Here Shelley contradicts himself flatly by saying, in two consecutive sentences, that Greek women were “certainly devoid of the moral and intellectual loveliness” which inspires sentimental love, but that the men nevertheless could feel such love.  His mind was evidently hazy on the subject, and that is probably the reason why his essay remained a fragment.

MACAULAY, BULWER-LYTTON, GAUTIER

Macaulay, with deeper insight than Shelley showed, realized that the passion of love may undergo changes.  In his essay on Petrarch he notes that in the days of that poet love had become a new passion, and he clearly realizes the obstacles to love presented by Greek institutions.  Of the two classes of women in Greece, the respectable and the hetairai, he says: 

“The matrons and their daughters, confined in the harem—­insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but the mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were married—­could rarely excite interest; while their brilliant rivals, half graces, half harpies, elegant and refined, but fickle and rapacious, could never inspire respect.”

Lord Lytton wrote an essay on “The Influence of Love upon Literature and Real Life,” in which he stated that

“with Euripides commences the important distinction in the analysis of which all the most refined and intellectual of modern erotic literature consists, viz., the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment....  He is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us intellectually in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes.”

Theophile Gautier clearly realized one of the differences between ancient passion and modern love.  In Mademoiselle de Maupin, he makes this comment on the ancient love-poems: 

“Through all the subtleties and veiled expressions one hears the abrupt and harsh voice of the master who endeavors to soften his manner in speaking to a slave.  It is not, as in the love-poems written since the Christian era, a soul demanding love of another soul because it loves....  ’Make haste, Cynthia; the smallest wrinkle may prove the grave of the most violent passion.’  It is in this brutal formula that all ancient elegy is summed up.”

GOLDSMITH AND ROUSSEAU

In Romantic Love and Personal Beauty I intimated (116) that Oliver Goldsmith was the first author who had a suspicion of the fact that love is not the same everywhere and at all times.  My surmise was apparently correct; it is not refuted by any of the references to love by the several authors just quoted, since all of these were written from about a half a century to a century later than Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (published in 1764), which contains his dialogue on “Whether Love be a Natural or