History Of An Idea

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Title:     History Of An Idea
Author: Henry Theophilus Finck [More Titles by Finck]

"Love is always the same. As Sappho loved, fifty years ago, so did people love ages before her; so will they love thousands of years hence."

These words, placed by Professor Ebers in the mouth of one of the characters in his historic novel, _An Egyptian Princess_, express the prevalent opinion on this subject, an opinion which I, too, shared fifteen years ago. Though an ardent champion of the theory of evolution, I believed that there was one thing in the world to which modern scientific ideas of gradual development did not apply--that love was too much part and parcel of human nature to have ever been different from what it is to-day.

 

ORIGIN OF A BOOK

It so happened that I began to collect notes for a paper on "How to Cure Love." It was at first intended merely as a personal experiment in emotional psychology. Afterward it occurred to me that such a sketch might be shaped into a readable magazine article. This, again, suggested a complementary article on "How to Win Love"--a sort of modern Ovid in prose; and then suddenly came the thought,

"Why not write a book on love? There is none in the English language--strange anomaly--though love is supposed to be the most fascinating and influential thing in the world. It will surely be received with delight, especially if I associate with it some chapters on personal beauty, the chief inspirer of love. I shall begin by showing that the ancient Greeks and Romans and Hebrews loved precisely as we love."

Forthwith I took down from my shelves the classical authors that I had not touched since leaving college, and eagerly searched for all references to women, marriage, and love. To my growing surprise and amazement I found that not only did those ancient authors look upon women as inferior beings while I worshipped them, but in their descriptions of the symptoms of love I looked in vain for mention of those supersensual emotions and self-sacrificing impulses which overcame me when I was in love. "Can it be," I whispered to myself, "that, notwithstanding the universal opinion to the contrary, love is, after all, subject to the laws of development?"

This hypothesis threw me into a fever of excitement, without the stimulus of which I do not believe I should have had the courage and patience to collect, classify, and weave into one fabric the enormous number of facts and opinions contained within the covers of _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_. I believed that at last something new under the sun had been found, and I was so much afraid that the discovery might leak out prematurely, that for two years I kept the first half of my title a secret, telling inquisitive friends merely that I was writing a book on Personal Beauty. And no one but an author who is in love with his theme and whose theme is love can quite realize what a supreme delight it was--with occasional moments of anxious suspense--to go through thousands of books in the libraries of America, England, France, and Germany and find that all discoverable facts, properly interpreted, bore out my seemingly paradoxical and reckless theory.

 

SKEPTICAL CRITICS

When the book appeared some of the critics accepted my conclusions, but a larger number pooh-poohed them. Here are a few specimen comments:

"His great theses are, first, that romantic love is
an entirely modern invention; and, secondly, that
romantic love and conjugal love are two things
essentially different.... Now both these theses
are luckily false."

"He is wrong when he says there was no such thing as pre-matrimonial love known to the ancients."

"I don't believe in his theory at all, and ... no one is likely to believe in it after candid examination."

"A ridiculous theory."

"It was a misfortune when Mr. Finck ran afoul of this theory."

"Mr. Finck will not need to live many years in order to be ashamed of it."

"His thesis is not worth writing about."

"It is true that he has uttered a profoundly original thought, but, unfortunately, the depth of its originality is surpassed by its fathomless stupidity."

"If in the light of these and a million other facts, we should undertake to explain why nobody had anticipated Mr. Finck's theory that love is a modern sentiment, we should say it might be because nobody who felt inspired to write about it was ever so extensively unacquainted with the literature of the human passions."

"Romantic love has always existed, in every clime and age, since man left simian society; and the records of travellers show that it is to be found even among the lowest savages."

 

ROBERT BURTON

While not a few of the commentators thus rejected or ridiculed my thesis, others hinted that I had been anticipated. Several suggested that Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ had been my model. As a matter of fact, although one of the critics referred to my book as "a marvel of epitomized research," I must confess, to my shame, that I was not aware that Burton had devoted two hundred pages to what he calls Love-Melancholy, until I had finished the first sketch of my manuscript and commenced to rewrite it. My experience thus furnished a striking verification of the witty epitaph which Burton wrote for himself and his book: "Known to few, unknown to fewer still." However, after reading Burton, I was surprised that any reader of Burton should have found anything in common between his book and mine, for he treated love as an appetite, I as a sentiment; my subject was pure, supersensual affection, while his subject is frankly indicated in the following sentences:

