fleshly instincts by Christianity was the chief cause of the rise of
that conception of romantic love which we associate with the institution
of chivalry. Exalted and sanctified by contact with the central dogmas
of religion, the emotion of love was brought down from this spiritual
atmosphere by the knightly lover, with something of its ethereal halo
still clinging to it, and directed towards an earthly mistress. The most
extravagant phase of romantic love which has ever been seen was then
brought about, and in many cases, certainly, it was a real erotomania
which passed beyond the bounds of sanity.[75] In its extreme forms,
however, this romantic love was a rare, localized, and short-lived
manifestation. The dominant attitude of the chivalrous age towards
women, as Léon Gautier has shown in his monumental work on chivalry, was
one of indifference, or even contempt. The knight's thoughts were more
of war than of women, and he cherished his horse more than his
mistress.[76]
But women, above all in France, reacted against this attitude, and with
splendid success. Their husbands treated them with indifference or left
them at home while they sought adventure in the world. The neglected
wives proceeded to lay down the laws of society, and took upon
themselves the part of rulers in the domain of morals. In the eleventh,
the twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, says Méray in a charming book on
life in the days of the Courts of Love, we find women "with infinite
skill and an adorable refinement seizing the moral direction of French
society." They did so, he remarks, in a spirit so Utopian, so ideally
poetic, that historians have hesitated to take them seriously. The laws
of the Courts of Love[77] may sometimes seem to us immoral and
licentious, but in reality they served to restrain the worst
immoralities and licences of the time. They banished violence, they
allowed no venality, and they inculcated moderation in passion. The task
of the Courts of Love was facilitated by the relative degree of peace
which then reigned, especially by the fact that the Normans, holding
both coasts of the Channel, formed a link between France and England.
When the murderous activities of French kings and English kings
destroyed that link, the Courts of Love were swept away in the general
disorder and the progress of civilization indefinitely retarded.[78] Yet
in some degree the ideals which had been thus embodied still persisted.
As the Goncourts pointed out in their invaluable book, _La Femme au
Dix-huitième Siècle_ (Chap. v), from the days of chivalry even on into
the eighteenth century, when on the surface at all events it apparently
disappeared, an exalted ideal of love continued to be cherished in
France. This conception remained associated, throughout, with the great
social influence and authority which had been enjoyed by women in France
even from medieval times. That influence had become pronounced during
the seventeenth century, and at that time Sir Thomas Smith in his
_Commonwealth of England_, writing of the high position of women in
England, remarked that they possessed "almost as much liberty as in
France."
There were at least two forms of medieval romantic love. The first arose
in Provence and northern Italy during the twelfth century, and spread to
Germany as _Minnedienst_. In this form the young knights directed their
respectful and adoring devotion to a high-born married woman who chose
one of them as her own cavalier, to do her service and reverence, the
two vowing devotion to each other until death. It was a part of this
amorous code that there could not be love between husband and wife, and
it was counted a mark of low breeding for a husband to challenge his
wife's right to her young knight's services, though sometimes we are
told the husband risked this reproach, occasionally with tragic results.
This mode of love, after being eloquently sung and practised by the
troubadours--usually, it appears, younger sons of noble houses--died out
in the place of its origin, but it had been introduced into Spain, and
the Spaniards reintroduced it into Italy when they acquired the kingdom
of Naples; in Italy it was conventionalized into the firmly rooted
institution of the _cavaliere servente_. From the standpoint of a strict
morality, the institution was obviously open to question. But we can
scarcely fail to see that at its origin it possessed, even if
unconsciously, a quasi-religious warrant in the worship of the Holy
Mother, and we have to recognize that, notwithstanding its questionable
shape, it was really an effort to attain a purer and more ideal
relationship than was possible in a rough and warlike age which placed
the wife in subordination to her husband. A tender devotion that
inspired poetry, an unalloyed respect that approached reverence, vows
that were based on equal freedom and independence on both sides--these
were possibilities which the men and women of that age felt to be
incompatible with marriage as they knew it.
