Part 14

Abstractness, however, is not a desirable quality in poetry, the very essence of which is concrete imagery. Accordingly we find that with few exceptions the German Minnesingers are not as poets equal to their French prototypes. It was Schiller himself who passed the severest judgment on these early colleagues of his. “If the sparrows on the roof,” he once remarked to a friend, “should ever undertake to write, or to issue an almanac of love and friendship, I would wager ten to one it would be just like these songs of love. What a poverty of ideas in these songs! A garden, a tree, a hedge, a forest, and a sweetheart—these are about all the objects that are to be found in a sparrow’s head. Then we have flowers which are fragrant, fruits which grow mellow, twigs on which a bird sits in the sunshine and sings, and spring which comes, and winter which goes, and nothing that remains except—_ennui_.”

Schiller’s criticism, however, is too sweeping, for there were notable exceptions to these sparrow-poets, concerning one of whom, Hadlaub, the late Professor Scherer gives the following fascinating information in his _History of German Literature_: "He introduces human figures into his descriptions of scenery, and shows us, for instance, in the summer a group of beautiful ladies walking in an orchard, and blushing with womanly modesty when gazed at by young men. He compares the troubles of love with the troubles of hard-working men, like charcoal-burners and carters.

“Hadlaub tells us more of his personal experiences than any other Minnesinger. Even as a child, we learn, he had loved a little girl, who, however, would have nothing to say to him, but continually flouted him, to his great distress. Once she bit his hand, but her bite, he says, was so tender, womanly, and gentle, that he was _sorry the feeling of it passed away so soon_. Another time, being urged to give him a keepsake, she threw her needle-case at him, and he seized it with sweet eagerness, but it was taken from him and returned to her, and she was made to give it him in a friendly manner. In later years his pains still remained unrewarded; when his lady perceived him, she would get up and go away. Once, he tells us, he saw her fondling and kissing a child, and when she had gone he drew the child towards him and embraced it as she had embraced it, and kissed it in the place where she had kissed it.”

The gradual change in woman’s position, social and amorous, is indicated by the differences between the earlier and the later Minnesongs. In the early poems Professor Scherer remarks, "The social supremacy of noble woman is not yet recognised, and the man wooes with proud self-respect.... Another refuses himself to a woman who desired his love.... A fourth boasts of his triumphs. ‘_Women_,’ says he, ‘_are as easily tamed as falcons_.’ In another song a woman tells how she tamed a falcon, but he flew away from her, and now wears other chains....

“In the later Minnesongs it is _the women who are proud, and the men who must languish_.”

A still more remarkable change is noticed in the German Folk-songs which followed the periods of Minnesong proper. “The women of these popular love-songs are not mostly married women; _they are, as a rule, young maidens_” [at last, pure Romantic Love!] “who are not only praised but also turned to ridicule and blamed. The woes of love do not here arise from the capricious coyness of the fair one, but are called forth by parting, jealousy, or faithlessness. Feeling is stronger than in the Minnesong, and seeks accordingly for stronger modes of expression.”

It is not a mere accident that true Romantic Love should have first appeared in these Folk-songs. For these were the products of gifted individuals in the lower classes, where chaperonage—arch enemy of Love—was less strict than among the higher classes.

FEMALE CULTURE

That the women were not ungrateful to the mediæval bards who first discovered in them the possibilities of higher charms and virtues, is shown by their treatment of Heinrich von Meissen, Minnesinger, who was called Frauenlob, because he constantly sang the “praise of woman.” When he died at Mainz in 1317 they carried his bier to church with their own hands, and then, in accordance with the custom of the time, poured libations of wine on his bier so freely that the whole floor of the church was covered.

And there is every reason to believe that the women of Frauenlob’s period deserved his praises, because they were in æsthetic, moral, and intellectual culture far superior to the women before or directly after their time. We read in Gottfried von Strassburg’s poem how Tristan, while Isolde healed his wound, instructed her in the arts and manners of court life. Isolde knew French and Latin besides her own language. She played the violin and the harp, and sang; she wrote letters and poems, and would indeed have been a model of culture even at the present day. The twelfth century even had a genuine blue-stocking, the nun Herrad von Landsberg, who wrote a cyclopædia of all human knowledge, in the Latin tongue, called the _Hortus Deliciarum_. Learning throughout the mediæval ages was all concentrated in the monasteries; but at the period in question the monks did not retain everything for themselves, but aided the knights and the poets in instructing the women of the court and nobility.

Nor did these women neglect their domestic affairs or physical exercise. They accompanied the men on their falcon-hunting parties, and at home learned to spin, weave, sew, and make clothing for themselves and their husbands and children. At the tournaments and other games they appeared as Queens of Beauty to distribute prizes and inspire their admirers to heroic deeds; and at banquets and other social gatherings they seem to have supplied more of the wit and entertainment than the men, whose military occupations left them less time for the cultivation of the arts.

