Read Ebook: On Love by Stendhal Woolf Cecil N Sidney Translator Woolf Philip Sidney Translator

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Ebook has 1631 lines and 116115 words, and 33 pages

OF LOVE

My aim is to comprehend that passion, of which every sincere development has a character of beauty.

There are four kinds of love.

girl crosses your path and escapes into the wood. Everyone knows the love founded on this kind of pleasure: and all begin that way at sixteen, however parched and unhappy the character.

The happiest case of this uninspiring relationship is that in which to physical pleasure is added habit. In that case store of memories makes it resemble love a little; there is the pique of self-esteem and sadness on being left; then, romance forces upon us its ideas and we believe that we are in love and melancholy, for vanity aspires to credit itself with a great passion. This, at least, is certain that, whatever kind of love be the source of pleasure, as soon as the soul is stirred, the pleasure is keen and its memory alluring, and in this passion, contrary to most of the others, the memory of our losses seems always to exceed the bounds of what we can hope for in the future.

Sometimes, in vanity-love habit or despair of finding better produces a kind of friendship, of all kinds the least pleasant: it prides itself on its security, etc.

Physical pleasure, being of our nature, is known to everybody, but it takes no more than a subordinate position in the eyes of tender and passionate souls. If they raise a laugh in the salons, if often they are made unhappy in the intrigues of society, in return the pleasure which they feel must remain always inaccessible to those hearts, whose beat only vanity and gold can quicken.

A few virtuous and sensitive women have scarcely a conception of physical pleasures: they have so rarely risked them, if one may use the expression, and even then the transports of passion-love caused bodily pleasure almost to be forgotten.

To conclude, instead of distinguishing four different forms of love, we can easily admit eight or ten shades of difference. Perhaps mankind has as many ways of feeling as of seeing; but these differences of nomenclature alter in no degree the judgments which follow. Subject to the same laws, all forms of love, which can be seen here below, have their birth, life and death or ascend to immortality.

Well-known dialogue of Pont de Veyle with Madame du Deffant, at the fireside.

This book is a free translation of an Italian MS. of M. Lisio Visconti, a young man of the highest distinction, who died recently at Volterra, the place of his birth. The day of his sudden death he gave the translator permission to publish his Essay on Love, if means were found to shape it to a decorous form. Castel Fiorentino, June 10th, 1819.

OF THE BIRTH OF LOVE

This is what takes place in the soul:--

We study her perfections: this is the moment at which a woman should yield to realise the greatest possible physical pleasure. In the case even of the most reserved women, their eyes redden at the moment when hope is conceived: the passion is so strong, the pleasure so keen, that it betrays itself by striking signs.

To love--that is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, feeling, through all the senses and as near as possible, an object to be loved and that loves us.

The lover delights in decking with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love he is sure: he dwells on all the details of his happiness with a satisfaction that is boundless. He is simply magnifying a superb bounty just fallen to him from heaven,--he has no knowledge of it but the assurance of its possession.

Leave the mind of a lover to its natural movements for twenty-four hours, and this is what you will find.

At the salt mines of Salzburg a branch stripped of its leaves by winter is thrown into the abandoned depths of the mine; taken out two or three months later it is covered with brilliant crystals; the smallest twigs, those

no stouter than the leg of a sparrow, are arrayed with an infinity of sparkling, dazzling diamonds; it is impossible to recognise the original branch.

I call crystallisation the operation of the mind which, from everything which is presented to it, draws the conclusion that there are new perfections in the object of its love.

A traveller speaks of the freshness of the orange groves at Genoa, on the sea coast, during the scorching days of summer.--What pleasure to enjoy that freshness with her!

One of your friends breaks his arm in the hunting-field.--How sweet to be nursed by a woman you love! To be always with her, to see every moment her love for you, would make pain almost a blessing: and starting from the broken arm of your friend, you conclude with the absolute conviction of the angelic goodness of your mistress. In a word, it is enough to think of a perfection in order to see it in that which you love.

This phenomenon, which I venture to call crystallisation, is the product of human nature, which commands us to enjoy and sends warm blood rushing to our brain; it springs from the conviction that the pleasures of love increase with the perfections of its object, and from the idea: "She is mine." The savage has no time to go beyond the first step. He is delighted, but his mental activity is employed in following the flying deer in the forest, and with the flesh with which he must as soon as possible repair his forces, or fall beneath the axe of his enemy.

