Instances of women sacrificing themselves for men’s sake abound in ancient literature, though I am not so sure that they abounded in life, except under compulsion, as in the Hindoo suttee.[38] As we shall see in the chapter on India, tales of feminine self-sacrifice were among the means craftily employed by men to fortify and gratify their selfishness.  Still, in the long run, just as man’s fierce “jealousy” helped to make women chaster than men, so the inculcation in women of self-sacrifice as a duty, gradually made them naturally inclined to that virtue—­an inclination which was strengthened by inveterate, deep-rooted, maternal love.  Thus it happened that self-sacrifice assumed rank in course of time as a specifically feminine virtue; so much so that the German metaphysician Fichte could declare that “the woman’s life should disappear in the man’s without a remnant,” and that this process is love.  No doubt it is love, but love demands at the same time that the man’s life should disappear in the woman’s.

It is interesting to note the sexual aspects of gallantry and self-sacrifice.  Women are prevented by custom, etiquette, and inbred coyness from showing gallant attentions to men before marriage, whereas the impulse to sacrifice happiness or life for love’s sake is at least as strong in them as in men, and of longer standing.  If a girl of affectionate impulses on hearing that the man she loved—­though he might not have proposed to her—­lay wounded, or ill of yellow fever, in a hospital, threw away all reserve, coyness, and fear of violating decorum, and went to nurse him day and night, at imminent risk of her own life, all the world would applaud her, convinced that she had done a more feminine thing than if she had allowed coyness to suppress her sympathetic and self-sacrificing impulses.

XII.  AFFECTION

A German poem printed in the Wunderhorn relates how a young man, after a long absence from home, returns and eagerly hastens to see his former sweetheart.  He finds her standing in the doorway and informs her that her beauty pleases his heart as much as ever: 

     Gott gruess dich, du Huebsche, du Feine,
     Von Herzen gefallst du mir.

To which she retorts:  “What need is there of my pleasing you?  I got a husband long ago—­a handsome man, well able to take care of me.”  Whereupon the disappointed lover draws his knife and stabs her through the heart.

In his History of German Song (chap, v.), Edward Schure comments on this poem in the following amazing fashion: 

“How necessary yet how tragic is this answer with the knife to the heartless challenge of the former sweetheart!  How fatal and terrible is this sudden change of a passionate soul from ardent love to the wildest hatred!  We see him taking one step back, we see how he trembles, how the flush of rage suffuses his face, and how his love, offended, injured, and dragged in the dust, slakes its thirst with the blood of the faithless woman.”

EROTIC ASSASSINS