Primitive Love and Love-Stories by Henry Theophilus Finck
page 42 of 1254 (03%)
page 42 of 1254 (03%)
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designate pure prematrimonial love. There is a passage in Steele's
_Lover_ (dated 1714) which proves that it must have been in common use in a similar sense two centuries ago. The passage refers to "the reign of the amorous Charles the Second," and declares that "the licenses of that court did not only make the Love which the Vulgar call Romantick, the object of Jest and Ridicule, but even common Decency and Modesty were almost abandoned as formal and unnatural." Here there is an obvious antithesis between romantic and sensual. The same antithesis was used by Hegel in contrasting the sensual love of the ancient Greeks and Romans with what he calls modern "romantic" love. Waitz-Gerland, too, in the six volumes of their _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, repeatedly refer to (alleged) cases of "romantic love" among savages and barbarians, having in all probability adopted the term from Hegel. The peculiar appropriateness of the word romantic to designate imaginative love will be set forth later in the chapter entitled Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment. Here I will only add an important truth which I shall have occasion to repeat often--that _a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love_; for it is obvious, for instance, that an elopement prompted by the most frivolous sensual passion, without a trace of real love, may lead to the most romantic incidents. In the chapters on affection, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, I shall make it clear even to a Saturday Reviewer that the gross sensual infatuation which leads a man to shoot a girl who refuses him, or a tramp to assault a woman on a lonely road and afterward to cut her throat in order to hide his crime, is absolutely antipodal to the |
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