One more species of pseudo-self-sacrifice remains to be considered.
When Hero finds Leander's dead body on the rocks she commits suicide.
Is not this self-sacrifice for love's sake? It is always so
considered, and Eckstein, in his eagerness to prove that the ancient
Greeks knew romantic love,[37] gives a list of six legendary suicides
from hopeless or foiled love. The question of suicide is an
interesting one and will be considered in detail in the chapter on the
American Indians, who, like other savages, were addicted to it, in
many cases for the most trivial reasons. In this place I will content
myself with noting that if Eckstein had taken the pains to peruse the
four volumes of Ramdohr's _Venus Urania_ (a formidable task, I admit),
he would have found an author who more than a hundred years ago knew
that suicide is no test of true love. There are indeed, he says (III.,
46), plenty of old stories of self-sacrifice, but they are all of the
kind where a man risks comfort and life to secure possession of a
coveted body for his own enjoyment, or else where he takes his own
life because he feels lonely after having failed to secure the desired
union. These actions are no index of love, for they "may coexist with
the cruelest treatment" of the coveted woman. Very ambitious persons
or misers may commit suicide after losing honor or wealth, and
"a coarse negro, in face of the danger of losing his
sweetheart, is capable of casting himself into the ocean
with her, or of plunging his dagger into her breast and then
into his own."
All this is selfish. The only true index of love, Ramdohr continues,
lies in the sacrifice of one's own happiness _for another's sake_; in
resigning one's self to separation from the beloved, or even to death,
if that is necessary to secure her happiness or welfare. Of such
self-sacrifice he declares he cannot find a single instance in the
records and stories of the ancients; nor can I.
The suicide of Dido after her desertion by Aeneas is often cited as
proof of love, but Ramdohr insists (338) that, apart from the fact
that "a woman really in love would not have pursued Aeneas with
curses," such an act as hers was the outcome of purely selfish
despair, on a par with the suicide of a miser after the loss of his
money. It is needless to add to this that Hero's suicide was likewise
selfish; for of what possible benefit was it to the dead Leander that
she took her own life in a cowardly fit of despondency at having lost
her chief source of delight? Had she lost her life in an effort to
save his, the case would have been different.
Instances of women sacrificing themselves for men's sake abound in
ancient literature, though I am not so sure that they abounded in
life, except under compulsion, as in the Hindoo suttee.[38] As we
shall see in the chapter on India, tales of feminine self-sacrifice
were among the means craftily employed by men to fortify and gratify
their selfishness. Still, in the long run, just as man's fierce
"jealousy" helped to make women chaster than men, so the inculcation
in women of self-sacrifice as a duty, gradually made them naturally
inclined to that virtue--an inclination which was strengthened by
inveterate, deep-rooted, maternal love. Thus it happened that
self-sacrifice assumed rank in course of time as a specifically
feminine virtue; so much so that the German metaphysician Fichte could
declare that "the woman's life should disappear in the man's without a
remnant," and that this process is love. No doubt it is love, but love
demands at the same time that the man's life should disappear in the
woman's.
It is interesting to note the sexual aspects of gallantry and
self-sacrifice. Women are prevented by custom, etiquette, and inbred
coyness from showing gallant attentions to men before marriage,
whereas the impulse to sacrifice happiness or life for love's sake is
at least as strong in them as in men, and of longer standing. If a
girl of affectionate impulses on hearing that the man she
loved--though he might not have proposed to her--lay wounded, or ill
of yellow fever, in a hospital, threw away all reserve, coyness, and
fear of violating decorum, and went to nurse him day and night, at
imminent risk of her own life, all the world would applaud her,
convinced that she had done a more feminine thing than if she had
allowed coyness to suppress her sympathetic and self-sacrificing
impulses.