Kenneth Joseph Mortimer
For
St. Valentine's - A History of Love by K. J. Mortimer
Romantic
love and devotion, as distinct from mere passion, must be as old
as man, despite its chequered course. Even the Naga headhunters,
leading a tribal life in remote mountain fastnesses of Assam,
have a tradition of encouraging young courting couples to go spooning
in the rice-fields so that the their pent up emotions will generate
vibrations favourable to the fertility of the crops.
Love,
true love, appeared in written literature at least three thousand
years ago. The inspired author of Genesis wrote about Isaac and
Rebecca,"And he loved her so much that it moderated the sorrow
occasioned by his mother's death"(ch. XXIV, v. 67). Isaac's
son Jacob laboured seven more years to obtain Rachel after he
had already toiled seven years for her, only to be cheated with
her sister Lia. The story of Tobias and Sara has a book to itself.
Paris,
prince of Troy, brought disaster on his city for having eloped
with Helen, wife of Menelaus. Perhaps he was merely infatuated,
for in Homer's account he is no hero, having none of the greatness
of character that one associates with a true lover. The fact is
that love received little honour in Greek literature. Women were
rather low in Greek esteem, so friendship between men, with or
without sexual overtones, was more highly considered than losing
one's head for a mere female. The quality of love was measured
by its object. Sir Arnold Lun says,"Love poems addressed
to women were all but unknown in the Greek poetry of the classic
age." And C.S.Lewis:"In ancient literature love seldom
rises above the levels of merry sensuality or domestic comfort
except to be treated as a merry madness, an ati which plunges
otherwise sane people (usually women) into crime and disgrace.
Such
is the love of Medea, of Phr?dra, of Dido; and such the love from
which maidens pray the Gods may protect them. At the other end
of the scale we find the comfort and utility of a good wife acknowledged.
Odysseus loves Penelope as he loves the rest of his home and possessions,
and Aristotle grudgingly admits that the conjugal relation may
now and then rise to the same level as virtuous friendship between
good men. But this has plainly very little to do with 'love' in
the modern or medi?val sense: and if we turn to poetry proper
we shall be even more disappointed." Certainly the praise
for Penelope falls far short of the lyrical praise of a wise woman
in Proverbs ch. XXXI and the ecstatic poetry of the Song of Songs.
Andromache
lamented over Hector: "In you I had a husband sufficient
for me in wisdom and in birth and great in richness and courage."
The gods had no doubt answered her prayers for them to save her
from merry madness. It was from a Greek source, supposedly Pythagorean,
that Peter Lombard quoted:
"Omnis ardentior amor propriae uxoris adulter est - passionate
love of a man's own wife is adultery." Socrates said that
"the body fills us full of love, lusts, fears, varied fancies
of unending foolishness, and
deprives us of the power of thought. We must free ourselves from
the body if we wish for pure knowledge of anything. True philosophers
have been in every way the enemies of the body."
But
the Christiasn doctrine of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh,
answered Greek puritanism with authority. "Husbands, love
your wives, as Christ also loved the Church and delivered himself
for it...they
shall be two in one flesh. This is a great sacrament...let everyone
of you in particular love his wife as himself" (Ephesians
V, 25-33). When in the fourth century A.D. Christian influence
had already become
strong, it was at last possible for a pagan poet, Ausonius, to
write:
Uxor
vivamus ut viximus et teneamur
Nomina qu? primo sumpsimus in thalamo.
Wife let us live as we have lived, nor ever lose
The little names that were the first night's grace.
One
hundred years later a pagan Merovingian king showed rather less
delicate sentiment by obliging his queen to drink wine out of
her father's skull. English literature starts in the seventh century
with the famous and strangely eerie epic of Beowulf (incomprehensible
to a modern English speaker), who in the night of the fog-bound
north wrenched off the arm of the ogre Grendel, then descended
into the murky lake to slay his mother, and fifty years later
put an end to the dragon that ravaged his lands. Yet for all his
long and one might suggest somewhat adventurous life, no mention
is made of any heroine. Saxons and Scandinavians were apparently
more concerned with the conflict between good and evil, light
and darkness, than with love.
While
some Arabic poetry was crudely sensual and bon viveur, it was
the romantic strain that the Provençal troubadors adopted
from the Muslim courts of Andalusia. The combination of Christian
honour to the Virgin Mary and southern romance produced the medieval
concept of chivalry. Like Tristram tragically and hopelessly in
love with Iseult who was under his guard, the knight pinned his
heart and his honour on some high lady beyond his social reach,
whose colours he wore in tournament but for whom he could only
sigh longingly. In Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Arcite saidé
piteously:
'The
freshé beauty sleeth me suddenly
of her that roameth in the yonder place;
And, but I have her mercy and her grace,
That I may see her atté leasté way, I nam but dead...'
In
La Louve de France (Les Rois Maudits...) Maurice Druon describes
how the knightly devotion of Roger Mortimer, Baron Wigmore, to
Queen Isabella, French wife of the pervert Edward II, King of
England, turned to adultery and regicide. The passion of the fourteen-year-old
heir, the future Edward III, for Philippa of Hainault, daughter
of a happy household, had a more fortunate outcome.
The
devotion of poets to Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, was fully
in the chivalric tradition, with its backdrop of scented gardens,
grassy meads and sylvan glades. The late sixteenth century produced
the finest romantic poetry that ever praised loved ones.
Shall
I compare there to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May'
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance , or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thous owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
This
was the time when, in addition to intricate "conceits"
like the one just quoted, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet,
the epitome of love stories that has gone around the world and
entranced even tribal peoples. In scene II of act III there is
unparalleled tension between the young girl's passion, seething
imagination and haunting, hinting language.
But
this golden age was followed by political debate, by the Puritanism
that could fine a man for going for a walk on a Sunday, by the
debauchery of a court returned from France, by the dry reasoning
of philosophers and by the Age of Reason, so called. Marriage
among the rising bourgeoisie was more a matter for lawyers wrangling
over contracts than for Cupid, who made private arrangements for
his devotees that made little demand on devotion and fidelity.
In an anthology of one hundred and twenty poems of the period
ranging from Pope to Keats one finds only one love poem, by the
Scotsman Robert Burns. With the second half of the eighteenth
century, the flood-gates of romanticism swept open, centred not
around bashful maidens but on Nature mysticism and the spine-chilling
atmosphere of the Gothic novel with its ghosts and monsters in
gloomy castles.
But
from Jane Austen on, the nineteenth century was the age of the
novel with a happy ending, where love was fulfilled in marriage
after hardships, mishaps and misunderstanding. Stormy passions
and fevered imaginings, delicately hinted, empty into marital
contentment after being channelled by the moral rectitude of Emily
Brontë's Jane Eyre. Charles Dickens proclaimed the essential
goodness of ordinary humanity. In the big, boisterous mid-Victorian
families, there was intimacy but hardly the prudery of which they
are accused; that came a generation later
At
the end of the century, love could no longer be taken so seriously
or so joyously by the fashionable authors, for with the affected
flippancy and cynical wit of the ?sthetic movement,a French importation,
only art could be taken seriously, and art existed only for its
own sake. Subsequently, pvert atheism and Freudianism infected
much (but not all) English literature for a couple of generations.
Now all literary quality and all devoted love have gone down the
drain with the thriller novels and TV serials popularising the
macho hero jumping from bed to bed. Crude physical description
has replaced teasing subtlety. The subtle, needling intimations
and subdued morning mist of the Victorian balladCome into the
garden, Maud have been replaced by the raucous screams of Do you
think I'm sexy?
NDU
Spirit April 1998 copyright
