"To one familiar with the literature, customs, speech, and ideas of the women who live where idolatry prevails, and the rulers and chief men of the country keep harems, the amazing purity and modesty of maidens reared in Christian homes is like a revelation from heaven."[294]
Supersensual charms are not alluded to in the Song of Songs, for the simple reason that Orientals never did, and do not now, care for such charms in women or cultivate them. They know love only as an appetite, and in accordance with Oriental taste and custom the Song of Songs compares it always to things that are good to eat or drink or smell. Hence such ecstatic expressions as "How much better is thy love than wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all manner of spices!" Hence her declaration that her beloved is
"as the apple-tree among the trees of the wood…. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste…. Stay ye me with raisins, comfort me with apples: For I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me."
Hence the shepherd's description of his love: "I am come into the garden, my sister, my bride: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice: I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk."
Modern love does not express itself in such terms; it is more mental and sentimental, more esthetic and sympathetic, more decorous and delicate, more refined and supersensual. While it is possible that, as Renan suggests (143), the author of the Canticles conceived his heroine as a saint of her time, rising above sordid reality, it is clear from all we have said that the author himself was not able to rise above Orientalism. The manners of the East, both ancient and modern, are incompatible with romantic love, because they suppress the evolution of feminine refinement and sexual mentality. The documents of the Hebrews, like those of the Hindoos and Persians, Greeks, and Romans, prove that tender, refined, and unselfish affection between the sexes, far from being one of the first shoots of civilization, is its last and most beautiful flower.
GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS
The most obstinate disbeliever in the doctrine that romantic love, instead of being one of the earliest products of civilization, is one of the latest, will have to capitulate if it can be shown that even the Greeks, the most cultivated and refined nation of antiquity, knew it only in its sensual and selfish side, which is not true love, but self-love. In reality I have already shown this to be the case incidentally in the sections in which I have traced the evolution of the fourteen ingredients of love. In the present chapter, therefore, we may confine ourselves chiefly to a consideration of the stories and poems which have fostered the belief I am combating. But first we must hear what the champions of the Greeks have to say in their behalf.
CHAMPIONS OF GREEK LOVE
Professor Rohde declares emphatically (70) that "no one would be so foolish as to doubt the existence of pure and strong love" among the ancient Greeks. Another eminent German scholar, Professor Ebers, sneers at the idea that the Greeks were not familiar with the love we know and celebrate. Having been criticised for making the lovers in his ancient historic romances act and talk and express their feelings precisely as modern lovers in Berlin or Leipsic do, he wrote for the second edition of his Egyptian Princess a preface in which he tries to defend his position. He admits that he did, perhaps, after all, put too warm colors on his canvas, and frankly confesses that when he examined in the sunshine what he had written by lamplight, he made up his mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend. He admits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between the sexes; yet he thinks it "quite conceivable that a Greek heart should have felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart," and he refers to a number of romantic stories invented by the Greeks as proof that they knew love in our sense of the word—such stories as Apuleius's Cupid and Psyche, Homer's portrait of Penelope, Xenophon's tale of Panthea and Abradates.
"Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have been unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, was transferred as a constellation to the skies; or can devotion to love be doubted in the case of peoples who, for the sake of a beautiful woman, wage terrible wars with bitter pertinacity?"