"I come at last to that heroical love, which is proper
to men and women ... and deserves much rather to be
called burning lust than by such an honorable title."
"This burning lust ... begets rapes, incests, murders."
"It rages with all sorts and conditions of men, yet is
most evident among such as are young and lusty, in the
flower of their years, nobly descended, high fed, such
as live idly, at ease, and for that cause (which our
divines call burning lust) this mad and beastly passion
... is named by our physicians heroical love, and a
more honorable title put upon it, _Amor nobilis_, as
Savonarola styles it, because noble men and women make
a common practice of it, and are so ordinarily affected
with it." "Carolus a Lorme ... makes a doubt whether
this heroical love be a disease.... Tully ... defines
it a furious disease of the mind; Plato madness
itself."

"Gordonius calls this disease the proper passion of
nobility."

"This heroical passion or rather brutish burning lust
of which we treat."

The only honorable love Burton knows is that between husband and wife, while of such a thing as the evolution of love he had, of course, not the remotest conception, as his book appeared in 1621, or two hundred and thirty-eight years before Darwin's _Origin of Species_.

 

HEGEL ON GREEK LOVE

In a review of my book which appeared in the now defunct New York _Star_, the late George Parsons Lathrop wrote that the author

"says that romantic love is a modern sentiment, less
than a thousand years old. This idea, I rather think,
he derived from Hegel, although he does not credit that
philosopher with it."

I read this criticism with mingled emotions. If it was true that Hegel had anticipated me, my claims to priority of discovery would vanish, even though the idea had come to me spontaneously; but, on the other hand, the disappointment at this thought was neutralized by the reflection that I should gain the support of one of the most famous philosophers, and share with him the sneers and the ridicule bestowed upon my theory. I wrote to Mr. Lathrop, begging him to refer me to the volume and page of Hegel's numerous works where I could find the passage in question. He promptly replied that I should find it in the second volume of the _Aesthetik_ (178-182). No doubt I ought to have known that Hegel had written on this subject; but the fact that of more than two hundred American, English, and German reviewers of my book whose notices I have seen, only one knew what had thus escaped my research, consoled me somewhat. Hegel, indeed, might well have copied Burton's epitaph. His _Aesthetik_ is an abstruse, unindexed, three-volume work of 1,575 pages, which has not been reprinted since 1843, and is practically forgotten. Few know it, though all know of it.

After perusing Hegel's pages on this topic I found, however, that Mr. Lathrop had imputed to him a theory--my theory--which that philosopher would have doubtless repudiated emphatically. What Hegel does is simply to call attention to the fact that in the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans love is depicted only as a transient gratification of the senses, or a consuming heat of the blood, and not as a romantic, sentimental affection of the soul. He does not generalize, says nothing about other ancient nations,[1] and certainly never dreamt of such a thing as asserting that love had been gradually and slowly developed from the coarse and selfish passions of our savage ancestors to the refined and altruistic feelings of modern civilized men and women. He lived long before the days of scientific anthropology and Darwinism, and never thought of such a thing as looking upon the emotions and morals of primitive men as the raw material out of which our own superior minds have been fashioned. Nay, Hegel does not even say that sentimental love did not exist in the life of the Greeks and Romans; he simply asserts that it is not to be found in their literature. The two things are by no means identical.

[FOOTNOTE 1: Albrecht Weber and other German scholars, while practically agreeing with Hegel regarding the Greeks and Romans, claim, that the amorous poetry of the ancient Hindoo has the sentimental qualities of modern European verse.]

Professor Rohde, an authority on the erotic writings of the Greeks, expresses the opinion repeatedly that, whatever their literature may indicate, they themselves were capable of feeling strong and pure love; and the eminent American psychologist, Professor William James, put forth the same opinion in a review of my book.[2] Indeed, this view was broached more than a hundred years ago by a German author, Basil von Ramdohr, who wrote four volumes on love and its history, entitled _Venus Urania_. His first two volumes are almost unreadably garrulous and dull, but the third and fourth contain an interesting account of various phases through which love has passed in literature. Yet he declares (Preface, vol. iii.) that "the nature [_Wesen_] of love is unchangeable, but the ideas we entertain in regard to it and the effects we ascribe to it, are subject to alteration."

