Romantic love—commonly considered immutable—not only displays countless individual variations in regard to duration and degrees of intensity, but has a sort of “local colour” in each country; or, to keep up our old metaphor, a varying clangtint, depending on the greater or less prominence of certain “overtones.”

To describe all these varieties of Love would require a separate volume. And since all the most interesting forms of the romantic passion are to be met with in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and America, it will suffice to briefly characterise Love in those countries.

As literary luck would have it, the subject of French Love follows naturally upon the subject of the last chapter, the Remedia Amoris.

The French are too clever a nation to leave to individual effort the difficult task of curing the mind of such an obstinate thing as Love. All the papas and mammas in the land have put their heads together and devised two methods of killing Love wholesale, compared with which all the remedies named in the last chapter are mere fly-bites.

These two methods are Chaperonage and Parental Choice, as opposed to Courtship and Individual Sexual Selection.

Paradoxical as it may seem, there is in the midst of modern Europe a nation which, in the treatment of women, Love, and marriage, stands on the same low level of evolution as the ancient, mediÆval, and Oriental nations.

This is not a theory, but a fact patent to all, and attested by the best English, German, and French authors.

One of the deepest of French thinkers, whose eyes were opened by travel and comparison, De Stendhal, in 1842, says in his book De l’Amour: “Pour comprendre cette passion, que depuis trente ans la peur du ridicule cache avec tant de soin parmi nous, il faut en parler comme d’une maladie”—"To understand this passion, which during the last thirty years has been concealed among us with so much solicitude, from fear of ridicule, it is necessary to speak of it as a malady."

But Stendhal greatly understates the case. It was not only within thirty years from the time when he wrote, and by means of ridicule, that the French had tried hard to kill Love. They have never really emancipated themselves from mediÆval barbarism. Pure Romantic Love between two young unmarried persons has never yet flourished in France—because it has never been allowed to grow. To-day, as in the days of the Troubadours, the only form of Love celebrated in French plays and romances is the form which implies conjugal infidelity.

“Marriage, as treated in the old French epics,” says Ploss, “is rarely based on love;” the woman marries for protection, the man for her wealth or social affiliations. In the eighteenth century girls were compelled from their earliest years to live only for appearance sake: “The most harmless natural enjoyment, every childish ebullition, is interdicted as improper. Her mother denies her the expression of tender emotion as too bourgeois, too common. The little one grows up in a dreary, heartless vacuum; her deeper feelings remain undeveloped.... Real love would be too ordinary a motive of marriage, and therefore extremely ridiculous. It is not offered her, accordingly, nor does she feel any.”

Heine wrote from Paris in 1837 that “girls never fall in love in this country.” "With us in Germany, as also in England and other nations of Germanic origin, young girls are allowed the utmost possible liberty, whereas married women become subjected to the strict and anxious supervision of their husbands.

"Here in France, as already stated, the reverse is the case: young girls remain in the seclusion of a convent until they either marry or are introduced to the world under the strict eye of a relative. In the world, i.e. in the French salon, they always remain silent and little noticed, for it is neither good form here nor wise to make love to an unmarried girl.

“There lies the difference. We Germans, as well as our Germanic neighbours, bestow our love always on unmarried girls, and these only are celebrated by our poets; among the French, on the other hand, married women only are the object of love, in life as well as in literature.”

The difficulty of becoming acquainted with a young lady, Mr. Hamerton tells us, is greatest “in what may be called the ‘respectable’ classes in country-towns and their vicinities. In Parisian society young ladies go out into le monde, and may be seen and even spoken to at evening-parties.”

“And even spoken to” is good, is very good. What a privilege for the young men! The iron bars which formerly separated them from the young ladies have actually been removed, and they are allowed to speak to them—in presence of a heart-chilling, conversation-killing dragon. No wonder Parisian society is so corrupt!

Mr. Hamerton has given in Round My House the most realistic and fascinating account of French courtship and marriage-customs ever written. He is a great admirer of the French, always ready to excuse their foibles, and his testimony is, therefore, doubly valuable as that of an absolutely impartial witness. He had an opportunity for many years of studying French provincial life with an artist’s trained faculties; and here are a few sentences culled from his descriptions:—

“It is not merely difficult, in our neighbourhood, for a young man in the respectable classes to get acquainted with a young lady, but every conceivable arrangement is devised to make it absolutely impossible. Balls and evening-parties are hardly ever given, and when they are given great care is taken to keep young men out of them, and young marriageable girls either dance with each other or with mere children.”

Whereas in England “a young girl may go where she likes, without much risk to her good name,” a French girl “may not cross a street alone, nor open a book which has not been examined, nor have an opinion about anything.” “The French ideal of a well-brought-up young lady is that she should not know anything whatever about love and marriage, that she should be both innocent and ignorant, and both in the supreme degree—both to a degree which no English person can imagine.”

“The young men are not to blame; they would be ready enough, perhaps, to fall in love if they had the chance, like any Englishman or German, but the respectable parents of the young lady take care that they shall not have the chance of falling in love.”

The only opportunity a young man has of seeing a girl is at a distance, at church or in a religious procession. Here he may see her face; her character he can only ascertain through gossip, a lady friend, or the parish priest. It is much more respectable, however, to show no such curiosity, for its absence implies the absence of such a ridiculous thing as Love. “There is nothing which good society in France disapproves of so much as the passion of Love, or anything resembling it.” “When Coelebs asks for the hand of a girl he has seen for a minute, he may just possibly be in love with her, which is a degrading supposition; but if he has never seen her, you cannot even suspect him of a sentiment so unbecoming.”

There is but one way for the young man to gain admission to a house where there is a marriageable young lady: “He must first, through a third party, ask to marry the young lady, and, if her parents consent, he will then be admitted to see her and speak to her, but not otherwise. The respectable order of affairs is that the offer and acceptance should precede and not follow courtship.”

Would it be possible to conceive a more diabolically ingenious social machinery for massacring Romantic Love en gros?

“Marriages in France are generally arranged by the exercise of reason and prudence, rather than by either passion or affection.” Mr. Hamerton gives an amusing account of how he was asked to be matrimonial ambassador by a young man who had never seen the girl he wanted to marry. Mr. Hamerton obliged the young man, but was told by the mother that if the young man would wait two years he might have a fair chance, provided a richer or nobler suitor did not turn up in the meantime.

Money and Rank versus Love. French mammas have at least one virtue. They are not hypocrites.

The Countess von Bothmer, who lived in France a quarter of a century, says in her French Home Life: “Where we so ordinarily listen to what we understand by love—to the temptations of the young heart in all their forms (however transitory), to our individual impressions and our own opinions—the French consult fitness of relative situation, reciprocities of fortune and position, and harmonies of family intercourse.”

To annihilate the last resource of Love—elopement—the Code NapolÉon forbids all marriages without either the consent of the father and mother, or proof that they are both dead. “It is very troublesome to get married in France; the operation is surrounded by difficulties and formalities which would make an Englishman stamp with rage.”

Social life, of course, suffers as much from this idiotic system as Romantic Love. French hospitality “does not extend beyond the family circle,” we are informed by M. Max O’Rell, who also gives this amusing instance of the imbecility or mental slavery (he does not use these words) produced by the French system of education and chaperonage:—

“I remember I was one day sitting in the Champs ElysÉes with two English ladies. Beside us was a young French girl with her father and mother. The person on the right of papa rose and went away, and we heard the young innocent say to her mother: ‘Mamma, may I go and sit by papa?’ It was a baby of about eighteen or twenty. Those English ladies laugh over the affair to this day.”

Boys suffer as well as girls. As the author of an article on “Parisian Psychology” remarks: “There are no mothers in France; it is a nation of ‘mammas,’ who, in the most unlimited sense of the word, spoil their boys, weaken them in body and soul, dwarf their thought, dry their hearts, and lower them to below even their own level, hoping thereby to rule over them through life, as they too often do. Frenchwomen having been at best but half-wives, regard their children as a sort of compensation for what they have themselves not had; and after the mischievous fashion of weak ‘mammas’ prolong babyhood till far into mature life.”

The French, in fact, are a nation of babies. Their puerile conceit, which prevents them from learning to read any language but their own, and thus finding out what other nations think of them, is responsible in part for the mediÆval barbarism of their matrimonial arrangements. The Parisian is the most provincial animal in the world. In any other metropolis—be it London, New York, Vienna, or Berlin—people understand and relish whatever is good in literature, art, and life, be it English, American, French, German, or Italian. But the Parisian understands only what is narrowly and exclusively French. And this is the dictionary definition of Provincialism.

