All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (14 page)

The secrecy is important, too. It heightens the meanings the twosome takes on. Gradually, in the eighteenth century, one aspect of this secrecy was transmuted into an idea of individual privacy: matters of love and sentiment became emphatically personal, something to be enacted far from the prying eyes of other family members and everpresent servants. It was then that the new family houses of aristocrats and bourgeoisie sprouted separate bedrooms and boudoirs with closed doors, as well as halls to reach them by: sex became a private matter.

The arts of seduction spelled out in courtly poetry were formalized by Andreas Capellanus sometime between 1174 and 1190 in
The Art of Courtly Love
–perhaps at the behest of King Philip II of France, or, as earlier scholars assumed, of Marie de Troyes, the daughter of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. The social and amatory forms the book describes were those of Queen Eleanor’s ‘Court of Love’, the most sophisticated court of its period. Here love of the highest courtly kind was believed to ennoble both lover and beloved. Capellanus used Ovid’s notorious
Ars Amatoria
as his source text, an earlier rule book where seduction consists of a series of cunning ploys with a distinct sexual end in view. This was not an altogether compatible source if, as scholars agree, the Provençal poets had a rather more spiritual process in mind, one in which Platonic influences, transported and revivified through early Arabic mystical writings and the Cordoban philosopher Ibn Hazm’s
The Ring of the Dove
, played their part. In these, the mistress’s earthly beauty is an intimation of heavenly beauty and angelic wisdom. These inspire the lover to great deeds. Love’s labours are a quest, here, for a transcendental truth, an ideal Platonic form, more akin to the Christian saint’s love of God than to Ovid’s altogether carnal seductions.

Capellanus’
De Amore
takes the form of a letter addressed to a friend who is being initiated into the civilizing art of love. It proceeds through various dialogues between men and women of different classes. Capellanus embraces the more spiritual form of courtly love due to the most highly placed of ladies, as well as the more mundane variety which includes lust and a tumble in the hay with peasant girls. There is an assumption that affection, even if immoderate, between man and wife is in no way akin to ‘true’ love’s highest calling, which has no place in marriage. Capellanus’ famous ‘rules’ of love grow out of these dialogues. They include the following:

Though Capellanus includes the rule that ‘It is not proper to love a woman whom one would be ashamed to seek to marry’, marriage is not the aim of courtly love. It is assumed that whatever the strength of the passion or the suffering it entails, both lover and beloved can be displaced by others. Yet for the length of time it lasts, ‘true love’ is based on faithful devotion.

Beatrice, the guiding spirit who finally leads Dante out of Purgatory and into the Paradiso of
The Divine Comedy
, is an instance of the idealized beloved of the courtly love poets. So, too, is Petrarch’s Laura, immortalized in the famous sonnets of the
Canzoniere
(Song Books). In both cases, the real women served as inspiration for poetry, but had little lived contact with the poets who translated them into the iconic mistresses of their work. Dante first met Beatrice when she was eight and he nine–a ‘first love’, one might say, which stayed with him for life, though both of them married others. Petrarch only glimpsed Laura in a church in Avignon, yet this fugitive beauty ignited a passion.

During the seventy-two-year reign of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV (1638–1715), those early bluestockings, the
précieuses
, took on the subject of courtly love. They debated and refined it in their
salons
to give love both a new psychological depth and a woman’s perspective of estimable values. In
La Carte de Tendre
, that map of an Arcadia of love which forms the frontispiece to her ten-volume novel
Clélie
(1654–60), Madeleine de Scudéry set out the correct and gallant path to winning a woman’s heart, as well as the dangers on the way. After the moment of ‘new friendship’, what count on the journey along the river of inclination towards love–apart from gallantry, little trinkets and
billets doux–
are characteristics such as sincerity, integrity, sensibility, respect and generosity. Persistence, too, is key. Amongst the pitfalls in this country of love, the Lake of Indifference and the Sea of Hostility loom, plus negative attributes such as indiscretion, pride, treachery and, interestingly, inequality. Women’s place in courtly love is at least equal–if not superior.

Madame de Lafayette’s hugely successful
La Princesse de Clèves
(1678) plays itself out, with new psychological intricacy, on this terrain of love. Set amidst an astutely observed court filled with envy and intrigues, the novel charts her introspective heroine’s trajectory from the age of fifteen when she is married off to the older Prince de Clèves. Soon, the Princess develops a closely analysed passion for the dashing Duc de Nemours. But their love, though she sees how it alters her relationship with her husband, is not one that can be fulfilled. Torn, like one of Racine’s classic heroines, between love and duty, even after her jealous husband dies, the Princess ends her days in a convent. Love here bows before the time’s aristocratic demands of form and honour.

It could be said that courtly love separated out to shape two different, though not always utterly distinguishable, trajectories: the profane focused on carnal passion; the sacred emphasized the romantic, the soulful, the transformative heights and depths of passion. The first tradition is a libertine one. Casanova and Byron or the fictional Valmont and Don Giovanni are its male exemplars, rakish and gallant by turn but ever concentrated on the seduction and pursuit of women, who are their prey, however willing or complicit. The chase, here, is as important and arguably more satisfying than any ultimate consummation, whatever its pleasures. As for the prey, unless they are already married and protected by class, they suffer the anguish of abandonment, and the wrecked lives that illegitimate pregnancy entailed. Amongst the female libertines are all those coquettes and courtesans of yore and the sirens of today, more often in search of fortune than fornication, who use their wiles to play the amoral mating game. Love here is mental and carnal, but rarely strays, except unwittingly, into the emotions.

