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Page 17
One of the chief distinctions between the manners of ancient Greece
and modern Europe, consisted in the regulations and the sentiments
respecting sexual intercourse. Whether this difference arises from
some imperfect influence of the doctrines of Jesus, who alleges
the absolute and unconditional equality of all human beings, or
from the institutions of chivalry, or from a certain fundamental
difference of physical nature existing in the Celts, or from a
combination of all or any of these causes acting on each other, is
a question worthy of voluminous investigation. The fact is, that
the modern Europeans have in this circumstance, and in the abolition
of slavery, made an improvement the most decisive in the regulation
of human society; and all the virtue and the wisdom of the Periclean
age arose under other institutions, in spite of the diminution
which personal slavery and the inferiority of women, recognized by
law and opinion, must have produced in the delicacy, the strength,
the comprehensiveness, and the accuracy of their conceptions, in
moral, political, and metaphysical science, and perhaps in every
other art and science.
The women, thus degraded, became such as it was expected they
would become. They possessed, except with extraordinary exceptions,
the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably not
extremely beautiful; at least there was no such disproportion in
the attractions of the external form between the female and male
sex among the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans. They
were certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual loveliness
with which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of
sentiment animates, as with another life of overpowering grace,
the lineaments and the gestures of every form which they inhabit.
Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workings
of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwoven
labyrinths.
Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of
its legitimate object, they were incapable of sentimental love; and
that this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of
modern times. This object or its archetype for ever exists in the
mind, which selects among those who resemble it that which most
resembles it; and instinctively fills up the interstices of the
imperfect image, in the same manner as the imagination moulds and
completes the shapes in clouds, or in the fire, into the resemblances
of whatever form, animal, building, &c., happens to be present to
it. Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain degree
of civilization and refinement ever produces the want of sympathies
still more intimate and complete; and the gratification of the
senses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connexion. It
soon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicated
sentiment, which we call love, which is rather the universal thirst
for a communion not only of the senses, but of our whole nature,
intellectual, imaginative and sensitive, and which, when individualized,
becomes an imperious necessity, only to be satisfied by the complete
or partial, actual or supposed fulfilment of its claims. This want
grows more powerful in proportion to the development which our
nature receives from civilization, for man never ceases to be a
social being. The sexual impulse, which is only one, and often a
small part of those claims, serves, from its obvious and external
nature, as a kind of type or expression of the rest, a common basis,
an acknowledged and visible link. Still it is a claim which even
derives a strength not its own from the accessory circumstances
which surround it, and one which our nature thirsts to satisfy. To
estimate this, observe the degree of intensity and durability of
the love of the male towards the female in animals and savages and
acknowledge all the duration and intensity observable in the love
of civilized beings beyond that of savages to be produced from
other causes. In the susceptibility of the external senses there
is probably no important difference.
Among the ancient Greeks the male sex, one half of the human race,
received the highest cultivation and refinement: whilst the other,
so far as intellect is concerned, were educated as slaves and were
raised but few degrees in all that related to moral of intellectual
excellence above the condition of savages. The gradations in the
society of man present us with slow improvement in this respect.
The Roman women held a higher consideration in society, and were
esteemed almost as the equal partners with their husbands in the
regulation of domestic economy and the education of their children.
The practices and customs of modern Europe are essentially different
from and incomparably less pernicious than either, however remote
from what an enlightened mind cannot fail to desire as the future
destiny of human beings.
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