a Fictitious Passion.”  His assertion therein that love existed only in early Rome, in chivalrous mediaeval Europe, and in China, all the rest of the world being, and having ever been, “utter strangers to its delights and advantages,” is, of course a mere bubble of his poetic fancy, not intended to be taken too seriously, and, is, moreover, at variance with facts.  It is odd that he overlooks the Greeks, whereas the other writers cited confine themselves to the Greeks and their Roman imitators.

Ten years before Goldsmith thus launched the idea that most nations were and had ever been strangers to the delights and advantages of love, Jean Jacques Rousseau published a treatise, Discours sur l’inegalite (1754), in which he asserted that savages are strangers to jealousy, know no domesticity, and evince no preferences, being as well pleased with one woman as with another.  Although, as we shall see later, many savages do have a crude sort of jealousy, domesticity, and individual preference, Rousseau, nevertheless, hints prophetically at a great truth—­the fact that some, at any rate, of the phenomena of love are not to be found in the life of savages.  Such a thought, naturally, was too novel to be accepted at once.  Ramdohr, for instance, declares (III. 17) that he cannot convince himself that Rousseau is right.  Yet, on the preceding page he himself had written that “it is unreasonable to speak of love between the sexes among peoples that have not yet advanced so far as to grant women humane consideration.”

LOVE A COMPOUND FEELING

All these things are of extreme interest as showing the blind struggles of a great idea to emerge from the mist into daylight.  The greatest obstacle to the recognition of the fact that love has a history, and is subject to the laws of evolution lay in the habit of looking upon it as a simple feeling.

When I wrote my first book on love, I believed that Herbert Spencer was the first thinker who grasped the idea that love is a composite state of mind.  I now see, however, that Silvius, in Shakspere’s As You Like It (V. 2), gave a broad hint of the truth, three hundred years ago.  Phoebe asks him to “tell what ’t is to love,” and he replies: 

     It is to be all made of sighs and tears.... 
     It is to be all made of faith and service.... 
     It is to be all made of fantasy,
     All made of passion, and all made of wishes,
     All adoration, duty, and observance,
     All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,
     All purity, all trial, all obedience.

Coleridge also vaguely recognized the composite nature of love in the first stanza of his famous poem: 

     All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
     Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
     All are but ministers of love,
       And feed his sacred flame.

And Swift adds, in “Cadenus and Vanessa:”