ACTIVE IMPULSES MUST BE ADDED

The most important distinction between Spencer’s analysis of love and mine is that he treats it merely as a composite feeling, or a group of emotions, whereas I treat it as a complex state of mind including not only diverse feelings or sentiments—­sympathy, admiration of beauty, jealousy, affection—­but the active, altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacrifice, which are really more essential to an understanding of the essence of love, and a better test of it, than the sentiments named by Spencer.  He ignores also the absolutely essential traits of individual preference and monopolism, besides coyness, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair, and purity, with the diverse emotions accompanying them.  An effort to trace the evolution of the ingredients of love was first made in my book, though in a fragmentary way, in which respect the present volume will be found a great improvement.  Apart from the completion of the analysis of love, my most important contribution to the study of this subject lies in the recognition of the fact that, “love” being so vague and comprehensive a term, the only satisfactory way of studying its evolution is to trace the evolution of each of its ingredients separately, as I do in the present volume in the long chapter entitled “What Is Romantic Love?”

In Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (180) I wrote that perhaps the main reason why no one had anticipated me in the theory that love is an exclusively modern sentiment was that no distinction had commonly been made between romantic love and conjugal affection, noble examples of the latter being recorded in countries where romantic love was not possible owing to the absence of opportunities for courtship.  I still hold that conjugal love antedated the romantic variety, but further study has convinced me that (as will be shown in the chapters on Conjugal Love and on India, and Greece) much of what has been taken as evidence of wifely devotion is really only a proof of man’s tyrannic selfishness which compelled the woman always to subordinate herself to her cruel master.  The idea on which I placed so much emphasis, that opportunity for prolonged courtship is essential to the growth of romantic love, was some years later set forth by Dr. Drummond in his Ascent of Man where he comments eloquently on the fact that “affection needs time to grow.”

SENSUALITY THE ANTIPODE OF LOVE

The keynote of my first book lies of course in the distinction between sensual love and romantic love.  This distinction seemed to me so self-evident that I did not dwell on it at length, but applied myself chiefly to the task of proving that savages and ancient nations knew only one kind, being strangers to romantic or pure love.  When I wrote (76) “No one, of course, would deny that sensual passion prevailed in Athens; but sensuality is the very antipode of love,” I never dreamed that anyone would object to this distinction in itself.  Great, therefore, was my amazement when, on reading the London Saturday Review’s comments on my book, I came across the following: