Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 92

[286] An explanation of this discrepancy may be found in A.K. Fiske's suggestion (191) that there is a double source for this story. The reader will please bear in mind that all my quotations are from the revised version of the Bible. I do not believe in retaining inaccurate translations simply because they were made long ago.

[287] McClintock and Strong's _Encyclop. of Biblical Literature_ says: "It must be borne in mind that Jacob himself had now reached the mature age of seventy-seven years, as appears from a comparison of Joseph's age... with Jacob's." That Rachel was not much over fifteen may be a.s.sumed because among Oriental nomadic races shepherd girls are very seldom unmarried after that age, or even an earlier age, for obvious reasons.

[288] Gen. 19: 1-9; 19: 30-38; 34: 1-31; 38: 8-25; 39: 6-20; Judges 19: 22-30; II. Sam. 3: 6-9; 11: 2-27; 13: 1-22; 16: 22; etc.

[289] For whom the Hebrew poet has a special word _(dodi)_ different from that used when Solomon is referred to.

[290] See Renan, Preface, p. iv. It is of all Biblical books, the one "pour lequel les scribes qui ont decide du sort des ecrits hebreux ont le plus elargi leurs regles d'admission."

[291] McClintock and Strong.

[292] In the seventh chapter there are lines where, as Renan points out (50), the speaker, in describing the girl, "vante ses charmes les plus intimes," and where the translator was "oblige a des attenuations."

[293] Renan says justly that it is the most obscure of all Hebrew poems. According to the old Hebrew exegesis, every pa.s.sage in the Bible has seventy different meanings, all of them equally true; but of this Song a great many more than seventy interpretations have been given: the t.i.tles of treatises on the Canticles fill four columns of fine print in McClintock and Strong's Cyclopaedia. Griffis declares that it is, "probably, the most perfect poem in any language," but in my opinion it is far inferior to other books in the Bible. The adjective perfect is not applicable to a poem so obscure that more than half its meaning has to be read between the lines, while its plan, if plan it has, is so mixed up and hindmost foremost that I sometimes feel tempted to accept the view of Herder and others that the _Song of Songs_ is not one drama, but a collection of unconnected poems.

[294] Mr. Griffis' lucid, ingenious, and admirably written monograph ent.i.tled, _The Lily among Thorns_, is unfortunately marred in many parts by the author's att.i.tude, which is not that of a critic or a judge, but of a lawyer who has a case to prove, that black and gray are really snow white. His sense of humor ought to have prevented him from picturing an Eastern shepherd complimenting a girl of his cla.s.s on her "instinctive refinement". He carries this idealizing process so far that he arbitrarily divides the line "I am black but comely,"

attributing the first three words to the Shulamite, the other two to a chorus of her rivals in Solomon's harem! The latter supposition is inconceivable; and why should not the Shulamite call herself comely? I once looked admiringly at a Gypsy girl in Spain, who promptly opened her lips, and said, with an arch smile, "soy muy bonita"--"I am very pretty!"--which seemed the natural, nave att.i.tude of an Oriental girl. To argue away such a trifling spot on maiden modesty as the Shulamite's calling herself comely, while seeing no breach of delicacy in her inviting her lover to come into the garden and eat his precious fruits, though admitting (214) that "the maiden yields thus her heart and her all to her lover," is surely straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.

[295] Which, however, evidently was not saying much, as he immediately added that he was ready to give her up provided they gave him another girl, lest he be the only one of the Greeks without a "prize of honor." Strong individual preference, as we shall see also in the case of Achilles, was not a trait of "heroic" Greek love.

[296] I have already commented (115) on Nausicaa's lack of feminine delicacy and coyness; yet Gladstone says (132) "it may almost be questioned whether anywhere in literature there is to be found a conception of the maiden so perfect as Nausicaa in grace, tenderness, and delicacy"!

[297] How Gladstone reconciled his conscience with these lines when he wrote (112) that "on one important and characteristic subject, the exposure of the person to view, the men of that time had a peculiar and fastidious delicacy," I cannot conceive.

[298] It will always remain one of the strangest riddles of the nineteenth century why the statesman who so often expressed his righteous indignation over the "Bulgarian atrocities" of his time should not only have pardoned, but with insidious and glaring sophistry apologized for the similar atrocities of the heroes whom Homer fancies he is complimenting when he calls them professional "spoilers of towns." I wish every reader of this volume who has any doubts regarding the correctness of my views would first read Gladstone's shorter work on Homer (a charmingly written book, with all its faults), and then the epics themselves, which are now accessible to all in the admirable prose versions of the _Iliad_ by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers, and of the _Odyssey_ by Professor George H. Palmer of Harvard--versions which are far more poetic than any translations in verse ever made and which make of these epics two of the most entertaining novels ever written. It is from these versions that I have cited, except in a few cases where I preferred a more literal rendering of certain words.

