Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 78

The view that the gist of the _Song of Songs_ is the Shulamite's love of a shepherd and her persistent resistance to the advances of Solomon, was first advanced in 1771 by J.F. Jacobi, and is now universally accepted by the commentators, the overwhelming majority of whom have also given up the artificial and really blasphemous allegorical interpretation of this poem once in vogue, but ignored in the Revised Version, as well as the notion that Solomon wrote the poem. Apart from all other arguments, which are abundant, it is absurd to suppose that Solomon would have written a drama to proclaim his own failure to win the love of a simple country girl. In truth, it is very probable that, as Renan has eloquently set forth (91-100), the _Song of Songs_ was written practically for the purpose of holding up Solomon to ridicule. In the northern part of his kingdom there was a strong feeling against him on account of his wicked ways and vicious innovations, especially his harem, and other expensive habits that impoverished the country. "Taken all in all," says the Rev. W.E.

Griffis, of Solomon (44),

"he was probably one of the worst sinners described in the Old Testament. With its usual truth and fearlessness, the Scriptures expose his real character, and by the later prophets and by Jesus he is ignored or referred to only in rebuke."

The contempt and hatred inspired by his actions were especially vivid shortly after his death, when the _Song of Songs_ is believed to have been written (Renan, 97); and, as this author remarks (100),

"the poet seems to have been animated by a real spite against the king; the establishment of a harem, in particular, appears to incense him greatly, and he takes evident pleasure in showing us a simple shepherd girl triumphing over the presumptuous sultan who thinks he can buy love, like everything else, with his gold."

That this is intended to be the moral of this Biblical drama is further shown by the famous lines near the close:

"For love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave [literally: pa.s.sion is as inexorable (or hard) as sheol]: The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench it, nor can the floods drown it: If a man should give all the substance of his house for love, he [it] would utterly be contemned."

These lines const.i.tute the last of the pa.s.sages cited by my critics to prove that the ancient Hebrews knew romantic love and its power. They doubtless did know the power of love; all the ancient civilized nations knew it as a violent sensual impulse which blindly sacrifices life to attain its object. The ancient Hindoos embodied their idea of irresistible power in the force and fury of an amorous elephant. Among animals in general, love is even stronger than death. Male animals of most species engage in deadly combat for the females. "For most insects," says Letourneau, "to love and to die are almost synonymous terms, and yet they do not even try to resist the amorous frenzy that urges them on." Yet no one would dream of calling this romantic love; from that it differs as widely as the insect mind in general differs from the human mind. Waters cannot quench any kind of love or affection nor floods drown it. What we are seeking for are _actions or words describing the specific symptoms of sentimental love_, and these are not to be found in this pa.s.sage any more than elsewhere in the Bible. An old man may buy a girl's body, but he cannot, with all his wealth and splendor, awaken her love, either sentimental or sensual; love, whatever its nature, will always prefer the apple-tree and the shepherd lover to the vain desires and a thousand times divided attentions of a decrepit king, though he be a Solomon.

It would be strange if this purely profane poem, which was added to the Scriptural collection only by an unusual stretch of liberality,[290] and in which there is not one mention of G.o.d or of religion, should give a higher conception of s.e.xual love than the books which are accepted as inspired, and which paint manners, emotions, and morals as the writers found them. As a matter of fact the _Song of Songs_ was long held to be so objectionable that the Talmudists did not allow young people to read it before their thirtieth year. Whiston denounced it as foolish, lascivious, and idolatrous. "The excessively amative character of some pa.s.sages is designated as almost blasphemous when supposed to be addressed by Christ to his Church,"[291] as it was by the allegorists. On the other hand there is a cla.s.s of commentators to whom this poem is the ideal of all that is pure and lovely. Herder went into ecstasies over it.

Israel Abrahams refers to it (163) as "the n.o.blest of love-poems;" as "this idealization of love." The Rev. W.E. Griffis declares rapturously (166, 63, 21, 16, 250) that "the purest-minded virgin may safely read the _Song of Songs_, in which is no trace of immoral thought." In it "sensuality is scorned and pure love glorified;" it "sets forth the eternal romance of true love," and is "chastely pure in word and delicate in idea throughout." "The poet of the Canticle shows us how to love." "An angel might envy such artless love dwelling in a human heart."

