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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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