[299] In all the extracts here made I follow the close literal prose version made by H.T. Wharton, in his admirable book on Sappho, by far the best in the English language.

[300] P.B. Jevons refers to some of these as "mephitic exhalations from the bogs of perverted imaginings!" Welcker's defence of Sappho is a masterpiece of navete written in ignorance of mental pathology.

[301] The most elaborate discussion of this subject is to be found in Moll's _Untersuchungen_, 314-440, where also copious bibliographic references are given. The most striking impression left by the reading of this book is that the differentiation of the s.e.xes is by no means as complete yet as it ought to be. All the more need is there of romantic love, whose function it is to a.s.sist and accelerate this differentiation.

[302] As long ago as 1836-38 a Swiss author, Heinrich Hossli, wrote a remarkable book with the t.i.tle _The Unreliability of External Signs as Indications of s.e.x in Body and Mind_. I may add here that if it were known how many of the "shrieking sisterhood" who are clamoring for masculine "rights" for women, are among the unfortunates who were born with male brains in female bodies, the movement would collapse as if struck by a ton of dynamite. These amazons often wonder why the great ma.s.s of women are so hard to stir up in this matter. The reason is that the great ma.s.s of women--heaven be thanked!--have feminine minds as well as feminine bodies.

[303] Probably no pa.s.sage in any drama has ever been more widely discussed than the nine lines I have just summarized. As long ago as the sixteenth century the astronomer Petrus Codicillus p.r.o.nounced them spurious. Goethe once remarked to Eckermann; (III., March 28, 1827) that he considered them a blemish in the tragedy and would give a good deal if some philologist would prove that Sophocles had not written them. A number of eminent philologists--Jacob, Lehrs, Hauck, Dindorf, Wecklein, Jebb, Christ, and others--have actually bracketed them as not genuine; but if they are interpolations, they must have been added within a century after the play was written, for Aristotle refers to them (_Rhet. III_., 16,9) in these words: "And should any circ.u.mstance be incredible, you must subjoin the reason; as Sophocles does. He furnishes an example in the _Antigone_, that she mourned more for her brother than for a husband and children; for these, if lost, might again be hers.

"'But father now and mother both being lost, A brother's name can ne'er be hailed again.'"

It is noticeable that Aristotle should p.r.o.nounce Antigone's preference strange or incredible from a Greek point of view; that point of view being, as we have seen, that a woman's first duties are toward her husband, for whom she should ever sacrifice herself. It has been plausibly suggested that Sophocles borrowed the idea of those nine lines from his friend Herodotus, who (III., 118) relates the story of Darius permitting the wife of Intophernes to save one of her relatives from death and who chooses her brother, for reasons like those advanced by Antigone. It has been shown (_Zeitschrift f. d.

Oesterreich Gymn_., 1898; see also _Frankfurter Zeitung_, July 22, 24, 27, 1899; _Hermes_, XXVIII.) that this idea occurs in old tales and poems of India, Persia, China, as well as among the Slavs, Scandinavians, etc. If Sophocles did introduce this notion into his tragedy (and there is no reason for doubting it except the unwarranted a.s.sumption that he was too great a genius to make such a blunder), he did it in a bungling way, for inasmuch as Antigone's brother is dead she cannot benefit her family by favoring him at the expense of her betrothed; and moreover, her act of sacrificing herself in order to secure the rest of a dear one's soul--which alone might have partly excused her heartless and unromantic ignoring and desertion of her lover--is bereft of all its n.o.bility by her equally heartless declaration that she would not have thus given her life for a husband or a child. These Greek poets knew so little of true femininity that they could not draw a female character without spoiling it.

[304] The unduly extolled [Greek: Epos] chorus in the _Antigone_ expresses nothing more than the universal power of love in the Greek conception of the term.

[305] In Muller's book on the Doric race we read (310) that the love of the Corinthian Philolaus and Diocles "lasted until death," and even their graves were turned toward one another, in token of their affection. Lovers in Athens carved the beloved's names on walls, and innumerable poems were addressed by the leading bards to their favorites.

[306] Compare Ramdohr, III., 191 and 124.

