The Evolution of Love Part 5

(THE FIRST FORM OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM)

_(a) The Love of the Troubadours_

In the long chapter on the Birth of Europe, I have attempted to bring corroborative evidence from all sides in support of my contention that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed the birth and gradual development of a new value of the highest importance: the value of individuality, impersonated by the citizen of Europe. We are now prepared to realise the psychological importance and the importance for progress of one of the greatest results of this new development--the spiritual love of man for woman. From this subject, the specific subject of my book, I shall not again digress.

We are aware that the man of antiquity (and also the Eastern nations of to-day) recognised between man and woman only the s.e.xual bond, uninfluenced by personal and psychological motives, and leading in Greece to the inst.i.tution of monogamy on purely economical and political grounds. In addition to this bond there existed a very distinct spiritual love, evolved by Plato and his circle and projected by one man on another member of his own s.e.x. In the true h.e.l.lenic spirit this love aspired to guide the individual to the ideal of perfection, the beauty and wisdom of the friend serving as stepping-stones in the upward climb.

In Christianity the spiritual love of the divine became the greatest value and the pivot on which the emotions turned. The primitive Christian scorned the body, his own as well as that of his fellow; he despised beauty of form, and regarded only the divine as worthy of love.

Woman was disparaged and suspected; all thinkers, down to Thomas and Anselm, looking upon her merely as a snare and a pitfall. The period discussed in detail in the foregoing chapter ushered in a new and, until then, unknown feeling. In crude and conscious contrast to s.e.xuality, deprecated alike by cla.s.sical Greece and primitive Christianity, spiritual love of man for woman came into existence. It was composed of three clearly distinguishable elements: the Platonic thought, maintaining that the greatest virtue lies in the striving for absolute perfection; the entirely spiritual love of the divine, sufficient in itself, and representing the final purpose of life, as developed by Christianity; and the dawning knowledge of the value of personality.

From these three elements: the n.o.blest inheritance of antiquity, the central creation of Christianity, and the pivot of the new-born European spirit, sprang the new value which is the subject of the second stage of eroticism. The position of woman had changed; she was no longer the medium for the satisfaction of the male impulse, or the rearing of children, as in antiquity; no longer the silent drudge or devout sister of the first Christian millenary; no longer the she-devil of monkish conception; transcending humanity, she had been exalted to the heavens and had become a G.o.ddess. She was loved and adored with a devotion not of this earth, a devotion which was the sole source of all things lofty and good; she had become the saviour of humanity and queen of the universe.

The rejection of sensuality is an inherent part of the Christian religion; only he who had overcome his sinful desires was a hero.

Spiritual love was as yet unknown, only the s.e.xual impulse was realised, and that was looked upon as a sin; there was but one way of escape: renunciation. This view is very clearly expressed in the legends of Alexius, and in Barlaam and Josaphat (which although of Indian origin, had found a German interpreter and were known all over Europe). The latter legend tells how Prince Josaphat, a devout Christian, married a beautiful princess. On his wedding night he had a vision of the celestial paradise, the dominion of chast.i.ty, and the earthly pool of sin. Recognising in his bride a devil who had come to tempt him, he left her and fled into the desert. Many legends ill.u.s.trate the incapacity of the first millenary to realise the relations.h.i.+p between the s.e.xes in any other sense. Woman was evil; the struggle against her a laudable effort.

Very probably the stigmatising of all eroticism during that long spell of a thousand years was necessary. Only the unnatural condemnation of love in its widest sense, a hatred of s.e.x and woman such as was felt by Tertullian and Origen, could result in the reverse of s.e.xuality--purely spiritual love with its logical climax, the deification and wors.h.i.+p of woman. There can be no doubt that the Christian ideal of chast.i.ty was largely responsible for the evolution of the ideal of spiritual love.

The ident.i.ty of love and chast.i.ty was propounded--in sharp contrast to s.e.xuality and--more particularly amongst the later troubadours, such as Montanhagol, Sordello, and the poets of the "sweet new style" in Italy--with a distinct leaning towards religious ecstasy.

Infinite tenderness pervaded the nascent cult of woman. It seemed as if man were eager to compensate her for the indignity which he had heaped upon her for a thousand years. His instinctive need to wors.h.i.+p had found an incomparable being on earth before whom he prostrated himself. She was the climax of earthly perfection; no word, no metaphor was sufficiently ecstatic to express the full fervour of his adoration; a new religion was created, and she was the presiding divinity. "What were the world if beauteous woman were not?" sang Johannes Hadlaub, a German poet.