The consequences of this mediÆvalism and provincialism in modern France are thus eloquently summed up by a writer in the Westminster Review (1877):—

“Such education as girls receive is not only not a preparation for the wedded state, it is a positive disqualification for it. They are not taught to read, they are not taught to reason; they are launched into life without a single intellectual interest. The whole effort of their early training goes to fill their mind with puerilities and superstitions. As regards God, they are instructed to believe in relics and old bones; as regards man, they are instructed to believe in dress, in mannerisms, and coquetry. Their love of appreciation, after being enormously developed, is bottled up and tied down until a husband is found to draw the cork. What else, then, can we look for but an explosion of frivolity? Can we expect that such a provision of coquettishness will be reserved for the husband’s exclusive use? He will be tired of it in three months—unless it is tired of him before; and then the pent-up waters will forsake their narrow bed and overflow the country far and wide.”

No wonder NapolÉon remarked that “Love does more harm than good.” And right he was, most emphatically, for the only kind of Love possible in France does infinite harm. It poisons life and literature alike.

We can now understand the fierceness of Dumas’s attacks on mariages de convenance: “The manifest deterioration of the race touches him; it does not touch us. Nor do we at all realise the next to impossibility of a man ever marrying for love in France. There are those who have tried to do it, but they can never get on in life; they are reputed of ‘bad example’” (St. James’s Gazette).

And now we come upon a paradox which has puzzled a great many thinkers. The Countess von Bothmer, while deploring the absence of Love in French courtship, endeavours to show that domestic happiness and conjugal affection are, nevertheless, not rare in France. French husbands “are ordinarily with their wives, accompany them wherever they can, and share their friendships and distractions.” Mr. Hamerton likewise bears witness that French girls “become excellent wives, faithful, orderly, dutiful, contented, and economical. They all either love their husbands, or conduct themselves as if they did so.” He says the notion fostered by novels “that Frenchmen are always occupied in making love to their neighbours’ wives” is nonsense; that there is no more adultery than elsewhere. “There exists in foreign countries, and especially in England, a belief that Frenchwomen are very generally adulteresses. The origin of the belief is this,— the manner in which marriages are generally managed in France leaves no room for interesting love-stories. Novelists and dramatists must find love-stories somewhere, and so they have to seek for them in illicit intrigues.”

This is all very ingenious, but the argument is not conclusive. Even granted for a moment that Mr. Hamerton is right in his defence of French conjugal life, is it not a more than sufficient condemnation of the French system of “courtship” that one-half of the nation are prevented from reading its literature because it is so foul and filthy—because Love has been made synonymous with adultery?

But Mr. Hamerton’s assertion loses its probability when viewed in the light of the following considerations. He himself admits that the French are anxious to read about Love, that the novelists and dramatists must find stories of Love somewhere—mind you, not of conjugal but of Romantic Love—and the Paris Figaro not long ago denounced the French novelists of the period for devoting their stories to Love almost exclusively, whereas Balzac, Dumas, Thackeray, and Scott, at least introduced various other matters of interest. Now French novels have the largest editions of any books published; and if so vast an interest is displayed by the French in reading about Love, is it likely that their interest is purely literary? Certainly not. They will seek it in real life. And in real life it can only be found in one sphere, which elsewhere is protected against such invasions, by the young being allowed to meet one another. “It is to be feared that they who marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry.’”marry.’” In this respect human nature is the same the world over. The testimony of scores of unprejudiced authors on this head cannot be ignored.

This, however, is only one of the evils following from the French suppression of pre-matrimonial Love. The parents may or may not suffer through conjugal jealousy and infidelity, one thing is certain,—that the children suffer from it, in body and mind. It is leading to the depopulation of France. It was M. Jules Rochard who called attention to the fact that “France, which two centuries ago included one-third of the total population of Europe, now contains but one-tenth”; although the death-rate is smaller in France than in most European countries, and although there has been a gradual increase of wealth throughout the country.

That the suppression of Romantic Love and of all opportunities for courtship is the principal cause of the decline of France, is apparent from the fact that the countries in which population increases most rapidly—as America and Great Britain—are those in which Romantic Love is the chief motive to marriage.

Romantic Love goes by complementary qualities, the defects of the parents neutralising one another in the offspring; so that the children who are the issue of a love-match are commonly more beautiful than their parents. In France there is no selection whatever, except with reference to money and rank. Not even Health is considered, the sine qua non of Love as well as Beauty. Hence the absence of Love in France has led to the almost absolute absence of beauty. And it would be nothing short of a miracle if the offspring of a young maiden, still in her teens, and an old broken-down sinner, chosen by her parents for his wealth or social position, were any different from the puny, hairy men and coarse-featured, vulgar women that make up the bulk of the French nation.

In Paris one does occasionally see a fine figure and a rather pretty face, but they almost always belong to the lower classes. As the lower classes allow the young considerable freedom, it would seem as if beauty in this class ought to be as common an article as in England or the United States. But the incapacity of the young women for feeling and reciprocating Love neutralises these opportunities. For of what use is it for a man to feel Love if the woman invariably bases her choice on money? This matter is most clearly brought out by Mr. Hamerton:—

“Amongst the lower classes, the peasantry and workmen ... girls have as much freedom as they have in England. The great institution of the parlement gives them ample opportunities for becoming acquainted with their lovers; indeed the acquaintance, in many cases, goes further than is altogether desirable. A peasant girl requires no parental help in looking after her own interests. She admits a lover to the happy state of parlement, which means that he has a right to talk with her when they meet, and to call upon her, dance with her, etc. The lover is always eager to fix the wedding-day, the girl is not so eager. She keeps him on indefinitely until a richer one appears, on which No. 1 has the mortification of seeing himself excluded from parlement, whilst another takes his place. In this way a clever girl will go on for several years, amusing herself by torturing amorous swains, until at length a sufficiently big fish nibbles at the bait, when she hooks him at once, and takes good care that he shall not escape. Nothing can be more pathetically ludicrous than the condition of a young peasant who is really in love, especially if he is able to write, for then he pours forth his feelings in innumerable letters full of tenderness and complaint. On her part the girl does not answer the letters, and has not the slightest pity for the unhappy victim of her charms. After seeing a good deal of such love-affairs I have come to the conclusion that in humble life young men do really very often feel

And they ‘wear the chain’ too. Young women, on the other hand, seem only to amuse themselves with all this simple-hearted devotion—

Schopenhauer pointed out that the French lack the GefÜhl fÜr das Innige—the tenderness and emotional depth which characterise the Germans and Italians. It is this that accounts for the inability of the French to appreciate Love, and for the fact that even vice is coarser in France than elsewhere, as remarked by Mr. Lecky, who, in his History of European Morals, contrasts “the coarse, cynical, ostentatious sensuality, which forms the most repulsive feature of the French character,” with “the dreamy, languid, and Æsthetical sensuality of the Spaniard or Italian.” And it remained for the French to attempt to deify vice as in that over-rated and repulsive story of Manon Lescaut.

Mme. de StaËl, who suffered so much from the provincialism (alias patriotism) of her countrymen, saw clearly the immorality of the French system of marrying girls without consulting their choice. Brandes relates the following anecdote of her: “One day, speaking of the unnaturalness of marriages arranged by the parents, as distinguished from those in which the young girls choose for themselves, she exclaimed, ‘I would compel my daughter to marry the man of her choice!’”

An attempt is being made at present in Paris to introduce the Anglo-American feminine spirit into society. The word flirter has been adopted, and the thing itself experimented with. But the French girl does not know how to draw the line between coquetry and flirtation. She needs a better education before she can flirt properly. This education the Government is trying to give her at present; but it meets with stubborn resistance from the priests, and from the old notion that intellectual culture is fatal to feminine charms and the capacity for affection. If this book should accomplish nothing else than prove that without intellect there can be no deep Love, it will not have been written in vain.

ITALIAN LOVE

In Italy, in the sixteenth century, women were kept in as strict seclusion as to-day in France; and with the same results,—conjugal infidelity and a great lack of Personal Beauty, as noted by Montaigne, who remarks at the same time that it was regarded as something quite extraordinary if a young lady was seen in public.

Byron wrote in 1817 that “Jealousy is not the order of the day in Venice”; and that the Italians “marry for their parents, and love for themselves.”

In Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s Life and Times of Titian we read that “Though chroniclers have left us to guess what the state of society may have been in Venice at the close of the fifteenth century, they give us reason to believe that it was deeply influenced by Oriental habit. The separation of men from women in churches, the long seclusion of unmarried females in convents or in the privacy of palaces, were but the precursors to marriages in which husbands were first allowed to see their wives as they came in state to dance round the wedding supper-table.”

But even at this early period when women were still treated as babies unable to take care of themselves, we find at least one trace of the Gallantry which is so essential an element in modern love. It was customary for the men, on festive occasions, to stand behind their wives’ chairs at table and serve them.

Extremely ungallant, on the other hand, are some of the Italian proverbs about women of this and other periods. “A woman is like a horse-chestnut—beautiful outside, worthless inside.” “Two women and a goose make a market.” “Married man—bird in cage.” “In buying a horse and taking a wife shut your eyes and commend your soul to heaven.”

