to be picked at once and used to gratify their appetite. Nay, they cannot even wait till it is a full-blown rose, but must destroy the lovely bud. The "civilized" Hindoos, who are allowed legally to sacrifice girls to their lusts before the poor victims have reached the age of puberty, are really on a level with the African savages who indulge in the same practice. An unsophisticated reader of Kalidasa might find in the King's comparison of Sakuntala to "a flower that no one has smelt, a sprig that no one has plucked, a pearl that has not yet been pierced," a recognition of the charm of maiden purity. But there is a world-wide difference between this and the modern sentiment. The King's attitude, as the context shows, is simply that of an epicure who prefers his oysters fresh. The modern sentiment is embodied in Heine's exquisite lines:

DU BIST WIE EINE BLUME.

E'en as a lovely flower

So fair, so pure, thou art ;

I gaze on thee and sadness

Comes stealing o'er my heart.

My hands I fain had folded
Upon thy soft brown hair,

Praying that God may keep thee

So lovely, pure, and fair.

-Trans. of Kate Freiligrath Kroeker.

It is not surprising that this intensely modern poem should have been set to music-the most modern of all the artsmore frequently than any other verses ever written. To Orientals, to savages, to Greeks, it would be incomprehensibleas incomprehensible as Ruskin's "there is no true conqueror of lust but love," or Tennyson's

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

To them the love between men and women seems not a purifying, ennobling emotion, a stimulus to self-improvement and an impulse to do generous, unselfish deeds, but a mere animal passion, low and degrading.

LOVE DESPISED IN JAPAN AND CHINA

The Japanese have a little more regard for women than most Orientals, yet by them, too, love is regarded as a low passion-as, in fact, identical with lust. It is not considered respectable for young folks to arrange their own marriages on a basis of love.

"Among the lower classes, indeed," says Küchler,1 "such direct unions are not unfrequent; but they are held in contempt, and are known as yago (meeting on a moor), a term of disrespect, showing the low opinion entertained of it." Professor Chamberlain writes, in his Things Japanese (285): "One love marriage we have heard of, one in eighteen years ! But then both the young people had been brought up in America. Accordingly they took the reins in their own. hands, to the great scandal of all their friends and relations."

On another page (308) he says: "According to the Confucian ethical code, which the Japanese adopted, a man's parents, his teacher, and his lord claim his life-long service, his wife standing on an immeasurably lower plane."2 Ball, in his Things Chinese comments on the efforts made by Chinamen to suppress love-matches as being immoral; and the French author, L. A. Martin, says, in his book on Chinese morals (171):

"Chinese philosophers know nothing of Platonic love; they speak of the relations between men and women with the greatest reserve, and we must attribute this to the low esteem in which they generally hold the fair sex; in their illustrations of the disorders of love, it is almost always the woman on whom the blame of seduction is laid."

1 Trans. Asiatic Soc. of Japan, 1885, p. 181.

In the Journal des Goncourts (V., 214-215) a young Japanese, with characteristic topsy-turviness, comments on the "" coarseness of European ideas of love, Vous dites à une

which he could understand only in his own coarse way. femme, je vous aime! Eh bien! Chez nous, c'est comme si on disait: Madame, je vais coucher avec vous. Tont ce que nous osons dire à la dame que nous aimons, c'est que nous envions près d'elle la place des canards mandarins. C'est messieurs, notre oiseau d'amour."

GREEK SCORN FOR WOMAN-LOVE

The Greeks were in the same boat. They did indeed distin, guish between two kinds of love, the sensual and the celestialbut as we shall see in detail in the special chapter devoted to them they applied the celestial kind only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love between men and women. That love was considered impure and degrading, a humiliating affliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable to the friendship between men or the feelings that unite parents and children. This is the view taken in Plato's writings, in Xenophon's Symposium and everywhere. In Plutarch's Dialogue on Love, written five hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faint protest against the current notion that "there is no gust of friendship or heavenly ravishment of mind," in the love for women; but this is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which is thus brutally expressed by one of the interlocutors in the same dialogue: "True love has nothing to do with women, and I assert that you who are passionately inclined toward women and maidens do not love any more than flies love milk or bees honey, or cooks the calves and birds whom they fatten in the dark. The passion for women consists at the best in the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty." Another interlocutor sums up the Greek attitude in these words: "It behooves respectable women neither to love nor to be loved."

