第72章 MAURICE KIRKWOOD'S STORY OF HIS LIFE(8)

"In this category many will be disposed to place the case we commend to the candid attention of the Academy.If one were told that a young man,a gentleman by birth and training,well formed,in apparently perfect health,of agreeable physiognomy and manners,could not endure the presence of the most attractive young woman,but was seized with deadly terror and sudden collapse of all the powers of life,if he came into her immediate presence;if it were added that this same young man did not shrink from the presence of an old withered crone;that he had a certain timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of their dolls,the listener would be apt to smile,if he did not laugh,at the absurdity of the fable.Surely,he would say,this must be the fiction of some fanciful brain,the whim of some romancer,the trick of some playwright.It would make a capital farce,this idea,carried out.

A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little comedy and making love to her grandmother!This would,of course,be overstating the truth of the story,but to such a misinterpretation the plain facts lend themselves too easily.We will relate the leading circumstances of the case,as they were told us with perfect simplicity and frankness by the subject of an affection which,if classified,would come under the general head of Antipathy,but to which,if we give it a name,we shall have to apply the term Gynophobia,or Fear of Woman."Here follows the account furnished to the writer of the paper,which is in all essentials identical with that already laid before the reader.

"Such is the case offered to our consideration.Assuming its truthfulness in all its particulars,it remains to see in the first place whether or not it is as entirely exceptional and anomalous as it seems at first sight,or whether it is only the last term of a series of cases which in their less formidable aspect are well known to us in literature,in the records of science,and even in our common experience.

"To most of those among us the explanations we are now about to give are entirely superfluous.But there are some whose chief studies have been in different directions,and who will not complain if certain facts are mentioned which to the expert will seem rudimentary,and which hardly require recapitulation to those who are familiarly acquainted with the common text-books.

"The heart is the centre of every living movement in the higher animals,and in man,furnishing in varying amount,or withholding to a greater or less extent,the needful supplies to all parts of the system.If its action is diminished to a certain degree,faintness is the immediate consequence;if it is arrested,loss of consciousness;if its action is not soon restored,death,of which fainting plants the white flag,remains in possession of the system.

How closely the heart is under the influence of the emotions we need not go to science to learn,for all human experience and all literature are overflowing with evidence that shows the extent of this relation.Scripture is full of it;the heart in Hebrew poetry represents the entire life,we might almost say.Not less forcible is the language of Shakespeare,as for instance,in 'Measure for Measure:'

'Why does my blood thus muster to my heart,Making it both unable for itself And dispossessing all my other parts Of necessary fitness?'

More especially is the heart associated in every literature with the passion of love.A famous old story is that of Galen,who was called to the case of a young lady long ailing,and wasting away from some cause the physicians who had already seen her were unable to make out.The shrewd old practitioner suspected that love was at the bottom of the young lady's malady.Many relatives and friends of both sexes,all of them ready with their sympathy,came to see her.

The physician sat by her bedside during one of these visits,and in an easy,natural way took her hand and placed a finger on her pulse.

It beat quietly enough until a certain comely young gentleman entered the apartment,when it suddenly rose infrequency,and at the same moment her hurried breathing,her changing color,pale and flushed by turns,betrayed the profound agitation his presence excited.This was enough for the sagacious Greek;love was the disease,the cure of which by its like may be claimed as an anticipation of homoeopathy.

In the frontispiece to the fine old 'Junta'edition of the works of Galen,you may find among the wood-cuts a representation of the interesting scene,with the title Amantas Dignotio,--the diagnosis,or recognition,of the lover.

"Love has many languages,but the heart talks through all of them.

The pallid or burning cheek tells of the failing or leaping fountain which gives it color.The lovers at the 'Brookside'could hear each other's hearts beating.When Genevieve,in Coleridge's poem,forgot herself,and was beforehand with her suitor in her sudden embrace,'T was partly love and partly fear,And partly 't was a bashful art,That I might rather feel than see The swelling of her heart'

Always the heart,whether its hurried action is seen,or heard,or felt.But it is not always in this way that the 'deceitful'organ treats the lover.

'Faint heart never won fair lady.'

This saying was not meant,perhaps,to be taken literally,but it has its literal truth.Many a lover has found his heart sink within him,--lose all its force,and leave him weak as a child in his emotion at the sight of the object of his affections.When Porphyro looked upon Madeline at her prayers in the chapel,it was too much for him:

'She seemed a splendid angel,newly drest,Save wings,for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint,She knelt,so pure a thing,so free from earthly taint.'

And in Balzac's novel,'Cesar Birotteau,'the hero of the story 'fainted away for-joy at the moment when,under a linden-tree,at Sceaux,Constance-Barbe-Josephine accepted him as her future husband.'