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_ XIII. MENTAL PURITY
Romantic love has worked two astounding miracles. We have seen how, with the aid of five of its ingredients--sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, and affection--it has overthrown the Goliath of selfishness. We shall now see how it has overcome another formidable foe of civilization--sensualism--by means of two other modern ingredients, one of which I will call mental purity (to distinguish it from bodily purity or chastity) and the other _esthetic_ admiration of personal beauty.
GERMAN TESTIMONY
Modern German literature contains many sincere tributes, in prose and verse, to the purity and nobility of true love and its refining influence. The psychologist Horwicz refers briefly to the way in which
"love, growing up as a mighty passion from the substratum of sexual life, has, under the repressing influence of centuries of habits and customs, taken on an entirely new, _supersensual, ethereal_ character, so that to a lover every thought of _naturalia_ seems indelicate and improper." "I feel it deeply that love must ennoble, not crush me,"
wrote the poet Korner; and again,
"Your sweet name was my talisman, which led me undefiled through youth's wild storms, amid the corruption of the times, and protected my inner sanctum." "O God!" wrote Beethoven, "let me at last find her who is destined to be mine, and who shall strengthen me in virtue."
According to Dr. Abel, while love longs ardently to possess the beloved, to enjoy her presence and sympathy, it has also a more or less prominent mental trait which ennobles the passion and places it at the service of the ideal of its fancy. It is accompanied by an enthusiasm for the good and the beautiful in general, which comes to most people only during the brief period of love. "It is a temporary self-exaltation, _purifying the desires_ and urging the lover to generous deeds."
Des hoechste Glueck hat keine Lieder,
Der Liebe Lust ist still und mild;
Ein Kuss, ein Blicken hin und wieder,
Und alle Sehnsucht ist gestillt.
---Geibel.
Schiller defined love as an eager "desire for another's happiness." "Love," he adds, "is the most beautiful phenomenon in all animated nature, the mightiest magnet in the spiritual world, the source of veneration and the sublimest virtues." Even Goethe had moments when he appreciated the purity of love, and he confutes his own coarse conception that was referred to in the last section when he makes Werther write: "She is sacred to me. _All desire is silent in her presence."_[41]
[FOOTNOTE 41: See also the reference to the "peculiar delicacy" of his relations to Lili, in Eckermann, III., March 5, 1830.]
The French Edward Schure exclaims, in his _History of German Song_:
"What surprises us foreigners in the poems of this
people is the unbounded faith in love, as the supreme
power in the world, as the most beautiful and _divine
thing_ on earth, ... the first and last word of
creation, its only principle of life, because it alone
can urge us to complete self-surrender."
Schure's intimation that this respect for love is peculiar to the Germans is, of course, absurd, for it is found in the modern literature of all civilized countries of Europe and America; as for instance in Michael Angelo's
The might of one fair face sublimes my love,
For it _hath weaned my heart from low desires_.
ENGLISH TESTIMONY
English literature, particularly, has been saturated with this sentiment for several centuries. Love is "all purity," according to Shakspere's Silvius. Schlegel remarked that by the manner in which Shakspere handled the story of _Romeo and Juliet_, it has become
"a glorious song of praise on that inexpressible
feeling which _ennobles the soul_ and gives to it
its highest sublimity, and which _elevates even
the senses_ themselves into soul;"
--which reminds one of Emerson's expression that the body is "ensouled" through love. Steele declared that "Love is a passion of the mind (_perhaps the noblest_), which was planted in it by the same hand that created it;" and of Lady Elizabeth Hastings he wrote that "to love her was a liberal education." In Steel's _Lover_ (No. 5) we read:
"During this emotion I am highly elated in my Being,
and my every sentiment improved by the effects of
that Passion.... I am more and more convinced that
this Passion is in lowest minds the strongest
Incentive that can move the Soul of Man to laudable
Accomplishments."
