The Task of Social Hygiene

IV

THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN IN RELATION TO ROMANTIC LOVE

The Absence of Romantic Love in Classic Civilization—Marriage as a Duty—The Rise of Romantic Love in the Roman Empire—The Influence of Christianity—The Attitude of Chivalry—The Troubadours—The Courts of Love—The Influence of the Renaissance—Conventional Chivalry and Modern Civilization—The Woman Movement—The Modern Woman's Equality of Rights and Responsibilities excludes Chivalry—New Forms of Romantic Love still remain possible—Love as the Inspiration of Social Hygiene.

What will be the ultimate effect of the woman's movement, now slowly but surely taking place among us, upon romantic love? That is really a serious question, and it is much more complex than many of those who are prepared to answer it off-hand may be willing to admit.

It must be remembered that romantic love has not been a constant accompaniment of human relationships, even in civilization. It is true that various peoples very low down in the scale possess romantic love-songs, often, it appears, written by the women. But the classic civilizations of Greece and Rome in their most robust and brilliant periods knew little or nothing of romantic love in connection with normal sexual relationships culminating in marriage. Classic antiquity reveals a high degree of conjugal devotion, and of domestic affection, at all events in Rome, but the right of the woman to follow the inspirations of her own heart, and the idealization and worship of the woman by the man, were not only scarcely known but, so far as they were known, reprehended or condemned. Ovid, in the opinion of some, represents a new movement in Rome. We are apt to regard Ovid as, in erotic matters, the representative of a set of immoral Roman voluptuaries. That view probably requires considerable modification. Ovid was not indeed a champion of morality, but there is no good reason to suppose that, before he appeared, the rather stern Roman mind had yet conceived those refinements and courtesies which he set forth in such charming detail. If we take a wide survey of his work, we may perhaps regard Ovid as the pioneer of a chivalrous attitude towards women and of a romantic conception of love not only new in Rome but of significance for Europe generally. Ovid was a powerful factor in the Renaissance movement, and not least in England, where his influence on Shakespeare and some others of the Elizabethans cannot easily be overrated. 69

For the ordinary classic mind, Greek or Roman, marriage was intended for the end of building up the family, and the family was consecrated to the State. The fulfilment of so exalted a function involved a certain austere dignity which excluded wayward inclination or passionate emotion. These might indeed occur between a man and a woman outside marriage, but putting aside the very limited phenomena of Athenian hetairism, they were too shameful to be idealized. Some trace of this classic attitude may be said to persist even to-day among the so-called Latin nations, notably in the French tradition (now dying out) of treating marriage as a relationship to be arranged, not by the two parties themselves, but by their parents and guardians; Montaigne, attached as he was to maxims of Roman antiquity, was not very alien from the ordinary French attitude of his time when he declared that, since we do not marry so much for our own sakes as for the sake of posterity and the race, marriage is too sacred a process to be mixed with amorous extravagance. 70 There is something to be said for that point of view which is nowadays too often forgotten, but it certainly fails to cover the whole of the ground.

It is not only in the West that a contemptuous attitude towards the romantic and erotic side of life has prevailed at some of the most vigorous moments of civilization. It is also found in the East. In Japan, for instance, even at the present day, romantic love, as a reputable element of ordinary life, is unknown or disapproved; its existence is not recognized in the schools, and the European novels that celebrate it are scarcely understood. 71

The development of modern romantic love in connection with marriage seems to be found in the late Greek world under the Roman Empire. 72 That is commonly called a period of decadence. In a certain limited sense it was. Greece had become subjugated to Rome. Rome herself had lost her military spirit and was losing her political power. But the fighting instinct, and even the ruling spirit, are not synonymous with civilization. The "decline and fall" of empires by no means necessarily involves the decay of civilization. It is now generally realized that the later Roman Empire was not, as was once thought, an age of social and moral degeneration. 73 The State indeed was dissolving, but the individual was evolving. The age which produced a Plutarch—for fifteen hundred years one of the great inspiring forces of the world—was the reverse of a corrupt age. The life of the home and the life of the soul were alike developing. The home was becoming more complex, more intimate, more elevated. The soul was being turned in on itself to discover new and joyous secrets: the secret of the love of Nature, the secret of mystic religion, and, not least, the secret of romantic love. When Christianity finally conquered the Roman world its task very largely lay in taking over and developing those three secrets already discovered by Paganism.

It was inevitable, however, that in developing these new forms of the emotional life, the ascetic bent of Christianity should make itself felt. It was not possible for Christianity to cast its halo around the natural sexual life, but it was possible to refine and exalt that life, to lift it into a spiritual sphere. Neither woman the sweetheart nor woman the mother were in ordinary life glorified by the Church; they were only tolerated. But on a higher than natural plane they were surrounded by a halo and raised to the highest pedestal of reverence and even worship. The Virgin was exalted, Bride and Bridegroom became terms of mystical import, and the Holy Mother received the adoring love of all Christendom. Even in the actual relations of men and women, quite early in the history of Christianity, we sometimes find men and women cultivating relationships which excluded that earthly union the Church looked down on, but yet involved the most tender and intimate physical affection. Many charming stories of such relationships are found in the lives of the saints, and sometimes they existed even within the marriage bond. 74 Christianity led to the use of ideas and terms borrowed from earthly love in a different and symbolic sense. But the undesigned result was that a new force and beauty were added to those ideas and terms, however applied, and also that many emotions were thus cultivated which became capable of re-inforcing earthly human love. In this way it happened that, though Christianity rejected the ideal of romantic love in its natural associations, it indirectly prepared the way for a loftier and deeper realization of that love.

