There are all sorts and conditions of love. To those who have known
only the primitive (sensual) sort, the conditions described in the
foregoing pages will seem strange and fantastic if not
fictitious--that is, the products of the writers' imaginations.
Fantastic they are, no doubt, and romantic, but that they are real I
can vouch for by my own experience whenever I was in love, which
happened several times. When I was a youth of seventeen I fell in love
with a beautiful, black-eyed young woman, a Spanish-American of
Californian stock. She was married, and I am afraid she was amused at
my mad infatuation. Did I try to flirt with her? A smile, a glance of
her eyes, was to me the seventh heaven beyond which there could be no
other. I would not have dared to touch her hand, and the thought of
kissing her was as much beyond my wildest flights of fancy as if she
had been a real goddess. To me she was divine, utterly unapproachable
by mortal. Every day I used to sit in a lonely spot of the forest and
weep; and when she went away I felt as if the son had gone out and all
the world were plunged into eternal darkness.
Such is romantic love--a supersensual feeling of crystalline purity
from which all gross matter has been distilled. But the love that
includes this ingredient is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand
years old, and not to be found among savages, barbarians, or
Orientals. To them, as the perusal of past and later chapters must
convince the reader, it is inconceivable that a woman should serve any
other than sensual and utilitarian purposes. The whole story is told
in what Dodge says of the Indians, who, "animal-like, approach a woman
only to make love to her"; and of the squaws who do not dare even go
with a beau to a dance, or go a short distance from camp, without
taking precautions against rape--precautions without which they "would
not be safe for an instant" (210, 213).