The truth, as usual in such cases, lies about half-way between these extreme views. There is only one pa.s.sage which is objectionably coa.r.s.e in the English version and in the Hebrew original obscene;[292] yet, on the other hand, I maintain that the whole poem is purely Oriental in its exclusively sensuous and often sensual character, and that there is not a trace of romantic sentiment such as would color a similar love-story if told by a modern poet. The _Song of Songs_ is so confused in its arrangement, its plan so obscure, its repet.i.tions and repeated denouements so puzzling,[293] that commentators are not always agreed as to what character in the drama is to be held responsible for certain lines; but for our purpose this difficulty makes no difference. Taking the lines just as they stand, I find that the following:--1: 2-4, 13 (in one version), 17; 2: 6; 4: 16; 5: 1; 8: 2, 3--are indelicate in language or suggestion, as every student of Oriental amorous poetry knows, and no amount of specious argumentation can alter this. The descriptions of the beauty and charms of the beloved or the lover, are, moreover, invariably sensuous and often sensual. Again and again are their bodily charms dwelt on rapturously, as is customary in the poems of all Orientals with all sorts of quaint hyperbolic comparisons, some of which are poetic, others grotesque. No fewer than five times are the external charms thus enumerated, but not once in the whole poem is any allusion made to the spiritual attractions, the mental and moral charms of femininity which are the food of romantic love. Mr. Griffis, who cannot help commenting (223) on this frequent description of the human body, makes a desperate effort to come to the rescue. Referring to 4: 12-14, he says (212) that the lover now "adds a more delicate compliment to her modesty, her instinctive refinement, her chaste life, her purity amid court temptations. He praises her inward ornaments, her soul's charms." What are these ornaments? The possible reference to her chast.i.ty in the lines: "A garden shut up is my sister, my bride. A spring shut up, a fountain sealed"--a reference which, if so intended, would be regarded by a Christian maiden not as a compliment, but an insult; while every student of Eastern manners knows that an Oriental makes of his wife "a garden shut up," and "a fountain sealed" not by way of complimenting her chast.i.ty, but because he has no faith in it whatever, knowing that so far as it exists it is founded on fear, not on affection. Mr.

Griffis knows this himself when he does not happen to be idealizing an impossible shepherd girl, for he says (161):

"To one familiar with the literature, customs, speech, and ideas of the women who live where idolatry prevails, and the rulers and chief men of the country keep harems, the amazing purity and modesty of maidens reared in Christian homes is like a revelation from heaven."[294]

Supersensual charms are not alluded to in the _Song of Songs_, for the simple reason that Orientals never did, and do not now, care for such charms in women or cultivate them. They know love only as an appet.i.te, and in accordance with Oriental taste and custom the _Song of Songs_ compares it always to things that are good to eat or drink or smell.

Hence such ecstatic expressions as "How much better is thy love than wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all manner of spices!"

Hence her declaration that her beloved is

"as the apple-tree among the trees of the wood.... I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.... Stay ye me with raisins, comfort me with apples: For I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me."

Hence the shepherd's description of his love: "I am come into the garden, my sister, my bride: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice: I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk."

Modern love does not express itself in such terms; it is more mental and sentimental, more esthetic and sympathetic, more decorous and delicate, more refined and supersensual. While it is possible that, as Renan suggests (143), the author of the Canticles conceived his heroine as a saint of her time, rising above sordid reality, it is clear from all we have said that the author himself was not able to rise above Orientalism. The manners of the East, both ancient and modern, are incompatible with romantic love, because they suppress the evolution of feminine refinement and s.e.xual mentality. The doc.u.ments of the Hebrews, like those of the Hindoos and Persians, Greeks, and Romans, prove that tender, refined, and unselfish affection between the s.e.xes, far from being one of the first shoots of civilization, is its last and most beautiful flower.

GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS

The most obstinate disbeliever in the doctrine that romantic love, instead of being one of the earliest products of civilization, is one of the latest, will have to capitulate if it can be shown that even the Greeks, the most cultivated and refined nation of antiquity, knew it only in its sensual and selfish side, which is not true love, but self-love. In reality I have already shown this to be the case incidentally in the sections in which I have traced the evolution of the fourteen ingredients of love. In the present chapter, therefore, we may confine ourselves chiefly to a consideration of the stories and poems which have fostered the belief I am combating. But first we must hear what the champions of the Greeks have to say in their behalf.