The second form of medieval romantic love was more ethereal than the
first, and much more definitely and consciously based on a religious
attitude. It was really the worship of the Virgin transferred to a
young earthly maiden, yet retaining the purity and ideality of
religious worship. To so high a degree is this the case that it is
sometimes difficult to be sure whether we are concerned with a real
maiden of flesh and blood or only a poetic symbol of womanhood. This
doubt has been raised, notably by Bartoli, concerning Dante's Beatrice,
the supreme type of this ethereal love, which arose in the thirteenth
century, and was chiefly cultivated in Florence. The poets of this
movement were themselves aware of the religious character of their
devotion to the _donna angelicata_ to whom they even apply, as they
would to the Queen of Heaven, the appellation Stella Maris. That there
was an element of flesh and blood in these figures is believed by Remy
de Gourmont, but when we gaze at them, he remarks, we see at first, "in
place of a body only two eyes with angel's wings behind them, on the
background of an azure sky sown with golden stars"; the lover is on his
knees and his love has become a prayer.[79] This phase of romantic love
was brief, and perhaps mostly the possession of the poets, but it
represented a really important moment in the evolution of modern
romantic love. It was a step towards the realization of the genuinely
human charm of young womanhood in real human relationships, of which we
already have a foretaste in the delicious early French story of Aucassin
and Nicolette.
The re-discovery of classic literature, the movements of Humanism and
the Renaissance, swept away what was left of the almost religious
idealization of the young virgin. The ethereal maiden, thin, pale,
anæmic, disappeared alike from literature and from art, and was no
longer an ideal in actual life. She gave place to a new woman, conscious
of her own fully developed womanhood and all its needs, radiantly
beautiful and finely shaped in every limb. She lacked the spirituality
of her predecessors, but she had gained in intellect. She appears first
in the pages of Boccaccio. After a long interval Titian immortalized her
rich and mature beauty; she is Flora, she is Ariadne, she is alike the
Earthly Love and the Heavenly Love. Every curve of her body was
adoringly and minutely described by Niphus and Firenzuola.[80] She was,
moreover, the courtesan whose imperial charm and adroitness enabled her
to trample under foot the medieval conception of lust as sin, even in
the courts of popes. At the great academic centre of Bologna, finally,
she chastely taught learning and science.[81] The people of the Italian
Renaissance placed women on the same level as men, and to call a woman a
_virago_ implied unalloyed praise.[82]
The very mixed conditions of what we have been accustomed to consider
the modern world then began for women. They were no longer
cloistered--whether in convents or the home--but neither were they any
longer worshipped. They began to be treated as human beings, and when
men idealized them in figures of romantic charm or pathos--figures like
Shakespeare's Rosalind or Marivaux's Sylvia or Richardson's
Clarissa--this humanity was henceforth the common ground out of which
the vision arose. But, one notes, in nearly all the great poets and
novelists up to the middle of the last century, it was usually in the
weakness of humanity that the artist sought the charm and pathos of his
feminine figures. From Shakespeare's Ophelia to Thackeray's Amelia this
is the rule, more emphatically expressed in the literature of England
than of any other country. There had been no actual emancipation of
women; though now they had entered the world of men, they were not yet,
socially and legally, of that world. Even the medieval traditions still
lived on in subtly conventionalized forms. The "chivalrous" attitude
towards women was, as the word itself suggests, a medieval survival. It
belonged to a period of barbarism when brutal force ruled and when the
man who magnanimously placed his force at the disposition of a woman was
really doing her a service and granting her a privilege. But
civilization means the building up of an orderly society in which
individual rights are respected, and force no longer dominates. So that
as civilization advances the occasions on which women require the aid
of masculine force become ever fewer and more unimportant. The
conventionalized chivalry of men then tends to become an offer of
services which it would be better for women to do for themselves and a
bestowal of privileges to which they are nowise entitled.[83] Moreover,
this same chivalry is, under these conditions, apt to take on a
character which is the reverse of its face value. It becomes the
assertion of a power over women instead of a power on their behalf; and
it carries with it a tinge of contempt in place of respect.
