Part 84 (1/2)
”I resigned myself to you, not as to a paramour, but as to a legitimate husband, and I have preserved my chast.i.ty with you, resisting your urgent solicitations because I always had in mind the lawful marriage to which we pledged ourselves,”
she uses the language of a shrewd hetaira, not of an innocent girl; nor could the author have made her say the following had his subject been romantic love: [Greek: _Hormaen gar, hos oistha, kratousaes epithumias machae men ant.i.tupos epipeinei, logos d' eikon kai pros to boulaema syntrechon taen protaen kai zeousan phoran esteile kai to katoxu taes orezeos to haedei taes epaggelias kateunase.]
The story of Heliodorus is full of such coa.r.s.e remarks, and his idea of love is plainly enough revealed when he moralizes that ”a lover inclines to drink and one who is drunk is inclined to love.”
It is not only on account of this coa.r.s.eness that the story of Theagenes and Chariclea fails to come up to the standard of romantic love. When Arsace (VIII., 9) imprisons the lovers together, with the idea that the sight of their chains will increase the sufferings of each, we have an intimation of crude sympathy; but apart from that the symptoms of love referred to in the course of the romance are the same that I have previously enumerated, as peculiar to Alexandrian literature. The maxims, ”dread the revenge that follows neglected love;” ”love soon finds its end in satiety;” and ”the greatest happiness is to be free from love,” take us back to the oldest Greek times. Peculiarly Greek, too, is the scene in which the women, unable to restrain their feelings, fling fruits and flowers at a young man because he is so beautiful; although on the same page we are surprised by the admission that woman's beauty is even more alluring than man's, which is not a Greek sentiment.
In this last respect, as in some others, the romance of Heliodorus differs favorably from that of Achilles Tatius, which relates the adventures of Leucippe and c.l.i.tophon; but I need not dwell on this amazingly obscene and licentious narrative, as its author's whole philosophy of love, like that of Heliodorus, is summed up in this pa.s.sage:
”As the wine produced its effect I cast lawless glances at Leucippe: for Love and Bacchus are violent G.o.ds, they invade the soul and so inflame it that they forget modesty, and while one kindles the flame the other supplies the fuel; for wine is the food of love.”
Nor need I dwell on the stories of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, or the epic _Dionysiaca_ of Nonnus, as they yield us no new points of view. The romance of Longus, however, calls for some remarks, as it is the best known of the Greek novels and has often been p.r.o.nounced a story of refined love worthy of a modern writer.
DAPHNIS AND CHLOE
Goethe found in _Daphnis and Chloe_ ”a delicacy of feeling which cannot be excelled.” Professor Murray backs up the morals of Longus: ”It needs an unintelligent reader or a morbid translator,” he writes (403), ”to find harm in the _History of Daphnis and Chloe_;” and an editorial writer in the New York _Mail and Express_ accused me, as before intimated, of unexampled ignorance for not knowing that _Daphnis and Chloe_ is ”as sweet and beautiful a love-story as ever skipped in prose.” This, indeed, is the prevalent opinion. How it ever arose is a mystery to me. Fiction has always been the sphere of the most unrestrained license, yet Dunlop wrote in his _History of Fiction_ that there are in this story ”particular pa.s.sages so extremely reprehensible that I know nothing like them in almost any work whatever.” In collecting the material for the present volume I have been obliged to examine thousands of books referring to the relations of men and women, but I declare that of all the books I have seen only the Hindoo _K[=a]masutr[=a]m_, the literal version of the _Arabian Nights_, and the American Indian stories collected by Dr.
Boas, can compare with this ”sweet and beautiful” romance of Longus in downright obscenity or deliberate laciviousness. I have been able, without going beyond the lat.i.tude permissible to anthropologists, to give a fairly accurate idea of the love-affairs of savages and barbarians; but I find it impossible, after several trials, to sum up the story of Daphnis and Chloe without going beyond the limits of propriety. Among all the deliberate pictures of _moral depravity_ painted by Greek and Roman authors not one is so objectionable as this ”idyllic” picture of the _innocent_ shepherd boy and girl. Pastoral love is coa.r.s.e enough, in all truth: but this story is infinitely more immoral than, for instance, the frank and natural sensualism of the twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus. Professor Anthon (755) described the story of _Daphnis and Chloe_ as
”the romance, _par excellence_, of physical love. It is a history of the senses rather than of the mind, a picture of the development of the instincts rather than of the sentiments.... _Paul and Virginia_ is nothing more than _Daphnis and Chloe_ delineated by a refined and cultivated mind, and spiritualized and purified by the influence of Christianity.”
