Marriage and Morals/Chapter VI

With the victory of Christianity and the barbarians, the relations of men and women sank to a pitch of brutality which had been unknown in the ancient world for many centuries. The ancient world was vicious, but not brutal. In the Dark Ages religion and barbarism combined to degrade the sexual side of life. In marriage, the wife had no rights; outside marriage, since all was sin, there was no object in curbing the natural beastliness of the uncivilized male. The immorality of the Middle Ages was widespread and disgusting; bishops lived in open sin with their own daughters, and archbishops promoted their male favourites to neighbouring sees.^[1] There was a growing belief in the celibacy of the clergy, but practice did not keep pace with precept. Pope Gregory VII made immense exertions to cause priests to put away their concubines, yet so late as the time ​of Abélard we find him regarding it as possible, though scandalous, for him to marry Heloise. it was only towards the end of the thirteenth century that the celibacy of the clergy was rigidly enforced. The clergy, of course, continued to have illicit relations with women, though they could not give any dignity or beauty to these relations owing to the fact that they themselves considered them immoral and impure. Nor could the Church, in view of its ascetic outlook on sex, do anything whatever to beautify the conception of love. To do this was necessarily the work of the laity.

“It was not surprising that, having once broken their vows and begun to live what they deemed a life of habitual sin, the clergy should soon have sunk far below the level of the laity. We may not lay much stress on such isolated instances of depravity as that of Pope John XXIII, who was condemned for incest, among many other crimes, and for adultery; or the abbot-elect of St. Augustine, at Canterbury, who in 1171 was found, on investigation, to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village; or an abbot of St. Pelayo, in Spain, who in 1130 was proved to have kept not less than seventy concubines; or Henry III, Bishop of Liége, who was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate children; but it is impossible to resist the evidence of a long chain of Councils and ecclesiastical writers, who conspire in depicting far greater evils than simple concubinage. It was observed, that when ​the priests actually took wives, the knowledge that these connections were illegal was peculiarly fatal to their fidelity, and bigamy and extreme mobility of attachments were especially common among them. The writers of the middle ages are full of accounts of nunneries that were like brothels, of the vast multitude of infanticides within their walls, and of that inveterate prevalence of incest among the clergy, which rendered it necessary again and again to issue the most stringent enactments that priests should not be permitted to Hve with their mothers or sisters. Unnatural love, which it had been one of the great services of Christianity almost to eradicate from the world, is more than once spoken of as lingering in the monasteries; and shortly before the Reformation, complaints became loud and frequent of the employment of the confessional for the purposes of debauchery.”^[2]

Throughout the Middle Ages there is the most curious division between the Greco-Roman traditions of the Church and the Teutonic traditions of the aristocracy. Each had its contribution to make towards civilization, but the contributions were entirely distinct. The Church contributed learning, philosophy, the canon law, the conception of the unity of Christendom—all of them results of the tradition handed down from Mediterranean antiquity. The laity contributed the common law, ​the forms of secular government, chivalry, poetry and romance. The contribution which especially concerns us is romantic love.

To say that romantic love was unknown before the Middle Ages would not be correct, but it was only in the Middle Ages that it became a commonly recognized form of passion. The essential of romantic love is that it regards the beloved object as very difficult to possess and as very precious. It makes, therefore, great efforts of many kinds to win the love of the beloved object, by poetry, by song, by feats of arms, or by whatever other method may be thought most pleasing to the lady. The belief in the immense value of the lady is a psychological effect of the difficulty of obtaining her, and I think it may be laid down that when a man has no difficulty in obtaining a woman, his feeling towards her does not take the form of romantic love. Romantic love, as it appears in the Middle Ages, was not directed at first towards women with whom the lover could have either legitimate or illegitimate sexual relations; it was directed towards women of the highest respectability, who were separated from their romantic lovers by insuperable barriers of morality and convention. So thor​oughly had the Church performed its task of making men feel sex inherently impure, that it had become impossible to feel any poetic sentiment towards a lady unless she was regarded as unattainable. Accordingly love, if it was to have any beauty, had to be Platonic. It is very difficult for the modern to feel in imagination the psychology of the poet lovers in the Middle Ages. They profess ardent devotion without any desire for intimacy, and this seems to a modern so curious that he is apt to regard their love as no more than a literary convention. Doubtless on occasion it was no more than this, and doubtless its literary expression was dominated by conventions. But the love of Dante for Beatrice, as expressed in the ““Vita Nuova,” is certainly not merely conventional: I should say, on the contrary, that it is an emotion more passionate than any known to most moderns. The nobler spirits of the Middle Ages thought ill of this terrestrial life; our human instincts were to them the products of corruption and original sin; they hated the body and its lusts; pure joy was to them only possible in ecstatic contemplation of a kind which seemed to them free from all sexual alloy. In the sphere of love, this outlook could not but produce the kind of ​attitude which we find in Dante. A man who deeply loved and respected a woman would find it impossible to associate with her the idea of sexual intercourse, since all sexual intercourse would be to him more or less impure; his love would therefore take poetic and imaginative forms, and would naturally become filled with symbolism. The effect of all this upon literature was admirable, as may be seen in the gradual development of love poetry, from its beginning in the court of the Emperor Frederick II to its flowering in the Renaissance.