Theoretically, a thousand chivalrous swords should leap from their
scabbards to succour the distressed woman. In practice this may only
mean that the thousand owners of these metaphorical weapons are on the
alert to take advantage of the distressed woman.
Thus the romantic emotions based on medieval ideals gradually lost their
worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had
become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic
uses. The movement for the emancipation of women was not consciously or
directly a movement of revolt against an antiquated chivalry. It was
rather a part of the development of civilization which rendered chivalry
antique. Medieval romantic love implied in women a weakness in the soil
of which only a spiritual force could flourish. The betterment of social
conditions, the subordination of violence to order, the growing respect
for individual rights, took away the reasons for consecrating weakness
in women, and created an ever larger field in which women could freely
seek to rival men, because it is a field in which knowledge and skill
are of far more importance than muscular strength. The emancipation of
women has simply been the later and more conscious phase of the process
by which women have entered into this field and sought their share of
its rights and its responsibilities.
The woman movement of modern times, properly understood, has thus been
the effort of women to adapt themselves to the conditions of an orderly
and peaceful civilization. Education, under the changed conditions, can
effect what before needed force of arms; responsibility is now demanded
where before only tutelage was possible. A civilized society in which
women are ignorant and irresponsible is an anachronism, and, however
great the wrench with the past might be, it was necessary that women
should be adjusted to the changing times. The ideal of the weak,
ignorant, inexperienced woman--the cross between an angel and an idiot,
as I have elsewhere described her[84]--no longer fulfilled any useful
purpose. Civilized society furnishes the conditions under which all
adult persons are socially equal and all are free to give to society the
best they are capable of.
It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that this movement should have
sometimes tended to take the form of an attempt on the part of women to
secure, not merely equality with men, but actual imitation of men. These
women said that since men had attained mastery in life, captured all the
best things, and adopted the most successful methods of living, it was
necessary for women to copy them at every point. That was a specious
plea which even had in it a certain element of truth. But the fact
remained that women and men are different, that the difference is based
in fundamental natural functions, and that to place one sex in exactly
the same position as the other sex is to deform its outlines and to
hamper its activities.
From the present point of view we are only concerned with the influence
of the woman's movement on love. On the traditional conception of
romantic love inherited from medieval days there can be no doubt that
this influence has been highly dissolvent. Medieval romantic love, in
its original form, had been part of a conception of womanhood made up of
opposites, and all the opposites balanced each other. The medieval man
laid his homage at the feet of the great lady in the castle hall, but he
himself lorded it over the wife who drudged in his own home. On his
knees he gazed up in devotion at the ethereal virgin, but when she
ceased to be a virgin, he asserted himself by cursing her as a demon
sent from hell to seduce and torment him. All this was possible because
the woman was outside the orbit of the man's life, never on the same
plane, necessarily higher or lower. It became difficult if woman was
man's equal, absurdly impossible if she was of identical nature with
him.
The medieval romantic tradition has come down to us so laden with beauty
and mystery that we are apt to think, as we see it melt away, that human
achievements are being permanently depreciated. That illusion occurs in
every age of transition. It was notably so in the eighteenth century,
which represented a highly important stage in the emancipation of women.
To some that century seems to have been given up to empty gallantry and
facile pleasure. Yet it was not only the age in which women for the
first time succeeded in openly attaining their supreme social
influence,[85] it was an age of romantic love, and the noble or poignant
love-stories which have reached us from the records of that period
surpass those of any other age.
If we believe with Goethe that the religion of the future consists in a
triple reverence--the reverence for what is above us, the reverence for
what is below us, and the reverence for our equals[86]--we need not
grieve overmuch if one form of this reverence, the first, and that which
Goethe regarded as the earliest and crudest, has lost its exclusive
claim. Reverence is essential to all romantic love. To bring down the
Madonna and the Virgin from their pedestals to share with men the common
responsibilities and duties of life is not to divest them of the claim
to reverence. It is merely the sign of a change in the form of that
reverence, a change which heralds a new romantic love.
It would be premature to attempt to define the exact outline of the new
forms of romantic love, or the precise lineaments of the beings who will
most ardently evoke that love. In literature, indeed, the ideals of life
cast their shadow before, and we may surely trace a change in the erotic
ideals mirrored in literature. The woman whom Dickens idealized in
_David Copperfield_ is unlike indeed to the series of women of a new
type introduced by George Meredith, and the modern heroine generally
exhibits more of the robust, open-eyed and spontaneous qualities of that
later type than the blind and clinging nature of the amiable simpletons
of the older type. That the changed conditions of civilization should
produce new types of womanhood and of love is not surprising, if we
realize that, even within the ancient chivalrous forms it was possible
to produce similar robust types when the qualities of a race were
favourable to them. Spain furnishes a notable illustration. Spanish
literature from Cervantes and Tirso to Valera and Blasco Ibañez reflects
a type of woman who stands on the same ground as man and is his equal
and often his superior on that ground, alike in vigour of body and of
spirit, acquiring all that she cares to of virility, while losing
nothing feminine that is of worth.[87] In more than one respect the
ideal woman of Spain is the ideal woman our civilization now renders
necessary. The women of the future, Grete Meisel-Hess declares in her
femininely clever and frank discussion of present-day conditions, _Die
Sexuelle Krise_, will be full, strong, elementary natures, devoid alike
of the impulse to destroy or the aptitude to be destroyed. She
considers, moreover, that so far from romantic love being a thing of the
past, "love as a form of worship is reserved for the future."[88] In the
past it has only been found among a few rare souls; in the future world,
fostered by the finer selection of a conscious eugenics, and a new
reverence and care for motherhood, we may reasonably hope for a truly
efficient humanity, the bearers and conservers of the highest human
emotions. It is in this sense, indeed, that the voices of the greatest
and most typical leaders of the woman's movement of emancipation to-day
are heard. Ellen Key, in her _Love and Marriage_, seeks to conciliate
the cultivation of a free and sacred sexual relationship with the
worship of the child, as the embodiment of the future race, while Olive
Schreiner proclaims in her _Woman and Labour_ that the woman of the
future will walk side by side with man in a higher and deeper
relationship than has ever been possible before because it will involve
a new community in activity and insight.
Nor is it alone from the feminine side that these forecasts are made.
Certainly for the most part love has been cultivated more by women than
by men. Primacy in the genius of intellect belongs incontestably to men,
but in the genius of love it has doubtless oftener been achieved by
women. They have usually understood better than men that in this matter,
as Goethe insisted, it is the lover and not the beloved who reaps the
chief fruits of love. "It is better to love, even violently," wrote the
forsaken Portuguese nun, in her immortal _Letters_, "than merely to be
loved." He who loses his life here saves it, for it is only in so far as
he becomes a crucified god that Love wins the sacrifice of human hearts.
Of late years, by an inevitable reaction, women have sometimes forgotten
this eternal verity. The women of the twentieth century in their anxiety
for self-possession and their rightful eagerness to gain positions they
feel they have been too long excluded from, have perhaps yet failed to
realize that the women of the eighteenth century, who exerted a sway
over life that the women of no age before or since have possessed, were,
above all women, great and heroic lovers, and that those two fundamental
facts cannot be cut asunder. But this failure, temporary as it is
doubtless destined to be, will work for good if it is the point of
departure for a revival among men of the art of love.
Men indeed have here fallen behind women. The old saying, so tediously
often quoted, concerning love as a "thing apart" in the lives of men
would scarcely have occurred to a medieval poet of Provence or Florence.
