the range of impersonal emotions and affections, as we have seen, women are vastly inferior to men; but in personal affections—partly owing to their almost exclusive devotion to them—women are commonly superior to men. Not always, however; for, as we shall see later on, the prevalent dogma that woman’s Romantic Love is deeper and more ardent than man’s is an absurd myth. But in conjugal affection—which differs widely from Romantic Love—woman is generally more sincere, devoted, and self-sacrificing than man. In friendship, too, women are more sincere and ardent than men; for friendship is an ancient, rather than a modern sentiment; and as women are more conservative than men, they have preserved this sentiment (at least in early life), while among men it has become nearly extinct:—

      “All friendship is feigning, all loving mere folly.”—Shakspere.

      But the one affection in which woman stands infinitely above man is the maternal, compared with which paternal love is ordinarily a mere shadow. Romantic Love in man and child-love in woman are the two strongest passions which the human mind entertains.

      In depth and strength these two passions are perhaps alike. In point of antiquity, the maternal feeling has an advantage over the Love-passion; for, of all personal affections, the maternal was developed first, and the sentiment of Romantic Love last.

      Personal affections are of two kinds: (1) Those based on blood-relationship—maternal, paternal, filial, brotherly, and sisterly love; (2) Those not based on blood-relationship—friendship and Romantic Love. Conjugal affection belongs psychologically to the first class.

      That of all relationships the one between mother and child is the most intimate is obvious. The child is part and parcel of the mother: her own flesh and blood and soul; and in loving it the mother practically loves a detached portion of herself—thus uniting the force of selfish with that of altruistic emotion. This is the primitive fountain of maternal affection. A second source of it lies in the resemblance of the child to the father, reviving in the mother’s memory the romantic days of pre-matrimonial Love. It must be an unending source of interest in a mother’s mind to note which of the child’s traits are derived from her, which from the father. If she loves herself, and loves her husband, the child that unites the traits of both must be doubly dear to her. The fact that the child is inseparably associated with all the mother’s joys and sorrows, from the wedding-day to death, constitutes a third source of her attachment; and a fourth is the social regard and honour which an energetic and gifted son, or a beautiful and accomplished daughter, may reflect on her.

      The mother herself is of course unconscious of the complex nature of her feeling and its origin; especially in the first days, when the new feeling dawns upon her like a revelation. As in the case of budding Love, the feeling is at first less individual than generic—less the affection of this particular mother for this particular child than the bursting out of the general feeling of motherhood, inherited by her in common with all women.

      Natural selection helps us to explain how this general feeling of motherhood was developed. As among animals, so among our savage and semi-civilised ancestors, those mothers who fondly cared for their infants naturally succeeded in rearing a larger and more vigorous progeny than those mothers who neglected their children. And through hereditary transmission this instinct gradually acquired, that marvellous intensity and power which we now admire.

      The sublime and almost terrible height to which this emotion can rise is most realistically depicted in Rubens’s famous picture in Munich, representing the murder of the children at Bethlehem; in which mothers grasp the naked daggers, and frantically expose their breasts to receive the blows intended for their little ones. Throughout the animal kingdom, including mankind, the female is less pugnacious than the male, less provided with means of defence, and hence more gentle and timid; yet in the moment of peril the mother’s affection absolutely annihilates fear, and makes her face danger and death with a courage, supernatural strength, and endurance, rarely equalled by man, with all his weapons and natural consciousness of superior muscle.

      It

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