Alexandrian period,
and notably in Asclepiades, Benecke maintains, that
the love of
women was regarded as a matter of life and death.
Thereafter the
conception of sexual love, in its romantic aspects,
appears in
European life. With the Celtic story of Tristram, as
Gaston Paris
remarks, it finally appears in the Christian
European world of
poetry as the chief point in human life, the great
motive force
of conduct.
Romantic love failed, however, to penetrate the
masses in Europe.
In the sixteenth century, or whenever it was that
the ballad of
"Glasgerion" was written, we see it is assumed that a churl's
relation to his mistress is confined to the mere act
of sexual
intercourse; he fails to kiss her on arriving or
departing; it is
only the knight, the man of upper class, who would
think of
offering that tender civility. And at the present
day in, for
instance, the region between East Friesland and the
Alps, Bloch
states (_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p. 29),
following E.H. Meyer,
that the word "love" is unknown among the masses, and only its
coarse counterpart recognized.
On the other side of the world, in Japan, sexual
love seems to be
in as great disrepute as it was in ancient Greece;
thus Miss
Tsuda, a Japanese head-mistress, and herself a
Christian, remarks
(as quoted by Mrs. Eraser in _World's Work and
Play_, Dec.,
1906): "That word 'love' has been hitherto a word unknown among
our girls, in the foreign sense. Duty, submission,
kindness--these were the sentiments which a girl was
expected to
bring to the husband who had been chosen for her--
and many happy,
harmonious marriages were the result. Now, your dear
sentimental
foreign women say to our girls: 'It is wicked to
marry without
love; the obedience to parents in such a case is an
outrage
against nature and Christianity. If you love a man
you must
sacrifice everything to marry him.'"
When, however, love is fully developed it becomes an
enormously
extended, highly complex emotion, and lust, even in
the best
sense of that word, becomes merely a coördinated
element among
many other elements. Herbert Spencer, in an
interesting passage
of his _Principles of Psychology_ (Part IV, Ch.
VIII), has
analyzed love into as many as nine distinct and
important
elements: (1) the physical impulse of sex; (2) the
feeling for
beauty; (3) affection; (4) admiration and respect;
(5) love of
approbation; (6) self-esteem; (7) proprietary
feeling; (8)
extended liberty of action from the absence of
personal barriers;
(9) exaltation of the sympathies. "This passion," he concludes,
"fuses into one immense aggregate most of the
elementary
excitations of which we are capable."
It is scarcely necessary to say that to define sexual
love, or even to
analyze its components, is by no means to explain its
mystery. We seek to
satisfy our intelligence by means of a coherent picture of love, but the
gulf between that picture and the emotional reality must always be
incommensurable and impassable. "There is no word more often pronounced
than that of love," wrote Bonstetten many years ago,
"yet there is no
subject more mysterious. Of that which touches us most nearly we know
least. We measure the march of the stars and we do not know how we love."
And however expert we have become in detecting and
analyzing the causes,
the concomitants, and the results of love, we must still make the same
confession to-day. We may, as some have done, attempt to explain love as a
form of hunger and thirst, or as a force analogous to
electricity, or as a
kind of magnetism, or as a variety of chemical affinity, or as a vital
tropism, but these explanations are nothing more than
ways of expressing
to ourselves the magnitude of the phenomenon we are in the presence of.
What has always baffled men in the contemplation of
sexual love is the
seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the
necessarily circumscribed region of mucous membrane
which is the final
goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing
emotions to which it
seems as the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has
said, "the mucous
membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their
obscure folds all the
riches of the infinite." It is a mystery before which the thinker and the
artist are alike overcome. Donnay, in his play
_L'Escalade_, makes a cold
and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere
mental disorder which
can be cured like other disorders, at last fall
desperately in love
himself. He forces his way into the girl's room, by a
ladder, at dead of
night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech:
"Everything that
touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred. Ah! to think that a thing
so well known as a woman's body, which sculptors have
modelled, which
poets have sung of, which men of science like myself
have dissected, that
such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy
merely because it is the body of one particular woman--
what insanity! And
yet that is what I feel."[64]
That love is a natural insanity, a temporary delusion
which the individual
is compelled to suffer for the sake of the race, is
indeed an explanation
that has suggested itself to many who have been baffled by this mystery.
