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 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."