Love, why do we one passion call,
     When ’tis a compound of them all?

The eminent Danish critic, George Brandes, though a special student of English literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one of his lectures on literary history (1872), that the book in which love is for the first time looked on as something composite and an attempt made to analyze it into its elements, is Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (which appeared in 1816).  “In Adolphe,” he says,

“and in all the literature associated with that book, we are informed accurately how many parts, how many grains, of friendship, devotion, vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual attraction, illusion, fancy, deception, hate, satiety, enthusiasm, reasoning calculation, etc., are contained in the mixtum compositum which the enamoured persons call love.”

This list, moreover, does not accurately name a single one of the essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated phenomena, whereas Shakspere’s lines call attention to three states of mind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love—­gallant “service,” “adoration,” and “purity”—­while “patience and impatience” may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixed moods of hope and despair.

HERBERT SPENCER’S ANALYSIS

Nevertheless the first thinker who treated love as a compound feeling and consciously attempted a philosophical analysis of it was Herbert Spencer.  In 1855 he published his Principles of Psychology, and in 1870 appeared a greatly enlarged edition, paragraph 215 of which contains the following exposition of his views: 

“The passion which unites the sexes is habitually spoken of as though it were a simple feeling; whereas it is the most compound, and therefore the most powerful, of all the feelings.  Added to the purely physical elements of it are first to be noticed those highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty; around which are aggregated a variety of pleasurable ideas, not in themselves amatory, but which have an organized relation to the amatory feeling.  With this there is united the complex sentiment which we term affection—­a sentiment which, as it exists between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an independent sentiment, but one which is here greatly exalted.  Then there is the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence—­in itself one of considerable power, and which in this relation becomes in a high degree active.  There comes next the feeling called love of approbation.  To be preferred above all the world, and that by one admired beyond all others, is to have the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous experience:  especially as there is added that indirect gratification of it which results from the preference being witnessed by unconcerned