“and when we find Mr. Finck marking off Romantic Love not merely from Conjugal Love, but from what he is pleased to call ‘sensuality,’ we begin to suspect that he really does not know what he is talking about.”

This criticism, with several others similar to it, was of great use to me, as it led to a series of studies, which convinced me that even at the present day the nature of romantic love is not understood by the vast majority of Europeans and Americans, many of them very estimable and intelligent individuals.

THE WORD ROMANTIC

Another London paper, the Academy, took me to task for using the word “romantic” in the sense I applied to it.  But in this case, too, further research has shown that I was justified in using that word to designate pure prematrimonial love.  There is a passage in Steele’s Lover (dated 1714) which proves that it must have been in common use in a similar sense two centuries ago.  The passage refers to “the reign of the amorous Charles the Second,” and declares that

“the licenses of that court did not only make the Love which the Vulgar call Romantick, the object of Jest and Ridicule, but even common Decency and Modesty were almost abandoned as formal and unnatural.”

Here there is an obvious antithesis between romantic and sensual.  The same antithesis was used by Hegel in contrasting the sensual love of the ancient Greeks and Romans with what he calls modern “romantic” love.  Waitz-Gerland, too, in the six volumes of their Anthropologie der Naturvoelker, repeatedly refer to (alleged) cases of “romantic love” among savages and barbarians, having in all probability adopted the term from Hegel.  The peculiar appropriateness of the word romantic to designate imaginative love will be set forth later in the chapter entitled Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment.  Here I will only add an important truth which I shall have occasion to repeat often—­that a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love; for it is obvious, for instance, that an elopement prompted by the most frivolous sensual passion, without a trace of real love, may lead to the most romantic incidents.

In the chapters on affection, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, I shall make it clear even to a Saturday Reviewer that the gross sensual infatuation which leads a man to shoot a girl who refuses him, or a tramp to assault a woman on a lonely road and afterward to cut her throat in order to hide his crime, is absolutely antipodal to the refined, ardent, affectionate Romantic Love which impels a man to sacrifice his own life rather than let any harm or dishonor come to the beloved.

ANIMALS HIGHER THAN SAVAGES