[307] I have before me a dictonary which defines Platonic love as it is now universally, and incorrectly, understood, as "a pure spiritual affection subsisting between the s.e.xes, unmixed with carnal desires, a species of love for which Plato was a warm advocate." In reality Platonic (i.e. Socratic) love has nothing whatever to do with women, but is a fantastic and probably hypocritical idealization of a species of infatuation which in our day is treated neither in poems nor in dialogues, nor discussed in text-books of psychology or physiology, but relegated to treatises on mental diseases and abnormalities. In fact, the whole philosophy of Greek love may be summed up in the a.s.sertion that "Platonic love," as understood by us, was by Plato and the Greeks in general considered an impossibility.

[308] In the _Deipnosophists_ of Athenaeus (III., Bk. XII.) we find some other information of anthropological significance: "Hermippus stated in his book about lawgivers that at Lacedaemon all the damsels used to be shut up in a dark room, while a number of unmarried young men were shut up with them; and whichever girl each of the young men caught hold of he led away as his wife, without a dowry." "But Clearches the Solensian, in his treatise on Proverbs, says: 'In Lacedaemon the women, on a certain festival, drag the unmarried men to an altar and then buffet them; in order that, for the purpose of avoiding the insults of such treatment, they may become more affectionate and in due season may turn their thoughts to marriage.

But at Athens Cecrops was the first person who married a man to one woman only, when before his time connections had taken place at random and men had their wives in common.'"

[309] My critics might have convicted me of a genuine blunder inasmuch as in my first book (78) I a.s.sumed that Plato "foresaw the importance of pre-matrimonial acquaintance as the basis of a rational and happy marriage choice." This was an unwarranted concession, because all that Plato recommended was that "the youths and maidens shall dance together, seeing and being seen naked," after the Spartan manner. This might lead to a rational choice of sound bodies, but romantic love implies an acquaintance of minds, and is altogether a more complicated process than the dog and cattle breeder's procedure commended by Plato and Lycurgus. I may add that in view of Lycurgus's systematic encouragement of promiscuity, the boast of the Spartan Geradas (recorded by Plutarch) that there were no cases of adultery in Sparta, must be accepted either as broad sarcasm, or in the manner of Limburg-Brouwer, who declares (IV., 165) that the boast is "like saying that in a band of brigands there is not a single thief." Even from the cattle-breeding point of view Lycurgus proved a failure, for according to Aristotle (_Pol._ II., 9) the Spartans grew too lazy to bring up children, and rewards had to be offered for large families.

[310] See the evidence cited in Becker (III., 315) regarding Aristotle's views as to the inferiority of women. After comparing it with the remarks of other writers Becker sums up the matter by saying that "the virtue of which a woman was in those days considered capable did not differ very much from that of a faithful slave."

[311] In the _Odyssey_ (XV., 418) Homer speaks of "a Phoenician woman, handsome and tall." He makes Odysseus compare Nausicaa to Diana "in beauty, height, and bearing," and in another place he declares that, like Diana among her nymphs, she o'ertops her companions by head and brow (VI., 152, 102). However, this manner of measuring beauty with a yard-stick; indicates _some_ progress over the savage and Oriental custom of making rotundity the criterion of beauty.

[312] Compare Menander, _Frag. Incert._, 154: [Greek: gunaich ho didaskon gpammat ou kalos poiei].

[313] A homely but striking ill.u.s.tration may here be added. In Africa the negroes are proud of their complexion and look with aversion on a white skin. In the United States, knowing that a black skin is looked down on as a symbol of slavery or inferiority, they are ashamed of it.

The wife of an eminent Southern judge informed me that Georgia negroes believe that in heaven they will be white; and I have heard of one negro woman who declared that if she could become white by being flayed she would gladly submit to the torture. Thus have _ideas_ regarding the complexion changed the _emotion_ of pride to the emotion of shame.

[314] Professor Rohde appears to follow the old metaphysical maxim "If facts do not agree with my theory, so much the worse for the facts."