And in No. 29: "Nothing can _mend the Heart_ better than an honorable Love, except Religion." Thomas Otway sang:
O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
To temper man: we had been brutes without you.
There's in you all that we believe of heaven,
Amazing brightness, purity, and truth,
Eternal joy, and everlasting love.
"Love taught him shame," said Dryden, and Spenser wrote a Hymn in Honor of Love, in which he declared that
Such is the power of that sweet passion
That it _all sordid baseness doth expel_,
And the refined mind doth newly fashion
Unto a fairer form, which now doth dwell
In his high thought, that would itself excel.
Leigh Hunt wrote: "My love has made me better and more desirous of improvement than I have been."
Love, indeed, is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire,
With angels shared, by Allah given,
To _lift from earth our low desire_.
Devotion wafts the mind above,
But heaven itself descends in love.
---Byron.
Why should we kill the _best of passions_, love?
It aids the hero, bids ambition rise
To nobler heights, inspires immortal deeds,
Ev'n _softens brutes_, and adds a grace to virtue.
---Thomson.
Dr. Beddoe, author of the _Browning Cyclopaedia_, declares that "the passion of love, throughout Mr. Browning's works, is treated as the most _sacred_ thing in the human soul." How Browning himself loved we know from one of his wife's letters, in which she relates how she tried to discourage his advances:
"I showed him how he was throwing away into the ashes
his best affections--how the common gifts of youth and
cheerfulness were behind me--how I had not strength,
even of heart, for the ordinary duties of
life--everything I told him and showed him. 'Look at
this--and this--and this,' throwing down all my
disadvantages. To which he did not answer by a single
compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose,
and that I might be right or he might be right, he was
not there to decide; but that he loved me and should to
his last hour. He said that the freshness of youth had
passed with him also, and that he had studied the world
out of books and seen many women, yet had never loved
one until he had seen me. That he knew himself, and
knew that, if ever so repulsed, he should love me to
his last hour--it should be first and last."
No poet understood better than Tennyson that purity is an ingredient of love:
For indeed I know
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only _to keep down the base in man_,
But teach high thoughts and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
MAIDEN FANCIES
Bryan Waller Proctor fell in love when he was only five years old: "My love," he wrote afterward, "had the fire of passion, but not the clay which drags it downward; it partook of the innocence of my years, while it etherealized me."
Such ethereal love too is the prerogative of a young maiden, whose imagination is immaculate, ignorant of impurity.
Her feelings have the fragrancy,
The freshness of young flowers.
No, no, the utmost share
Of my desire shall be,
Only to kiss that air
That lately kissed thee.
In high school, when sentimental impulses first manifest themselves in a girl, she is more likely than not to transfer them to a girl. Her feelings, in these cases, are not merely those of a warm friendship, but they resemble the passionate, self-sacrificing attitude of romantic love. New York schoolgirls have a special slang phrase for this kind of love--they call it a "crush," to distinguish it from a "mash," which refers to an impression made on a man. A girl of seventeen told me one day how madly she was in love with another girl whose seat was near hers; how she brought her flowers, wiped her pens, took care of her desk; "but I don't believe she cares for me at all," she added, sadly.
PATHOLOGIC LOVE
Such love is usually as innocent as a butterfly's flirtation with a flower.[42] It has a pathologic phase, in some cases, which need not be discussed here. But I wish to call attention to the fact that even in abnormal states modern love preserves its purity. The most eminent authority on mental pathology, Professor Krafft-Ebing, says, concerning erotomania:
"The kernel of the whole matter is the delusion of
being singled out and loved by a person of the other
sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social class.
And it should be noted that the love felt by the
patient toward this person is a romantic, ecstatic, but
entirely 'Platonic' affection."
I have among my notes a remarkable case, relating to that most awful of diseases that can befall a woman--nymphomania.[43] The patient relates:
"I have also noticed that when my affections are
aroused, they counteract animal passion. I could never
love a man because he was a man. My tendency is to
worship the good I find in friends. I feel just the
same toward those of my own sex. If they show any
regard for me, the touch of a hand has power to take
away all morbid feelings."
