grace been seen?  In face of her, the strongest of all impulses—­selfishness—­is annihilated.  The lover is no longer “number one” to himself; his own pleasures and comforts are ignored in the eager desire to please her, to show her gallant attentions.  To save her from disaster or grief he is ready to sacrifice his life.  His cordial sympathy makes him share all her joys and sorrows, and his affection for her, though he may have known her only a few days—­nay, a few minutes—­is as strong and devoted as that of a mother for the child that is her own flesh and blood.

INGREDIENTS OF LOVE

No one who has ever been truly in love will deny that this description, however romantic it may seem in its apparent exaggeration, is a realistic reflection of his feelings and impulses.  As this brief review shows, Individual Preference, Monopolism, Coyness, Jealousy, Mixed Moods of Hope and Despair, Hyperbole, Adoration, Purity, Pride, Admiration of Personal Beauty, Gallantry, Self-sacrifice, Sympathy, and Affection, are the essential ingredients in that very composite mental state, which we call romantic love.  Coyness, of course, occurs only in feminine love, and there are other sexual differences which will be noted later on.  Here I wish to point out that the fourteen ingredients named may be divided into two groups of seven each—­the egoistic and the altruistic.  The prevailing notion that love is a species of selfishness—­a “double selfishness,” some wiseacre has called it—­is deplorably untrue and shows how little the psychology of love has heretofore been understood.

It has indeed an egoistic side, including the ingredients I have called Individual Preference, Monopolism, Jealousy, Coyness, Hyperbole, Mixed Moods, and Pride; and it is not a mere accident that these are also the seven features which may be found in sensual love too; for sensuality and selfishness are twins.  But the later and more essential characteristics of romantic love are the altruistic and supersensual traits—­Sympathy, Affection, Gallantry, Self-sacrifice, Adoration, Purity, and Admiration of Personal Beauty.  The two divisions overlap in some places, but in the main they are accurate.  It is certain that the first group precedes the second, but the order in which the ingredients in each group first made their appearance cannot be indicated, as we know too little of the early history of man.  The arrangement here adopted is therefore more or less arbitrary.  I shall try in this long chapter to answer the question “What is Romantic Love?” by discussing each of its fourteen ingredients and tracing its evolution separately.

I. INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE

If a man pretended to be in love with a girl while confessing that he liked other girls equally well and would as soon marry one as another, everybody would laugh at him; for however ignorant many persons may be as to the subtler traits of sentimental love, it is known universally that a decided and obstinate preference for one particular individual is an absolute condition of true love.