’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

To them the love between men and women seems not a purifying, ennobling emotion, a stimulus to self-improvement and an impulse to do generous, unselfish deeds, but a mere animal passion, low and degrading.

LOVE DESPISED IN JAPAN AND CHINA

The Japanese have a little more regard for women than most Orientals, yet by them, too, love is regarded as a low passion—­as, in fact, identical with lust.  It is not considered respectable for young folks to arrange their own marriages on a basis of love.

“Among the lower classes, indeed,” says Kuechler,[44] “such direct unions are not infrequent; but they are held in contempt, and are known as yago (meeting on a moor), a term of disrespect, showing the low opinion entertained of it.”  Professor Chamberlain writes, in his Things Japanese (285): 

“One love marriage we have heard of, one in eighteen years!  But then both the young people had been brought up in America.  Accordingly they took the reins in their own hands, to the great scandal of all their friends and relations.”

On another page (308) he says: 

“According to the Confucian ethical code, which the Japanese adopted, a man’s parents, his teacher, and his lord claim his life-long service, his wife standing on an immeasurably lower plane."[45]

Ball, in his Things Chinese comments on the efforts made by Chinamen to suppress love-matches as being immoral; and the French author, L.A.  Martin, says, in his book on Chinese morals (171): 

“Chinese philosophers know nothing of Platonic love; they speak of the relations between men and women with the greatest reserve, and we must attribute this to the low esteem in which they generally hold the fair sex; in their illustrations of the disorders of love, it is almost always the woman on whom the blame of seduction is laid.”

GREEK SCORN FOR WOMAN-LOVE

The Greeks were in the same boat.  They did indeed distinguish between two kinds of love, the sensual and the celestial, but—­as we shall see in detail in the special chapter devoted to them—­they applied the celestial kind only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love between men and women.  That love was considered impure and degrading, a humiliating affliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable to the friendship between men or the feelings that unite parents and children.  This is the view taken in Plato’s writings, in Xenophon’s Symposium and everywhere.  In Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love, written five hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faint protest against the current notion that “there is no gust of friendship or heavenly ravishment of mind,” in the love for women; but this is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which is thus brutally expressed by one of the interlocutors in the same dialogue: