Each lives in the other, and in that new home "thinks, and acts, and maintains his own being; as Crescimbeni "Thus he comes to live also in himself no longer says:alone, but in company with the soul of the beloved object, which passes into him as his has passed into her; so that, by his loving death, he has gained not one, but two lives." This ethical doctrine of the identification of the lover and the beloved is the counterpart of the logical doctrine of the identity of the knowing and the known. "The mind is the man," says Bacon, "and the knowledge is the mind. A man is but what he knoweth. The mind itself is but an accident to knowledge; for knowledge is a double of that which is; the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one." As the mind takes a new form with every change of knowing, and the thing known takes a new form in the mind into which it enters; so the two loving souls have, as it were, suppressed themselves, and have enveloped themselves in a new existence, in which they live a double life in unity of being. This unity is the guarantee of constancy. All the scattered beauties which the senses collect are referred to the ideal beauty whose image lives in the memory, and are beautiful in proportion to their resemblance to it. And thus the three first steps of love in the contemplation of sensible beauty are completed. The three higher grades of love begin with the conversion of sensible into intellectual beauty. Love is born in the eyes, but lives in the mind. It comes into being when it sees the beautiful face; but it lives on the beauty of the soul. Love does not decay with the decay of the sensible beauty which engendered it. It survives age and wrinkles. If it still lives when the beauty which begot it is dead, its life has clearly come to depend on some other beauty on the beauty of the soul, no longer on that of the body. And this intellectual love goes through the same grades as the sensible love. It begins with the individual soul of the beloved one, as apprehended by the loving consciousness; it enlarges into love for the general nature of the soul, as distinguished by the judgment; and it perfects itself in love for the universal soul as comprehended by reason-for the universal soul, the "sacred universal love" which itself comprehends and unites all the differences of souls in general. These two loves, the love of sensible and that of intellectual. beauty, are counterparts of each other in their essence and their operation; their processes may be described in the same terms. If love begins with corporeal beauty, it is, as Crescimbeni says, not without the assumption that "beauty of body is naturally a conclusive argument of beauty of soul, because the one is only an offshoot of the perfection of the other, according to Ariosto's words : 'Che se la faccia può del cor dar fede Such is the necessary assumption of love in its lower grades. Afterwards, when love is established, and is strong enough to go without supports, it refutes the idea, and even contrasts beauty of mind with beauty of body, confessing with Duncan that— there is no art To find the mind's construction in the face. This scale of love with its six steps may be illustrated by the examples of poets. The lowest stage is the love of the concrete individual woman for her sensuous charm, as in the poetry of Byron. The second degree is where love is eclectic, busying itself in a subtle analysis of beauty, writing about blue eyes, or black hair, or such component parts of beauty in separate epigrams and songs, as Herrick does. In the third degree this analytical process reunites its scattered limbs, and the lover worships universal beauty either in the face, which is its symbol, or in nature, which displays it at large. Wordsworth's lyrical poems are in this grade. In the fourth degree, or first step of intellectual love, the lover is no longer taken up with corporeal beauty, but with that of the mind and character; the poet no longer remarks how the man looks, but what he is, and gives us, not a picture of his face, but of his personality. This is epic poetry. The next grade gives us a philosophical analysis of intellectual beauty. This is the ideal of lyrical poetry. The sixth grade puts together again all that was separated in the analysis, and contem plates that concrete intellectual beauty which comprehends every kind of beauty and perfection, that love which includes all other loves, that friend's soul which has become the symbol of the highest intellectual beauty, or that idealized action in which men combine to exhibit their individual characters. This is dramatic poetry. This philosophy of love will be found to be a key to Shakespeare's Sonnets, explaining them as they stand, without obliging us to put them into a new and arbitrary order, or to invent biographical facts to fit their allusions. CHAPTER II. THE ANALYSIS OF LOVE. LOVE, says Benedetto Varchi (Lezioni d' Amor, 2da parte, lez. 1ma, ed. 1561), being directed to the beauty either of the body or the mind, may be of the mind only, or of the body only, or of both. And this composite love, or love of both body and mind, may be of three kinds, according to the proportions of the composition. Love of the mind only, or intellectual love, is called the good dæmon or genius; love of the body only, or animal love, is the evil dæmon or genius. The three composite loves are not called dæmons, but only affections or passions. The first is noble or chivalrous love (sometimes called divine). It contemplates chiefly the beauty of the mind, regarding the beauty of the body only as a symbol of spiritual beauty, and employing only the two spiritual senses, sight and hearing. Civil, human, social, or domestic love, loves the mind best, but also loves the body, not only with the spiritual, but also with the material senses, but without overstepping the limits of modesty and civility. Vulgar or plebeian love is directed to both soul and body; but the love of body prevails, and it is loved for the sake of its own pleasures. As it is the function of love, Varchi continues, to beget beauty by means of beauty, the noble or chivalrous love, which loves mental beauty, and corporeal beauty only as its token, is more prone to devote itself to young men, whose minds, he says, are more apt to receive the beautiful impressions of virtue and science than those of women. The civil, and especially the vulgar love, on the contrary, being conversant more directly with corporeal beauty, are more prone to devote themselves to women than to men, who are, as Shakespeare says in Sonnet 20, nothing to their purpose. It is the two dæmons of love, not the intermediate passions, which Shakespeare describes in his sonnets. says (Son. 144): "Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which, like two spirits, do suggest me still; The worser spirit a woman, coloured ill." He The intermediate passions-chivalrous love, domestic love, and vulgar love-are illustrated in his dramas and poems. The first series of sonnets is addressed entirely to the "man right fair," who represents the dæmon of intellectual love; the sonnets directed to him are passionate in their affection, but the affection is one of the purest friendship; and the twentieth sonnet, not without a certain coarseness of thought, entirely precludes any imputation of a Greek sentiment which would have at once changed the comfort of his love into despair. Shakespeare's conception will be made more clear by an extract from Pico della Mirandola's comment on Benevieni's Canzone. He notices that whereas Guido Cavalcanti made Love a woman, "Donna ti prega," Benevieni simply calls him Amore, as a man. The reason, he says, is that vulgar love holds the same relation to celestial love as an imperfect to a perfect thing; and the Pythagoreans symbolized imperfect nature by the female, and perfect nature by the male. Besides, he adds, vulgar love is more appropriately made conversant with females than males, because it is prone to material pleasures. Heavenly love, on the contrary, runs no such risk, but its whole bent is towards the spiritual beauty of the mind and intellect, which is much more perfect in men than in women. Wherefore the votaries of this love have, for the most part, loved some young man of generous mind, who enhanced the worth of his virtue by its union with corporeal beauty. They have not strayed after herds of loose women, who never raise men to any grade of spiritual perfection, but, like Circe, transform them into beasts. With such a chaste love, he says, Socrates affected not only Alcibiades, but all the most ingenuous and subtle young Athenians. So Parmenides loved Zeno, Orpheus Museus, Theophrastus Nicomachus. Their intention was simply to make the corporeal beauty of those they loved the occasion of raising themselves to the contemplation of the beauty of soul, whence that of the body is an emana C |