GALLANTRY AND SELF-SACRIFICE
Primitive tribes have a delightfully simple way of arranging their division of labour. The men do the hunting and carry on wars, the women do everything else. If a warrior on “moving day” should say to his wife and daughters: “See here, this will never do for me to have nothing but my weapons and my pipe, while you carry the babies, the cooking utensils, the remnants of the game, and the tent: let me help you!”—if he should say this, his comrades would consider him crazy, or rather, possessed of a demon, and would burn two or three persons at the stake for having bewitched him.
Gallantry, in other words, is unknown to savages either between lovers, or, in a general sense, towards all women. Nor is it known to semi-civilised peoples. Among the nomadic Arab tribes of the Sahara the wife has to do all the work unless her husband is rich enough to own a slave; and among the poorer Bedouins the husband traverses the desert comfortably seated on his camel, while his wife plods along behind on foot, loaded with her bed, her kitchen utensils, and her child on top.
The ancient Greeks were not so ungallant as these peoples towards their women, as they had slaves to do their hard work; but the constant devoted attention and desire to please which constitute modern Gallantry did not, as we have seen, exist among them. Among the Romans we find traces—but traces only—of this virtue. Mediæval Gallantry reached its extremes in the witches’ fires on the one side, and the grotesque performances of the knight-errants on the other. The intermediate ground apparently remained uncultivated, except during the brief period of chivalrous poetry, and then only in the highest classes. Wherever, in short, Romantic Love was absent, Gallantry, as one of its ingredients, was unknown.
Coming to modern times, we see the same parallelism between general Gallantry and the freedom granted to the young to form Love-matches.
In France, Germany, Italy, the women still have to do the hardest field work, though the men assist. The French, indeed, who systematically suppress Romantic Love, are apparently the most gallant nation in the world. But there is a general agreement among tourists that in real Gallantry, which calls for self-sacrificing actions and not mere polite words and bows, the French are inferior to all other European nations. It is in England and America that true general Gallantry, like true Romantic Love, flourishes most. In America, indeed, owing to the former scarcity of women, Gallantry was for a time carried to a ludicrous excess, almost reminding one of the days of Don Quixote; as in that story of the Western miners who surrounded an emigrant’s waggon and insisted on his “trotting out” his wife; which being done by the trembling man, who feared the worst, the “roughs” passed round the hat and collected a large sum of gold for the woman. Perhaps American women still are, as we read in Daisy Miller, “the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense of indebtedness.” But the constant sight in New York and elsewhere of street-cars in which every man has a seat while every woman is standing, seems to indicate that there is a reaction which may go to the opposite extreme. But after a while the pendulum will doubtless swing back to the middle and remain stationary; and this will be in the new golden age when men will always give up their seats to old and infirm women, to pretty girls, and to all the others who display truly refined instincts and good taste by abjuring crinolines, bustles, high heels, stuffed birds on their hats, and other “ornaments” fatal to Personal Beauty.
From the facts thus hastily sketched we may safely infer that, as we saw in the case of Sympathy with another’s joys, so again with Gallantry, what was born as a trait of Romantic Love was subsequently transferred to the social and domestic relations of men and women in general. Had Romantic Love done nothing more than this, it would deserve to rank among the most refining influences in modern civilisation.
Perhaps the most remarkable existing illustration of the way in which Lovers’ Gallantry may assume a general form, is to be found in Mr. Ruskin’s recent confession regarding girls: “My primary thought is how to serve them and make them happy; or if they could use me for a plank-bridge over a stream, or set me up for a post to tie a swing to, or anything of the sort not requiring me to talk, I should be always quite happy in such a promotion.”
This reads precisely like Heine’s poem in which the lover wishes he were his mistress’s footstool, or again her needle-cushion, that he might experience the delights of pain inflicted by her foot or hand.
Such excess of amorous Gallantry is a favourite theme for poetic hyperbole, and it hardly can be exaggerated; for the lover really does entertain such wishes. With him, romance is realism.
No slave could be so meek and humble, no well-trained dog so obedient as the amorous swain. Again and again will he, without a moment’s hesitation, plunge into a wintry stream and triumphantly snap up and bring back to her the chip she has thrown in to amuse herself.
Active and Passive Desire to Please.—"Love, studious how to please" (Dryden), has two ways of accomplishing its purpose—one passive, one active. Women, owing to their prescribed Coyness, are not allowed to indulge in actions that would imply a desire to please a suitor, except in the later stages of Courtship, when all is settled or understood. Hence their desire to please can only show itself passively in their efforts to make their personal appearance attractive to the lover. Nor are men indifferent to this passive phase of Gallantry. As nothing so fills a man with Pride as the thought that She, a paragon of beauty, adorns herself so carefully all for his delight; so in turn he feels it incumbent on him to follow her example. Even the habitually slovenly become dandies for the moment, brush their hair, buy a new hat and clothes; the lazy become industrious, the cowards assume heroic airs and strut about like tragedians—
“I was the laziest creature,
The most unprofitable sign of nothing,
The veriest drone, and slept away my life
Beyond the dormouse, till I was in love!