That, as we know, was the explanation offered by
Schopenhauer. When a
youth and a girl fall into each other's arms in the
ecstacy of love they
imagine that they are seeking their own happiness. But it is not so, said
Schopenhauer; they are deluded by the genius of the race into the belief
that they are seeking a personal end in order that they may be induced to
effect a far greater impersonal end: the creation of the future race. The
intensity of their passion is not the measure of the
personal happiness
they will secure but the measure of their aptitude for producing
offspring. In accepting passion and renouncing the
counsels of cautious
prudence the youth and the girl are really sacrificing their chances of
selfish happiness and fulfilling the larger ends of
Nature. As
Schopenhauer saw the matter, there was here no vulgar
illusion. The lovers
thought that they were reaching towards a boundlessly
immense personal
happiness; they were probably deceived. But they were
deceived not because
the reality was less than their imagination, but because it was more;
instead of pursuing, as they thought, a merely personal end they were
carrying on the creative work of the world, a task
better left undone, as
Schopenhauer viewed it, but a task whose magnitude he
fully
recognized.[65]
It must be remembered that in the lower sense of
deception, love may be,
and frequently is, a delusion. A man may deceive
himself, or be deceived
by the object of his attraction, concerning the
qualities that she
possesses or fails to possess. In first love, occurring in youth, such
deception is perhaps entirely normal, and in certain
suggestible and
inflammable types of people it is peculiarly apt to
occur. This kind of
deception, although far more frequent and conspicuous in matters of
love--and more serious because of the tightness of the marriage bond--is
liable to occur in any relation of life. For most
people, however, and
those not the least sane or the least wise, the memory of the exaltation
of love, even when the period of that exaltation is
over, still remains
as, at the least, the memory of one of the most real and essential facts
of life.[66]
Some writers seem to confuse the liability in
matters of love to
deception or disappointment with the larger question
of a
metaphysical illusion in Schopenhauer's sense. To
some extent
this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of
love by
Renouvier and Prat in _La Nouvelle Monadologie_ (pp.
216 _et
seq._). In considering whether love is or is not a
delusion, they
answer that it is or is not according as we are, or
are not,
dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential
error which presided over the creation of the
_idol_, for the
idol is only what in all things the _ideal_ is. But
to realize
the ideal in love two persons are needed, and
therein is the
great difficulty. We are never justified," they
conclude, "in
casting contempt on our love, or even on its object,
for if it is
true that we have not gained possession of the
sovereign beauty
of the world it is equally true that we have not
attained a
degree of perfection that would have entitled us
justly to claim
so great a prize." And perhaps most of us, it may be added, must
admit in the end, if we are honest with ourselves,
that the
prizes of love we have gained in the world, whatever
their flaws,
are far greater than we deserved.
We may well agree that in a certain sense not love alone but all the
passions and desires of men are illusions. In that sense the Gospel of
Buddha is justified, and we may recognize the
inspiration of Shakespeare
(in the _Tempest_) and of Calderon (in _La Vida es
Sueño_), who felt that
ultimately the whole world is an insubstantial dream.
But short of that
large and ultimate vision we cannot accept illusion; we cannot admit that
love is a delusion in some special and peculiar sense
that men's other
cravings and aspirations escape. On the contrary, it is the most solid of
realities. All the progressive forms of life are built up on the
attraction of sex. If we admit the action of sexual
selection--as we can
scarcely fail to do if we purge it from its unessential accretions[67]--love has moulded the precise shape and color, the
essential beauty, alike of animal and human life.
If we further reflect that, as many investigators
believe, not only the
physical structure of life but also its spiritual
structure--our social
feelings, our morality, our religion, our poetry and
art--are, in some
degree at least, also built up on the impulse of sex,
and would have been,
if not non-existent, certainly altogether different had other than sexual
methods of propagation prevailed in the world, we may
easily realize that
we can only fall into confusion by dismissing love as a delusion. The
whole edifice of life topples down, for as the idealist Schiller long
since said, it is entirely built up on hunger and on
love. To look upon
love as in any special sense a delusion is merely to
fall into the trap of
a shallow cynicism. Love is only a delusion in so far as the whole of life
is a delusion, and if we accept the fact of life it is unphilosophical to
refuse to accept the fact of love.