This is true; but Anthon erred decidedly in saying that in the Greek story ”vice is advocated by no sophistry.” On the contrary, what makes this romance so peculiarly objectionable is that it is a master work of that kind of fiction which makes vice alluring under the sophistical veil of innocence. Longus knew very well that nothing is so tempting to libertines as purity and ignorant innocence; hence he made purity and ignorant innocence the pivot of his prurient story.
Professor Rohde (516) has rudely torn the veil from his sly sophistry:
”The way in which Longus excites the sensual desires of the lovers by means of licentious experiments going always only to the verge of gratification, betrays an abominably hypocritical _raffinement_[331] which reveals in the most disagreeable manner that the navete of this idyllist is a premeditated artifice and he himself nothing but a sophist. It is difficult to understand how anyone could have ever been deceived so far as to overlook the sophistical character of this pastoral romance of Longus, or could have discovered genuine navete in this most artificial of all rhetorical productions. No attentive reader who has some acquaintance with the ways of the Sophistic writers will have any difficulty in apprehending the true inwardness of the story... As this sophist, in those offensively licentious love-scenes, suddenly shows the cloven foot under the cloak of innocence, so, on the other hand, his eager desire to appear as simple and childlike as possible often enough makes him cold, finical, trifling, or utterly silly in his affectation.”[332]
HERO AND LEANDER
Our survey of Greek erotic literature may be brought to a close with two famous stories which are closely allied to the Greek romances, although one of them--_Hero and Leander_--was written in verse, and the other--_Cupid and Psyche_--in Latin prose. While Apuleius was an African and wrote his story in Latin, he evidently derived it from a Greek source.[333] He lived in the second century of our era, and Musaeus, the author of _Hero and Leander_, in the fifth. It is more than probable that Musaeus did not invent the story, but found it as a local legend and simply adorned it with his pen.
On the sh.o.r.es of the h.e.l.lespont, near the narrowest part of the strait, lay the cities of Sestos and Abydos. It was at Sestos that Xerxes undertook to cross with his vast armies, while Abydos claimed to be the true burial place of Osiris; yet these circ.u.mstance were considered insignificant in comparison with the fact that it was from Abydos to Sestos and back that Leander was fabled to have swum on his nightly visits to his beloved Hero; for the coins of both the cities were adorned with the solitary tower in which Hero was supposed to live at the time. Why she lived there is not stated by any of the poets who elaborated the legend, but it may be surmised that she did so in order to give them a chance to invent a romantic story. To the present day the Turks point out what they claim to be her tower, and it is well-known that in 1810, Lord Byron and Lieutenant Ekenhead, in order to test the possibility of Leander's feat, swam from Europe to Asia at this place; it took them an hour and five and an hour and ten minutes respectively, and on account of the strong current the distance actually traversed was estimated at more than four miles, while in a straight line it was only a mile from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e.
I have already pointed out (202, 204) that the action of Leander in swimming across this strait for the sake of enjoying the favor of Hero, and her suicide when she finds him dead on the rocks, have nothing so do with the altruistic self-sacrifice that indicates _soul_-love. Here I merely wish to remark that apart from that there is not a line or word in the whole poem to prove that this story ”completely upsets” my theory, as one critic wrote. The story is not merely frivolous and cold, as W. von Humboldt called it; it is as unmitigatedly sensual as _Daphnis and Chloe_, though less offensively so because it does not add the vice of hypocrisy to its immodesty.
From beginning to end there is but one thought in Leanders mind, as there is in Hero's, whose words and actions are even more indelicate than those of Leander; they are the words and actions of a priestess of Venus true to her function--a girl to whom the higher feminine virtues, which alone can inspire romantic love, are unknown. On the impulse of the moment, in response to coa.r.s.e flattery, she makes an a.s.signation in a lonely tower with a perfect stranger, regardless of her parents, her honor, her future. Details need not be cited, as the poem is accessible to everybody. It is a romantic story, in Ovid's version even more so than in that of Musaeus; but of romantic love--soul-love--there is no trace in either version. There are touches of sentimentality in Ovid, but not of sentiment; a distinction on which I should have dwelt in my first book (91).
