“True love has nothing to do with women, and I assert that you who are passionately inclined toward women and maidens do not love any more than flies love milk or bees honey, or cooks the calves and birds whom they fatten in the dark....  The passion for women consists at the best in the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty.”

Another interlocutor sums up the Greek attitude in these words:  “It behooves respectable women neither to love nor to be loved.”

Goethe had an apercu of the absence of purity in Greek love when he wrote, in his Roman Elegies:

     In der heroischen Zeit, da Goetter und Goettinnen liebten. 
     Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.

PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY

The change in love from the barbarian and ancient attitude to the modern conception of it as a refining, purifying feeling is closely connected with the growth of the altruistic ingredients of love—­sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, and especially adoration.  It is one of the points where religion and love meet.  Mariolatry greatly affected men’s attitude toward women in general, including their notions about love.  There is a curious passage in Burton worth citing here (III., 2): 

“Christ himself, and the Virgin Mary, had most beautiful eyes, as amiable eyes as any persons, saith Baradius, that ever lived, yet withal so modest, so chaste, that whosoever looked on them was freed from that passion of burning lust, if we may believe Gerson and Bonaventure; there was no such antidote against it as the Virgin Mary’s face.”

Mediaeval theologians had a special name for this faculty—­Penetrative Virginity—­which McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature defines as

“such an extraordinary or perfect gift of chastity, to which some have pretended that it overpowered those by whom they have been surrounded, and created in them an insensibility to the pleasures of the flesh.  The Virgin Mary, according to some Romanists, was possessed of this gift, which made those who beheld her, notwithstanding her beauty, to have no sentiments but such as were consistent with chastity.”

In the eyes of refined modern lovers, every spotless maiden has that gift of penetrative virginity.  The beauty of her face, or the charm of her character, inspires in him an affection which is as pure, as chaste, as the love of flowers.  But it was only very gradually and slowly that human beauty gained the power to inspire such a pure love; the proof of which assertion is to be unfolded in our next section.

XIV.  ADMIRATION OF PERSONAL BEAUTY

“When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind,” exclaimed Dryden; and Romeo asks: 

     Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! 
     For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.