There can be no doubt that the emotional training and refining of the fleshly instincts by Christianity was the chief cause of the rise of that conception of romantic love which we associate with the institution of chivalry. Exalted and sanctified by contact with the central dogmas of religion, the emotion of love was brought down from this spiritual atmosphere by the knightly lover, with something of its ethereal halo still clinging to it, and directed towards an earthly mistress. The most extravagant phase of romantic love which has ever been seen was then brought about, and in many cases, certainly, it was a real erotomania which passed beyond the bounds of sanity. 75 In its extreme forms, however, this romantic love was a rare, localized, and short-lived manifestation. The dominant attitude of the chivalrous age towards women, as Léon Gautier has shown in his monumental work on chivalry, was one of indifference, or even contempt. The knight's thoughts were more of war than of women, and he cherished his horse more than his mistress. 76

But women, above all in France, reacted against this attitude, and with splendid success. Their husbands treated them with indifference or left them at home while they sought adventure in the world. The neglected wives proceeded to lay down the laws of society, and took upon themselves the part of rulers in the domain of morals. In the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, says Méray in a charming book on life in the days of the Courts of Love, we find women "with infinite skill and an adorable refinement seizing the moral direction of French society." They did so, he remarks, in a spirit so Utopian, so ideally poetic, that historians have hesitated to take them seriously. The laws of the Courts of Love 77 may sometimes seem to us immoral and licentious, but in reality they served to restrain the worst immoralities and licences of the time. They banished violence, they allowed no venality, and they inculcated moderation in passion. The task of the Courts of Love was facilitated by the relative degree of peace which then reigned, especially by the fact that the Normans, holding both coasts of the Channel, formed a link between France and England. When the murderous activities of French kings and English kings destroyed that link, the Courts of Love were swept away in the general disorder and the progress of civilization indefinitely retarded. 78 Yet in some degree the ideals which had been thus embodied still persisted. As the Goncourts pointed out in their invaluable book, La Femme au Dix-huitième Siècle (Chap. v), from the days of chivalry even on into the eighteenth century, when on the surface at all events it apparently disappeared, an exalted ideal of love continued to be cherished in France. This conception remained associated, throughout, with the great social influence and authority which had been enjoyed by women in France even from medieval times. That influence had become pronounced during the seventeenth century, and at that time Sir Thomas Smith in his Commonwealth of England, writing of the high position of women in England, remarked that they possessed "almost as much liberty as in France."

There were at least two forms of medieval romantic love. The first arose in Provence and northern Italy during the twelfth century, and spread to Germany as Minnedienst. In this form the young knights directed their respectful and adoring devotion to a high-born married woman who chose one of them as her own cavalier, to do her service and reverence, the two vowing devotion to each other until death. It was a part of this amorous code that there could not be love between husband and wife, and it was counted a mark of low breeding for a husband to challenge his wife's right to her young knight's services, though sometimes we are told the husband risked this reproach, occasionally with tragic results. This mode of love, after being eloquently sung and practised by the troubadours—usually, it appears, younger sons of noble houses—died out in the place of its origin, but it had been introduced into Spain, and the Spaniards reintroduced it into Italy when they acquired the kingdom of Naples; in Italy it was conventionalized into the firmly rooted institution of the cavaliere servente. From the standpoint of a strict morality, the institution was obviously open to question. But we can scarcely fail to see that at its origin it possessed, even if unconsciously, a quasi-religious warrant in the worship of the Holy Mother, and we have to recognize that, notwithstanding its questionable shape, it was really an effort to attain a purer and more ideal relationship than was possible in a rough and warlike age which placed the wife in subordination to her husband. A tender devotion that inspired poetry, an unalloyed respect that approached reverence, vows that were based on equal freedom and independence on both sides—these were possibilities which the men and women of that age felt to be incompatible with marriage as they knew it.

The second form of medieval romantic love was more ethereal than the first, and much more definitely and consciously based on a religious attitude. It was really the worship of the Virgin transferred to a young earthly maiden, yet retaining the purity and ideality of religious worship. To so high a degree is this the case that it is sometimes difficult to be sure whether we are concerned with a real maiden of flesh and blood or only a poetic symbol of womanhood. This doubt has been raised, notably by Bartoli, concerning Dante's Beatrice, the supreme type of this ethereal love, which arose in the thirteenth century, and was chiefly cultivated in Florence. The poets of this movement were themselves aware of the religious character of their devotion to the donna angelicata to whom they even apply, as they would to the Queen of Heaven, the appellation Stella Maris. That there was an element of flesh and blood in these figures is believed by Remy de Gourmont, but when we gaze at them, he remarks, we see at first, "in place of a body only two eyes with angel's wings behind them, on the background of an azure sky sown with golden stars"; the lover is on his knees and his love has become a prayer. 79 This phase of romantic love was brief, and perhaps mostly the possession of the poets, but it represented a really important moment in the evolution of modern romantic love. It was a step towards the realization of the genuinely human charm of young womanhood in real human relationships, of which we already have a foretaste in the delicious early French story of Aucassin and Nicolette.

