Although dogs are the most intelligent of all animals and at the same
time proverbial for their faithful attachment to their masters, they
are nevertheless, as I have before pointed out, in their sexual
relations utterly incapable of that approximation to conjugal love
which we find instinctive in some birds. Most readers of this book,
too, are probably acquainted with men and women, who while highly
educated and refined, as well as devoted to the members of their
family, are strangers to romantic love; and I have pointed out (302)
that men of genius may in this respect be in the same boat as ordinary
mortals. In view of these considerations, and of the rarity of true
love even in modern Europe and America, it surely is not unnatural or
reckless to assume that there may have been whole nations in this
predicament, though they were as advanced in many other respects as
were the Greeks and as capable of other forms of domestic attachment.
Yet, as I remarked on page 6, several writers, including so eminent a
thinker as Professor William James, have held that the Greeks could
have differed from us only in their _ideas_ about love, and not in
their feelings themselves. "It is incredible," he remarks in the
review referred to,
"that individual women should not at all times have had the
power to fill individual manly breasts with enchanted
respect.... So powerful and instinctive, an emotion can
never have been recently evolved. But our ideas _about_ our
emotions, and the esteem in which we hold them, differ very
much from one generation to another."
In the next paragraph he admits, however, that "no doubt the
way in which we think about our emotions reacts on the emotions
themselves, dampening or inflaming them, as the case may be;" and in
this admission he really concedes the whole matter. The main object of
my chapter "How Sentiments Change and Grow" is to show how men's
_ideas_ regarding nature, religion, murder, polygamy, modesty,
chastity, incest, affect and modify their _feelings_ in relation to
them, thus furnishing indirectly a complete answer to the objection
made to my theory.[313]
Now the ideas which the Greeks had about their women could not but
dampen any elevated feelings of love that might otherwise have sprung
up in them. Their literature attests that they considered love a
degrading, sensual passion, not an ennobling, supersensual sentiment,
as we do. With such an _idea_ how could they have possibly _felt_
toward women as we do? With the _idea_ firmly implanted in their minds
that women are in every respect the inferiors of men, how could they
have experienced that _emotional_ state of ecstatic adoration and
worship of the beloved which is the very essence of romantic love? Of
necessity, purity and adoration were thus entirely eliminated from
such love as they were capable of feeling toward women. Nor can they,
though noted for their enthusiasm for beautiful human forms, have
risen above sensualism in the admiration of the personal beauty of
women; for since their girls were left to grow up in utter ignorance,
neither their faces nor their minds can have been of the kind which
inspires supersensual love. With boys it was different. They were
educated mentally as well as physically, and hence as
Winckelmann--himself a Greek in this respect--has remarked, "the
supreme beauty of Greek art is male rather than female." If the
healthy Greek mind could be so utterly different from the healthy
modern mind in regard to the love of boys, why not in regard to the
love of women? The perverseness of the Greeks in this respect was so
great that, as we have seen, they not only adored boys while despising
women, but preferred masculine women to feminine women.
But the most serious oversight of the champions of Greek love is that
they regard love as merely an emotion, or group of emotions, whereas,
as I have shown, its most essential ingredients and only safe criteria
are the altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacrifice, allied
with sympathy and affection. That there was no gallantry and
self-sacrifice in Greek love of women I have already indicated (188,
197, 203, 163); and that there was no sympathy in it is obvious from
the heartless way in which the men treated the women--in life I mean,
not merely in literature--refusing to allow them the least liberty of
movement, or choice in marriage, or to give them an education which
would have enabled them to enjoy the higher pleasures of life on their
own account. As for affection, it is needless to add that it cannot
exist where there is no sympathy, no gallant kindness and courtesy,
and no willingness to sacrifice one's selfish comfort or pleasures for
another.
Of course we know all these things only on the testimony of Greek
literature; but it would surely be the most extraordinary thing in the
world if these altruistic impulses had existed in Greek life, and
Greek literature had persistently and absolutely ignored them, while
on the other hand it is constantly harping on the other ingredients of
love which also accompany lust. If literature has any historic value
at all, if we can ever regard it as a mirror of life, we are entitled
to the inference that romantic love was unknown to the Greeks of
Europe, whereas the caresses and refinements and ardent longings of
sensual love--including hyperbole and the mixed moods of hope and
despair---were familiar to them and are often expressed by them in
poetic language (see 137, 140-44, 295, 299). I say the Greeks of
Europe, to distinguish them from those of Greater Greece, whose
capacities for love we still have to consider.