Part 78 (1/2)
The view that the gist of the _Song of Songs_ is the Shulamite's love of a shepherd and her persistent resistance to the advances of Solomon, was first advanced in 1771 by J.F. Jacobi, and is now universally accepted by the commentators, the overwhelming majority of whom have also given up the artificial and really blasphemous allegorical interpretation of this poem once in vogue, but ignored in the Revised Version, as well as the notion that Solomon wrote the poem. Apart from all other arguments, which are abundant, it is absurd to suppose that Solomon would have written a drama to proclaim his own failure to win the love of a simple country girl. In truth, it is very probable that, as Renan has eloquently set forth (91-100), the _Song of Songs_ was written practically for the purpose of holding up Solomon to ridicule. In the northern part of his kingdom there was a strong feeling against him on account of his wicked ways and vicious innovations, especially his harem, and other expensive habits that impoverished the country. ”Taken all in all,” says the Rev. W.E.
Griffis, of Solomon (44),
”he was probably one of the worst sinners described in the Old Testament. With its usual truth and fearlessness, the Scriptures expose his real character, and by the later prophets and by Jesus he is ignored or referred to only in rebuke.”
The contempt and hatred inspired by his actions were especially vivid shortly after his death, when the _Song of Songs_ is believed to have been written (Renan, 97); and, as this author remarks (100),
”the poet seems to have been animated by a real spite against the king; the establishment of a harem, in particular, appears to incense him greatly, and he takes evident pleasure in showing us a simple shepherd girl triumphing over the presumptuous sultan who thinks he can buy love, like everything else, with his gold.”
That this is intended to be the moral of this Biblical drama is further shown by the famous lines near the close:
”For love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave [literally: pa.s.sion is as inexorable (or hard) as sheol]: The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench it, nor can the floods drown it: If a man should give all the substance of his house for love, he [it] would utterly be contemned.”
These lines const.i.tute the last of the pa.s.sages cited by my critics to prove that the ancient Hebrews knew romantic love and its power. They doubtless did know the power of love; all the ancient civilized nations knew it as a violent sensual impulse which blindly sacrifices life to attain its object. The ancient Hindoos embodied their idea of irresistible power in the force and fury of an amorous elephant. Among animals in general, love is even stronger than death. Male animals of most species engage in deadly combat for the females. ”For most insects,” says Letourneau, ”to love and to die are almost synonymous terms, and yet they do not even try to resist the amorous frenzy that urges them on.” Yet no one would dream of calling this romantic love; from that it differs as widely as the insect mind in general differs from the human mind. Waters cannot quench any kind of love or affection nor floods drown it. What we are seeking for are _actions or words describing the specific symptoms of sentimental love_, and these are not to be found in this pa.s.sage any more than elsewhere in the Bible. An old man may buy a girl's body, but he cannot, with all his wealth and splendor, awaken her love, either sentimental or sensual; love, whatever its nature, will always prefer the apple-tree and the shepherd lover to the vain desires and a thousand times divided attentions of a decrepit king, though he be a Solomon.
It would be strange if this purely profane poem, which was added to the Scriptural collection only by an unusual stretch of liberality,[290] and in which there is not one mention of G.o.d or of religion, should give a higher conception of s.e.xual love than the books which are accepted as inspired, and which paint manners, emotions, and morals as the writers found them. As a matter of fact the _Song of Songs_ was long held to be so objectionable that the Talmudists did not allow young people to read it before their thirtieth year. Whiston denounced it as foolish, lascivious, and idolatrous. ”The excessively amative character of some pa.s.sages is designated as almost blasphemous when supposed to be addressed by Christ to his Church,”[291] as it was by the allegorists. On the other hand there is a cla.s.s of commentators to whom this poem is the ideal of all that is pure and lovely. Herder went into ecstasies over it.
Israel Abrahams refers to it (163) as ”the n.o.blest of love-poems;” as ”this idealization of love.” The Rev. W.E. Griffis declares rapturously (166, 63, 21, 16, 250) that ”the purest-minded virgin may safely read the _Song of Songs_, in which is no trace of immoral thought.” In it ”sensuality is scorned and pure love glorified;” it ”sets forth the eternal romance of true love,” and is ”chastely pure in word and delicate in idea throughout.” ”The poet of the Canticle shows us how to love.” ”An angel might envy such artless love dwelling in a human heart.”
