HISTORY OF LOVE
It would be a profitless task to hunt for the first traces of the various elements of Love in the records of all the nations of antiquity; for we meet almost everywhere with the same old story of Romantic Love impeded in its growth or its very existence by the degraded position of women, and by the absence of opportunities for courtship, and for free matrimonial choice. A few remarks, however, must be made concerning Love among the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and our Aryan kinsfolk in India, before passing on to Mediæval and Modern Love.
LOVE IN EGYPT
Dr. Georg Ebers, the Leipzig professor, and author of the popular series of historic Egyptian novels, remarks that “if it is true that a nation’s degree of culture can be estimated by the more or less favourable position accorded its women, then Egyptian culture ranks above that of all other ancient peoples.”
The women of ancient Egypt were not kept in seclusion like those of Greece. They did their own marketing, and had other domestic and public liberties and privileges which astonished the Greek historian Herodotus, who also mentions that although polygamy was tolerated among them, monogamy was the rule. Inasmuch as the Egyptians had an advanced culture, invented many arts, promoted the sciences, and were industrial rather than militant in their occupations, it is possible that several of the more refined elements of Romantic Love may have existed among them; for just as we have seen that some animals have higher notions of love, conjugal and romantic, than some savages, although the latter represent a later stage of evolution, so it seems probable that among the nations of antiquity Love did not progress steadily, year by year; but that some nations had more and some less of it; while the acquisitions of one period may have been lost in evil and corrupt times following, as was certainly the case in India.
Since we have no such extensive literature of Egypt as we have of the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews, it is not easy to arrive at definite conclusions. But the Egyptian custom of forming “trial marriages” for one year, and the ease with which a husband could divorce and expel his wife by simply pronouncing three words in her presence do not harmonise with our modern notions of Love. How scornfully a modern Romeo would reject the very notion of such a trial-marriage! for does he not feel absolutely certain that his Love is eternal and unalterable?
The institution of trial-marriages seems to point to the conclusion that the Egyptians, like the Greeks, looked upon marriage primarily as a means of augmenting the family and the state, and not as a union of loving souls—children or no children—which is the modern ideal.
Professor Ebers of course has a right to make use of a poetic license in painting the Love affairs of his Egyptian heroes and heroines in modern colours, as Shakspere does in Antony and Cleopatra. At the same time it would give an added flavour to historic romances if their pictures of domestic and public life were characterised by emotional realism as well as by general antiquarian accuracy. The elaborate analysis of Love, for the first time attempted in the present monograph, should facilitate this task for novelists.
ANCIENT HEBREW LOVE
It is almost startling to find, on consulting a Concordance of the Old and New Testaments, that in the whole of the Bible there is not a single reference to Romantic Love. Had this sentiment existed among the ancient Hebrews as it does among their descendants to-day, it is obvious that it could not possibly have been ignored in the Book of Books, which so eloquently and poetically discourses of everything else that is of vital interest to man. Conjugal Love (which apparently antedates Romantic Love in every nation) is indeed repeatedly referred to and enjoined, as well as the other family affections; but in the remaining cases the word Love is always used in the sense of religious veneration, or of regard for a neighbour or an enemy.