It is unnecessary here to magnify the functions of
love in the
world; it is sufficient to investigate its workings
in its own
proper sphere. It may, however, be worth while to
quote a few
expressions of thinkers, belonging to various
schools, who have
pointed out what seemed to them the far-ranging
significance of
the sexual emotions for the moral life. "The
passions are the
heavenly fire which gives life to the moral world,"
wrote
Helvétius long since in _De l'Esprit_. "The activity of the mind
depends on the activity of the passions, and it is
at the period
of the passions, from the age of twenty-five to
thirty-five or
forty that men are capable of the greatest efforts
of virtue or
of genius." "What touches sex," wrote Zola, "touches the centre
of social life." Even our regard for the praise and blame of
others has a sexual origin, Professor Thomas argues
(_Psychological Review_, Jan., 1904, pp. 61-67), and
it is love
which is the source of susceptibility generally and
of the
altruistic side of life. "The appearance of sex,"
Professor Woods
Hutchinson attempts to show ("Love as a Factor in Evolution,"
_Monist_, 1898), "the development of maleness and femaleness, was
not only the birthplace of affection, the well-
spring of all
morality, but an enormous economic advantage to the
race and an
absolute necessity of progress. In it first we find
any conscious
longing for or active impulse toward a fellow
creature." "Were
man robbed of the instinct of procreation, and of
all that
spiritually springs therefrom," exclaimed Maudsley in his
_Physiology of Mind_, "that moment would all poetry, and perhaps
also his whole moral sense, be obliterated from his
life." "One
seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer,
more complete;
one _is_ more complete," says Nietzsche (_Der Wille zur Macht_,
p. 389), "we find here art as an organic function: we find it
inlaid in the most angelic instinct of 'love:' we
find it as the
greatest stimulant of life.... It is not merely that
it changes
the feeling of values: the lover _is_ worth more, is
stronger. In
animals this condition produces new weapons,
pigments, colors,
and forms, above all new movements, new rhythms, a
new seductive
music. It is not otherwise in man.... Even in art
the door is
opened to him. If we subtract from lyrical work in
words and
sounds the suggestions of that intestinal fever,
what is left
over in poetry and music? _L'Art pour l'art_
perhaps, the
quacking virtuosity of cold frogs who perish in
their marsh. All
the rest is created by love."
It would be easy to multiply citations tending to
show how many
diverse thinkers have come to the conclusion that
sexual love
(including therewith parental and especially
maternal love) is
the source of the chief manifestations of life. How
far they are
justified in that conclusion, it is not our business
now to
inquire.
It is undoubtedly true that, as we have seen when
discussing the erratic
and imperfect distribution of the conception of love,
and even of words
for love, over the world, by no means all people are
equally apt for
experiencing, even at any time in their lives, the
emotions of sexual
exaltation. The difference between the knight and the
churl still
subsists, and both may sometimes be found in all social strata. Even the
refinements of sexual enjoyment, it is unnecessary to
insist, quite
commonly remain on a merely physical basis, and have
little effect on the
intellectual and emotional nature.[68] But this is not the case with the
people who have most powerfully influenced the course of the world's
thought and feeling. The personal reality of love, its importance for the
individual life, are facts that have been testified to by some of the
greatest thinkers, after lives devoted to the attainment of intellectual
labor. The experience of Renan, who toward the end of
his life set down in
his remarkable drama _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_, his
conviction that, even
from the point of view of chastity, love is, after all, the supreme thing
in the world, is far from standing alone. "Love has always appeared as an
inferior mode of human music, ambition as the superior mode," wrote Tarde,
the distinguished sociologist, at the end of his life.
"But will it always
be thus? Are there not reasons for thinking that the
future perhaps
reserves for us the ineffable surprise of an inversion of that secular
order?" Laplace, half an hour before his death, took up a volume of his
own _Mécanique Celeste_, and said: "All that is only trifles, there is
nothing true but love." Comte, who had spent his life in building up a
Positive Philosophy which should be absolutely real,
found (as indeed it
may be said the great English Positivist Mill also
found) the culmination
of all his ideals in a woman, who was, he said, Egeria and Beatrice and
Laura in one, and he wrote: "There is nothing real in the world but love.
One grows tired of thinking, and even of acting; one
never grows tired of
loving, nor of saying so. In the worst tortures of
affection I have never
ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be
worthily filled--even with pain, yes, even with pain,
the bitterest pain."