Her exuberant health makes an Italian woman naturally prone to Love; but though she falls in love most readily, the passion is apt to be fugitive and superficial. She rarely loves with the passionate ardour of a Spanish woman. “What we notice especially in Italian women,” says Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, “is the absence of that alternation between those extremes of temperament which are so conspicuous in other Southern women. Energy is almost as unknown to her as the moral power of resignation and sacrifice. Hence it can hardly surprise us that Italian history records so few heroic women or pious female martyrs. Italy has produced neither a Jeanne d’Arc nor an Elizabeth of Thuringia; the crowns were too oppressive to be borne by these beauties, and life too enchanting for them to invite to tragic self-sacrifice.”

Probably the most realistic, and certainly the most fascinating, account of Italian love-making ever given is to be found in Mr. Howells’s Venetian Life. As it is too long to quote, I will attempt to condense it, though at some sacrifice of that literary “bouquet,” as an epicure would say, which constitutes the unique charm of Mr. Howells’s style:—

"The Venetians have had a practical and strictly businesslike way of arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has always been made for the dower and for the good of the state; private and public interest being consulted, the small matters of affection have been left to the chances of association.

"Herodotus relates that the Assyrian Veneti sold their daughters at auction to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably placed in life, the hard-favoured were given to whomsoever would take them, with such dower as might be considered a reasonable compensation. The auction was discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts still partook of the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction.

“These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her.”

“With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still greatly a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to the principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that they have not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the poorest, who cannot or will not seclude the youth of either sex from each other, and with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and subterfuge would be superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the Capa y espada comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried on with all the cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and stolen interviews.”

The “operatic method of courtship” thence resulting commonly assumes this form:—

“They follow that beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of the gray-moustached papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is electrically conscious of pursuit. They follow during the whole evening, and, at a distance, softly follow her home, where the burning Todaro photographs the number of the house upon the sensitised tablets of his soul. This is the first step in love: he has seen his adored one, and she knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardour.”

The next step consists in his frequenting the caffÉ, where she goes with her parents, and feasting his eyes on her beauty. After some time he may possibly get a chance to speak a few words to her under her balcony; or, what is more likely, he will bribe her servant-maid to bring her a love-letter. Or else he goes to church to admire her at a convenient distance.

“It must be confessed that if the Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his devotion must assume the character of an intolerable bore to her; and that to see him everywhere at her heels—to behold him leaning against the pillar near which she kneels at church, the head of his stick in his mouth, and his attitude carefully taken with a view to captivation—to be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or turning round at the caffÉ encounter his pleading gaze—that all this must drive the Biondina to a state bordering upon blasphemy and finger-nails. Ma, come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza? This is the sole course open to ingenuous youth in Venice, where confessed and unashamed acquaintance between young people is extremely difficult; and so this blind pursuit must go on till the Biondina’s inclinations are at last laboriously ascertained.” Then follow the inquiries as to her dowry, after which nothing remains but “to demand her in marriage of her father, and after that to make her acquaintance.”

Topsy-turvy as this last arrangement may seem to Anglo-American notions, here at least Love has some chance to bring about real Sexual Selection, for a Southerner’s passions are momentarily inflamed, and the Italian Cupid needs but a moment to fix his choice. And what distinguishes Italy still more favourably from France is that, whereas the French consider Love ridiculous, and have made the most ingenious contrivances for annihilating it, the Italians worship it, revel in it, and are inclined rather to make too many concessions to it than to ignore it.

The result is patent to all eyes. For every attractive Frenchwoman there are to-day a hundred beautiful Italians. And were Anglo-American methods of courtship introduced in Italy, beauty would again be doubled in amount. It must not be forgotten, however, that Love, as a beautifier of mankind, has in Italy very strong allies in the balmy air and sunshine, tempting to constant outdoor life, which mellows the complexion, brightens the eyes, and fills out the figure to those full yet elegant proportions which instantaneously arouse the romantic passion.

SPANISH LOVE

Spanish veins contain more Oriental blood than those of any other European nation; and to the present day Eastern methods of treating women cast their shadow on Spanish life. But the shadow is so light, and so much mitigated by the rosy hue of romance, that the “local colour” of Love in Spain presents an unusually fascinating spectacle, which countless literary artists have attempted to depict.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Oriental shadow was much darker, and kept the women in extreme subjection and ignorance. “Their life,” says Professor Scherr, speaking even of the queens, “passed away in a luxurious tedium which dulled the sentiments to the point of idiocy. They were only crowned slaves. As an instance of their absolute deprivation of liberty may be cited the case of Elizabeth, wife of Philip II., who, when in 1565 she went to Bayonne to meet her mother, had to wait three days before the gates of Burgos before it was possible to ascertain the king’s decision whether the queen should pass through the city or around it.”

“Women of rank,” he continues, "lived in a seclusion bordering on that of a convent, if not surpassing it. For nuns were at least allowed to speak to male visitors behind bars, whereas married women were strictly forbidden to receive the visit of a man, except with the special permission of the husband. And only during the first year of their wedded life were they allowed to frequent public drives in open carriages by the side of their husband; subsequently they were only allowed to go out in closed carriages. Of cosy family life not a trace.... Even the table did not unite the husband and wife; the master took his meal alone, while his wife and children sat respectfully on the floor on carpets, with their legs crossed in Oriental fashion.

“The poor women, excluded from every refined social diversion, were confined to manual work, gossip with their duennas, mechanical praying, playing with their rosaries, and—intriguing. For the greater the subjection of women, the more does their cunning grow, the more passionate becomes their desire to avenge themselves on their tyrants. The Spaniards found this out to their cost. The most inexorable spirit of revenge, all the parade of ‘Spanish honour,’ bordering in its excess on clownishness, could not prevent the Spanish dames from loving and being loved.”

In course of time this Oriental despotism, with its fatal consequences to conjugal fidelity—as in France—has been greatly mitigated in Spain. In Pepys’s Diary, 1667, we read of an informant who told the writer “of their wooing [in Spain] by serenades at the window, and that their friends do always make the match; but yet they have opportunities to meet at masse at church, and there they make love.”

In an interesting book on Spain, written almost two and a quarter centuries after Pepys’s Diary—Mr. Lathrop’s Spanish Vistas—we still read concerning this ecclesiastic Love-making, in the Seville Cathedral: “Every door was guarded by a squad of the decrepit army, so that entrance there became a horror. These sanctuary beggars serve a double purpose, however. The black-garbed Sevillan ladies, who are perpetually stealing in and out noiselessly under cover of their archly-draped lace veils—losing themselves in the dark, incense-laden interior, or emerging from confession into the daylight glare again—are careful to drop some slight conscience-money into the palms that wait. Occasionally, by pre-arrangement, one of these beggars will convey into the hand that passes him a silver piece, a tightly-folded note from some clandestine lover. It is a convenient underground mail, and I am afraid the venerable church innocently shelters a good many little transactions of this kind.”

How greatly the facilities for falling in love and for making love have been increased in modern Spain is vividly brought out in the following citation from Schweiger-Lerchenfeld regarding the scenes to be witnessed every evening on the crowded promenade or Rambla at Barcelona:—

“Are these elegantly-attired ramblers one and all suitors, since they put no limit nor restraint on their whispered flatteries? No, that is simply the custom in Barcelona. The women and girls are beautiful, and though they are well aware of it, they nevertheless allow their charms to be whispered in their ears hundreds of times every evening—a freedom of intercourse which is only possible on Spanish soil.... And thus one of these adored beauties walks up and down in the glare of the lamps, and sweet music is wafted to her ears: ‘Your beauty dazzles me,’ whispers one voice; and another, ‘Happiness and anguish your eyes are burning into my soul.’ One compliments the chosen one on her hair, another on her figure, a third on her graceful gait. Young adorers feel a thrill running down their whole body if her mantilla only touches them; while mature lovers are contented with nothing less than a pressure of the hand. It is a picture that is possible, conceivable only in Spain.”

The same writer quotes some specimens of Spanish Love-songs, one of which may be transferred to this page—

“Show me, my little charmer, the tear in your handkerchief; to Madrid will I take it and have it set by a jeweller.”

What a contrast between this modern complimentary and poetic form of Gallantry and the form prevalent in the good old times when lovers endeavoured to win a maiden’s favour by flagellating themselves under her window until the blood ran down their backs; and when, as Scherr adds, “it was regarded as the surest sign of supreme gallantry if some of the blood bespattered the clothes of the beauty to whom this crazy act of devotion was addressed!”

Nevertheless, the Spanish still have much to learn from England and America regarding the proper methods of Courtship; for, according to a writer in Macmillan’s Magazine (1874), the unmarried maiden of the higher classes, “like her humbler sister, can never have the privilege of seeing her lover in private, and very rarely, indeed, if ever, is he admitted into the sala where she is sitting. He may contrive to get a few minutes’ chat with her through the barred windows of her sala; but when a Spaniard leads his wife from the altar, he knows no more of her character, attainments, and disposition than does the parish priest who married them, and perhaps not so much.”