At the other pole of civilisation, I have no doubt that a sensitive woman may come to the point of feeling no physical pleasure but with the man she loves. It is the opposite with the savage. But among civilised peoples, woman has leisure at her disposal, while the savage is so pressed with necessary occupations that he is forced to

treat his female as a beast of burden. If the females of many animals are more fortunate, it is because the subsistence of the males is more assured.

But let us leave the backwoods again for Paris. A man of passion sees all perfections in that which he loves. And yet his attention may still be distracted; for the soul has its surfeit of all that is uniform, even of perfect bliss.

This is what happens to distract his attention:--

After ten or twelve glances, or some other series of actions, which can last as well several days as one moment, hopes are first given and later confirmed. The lover, recovered from his first surprise and, accustomed to his happiness or guided by theory, which, always based on the most frequent cases, must only take light women into account--the lover, I say, demands more positive proofs and wishes to press his good fortune.

He is parried with indifference, coldness, even anger, if he show too much assurance--in France a shade of irony, which seems to say: "You are not quite as far as you think."

A woman behaves in this way, either because she wakes up from a moment of intoxication, and obeys the word of modesty, which she trembles to have infringed, or simply through prudence or coquetry.

The lover comes to doubt of the happiness, to which he looked forward: he scans more narrowly the reasons that he fancied he had for hope.

He would like to fall back upon the other pleasures of life, and finds them annihilated. He is seized with the fear of a terrible disaster, and at the same time with a profound preoccupation.

Here begins the second crystallisation, which forms diamonds out of the proofs of the idea--"She loves me."

The night which follows the birth of doubts, every quarter of an hour, after a moment of fearful unhappiness, the lover says to himself--"Yes, she loves me"--and crystallisation has its turn, discovering new charms. Then doubt with haggard eye grapples him and brings him to a standstill, blank. His heart forgets to beat--"But does she love me?" he says to himself. Between these alternatives, agonising and rapturous, the poor lover feels in his very soul: "She would give me pleasures, which she alone can give me and no one else."

It is the palpability of this truth, this path on the extreme edge of a terrible abyss and within touch, on the other hand, of perfect happiness, which gives so great a superiority to the second crystallisation over the first.

The lover wanders from moment to moment between these three ideas:--

The most agonising moment of love, still young, is when it sees the false reasoning it has made, and must destroy a whole span of crystallisation.

Doubt is the natural outcome of crystallisation.

If this peculiarity is not observed in the case of man, the reason is that on his side there is no modesty to be for a moment sacrificed.

That is to say, that the same tone of existence can give but one instant of perfect happiness; but with a man of passion, his mood changes ten times a day.

OF HOPE

A very small degree of hope is enough to cause the birth of love.

In the course of events hope may fail--love is none the less born. With a firm, daring and impetuous character, and in an imagination developed by the troubles of life, the degree of hope may be smaller: it can come sooner to an end, without killing love.

If a lover has had troubles, if he is of a tender, thoughtful character, if he despairs of other women, and if his admiration is intense for her whom he loves, no ordinary pleasure will succeed in distracting him from the second crystallisation. He will prefer to dream of the most doubtful chance of pleasing her one day, than to accept from an ordinary woman all she could lavish.

The woman whom he loves would have to kill his hope at that period, and in some inhuman manner, and overwhelm him with those marks of patent contempt, which make it impossible to appear again in public.

Far longer delays between all these periods are compatible with the birth of love.

It demands much more hope and much more substantial hope, in the case of the cold, the phlegmatic and the prudent. The same is true of people no longer young.

It is the second crystallisation which ensures love's duration, for then every moment makes it clear that the question is--be loved or die. Long months of love have

turned into habit this conviction of our every moment--how find means to support the thought of loving no more? The stronger the character the less is it subject to inconstancy.

This second crystallisation is almost entirely absent from the passions inspired by women who yield too soon.

After the crystallisations have worked--especially the second, which is far the stronger--the branch is no longer to be recognised by indifferent eyes, for:--

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