[FOOTNOTE 2: In the New York _Nation_ of September 22, and the _Evening Post_ of September 24, 1887. My reasons for not agreeing with these two distinguished professors will be dwelt on repeatedly in the following pages. If they are right, then literature is not, as it is universally held to be, a mirror of life.]

 

SHELLEY ON GREEK LOVE

It is possible that Hegel may have read this book, for it appeared in 1798, while the first manuscript sketches of his lectures on esthetics bear the date of 1818. He may have also read Robert Wood's book entitled _An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_, dated 1775, in which this sentence occurs:

"Is it not very remarkable, that Homer, so great a
master of the tender and pathetic, who has exhibited
human nature in almost every shape, and under every
view, has not given a single instance of the powers
and effects of love, distinct from sensual enjoyment,
in the _Iliad_?"

This is as far as I have been able to trace back this notion in modern literature. But in the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century I have come across several adumbrations of the truth regarding the Greeks,[3] by Shelley, Lord Lytton, Lord Macaulay, and Theophile Gautier. Shelley's ideas are confused and contradictory, but interesting as showing the conflict between traditional opinion and poetic intuition. In his fragmentary discourse on "The Manners of the Ancients Relating to the Subject of Love," which was intended to serve as an introduction to Plato's _Symposium_, he remarks that the women of the ancient Greeks, with rare exceptions, possessed

"the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were
probably not extremely beautiful, at least there was
no such disproportion in the attractions of the
external form between the female and male sex among
the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans.
They were certainly devoid of that moral and
intellectual loveliness with which the acquisition
of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment
animates, as with another life of overpowering
grace, the lineaments and the gestures of every
form which they inhabit. Their eyes could not have
been deep and intricate from the workings of the
mind, and could have entangled no heart in
soul-enwoven labyrinths." Having painted this
life-like picture of the Greek female mind, Shelley
goes on to say perversely:

"Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were
deprived of its legitimate object, that they were
incapable of sentimental love, and that this passion
is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of
modern times."

[FOOTNOTE 3: No important truth is ever born full fledged. The Darwinian theory was conceived simultaneously by Wallace and Darwin, and both were anticipated by other writers. Nay, a German professor has written a treatise on the "Greek Predecessors of Darwin."]

 

He tries to justify this assertion by adding that

"Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain
degree of civilization and refinement ever produces the want
of sympathies still more intimate and complete; and the
gratification of the senses is no longer all that is sought
in sexual connection. It soon becomes a very small part of
that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love,
which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not
merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual,
imaginative, and sensitive."

Here Shelley contradicts himself flatly by saying, in two consecutive sentences, that Greek women were "certainly devoid of the moral and intellectual loveliness" which inspires sentimental love, but that the men nevertheless could feel such love. His mind was evidently hazy on the subject, and that is probably the reason why his essay remained a fragment.

 

MACAULAY, BULWER-LYTTON, GAUTIER

Macaulay, with deeper insight than Shelley showed, realized that the passion of love may undergo changes. In his essay on Petrarch he notes that in the days of that poet love had become a new passion, and he clearly realizes the obstacles to love presented by Greek institutions. Of the two classes of women in Greece, the respectable and the hetairai, he says:

"The matrons and their daughters, confined in the
harem--insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but
the mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were
married--could rarely excite interest; while their
brilliant rivals, half graces, half harpies,
elegant and refined, but fickle and rapacious,
could never inspire respect."

Lord Lytton wrote an essay on "The Influence of Love upon Literature and Real Life," in which he stated that

"with Euripides commences the important distinction
in the analysis of which all the most refined and
intellectual of modern erotic literature consists,
viz., the distinction between love as a passion and
love as a sentiment.... He is the first of the
Hellenic poets who interests us _intellectually_
in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes."

Theophile Gautier clearly realized one of the differences between ancient passion and modern love. In _Mademoiselle de Maupin,_ he makes this comment on the ancient love-poems:

"Through all the subtleties and veiled expressions one
hears the abrupt and harsh voice of the master who
endeavors to soften his manner in speaking to a slave.
It is not, as in the love-poems written since the
Christian era, a soul demanding love of another soul
because it loves.... 'Make haste, Cynthia; the smallest
wrinkle may prove the grave of the most violent
passion.' It is in this brutal formula that all ancient
elegy is summed up."

 

GOLDSMITH AND ROUSSEAU

In _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ I intimated (116) that Oliver Goldsmith was the first author who had a suspicion of the fact that love is not the same everywhere and at all times. My surmise was apparently correct; it is not refuted by any of the references to love by the several authors just quoted, since all of these were written from about a half a century to a century later than Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_ (published in 1764), which contains his dialogue on "Whether Love be a Natural or a Fictitious Passion." His assertion therein that love existed only in early Rome, in chivalrous mediaeval Europe, and in China, all the rest of the world being, and having ever been, "utter strangers to its delights and advantages," is, of course a mere bubble of his poetic fancy, not intended to be taken too seriously, and, is, moreover, at variance with facts. It is odd that he overlooks the Greeks, whereas the other writers cited confine themselves to the Greeks and their Roman imitators.

Ten years before Goldsmith thus launched the idea that most nations were and had ever been strangers to the delights and advantages of love, Jean Jacques Rousseau published a treatise, _Discours sur l'inegalite_ (1754), in which he asserted that savages are strangers to jealousy, know no domesticity, and evince no preferences, being as well pleased with one woman as with another. Although, as we shall see later, many savages do have a crude sort of jealousy, domesticity, and individual preference, Rousseau, nevertheless, hints prophetically at a great truth--the fact that some, at any rate, of the phenomena of love are not to be found in the life of savages. Such a thought, naturally, was too novel to be accepted at once. Ramdohr, for instance, declares (III. 17) that he cannot convince himself that Rousseau is right. Yet, on the preceding page he himself had written that "it is unreasonable to speak of love between the sexes among peoples that have not yet advanced so far as to grant women humane consideration."

 

LOVE A COMPOUND FEELING

All these things are of extreme interest as showing the blind struggles of a great idea to emerge from the mist into daylight. The greatest obstacle to the recognition of the fact that love has a history, and is subject to the laws of evolution lay in the habit of looking upon it as a simple feeling.

When I wrote my first book on love, I believed that Herbert Spencer was the first thinker who grasped the idea that love is a composite state of mind. I now see, however, that Silvius, in Shakspere's _As You Like It_ (V. 2), gave a broad hint of the truth, three hundred years ago. Phoebe asks him to "tell what 't is to love," and he replies:

It is to be all made of sighs and tears....
It is to be all made of faith and service....
It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion, and all made of wishes,
All adoration, duty, and observance,
All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,
All purity, all trial, all obedience.

Coleridge also vaguely recognized the composite nature of love in the first stanza of his famous poem:

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame.

And Swift adds, in "Cadenus and Vanessa:"

Love, why do we one passion call,
When 'tis a compound of them all?

The eminent Danish critic, George Brandes, though a special student of English literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one of his lectures on literary history (1872), that the book in which love is for the first time looked on as something composite and an attempt made to analyze it into its elements, is Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_ (which appeared in 1816). "In _Adolphe_," he says,

"and in all the literature associated with that book,
we are informed accurately how many parts, how many
grains, of friendship, devotion, vanity, ambition,
admiration, respect, sensual attraction, illusion,
fancy, deception, hate, satiety, enthusiasm, reasoning
calculation, etc., are contained in the _mixtum
compositum_ which the enamoured persons call love."

This list, moreover, does not accurately name a single one of the essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated phenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states of mind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love--gallant "service," "adoration," and "purity"--while "patience and impatience" may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixed moods of hope and despair.

 

HERBERT SPENCER'S ANALYSIS

Nevertheless the first thinker who treated love as a compound feeling and consciously attempted a philosophical analysis of it was Herbert Spencer. In 1855 he published his _Principles of Psychology_, and in 1870 appeared a greatly enlarged edition, paragraph 215 of which contains the following exposition of his views:

"The passion which unites the sexes is habitually
spoken of as though it were a simple feeling; whereas
it is the most compound, and therefore the most
powerful, of all the feelings. Added to the purely
physical elements of it are first to be noticed those
highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty;
around which are aggregated a variety of pleasurable
ideas, not in themselves amatory, but which have an
organized relation to the amatory feeling. With this
there is united the complex sentiment which we term
affection--a sentiment which, as it exists between
those of the same sex, must be regarded as an
independent sentiment, but one which is here greatly
exalted. Then there is the sentiment of admiration,
respect, or reverence--in itself one of considerable
power, and which in this relation becomes in a high
degree active. There comes next the feeling called love
of approbation. To be preferred above all the world,
and that by one admired beyond all others, is to have
the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing
every previous experience: especially as there is added
that indirect gratification of it which results from
the preference being witnessed by unconcerned persons.
Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into
play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment
from, and sway over, another, is a proof of power which
cannot fail agreeably to excite the _amour propre_. Yet
again the proprietary feeling has its share in the
general activity: there is the pleasure of
possession--the two belong to each other. Once more,
the relation allows of an extended liberty of action.
Toward other persons a restrained behavior is
requisite. Round each there is a subtle boundary that
may not be crossed--an individuality on which none may
trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown
down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is
gratified. Finally, there is an exaltation of the
sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled
by another's sympathetic participation; and the
pleasures of another are added to the egoistic
pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling forming the
nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings
produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple
attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation,
of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of
sympathy. These, all greatly exalted, and severally
tending to reflect their excitements on one another,
unite to form the mental state we call love. And as
each of them is itself comprehensive of multitudinous
states of consciousness, we may say that this passion
fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary
excitations of which we are capable; and that hence
results its irresistible power."

Ribot has copied this analysis of love in his _Psychologie des Sentiments_ (p. 249), with the comment that it is the best known to him (1896) and that he sees nothing to add or to take away from it. Inasmuch as it forms merely an episodic illustration in course of a general argument, it certainly bears witness to the keenness of Spencer's intellect. Yet I cannot agree with Ribot that it is a complete analysis of love. It aided me in conceiving the plan for my first book, but I soon found that it covered only a small part of the ground. Of the ingredients as suggested by him I accepted only two--Sympathy, and the feelings associated with Personal Beauty. What he called love of approbation, self-esteem, and pleasure of possession I subsummed under the name of Pride of Conquest and Possession. Further reflection has convinced me that it would have been wiser if, instead of treating Romantic Love as a phase of affection (which, of course, was in itself quite correct), I had followed Spencer's example and made affection one of the ingredients of the amorous passion. In the present volume I have made the change and added also Adoration, which includes what Spencer calls "the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence," while calling attention to the superlative phase of these sentiments which is so characteristic of the lover, who does not say, "I respect you," but "I adore you." I may therefore credit Spencer with having suggested three or four only of the fourteen essential ingredients which I find in love.

 

ACTIVE IMPULSES MUST BE ADDED

The most important distinction between Spencer's analysis of love and mine is that he treats it merely as a composite feeling, or a group of emotions, whereas I treat it as a complex state of mind including not only diverse feelings or sentiments--sympathy, admiration of beauty, jealousy, affection--but the _active, altruistic impulses_ of gallantry and self-sacrifice, which are really more essential to an understanding of the essence of love, and a better test of it, than the sentiments named by Spencer. He ignores also the absolutely essential traits of individual preference and monopolism, besides coyness, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair, and purity, with the diverse emotions accompanying them. An effort to trace the evolution of the ingredients of love was first made in my book, though in a fragmentary way, in which respect the present volume will be found a great improvement. Apart from the completion of the analysis of love, my most important contribution to the study of this subject lies in the recognition of the fact that, "love" being so vague and comprehensive a term, the only satisfactory way of studying its evolution is to trace the evolution of each of its ingredients separately, as I do in the present volume in the long chapter entitled "What Is Romantic Love?"

In _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ (180) I wrote that perhaps the main reason why no one had anticipated me in the theory that love is an exclusively modern sentiment was that no distinction had commonly been made between romantic love and conjugal affection, noble examples of the latter being recorded in countries where romantic love was not possible owing to the absence of opportunities for courtship. I still hold that conjugal love antedated the romantic variety, but further study has convinced me that (as will be shown in the chapters on Conjugal Love and on India, and Greece) much of what has been taken as evidence of wifely devotion is really only a proof of man's tyrannic selfishness which compelled the woman always to subordinate herself to her cruel master. The idea on which I placed so much emphasis, that opportunity for prolonged courtship is essential to the growth of romantic love, was some years later set forth by Dr. Drummond in his _Ascent of Man_ where he comments eloquently on the fact that "affection needs time to grow."

 

SENSUALITY THE ANTIPODE OF LOVE

The keynote of my first book lies of course in the distinction between sensual love and romantic love. This distinction seemed to me so self-evident that I did not dwell on it at length, but applied myself chiefly to the task of proving that savages and ancient nations knew only one kind, being strangers to romantic or pure love. When I wrote "No one, of course, would deny that sensual passion prevailed in Athens; but sensuality is the very antipode of love," I never dreamed that anyone would object to this distinction in itself. Great, therefore, was my amazement when, on reading the London _Saturday Review's_ comments on my book, I came across the following:

"and when we find Mr. Finck marking off Romantic Love
not merely from Conjugal Love, but from what he is
pleased to call 'sensuality,' we begin to suspect that
he really does not know what he is talking about."

This criticism, with several others similar to it, was of great use to me, as it led to a series of studies, which convinced me that even at the present day the nature of romantic love is not understood by the vast majority of Europeans and Americans, many of them very estimable and intelligent individuals.

 

THE WORD ROMANTIC

Another London paper, the _Academy_, took me to task for using the word "romantic" in the sense I applied to it. But in this case, too, further research has shown that I was justified in using that word to designate pure prematrimonial love. There is a passage in Steele's _Lover_ (dated 1714) which proves that it must have been in common use in a similar sense two centuries ago. The passage refers to "the reign of the amorous Charles the Second," and declares that

"the licenses of that court did not only make the
Love which the Vulgar call Romantick, the object of
Jest and Ridicule, but even common Decency and Modesty
were almost abandoned as formal and unnatural."

Here there is an obvious antithesis between romantic and sensual. The same antithesis was used by Hegel in contrasting the sensual love of the ancient Greeks and Romans with what he calls modern "romantic" love. Waitz-Gerland, too, in the six volumes of their _Anthropologie der Naturvoelker_, repeatedly refer to (alleged) cases of "romantic love" among savages and barbarians, having in all probability adopted the term from Hegel. The peculiar appropriateness of the word romantic to designate imaginative love will be set forth later in the chapter entitled Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment. Here I will only add an important truth which I shall have occasion to repeat often--that _a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love_; for it is obvious, for instance, that an elopement prompted by the most frivolous sensual passion, without a trace of real love, may lead to the most romantic incidents.

In the chapters on affection, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, I shall make it clear even to a Saturday Reviewer that the gross sensual infatuation which leads a man to shoot a girl who refuses him, or a tramp to assault a woman on a lonely road and afterward to cut her throat in order to hide his crime, is absolutely antipodal to the refined, ardent, affectionate Romantic Love which impels a man to sacrifice his own life rather than let any harm or dishonor come to the beloved.

 

ANIMALS HIGHER THAN SAVAGES

Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin, in his second treatise on sexual anomalies,[4] takes occasion to express his disbelief in my view that love before marriage is a sentiment peculiar to modern man. He declares that traits of such love occur even in the courtship of animals, particularly birds, and implies that this upsets my theory. On the same ground a reviewer in a New York evening paper accused me of being illogical. Such criticisms illustrate the vague ideas regarding evolution that are still current. It is assumed that all the faculties are developed step by step simultaneously as we proceed from lower to higher animals, which is as illogical as it would be to assume that since birds have such beautiful and convenient things as wings, and dogs belong to a higher genus of animals, therefore dogs ought to have better wings than birds. Most animals are cleaner than savages; why should not some of them be more romantic in their love-affairs? I shall take occasion repeatedly to emphasize this point in the present volume, though I alluded to it already in my first book in the following passage, which my critics evidently overlooked:

"In passing from animals to human beings we find at
first not only no advance in the sexual relations, but
a decided retrogression. Among some species of birds,
courtship and marriage are infinitely more refined and
noble than among the lowest savages, and it is
especially in their treatment of females, both before
and after mating, that not only birds but all animals
show an immense superiority over primitive man; for
male animals fight only among themselves and never
maltreat the females."

[FOOTNOTE 4: _Studien ueber die Libido Sexualis_, I., Pt. I., 28.]