In one respect Spanish lovers have a great advantage over their unfortunate colleagues in France. There marriage is impossible without parental consent, whereas in Spain a law exists concerning which the writer just quoted says:—

“Should a Spanish lad and lassie become attached to one another, and the parents absolutely forbid the match, and refuse their daughter liberty and permission to marry, the lover has his remedy at law. He has but to make a statement of the facts on paper, and deposit it, signed and attested, with the alcalde or mayor of the township in which the lady’s parents dwell. The alcalde then makes an order, giving the young man the right of free entry into the house in question, within a certain number of days, for the purpose of wooing and carrying off his idol. The parents dare not interfere with the office of the alcalde, and the lady is taken to her lover’s arms. From that moment he, and he alone, is bound to provide for her: by his own act and deed she has become his property.” Should he prove false “the law comes upon him with all its force, and he is bound to maintain her, in every way, as a wife, under pain of punishment.”

Thus a Spanish girl is protected against perfidious lovers as well as is an English and American girl through the possibility of suing for breach of promise. If the short stories told in Don Quixote may be taken as examples, faithless lovers were very common in Spain at that time; which, doubtless, accounts for the origin of this law. The girls on their part erred by yielding too easily to the promises of the men; though they are partially excused by the great strength of their passions.

In his work on Suicide, Professor Morselli has statistics showing that more women take their life in Spain than in any other country; and he attributes this to the force of their passions, which is greater than in Italy, where the number of female suicides is considerably lower.

Thus Love has a more favourable ground in Spain than either in Italy or in France, notwithstanding certain restrictions. And the result shows itself in this, that all tourists unite in singing the praises of Spanish Beauty. Spain, indeed, unites in itself all the conditions favourable to Beauty: a climate tempting to outdoor life; a considerable amount of intellectual culture and Æsthetic refinement; a mixture of nationalities, fusing ethnic peculiarities into a harmonious whole; and Love, which fuses individual complementary qualities into a harmonious ensemble of beautiful features, graceful figure, amiable disposition, and refined manners.

GERMAN LOVE

When Tacitus penned his famous certificate of good moral character for the Germans of his time, he little suspected how many thousand times it would be quoted by the grateful and proud descendants of those early Teutons, and pinned to the lapels of their coats as a sort of prize medal in the competition for ancestral virtue. The more candid historians, however, admit that the Roman historian somewhat overdrew his picture in order to teach his own profligate countrymen a sort of Sunday school lesson, by the vivid contrast presented by these inhabitants of the northern virgin forests.

There is no question that women were held in considerable honour among these early Germans. Many of them served as priestesses, and adultery was punished with death. Polygamy existed only among the chiefs, and even among them it was not common. Yet the men did not treat the women as their equals. “They had more duties than privileges,” says Schweiger-Lerchenfeld. Their husbands were addicted to excessive drinking or gambling when not engaged in war or the chase, leaving the hard domestic and field labour to the women: and all this cannot have tended to refine the women.

“Marriage in the old Germanic times,” says Ploss, “was mostly an affair of expediency.... In the choice of a wife beauty was of less moment than property and good social antecedents. Love before the betrothal rarely occurs.”

Gustav Freytag, in his Pictures of German Life, during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, remarks: “Marriage was considered by our ancestors less as a union of two lovers than as an institution replete with duties and rights, not only of married people towards one another, but also towards their relatives, as a bond uniting two corporate bodies.... Therefore in the olden time the choice of husband and wife was always an affair of importance to the relatives on both sides, so that a German wooing from the oldest times, even until the last century, had the appearance of a business transaction, which was carried out with great regard to suitability.”

And a business transaction it is, unfortunately, to the present day, in the vast majority of cases. A certain amount of dower or property on the bride’s part is the first and most essential requisite. Second in importance is the desirability of not descending even a step in the social ladder, though an extra lump of gold commonly suffices to pull down social Pride to a lower level. Health, temper, Personal Beauty, and mutual suitability—these are the trifles which, other things being equal, come in as a third consideration. And thus is the order of Sexual Selection, as ordained by Love, commonly reversed.

What would an English or American youth of twenty-two say to his father if the latter should undertake to write to all his relatives, asking them to look about for an eligible partner for his son, and capping the climax by starting himself on a trip in search of a bride for his son? Would he accept without a murmur the girl thus found, and would an English or American girl thus allow herself to be given away like a cat in a bag, not knowing whitherwhither she was going? I have seen several such cases with my own eyes. One of them was most pathetic. For when the blooming bride, a sweet and refined girl, was introduced to the bridegroom selected for her by her parents—a repulsive-looking brute, twice her age—she conceived a perfect loathing for him, and almost wept out her eyes before the wedding-day. But the man was rich, and that settled the matter.

What aggravated this outrage was the fact that the bride’s father also was rich. And herein, in fact, lies the canker of the German system. Money is such a comfortable thing to have that it is useless to preach against it. There are money-marriages enough in England and America. But in these countries it is generally considered sufficient if one party has the money. Not so in Germany. It is not so much the comfort ensured by a certain amount of money that is aimed at as the superior social influence ensured by a large amount of wealth. Hence the rich marry the rich, regardless of other consequences, and poor Cupid is left shivering in the cold. So that, after all, the silly pride of social position is a greater enemy of Romantic Love than money.

And the consequences of such a matrimonial system? They have been most eloquently set forth by the blind old philosopher, Dr. DÜhring:—

“The amalgamation of fortunes, and the resulting enervating luxury of living, are the ruling matrimonial motives; and the want of mutual adaptation of the individuals becomes the cause of the degenerate appearance of the offspring. The loathsome products of such marriages then walk about as ugly embodiments and witnesses of such a degraded system of legalised prostitution (Kuppelwirthschaft). They bear the stamp of incongruity on body and mind; for their appearance shows them to be the offspring of disharmonious parents, blindly associated, or even, in many cases, of parents who themselves are already products of this new matrimonial method. This degeneracy necessarily continues from one generation to another, and in this manner maltreated Nature avenges herself by leading to personal decrepitude and the formation of a new sort of idiocy.”

“It is true,” he adds, “that love is not an infallible sign of mutual suitability; but when it is absent, or even replaced by aversion, it is certain that it is useless to expect a specially harmonious composition of the offspring.”

Is this one of the reasons why Personal Beauty is so rare, comparatively, in Germany?

But Individual Preference is not the only element of Love which thus suffers in Germany through false Pride and parental tyranny. Gallantry is another factor which needs mending. German women are sweet and amiable. In fact, they are too sweet and good-natured. They have spoiled the men, who in consequence are excessively selfish in their relations to women—the most selfish men in the world, outside of Turkey or China. True, the German officer in a ballroom seems to be the very essence of officious Gallantry. But his motives are too transparently Ovidian: it is not true Anglo-American politeness of the heart that inspires his conduct. He is either after forbidden sweets or parading his uniform and his vanity. Take the same man and watch him at home. His wife has to get him his chair, move it up to the fire, bring him his slippers, put the coffee in his hand, and do errands for him. When he goes out she puts on his overcoat and buttons it up carefully for him as if he were a helpless big baby. This would be all very well—for why should not women be gallant too?—if he would only retaliate. But he never dreams of it. Even if it comes to a task which calls for masculine muscular power—the carrying of bundles, etc.—he makes the wife do it. He is, in fact, matrimonially considered, not only a big baby but also a big brute, the very incarnation of masculine selfishness.

In former centuries it was customary in Germany, as it is now with us, for women to bow first to men. The modern German has reversed this. Woman has no right to bow until her lord and superior has invited her to do so by doffing his hat.

The German girl, says the Countess von Bothmer in German Home Life, “is taught that to be womanly she must be helpless, to be feminine she must be feeble, to endear herself she must be dependent, to charm she must cling.” “To keep carefully to the sheep-walk, to applaud in concert and condemn in chorus, is the only behaviour that can be tolerated.” “They have one bugbear and one object of idolatry, these monotonous ladies,—a fetish which they worship under the name of Mode; a monster between public opinion and Mrs. Grundy. To say a thing is not ‘Mode’ here, is to condemn it as if by all the laws of Media and Persia. It is not her centre [sic], but the system of her social education, that renders the German woman so hopelessly provincial.”

Of course it is the men who are responsible for this social education and this feminine ideal of absolute dependence. It suits their selfish pleasure to be worshipped and obeyed by the women without any efforts at gallant retaliation on their part.

A native writer tells us that “a true German philosophises occasionally while he embraces his sweetheart; while kissing even, theories will sprout in his mind.”