CHAMPIONS OF GREEK LOVE

Professor Rohde declares emphatically (70) that "no one would be so foolish as to doubt the existence of pure and strong love" among the ancient Greeks. Another eminent German scholar, Professor Ebers, sneers at the idea that the Greeks were not familiar with the love we know and celebrate. Having been criticised for making the lovers in his ancient historic romances act and talk and express their feelings precisely as modern lovers in Berlin or Leipsic do, he wrote for the second edition of his _Egyptian Princess_ a preface in which he tries to defend his position. He admits that he did, perhaps, after all, put too warm colors on his canvas, and frankly confesses that when he examined in the suns.h.i.+ne what he had written by lamplight, he made up his mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend. He admits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between the s.e.xes; yet he thinks it "quite conceivable that a Greek heart should have felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart," and he refers to a number of romantic stories invented by the Greeks as proof that they knew love in our sense of the word--such stories as Apuleius's _Cupid and Psyche_, Homer's portrait of Penelope, Xenophon's tale of Panthea and Abradates.

"Can we a.s.sume even the gallantry of love to have been unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, was transferred as a constellation to the skies; or can devotion to love be doubted in the case of peoples who, for the sake of a beautiful woman, wage terrible wars with bitter pertinacity?"

Hegel's episodic suggestion referred to in our first chapter regarding the absence of romantic love in ancient Greek literature having thus failed to convince even his own countrymen, it was natural that my revival of that suggestion, as a detail of my general theory of the evolution of love, should have aroused a chorus of critical dissent.

Commenting on my a.s.sertion that there are no stories of romantic love in Greek literature, an editorial writer in the London _Daily News_ exclaimed: "Why, it would be less wild to remark that the Greeks had nothing but love-stories." After referring to the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, Meleager and Atalanta, Alcyone and Ceyx, Cephalus and Procris, the writer adds,

"It is no exaggeration to say that any school-girl could tell Mr. Finck a dozen others." "The Greeks were human beings, and had the sentiments of human beings, which really vary but little...."

The New York _Mail and Express_ also devoted an editorial article to my book, in which it remarked that if romantic love is, as I claim, an exclusively modern sentiment,

"we must get rid of some old-fas.h.i.+oned fancies. How shall we hereafter cla.s.sify our old friends Hero and Leander? Leander was a fine fellow, just like the handsomest boy you know. He fell in love with the lighthouse-keeper's daughter[!] and used to swim over the river[!] every night and make love to her. It was all told by an old Greek named Musaeus. How did he get such modern notions into his noddle? How, moreover, shall we cla.s.sify Daphnis and Chloe? This fine old romance of Longus is as sweet and beautiful a love-story as ever skipped in prose."

"Daphnis and Chloe," wrote a New Haven critic, "is one of the most idyllic love-stories ever written." "The love story of Hero and Leander upsets this author's theory completely," said a Rochester reviewer, while a St. Louis critic declared boldly that "in the pages of Achilles Tatius and Theodorus, inventors of the modern novel, the young men and maidens loved as romantically as in Miss Evans's latest." A Boston censor p.r.o.nounced my theory "simply absurd," adding:

"Mr. Finck's reading, wide as it is, is not wide enough; for had he read the Alexandrian poets, Theoeritus especially, or Behr A'Adin among the Arabs, to speak of no others, he could not possibly have had courage left to maintain his theory; and with him, really, it seems more a matter of courage than of facts, notwithstanding his evident training in a scientific atmosphere."

GLADSTONE ON THE WOMEN OF HOMER

The divers specifications of my ignorance and stupidity contained in the foregoing criticisms will be attended to in their proper place in the chronological order of the present chapter, which naturally begins with Homer's epics, as nothing definite is known of Greek literature before them. Homer is now recognized as the first poet of antiquity, not only in the order of time; but it took Europe many centuries to discover that fact. During the Middle Ages the second-rate Virgil was held to be a much greater genius than Homer, and it was in England, as Professor Christ notes (69), that the truer estimate originated.

