(2) Maiden versus Wife.—It is hardly necessary, however, to rely upon such a remote sociological echo, so to speak, for an explanation of a girl’s hesitation to become a wife even if her suitor pleases her. The thought of exchanging her maiden freedom for conjugal restrictions and duties; of giving up the homage and admiration of all men for the possible neglect of one; of probably soon losing her youthful beauty, etc.—such thoughts would make many girls even more coy than they now are, did not the fear of becoming an old maid act as a counterbalancing motive in favour of marriage.
(3) Modesty.—Esquimaux girls, as we have seen, “affect the utmost bashfulness and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they should lose their reputation for modesty.” And the greatest analyst of the human heart puts the same philosophy into the mouth of Juliet in a passage which, although everybody knows it by heart, must yet be quoted here—
“O gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully:
Or if thou think’st I am too quickly won,
I’ll frown and be perverse and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world.
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond,
And therefore thou may’st think my ’haviour light:
But trust me, gentleman, I’ll prove more true
Than those that have more cunning to be strange.
I should have been more strange, I must confess,
But that thou overheard’st, ere I was ware,
My true love’s passion: therefore pardon me,
And not impute this yielding to light love,
Which the dark night hath so discovered.”
(4) Cunning to be Strange.—No huntsman (except a monarch) would care to go to an enclosure and shoot the deer confined therein, nor a fisherman to catch trout conveniently placed in a pond. But to wade up a mountain brook all day long, climbing over slippery rocks, and enduring the discomforts of a hot sun and wet clothes, with nothing to eat, and only a few speckled trifles to reward him—that is what he considers “glorious sport.”
The instinctive perception that a thing is valued in proportion to the difficulty of its attainment is what taught women the “cunning to be strange.” Seeing that they could not compete with man in brute force, they acquired the arts of Beauty and of Coyness, as their best weapons against his superior strength—the Beauty to fascinate him, the Coyness to teach him that in Love, as in fishing, the pleasure of pursuit is the main thing.
At first this Coyness was manifested in a very crude manner, as among the primitive maidens who hid in the forest; or among the Roman women celebrated by Ovid, who locked their door and compelled the lover to beg and whine for admission by the hour; or among the mediæval women who, to gratify their caprices and enjoy the sense of a newly-acquired power, sent their admirers to participate in bloody wars before recognising their addresses. And so coarse-grained were the men that as soon as the women ceased to tease they ceased to woo; as, for instance, in mediæval France, about the time of the Chansons de Geste, “the man who desires a woman yet does not appear as a wooer; for he knows he is certain of her favour,” as we read in Ploss. Hence Cleopatra’s brief and pointed rejoinder to Charmian when he advises her, in order to win Antony’s love, to give him way in everything, cross him in nothing: “Thou teachest like a fool; the way to lose him.”
(5) Procrastination.—Love at first sight is frequent at the present day, but in ancient Greece and Rome marriage at first sight appears to have been more common. The classical suitor’s wooing was generally comprised in three words: Veni, Vidi, Vici; i.e. I Came, Saw the girl’s father, Conquered his scruples by proving my wealth or social position. Sufficient brevity in this, no doubt: but brevity is not the soul of Love.
“Tant plus le chemin est long dans l’amour, tant plus un esprit délicat sent de plaisir,” says Pascal, announcing a truth of which ancient and mediæval nations had no conception until female Coyness taught it them. Goethe evidently had the same truth in mind when he mentioned as a phase of ancient love (Roman Elegies)—
“In der heroischen zeit, da Götter und Göttinen liebten
Folgte Begierde dem Blick folgte Genuss der Begier.”
That is, in prose, there were no preliminaries in the love-drama, which had only one act, the fifth, in which the marriage is celebrated.
Goldsmith on Love.—In Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World there is a chapter on “Whether Love be a Natural or Fictitious Passion,” in which reference is likewise made to the value of procrastination. As this passage shows Goldsmith to have been the first author who had an approximate conception of the development and psychology of Love, I will quote it almost entire. It is in the form of a dialogue, and one of the speakers remarks: "Whether love be natural or no … it contributes to the happiness of every society in which it is introduced. All our pleasures are short and can only charm at intervals; love is a method of protracting our greatest pleasure; and surely that gamester who plays the greatest stake to the best advantage will, at the end of life, rise victorious. This was the opinion of Vanini, who affirmed that ‘every hour was lost which was not spent in love.’ His accusers were unable to comprehend his meaning; and the poor advocate for love was burned in flames; alas! no way metaphorical. But whatever advantages the individual may reap from this passion, society will certainly be refined and improved by its introduction; all laws calculated to discourage it tend to embrute the species, and weaken the state. Though it cannot plant morals in the human breast, it cultivates them when there: pity, generosity, and honour receive a brighter polish from its assistance; and a single amour is sufficient entirely to brush off the clown.
“But it is an exotic of the most delicate constitution: it requires the greatest art to introduce it into a state, and the smallest discouragement is sufficient to repress it again. Let us only consider with what ease it was formerly extinguished in Rome, and with what difficulty it was lately revived in Europe: it seemed to sleep for ages, and at last fought its way among us through tilts, tournaments, dragons, and all the dreams of chivalry. The rest of the world, China only excepted, are, and have ever been, utter strangers to its delights and advantages. In other countries, as men find themselves stronger than women, they lay a claim to rigorous superiority: this is natural, and love, which gives up this natural advantage, must certainly be the effect of art—an art calculated to lengthen out our happier moments, and add new graces to society.”
To this conclusion the lady interlocutor in the dialogue objects on the ground that “the effects of love are too violent to be the result of an artificial passion”; and suggests, by way of accounting for the absence of love, that “the same efforts that are used in some places to suppress pity, and other natural passions, may have been employed to extinguish love”; and that “those nations where it is cultivated only make nearer advances to nature.”
Goldsmith thus leaves it in doubt whether he considers Love a natural or an artificial passion. In the three passages which I have italicised, he errs: first, in saying that Love was “extinguished” in Rome, when in fact it never existed there, except incompletely in the poetic intuition of Ovid and possibly one or two other poets; secondly, he errs in remarking that it was lately “revived” in Europe, when in fact it was newly-born; and his excepting China, in speaking of the absence of Love, can only be looked on in the light of a joke in view of the absolute subjection of women to parental dictation, and the fact that, as one writer remarks, “a union prompted solely by love would be a monstrous infraction of the duty of filial obedience, and a predilection on the part of the female as heinous a crime as infidelity.” But his definition of Love as “the effect of art—an art calculated to lengthen out our happier moments and add new graces to society” is exceedingly