He piles up pages of evidence which show conclusively that these Greeks knew nothing of the higher traits and symptoms of love, and then he adds: "but they _must_ have known them all the same." To give one instance of his contradictory procedure. On page 70 he admits that, as women were situated, the tender and pa.s.sionate courtship of the youths as described in poems and romances of the period "could hardly have been copied from life," because the Greek custom of allowing the fathers to dispose of their daughters without consulting their wishes was incompatible with the poetry of such courting. "It is very significant," he adds, "that among the numerous references to the ways of obtaining brides made by poets and moral philosophers, including those of the h.e.l.lenistic [Alexandrian] period, and collected by Stobaeus in chapters 70, 71, and 72 of his _Florilegium_, love is never mentioned among the motives of marriage choice." In the next sentence he declares nevertheless that "no one would be so foolish as to deny the existence of pure, strong love in the Greek life of this period;" and ten lines farther on he backs down again, admitting that though there may be indications of supersensual, sentimental love in the literature of this period these traits _had not yet taken hold of the life of these men_, though there were _longings_ for them. And at the end of the paragraph he emphasizes his back-down by declaring that "the very essence of sentimental poetry is the _longing for what does not exist_." (_Ist doch das rechte Element gerade der sentimentalen Poesie die Sehnsucht nach dem nicht Vorhandenen_.) What makes this admission the more significant is that Professor Rohde, in speaking of "sentimental" elements, does not even use that word as the adjective of sentiment but of sentimentality. He defines this _Sentimentalitat_ to which he refers as a "_ Sehnen, Sinnen und Hoffen_," a "_Selbstgenuss der Leidenschaft_"--a "longing, dreaming, and hoping,"

a "revelling in (literally, self-enjoying of) pa.s.sion." In other words, an enjoyment of emotion for emotion's sake, a gloating over one's selfish joys and sorrows. Now in this respect I actually go beyond Rohde as a champion of Greek love! Such _Sentimentalitat_ existed, I am convinced, in Alexandrian life as well as in Alexandrian literature; but of the existence of true supersensual altruistic _sentiment_ I can find no evidence. The trouble with Rohde, as with so many who have written on this subject, is that he has no clear idea of the distinction between sensual love, which is selfish (_Selbstgenuss_) and romantic love, which is altruistic; hence he flounders in hopeless contradictions.

[315] See Anthon, 258, and the authors there referred to.

[316] See Theocritus, Idyll XVII. Regarding the silly and degrading adulation which the Alexandrian court-poets were called upon to bestow on the kings and queens, and its demoralizing effect on literature, see also Christ's _Griechische Litteraturgeschichte_, 493-494 and 507.

[317] I have given Professor Rohde's testimony on this point not only because he is a famous specialist in the literature of this period, but because his peculiar bias makes his negative att.i.tude in regard to the question of Alexandrian gallantry the more convincing. A reader of his book would naturally expect him to take the opposite view, since he himself fancied he had discovered traces of gallantry in an author who preceded the Alexandrians. The _Andromeda_ of Euripides, he declares (23), "became in his hands one of the most brilliant examples of chivalrous love." This, however, is a pure a.s.sumption on his part, not warranted by the few fragments of this play that have been preserved. Benecke has devoted a special "Excursus" to this play (203-205), in which he justly remarks that readers of Greek literature "need hardly be reminded of how utterly foreign to the Greek of Euripides's day is the conception of the '_galante Ritter_' setting out in search of ladies that want rescuing." He might have brought out the humor of the matter by quoting the characteristically Greek version of the Perseus story given by Apollodorus, who relates dryly (II., chap. 4) that Cepheus, in obedience to an oracle, bound his daughter to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster. "Perseus saw her, fell in love with her, and promised Cepheus to slaughter the monster _if he would promise to give him the rescued daughter to marry_. The contract was made and Perseus undertook the adventure, killed the monster and rescued Andromeda." Nothing could more strikingly reveal the difference between h.e.l.lenic and modern ideas regarding lovers than the fact that to the Greek mind there was nothing disgraceful in this selfish, ungallant bargain made by Perseus as a condition of his rescuing the poor girl from a horrible death. A mediaeval knight, or a modern gentleman, not to speak of a modern lover, would have saved her at the risk of his own life, reward or no reward. The difference is further emphasized by the att.i.tude of the girl, who exclaims to her deliverer, "Take me, O stranger, for thine handmaiden, or wife, or slave." Professor Murray, who cites this line in his _History of Greek Literature_, remarks with comic navete: "The love-note in this pure and happy sense Euripides had never struck before." But what is there so remarkably "pure and happy" in a girl's offering herself as a slave to a man who has saved her life? Were not Greek women always expected to a.s.sume that att.i.tude of inferiority, submission, and self-sacrifice? Was not _Alcestis_ written to enforce that principle of conduct? And does not that very exclamation of Andromeda show how utterly antipodal the situation and the whole drama of Euripides were to modern ideas of chivalrous love?

Having just mentioned Benecke, I may as well add here that his own theory regarding the first appearance of the romantic elements in Greek love-poetry rests on an equally flimsy basis. He held that Antimachus, who flourished before Euripides and Plato had pa.s.sed away, was the first poet who applied to women the idea of a pure, chivalrous love, which up to his time had been attributed only to the romantic friendships with boys. The "romantic idea," according to Benecke, is "the idea that a woman is a worthy object for a man's love and that such love may well be the chief, if not the only, aim of a man's life." But that Antimachus knew anything of such love is a pure figment of Benecke's imagination. The works of Antimachus are lost, and all that we know about them or him is that he lamented the loss of his wife--a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon--and consoled himself by writing an elegy named [Greek: Ludae], in which he brought together from mythical and traditional sources a number of sad tales. Conjugal grief does not take us very far toward so complicated an altruistic state of mind as I have shown romantic love to be.