No wonder, therefore, that one of the German metaphysicians, Fichte, should have made a sophistic attempt to reduce masculine selfishness to a system. He proves to his own satisfaction that it is woman’s duty to sacrifice herself in man’s behalf; while man, on his part, has no such obligations. His reasoning is too elaborate to quote in full; but is too amusingly naÏve to be omitted, so I will translate the summary of it given by Kuno Fischer in his History of Philosophy:—

“What woman’s natural instincts demand is self-abandonment to a man; she desires this abandonment not for her own sake, but for the man’s sake; she gives herself to him, for him. Now abandoning oneself for another is self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice from an instinctive impulse is Love. Therefore love is a kind of instinctive impulse which the sexual instinct in woman necessarily and involuntarily assumes. She feels the necessity of loving.... This impulse is peculiar to woman alone; woman alone loves [!!!]; only through woman does love appear among mankind.... The woman’s life should disappear in the man’s without a remnant, and it is this relation that is so beautifully and correctly indicated in the fact that the wife no longer uses her own name, but that of her husband [!].”

The latest (and it is to be hoped the last) of the German metaphysicians, the pessimist Hartmann, goes even a step beyond Fichte in arrogating for man special privileges in Love. If Fichte makes Love synonymous with Self-Sacrifice—feminine, mind you, not masculine—Hartmann tries to prove that man may love as often as he pleases, but woman only once. And what aggravates the offence, he does it in such a poetic manner. “Though it may be doubtful,” he says, “whether a man can truly love two women at the same time, it is beyond all doubt that he can love several in succession with all the depth of his heart; and the assertion that there is only one true love is an unwarranted generalisation to all mankind of a maxim which is true of woman alone.... Woman can learn but once by experience what love is, and it is painful for the lover not to be the one who teaches her first. True it is that a tree nipped by a spring frost brings forth a second crown of leaves, but so rich and luxuriant as the first it will not be; thus does a maiden-heart produce a second bloom, if the first had to wither before maturity, but its full and complete floral glory is unfolded only where love, aroused for the first time, passes in full vigour through all its phases.”

Yet it is not ungallant selfishness alone that prompts German men to bring up their women so that they shall be mere playthings at first and drudges after marriage, never real soul-mates. They have the same old stupid continental fear that culture of the intellect weakens the feelings. This fear is based on slovenly reasoning—on the inference that because a few blue-stockings have at all ages made themselves ridiculous by assuming masculine attributes and parading their lack of tenderness and feminine delicacy, therefore intellectual training must be fatal to feminine charms. As if there were not plenty of masculine blue-stockings, or pedants, without disproving the fact that the men of the greatest intellectual power—men of genius—are also the most emotional and refined of all men; or the fact proved by this whole monograph, that Love and general emotional refinement grow with the general intellectual culture of women.

A typical illustration of German feeling on the subject of female education is to be found in Schweiger-Lerchenfeld’s Frauenleben der Erde, p. 530. Referring to the attempts now being made in France to give young girls a rational education, he quotes the opinion of a French legislator that a girl thus brought up would not love less deeply than heretofore, while she would love more intelligently; and then comments as follows: “How far this anticipation may be realised cannot be decided now or in the near future. At any rate we must leave to the French themselves the task of getting along with this classical female generation of the future. Certain it is that their experiment will hardly be imitated, and that the old Romans and Greeks may eventually become more dangerous to masculine supremacy (AutoritÄt) than the pilgrimage stories of Lourdes.”

It is time for German woman to rise in revolt against this mediÆval masculine selfishness. Not in active revolt, for a warlike woman is an abomination. But in passive revolt. Let them cease to spoil the men, and these bears will become more gallant. Germany is later in almost every phase of literary and social culture than England. It was not an accident that Shakspere came before Heine, the English before the German poet of Love; for Love is much less advanced in Germany than in England. It has not even passed the stage where a harsh sort of Coyness is still in place. German women want to learn the cunning to be strange, They are too deferential to the men, too easily won. They want to learn to indulge in harmless flirtation, and they want the education which will give them wit enough to flirt cleverly and make the men mellow.

It must be admitted, however, notwithstanding all these strictures, that there is much genuine Romantic Love in Germany, often differing in no wise from Anglo-American Love. At first sight it seems, indeed, as if chaperonage were as strict as in France; and no doubt many German girls are brought up on the spring-chicken-coyness system which regards every man as a hawk, and a signal for hiding away in a corner. But in general German girls have much more freedom than French girls. They may walk alone in the street in the daytime, go alone to the conservatory to attend a music-lesson. They meet the young men freely at evening parties, dances, musical entertainments, etc.; and the chaperons are not nearly so obtrusive and offensive as in France. The mothers appear to have taken to heart Jean Paul’s saying that “in the mother’s presence it is impossible to carry on an edifying conversation with the daughter.” So that there is plenty of opportunity for falling in love; and were it not for parental dictation, Love-matches would perhaps be as common as in England. But the girls lack independence of spirit to defy parental tyranny, which it is their moral duty to defy where money or rank are pitted against Love. For the health and happiness of the next generation are at stake.

German girls also enjoy an advantage over the French in having a literature which is pure and wholesome; and by reading about Romantic Love they train and deepen their feelings. It is often said that Heine’s influence has been chiefly negative. The truth is, Heine is the greatest emotional educator Germany has ever had. More young men and girls have wept over his pathetic lyrics than over any other poetry. His Buch der Lieder has done more to foster the growth of Romantic Love in Germany than all other collections of verse combined; not only by their own unadorned beauty, but through the soulful music wedded to these poems by Schubert, Schumann, and other magicians of the heart. The fact that the copyright on Heine’s works was soon to expire, and the country to be flooded with cheap editions, has long caused Master Cupid to rub his hands in gleeful anticipation of brisk business; and he has just given orders in his arsenal for one hundred thousand new golden arrows.

Heine indeed fathomed the secrets of Love much more deeply than Goethe. Whereas Heine sang of Love in every major and minor key, Goethe appears to have emphasised chiefly its transitoriness. “Love, as Goethe knows it,” says Professor Seeley, “is very tender, and has a lyric note as fresh as that of a song-bird. In his Autobiography one love-passage succeeds another, but each comes speedily to an end. How far in each case he was to blame is a matter of controversy. But he seems to betray a way of thinking about women such as might be natural to an Oriental sultan. ‘I was in that agreeable phase,’ he writes, ‘when a new passion had begun to spring up in me before the old one had quite disappeared.’ About Frederika he blames himself without reserve, and uses strong expressions of contrition; but he forgets the matter strangely soon. In his distress of mind he says he found riding, and especially skating, bring much relief. This reminds us of the famous letter to the Frau von Stein about coffee. He is always ready in a moment to shake off the deepest impressions and receive new ones; and he never looks back.... Goethe was a man of the old rÉgime.... Had he entered into the reforming movement of his age, he might have striven to elevate women.... He certainly felt at times that all was not right in the status of women (‘woman’s fate is pitiable’), and how narrowly confined was their happiness (wie enggebunden ist des Weibes GlÜck) ... but he was not a reformer of institutions.”

A reformer of institutions, however, has apparently just arisen in Berlin. For we read that at a private female seminary the girls received the following subject for an essay: “There is from the Ideas of Plato, the atoms of Democritus, the Substance of Spinoza, the monads of Leibnitz, and from the subjective mental forms of Kant, the proof to bring, that the philosophy it never neglected has the to-be-calculated results of their hypotheses with their into-perception-falling effects to compare.”

Such subjects, so elegantly expressed, are no doubt eminently calculated to bring out the latent possibilities of feminine feeling and culture.

To close this chapter with a sweet, soothing concord—major triad, horns and ’cellos, smorzando—it must be admitted that the Germans have one ingredient of Romantic Love which all other nations must envy them. They have one more thrill in the drama of Love, in the ascending scale of familiarities, than we have, namely, the word Du, which is something very different from the stilted Thou, because still a part of everyday language. The second person singular is used in Germany towards pet animals and children, between students, intimate friends, relatives, and lovers. French “lovers” do not say tu to each other till after marriage, and even then they do not use it in public. But the German lover has the privilege, as soon as he is engaged, of exchanging the formal Sie for the affectionate Du; and the first Du that comes from her lips can hardly be less sweet than the first kiss.

There is a game of cards, popular among young folks in Germany, during which you have to address every one with Du whom you otherwise would have to call Sie, and vice versÂ; cards have to be called spoons, white black, etc. If there is a young man in the company secretly in love with a young lady, you can always “spot” him by the eagerness he shows to speak to her, and the fact that he always gets the Du right and everything else wrong; while she, strange to say, appears to have never heard of such a thing at all as a personal pronoun.

