Primitive Love and Love-Stories | Page 8

course a mere bubble of his poetic
fancy, not intended to be taken too seriously, and, is, moreover, at
variance with facts. It is odd that he overlooks the Greeks, whereas the
other writers cited confine themselves to the Greeks and their Roman
imitators.
Ten years before Goldsmith thus launched the idea that most nations
were and had ever been strangers to the delights and advantages of love,
Jean Jacques Rousseau published a treatise, _Discours sur l'inégalité_
(1754), in which he asserted that savages are strangers to jealousy,
know no domesticity, and evince no preferences, being as well pleased
with one woman as with another. Although, as we shall see later, many
savages do have a crude sort of jealousy, domesticity, and individual
preference, Rousseau, nevertheless, hints prophetically at a great
truth--the fact that some, at any rate, of the phenomena of love are not
to be found in the life of savages. Such a thought, naturally, was too
novel to be accepted at once. Ramdohr, for instance, declares (III. 17)
that he cannot convince himself that Rousseau is right. Yet, on the
preceding page he himself had written that "it is unreasonable to speak
of love between the sexes among peoples that have not yet advanced so

far as to grant women humane consideration."
LOVE A COMPOUND FEELING
All these things are of extreme interest as showing the blind struggles
of a great idea to emerge from the mist into daylight. The greatest
obstacle to the recognition of the fact that love has a history, and is
subject to the laws of evolution lay in the habit of looking upon it as a
simple feeling.
When I wrote my first book on love, I believed that Herbert Spencer
was the first thinker who grasped the idea that love is a composite state
of mind. I now see, however, that Silvius, in Shakspere's As You Like It
(V. 2), gave a broad hint of the truth, three hundred years ago. Phoebe
asks him to "tell what 't is to love," and he replies:
It is to be all made of sighs and tears.... It is to be all made of faith and
service.... It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all
made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness,
all patience, and impatience, All purity, all trial, all obedience.
Coleridge also vaguely recognized the composite nature of love in the
first stanza of his famous poem:
All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of love, And feed his sacred flame.
And Swift adds, in "Cadenus and Vanessa:"
Love, why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all?
The eminent Danish critic, George Brandes, though a special student of
English literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one of
his lectures on literary history (1872), that the book in which love is for
the first time looked on as something composite and an attempt made to
analyze it into its elements, is Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (which
appeared in 1816). "In Adolphe," he says,
"and in all the literature associated with that book, we are informed
accurately how many parts, how many grains, of friendship, devotion,
vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual attraction, illusion, fancy,
deception, hate, satiety, enthusiasm, reasoning calculation, etc., are
contained in the mixtum compositum which the enamoured persons call
love."
This list, moreover, does not accurately name a single one of the
essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated
phenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states of

mind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love--gallant
"service," "adoration," and "purity"--while "patience and impatience"
may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixed
moods of hope and despair.
HERBERT SPENCER'S ANALYSIS
Nevertheless the first thinker who treated love as a compound feeling
and consciously attempted a philosophical analysis of it was Herbert
Spencer. In 1855 he published his Principles of Psychology, and in
1870 appeared a greatly enlarged edition, paragraph 215 of which
contains the following exposition of his views:
"The passion which unites the sexes is habitually spoken of as though it
were a simple feeling; whereas it is the most compound, and therefore
the most powerful, of all the feelings. Added to the purely physical
elements of it are first to be noticed those highly complex impressions
produced by personal beauty; around which are aggregated a variety of
pleasurable ideas, not in themselves amatory, but which have an
organized relation to the amatory feeling. With this there is united the
complex sentiment which we term affection--a sentiment which, as it
exists between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an
independent sentiment, but one which is here greatly