[FOOTNOTE 42: Renan, in one of his short stories, describes a girl, Emma Kosilis, whose love, at sixteen, is as innocent as it is unconscious, and who is unable to distinguish it from piety. Regarding the unconscious purity of woman's love see Moll, 3, and Paget, _Clinical Lectures_, which discuss the loss in women of instinctive sexual knowledge. _Cf_. Ribot, 251, and Moreau, _Psychologie Morbide_, 264-278. Ribot is sceptical, because the ultimate goal is the possession of the beloved. But that has nothing to do with the question, for what he refers to is unconscious and instinctive. Here we are considering love as a conscious feeling and ideal, and as such it is as spotless and sinless as the most confirmed ascetic could wish it.]
[FOOTNOTE 43: The case is described in the _Medical Times_, April 18, 1885.]
A MODERN SENTIMENT
There are all sorts and conditions of love. To those who have known only the primitive (sensual) sort, the conditions described in the foregoing pages will seem strange and fantastic if not fictitious--that is, the products of the writers' imaginations. Fantastic they are, no doubt, and romantic, but that they are real I can vouch for by my own experience whenever I was in love, which happened several times. When I was a youth of seventeen I fell in love with a beautiful, black-eyed young woman, a Spanish-American of Californian stock. She was married, and I am afraid she was amused at my mad infatuation. Did I try to flirt with her? A smile, a glance of her eyes, was to me the seventh heaven beyond which there could be no other. I would not have dared to touch her hand, and the thought of kissing her was as much beyond my wildest flights of fancy as if she had been a real goddess. To me she was divine, utterly unapproachable by mortal. Every day I used to sit in a lonely spot of the forest and weep; and when she went away I felt as if the son had gone out and all the world were plunged into eternal darkness.
Such is romantic love--a supersensual feeling of crystalline purity from which all gross matter has been distilled. But the love that includes this ingredient is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old, and not to be found among savages, barbarians, or Orientals. To them, as the perusal of past and later chapters must convince the reader, it is inconceivable that a woman should serve any other than sensual and utilitarian purposes. The whole story is told in what Dodge says of the Indians, who, "animal-like, approach a woman only to make love to her"; and of the squaws who do not dare even go with a beau to a dance, or go a short distance from camp, without taking precautions against rape--precautions without which they "would not be safe for an instant".
PERSIANS, TURKS, AND HINDOOS
We shall read later on of the obscene talk and sights that poison the minds of boys and girls among Indians, Polynesians, etc., from their infancy; in which respect Orientals are not much better than Hurons and Botocudos. "The Persian child," writes Mrs. Bishop (I., 218),
"from infancy is altogether interested in the topics
of adults; and as the conversation of both sexes is
said by those who know them best to be without
reticence or modesty, the purity which is one of the
greatest charms of childhood is absolutely unknown."
Of the Turks (at Bagdad) Ida Pfeiffer writes _(L.J.R.W._, 202-203) that she found it
"very painful to notice the tone of the conversation
that goes on in these harems and in the baths. Nothing
can exceed the demureness of the women in public; but
when they come together in these places, they indemnify
themselves thoroughly for the restraint. While they
were busy with their pipes and coffee, I took the
opportunity to take a glance into the neighboring
apartments, and in a few minutes I saw enough to fill
me at once with disgust and compassion for these poor
creatures, whom idleness and ignorance have degraded
almost below the level of humanity. A visit to the
women's baths left a no less melancholy impression.
There were children of both sexes, girls, women, and
elderly matrons. The poor children! how should they in
after life understand what is meant by modesty and
purity, when they are accustomed from their infancy to
witness such scenes, and listen to such conversation?"
These Orientals are too coarse-fibred to appreciate the spotless, peach-down purity which in our ideal is a maiden's supreme charm. They do not care to prolong, even for a year what to us seems the sweetest, loveliest period of life, the time of artless, innocent maidenhood. They cannot admire a rose for its fragrant beauty, but must needs regard it as a thing to be picked at once and used to gratify their appetite. Nay, they cannot even wait till it is a full-blown rose, but must destroy the lovely bud. The "civilized" Hindoos, who are allowed legally to sacrifice girls to their lusts before the poor victims have reached the age of puberty, are really on a level with the African savages who indulge in the same practice. An unsophisticated reader of _Kalidasa_ might find in the King's comparison of Sakuntala to "a flower that no one has smelt, a sprig that no one has plucked, a pearl that has not yet been pierced," a recognition of the charm of maiden purity. But there is a world-wide difference between this and the modern sentiment. The King's attitude, as the context shows, is simply that of an epicure who prefers his oysters fresh. The modern sentiment is embodied in Heine's exquisite lines:
DU BIST WIE EINE BLUME.
E'en as a lovely flower
So fair, so pure, thou art;
I gaze on thee and sadness
Comes stealing o'er my heart.
My hands I fain had folded
Upon thy soft brown hair,
Praying that God may keep thee
So lovely, pure, and fair.
---Trans, of Kate Freiligrath Kroeker.
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 lust 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, ennobling emotion, a stimulus to self-improvement and an impulse to do generous, unselfish deeds, but a mere animal passion, low and degrading.
LOVE DESPISED IN JAPAN AND CHINA
The Japanese have a little more regard for women than most Orientals, yet by them, too, love is regarded as a low passion--as, in fact, identical with lust. It is not considered respectable for young folks to arrange their own marriages on a basis of love.
"Among the lower classes, indeed," says Kuechler,[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 Japanese_:
"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 he says:
"According to the Confucian ethical code, which the
Japanese adopted, a man's parents, his teacher,
and his lord claim his life-long service, his wife
standing on an immeasurably lower plane."[45]
[FOOTNOTE 44: _Trans. Asiatic Soc. of Japan_, 1885, p. 181.]
[FOOTNOTE 45: In the _Journal des Goncourts_ (V., 214-215) a young Japanese, with characteristic topsy-turviness, comments on the "coarseness" of European ideas of love, which he could understand only in his own coarse way. "Vous dites a une femme, je vous aime! Eh bien! Chez nous, c'est comme si on disait Madame, je vais coucher avec vous. Tont ce que nous osons dire a la dame que nous aimons, c'est que nous envions pres d'elle la place des canards mandarins. C'est messieurs, notre oiseau d'amour."]
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:
"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 sex;
in their illustrations 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 friendship 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 friendship 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 friendship 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
assert that you who are passionately 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 passion for women consists at the best in
the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment
of bodily beauty."
Another interlocutor sums up the Greek attitude 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 Goetter und Goettinnen liebten.
Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.
PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY
The change in love from the barbarian and ancient attitude 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 attitude toward women in general, including their notions about love. There is a curious passage 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 passion of burning lust, if we may believe Gerson
and Bonaventure; there was no such antidote against it
as the Virgin Mary's face."
Mediaeval theologians had a special name for this faculty--Penetrative Virginity--which McClintock and Strong's _Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature_ defines as
"such an extraordinary or perfect gift of chastity, to
which some have pretended that it overpowered those by
whom they have been surrounded, and created in them an
insensibility to the pleasures of the flesh. The Virgin
Mary, according to some Romanists, was possessed of
this gift, which made those who beheld her,
notwithstanding her beauty, to have no sentiments but
such as were consistent with chastity."
In the eyes of refined modern lovers, every spotless maiden has that gift of penetrative virginity. The beauty of her face, or the charm of her character, inspires in him an affection which is as pure, as chaste, as the love of flowers. But it was only very gradually and slowly that human beauty gained the power to inspire such a pure love; the proof of which assertion is to be unfolded in our next section. _
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