In its playful, flirtatious French version, seduction can indeed be an art. Embedded in a tradition which understands passion as pleasure, it makes of love a titillating game, one that inhabits so special a place in life that even when it bursts out of the rules of the game to engage ungovernable emotions, laws as well as social forms are bent to give it room: a crime of passion is not an everyday crime. Passion is understood to have its own logic, which is in a certain measure beyond the law. Women in this tradition have a heightened, often civilizing, importance: they are, indeed, the mistresses of love, most particularly once they are already married.

Translated into contemporary manuals of behaviour, the arts of seduction gain a deadly earnestness which robs them of much of their allure and any of their potential link to love. They become utterly instrumental, as well as hard toil. In his racy
The Art of Seduction
(2001), Robert Greene, author of
The 48 Laws of Power
(1998), demonstrates seduction tactics for both sexes: ‘how to cast a spell, break down resistance, and… compel a target to surrender, all in the twenty-four maneuvers and strategies of the Seductive Process’. Manipulation, though it involves pretence, is never altogether art, and seduction here can look more like stalking than an engagement with pleasure. In a world where women are equal and sex casual, the attentiveness of a seducer, if unwanted, is less titillation than bullying.

When the tropes of courtly love left the royal courts of France to move across the English Channel and, in time, down the social ladder, they were very gradually naturalized into an idea of romance that often found its happy end in marriage. In the most summary fashion, one could say that chivalric heroism, the pursuit of wedded and unattainable queens–products of feudal societies who were regularly at war with near-neighbours–gave way by the sixteenth century to a literature which reflected both the lives and the aspirations of a new, more settled gentry and a rising middle class. Here, in the English language at least, the civilizing features of romance find a licit end. In
As You Like It
, Shakespeare combines old romance with new. Orlando is a noble, courtly lover–ever pinning verses declaiming his love of Rosalind to the trees. His verse is hardly of the highest calibre and Rosalind mocks it gently. Yet this love at first sight, proved by bravery and good character, finds its romantic end in marriage. Shakespeare provides a template replayed in fiction down the ages, from its more textured examples in Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë to the popular romances.

When marriage doesn’t mark the triumphant climax of love, death comes in its place. In Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774), written when he was just twenty-four, the young artist-hero’s romantic lovesickness for an unattainable Charlotte moves from intense idealization into an abject melancholy and eventual suicide. The book attained a celebrity akin to that of a pop hit today. A wave of copycat suicides across Europe followed, while Napoleon himself was inspired into verse and carried
Werther
with him on his Egyptian campaign.

The long eighteenth century saw the first great growth in the fiction-reading public in England. Richardson’s mid-century epistolary classics of sentimental psychology, in part conceived as manuals of good conduct,
Pamela or Virtue Rewarded
(1741) and the tragic
Clarissa
(1748), became the bestsellers of the day, read in towns and villages alike. They spawned both parodies and imitations. The rise and rise of popular romantic fictions and verse followed.

Popular romances emphatically twinned romantic love with marriage, making the first a sufficient motive for the second. The new circulating libraries extended the reach of these novels. In 1772, the
Universal Magazine
observed: ‘Of all the arrows which Cupid has shot at youthful hearts, [the modern novel] is the keenest. There is no resisting it. It is the literary opium that lulls every sense into delicious rapture.’ Both Samuel Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft criticized these addictive fictions, reflecting that the romantic love they described was no more than a male cover for lust. But their readership grew and the form proliferated, eventually to be condemned by Victorian clerics and mind doctors alike, who found them inimical to the health of young girls. By imbuing women with impossible fantasies of love which had all the redemptive features of a secular religion, they threatened to displace the godly one. ‘He who burns a romance purifies the human mind,’ wrote Richard Carlile, the radical nineteenth-century publisher, capturing the visceral tone of puritan revulsion that romance would elicit in the public sphere in the Victorian era. His disapproval may have been strengthened by the fact that, in that sexual division of labour which at the time placed emotion and the intimate life in the feminine camp and public life in the male, such popular romances were increasingly written by women.

The strength of the Victorian attacks on romance betrays a double fear. It is as if the reading of romance has begun in some mysterious way to stand in for sexuality itself. The pleasure women readers take in these stories of courting males and passionate or resisting heroines is illicit. Reading wives, daughters and servants will be led forever astray, rebel against parental or husbandly wishes, once their imaginations have been fired by the likes of Ouida’s audacious cross-dressing heroine, Cigarette, in
Under Two Flags
, or indeed, by Madame Bovary, whom Flaubert in part makes a victim of that same romantic impulse.

Not all men have been quite so vitriolic about a literary form read largely by women–one which offered both escape from drudgery and dreams that somewhere love and marriage (if not only love and death) could be combined. Earlier, at the height of literature’s Romantic period, the venerable Sir Walter Scott, whose own fictions charted the heights and depths of grand passion, had criticized Jane Austen for not being romantic enough. Cupid, he complained in a review of
Emma
, was unfairly left out of popular novels. Romance can render young men’s characters ‘honourable, dignified and disinterested’. For Scott, it seems, the reading of romance could provide a sentimental education for men, as much as for the women usually assumed to be its regular readers.