And now I can outwake the nightingale,
Outwatch an usurer, and out-walk him too,
Stalk like a ghost that haunted ’bout a treasure,
And all that fancied treasure, it is love.”—Ben Jonson.
Active Gallantry has been sufficiently characterised in the foregoing pages. It is that form of the Desire to Please which readily merges into Self-Sacrifice. A man who would never dream of exposing himself to the slightest danger in his own behalf will, if his sweetheart expresses admiration of a flower growing near a dangerous precipice, rush to pluck it with an audacity which may cost him his life. A fatal case of this sort occurred not long ago on the Hudson River near New York. A man’s life thrown away for the slight æsthetic gratification to be derived by his love from the sight and fragrance of a flower!
How frequently, again, do lovers sacrifice their family bonds, the love of parents and relatives, as well as rank and fortune, for the sake of the romantic passion!
A mother willingly dies in defence of her offspring’s life. But will she, like Romeo, drink the apothecary’s poisonous draught over the corpse of her dead darling? No, herein again Romantic Love is the deepest of the passions.
Feminine Devotion.—Self-Sacrifice is one of the traits of Romantic Love which may remain unaltered and unweakened in conjugal affection. “Those who have traced the course of the wives of the poor,” says Mr. Lecky, “and of many who, though in narrowed circumstances, can hardly be called poor, will probably admit that in no other class do we so often find entire lives spent in daily persistent self-denial, in the patient endurance of countless trials, in the ceaseless and deliberate sacrifice of their own enjoyments to the wellbeing or the prospects of others.”
It is in Wagner’s music-dramas that the modern ideal of feminine devotion unto death has found its most stirring embodiment. Elizabeth, having lost her Tannhäuser, thanks to the allurements of Venus, dies of a broken heart; Senta, realising that only by her self-sacrifice can the unhappy Dutchman be released from his terrible doom of eternally sailing the stormy seas until he should find a woman faithful to him unto death, tears herself away from her family and plunges into the ocean. Isolde sings her death-song over the body of Tristan; and Brünnhilde immolates herself on Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Wagner’s theory of the music-drama was a theory of Love in which each lover sacrifices selfish idiosyncrasies in order to produce a happy union in marriage.
Mr. Mill, forgetting the difference between masculine maltreatment of women, and voluntary female self-denial, thought it expedient to sneer at the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character; and those unsexed viragoes who wish to “reform” women by robbing them of all womanly attributes and converting them into caricatures of masculinity, re-echo Mill’s sneer in shrill chorus. Women, they shout, must no longer waste their best years in staying at home, educating their children and taking care of their husbands. These brutes have been caressed and fondled long enough; the time has come for women to be manly and independent. Let them take away from men the employments, of which even now there are not enough for three-fourths of the men; let them thus drive another 20 per cent of men and women into celibacy because the men cannot afford any longer to marry. Let the women strip off their artificial air of domestic refinement by mingling with the foul-mouthed, tobacco-reeking crowds and making political stump speeches; or by visiting the loathsome criminals in prisons, treating them to cakes and flowers and other methods of feminine reform, so that when set free they may be eager to do something which will bring them back to their cakes and flowers! The children meanwhile being left at home in charge of coarse, ignorant, careless servants, copying their manners, and the husband compelled to seek companionship at the club, or much worse.
How the selfish husband will wince under this cold neglect and retaliation—he who never does anything but amuse himself while his wife toils at home; who never risks his life in war for his wife and children; who never toils at his desk from morn to night, to earn the daily bread of all by the sweat of his brow; who never goes to lunatic asylums from overwork and worry! How sly in man to set up his “artificial ideal of woman’s self-abnegation,” while he is having such a good time! But why try to paint in weak prose the hideousness of man’s selfish conduct, when Shakspere has done it in immortal verse?
“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.”
There is another very curious aspect of Self-Sacrifice which will be fully discussed in the chapter on Schopenhauer’s Theory of Love, but which may be stated here, without comment, that the reader may reflect on the pessimist’s paradox. Schopenhauer held that Love is based on the possession by the lovers of traits which mutually complement each other. In the children these incongruous traits will so neutralise each other as to produce a harmonious result; but in the life of the parents they will produce only discords. True love, therefore, as he claims, rarely results in a happy conjugal life: Love causes the parents to sacrifice their mutual happiness to the welfare of their offspring.
Meanwhile it may be stated that France offers a curious confirmation of Schopenhauer’s theory, not noted by himself. Romantic Love, it is well known, hardly exists in France as a motive to marriage, being systematically suppressed and craftily annihilated. Nevertheless, as many observers attest, the French commonly lead a happy family life. But look at the offspring, at the birth-rate, the lowest in Europe; look at the puny men, at the women, among whom there is hardly a single beauty in all the land. In a word, whereas Love sacrifices, according to Schopenhauer, the parents to the children, the French sacrifice the offspring, and Love itself, to the happiness of the individuals, married according to motives of personal expediency.