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!
[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.