At the same time one cannot help smiling at the elementary rules of conduct which had to be given even to women of the nobility. You must not stare at a man long, or refuse to return his salutation, young ladies were told; nor must you in walking take too long or too short steps. A poet of the middle of the thirteenth century (quoted by Mr. Hueffer) gives this advice to a girl: “If a gentleman takes you aside and wishes to talk of courtship to you, do not show a strange or sullen behaviour, but defend yourself with pleasant and pretty repartees. And if his talk annoys you and makes you uneasy, I advise you to ask him questions,” and contradict his statements, in order “to give a harmless turn to the conversation.”

Like Greek and Roman civilisation, like the palmy days of Persian and Arabian culture, this mediæval period of feminine ascendancy and refinement unfortunately did not last many generations. Although, undoubtedly, chivalry accomplished real good for the time being, most of what went by that name was, after all, too much of a sham—less a matter of actuality than of poetic fancy. “Sincere and beautiful as the chivalrous ideal may have been,” says Mr. Symonds, “it speedily degenerated. Chivalry, though a vital element of feudalism, existed, even among the nations of its origin, more as an aspiration than a reality. In Italy it never penetrated the life or subdued the imagination of the people. For the Italo-Provençal poets that code of love was almost wholly formal.” Petrarch, like Alberti and Boccaccio, indulges again in abuse of women as coarse and brutal as that of the early “Christian Fathers”; and when we come to the sixteenth century, the scholar Cornelius Agrippa complains of the old state of affairs—woman’s complete subjection: “Unjust laws,” he says, “do their worst to repress women; custom and education combine to make them nonentities. From her childhood a girl is brought up in idleness at home, and confined to needle and thread for sole employment. When she reaches marriageable years, she has this alternative: the jealousy of a husband, or the custody of a convent. All public duties, all legal functions, all active ministrations of religion are closed against her.”

The manner in which a great English poet, much later still, treated the women of his household was quite in consonance with the customs of preceding times. As an English author wrote, forty years ago, “Milton taught his daughters to pronounce Greek and Latin, so that they might read the classics aloud for his pleasure, but forbade their understanding the meaning of a word for their own—for which he deserved to be blind.”

Regarding France we read in Compayré that “Even in the higher classes, woman held herself aloof from instruction, and from things intellectual. Madame Racine had never seen played, and had probably never read, the tragedies of her husband.” Mme. de Lambert “reproaches Molière for having excluded women from recreation, pastime, and pleasure.” Fénelon advised girls to learn to read and write correctly and to learn grammar, which “surpassed in the time of Fénelon the received custom.” “No one knew better than Fénelon the faults that come to woman through ignorance—unrest, unemployed time, inability to apply herself to solid and serious duties, frivolity, indolence, lawless imagination, indiscreet curiosity concerning trifles, levity, and talkativeness, sentimentalism, and ... a mania for theology: women are too much inclined to speak decisively on religious questions.”

PERSONAL BEAUTY

Rarer even than feminine culture, Personal Beauty appears to have been throughout the Middle Ages. Most of the portraits of women and men, as well as the ideal heads and figures in paintings and sculpture, are repulsively ugly and inexpressive of higher traits. The general causes of mediæval ugliness—neglect of personal hygiene and sanitary measures, hard manual labour, prevention of love-matches, etc.—will be considered elsewhere. In this place only one cause need be alluded to. The old Church Fathers, it is well known, were not only unæsthetic but positively anti-æsthetic. Everything pleasing to the senses was denounced by them, especially the physical beauty of women, which they looked upon as a special gift of the devil. Such an attitude on the part of the leading social class could hardly tend to encourage the cultivation of personal charms; and during the trials for witchcraft special efforts appear to have even been made to eliminate beauty forcibly; for the mere possession of unusual beauty sometimes sufficed to bring a poor girl to trial, outrage, torture, and death.

It may have been due partly to a natural reaction against asceticism, partly to the rarity of spiritual beauty, that the mediæval poets in enumerating the charms of their mistresses, confine themselves almost exclusively to their physical features. Professor Scherr, after quoting Ariosto’s description of his heroine Alcina in _Orlando Furioso_ (vii. 11, _seq._), for comparison with similar efforts of German poets, observes: “It is very remarkable that, as in this female portrait sketched by Ariosto, so with mediæval poets in general, including those of Germany, the principal accent is placed on the bodily charms of the women. Almost all sketches of this kind are purely material. Intellectual beauty, as expressed in the features, is barely mentioned. These old romanticists were much more sensual than modern writers would have us believe.”