ENGLISH LOVE

Concerning Romantic Love in England and America, there is less to be said under the head of National Peculiarities than in case of the continental nations of Europe, for the simple reason that almost everything said in the pages on Modern Love refers especially to these two countries. Anglo-American Love is Romantic Love, pure and simple, as first depicted by Shakspere, and after him, with more or less accuracy, by a hundred other poets and novelists. There is no lack of colour in this Love—colour warm and glowing—but it is no longer a mere local colour, a national or provincial peculiarity, but Love in its essence, its cosmopolitan aspect; Love such as will in course of time prevail throughout the world, when the Anglisation of this planet—which is only a question of time—shall have been completed.

England has many a bright jewel in the crown of her achievements in behalf of civilisation, but the brightestbrightest of all is this, that she was the first country in the world—ancient, mediÆval, or modern—that removed the bars from woman’s prison-windows, opened every door to Cupid, and made him thoroughly welcome and comfortable. And grateful Cupid has retaliated by setting up English manners and customs as a model which all other nations are slowly but surely copying. Eighteen million souls in the United States, or almost two persons in every five, are not of English origin; yet of these there are not one million who have not given up their old country methods of courtship as antiquated, and adopted the Anglo-American style. The Germans in America make love not after the German but after the English fashion. So do the French, though somewhat more reluctantly and tardily. In San Francisco and Chicago it is said that but one name in ten is of English origin; yet who ever heard of a San Franciscan or Chicagoan making love in foreign style? During the last hundred years the majority of the immigrants to America have come from non-English countries; yet, though the parents enter the country as adults with all their national traditions stamped on their memories, they invariably allow their sons and daughters to court and be courted in American style. And now that England is gradually extending her influence to every one of the five continents, Romantic Love—to whose sway, quite as much as to their outdoor active life, the English owe the fact that they are to-day the handsomest and most energetic race in the world—is also rapidly extending its sphere, and will finally oust the last vestiges of Oriental despotism, feminine suppression, and mediÆval masculine barbarism.

For some centuries woman has been more favoured by law, and especially by national custom, in England than in any other European state. It is true that the Englishman who beats his wife is the most brutal savage on the face of the globe, but he is to be found only among the lowest classes. Nor has wife-selling ever been quite such a universal custom in England as foreigners imagine; although cases are on record as far back as 1302 and as late as 1884. In an article in All the Year Round (Dec. 20, 1884) more than twenty cases are enumerated with full details, the price of a wife varying from twenty-five guineas to a pint or half a pint of beer, or a penny and a dinner; and the Times of July 22, 1797, remarks sarcastically: “By some mistake or omission, in the report of the Smithfield market, we have not learned the average price of wives for the week. The increasing value of the fair sex is esteemed by several eminent writers the certain criterion of increasing civilisation. Smithfield has, on this ground, strong pretensions to refined improvement, as the price of wives has risen in that market from half a guinea to three guineas and a half.”

That these cases occurred only among the lowest classes is self-evident; yet even the lowest classes often resented the brutal transaction by pelting the offenders with stones and mud; whereas, as far as the women were concerned, the offence was mitigated by the fact that in all cases on record they appear to have been only too glad to be sold, so as to get rid of their tyrants.

It cannot be said that English women are all exempt from the hardest manual labour even to-day; but the tendency to relieve them of tasks unsuited to feminine muscular development has existed longer in England than elsewhere. The difference can be best observed with regard to agricultural labour. Any one who travels through Italy, Switzerland, France, or Germany in the autumn, gets the impression that most of the harvesting is done by the women; whereas in England, as shown by statistics, there are twenty-two men to every woman engaged as field-labourers. Yet even at that rate there are still 64,840 women in England engaged in agricultural labour unsuited to their sex.

On the other hand, English women, like American women, are manifesting a great disposition at present to try their hand or brain at almost every employment heretofore considered exclusively masculine. The census enumerates 349 different classes of work, and of these all but about 70 have been invaded by women; including 5 horse-dealers, 14 bicycle makers and dealers, 16 sculptors, 18 fence makers, 19 fossil diggers, etc.; whereas there are as yet no female pilots, dentists, police officers, shepherds, law students, architects, cab-drivers, commercial travellers, barristers, etc. [Full list in Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 3, 1884.]

Inasmuch as there are almost a million more women than men in England, it is not surprising that women should thus seek to extend their sphere of usefulness. We live in an experimental epoch, when it is to be ascertained what is and what is not becoming to woman regarded as a labourer. It is therefore of the utmost importance that there should be some standard by which each employment is to be judged. And this standard, fortunately, is supplied by Romantic Love.

We have seen that the tendency of civilisation has been to differentiate the sexes more and more in appearance, character, and emotional susceptibilities, and that on this differentiation depends the existence and power of Love, because it individualises man and woman, and Love is the more intense the more it is individualised.

Hence every employment which tends to make woman masculine in appearance or habits is to be tabooed by her because antagonistic to Love. If she, nevertheless, persists in it, Love will have its revenge by eliminating her through Sexual Selection. No man will marry a masculine woman, or fall in love with her, so that her unnatural temperament will not be transmitted to the next generation and multiplied.

But what is to be accepted as the standard of femininity? The answer is given us by Nature. Throughout the animal world, with a few insignificant exceptions, the sexes are differentiated distinctly; and the female is the more tender and gentle of the two, the more devoted to domestic affection and the care and education of the young, the more amiable, and, above all, less aggressive, bold, and pugnacious than the male. “Any education which women undergo,” says the Spectator, “should be an education not for the militant life of war against evil but for the spiritual life inspiring a persuasive or patient charity.... Even in a field properly suited to them—the field of charitable institutions, of poor-law work, of educational representation—women no sooner take up the cudgels than they lose their appropriate influence, and are either unsexed or paralysed.”

According to Mr. Ruskin, “woman’s work is—(1) To please people. (2) To feed them in dainty ways. (3) To clothe them. (4) To keep them orderly. (5) To teach them.”

Statistics concerning the employments instinctively sought by the majority of women bear out Mr. Ruskin’s table quite well. Woman’s first duty is to please people by being beautiful, amiable, and fascinating in conversation and manners. No man would marry a woman unless she pleased him in one way or another; hence matrimony is the most successful female profession, which in England includes 4,437,962 women. But there are other ways in which women seek to please and prosper; hence there are in England 2368 actresses as against 2197 actors, and 11,376 women whose profession is music, as against 14,170 men.

Domestic service, which includes the “feeding in dainty ways” (though too often the “dainty” must be omitted), employs 1,230,406 women in England—about 30,000 fewer than industrial employments, which are somewhat more popular owing to the greater individual liberty they allow the employed. Yet domestic service is a much better preparation for married life than labour in a manufactory; so that, other things being equal, a labouring man looking for a wife would be apt to select one who has learned how to take care of his home. This thought ought to help to render domestic service more popular.

“To clothe them.” Dressmaking, staymaking (alas!), and millinery, employ 357,995 women in England.

“To keep them orderly.” Bathing and washing service employ 176,670 women; medicine and nursing, almost 50,000; missions, 1660.

“To teach them.” This, one of woman’s special vocations, eminently suited to her capacity, employs 123,995 females.

If I have failed in correctly interpreting Mr. Ruskin’s oracle, I stand subject to correction from that earnest labourer in the task of finding for woman her proper sphere—a work for which he has not yet received the recognition and thanks he deserves.

That marriage, and not miscellaneous employment, is woman’s true destiny, is shown by the way in which Cupid influences statistics. Thus there are in England about 29,000 school-mistresses aged 15-20, and 28,500 aged 25-45; but the time from 20-25, the period of courtship and marriage, has only 21,000. In the case of dressmakers this fact is brought out still more strikingly: 15-20—84,000; 20-25—76,000; 25-45—129,000, in round numbers.

Although, therefore, as Emerson remarks, “the circumstances may be easily imagined in which woman may speak, vote, argue cases, legislate, and drive coaches, if only it comes by degrees,” facts show that there is more philosophy of the future in Mrs. Hawthorne’s remark that “Home, I think, is the great arena for women, and there, I am sure, she can wield a power which no king or emperor can cope with.”

A consideration of all the foregoing facts shows that Love may be safely accepted as a guiding-star in making a proper division of the world’s labour between men and women. And the reason why England and America have made so much more progress than other nations in ascertaining woman’s true capacity and sphere, is because she has been educated to a point where she can assert her independence, and where she can inspire as well as feel Love—thus making man humble, gallant, gentle, ready to make concessions and remove restrictions. It is in England and America alone that Love plays a more important rÔle in marriage than money and social position; that the young are generally permitted to consult their own heart instead of parental command; and that the opportunities for courtship are so liberal and numerous that the young are enabled to fall in love with one another not only for dazzling qualities of Personal Beauty, viewed for a moment, but for traits of character, emotional refinement, and a cultured intellect.

These two nations alone have fully taken to heart and heeded Addison’s maxim that “Those marriages generally abound most with love and constancy that are preceded by a long courtship. The passion should strike root and gather strength before marriage be grafted on it. A long course of hopes and expectations fixes the idea in our minds, and habituates us to a fondness of the person beloved.”

