Part 24 (2/2)

It is not surprising that this intensely modern poem should have been set to music--the most modern of all the arts--more frequently than any other verses ever written. To Orientals, to savages, to Greeks, it would be incomprehensible--as incomprehensible as Ruskin's ”there is no true conqueror of l.u.s.t but love,” or Tennyson's

'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

To them the love between men and women seems not a purifying, enn.o.bling emotion, a stimulus to self-improvement and an impulse to do generous, unselfish deeds, but a mere animal pa.s.sion, low and degrading.

LOVE DESPISED IN j.a.pAN AND CHINA

The j.a.panese have a little more regard for women than most Orientals, yet by them, too, love is regarded as a low pa.s.sion--as, in fact, identical with l.u.s.t. It is not considered respectable for young folks to arrange their own marriages on a basis of love.

”Among the lower cla.s.ses, indeed,” says Kuchler,[44] ”such direct unions are not infrequent; but they are held in contempt, and are known as yago (meeting on a moor), a term of disrespect, showing the low opinion entertained of it.” Professor Chamberlain writes, in his _Things j.a.panese_ (285):

”One love marriage we have heard of, one in eighteen years!

But then both the young people had been brought up in America. Accordingly they took the reins in their own hands, to the great scandal of all their friends and relations.”

On another page (308) he says:

”According to the Confucian ethical code, which the j.a.panese adopted, a man's parents, his teacher, and his lord claim his life-long service, his wife standing on an immeasurably lower plane.”[45]

Ball, in his _Things Chinese_ comments on the efforts made by Chinamen to suppress love-matches as being immoral; and the French author, L.A.

Martin, says, in his book on Chinese morals (171):

”Chinese philosophers know nothing of Platonic love; they speak of the relations between men and women with the greatest reserve, and we must attribute this to the low esteem in which they generally hold the fair s.e.x; in their ill.u.s.trations of the disorders of love, it is almost always the woman on whom the blame of seduction is laid.”

GREEK SCORN FOR WOMAN-LOVE

The Greeks were in the same boat. They did indeed distinguish between two kinds of love, the sensual and the celestial, but--as we shall see in detail in the special chapter devoted to them--they applied the celestial kind only to friends.h.i.+p and boy-love, never to the love between men and women. That love was considered impure and degrading, a humiliating affliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable to the friends.h.i.+p between men or the feelings that unite parents and children. This is the view taken in Plato's writings, in Xenophon's _Symposium_ and everywhere. In Plutarch's _Dialogue on Love_, written five hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faint protest against the current notion that ”there is no gust of friends.h.i.+p or heavenly ravishment of mind,” in the love for women; but this is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which is thus brutally expressed by one of the interlocutors in the same dialogue:

”True love has nothing to do with women, and I a.s.sert that you who are pa.s.sionately inclined toward women and maidens do not love any more than flies love milk or bees honey, or cooks the calves and birds whom they fatten in the dark....

The pa.s.sion for women consists at the best in the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty.”

Another interlocutor sums up the Greek att.i.tude in these words: ”It behooves respectable women neither to love nor to be loved.”

Goethe had an apercu of the absence of purity in Greek love when he wrote, in his _Roman Elegies:_

In der heroischen Zeit, da Gotter und Gottinnen liebten.

Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.

PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY

The change in love from the barbarian and ancient att.i.tude to the modern conception of it as a refining, purifying feeling is closely connected with the growth of the altruistic ingredients of love--sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, and especially adoration. It is one of the points where religion and love meet.

Mariolatry greatly affected men's att.i.tude toward women in general, including their notions about love. There is a curious pa.s.sage in Burton worth citing here (III., 2):

”Christ himself, and the Virgin Mary, had most beautiful eyes, as amiable eyes as any persons, saith Baradius, that ever lived, yet withal so modest, so chaste, that whosoever looked on them was freed from that pa.s.sion of burning l.u.s.t, if we may believe Gerson and Bonaventure; there was no such antidote against it as the Virgin Mary's face.”

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