CUPID AND PSYCHE
To a student of comparative literature the story of Cupid and Psyche[334] is one of those tales which are current in many countries (and of which _Lohengrin_ is a familiar instance), that were originally intended as object lessons to enforce the moral that women must not be too inquisitive regarding their lovers or husbands, who may seem monsters, but in reality are G.o.ds and should be accepted as such. If most persons, nevertheless, fancy that _Cupid and Psyche_ is a story of ”modern” romantic love, that is presumably due to the fact that most persons have never read it. It is not too much to say that had Apuleius really known such a thing as modern romantic love--or conjugal affection either--it would have required great ingenuity on his part to invent a plot from which those qualities are so rigorously excluded. Romantic love means pre-matrimonial infatuation, based not only on physical charms but on soul-beauty. The time when alone it flourishes with its mental purity, its minute sympathies, its gallant attentions and sacrifices, its hyperbolic adorations, and mixed moods of agonies and ecstasies, is during the period of courts.h.i.+p. Now from the story of Cupid and Psyche this period is absolutely eliminated.
Venus is jealous because divine honors are paid to the Princess Psyche on account of her beauty; so she sends her son Cupid to punish Psyche by making her fall in love violently (_amore flagrantissimo_) with the lowest, poorest, and most abject man on earth. Just at that time Psyche has been exposed by the king on a mountain top in obedience to an obscure oracle. Cupid sees her there, and, disobeying his mother's orders, has her brought while asleep, by his servant Zephir, to a beautiful palace, where all the luxuries of life are provided for her by unseen hands; and at night, after she has retired, an unknown lover visits her, disappearing again before dawn (_jamque aderat ign.o.bilis maritus et torem inscenderat et uxorem sibi Psychen fecerat et ante lucis exortum propere discesserat_).
Now follow some months in which Psyche is neither maiden nor wife.
Even if they had been properly married there would have been no opportunity for the development or manifestation of supersensual conjugal attachment, for all this time Psyche is never allowed even to see her lover; and when an opportunity arises for her to show her devotion to him she fails utterly to rise to the occasion. One night he informs her that her two sisters, who are unhappily married, are trying to find her, and he warns her seriously not to heed them in any way, should they succeed in their efforts. She promises, but spends the whole of the next day weeping and wailing because she is locked up in a beautiful prison, unable to see her sisters--very unlike a loving modern girl on her honeymoon, whose one desire is to be alone with her beloved, giving him a monopoly of her affection and enjoying a monopoly of his, with no distractions or jealousies to mar their happiness. Cupid chides her for being sad and dissatisfied even amid his caresses and he again warns her against her scheming sisters; whereat she goes so far as to threaten to kill herself unless he allows her to receive her sisters. He consents at last, after making her promise not to let them persuade her to try to find out anything about his personal appearance, lest such forbidden curiosity make her lose him forever. Nevertheless, when, on their second visit, the sisters, filled with envy, try to persuade her that her unseen lover is a monster who intends to eat her after she has grown fat, and that to save herself she must cut off his head while he is asleep, she resolves to follow their advice. But when she enters the room at night, with a knife in one hand and a lamp in the other, and sees the beautiful G.o.d Cupid in her bed, she is so agitated that a drop of hot oil falls from her lamp on his face and wakes him; whereupon, after reproaching her, he rises on his wings and forsakes her.
Overcome with grief, Psyche tries to end her life by jumping into a river, but Zephir saves her. Then she takes revenge on her sisters by calling on them separately and telling each one that Cupid had deserted her because he had seen her with lamp and knife, and that he was now going to marry one of them. The sisters hasten one after the other to the rock, but Zephir fails to catch them, and they are dashed to pieces. Venus meanwhile had discovered the escapade of her boy and locked him up till his wound from the hot oil was healed. Her anger now vents itself on Psyche. She sets her several impossible tasks, but Psyche, with supernatural aid, accomplishes all of them safely. At last Cupid manages to escape through a window. He finds Psyche lying on the road like a corpse, wakes her and Mercury brings her to heaven, where at last she is properly married to Cupid--_sic rite Psyche convenit in manum Cupidinis et nascitur illis maturo partu filia, quam Voluptatem nominamus_.
Such is the much-vaunted ”love-story” of Cupid and Psyche!
Commentators have found all sorts of fanciful and absurd allegories in this legend. Its real significance I have already pointed out. But it may be looked at from still another point of view. Psyche means soul, and in the story of Apuleius Cupid does not fall in love with a soul, but with a beautiful body. This sums up h.e.l.lenic love in general. _The Greek Cupid_ NEVER _fell in love with a Psyche_.
UTILITY AND FUTURE OF LOVE