Professor Rohde declares emphatically (70) that "no one would be so
foolish as to doubt the existence of pure and strong love" among the
ancient Greeks. Another eminent German scholar, Professor Ebers,
sneers at the idea that the Greeks were not familiar with the love we
know and celebrate. Having been criticised for making the lovers in
his ancient historic romances act and talk and express their feelings
precisely as modern lovers in Berlin or Leipsic do, he wrote for the
second edition of his _Egyptian Princess_ a preface in which he tries
to defend his position. He admits that he did, perhaps, after all, put
too warm colors on his canvas, and frankly confesses that when he
examined in the sunshine what he had written by lamplight, he made up
his mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend. He
admits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between the
sexes; yet he thinks it "quite conceivable that a Greek heart should
have felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart," and he
refers to a number of romantic stories invented by the Greeks as proof
that they knew love in our sense of the word--such stories as
Apuleius's _Cupid and Psyche_, Homer's portrait of Penelope,
Xenophon's tale of Panthea and Abradates.
"Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have been
unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice,
was transferred as a constellation to the skies; or can
devotion to love be doubted in the case of peoples who, for
the sake of a beautiful woman, wage terrible wars with
bitter pertinacity?"
Hegel's episodic suggestion referred to in our first chapter regarding
the absence of romantic love in ancient Greek literature having thus
failed to convince even his own countrymen, it was natural that my
revival of that suggestion, as a detail of my general theory of the
evolution of love, should have aroused a chorus of critical dissent.
Commenting on my assertion that there are no stories of romantic love
in Greek literature, an editorial writer in the London _Daily News_
exclaimed: "Why, it would be less wild to remark that the Greeks had
nothing but love-stories." After referring to the stories of Orpheus
and Eurydice, Meleager and Atalanta, Alcyone and Ceyx, Cephalus and
Procris, the writer adds,
"It is no exaggeration to say that any school-girl
could tell Mr. Finck a dozen others." "The Greeks were
human beings, and had the sentiments of human beings,
which really vary but little...."
The New York _Mail and Express_ also devoted an editorial article to
my book, in which it remarked that if romantic love is, as I claim, an
exclusively modern sentiment,
"we must get rid of some old-fashioned fancies. How
shall we hereafter classify our old friends Hero and
Leander? Leander was a fine fellow, just like the
handsomest boy you know. He fell in love with the
lighthouse-keeper's daughter[!] and used to swim over
the river[!] every night and make love to her. It was
all told by an old Greek named Musaeus. How did he get
such modern notions into his noddle? How, moreover,
shall we classify Daphnis and Chloe? This fine old
romance of Longus is as sweet and beautiful a
love-story as ever skipped in prose."
"Daphnis and Chloe," wrote a New Haven critic, "is one of the most
idyllic love-stories ever written." "The love story of Hero and
Leander upsets this author's theory completely," said a Rochester
reviewer, while a St. Louis critic declared boldly that "in the pages
of Achilles Tatius and Theodorus, inventors of the modern novel, the
young men and maidens loved as romantically as in Miss Evans's
latest." A Boston censor pronounced my theory "simply absurd," adding:
"Mr. Finck's reading, wide as it is, is not wide
enough; for had he read the Alexandrian poets,
Theoeritus especially, or Behr A'Adin among the Arabs,
to speak of no others, he could not possibly have had
courage left to maintain his theory; and with him,
really, it seems more a matter of courage than of
facts, notwithstanding his evident training in a
scientific atmosphere."