There is, however, a difference between English and American Love which shows that we have learned Addison’s lesson even better than his own countrymen. As Mr. Robert Laird Collier remarks in English Home Life: “The American custom, among the mass of the people, of leaving young men and young women free to associate together and to keep company with each other for an indefinite length of time, without declaring their intentions, is almost unknown in any country of Europe. It is not long after a young man begins to show the daughter attentions before the father gives intimation that he wishes to know what it means, and either the youth declares his intentions or is notified to ‘cut sticks.’” “Courtships in England are short, and engagements are long.”

The London Standard doubtless exaggerates the difference between English and American girls and their attitude toward men in the course of an article, part of which may, nevertheless, be cited: “American girls offer a bright example to their English sisters of a happy, unclouded youth, and instances seem to be few of their abusing the liberty which is accorded to them. Perhaps their immunity from sentimental troubles arises from the fact that from earliest childhood they have been comrades of the other sex, and are therefore not disposed to turn a man into a demi-god because they only see one at rare intervals under the eagle eye of a mother or aunt. A great revolution in public opinion would be required ere English girls could be emancipated to the extent which prevails on the other side of the Atlantic, and even then it is doubtful whether the system would work well. The daughters of Albion, with but few exceptions, are single-hearted, earnest, and prone to look upon everything seriously. They often make the mistake of imagining that a man is in love because he is decently civil.”

Yet in German Home Life, written from an English point of view, we read that “There is no such thing as country life, as we understand it, in Germany; no cosy sociability, smiling snugness, pleasant bounties and hospitalities; and, above all, for the young folk, no freedom, flirtation, boatings, sketchings, high teas, scamperings, and merriments generally.” And again: “The sort of frank ‘flirtation,’ beginning openly in fun and ending in amusement, which is common amongst healthy, high-spirited boys and girls in England, and has no latent element of intrigue or vanity in it, but is born of exuberant animal spirits, youthful frolics, and healthy pastimes shared together, is forbidden to her” (the German girl).

The Standard itself apparently contradicts itself in another article on “Flirtation,” concerning which it says: “It is usually so innocent that it has become part of the education most of our young women pass through in their training for society. The British matron smiles contentedly when she sees that her daughter, just entered on her teens, exhibits a partiality for long walks and soft-toned confabulations with her cousin Fred or her brother’s favourite schoolmate. Three or four such juvenile attachments will do the girl no harm, if they are gently watched over by the parental eye. They serve to evolve the sexually social instincts in a gradual way. Through them the bashful maiden learns the nature of man in the same fashion as she takes lessons on the piano. In a word, she is ‘getting her hand in’ for the real game of matrimony that is to be played in a few years. Her youthful swains, of course, derive their own instructions from these innocent amours.... Chivalrous feeling is developed which it takes a deal of worldly wisdom to smother in after years.... When we observe this sentimentality in a boy, we derive great amusement from it, but it should raise the lad in our estimation. He has something in him to which ideals appeal, and his early-developed susceptibility will—to use a beautiful but forgotten word—engentle his nature.”

Perhaps the difference between English and American courtship and flirtation is not so great as often painted, and is becoming less every year, owing to the Americanisation of Europe.

AMERICAN LOVE

It is in the United States of America that Plato’s ideal—so completely ignored by his countrymen—that young men and women should have ample opportunity to meet and get acquainted with one another before marriage, is most perfectly realised; as well as Addison’s supplementary advice that marriage should be preceded by a long courtship.

As boys and girls in America are commonly educated in the same schools, they are initiated at an early age into the sweets and sorrows of Calf-love Courtship, which has such a refining influence on the boys, and renders the girls more easy and natural in society when they get older; destroying among other puerilities that spring-chicken Coyness which makes many of their European sisters appear so silly. In the Western country-schools each girl has her “beau”—a boy of fourteen to seventeen—who brings her flowers, apples, or other presents, accompanies her home, and performs various other gallant services; nor has any harm ever been known to result from this juvenile Courtship—except an occasional elopement, in case of a prematurely frivolous couple, whom it was just as well to get rid of in that way as any other.

When they get a little older, the young folks go to picnics without a chaperon, or they enjoy a drive or sleigh-ride, or go a-skating together; and after a party, dance, church fair, or other social gathering, where the elders commonly keep out of the way considerately, each young man accompanies a young lady home. Were you to insinuate to him the advisability of having a chaperon for the young lady, he would inform you pointedly that the young lady needed no protection inasmuch as he was a gentleman and not a tramp. It is this high sense of gentlemanly honour that protects women in America—a hundred times better than all the barred windows of the Orient and the dragons of Europe. Thanks to this feeling of modern chivalry, a young lady may travel all alone from New York to Chicago, or even to San Francisco, and, if her manners are modest and refined, she will not once be insulted by word or look, not even in passing through the roughest mining regions.

It is the consciousness of this chivalrous code of honour among the men that gives an American girl the frank and natural gaze which is one of her greatest charms, and that allows her to talk to a man just introduced as if they were old acquaintances. It is a knowledge of this gentlemanly code that makes parents feel perfectly at ease in leaving their daughter alone in the parlour all the evening with a visitor. In a word, American customs prove that if you treat a man as a gentleman he will behave like a gentleman.

Unquestionably there are girls who abuse the liberty allowed them, and encourage the men to encourage them in their freedom. Mr. Henry James has done a most valuable service in holding up the mirror to one of these girls, to serve as a warning to all Daisy Millers and semi-Daisy Millers. There are not a few of the latter kind, and I have myself met three full-fledged specimens of the real “Daisy” in Europe—girls who would not have hesitated to go out rowing on a lake at eleven o’clock in the evening with a man known to them only a few hours, or to go next day with him to visit an old tower, or to say that mamma “always makes a fuss if I introduce a gentleman. But I do introduce them—almost always. If I didn’t introduce my gentlemen friends to mother, I shouldn’t think I was natural.” It is this class of American tourists that have, unfortunately, given foreigners a caricatured notion of the American girl’s deportment.

Etiquette differs somewhat in various American cities and among the different classes. For instance, a young lady of the “upper circles,” who in Chicago is permitted to drive to the theatre in a carriage with a young man, is not allowed the same privilege in New York.

The New York Sun, an excellent authority in social matters, gives the whole philosophy of American Courtship and Love in answering a young man’s question as to whether, in asking a young lady of the highest circles to accompany him to a place of amusement, it is necessary to invite a chaperon at the same time. He is told that he must,—in those circles:—

"But these people are only a few among the many. What is called society more exclusively in New York comprises, all told, no more than a hundred or two hundred families. Outside of them, of course, there are larger circles, to which they give the law to a greater or less extent, but the whole number of men and women in this great town of a million and a half of inhabitants who pay obedience to that law is not over a few thousand.

"Nine girls out of ten in New York, with the full consent of their parents and as a matter of course, accompany young men to amusements without taking a chaperon along. They feel, and they are, entirely able to look out for themselves, and they would regard the whole fun as spoiled if a third person was on hand to watch over them. A large part of the audience at every theatre is always made up of young men and young women who have come out in pairs, and who have no thought of violating any rule of propriety. Very many of these girls would never be invited to the theatre by their male acquaintances if they were under the dominion of such a usage, for the men want them to themselves, else they would not ask their company, and besides do not feel able to pay for an extra ticket for an obnoxious third person; or, if they have a little more money to spare, they prefer to expend it at an ice-cream saloon after the play.

"Nor can it be said that the morals of these less formal young people are any worse than those of the more exacting society. Probably they are better on the average, and if the laws of Murray Hill prevailed throughout this city, the marriage-rate of New York would be likely to decline, for nothing discourages the passion of the average young man so much as his inability to meet the charmer except in the presence of a third person, who acts as a buffer between him and her. He feels that he has no show, and cannot appear to good advantage under the eyes of a cool critic, whereas if he could walk with the girl alone in the shades of the balmy evening, the courage to declare his affection would come to him.

“Therefore it is that engagements, even in the most fashionable society, are commonly made in the country during the summer, where the young people come together more freely and more constantly than in the town.”

The attempt made in certain corners of New York “Society” to introduce the foreign system of chaperonage is one of the most absurd and incongruous efforts at aping foreign fashions (which are on the decline even in Europe) ever witnessed in our midst. In Europe Chaperonage is in so far excusable, as it is a modified survival from barbarous times when men were mostly brutes, being drunk half the time and on military expeditions the other half. To treat American men, who are brought up as gentlemen, and commonly behave as such, as mediÆval ruffians, is a gratuitous insult, which they ought to resent by avoiding those houses where Oriental experiments are being tried with the daughters. That would bring the “mammas” to reason very soon.