The re-discovery of classic literature, the movements of Humanism and the Renaissance, swept away what was left of the almost religious idealization of the young virgin. The ethereal maiden, thin, pale, anæmic, disappeared alike from literature and from art, and was no longer an ideal in actual life. She gave place to a new woman, conscious of her own fully developed womanhood and all its needs, radiantly beautiful and finely shaped in every limb. She lacked the spirituality of her predecessors, but she had gained in intellect. She appears first in the pages of Boccaccio. After a long interval Titian immortalized her rich and mature beauty; she is Flora, she is Ariadne, she is alike the Earthly Love and the Heavenly Love. Every curve of her body was adoringly and minutely described by Niphus and Firenzuola. 80 She was, moreover, the courtesan whose imperial charm and adroitness enabled her to trample under foot the medieval conception of lust as sin, even in the courts of popes. At the great academic centre of Bologna, finally, she chastely taught learning and science. 81 The people of the Italian Renaissance placed women on the same level as men, and to call a woman a virago implied unalloyed praise. 82

The very mixed conditions of what we have been accustomed to consider the modern world then began for women. They were no longer cloistered—whether in convents or the home—but neither were they any longer worshipped. They began to be treated as human beings, and when men idealized them in figures of romantic charm or pathos—figures like Shakespeare's Rosalind or Marivaux's Sylvia or Richardson's Clarissa—this humanity was henceforth the common ground out of which the vision arose. But, one notes, in nearly all the great poets and novelists up to the middle of the last century, it was usually in the weakness of humanity that the artist sought the charm and pathos of his feminine figures. From Shakespeare's Ophelia to Thackeray's Amelia this is the rule, more emphatically expressed in the literature of England than of any other country. There had been no actual emancipation of women; though now they had entered the world of men, they were not yet, socially and legally, of that world. Even the medieval traditions still lived on in subtly conventionalized forms. The "chivalrous" attitude towards women was, as the word itself suggests, a medieval survival. It belonged to a period of barbarism when brutal force ruled and when the man who magnanimously placed his force at the disposition of a woman was really doing her a service and granting her a privilege. But civilization means the building up of an orderly society in which individual rights are respected, and force no longer dominates. So that as civilization advances the occasions on which women require the aid of masculine force become ever fewer and more unimportant. The conventionalized chivalry of men then tends to become an offer of services which it would be better for women to do for themselves and a bestowal of privileges to which they are nowise entitled. 83 Moreover, this same chivalry is, under these conditions, apt to take on a character which is the reverse of its face value. It becomes the assertion of a power over women instead of a power on their behalf; and it carries with it a tinge of contempt in place of respect. Theoretically, a thousand chivalrous swords should leap from their scabbards to succour the distressed woman. In practice this may only mean that the thousand owners of these metaphorical weapons are on the alert to take advantage of the distressed woman.

Thus the romantic emotions based on medieval ideals gradually lost their worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic uses. The movement for the emancipation of women was not consciously or directly a movement of revolt against an antiquated chivalry. It was rather a part of the development of civilization which rendered chivalry antique. Medieval romantic love implied in women a weakness in the soil of which only a spiritual force could flourish. The betterment of social conditions, the subordination of violence to order, the growing respect for individual rights, took away the reasons for consecrating weakness in women, and created an ever larger field in which women could freely seek to rival men, because it is a field in which knowledge and skill are of far more importance than muscular strength. The emancipation of women has simply been the later and more conscious phase of the process by which women have entered into this field and sought their share of its rights and its responsibilities.

The woman movement of modern times, properly understood, has thus been the effort of women to adapt themselves to the conditions of an orderly and peaceful civilization. Education, under the changed conditions, can effect what before needed force of arms; responsibility is now demanded where before only tutelage was possible. A civilized society in which women are ignorant and irresponsible is an anachronism, and, however great the wrench with the past might be, it was necessary that women should be adjusted to the changing times. The ideal of the weak, ignorant, inexperienced woman—the cross between an angel and an idiot, as I have elsewhere described her 84—no longer fulfilled any useful purpose. Civilized society furnishes the conditions under which all adult persons are socially equal and all are free to give to society the best they are capable of.

It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that this movement should have sometimes tended to take the form of an attempt on the part of women to secure, not merely equality with men, but actual imitation of men. These women said that since men had attained mastery in life, captured all the best things, and adopted the most successful methods of living, it was necessary for women to copy them at every point. That was a specious plea which even had in it a certain element of truth. But the fact remained that women and men are different, that the difference is based in fundamental natural functions, and that to place one sex in exactly the same position as the other sex is to deform its outlines and to hamper its activities.