One of the best accounts known to me of love in the later Middle Ages is to be found in Huizinga’s book on “The Waning of the Middle Ages” (1924).

“When in the twelfth century,” he says, “unsatisfied desire was placed by the troubadours of Provence in the centre of the poetic conception of love, an important turn in the history of civilization was effected. Antiquity, too, had sung the sufferings of love but it had never conceived them save as the expectation of happiness or as its pitiful frustration. The sentimental point of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Cephalus and Procris, lies in their tragic end; in the heart-rending loss of a happiness already enjoyed. Courtly poetry, on the other hand, makes desire itself the essential motif, and so creates a conception of love with a negative ground-note. Without giving up all connection ​with sensual love, the new poetic ideal was capable of embracing all kinds of ethical aspirations. Love now became the field where all moral and cultural perfection flowered. Because of his love, the courtly lover is pure and virtuous. The spiritual element dominates more and more, till towards the end of the thirteenth century, the dolce stil nuovo of Dante and his friends ends by attributing to love the gift of bringing about a state of piety and holy intuition. Here an extreme had been reached. Italian poetry was gradually to find its way back to a less exalted expression of erotic sentiment. Petrarch is divided between the idea of spiritualized love and the more natural charm of antique models. Soon the artificial system of courtly love is abandoned, and its subtle distinctions will not be revived, when the Platonism of the Renaissance, latent, already, in the courtly conception, gives rise to new forms of erotic poetry with a spiritual tendency.”

In France and Burgundy, however, the development was not quite the same as it had been in Italy, since French aristocratic ideas of love were dominated by the “Romaunt of the Rose,” which dealt with knightly love but did not insist upon its remaining unsatisfied. It was, in fact, a revulsion against the teaching of the Church and a virtual pagan assertion of love’s rightful place in life.

“The existence of an upper class whose intellectual and moral notions are enshrined in an ars amandi remains a rather exceptional fact in history. In no other epoch did ​the ideal of civilization amalgamate to such a degree with that of love. Just as scholasticism represents the grand effort of the mediæval spirit to unite all philosophic thought in a single centre, so the theory of courtly love, in a less elevated sphere, tends to embrace all that appertains to the noble life. The Roman de la Rose did not destroy the system; it only modified its tendencies and enriched its contents.”^[3]

The age was one of extraordinary coarseness, but the kind of love advocated by the “Romaunt of the Rose,” while not virtuous in the priestly sense, is refined, gallant, and gentle. Such ideas were, of course, only for the aristocracy; they presupposed not only leisure but a certain emancipation from ecclesiastical tyranny. Tournaments, in which motives of love were prominent, were abhorred by the Church, which, however, was powerless to suppress them; in like manner it could not suppress the system of knightly love. In our democratic age we are apt to forget what the world has owed at various times to aristocracies. Certainly in this matter of the revival of love the Renaissance could not have been so successful had the way not been prepared by the romances of chivalry.

In the Renaissance, as a consequence of ​the revulsion towards Paganism, love usually ceased to be Platonic although it remained poetic. What the Renaissance thought of the mediæval convention is to be seen in the account of Don Quixote and his Dulcinea. Nevertheless the mediæval tradition remained not without influence; Sydney’s “Astrophel and Stella” is full of it, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Mr. W. H. are considerably influenced by it. On the whole, however, the characteristic love poetry of the Renaissance is cheerful and straightforward.

says an Elizabethan poet. This sentiment, it must be admitted, is straightforward and uninhibited, and by no means Platonic. The Renaissance had, however, learnt from the Platonic love of the Middle Ages to employ poetry as a means of courtship. Cloten in “Cymbeline” is laughed at because he cannot produce his own love poetry, but has to hire a penny-a-liner, who turns out “Hark, hark, the lark”—quite a creditable effort, one would say. It is curious that before the Middle Ages, al​though there had been a good deal of poetry concerned with love, there was very little that was directly a part of courtship. There is Chinese poetry representing the grief of a lady because of the absence of her lord; there is mystical Indian poetry, in which the soul is represented as the bride longing for the advent of the bridegroom, who is God; but one gathers that men had so little difficulty in securing the women they desired that it hardly ever became necessary to woo them with music and poetry. From the point of view of the arts, it is certainly regrettable when women are too accessible; what is most to be desired is that they should be difficult but not impossible of access. This situation has existed more or less since the Renaissance. The difficulties have been partly external and partly internal, the latter being derived from scruples due to conventional moral teaching.

