Primitive Love and Love-Stories | Page 6

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 was true that Hegel
had anticipated me, my claims to priority of discovery would vanish,
even though the idea had come to me spontaneously; but, on the other
hand, the disappointment at this thought was neutralized by the
reflection that I should gain the support of one of the most famous
philosophers, and share with him the sneers and the ridicule bestowed
upon my theory. I wrote to Mr. Lathrop, begging him to refer me to the
volume and page of Hegel's numerous works where I could find the
passage in question. He promptly replied that I should find it in the
second volume of the Aesthetik (178-182). No doubt I ought to have

known that Hegel had written on this subject; but the fact that of more
than two hundred American, English, and German reviewers of my
book whose notices I have seen, only one knew what had thus escaped
my research, consoled me somewhat. Hegel, indeed, might well have
copied Burton's epitaph. His Aesthetik is an abstruse, unindexed,
three-volume work of 1,575 pages, which has not been reprinted since
1843, and is practically forgotten. Few know it, though all know of it.
After perusing Hegel's pages on this topic I found, however, that Mr.
Lathrop had imputed to him a theory--my theory--which that
philosopher would have doubtless repudiated emphatically. What
Hegel does is simply to call attention to the fact that in the literature of
the ancient Greeks and Romans love is depicted only as a transient
gratification of the senses, or a consuming heat of the blood, and not as
a romantic, sentimental affection of the soul. He does not generalize,
says nothing about other ancient nations,[1] and certainly never dreamt
of such a thing as asserting that love had been gradually and slowly
developed from the coarse and selfish passions of our savage ancestors
to the refined and altruistic feelings of modern civilized men and
women. He lived long before the days of scientific anthropology and
Darwinism, and never thought of such a thing as looking upon the
emotions and morals of primitive men as the raw material out of which
our own superior minds have been fashioned. Nay, Hegel does not even
say that sentimental love did not exist in the life of the Greeks and
Romans; he simply asserts that it is not to be found in their literature.
The two things are by no means identical.
Professor Rohde, an authority on the erotic writings of the Greeks,
expresses the opinion repeatedly that, whatever their literature may
indicate, they themselves were capable of feeling strong and pure love;
and the eminent American psychologist, Professor William James, put
forth the same opinion in a review of my book.[2] Indeed, this view
was broached more than a hundred years ago by a German author, Basil
von Ramdohr, who wrote four volumes on love and its history, entitled
Venus Urania. His first two volumes are almost unreadably garrulous
and dull, but the third and fourth contain an interesting account of
various phases through which love has passed in literature. Yet he
declares (Preface, vol. iii.) that "the nature [_Wesen_] of love is
unchangeable, but the ideas we entertain in regard to it and the effects

we ascribe to it, are subject to alteration."
SHELLEY ON GREEK LOVE
It is possible that Hegel may have read this book, for it appeared in
1798, while the first manuscript sketches of his lectures on esthetics
bear the date of 1818. He may have also read Robert Wood's book
entitled An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, dated
1775, in which this sentence occurs:
"Is it not very remarkable, that Homer, so great a master of the tender
and pathetic, who has exhibited human nature in almost every shape,
and under every view, has not given a single instance of the powers and
effects of love, distinct from sensual enjoyment, in the _Iliad_?"
This is as far as I have been able to trace back this notion in modern
literature. But in the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century
I have come across several adumbrations of the truth regarding