Primitive Love and Love-Stories | Page 5

and self-sacrificing impulses which
overcame me when I was in love. "Can it be," I whispered to myself,
"that, notwithstanding the universal opinion to the contrary, love is,
after all, subject to the laws of development?"
This hypothesis threw me into a fever of excitement, without the
stimulus of which I do not believe I should have had the courage and
patience to collect, classify, and weave into one fabric the enormous
number of facts and opinions contained within the covers of Romantic
Love and Personal Beauty. I 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