Romantic love reached its apogee in the romantic movement, and one may perhaps take Shelley as its chief apostle. Shelley when he fell in love was filled with exquisite emotions and imaginative thoughts of a kind lending themselves to expression in poetry; naturally enough he considered that the emotion that ​produced these results was wholly good, and he saw no reason why love should ever be restrained. His argument, however, rested upon bad psychology. It was the obstacles to his desires that led him to write poetry. If the noble and unfortunate lady Emilia Viviani had not been carried off to a convent, he would not have found it necessary to write “Epipsychidion”; if Jane Williams had not been a fairly virtuous wife, he would never have written “The Recollection.” The social barriers against which he inveighed were an essential part of the stimulus to his best activities. Romantic love as it existed in Shelley depends upon a state of unstable equilibrium, where the conventional barriers still exist but are not quite insuperable; if the barriers are rigid, or if they do not exist, romantic love is not likely to flourish. Take at the one extreme the Chinese system: in this system a man never meets any respectable woman except his own wife, and when he feels her insufficient, he goes to a brothel; his wife is chosen for him and is probably unknown to him until the wedding day; consequently all his sex relations are entirely divorced from love in the romantic sense, and he never has occasion for those efforts of ​courtship which give rise to love poetry. In a state of complete freedom, on the other hand, a man capable of great love poetry is likely to have so much success through his charm that he will seldom have need of his best imaginative efforts in order to achieve a conquest. Thus love poetry depends upon a certain delicate balance between convention and freedom, and is not likely to exist in its best form where this balance is upset in either direction.

Love poetry, however, is not the only purpose of love, and romantic love may flourish even where it does not lead to artistic expression. I believe myself that romantic love is the source of the most intense delights that life has to offer. In the relations of a man and woman who love each other with passion and imagination and tenderness, there is something of inestimable value, to be ignorant of which is a great misfortune to any human being. I think it important that a social system should be such as to permit this joy, although it can only be an ingredient in life and not its main purpose.

In quite modern times, that is to say since about the period of the French Revolution, an idea has grown up that marriage should be the ​outcome of romantic love. Most moderns, at any rate in English-speaking countries, take this for granted, and have no idea that not long ago it was a revolutionary innovation. The novels and plays of a hundred years ago deal largely with the struggle of the younger generation to establish this new basis for marriage as opposed to the traditional marriage of parental choice. Whether the effect has been as good as the innovators hoped may be doubted. There is something to be said for Mrs. Malaprop’s principle, that love and aversion both wear off in matrimony so that it is better to begin with a little aversion. Certain it is that when people marry without previous sexual knowledge of each other and under the influence of romantic love, each imagines the other to be possessed of more than mortal perfections, and conceives that marriage is going to.be one long dream of bliss. This is especially liable to be the case with the woman if she has been brought up ignorant and pure, and therefore incapable of distinguishing sex hunger from congeniality. In America, where the romantic view of marriage has been taken more seriously than anywhere else, and where law and custom alike are based upon the dreams ​of spinsters, the result has been an extreme prevalence of divorce and an extreme rarity of happy marriages. Marriage is something more serious than the pleasure of two people in each other’s company; it is an institution which, through the fact that it gives rise to children, forms part of the intimate texture of society, and has an importance extending far beyond the personal feelings of the husband and wife. It may be good—I think it is good—that romantic love should form the motive for a marriage, but it should be understood that the kind of love which will enable a marriage to remain happy and to fulfil its social purpose is not romantic but is something more intimate, affectionate, and realistic. In romantic love the beloved object is not seen accurately, but through a glamorous mist; undoubtedly it is possible for a certain type of woman to remain wrapped in this mist even after marriage provided she has a husband of a certain type, but this can only be achieved if she avoids all real intimacy with her husband and preserves a sphinx-like secrecy as to her inmost thoughts and feelings, as well as a certain degree of bodily privacy. Such manœuvres, however, prevent a marriage from realizing its best possi​bilities, which depend upon an affectionate intimacy quite unmixed with illusion. Moreover, the view that romantic love is essential to marriage is too anarchic, and, like St. Paul’s view, though in an opposite sense, it forgets that children are what makes marriage important. But for children, there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex, but as soon as children enter in, the husband and wife, if they have any sense of responsibility or any affection for their offspring, are compelled to realize that their feelings towards each other are no longer what is of most importance.