Sentimentality, as I have said, precedes sentiment in the history of love, and it has been a special characteristic of certain periods, like that of the Alexandrian Greeks and their Roman imitators, to whom we shall recur in a later chapter, and the mediaeval Troubadours and Minnesingers.  To the present day sentimentality in love is so much more abundant than sentiment that the adjective sentimental is commonly used in an uncomplimentary sense, as in the following passage from one of Krafft-Ebing’s books (Psch.  Sex., 9): 

“Sentimental love runs the risk of degenerating into caricature, especially in cases where the sensual ingredient is weak....  Such love has a flat, saccharine tang.  It is apt to become positively ludicrous, whereas in other cases the manifestations of this strongest of all feelings inspire in us sympathy, respect, awe, according to circumstances.”

Steele speaks in The Lover (23, No. 5) of the extraordinary skill of a poet in making a loose people “attend to a Passion which they never, or that very faintly, felt in their own Bosoms.”  La Rochefoucauld wrote:  “It is with true love as with ghosts; everybody speaks of it, but few have seen it.”  A writer in Science expressed his belief that romantic love, as described in my first book, could really be experienced only by men of genius.  I think that this makes the circle too small; yet in these twelve years of additional observation I have come to the conclusion that even at this stage of civilization only a small proportion of men and women are able to experience full-fledged romantic love, which seems to require a special emotional or esthetic gift, like the talent for music.  A few years ago I came across the following in the London Tidbits which echoes the sentiments of multitudes: 

“Latour, who sent a pathetic complaint the other day that though he wished to do so he was unable to fall in love, has called forth a sympathetic response from a number of readers of both sexes.  These ladies and gentlemen write to say that they also, like Latour, cannot understand how it is that they are not able to feel any experience of tender passion which they read about so much in novels, and hear about in actual life.”

At the same time there are not a few men of genius, too, who never felt true love in their own hearts.  Herder believed that Goethe was not capable of genuine love, and Grimm, too, thought that Goethe had never experienced a self-absorbing passion.  Tolstoi must have been ever a stranger to genuine love, for to him it seems a degrading thing even in marriage.  A suggestive and frank confession may be found in the literary memoirs of Goncourt.[122] At a small gathering of men of letters Goncourt remarked that hitherto love had not been studied scientifically in novels.  Zola thereupon declared that love was not a specific emotion; that it does not affect persons so absolutely