CHAPTER II.

LOVES OF THE CLASSIC POETS.

I am not sufficiently an antiquarian or scholar, to trace the muses

"upward to their spring," neither is there occasion to seek our first

examples of poetical loves in the days of fables and of demi-gods; or in

those pastoral ages when shepherds were kings and poets: the loves of

Orpheus and Eurydice are a little too shadowy, and those of the royal

Solomon rather too mixed and too mystical for our purpose.--To descend

then at once to the _classical_ ages of antiquity.

It must be allowed, that as far as women are concerned, we have not much

reason to regard them with reverence. The fragments of the amatory

poetry of the Greeks, which have been preserved to our times, show too

plainly in what light we were then regarded; and graceful and exquisite

as many of them are, they bear about them the taint of degraded morals

and manners, and are utterly destitute of that exalted sentiment of

respect and tenderness for woman, either individually or as a sex, which

alone can give them value in our eyes.

I must leave it then to learned commentators to explore and elucidate

the loves of Sappho and Anacreon. To us unlearned women, they shine out

through the long lapse of ages, bright _names_, and little else; a kind

of half-real,--half-ideal impersonations of love and song; the one

enveloped in "a fair luminous cloud," the other "veiled in shadowing

roses;" and thus veiled and thus shadowed, by all accounts, they had

better remain.

The same remark, with the same reservation, applies to the Latin poets.

They wrote beautiful verses, admirable for their harmony, elegance and

perspicuity of expression; and are studied as models of style in a

language, the knowledge of which, as far as these poets are concerned,

were best confined to the other sex. They lived in a corrupted age, and

their pages are deeply stained with its licentiousness; they inspire no

sympathy for their love, no interest, no respect for the objects of it.

How, indeed, should that be possible, when their mistresses, even

according to the lover's painting, were all either perfectly insipid, or

utterly abandoned and odious?[1] Ovid, he who has revealed to mortal

ears "all the soft scandal of the laughing sky," and whose gallantry has

become proverbial, represents himself as so incensed by the public and

shameless infidelities of his Corinna, that he treats her with the

unmanly brutality of some street ruffian;--in plain language, he beats

her. They are then reconciled, and again there are quarrels, coarse

reproaches, and mutual blows. At length the lady, as might be expected

from such tuition, becoming more and more abandoned, this delicate and

poetical lover requests, as a last favour, that she will, for the

future, take some trouble to deceive him more effectually; and the fair

one, can she do less? kindly consents!

Cynthia, the mistress of Propertius, gets tipsey, overturns the

supper-table, and throws the cups at her lover's head; he is delighted

with her _playfulness_: she leaves him to follow the camp with a

soldier; he weeps and laments: she returns to him again, and he is

enchanted with her amiable condescension. Her excesses are such, that he

is reduced to blush for her and for himself; and he confesses that he is

become, for her sake, the laughing-stock of all Rome. Cynthia is the

only one of these classical loves who seems to have possessed any mental

accomplishments. The poet praises, incidentally, her talents for music

and poetry; but not as if they added to her charms or enhanced her value

in his estimation. The Lesbia[2] of Catullus, whose eyes were red with

weeping the loss of her favourite sparrow, crowned a life of the most

flagitious excesses by poisoning her husband. Of the various ladies

celebrated by Horace and Tibullus, it would really be difficult to

discover which was most worthless, venal, and profligate. These were the

refined loves of the classic poets!

* * * * *

The passion they celebrated never seems to have inspired one ennobling

or generous sentiment, nor to have lifted them for one moment above the

grossest selfishness. They had no scruple in exhibiting their mistresses

to our eyes, as doubtless they appeared in their own, degraded by every

vice, and in every sense contemptible; beings, not only beyond the pale

of our sympathy, but of our toleration. Throughout their works, virtue

appears a mere jest: Love stript of his divinity, even by those who

first deified him, is what we disdain to call by that name; _sentiment_,

as we now understand the word,--that is, the union of fervent love with

reverence and delicacy towards its object,--a thing unknown and unheard

of,--and all is "of the earth, earthy."

* * * * *

It is for women I write; the fair, pure-hearted, delicate-minded, and

unclassical reader will recollect that I do not presume to speak of

these poets critically, being neither critic nor scholar; but merely

with a reference to my subject, and with a reference to my sex. As

monuments of the language and literature of a great and polished people,

rich with a thousand beauties of thought and style, doubtless they have

their value and their merit: but as monuments also of a state of morals

inconceivably gross and corrupt; of the condition of women degraded by

their own vices, the vices and tyranny of the other sex, and the

prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, the tendency of which, (however

disguised by rhetoric,) was ever to lower the tone of the mind;

considered in this point of view, they might as well have all burned

together in that vast bonfire of love-poetry which the Doctors of the

Church raised at Constantinople:--what a flame it must have made![3]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I need scarcely observe, that the following sketch of the lyrical

poets of Rome is abridged from the analysis of their works, in

Ginguene's Histoire Litteraire, vol. 3.

[2] Clodia, the wife of Quintus Metellus Celer.

[3] "J'ai oui dire dans mon enfance a Demetrius Chalcondyle, homme tres

instruit de tout ce qui regarde la Grece, qui les Pretres avaient eu

assez d'influence sur les Empereurs de Constantinople, pour les engager

a bruler les ouvrages de plusieurs anciens poetes Grecs, et en

particulier de ceux qui parlaient des amours, &c. * * * Ces pretres,

sans doute, montrerent une malveillance honteuse envers les anciens

poetes; mais ils donnerent une grande preuve d'integrite, de probite, et

de religion."--ALCYONIUS.

This sentiment is put into the mouth of Leo X. at a time when the mania

of classical learning was at its height.--See Roscoe, (Leo X.) and

Ginguene.