It seems almost incredible that such a villanous sentiment should have been allowed to appear in a book without sending its author to prison.  “Necessary” to murder a sweetheart because she has changed her mind during a man’s long absence!  The wildest anarchist plot never included a more diabolical idea.  Brainless, selfish, impulsive young idiots are only too apt to act on that principle if their proposals are not accepted; the papers contain cases nearly every week of poor girls murdered for refusing an unwelcome suitor; but the world is beginning to understand that it is illogical and monstrous to apply the sacred word of love to the feeling which animates these cowardly assassins, whose only motives are selfish lust and a dog-in-the-manger jealousy. Love never “slakes its thirst” with the blood of a woman.  Had that man really loved that woman, he would have been no more capable of murdering her than of murdering his father for disinheriting him.

Schure is by no means the only author who has thus confounded love with murderous, jealous lust.  A most astounding instance occurs in Goethe’s Werther—­the story of a common servant who conceived a passion for a well-to-do widow.

He lost his appetite, his sleep, forgot his errands; an evil spirit pursued him.  One day, finding her alone in the garret, he made an improper proposal to her, and on her refusing he attempted violence, from which she was saved only through the timely arrival of her brother.  In defending his conduct the servant, in a most ungallant, unmanly, and cowardly way, tried to fasten the guilt on the widow by saying that she had previously allowed him to take some liberties with her.  He was of course promptly ejected from the house, and when subsequently another man was engaged to take his place, and began to pay his addresses to the widow, the discharged servant fell upon him and assassinated him.  And this disgusting exhibition of murderous lust and jealousy leads Goethe to exclaim, rapturously: 

“This love, this fidelity(!), this passion, is thus seen to be no invention of the poets(!).  It lives, it is to be found in its greatest purity(!) among that class of people whom we call uneducated and coarse.”

In view of the sensual and selfish attitude which Goethe held toward women all his life, it is perhaps not strange that he should have written the silly words just quoted.  It was probably a guilty conscience, a desire to extenuate selfish indulgence at the expense of a poor girl’s virtue and happiness, that led him to represent his hero, Werther, as using every possible effort in court to secure the pardon of that erotomaniac who had first attempted rape and then finished up by assassinating his rival.

If Werther’s friend had murdered the widow herself, Goethe would have been logically bound to see in his act still stronger evidence of the “reality,” “fidelity,” and “purity” of love among “people whom we call uneducated and coarse.”  And if Goethe had lived to read the Rev. W.W.  Gill’s Savage Life in Polynesia, he might have found therein (118) a story of cannibal “love” still more calculated to arouse his rapturous enthusiasm—­