 

LOVE THE LAST, NOT THE FIRST, PRODUCT OF CIVILIZATION

Notwithstanding this striking and important fact, there is a large number of sentimental writers who make the extraordinary claim that the lower races, however savage they may be in everything else, are like ourselves in their amorous relations; that they love and admire personal beauty just as we do. The main object of the present volume is to demolish this doctrine; to prove that sexual refinement and the sense of personal beauty are not the earliest but the latest products of civilization. I have shown elsewhere[5] that Japanese civilization is in many important respects far superior to ours; yet in their treatment of women and estimate of love, this race has not yet risen above the barbarous stage; and it will be shown in this volume that if we were to judge the ancient Greeks and the Hindoos from this point of view, we should have to deny them the epithet of civilized. Morgan found that the most advanced of American Indians, the Iroquois, had no capacity for love. His testimony in detail will be found in its proper place in this volume, together with that of competent observers regarding other tribes and races. Some of this evidence was known to the founders of the modern science of sociology. It led Spencer to write _en passant_ (_Pr. Soc_., I., Sec. 337, Sec.339) that "absence of the tender emotion ... habitually characterizes men of low types;" and that the "higher sentiments accompanying union of the sexes ... do not exist among primitive men." It led Sir John Lubbock to write regarding the lowest races that "love is almost unknown among them; and marriage, in its lowest phases, is by no means a matter of affection and companionship."

[FOOTNOTE 5: In the last chapter of _Lotos-Time in Japan_.]

PLAN OF THIS VOLUME

These are casual adumbrations of a great truth that applies not only to the lowest races (savages) but to the more advanced barbarians as well as to ancient civilized nations, as the present volume will attempt to demonstrate. To make my argument more impressive and conclusive, I present it in a twofold form. First I take the fourteen ingredients of love separately, showing how they developed gradually, whence it follows necessarily that love as a whole developed gradually. Then I take the Africans, Australians, American Indians, etc., separately, describing their diverse amorous customs and pointing out everywhere the absence of the altruistic, supersensual traits which constitute the essence of romantic love as distinguished from sensual passion. All this will be preceded by a chapter on "How Sentiments Change and Grow," which will weaken the bias against the notion that so elemental a feeling as sexual love should have undergone so great a change, by pointing out that other seemingly instinctive and unalterable feelings have changed and developed.

 

GREEK SENTIMENTALITY

The inclusion of the civilized Greeks in a treatise on Primitive Love will naturally cause surprise; but I cannot attribute a capacity for anything more than primitive sensual love to a nation which, in its prematrimonial customs, manifested none of the essential _altruistic_ traits of Romantic Love--sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, adoration, and purity. As a matter of course, the sensualism of a Greek or Roman is a much less coarse thing than an Australian's, which does not even include kisses or other caresses. While Greek love is not a sentiment, it may be sentimental, that is, an _affectation of sentiment_, differing from real sentiment as adulation does from adoration, as gallantry or the risking of life to secure favors do from genuine gallantry of the heart and self-sacrifice for the benefit of another. This important point which I here superadd to my theory, was overlooked by Benecke when he attributed a capacity for real love to the later Greeks of the Alexandrian period.

 

IMPORTANCE OF LOVE

One of the most important theses advanced in _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ (323, 424, etc.), was that love, far from being merely a passing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the reign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to perish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals and saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, and hand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediator between these two agencies, love comes in; for Cupid, as I have said, "does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of health and beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of single-blessedness;" which in these days is not such a hardship as it used to be. This thought will be enlarged in the last chapter of the present volume, on the "Utility and Future of Love," which will indicate how the amorous sense is becoming more and more fastidious and beneficial. In the same chapter attention will be called, for the first time, to the three great strata in the evolution of parental love and morality. In the first, represented by savages, parents think chiefly of their own comfort, and children get the minimum of attention consistent with their preservation. In the second, which includes most of the modern Europeans and Americans, parents exercise care that their children shall make an advantageous marriage--that is a marriage which shall secure them wealth or comfort; but the frequency with which girls are married off to old, infirm, or unworthy men, shows how few parents as yet have a thought of their _grandchildren_. In the next stage of moral evolution, which we are now entering, the grandchildren's welfare also will be considered. In consequence of the persistent failure to consider the grandchildren, the human race is now anything but a model of physical, intellectual, and moral perfection. Luckily love, even in its sensual stages, has counteracted this parental selfishness and myopia by inducing young folks to marry for health, youth, and beauty, and creating an aversion to old age, disease, and deformity. As love becomes more and more fastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moral beauty--that is becomes Romantic Love--its sway becomes greater and greater, and the time will come when questions relating to it will form the most important chapters in treatises on moral philosophy, which now usually ignore them altogether.

[The end]
Henry Theophilus Finck's non-fiction: History Of An Idea

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