Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 24

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 friends.h.i.+p, but they resemble the pa.s.sionate, self-sacrificing att.i.tude 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 b.u.t.terfly'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 s.e.x, who regularly belongs to a higher social cla.s.s.

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 pa.s.sion. I could never love a man because he was a man. My tendency is to wors.h.i.+p the good I find in friends. I feel just the same toward those of my own s.e.x. If they show any regard for me, the touch of a hand has power to take away all morbid feelings."

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 fict.i.tious--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 G.o.ddess. 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" (210, 213).

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 s.e.xes 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 compa.s.sion 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 s.e.xes, 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 coa.r.s.e-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 appet.i.te. 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 l.u.s.ts before the poor victims have reached the age of p.u.b.erty, 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 att.i.tude, 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 G.o.d 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 l.u.s.t 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, enn.o.bling emotion, a stimulus to self-improvement and an impulse to do generous, unselfish deeds, but a mere animal pa.s.sion, low and degrading.

LOVE DESPISED IN j.a.pAN AND CHINA

The j.a.panese have a little more regard for women than most Orientals, yet by them, too, love is regarded as a low pa.s.sion--as, in fact, identical with l.u.s.t. It is not considered respectable for young folks to arrange their own marriages on a basis of love.

"Among the lower cla.s.ses, indeed," says Kuchler,[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 j.a.panese_ (285):

"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 (308) he says:

"According to the Confucian ethical code, which the j.a.panese adopted, a man's parents, his teacher, and his lord claim his life-long service, his wife standing on an immeasurably lower plane."[45]

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 (171):

"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 s.e.x; in their ill.u.s.trations 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sert that you who are pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sion for women consists at the best in the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty."

Another interlocutor sums up the Greek att.i.tude 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 Gotter und Gottinnen liebten.

Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.

PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY

The change in love from the barbarian and ancient att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude toward women in general, including their notions about love. There is a curious pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sion of burning l.u.s.t, if we may believe Gerson and Bonaventure; there was no such antidote against it as the Virgin Mary's face."