Yet it would seem as if New York “Society” had already had enough of the Oriental experiment; for the same high authority just quoted asserted last autumn that “A regular stampede in favour of the liberty of the young unmarried female is to be undertaken this winter by a number of ‘three-years-in-society’ veterans, supported and encouraged by nearly all this seasons dÉbutantes. The first step is to be the establishment of a right on the part of young girls to form parties for theatre matinÉes and afternoon concerts, untrammelled by the presence of even a matron of their own age, and to which all ‘reliable and well-behaved young men are to be eligible.’... Rule No. 2 establishes beyond all dispute the often-mooted question whether the presence of a brother and sister in a party of young people going to any place of evening amusement throws a shield of respectability over the others of the party. Society long ago frowned upon this mongrel kind of chaperonage; but upon the principle that no young man would permit indiscretions or improprieties in a party of which his sister made one, the ‘veterans’ have voted in favour of it. The young man with a sister is therefore to enact the part of dragon on these occasions, and will be largely in demand. Failing a convenient sister, he may get a cousin, perhaps, to take her place.”

When it comes to the cousin, the reversion to Americanism, pure and simple, will be complete.

The gentlemanliness and Gallantry of Americans have at all times been acknowledged by observers of all nationalities; and it is indeed hardly too much to say that the average American is disposed to treat the whole female sex with a studied Gallantry, which in most European countries is reserved by men for the one girl with whom they happen to be in love. Even the irate and vituperative Anthony Trollope in his book on North America was obliged to admit that “It must be borne in mind that in that country material wellbeing and education are more extended than with us, and that therefore men there have learned to be chivalrous who with us have hardly progressed so far. The conduct of the men to the women throughout the states is always gracious.... But it seems to me that the women have not advanced as far as the men have done.... In America the spirit of chivalry has sunk deeper among men than it has among women.”

Anthony Trollope is by no means the only writer who has put his finger on the greatest foible of American women. No doubt they have, as a class, been spoiled by excessive masculine Gallantry. They do not, like the women of the Troubadour period, who were similarly spoilt, go quite so far as to send their knights on crusades and among lepers, but they often shroud themselves in an atmosphere of selfishness which is very unfeminine—to choose a complimentary adjective.

In the East, where there is already a large excess of women over men, this evil is less marked than in the West, where women are still in a minority. Thus the Denver Tribune, in an article on “The Impoliteness of Women,” remarks: “If there is any characteristic of Americans of which they are more proud than any other, it is the courtesy which the men who are natives of this country exhibit towards women, and the respect which the gentler sex receives in public. This is a trait of the American character of which Americans are justly proud, and in which they doubtless excel the people of any other country. But while this is true of the men, it is a matter to be deeply regretted that as much cannot be said of the women of this country.” After praising American women for their beauty, vivacity, high moral character, and other charms, the Tribune adds that they “seem very generally to be prompted in their conduct in public by a spirit of selfishness which very often finds expression in acts of positive rudeness.” They are ungrateful, it continues, to the men who give up their seats in street-cars; they compel men to step into a muddy street, instead of walking one behind the other at a crossing; and at such places as the stamp-window of the post-office they do not wait for their turn, but force the men to stand aside.

Another Western paper, the Chicago Tribune, complains that in that city there are 10,000 homes in which the daughters are ignorant of the simplest kind of household duties. It adds “That they do not desire to learn; that, having been brought up to do nothing except appear gracefully in society, their object in life is to marry husbands who can support them in idle luxury; that this state of things has substituted for marriages founded on love and respect a market in which the men have quoted money-values, and where a young man, however great his talents, has no chance of winning a wife from the charmed circle.”

So that the pendulum has apparently swung to the other extreme. In mediÆval times the women were married for their money by the lazy, selfish men; now the women are lazy and selfish, while the men toil and are married for their money.

Yet there is much exaggeration in this view, which applies to only a small portion of the American people. We are far from the times when Miss Martineau complained of the feeble health of American women, and attributed it to the vacuity of their minds. Their health is still, on the average, inferior to that of English and German damsels, from whom they could also learn useful lessons in domestic matters; but intellectually the American woman has no equal in the world; while her sweetness, grace, and proverbial beauty combine into an ensemble which makes Cupid chuckle whenever he looks at a susceptible young man.

Goldsmith says somewhere that “the English love with violence, and expect violent love in return.” Certainly this holds true no less of the Americans. There are indeed several favourable circumstances which combine to make Romantic Love more ardent and more prevalent in the United States than in any other part of the world.

(1) The first is the intellectual culture of women just referred to, which they owe partly to the leisure they enjoy, partly to the fact that America has the best elementary schools in the world, so that their minds are aroused early from their dormant state. As Bishop Spalding remarks: “Woman here in the United States is more religious, more moral, and more intelligent than man; more intelligent in the sense of greater openness to ideas, greater flexibility of mind, and a wider acquaintance with literature.” Now the whole argument of this book tends to show that the capacity for feeling Romantic Love is dependent on intellectual culture, and increases with it; hence we might infer that there is more Love among the women of America than among those of any other country, even if this were not so patent from the greater number of Love-matches and various subtle signs known to international observers.

And as the sweetest pleasure and goad of Love lies in the conviction that it is really returned, man’s Love is thus doubled in ardour through woman’s responsive sympathy.

(2) That Courtship proper is longer than in England, and engagement shorter, is a circumstance in favour of America. For nothing adds so much to the ardour of Love as the uncertainty which prevails during Courtship; whereas, after engagement, all these alternate hopes and doubts, confidences and jealousies, are quieted, and the ship approaches the still waters of the harbour of matrimony, which may be quite as deep but are less sublime and romantic than mid-ocean, with its possibilities of storm and shipwreck.

Moreover, the longer the time of tentative Courtship, the fewer are the chances of a mistake being made in selecting a sympathetic spouse.

In Germany an engagement is so conclusive an affair that it is announced in the papers, and cards are sent out as at a wedding. In America we meet with the other extreme, for it is not very unusual for a couple to be engaged some time before even the parents know it. Though there is such a thing as breach of promise suits against fickle young men, such engagements, if unsatisfactory to either side, are commonly broken off amicably. And, as one of Mr. Howells’s characters remarks in Indian Summer: “A broken engagement may be a bad thing in some cases, but I am inclined to think it is the very best thing that could happen in most cases where it happens. The evil is done long before; the broken engagement is merely sanative, and so far beneficent.”

Were engagements less readily dissolved, divorces would be more frequent even than they are now.

(3) Parental dictation is almost unknown in America; nowhere else have young men and women such absolute freedom to choose their own soul-mate. Hence Individual Preference, on which the ardour of Love depends in the highest degree, has full sway. The comparative absence of barriers of rank and social grade also makes it easier for a man to find and claim his real Juliet.

(4) This dependence of Love on Individualisation gives it another advantage in America. For nowhere is there so great a mixture of nationalities as here; and, away from home, a national peculiarity of feature or manners has a sort of individualising effect. Till we get used to such national peculiarities through their constant recurrence we are apt to judge almost every woman in a new city attractive. From this point of view Love may be defined as an instinctive longing to absorb national traits, and blend them all in the one cosmopolitan type of perfect Personal Beauty.

(5) There are beautiful women in all countries of the world, but no country has so many pretty girls as America. Money and rank find it hard to compete with such loveliness, hence Love has its own way. Here alone is it possible to find heiresses who have failed to get married through lack of Beauty. Personal Beauty is the great matchmaker in America; and thus it comes that Beauty is ever inherited and multiplied. For Love is the cause of Beauty as Beauty is the cause of Love.

One more characteristic of American Love remains to be noted—the most unique of all. American women are of all women in the world the most self-conscious, and have the keenest sense of humour. To these quick-witted damsels the sentimental sublimities of amorous Hyperbole, which may touch the heart of a naÏve German or Italian girl, are apt to appear dangerously near the ludicrous; hence an American lover, if he is clever enough, deliberately covers the step which separates the sublime from the ridiculous. He gilds the gold of his compliments by using the form of playful exaggeration, which is the more easy to him because exaggeration is a national form of American humour. Mr. Howells’s heroes often make love in this fashion. The lover in The Lady of the Aroostook spices his flatteries with open burlesque, and succeeds admirably with this new Ars Amoris; and Colville in Indian Summer says to Imogene: “Come, I’ll go, of course, Imogene. A fancy-ball to please you is a very different thing from a fancy-ball in the abstract.”

“Oh, what nice things you say! Do you know, I always admired your compliments? I think they’re the most charming compliments in the world.”

“I don’t think they’re half so pretty as yours; but they’re more sincere.”

“No, honestly. They flatter, and at the same time they make fun of the flattery a little; they make a person feel that you like them even while you laugh at them.”

Perfect success in this form of flattery requires a talent for epigram. Not many, unfortunately, even in America, are poets and wits at the same time, like Mr. Howells; but there is an abundance of clever compliments nevertheless, and they are apt to assume the form of playful exaggeration.