[318] Theocritus makes this point clear in line 5 of Idyl 12:

[Greek: hosson parthenikae propherei trigamoio gunaikos].

[319] See Helbig, 246, and Rohde, 36, for details. Helbig remarks that the Alexandrians, following the procedure of Euripides, chose by preference incestuous pa.s.sions, "and it appears that such pa.s.sions were not rare in actual life too in those times."

[320] He refers as instances to Plaut., _Asin._, III., 3, particularly v. 608 ff. and 615; adding that "a very sentimental character is Charinus in the _Mercator_;" and he also points to Ter., _Eun._, 193 ff.

[321] What makes this evidence the more conclusive is that Rohde's use of the word "sentimental" refers, according to his own definition, to egoistic sentimentality, not to altruistic sentiment. Of sentimentality--altiloquent, fabricated feeling and cajolery--there is enough in Greek and Latin literature, doubtless as a reflection of life. But when, in the third act of the _Asinaria_, the lover says to his girl, "If I were to hear that you were in want of life, at once would I present you my own life and from my own would add to yours,"

we promptly ask, "_Would he have done it_?" And the answer, from all we know of these men and their att.i.tude toward women, would have been the same as that of the maiden to the enamoured Daphnis, in the twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus: "_Now_ you promise me everything, but afterward you will not give me a pinch of salt." As for the purity of the characters in the play, its quality may be inferred from the fact that the girl is not only a hetaira, but the daughter of a procuress. From the point of view of purity the _Captivi_ is particularly instructive. Riley calls it "the most pure and innocent of all the plays of Plautus;" and when we examine why this is so we find that it is because there is no woman in it! In the epilogue Plautus himself--who made his living by translating Athenian comedies into Latin--makes the significant confession that there were but few Greek plays from which he might have copied so chaste a plot, in which "there is no wenching, no intriguing, no exposure of a child" to be found by a procuress and brought up as a hetaira--which are the staple features of these later Greek plays.

[322] Those who cannot read Greek will derive much pleasure from the admirable prose version of Andrew Lang, which in charm of style sometimes excels the original, while it veils those features that too much offend modern taste.

[323] Couat, 142. There are reasons to believe that the epistles referred to are not by Ovid. Aristaenetus lived about the fifth century. It is odd that the poem of Callimachus should have been lost after surviving eight centuries.

[324] See also Helbig's Chap. XXII. on the increasing lubricity of Greek art.

[325] s.p.a.ce permitting, it would be interesting to examine these poets in detail, as well as the other Romans--Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, etc., who came less under Greek influence. But in truth such examination would be superfluous. Any one may pursue the investigation by himself, and if he will bear in mind and apply as tests, the last seven of my ingredients of love--the altruistic-supersensual group--he cannot fail to become convinced that there are no instances of what I have described as romantic love in Latin literature any more than in Greek. And since it is the province of poets to idealize, we may feel doubly sure that the emotions which they did not even imagine cannot have existed in the actual life of their more prosaic contemporaries.

It would, indeed, be strange if a people so much more coa.r.s.e-fibred and practical, and so much less emotional and esthetic, than the Greeks, should have excelled them in the capacity for what is one of the most esthetic and the most imaginative of all sentiments.

Before leaving the poets, I may add that the Greek _Anthology_, the basis of which was laid by Meleager, a contemporary of the Roman poets just referred to, contains a collection of short poems by many Greek writers, in which, of course, some of my critics have discovered romantic love. One of them wrote that "the poems of Meleager alone in the Greek _Anthology_ would suffice to refute the notion that Greece ignored romantic pa.s.sion." If this critic will take the trouble to read these poems of Meleager in the original he will find that a disgustingly large number relate to [Greek: paiderastia], which in No. III. is expressly declared to be superior to the love for women; that most of the others relate to hetairai; and that not one of them--or one in the whole _Anthology_--comes up to my standard of romantic love.

[326] The best-known ancient story of "love-suicide" is that of Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus, having reason to think that Thisbe, with whom he had arranged a secret interview at the tomb of Ninus, has been devoured by a lion, stabs himself in despair, and Thisbe, on finding his body, plunges on to the same sword, still warm with his blood.