If intellect, as revealed in the face, in words, and in actions, did not assist in inspiring the amorous sentiment, it would be as easy to fall in love with a doll-faced, silly girl as with a woman of culture; it would even be possible to fall in love with a statue or with a demented person.  Let us imagine a belle who is thrown from a horse and has become insane from the shock.  For a time her features will remain as regular, her figure as plump, as before; but the mind will be gone, and with it everything that could make a man fall in love with her.  Who has ever heard of a beautiful idiot, of anyone falling in love with an imbecile?  The vacant stare, the absence of intellect, make beauty and love alike impossible in such a case.

THE STRANGE GREEK ATTITUDE

The important corollary follows, from all this, that in countries where women receive no education sensual love is the only kind men can feel toward them.  Oriental women are of that kind, and so were the ancient Greeks.  The Greeks are indeed renowned for their statuary, yet their attitude toward personal beauty was of a very peculiar kind.  Their highest ideal was not the feminine but the masculine type, and accordingly we find that it was toward men only that they professed to feel a noble passion.  The beauty of the women was regarded merely from a sensual point of view.  Their respectable women were deliberately left without education, wherefore their charms can have been at best of a bodily kind and capable of inspiring love of body only.  There is a prevalent superstition that the Greeks of the day of Perikles had a class of intelligent women known as hetairai, who were capable of being true companions and inspirers of men; but I shall show, in a later chapter, that the mentality of these women has been ludicrously exaggerated; they were coarse and obscene in their wit and conversation, and their morals were such that no man could have respected them, much less loved them with a pure affection; while the men whom they are supposed to have inspired were in most cases voluptuaries of the most dissolute sort.

A COMPOSITE AND VARIABLE SENTIMENT

Our attempt to answer the question “What is romantic love,” has taken up no fewer than two hundred and thirty-five pages, and even this answer is a mere preliminary sketch, the details of which will be supplied in the following chapters, chiefly, it is true, in a negative way, by showing what is not romantic love; for the subject of this book is Primitive Love.

DEFINITION OF LOVE