It is not enough for women to proclaim a new avatar of love if men are
not ready and eager to learn its art and to practise its discipline. In
a profoundly suggestive fragment on love, left incomplete at his death
by the distinguished sociologist Tarde,[89] he suggests that when
masculine energy dies down in the fields of political ambition and
commercial gain, as it already has in the field of warfare, the energy
liberated by greater social organization and cohesion may find scope
once more in love. For too long a period love, like war and politics and
commerce, has been chiefly monopolized by the predatory type of man, in
this field symbolized by the figure of Don Juan. In the future, Tarde
suggests, the Don Juan type of lover may fall into disrepute, giving
place to the Virgilian type, for whom love is not a thing apart but a
form of life embodying its best and highest activities.
When we come upon utterances of this kind we are tempted to think that
they represent merely the poetic dreams of individuals, standing too far
ahead of their fellows to possess any significance for men and women in
general. But it is probable that Ovid, and certain that Dante, set forth
erotic conceptions that were unintelligible to most of their
contemporaries, yet they have been immensely influential over the ideas
and emotions of men in later ages. The poets and prophets of one
generation are engaged in moulding ideals which will be realized in the
lives of a subsequent generation; in expressing their own most intimate
emotions, as it has been truly said, they become the leaders in a long
file of men and women. Whatever may yet be uncertain and undefined, we
may assuredly believe that the emotion of love is far too deeply rooted
in the depth of man's organism and woman's organism ever to be torn out
or ever to be thrust into a subordinate place. And we may also believe
that there is no measurable limit to its power of putting forth ever new
and miraculous flowers. It is recorded that once, in James Hinton's
presence, the conversation turned on music, and it was suggested that,
owing to the limited number of musical combinations and the unlimited
number of musical compositions, a time would come when all music would
only be a repetition of exhausted harmonies. Hinton remarked that then
would come a man so inspired by a new spirit that his feeling would be,
not that _all_ music has been written, but that no _music_ has yet been
written. It was a memorable saying. In every field that is the perpetual
proclamation of genius: Behold! I create all things new. And in this
field of love we can conceive of no age in which to the inspired seer it
will not be possible to feel: There has yet been no _love_!
FOOTNOTES:
[69] See especially Sidney Lee, "Ovid and Shakespeare's Sonnets,"
_Quarterly Review_, April, 1909.
[70] Montaigne, _Essais_, Book III, chap. V.
[71] See e.g. Mrs. Fraser, _World's Work and Play_, December, 1906.
[72] A more modern feeling for love and marriage begins to emerge,
however, at a much earlier period, with Menander and the New Comedy.
E.F.M. Benecke, in his interesting little book on _Antimachus of
Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry_, believes that the
romantic idea (that is to say, the idea that a woman is a worthy object
for a man's love, and that such love may well be the chief, if not the
only, aim of a man's life) had originally been propounded by Antimachus
at the end of the fifth century B.C. Antimachus, said to have been the
friend of Plato, had been united to a woman of Lydia (where women, we
know, occupied a very high position) and her death inspired him to write
a long poem, _Lyde_, "the first love poem ever addressed by a Greek to
his wife after death." Only a few lines of this poem survive. But
Antimachus seems to have greatly influenced Philetas (whom Croiset calls
"the first of the Alexandrians") and Asclepiades of Samos, tender and
exquisite poets whom also we only know by a few fragments. Benecke's
arguments, therefore, however probable, cannot be satisfactorily
substantiated.
[73] As I have elsewhere pointed out (_Studies in the Psychology of Sex_,
Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. IX), most modern
authorities--Friedländer, Dill, Donaldson, etc.--consider that there was
no real moral decline in the later Roman Empire; we must not accept the
pictures presented by satirists, pagan or Christian, as of general
application.
[74] I have discussed this phase of early Christianity in the sixth
volume of _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, "Sex in Relation to
Society," chap. V.
[75] Ulrich von Lichtenstein, in the thirteenth century, is the typical
example of this chivalrous erotomania. His account of his own adventures
has been questioned, but Reinhold Becker (_Wahrheit und Dichtung in
Ulrich von Lichtenstein's Frauendienst_, 1888) considers that, though
much exaggerated, it is in substance true.