Once more I must revert to personality, the fundamental value of the European. In antiquity, even in Greece and Rome, personality in its higher sense did not exist. The hero was the epitome of all the energies of the nation, a term for the striving of the community; the statesman was the incarnate political will of the people; even the poet's ideal was the representation of the h.e.l.lenic type in all its aspects.

Agamemnon was no more than the intelligent ruler, Achilles the headstrong hero, Odysseus the cunning adventurer. The individual was a member and servant of the tribe, the town, the state; each man knew that his fellow did not essentially differ from him; and even at the period when h.e.l.las was at its meridian the individuals were, compared to modern men, but slightly differentiated. But the Greek differed from the Oriental, the barbarian, inasmuch as he felt himself no longer a component part of nature, but realised his distinct individuality.

We find the first germs of the new creative principle of personality in the Platonic figure of Socrates who, first of all, conceived the idea of a higher spiritual love, blended it with the love of ideas and separated it sharply from base desire. Though his conception was not yet personal love in the true sense, it was nevertheless a spiritual divine love. The Greek State could not tolerate him, and sentenced him to death. But this same Socrates also said (in "Crito") that man was indebted to the State for his existence. "Did not thy father, in obedience to the law, take thy mother to wife and beget thee?" This sentiment was as antique as it could well be, and the death of Socrates--as related by Plato--was the most magnificent confirmation of the Greek idea that the individual, even the wisest, was entirely subordinate to the community.

The civilisations of China and j.a.pan are impersonal even to a greater extent than the civilisation of ancient Greece. Percival Lowell maintains that the diverse manifestations of the spirit of those countries can only be understood if regarded from the standpoint of absolute impersonality. He sees in a "p.r.o.nounced impersonality the most striking characteristic of the Far East", "the foundation on which the Oriental character is built up." It is very instructive to observe how it determines the individual's conception of birth and marriage, thoughts and acts, life and death. It is carried to so great an extreme that special terms for "I," "you," "he," do not even exist in the j.a.panese language, and have to be replaced by objective circ.u.mlocutions.

Not content with the fact of having been born impersonal, it is the ambition of the inhabitant of the Far East to become more and more so as his life unfolds itself. Witness the heroic exploits of j.a.panese soldiers during the last war: individual soldiers frequently went to their death for the sake of a small advantage to their group. We Europeans regard this in the light of heroism--and it would be heroism in the case of a European. But with the sacrifice of his individual life in the interest of the community, the j.a.panese instinctively yields the smaller value. In the same way Greeks and Romans did not attach very much importance to life; suicide was very common, and frequently committed without any special motive. As true love is based on personality, it is impossible for the modern East-Asiatic to know love in our sense. Lowell agrees with this: "Love, as we understand it, is an unknown feeling in the East." He reports that j.a.panese women will appear before strangers entirely nude, without the least trace of embarra.s.sment--as would Greek women!--because they are innocent of that other aspect of personality--the feeling of shame. To be ashamed implies the desire of concealing something individual and intimate; where this is not the case, there can be no feeling of shame. Finally, I should like to point out that the perversity and s.e.xual refinement peculiar to China and j.a.pan are attributable simply to the fact that the limits of s.e.xuality cannot be overstepped, and that s.e.xuality is therefore dependent on vice and perversity to satisfy its craving for variety.

The first manifestation of overwhelming personality appears in Jesus, and he created the religion of love. In him personality and love were convertible forces, one might even say they were identical. He, first of all, revealed their mysterious intimate connection, and clearly showed that love can only be experienced by a distinct personality, because it is an emanation of the soul and not a natural instinct.

It was, again, personality which, in the twelfth century, produced a new force: spiritual love projected not only on G.o.d and nature, but also on woman. Now only had personality acquired its true significance; it no longer meant--as it did in the mature Greek world--the individual separated from his environment, the individual with a conscious beginning and a conscious end, but the principle of the synthesis, a higher ent.i.ty above the mere individual, the source of all values and virtue.

