Art of love

“ What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty: our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence; our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery. ”

“ Man, art thou insensible?—Hearest thou not these living tones?—Can doubt be thine, as I have heard whispered in the celestial courts? Created by Love—placed in a world of Love—distant as thou art, yet cherished and beloved by Love, destined for immortal union with the Love that gave thee being!—canst thou be faithless, canst thou be senseless?—when above, below, around, within, soundeth the deep eternal voice of Love! ”

“ The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharged with burthen of mine own love's might:
O let my looks be then the eloquence,
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ,
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.
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Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled,
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart,
My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,
And perspective it is best painter's art. ”

“ To please without being exacting, to charm without dominating, to tender a love that is humble yet at once fervent and disinterested—that is all our 'artfulness.' Oh, kind Queen, is it any fault of ours if our adversaries fail to practice so simple an art—the art of loving? ”

“ Say doth love live within thy hidden heart
(Love born of dream but nurtured wakingly)
Ev'n as that Once when thy soul's eyes did see
Love's visible self, and worshipt? Or hast thou
Fall'n from thy faith in Her and Love ere now,
And is thy passion as a robe outworn?
Nay, love forbid! Yet wherefore art thou lorn
Of hope and peace if Love be still thine own? ”

“ That is why hearts choose each other by help of the face, and why they choose so diversely. The eye of love, which again is the eye of art, reads soul into the features, however incomplete their expression of it may be. ”

“ But feelings are roots, not threads—not even gold threads. It is in the great, wholesome realities of life that the creative force of love, like that of art, finds the productive earth for its growth. ”

“ We make, but thou art the creating core. Whatever thing I dream, invent, or feel, Thou art the heart of it, the atmosphere. Thou art inside all love man ever bore; Yea, the love itself, whatever thing be dear. Man calls his dog, he follows at his heel, Because thou first art love, self-caused, essential, mere. ”

“ Love as an art consists of the same production of tension and relaxation in a rhythm whose first pulsation begins even in childhood and whose last is coincident with the final heartbeat of the individual. ”

“ He had married a girl who had only one talent, but that was the oldest in the world—she was a born lover. She, who in many ways was so startlingly lacking in refinement, had a genius for the little lures, the ways with hand and eye, of voice and gesture, that make of love an art. ”

“ The content they offer to the emotions is in a sphere the most sterling of all, depicting as they do the love of mother, wife, sister, friendship, honour, and so forth, and permitting these simple motives and the form of their essential collisions to unfold in an atmosphere of tranquillity. And for this reason the passion they disclose is throughout pure, great, noble, and of plastic simplicity. ”

“ CAPTIVITY Nay, lady, though I love thee, I make pause Before thy question, and know naught to say; Art cannot teach me to define the way, Love led me, nor e’en register Love’s cause. It can but blazon in this verse of mine What love does for me; what from Love it gains ”

“ Up then she rose and took his hand
And never a moment did they stand.
“Come, love,” she cried, “the ways I know,
How thick soe’er the thickets grow.
O love, I love thee! O thine heart!
How mighty and how kind thou art!” ”

“ The Passions therefore of the human Heart, expressed either in the living Countenance, or the mimetic Strokes of Art, will affect the Soul of the Beholder with a similar and responsive Disposition. What wonder then is it that Beauty, borrowing thus the Look of softening Love, whose Power can lull the most watchful of the Senses, should cast that sweet Nepenthe upon our Hearts, and enchant our corresponding Thoughts to rest in the Embraces of Desire? ”

“ Unfortunate in love and marriage, perhaps scarcely capable of friendship, he found the warmth of life, the tie that bound him to humanity in the fervour of his admiration for all that is great, or beautiful, or powerful in literature, in art, in heroic achievement. ”

“ Love is a more wonderful thing than art."
"They are both simply forms of imitation," remarked Lord Henry. ”

“ In this respect it is this same inward infinitude of the individual which makes love of such importance to romantic art, an importance which is materially enhanced by the exalted character of the wealth which the notion of love itself carries. ”

“ And why is it that affection, as exhibited in general life, is so rarely seen unstained by the tint of some darker passion? Love on, fair girl—love on in thy purity and innocence! The beauty that thou seest in nature, and the music it sends forth, exist only in thy own heart, and the light which plays around thee like a glory, is only the reflection of that image whose lustre has taken away the shadows from thy spirit! ”

“ Item: To lovers, I devise their imaginary world, with whatever they may need, as the stars of the sky, the red roses by the wall, the bloom of the hawthorn, the sweet strains of music, and aught else by which they may desire to figure to each other the lastingness and beauty of their love. ”

“ The song within your heart could never rise Until love bade it spread its wings and soar. Nor could you look on Beauty's face before A poet's burning mouth had touched your eyes. Love is made out of ecstasy and wonder; Love is a poignant and accustomed pain. ”

“ So difficult is this problem that some have even averred that the passion of love, as depicted by the said poet and romancer, is nothing but an invention of the ingenious artist—an unsubstantial [235] paradise created by them for their pleasure. The mark of the true lover, say the precisians, is a contented silence. ”

“ It is therefore not surprising that one of the innumerable sweet impulses of love should be to reveal, each to each, this treasure of living beauty: To give each other the right to enter and enjoy the sight which most of all sights in the world draws and satisfies the artist's eyes. ”

“ Then again, too, she felt to perfection the fine wonder, the fine glow of a great inspiration, and realised anew that therein all the pleasures of the senses added together are contained; that inspiration in its higher manifestations is like love—that it is love, in fact—love without the lover ”

“ My lover has handsome, intelligent blue eyes—my ideal's eyes are black, full of sadness and fire, not the soft, troubadour eye with long drooping lids—no! My ideal's glance has none of the languishing tenderness of romance, but is proud, powerful, penetrating, the look of a thinker, of a great mind yielding to the influence of love, the gaze of a hero disarmed by passion! ”

“ Her face so pure and fair Sheds light in the shady places, And the spell of her girlish graces Holds charmed the happy air. A breath of purity For ever before her flies, And ill things cease to be In the glance of her honest eyes. Around her pathway flutter, Where her dear feet wander free In youth's pure majesty, The wings of the vague desires; But the thought that love would utter In reverence expires. ”

“ They were all alone these two in the mad and beautiful world, which man has created for himself—the world of romance—that world more wonderful than any heaven, where only those may enter who have learned the sweet lesson of love. ”

“ For there is, in all our perceptions and desires of physical and moral beauty, an element of passion which is akin to love; and there is, in all love that is not mere lust, a perception of, a craving for, beauty, real or imaginary which is identical with our merely aesthetic perceptions and cravings; hence the possibility, once the wish for such a passion present, of a kind of love which is mainly aesthetic, which views the beloved as gratifying merely to the wish for physical or spiritual loveliness, and concentrates upon one exquisite reality all dreams of ideal perfection. ”

“ Mid the ruin its madness too often hath made,
As it keeps even then a bright trace of the heaven,
That heaven of Virtue from which it has strayed—
This entireness of love which can only be found,
Where Woman like something that's holy, watched over,
And fenced from her childhood with purity round,
Comes body and soul fresh as Spring to a lover!
Where not an eye answers, where not a hand presses,
Till spirit with spirit in sympathy move;
And the Senses asleep in their sacred recesses
Can only be reached thro' the temple of Love! ”

“ There were things between us two as lovers,—love, things more beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression, images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off wonderful music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing softly, of floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and sudden as the knife of an assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears, tears that are happiness, wordless things ”

“ And when I now look back on that time and observe everything calmly from a distance, does not my own heart oftentimes seem to me a riddle? To you, indeed, that which is unintelligible to most people will seem natural enough; namely, that the love I bore my wife was strengthened instead of weakened by the years of unclouded happiness. One might say that every deep and earnest affection is artistic. As the artist and the poet bear and cherish the burning thought within them, ever striving to approximate it to their highest ideal, so love, if not mistaken in its object, is a ceaseless advance. ”

“ The only love-poetry that stands through all time and appeals to all hearts is that which is founded on either or both the species of love natural to all men,—the love of the senses, and the love of custom. ”

“ So strangely you dazzle my eye!
But when without art
Your kind thoughts you impart,
When your love runs in blushes through every vein;
When it darts from your eyes, when it pants in your heart,
Then I know you're a woman again. ”

“ Let us dismiss these matters, which perplex the reason, and approach that which touches the heart, which in your case, my child, touches the heart of woman. You speak of love, and deem that the love which lasts—the household, the conjugal love—should be based upon such sympathies of pursuit that the artist should wed the artist. ”

“ I had now a form and features before me; a sweet and melodious voice vibrated in my ear; my soul was filled, as it were, with her lineaments and gestures, actions and looks. All ideas, possessing any relation to beauty or sex, appeared to assume this shape. They kept an immovable place in my mind, they diffused around them an ineffable complacency. Love is merely of value as a prelude to a more tender, intimate, and sacred union. ”

“ you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart’s-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty. ”

“ And stars reflected seemed where firefly played,
Each leaflet murmured lover's tenderness;
Soul's ecstasy was pure and fathomless.
O mystic Love! to every trivial thing
A new and holy charm dost ever bring,
With light and joy, to all touched by thy ray
Creation glows for him who feels thy sway.
Of one we love Perfection is the name,
For love is breath of God, all potent flame! ”

“ But the starry crown of woman is in the power of her affection and sentiment, and the infinite enlargements to which they lead. Beautiful is the passion of love, painter and adorner of youth and early life: but who suspects, in its blushes and tremors, what tragedies, heroisms and immortalities are beyond it? The passion, with all its grace and poetry, is profane to that which follows it. ”

“ His close watch of the blameless girl's whole life confirmed the warm and romantic wishes of his soul, which her beauty inspired—that beauty as fully confirming the vision of his love-dream when far and long away. ”

“ Without a wife, an artist falls a prey to the inspiration of the moment—condemned to it; and as he is not an analyst, he ends by imagining he really is in love. Take portrait-painting. Charming lady sits for portrait, painter takes up his brushes, arranges his palette, seeks inspiration,—what is below the surface?—something intangible to divine, seize, and affix to his canvas. He seeks to know the soul; he seeks how? As a man in love seeks, naturally. The more he imagines himself in love, the more completely does the idea obsess him from morning to night—plain as the nose on your face. ”

“ How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. ”