If a romantic love-poem were necessarily a poem of romantic love, the
specimens of amorous hyperbole cited in the preceding pages would
indicate that the ancients knew love as we know it. In reality,
however, there is not, in all the examples cited, the slightest
evidence of genuine love. A passion which is merely sensual may
inspire a gifted poet to the most extravagantly fanciful expressions
of covetous admiration, and in all the cases cited there is nothing
beyond such sensual admiration. An African Harari compares the girl he
likes to "sweet milk fresh from the cow," and considers that coarse
remark a compliment because he knows love only as an appetite. A gypsy
poet compares the shoulders of his beloved to "wheat bread," and a
Turkish poem eulogizes a girl for being like "bread fried in butter."
(Ploss, L, 85, 89.)
The ancient poets had too much taste to reveal their amorous desires
quite so bluntly as an appetite, yet they, too, never went beyond the
confines of self-indulgence. When Propertius says a girl's cheeks are
like roses floating on milk; when Tibullus declares another girl's
eyes are bright enough to light a torch by; when Achilles Tatius makes
his lover exclaim: "Surely you must carry about a bee on your lips,
they are full of honey, your kisses wound"--what is all this except a
revelation that the poet thinks the girl pretty, that her beauty
_gives him pleasure_, and that he tries to express that pleasure by
comparing her to some other object--sun, moon, honey, flowers--that
pleases his senses? Nowhere is there the slightest indication that he
is eager to _give her pleasure_, much less that he would be willing to
sacrifice his own pleasures for her, as a mother, for instance, would
for a child. His hyperboles, in a word, tell us not of love for
another but of a self-love in which the other figures only as a means
to an end, that end being his own gratification.
When Anacreon wishes he were the gown worn by a girl, or the water
that laves her limbs, or the string of pearls around her neck, he does
not indicate the least desire to make _her_ happy, but an eagerness to
please _himself_ by coming in contact with her. The daintiest poetic
conceit cannot conceal this blunt fact. Even the most fanciful of all
forms of amorous hyperbole--that in which the lover imagines that all
nature smiles or weeps with him--what is it but the most colossal
egotism conceivable?
The amorous hyperbole of the ancients is romantic in the sense of
fanciful, fictitious, extravagant, but not in the sense in which I
oppose romantic love to selfish sensual infatuation. There is no
intimation in it of those things that differentiate love from
lust--the mental and moral charms of the women, or the adoration,
sympathy, and affection, of the men. When one of Goethe's characters
says: "My life began at the moment I fell in love with you;" or when
one of Lessing's characters exclaims: "To live apart from her is
inconceivable to me, would be my death"--we still hear the note of
selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the
result of a change in the way of regarding women. Where women are
looked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbole
cannot be sincere; it is either nothing but "spruce affectation" or
else an illustration of the power of sensual love. No ancient author
could have written what Emerson wrote in his essay on Love, of the
visitations of a power which
"made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the
morning and the night varied enchantments; when a
single tone of one voice could make the heart bound,
and the most trivial circumstance associated with one
form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all
eye when one was present, and all memory when one was
gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and
studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of
a carriage.... When the head boiled all night on the
pillow with the generous deed it resolved on.... When
all business seemed an impertinence, and all men and
women running to and fro in the streets, mere
pictures."