Primitive Love and Love-Stories | Page 5

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 à 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