Pope's translation of the Homeric poems, with all its faults, helped to dispel the mists of ignorance, and in 1775 appeared Robert Wood's book, _On the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_, which combated the foolish prejudice against the poet, due to the coa.r.s.eness of the manners he depicts. Wood admits (161) that "most of Homer's heroes would, in the present age, be capitally convicted, in any country in Europe, on the poet's evidence;" but this, he explains, does not detract from the greatness of Homer, who, upon an impartial view, "will appear to excel his own state of society, in point of decency and delicacy, as much as he has surpa.s.sed more polished ages in point of genius."

In this judicious discrimination between the genius of Homer and the realistic coa.r.s.eness of his heroes, Wood forms an agreeable contrast to many modern Homeric scholars, notably the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone, who, having made this poet his hobby, tried to persuade himself and his readers that nearly everything relating not only to Homer, but to the characters he depicts, was next door to perfection. Confining ourselves to the topic that concerns us here, we read, in his _Studies on Homer_ (II., 502), that "we find throughout the poems those signs of the overpowering force of conjugal attachments which ... we might expect." And in his shorter treatise on Homer he thus sums up his views as to the position and estimate of woman in the heroic age, as revealed in Homer's female characters:

"The most notable of them compare advantageously with those commended to us in the Old Testament; while Achaiian Jezebels are nowhere found. There is a certain authority of the man over the woman; but it does not destroy freedom, or imply the absence either of respect, or of a close mental and moral fellows.h.i.+p. Not only the relation of Odysseus to Penelope and of Hector to Andromache, but those of Achilles to Briseis, and of Menelaus to the returned Helen, are full of dignity and attachment. Briseis was but a captive, yet Achilles viewed her as in expectation a wife, called her so, avowed his love for her, and laid it down that not he only, but every man must love his wife if he had sense and virtue. Among the Achaiian Greeks monogamy is invariable; divorce unknown; incest abhorred.... The sad inst.i.tution which, in Saint Augustine's time, was viewed by him as saving the world from yet worse evil is unknown or unrecorded. Concubinage prevails in the camp before Troy, but only simple concubinage. Some of the women, attendants in the Ithacan palace, were corrupted by the evil-minded Suitors; but some were not. It should, perhaps, be noted as a token of the respect paid to the position of the woman, that these very bad men are not represented as ever having included in their plans the idea of offering violence to Penelope. The n.o.blest note, however, of the Homeric woman remains this, that she shared the thought and heart of her husband: as in the fine utterance of Penelope she prays that rather she may be borne away by the Harpies than remain to 'glad the heart of a meaner man' (_Od_. XX., 82) than her husband, still away from her."

Only a careful student of Homer can quite realize the diplomatic astuteness which inspired this sketch of Homeric morals. Its amazing sophistry can, however, be made apparent even to one who has never read the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

ACHILLES AS A LOVER

The Trojan War lasted ten years. Its object was to punish Paris, son of the King of Troy, for eloping with Helen, the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and taking away a s.h.i.+pload of treasures to boot. The subject of Homer's _Iliad_ is popularly supposed to be this Trojan War; in reality, however, it covers less than two months (fifty-two days) of those ten years, and its theme, as the first lines indicate, is the wrath of Achilles--the ruinous wrath, which in the tenth year, brought on the other Greek warriors woes innumerable. Achilles had spent much of the intervening time in ravaging twelve cities of Asia Minor, carrying away treasures and captive women, after the piratical Greek custom. One of these captives was Briseis, a high priest's daughter, whose husband and three brothers he had slain with his own hand, and who became his favorite concubine. King Agamemnon, the chief commander of the Greek forces, also had for his favorite concubine a high priest's daughter, named Chryseis. Her father came to ransom the captive girl, but Agamemnon refused to give her up because, as he confessed with brutal frankness, he preferred her to his wife.[295]

For this refusal Apollo brings a pestilence on the Greek army, which can be abated only by restoring Chryseis to her father. Agamemnon at last consents, on condition that some other prize of honor be given to him--though, as Thersites taunts him (II, 226-228), his tents are already full of captive women, among whom he always has had first choice. Achilles, too, informs him that he shall have all the women he wants when Troy is taken; but what really hurts Agamemnon's feelings is not so much the loss of his favorite as the thought that the hated Achilles should enjoy Briseis, while his prize, Chryseis, must be returned to her father. So he threatens to retaliate on Achilles by taking Briseis from his tent and keeping her for himself. "I would deserve the name of coward," retorts Achilles

"were I to yield to you in everything.... But this let me say--Never shall I lift my arm to strive for the girl either with you or any other man; you gave her, you can take her.

But of all else, by the dark s.h.i.+p, that belongs to me, thereof you shall not take anything against my will. Do that and all shall see your black blood trickle down my spear."

Having made this "uncowardly," chivalrous, and romantic distinction between his two kinds of property--yielding Briseis, but threatening murder if aught else belonging to him be touched--Achilles goes and orders his friend Patroclus to take the young woman from the tent and give her to the king. She leaves her paramour--her husband's and brothers' murderer--unwillingly, and he sits down and weeps--why?

because, as he tells his mother, he has been insulted by Agamemnon, who has taken away his prize of honor. From that moment Achilles refuses to join the a.s.semblies, or take a part in the battles, thus bringing "woes innumerable" on his countrymen. He refuses to yield even after Agamemnon, alarmed by his reverses, seeks to conciliate him by offering him gold and horses and women in abundance; telling him he shall have back his Briseis, whom the king swears he has never touched, and, besides her, seven Lesbian women of more than human beauty; also, the choice of twenty Trojan women as soon as the city capitulates; and, in addition to these, one of the three princesses, his own daughters--twenty-nine women in all!

Must not a hero who so stubbornly and wrathfully resented the seizure of his concubine have been deeply in love with her? He himself remarks to Odysseus, who comes to attempt a reconciliation (IX., 340-44):

"Do the sons of Atreus alone of mortal men love their bedfellows? Every man who is good and sensible loves his concubine and cares for her as I too love mine with all my heart, though but the captive of my spear."

Gladstone here translates the word [Greek: alochos] "wife," though, as far as Achilles is concerned, it means concubine. Of course it would have been awkward for England's Prime Minister to make Achilles say that "every man must love his concubine, if he has sense and virtue;"

so he arbitrarily changes the meaning of the word and then begs us to notice the moral beauty of this sentiment and the "dignity" of the relation between Achilles and Briseis! Yet no one seems to have denounced him for this transgression against ethics, philology, and common sense. On the contrary, a host of translators and commentators have done the same thing, to the obscuration of the truth.

Nor is this all. When we examine what the Achilles of Homer means by the fine phrase "every man loves his bedfellow as I love mine," we come across a grotesque parody even of sensual infatuation, not to speak of romantic love. If Achilles had been animated by the strong individual preference which sometimes results even from animal pa.s.sion, he would not have told Agamemnon, "take Briseis, but don't you dare to touch any of my other property or I will smash your skull." If he had been what _we_ understand by a lover, he would not have been represented by the poet, after Briseis was taken away from him, as having "his heart consumed by grief" because "he yearned for _the battle_." He would, instead, have yearned for the girl. And when Agamemnon offered to give her back untouched, Achilles, had he been a real lover, would have thrown pride and wrath to the winds and accepted the offer with eagerness and alacrity.

But the most amazing part of the story is reached when we ask what Achilles means when he says that every good and sensible man [Greek: phileei kai kaedetai]--loves and cherishes--his concubine, as he professes to love his own. _How_ does he love Briseis? Patroclus had promised her (XIX., 297-99), probably for reasons of his own (she is represented as being extremely fond of him), to see to it that Achilles would ultimately make her his legitimate wife, but Achilles himself never dreams of such a thing, as we see in lines 393-400, book IX. After refusing the offer of one of Agamemnon's daughters, he goes on to remark:

"If the G.o.ds preserve me and I return to my home, Peleus himself will seek a wife for me. There are many Achaian maidens in h.e.l.las and Phthia, daughters of city-protecting princes. Among these I shall select the one I desire to be my dear wife. Very often is my manly heart moved with longing to be there to take a wedded wife [Greek: mnaestaen alochon], and enjoy the possessions Peleus has gathered."

And if any further detail were needed to prove how utterly shallow, selfish, and sensual was his "love" of Briseis, we should find it a few lines later (663) where the poet navely tells us, as a matter of course, that

"Achilles slept in the innermost part of the tent and by his side lay a beautiful-cheeked woman, whom he had brought from Lesbos. On the other side lay Patroclus with the fair Isis by his side, the gift of Achilles."