The truth, as usual in such cases, lies about half-way between these extreme views. There is only one pa.s.sage which is objectionably coa.r.s.e in the English version and in the Hebrew original obscene;[292] yet, on the other hand, I maintain that the whole poem is purely Oriental in its exclusively sensuous and often sensual character, and that there is not a trace of romantic sentiment such as would color a similar love-story if told by a modern poet. The _Song of Songs_ is so confused in its arrangement, its plan so obscure, its repet.i.tions and repeated denouements so puzzling,[293] that commentators are not always agreed as to what character in the drama is to be held responsible for certain lines; but for our purpose this difficulty makes no difference. Taking the lines just as they stand, I find that the following:--1: 2-4, 13 (in one version), 17; 2: 6; 4: 16; 5: 1; 8: 2, 3--are indelicate in language or suggestion, as every student of Oriental amorous poetry knows, and no amount of specious argumentation can alter this. The descriptions of the beauty and charms of the beloved or the lover, are, moreover, invariably sensuous and often sensual. Again and again are their bodily charms dwelt on rapturously, as is customary in the poems of all Orientals with all sorts of quaint hyperbolic comparisons, some of which are poetic, others grotesque. No fewer than five times are the external charms thus enumerated, but not once in the whole poem is any allusion made to the spiritual attractions, the mental and moral charms of femininity which are the food of romantic love. Mr. Griffis, who cannot help commenting (223) on this frequent description of the human body, makes a desperate effort to come to the rescue. Referring to 4: 12-14, he says (212) that the lover now ”adds a more delicate compliment to her modesty, her instinctive refinement, her chaste life, her purity amid court temptations. He praises her inward ornaments, her soul's charms.” What are these ornaments? The possible reference to her chast.i.ty in the lines: ”A garden shut up is my sister, my bride. A spring shut up, a fountain sealed”--a reference which, if so intended, would be regarded by a Christian maiden not as a compliment, but an insult; while every student of Eastern manners knows that an Oriental makes of his wife ”a garden shut up,” and ”a fountain sealed” not by way of complimenting her chast.i.ty, but because he has no faith in it whatever, knowing that so far as it exists it is founded on fear, not on affection. Mr.
Griffis knows this himself when he does not happen to be idealizing an impossible shepherd girl, for he says (161):
”To one familiar with the literature, customs, speech, and ideas of the women who live where idolatry prevails, and the rulers and chief men of the country keep harems, the amazing purity and modesty of maidens reared in Christian homes is like a revelation from heaven.”[294]
Supersensual charms are not alluded to in the _Song of Songs_, for the simple reason that Orientals never did, and do not now, care for such charms in women or cultivate them. They know love only as an appet.i.te, and in accordance with Oriental taste and custom the _Song of Songs_ compares it always to things that are good to eat or drink or smell.
Hence such ecstatic expressions as ”How much better is thy love than wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all manner of spices!”
Hence her declaration that her beloved is
”as the apple-tree among the trees of the wood.... I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.... Stay ye me with raisins, comfort me with apples: For I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.”
Hence the shepherd's description of his love: ”I am come into the garden, my sister, my bride: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice: I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk.”
Modern love does not express itself in such terms; it is more mental and sentimental, more esthetic and sympathetic, more decorous and delicate, more refined and supersensual. While it is possible that, as Renan suggests (143), the author of the Canticles conceived his heroine as a saint of her time, rising above sordid reality, it is clear from all we have said that the author himself was not able to rise above Orientalism. The manners of the East, both ancient and modern, are incompatible with romantic love, because they suppress the evolution of feminine refinement and s.e.xual mentality. The doc.u.ments of the Hebrews, like those of the Hindoos and Persians, Greeks, and Romans, prove that tender, refined, and unselfish affection between the s.e.xes, far from being one of the first shoots of civilization, is its last and most beautiful flower.
GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS
The most obstinate disbeliever in the doctrine that romantic love, instead of being one of the earliest products of civilization, is one of the latest, will have to capitulate if it can be shown that even the Greeks, the most cultivated and refined nation of antiquity, knew it only in its sensual and selfish side, which is not true love, but self-love. In reality I have already shown this to be the case incidentally in the sections in which I have traced the evolution of the fourteen ingredients of love. In the present chapter, therefore, we may confine ourselves chiefly to a consideration of the stories and poems which have fostered the belief I am combating. But first we must hear what the champions of the Greeks have to say in their behalf.
CHAMPIONS OF GREEK LOVE
Professor Rohde declares emphatically (70) that ”no one would be so foolish as to doubt the existence of pure and strong love” among the ancient Greeks. Another eminent German scholar, Professor Ebers, sneers at the idea that the Greeks were not familiar with the love we know and celebrate. Having been criticised for making the lovers in his ancient historic romances act and talk and express their feelings precisely as modern lovers in Berlin or Leipsic do, he wrote for the second edition of his _Egyptian Princess_ a preface in which he tries to defend his position. He admits that he did, perhaps, after all, put too warm colors on his canvas, and frankly confesses that when he examined in the suns.h.i.+ne what he had written by lamplight, he made up his mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend. He admits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between the s.e.xes; yet he thinks it ”quite conceivable that a Greek heart should have felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart,” and he refers to a number of romantic stories invented by the Greeks as proof that they knew love in our sense of the word--such stories as Apuleius's _Cupid and Psyche_, Homer's portrait of Penelope, Xenophon's tale of Panthea and Abradates.
”Can we a.s.sume even the gallantry of love to have been unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, was transferred as a constellation to the skies; or can devotion to love be doubted in the case of peoples who, for the sake of a beautiful woman, wage terrible wars with bitter pertinacity?”
Hegel's episodic suggestion referred to in our first chapter regarding the absence of romantic love in ancient Greek literature having thus failed to convince even his own countrymen, it was natural that my revival of that suggestion, as a detail of my general theory of the evolution of love, should have aroused a chorus of critical dissent.
Commenting on my a.s.sertion that there are no stories of romantic love in Greek literature, an editorial writer in the London _Daily News_ exclaimed: ”Why, it would be less wild to remark that the Greeks had nothing but love-stories.” After referring to the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, Meleager and Atalanta, Alcyone and Ceyx, Cephalus and Procris, the writer adds,
”It is no exaggeration to say that any school-girl could tell Mr. Finck a dozen others.” ”The Greeks were human beings, and had the sentiments of human beings, which really vary but little....”