Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
That the ancient Greeks, though they may have possessed it, had but
little regard for Individuality is shown especially in their sculpture,
and in the fact that with them even marriage was considered less a
private than a social matter. Lycurgus, Solon, and Plato agreed in
viewing marriage as “a matter in which the state had a right to
interfere;” and for the purpose of providing the state with legitimate
citizens, it was therefore regarded as obligatory. The absence of
emotional expression in Greek statues equally shows their indifference
to Individualisation and their ignorance of Love: for Love is inspired
not so much by regularity of features as by fascinating variety of
emotional expression.
Thus the absence or disregard of individual traits among ancient nations
helps, like the absence of individual Choice, to account for the absence
of Romantic Love, the very essence of which—as distinguished from mere
sexual passion—is the insistance on individual traits and the mutual
adaptation of the lovers.
What sublime—or ridiculous—extremes, this absorption in individual
traits reaches in Modern Love, no one need be told. Not only does the
lover consider his maiden’s frowns more beautiful than other maidens’
smiles, but he longs to kiss the floor on which she has walked; and
every ribbon that has clasped her waist, every jewel that has touched
her ear or neck, becomes charged with a subtle and mysterious electric
current that would shock him with a thrill of recognition should his
fingers come in contact with them on a table, even in a dark room.
_Making Women Masculine._—Nothing proves so irrefutably the hopelessness
of the task undertaken by a few “strong-minded” women—namely, to
equalise the sexes by making women more masculine—than the fact thus
revealed by anthropology and history: that the tendency of civilisation
has been to make men and women more and more unlike, physically and
emotionally. Whatever approximation there may have been has been
entirely on the part of the men, who have become less coarse or “manly,”
in the old acceptation of that term, and more femininely refined; while
women have endeavoured to maintain the old distance by a corresponding
increase of refinement on their part. Should the Woman’s Rights viragoes
ever succeed in establishing their social ideal, when women will share
all the men’s privileges, make stump speeches, and—of course—go back to
the harvest fields and to war with them—then good-bye, Romantic Love!
But there is no danger that these Amazons will ever carry their point.
They might as well try to convince women to wear beards; or men,
crinolines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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