Goethe had an aperçu of the absence of purity in Greek love when he wrote, in his Roman Elegies:

In der heroischen Zeit, da Götter und Göttinnen liebten.
Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.

PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY

The change in love from the barbarian and ancient attitude to the modern conception of it as a refining, purifying feeling is closely connected with the growth of the altruistic ingredients of love-sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection,

and especially adoration. It is one of the points where religion and love meet. Mariolatry greatly affected men's attitude toward women in general, including their notions about love. There is a curious passage in Burton worth citing here (III., 2):

"Christ himself, and the Virgin Mary, had most beautiful eyes, as amiable eyes as any persons, saith Baradius, that ever lived, yet withal so modest, so chaste, that whosoever looked on them was freed from that passion of burning lust, if we may believe Gerson and Bonaventure; there was no such antidote against it as the Virgin Mary's face.'

Medieval theologians had a special name for this facultyPenetrative Virginity which McClintock and Strong's Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature defines as

"such an extraordinary or perfect gift of chastity, to which some have pretended that it overpowered those by whom they have been surrounded, and created in them an insensibility to the pleasures of the flesh. The Virgin Mary, according to some Romanists, was possessed of this gift, which made those who beheld her, notwithstanding her beauty, to have no sentiments but such as were consistent with chastity."

In the eyes of refined modern lovers, every spotless maiden has that gift of penetrative virginity. The beauty of her face, or the charm of her character, inspires in him an affection which is as pure, as chaste, as the love of flowers. But it was only very gradually and slowly that human beauty gained the power to inspire such a pure love; the proof of which assertion is to be unfolded in our next section.

XIV. ADMIRATION OF PERSONAL BEAUTY "When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind," exclaimed Dryden; and Romeo asks:

Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.

In full-fledged romantic love of the masculine type the admiration of a girl's personal beauty is no doubt the most

entrancing ingredient. But such love is rare even to-day, while in ordinary love-affairs the sense of beauty does not play nearly so important a rôle as is commonly supposed. In woman's love, as everybody knows, the regard for masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient; and a man's love, provided sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, and purity enter into it, may be of the genuine romantic type, even though he has no sense of beauty at all. And this is lucky for the prospects of love, since, even among the most civilized races to-day, the number of men and women who, while otherwise refined and estimable, have no real appreciation of beauty, personal or otherwise, is astonishingly large.

DARWIN'S UNFORTUNATE MISTAKE

This being true of the average man and woman among the most cultured races, we ought to be able to conclude, as a matter of course and without the necessity of argumentation, that the admiration of personal beauty has still less to do with the motives that lead a savage to marry this or that girl, or a savage girl to prefer this or that suitor. Strange to say, this simple corollary of the doctrine of evolution has been greatly obscured by Darwin himself, by his theory of sexual selection, which goes so far as to attribute the beauty of the male animals to the continued preference by the females of the more showy males, and the consequent hereditary transmission of their colors and other ornaments. When we bear in mind how unimportant a rôle the regard for personal beauty plays even among the females of the most advanced human beings, the idea that the females of the lower animals are guided in their pairing by minute subtle differences in the beauty of masculine animals seems positively comic. It is an idea such as could have emanated only from a mind as unesthetic as Darwin's was.

So far as animals are concerned, Alfred Russell Wallace completely demolished the theory of sexual selection,' after

In his Tropical Nature, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, and Darwinism. In R. L. P. B., 42–50, where I gave a summary of this