SPENSER ON LOVE

That Love, too, continued to be looked at from a material point of view, long after the chivalric efforts to idealise it, is shown strikingly by the way in which Spenser compares love with friendship and family affection. In the fifth book of the _Faery Queene_ he asks—

“Whither shall weigh the balance down; to wit, The dear affection unto kindred sweet, Or raging fire of love to womankind, Or zeal of friends, combined by virtues meet?”

Like an ancient Greek he decides in favour of friendship—

“For natural affection soon doth cease, And quenched is with Cupid’s greater flame, But faithful friendship doth them both suppress,” (for) “_Love of soul doth love of body pass._”

Could anything attest better than this the general mediæval ignorance of the psychic traits or “overtones” which constitute Romantic Love?

DANTE AND SHAKSPERE

Long before the day of Spenser there lived, however, in Florence, a poet whose transcendent genius enabled him to feel and describe for the first time the real romantic sentiment of Love. It is true that some of the poets of Chivalry had before him attempted to depict the supersensual, æthereal side of the passion. But their portraits lacked the touch of realism: they described what they imagined; Dante what he felt.

Dante was born in 1265: Modern Love was born nine years later—613 years ago. “Nine times already since my birth,” says Dante, “had the heaven of light returned to the self-same point almost, as concerns its own revolution, when first the glorious lady of my mind was made manifest to mine eyes; even she who was called Beatrice (she who confers blessing) by many who knew not wherefore.... From that time onward, Love quite governed my soul.... But seeing that were I to dwell overmuch on the passions and doings of such early youth, my words might be counted something fabulous, I will therefore put them aside,” etc.

These are the opening lines of the _Vita Nuova_, in which Modern Love is for the first time portrayed with an air of sincerity, and concerning which Professor C. E. Norton justly remarks that “so long as there are lovers in the world, and so long as lovers are poets, will this first and tenderest love-story of modern literature be read with appreciation and responsive sympathy.”

What a privilege to describe First Love not only in an individual but a _historic_ sense, as Dante did in this poem, which Rossetti calls “the auto-biography or auto-psychology of Dante’s youth, till his twenty-seventh year.”

After that first sight of Beatrice one of her sweet smiles was the highest goal of his desires; but so powerful was the spell of her presence that he was obliged to avoid her. “From that night forth the natural functions of my body began to be vexed and impeded, for I was given up wholly to thinking of this most gracious creature; whereby in short space I became so weak and so reduced that it was irksome to many of my friends to look upon me ... the thing was so plainly to be discerned in my countenance that there was no longer any means of concealing it.” Such words as “trembling,” “confusion,” “weeping,” constantly occur as the narrative proceeds. Love, he says, “bred in me such overpowering sweetness that my body, being all subjected thereto, remained many times helpless and passive.” When for the first time Beatrice denied him her smile, “I became possessed with such grief that, parting myself from others, _I went into a lonely place_ to bathe the ground with most bitter tears.” And in one of the sonnets interspersed he says—

“My face shows my heart’s colour, No sooner do I lift mine eyes to look Than the blood seems as shaken from my heart, And all my pulses beat at once and stop.”

But by far the most remarkable thing in the _Vita Nuova_, is Dante’s own indirect testimony that such Love as he felt, such supersensual, æsthetic Love, _was a novelty and a puzzle to his contemporaries_. For he tells how he met some ladies who gazed at him and laughed till one of them asked: “To what end lovest thou this lady, seeing that thou canst not support her presence? Now tell us this thing that we may know it: for certainly the end of such a love must be worthy of knowledge.”

No doubt it was worth knowing; for, as the author of the admirable article on “Poetry,” in the eighth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (1859), remarks: “When in modern times the attempt was made to revive tragedy, it proved totally unsuccessful until this principle (of romantic love) was admitted into the drama to give it warmth and life. Of that species of composition which in its proper sense is peculiar to the moderns, viz. the novel and romance, it forms, as we all know, the moving power. In short, it influences, more or less, every department in which the imagination has exerted itself with success since the revival of literature.”

Once more it is well to state that there are geniuses in the emotional as in the intellectual world. Dante was both; and the realistic descriptions he has given of the effects of Romantic Love have helped to sustain the notion that Love is immutable, and has existed at all times. But the indirect testimony to the contrary just quoted, and the whole argument of this chapter on Mediæval Love, make it apparent that Dante’s Love was the exception which proves that among the others Love did not exist. And even Dante was not entirely modern in his Love. A modern lover would not have attempted to conceal the object of his Love, but would have made it apparent to all by his foolish actions that he was in Love with this particular girl and no other; he would perhaps have wooed more persistently, and his feelings would not have remained unchanged after her marriage to another. Like Petrarch, moreover, Dante cannot be quite acquitted of the suspicion that, after the first flush of excitement, the excessive and persistent purification and idealisation of his passion was based not so much on real amorous feelings and motives, as on an author’s craving for an object on which to lavish his literary art of embellishment.

