The Anatomy of Melancholy

Member 2. Subsection 2. Other causes of love melancholy: sight; beauty of the face, eyes and other parts; and how it pierces us.

Many such causes may be listed, but they cannot take effect unless time and place offer an opportunity, and other beautiful objects or contrived enticements—kissing, meeting, conversation, gestures and similar lustful provocations—combine with them.

Kornmann, in his book On the Line of Love, sets out five stages of lust, apparently taken from Lucian, which he treats in five chapters: seeing, conversation, keeping company, kisses and touching.

Above all else, sight is the first step in this unruly love, though sometimes a report or something heard anticipates it—or, rather, inflames it. Some people are so prone, so credulous and so ready to love that, if they hear of a handsome man or woman, they fall in love before seeing them, merely from the description, as Achilles Tatius observes. “Such is their lack of restraint and their lust that they are as deeply wounded by a report as if they had seen the person.”

Callisthenes, a rich young gentleman of Byzantium in Thrace, heard of Leucippe, the beautiful daughter of Sostratus, and fell deeply in love with her. Her reputation and common report so inflamed him that he was determined to have her as his wife.

Sometimes reading affects them in this way, as the speaker in Lucian confesses of himself: “I never read that passage about Panthea in Xenophon without being as deeply moved as if I were in her presence.” Such people commonly imagine a kind of beauty for themselves. So those three gentlewomen in Baldassare Castiglione fell in love with a young man whom they had never known, merely from hearing him praised.

Or it may happen through reading a letter: for, as a moral philosopher tells us, charm comes through hearing as well as sight, and images of love enter the imagination through a description alone. “As desire comes from seeing, so longing comes from hearing”: both senses move us. “Sometimes we love those who are absent,” says Philostratus. He gives the example of his friend Athenodorus, who loved a girl at Corinth whom he had never seen: “It is the mind that sees, not the eyes.” We see with the eyes of our understanding.

But the most familiar and usual cause of love is what comes through sight, which carries those wonderful rays of beauty and pleasing graces to the heart. Plotinus derives the word for love from the word for sight: eros, as if from horasis.

In case you do not know, the eyes are our guides in love.

The eyes are love’s forerunners, and the first step in love is sight, as Lilio Giraldi demonstrates at length in his History of the Gods, treatise 13. Like two sluices, they admit the influences of that divine, powerful, soul-enrapturing and captivating beauty which, as one writer says, “is sharper than any dart or needle, wounds the heart more deeply, and opens a passage through our eyes for that lovely wound which pierces the soul itself.” “Through it love is kindled like a fire” (Eccles. 18).