And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed
her among the most distinguished of her sex,
pathetically wrote: "Why can
no one love me? I could give more than most women, and yet the most
insignificant women are loved and I am not." Love, they all seem to say,
is the one thing that is supremely worth while. The
greatest and most
brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final
insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous
persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote _The
Imitation of Christ_ or
_The Letters of a Portuguese Nun_. And how many others!
FOOTNOTES:
[45] _Meditationes Piissimæ de Cognitione Humanæ
Conditionis_, Migne's
_Patrologia_, vol. clxxiv, p. 489, cap. III, "De
Dignitate Animæ et
Vilitate Corporis." It may be worth while to quote more at length the
vigorous language of the original. "Si diligenter consideres quid per os
et nares cæterosque corporis meatus egrediatur, vilius sterquilinum
numquam vidisti.... Attende, homo, quid fuisti ante
ortum, et quid es ab
ortu usque ad occasum, atque quid eris post hanc vitam.
Profecto fuit
quand non eras: postea de vili materia factus, et
vilissimo panno
involutus, menstruali sanguine in utero materno fuisti nutritus, et tunica
tua fuit pellis secundina. Nihil aliud est homo quam
sperma fetidum,
saccus stercorum, cibus vermium.... Quid superbis,
pulvis et cinis, cujus
conceptus cula, nasci miseria, vivere poena, mori
angustia?"
[46] See (in Mignes' edition) _S. Odonis abbatis
Cluniacensis
Collationes_, lib. ii, cap. IX.
[47] Dühren (_Neue Forshungen über die Marquis de Sade_, pp. 432 et seq.)
shows how the ascetic view of woman's body persisted,
for instance, in
Schopenhauer and De Sade.
[48] In "The Evolution of Modesty," in the first volume of these
_Studies_, and again in the fifth volume in discussing urolagnia in the
study of "Erotic Symbolism," the mutual reactions of the sexual and
excretory centres were fully dealt with.
[49] "La Morale Sexuelle," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan.,
1907.
[50] The above passage, now slightly modified,
originally formed an
unpublished part of an essay on Walt Whitman in _The New Spirit_, first
issued in 1889.
[51] Even in the ninth century, however, when the
monastic movement was
rapidly developing, there were some who withstood the
tendencies of the
new ascetics. Thus, in 850, Ratramnus, the monk of
Corbie, wrote a
treatise (_Liber de eo quod Christus ex Virgine natus
est_) to prove that
Mary really gave birth to Jesus through her sexual
organs, and not, as
some high-strung persons were beginning to think could alone be possible,
through the more conventionally decent breasts. The
sexual organs were
sanctified. "Spiritus sanctus ... et thalamum tanto dignum sponso
sanctificavit et portam" (Achery, _Spicilegium_, vol. i, p. 55).
[52] _Pædagogus_, lib. ii, cap. X. Elsewhere (id., lib.
ii, Ch. VI) he
makes a more detailed statement to the same effect.
[53] See, e.g., Wilhelm Capitaine, _Die Moral des
Clemens von
Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et seq.
[54] _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xxii, cap. XXIV. "There is no need," he says
again (id., lib. xiv, cap. V) "that in our sins and vices we accuse the
nature of the flesh to the injury of the Creator, for in its own kind and
degree the flesh is good."
[55] St. Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xiv, cap.
XXIII-XXVI.
Chrysostom and Gregory, of Nyssa, thought that in
Paradise human beings
would have multiplied by special creation, but such is not the accepted
Catholic doctrine.
[56] W. Capitaine, _Die Moral des Clemens von
Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et
seq. Without the body, Tertullian declared, there could be no virginity
and no salvation. The soul itself is corporeal. He
carries, indeed, his
idea of the omnipresence of the body to the absurd.
[57] Rufinus, _Commentarius in Symbolum Apostolorum_,
cap. XII.
[58] Migne, _Patrologia Græca_, vol. xxvi, pp. 1170 et seq.
[59] Even in physical conformation the human sexual
organs, when compared
with those of the lower animals, show marked differences (see "The
Mechanism of Detumescence," in the fifth volume of these _Studies_).
[60] It may perhaps be as well to point out, with Forel (_Die Sexuelle
Frage_, p. 208), that the word "bestial" is gen