Dante, in a word, hyper-idealised his passion. He became quite deaf to the fundamental tone of Love, and heard only its overtones. And herein lies his inferiority to Shakspere. It is in the works of Shakspere that the various motives and emotions which constitute Love—sensuous, æsthetic, intellectual—are for the first time mingled in proper proportions. Shakspere’s Love is Modern Love, full-fledged, and therefore calls for no separate analysis. It is a primitive passion, purified and refined by intellectual, moral, and æsthetic culture. And though by no means universal, or even common, at the present day, it is yet of frequent occurrence, and will become more and more prevalent as time rolls on. To facilitate its progress by pointing out its characteristics, its evolution, and the measures that must be taken to foster it, is one of the principal objects of this monograph.

MODERN LOVE

A BIOLOGIC TEST

Writers on evolution have a very simple and convenient way of verifying their inferences, by applying the rule—which seems to hold true universally—that the different stages through which an individual passes in his development—physical and mental—correspond to the periods of development through which the whole race has passed.

This principle, applied to our present problem, fits exactly, and proves that the account given in the preceding pages of the development of Love is correct.

Historically we have seen that of all affections Maternal Love is the earliest and (until after Romantic Love appears) the strongest. Then paternal, filial, and fraternal love are gradually developed, followed by friendship (Greek), and finally by Love proper.

Just so with the individual. The baby’s first love is for its mother, whose tender expression and beaming eyes throw the first reflected smile on its face, and touch the first cord of sympathetic attachment. Then the father comes in for his share of attention, followed by sisters and brothers. At school begins the era of friendship, representing “classical” love, and often as ardent and Love-like as among the ancient Greeks. Finally Romantic Love appears on the scene, eclipsing every other emotion. And, like historic Love, it generally passes through a blind, silly, chivalric stage, known as “calf-love,” which at last is succeeded by real, intense romantic passion, that leads to monogamous marriage, the central pillar of modern civilisation.

Not only have we seen that Romantic Love is the latest and the strongest of all affections, but the causes which retarded its development have been indicated. Chief among these were the negation of Individual Preference, and the absence of opportunities for Courtship, already deplored by Plato. As long as women were captured, or bought, or disposed of by father or mother without any reference to their own will, Sexual Selection on the female’s part was of course out of the question; and on the man’s part it was rendered impossible by the absence of Courtship. Wooing a woman was not winning _her_ favour, but impressing her father with a display of wealth or social power. Thus there were no opportunities on her part for the display of personal charms or the cunning art of Coyness, or for inflaming and feeding his passion through Jealousy by bestowing an occasional mischief-making smile on his rivals; there were no lover’s quarrels followed by sweet reconciliations and an increase of Love; no short absences fanning Love with sighs; no alternate feelings of hope and despair, inspired by his or her fickle or uncertain actions; no chance for displays of Gallantry and mutual Self-sacrifice and assistance; no sympathetic exchange and consequent doubling of pleasures, real or anticipated; none, in fact, of the more subtle traits and emotions which make Romantic Love what it is.

VENUS, PLUTUS, AND MINERVA

It cannot be said that these obstacles to Love have been as radically removed as they ought to be. Oriental chaperonage is still rampant in France, to the extinction of all true romantic sentiment. In other countries Parental Tyranny has considerably abated, but the Goddess of Love still has formidable rivals in Plutus, the god of wealth, and Minerva, the goddess of “wisdom” or expediency. Thus it happens that even in the case of persons who are refined enough to experience Love, it is too often absent when they marry; and, as a German pessimist sneeringly points out, no one has yet dared to tempt bride and bridegroom to perjury, by asking when the knot is tied, “Do you _love_ this woman?” “Do you _love_ this man?”

Nevertheless public sentiment is continually making war on Plutus and Minerva, and siding with Venus. Probably the mercantile element in marriage will not die out till a few weeks before the millennium, although Herbert Spencer is optimistic enough to believe it will sooner. “After wife-stealing,” he says, “came wife-purchase; and then followed the usages which made, and continue to make, considerations of property predominate over considerations of personal preference. Clearly, wife-purchase and husband-purchase (which exists in some semi-civilised societies), though they have lost their original gross form, persist in disguised forms. Already some disapproval of those who marry for money or position is expressed; and this growing stronger may be expected to purify the monogamic union, by making it in all cases real instead of being in some cases nominal.”

It is indeed a most hopeful sign of progress, this strong and growing modern sentiment in favour of Romantic Love as against rival motives matrimonial. Novelists, when the wills of the lovers and the parents clash, invariably and unconsciously side with the lovers; and should a novelist make an exception, many of his readers would close the book, and the others would finish it under protest and disappointedly. Even when we read a newspaper reporter’s thrilling and dramatic narrative of the elopement of a foolish young couple, fresh from the high-school, our hearts throb with sympathetic anxiety lest the irate parent should succeed in capturing the runaway couple.