Personality is the self-conscious, individual soul, producing out of its own wealth the universal ideal values, and re-absorbing and a.s.similating these ideal values in their higher form. It admits of the fusion of the subjective with the universal and eternal, with the religious and artistic, the moral and scientific values of civilisation. "Personality is the blending of the universal and the individual," said Kierkegaard, expressing, if not exactly my meaning, something very near it.

I shall endeavour to depict the spiritual love of man for woman--the position cannot be reversed--from its inception to its climax. I shall submit abundant evidence to make the great unbroken stream of emotion clearly apparent, and indicate all its tributaries. I do not pretend that I have exhausted the subject--that would be impossible. The works from which I have drawn may be safely regarded as the direct outpouring of emotion; those purely lyric poets were entirely subjective and ever intent upon their own feelings; there hardly exists one Provencal, old-Italian, or mediaeval love-song without the "I."

Spiritual love first appeared as a nave sentiment--unconscious of its own peculiar characteristics--in the poems of the earlier troubadours of Provence. There is a poem in which the Provencals claim the fathers.h.i.+p of the cult of woman; their opponents do not deny it, but add that it was an invention which "could fill no man's stomach." These words express the great and insurmountable barrier between pure spiritual love and pleasure. The Christian dualism: soul-body, spirit-matter, had invaded the domain of love.

Spontaneous, genuine love, untainted by speculations and metaphysics, is found in the songs of the earlier troubadours. The greatest among all of them, Bernart of Ventadour, was the first to praise chaste love. If any champion of civilisation deserves a monument, it is this poet.

Dead is the man who knows not love, A sweet tremor in the heart.

Love's rapture fills my heart With laughter and sighs.

Grief slays me a hundred times, Joy bids me rise.

Sweet is love's happiness, Sweeter love's pain.

Joy brings back grief to me, Grief, joy again.

Guillem Augier Novella expressed the feeling of being "elated with exaltation and grieved to death" as follows:

Lady, often flow my tears, Glad songs in my mem'ry ring, For the love that makes my blood Dance and sing.

I am yours with heart and soul, If it please you, lady, slay me....

Aimeril de Peguilhan is of opinion that the pain of love is no less sweet than the joy of love:

For he who loves with all his heart would fain Be sick with love, such rapture is his pain.

And Bernart again:

G.o.d keep my lady fair from grief and woe, I'm close to her, however far I go; If G.o.d will be her shelter and her s.h.i.+eld, Then all my heart's desire is fulfilled.

And:

My mind was erring in a maze, That hour I was no longer I, When in your eyes I met my gaze As in a mirror strange and shy.

Oh, mirror sweet, reflecting me, Sighing I fell beneath your spell; I perished in you utterly As did Narcissus in the well.

In the same poem he goes on to say that he will ask for no reward, but finally concludes:

My fervent kisses her sweet lips should cover, For weeks they'd show the traces of her lover.

The German minnesinger, Heinrich of Morungen, called woman "a mirror of all the delights of the world," and sang:

Blessed be the tender hour, Blest the time, the precious day, When my br.i.m.m.i.n.g heart welled over, When my secret open lay.

I was startled with great gladness, And bewildered so with love, I can hardly sing thereof.

The sensuous element still dominated Bernart and his contemporaries to some extent. In their poems, all of which are genuine and sincere, the longing for kisses, sometimes for more, is frankly expressed, but the tendency towards the not sensuous and super-sensuous is already apparent. The lover loves one woman only, and would rather love in vain, patiently enduring every pang she causes him, than receive favours from another woman, were she beautiful as Venus her self.

Bernart says:

My sorrow is a sweet distress To which no alien bliss compares, And if my pain such sweetness bears, How sweet would be my happiness!

Elias of Barjols:

Full of joy I am and sorrow When I stand before her face.

Bonifacio Calvo:

There is no treasure-trove on earth Which I would barter for my pain; I love my grief, but spite and wrath Run riot in my heart; my brain Is reeling--and I laugh and cry.

Jubilant and desperate, Exultant, I bewail my fate.

Quarter! Lady, ere I die.

The earlier troubadours were still ignorant of the later dogma which made chaste love the sole fountain of virtue and the road to perfection--the beloved woman can make of her admirer what she wills--a saint or a sinner.

Thus Guillem of Poitiers says:

Love heals the sick And a grave does it delve For the strong; mars the beauty of beauty itself, Makes a fool of the sage with its magic, A clown of the courteous knight, And a king of the lowliest wight.

The equally early Cercamon: