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