Primitive Love and Love-Stories | Page 7

the
Greeks,[3] by Shelley, Lord Lytton, Lord Macaulay, and Théophile
Gautier. Shelley's ideas are confused and contradictory, but interesting
as showing the conflict between traditional opinion and poetic intuition.
In his fragmentary discourse on "The Manners of the Ancients Relating
to the Subject of Love," which was intended to serve as an introduction
to Plato's Symposium, he remarks that the women of the ancient Greeks,
with rare exceptions, possessed
"the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably not
extremely beautiful, at least there was no such disproportion in the
attractions of the external form between the female and male sex
among the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans. They were
certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the
acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment animates, as
with another life of overpowering grace, the lineaments and the
gestures of every form which they inhabit. Their eyes could not have
been deep and intricate from the workings of the mind, and could have
entangled no heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths." Having painted this
life-like picture of the Greek female mind, Shelley goes on to say
perversely:
"Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of its
legitimate object, that they were incapable of sentimental love, and that
this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern
times."

He tries to justify this assertion by adding that
"Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain degree of
civilization and refinement ever produces the want of sympathies still
more intimate and complete; and the gratification of the senses is no
longer all that is sought in sexual connection. It soon becomes a very
small part of that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call
love, which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not merely of
the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative, and
sensitive."
Here Shelley contradicts himself flatly by saying, in two consecutive
sentences, that Greek women were "certainly devoid of the moral and
intellectual loveliness" which inspires sentimental love, but that the
men nevertheless could feel such love. His mind was evidently hazy on
the subject, and that is probably the reason why his essay remained a
fragment.
MACAULAY, BULWER-LYTTON, GAUTIER
Macaulay, with deeper insight than Shelley showed, realized that the
passion of love may undergo changes. In his essay on Petrarch he notes
that in the days of that poet love had become a new passion, and he
clearly realizes the obstacles to love presented by Greek institutions. Of
the two classes of women in Greece, the respectable and the hetairai, he
says:
"The matrons and their daughters, confined in the harem--insipid,
uneducated, ignorant of all but the mechanical arts, scarcely seen till
they were married--could rarely excite interest; while their brilliant
rivals, half graces, half harpies, elegant and refined, but fickle and
rapacious, could never inspire respect."
Lord Lytton wrote an essay on "The Influence of Love upon Literature
and Real Life," in which he stated that
"with Euripides commences the important distinction in the analysis of
which all the most refined and intellectual of modern erotic literature
consists, viz., the distinction between love as a passion and love as a
sentiment.... He is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us
intellectually in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes."
Théophile Gautier clearly realized one of the differences between
ancient passion and modern love. In _Mademoiselle de Maupin,_ he
makes this comment on the ancient love-poems:

"Through all the subtleties and veiled expressions one hears the abrupt
and harsh voice of the master who endeavors to soften his manner in
speaking to a slave. It is not, as in the love-poems written since the
Christian era, a soul demanding love of another soul because it loves....
'Make haste, Cynthia; the smallest wrinkle may prove the grave of the
most violent passion.' It is in this brutal formula that all ancient elegy is
summed up."
GOLDSMITH AND ROUSSEAU
In Romantic Love and Personal Beauty I intimated (116) that Oliver
Goldsmith was the first author who had a suspicion of the fact that love
is not the same everywhere and at all times. My surmise was apparently
correct; it is not refuted by any of the references to love by the several
authors just quoted, since all of these were written from about a half a
century to a century later than Goldsmith's Citizen of the World
(published in 1764), which contains his dialogue on "Whether Love be
a Natural or a Fictitious Passion." His assertion therein that love existed
only in early Rome, in chivalrous mediaeval Europe, and in China, all
the rest of the world being, and having ever been, "utter strangers to its
delights and advantages," is, of