by Emily Hahn
Love Conquers Nothing
A Glandular History of Civilization
Emily Hahn
Contents
FOREWORD
PREFACE
UNHAPPY HELEN: Helen of Troy
THE WARM VOICE: Sappho
VERY UNPLEASANT CHARACTERS: Cleopatra
HENRY THE INEVITABLE: Henry VIII
THE WARRIOR QUEEN: Nzinga
BRIDE BY PROXY: Marie Françoise
THE KÖNIGSMARKS
1. Karl Johann
2. Philipp Christoph
THE BEARDED DEMOISELLE: D’Eon
THE INNOCENT ADMIRAL: Nelson
TWO LADIES OF CALCUTTA
1. Pearls and Kittens—Marian Hastings
2. The Princess—Madame Talleyrand
THE BUSINESS: Lady Flora Hastings
SUMMING IT UP
Foreword
Bibliographies are growing overornamented. If we do not look out they will suffer the fate of the trilobite, which committed race suicide by adding more and yet more trimming to itself. The same danger threatens the customary author’s acknowledgment, which is getting sillier and sillier. “Thanks are due the gallant public libraries of Maryland, Louisiana, and Vancouver. Thanks are due my courteous, loyal typing agency, without which this book would never have been typed.”
It is high time to ask the question: what should a bibliography be? If only critics would get their ideas sorted out on the subject, I would be less confused when preparing mine. I’ve always thought a bibliography is there to show where the writer got his source material. It need not be a dump heap of all the books from which I may possibly have extracted vague bits of atmosphere, nor a list of titles included in the name of general culture. A bibliography is not intended for showing off, on either the author’s or reviewer’s part. According to my ideas, it’s included for the convenience of that forgotten man, the reader.
Anyway, I’ve now worked myself into such a temper that I am not going to use a bibliography at all. The list would be too long and pretentious, considering the number of characters discussed in the text. After all, any reader who wants to can employ a library card index. I did. Let it be understood between us, then, that I’ve read a lot, though not nearly everything there is to be read on my subjects.
A few comments, nevertheless, seem to be in order. Grudgingly I vouchsafe the information that I used E. V. Rieu’s translations of Homer for the Helen chapter. My husband found me the material on Nzinga, mostly in Dapper’s Africa. Thanks are due my husband.
The direct quotation in the Cleopatra chapter I owe to Weigall.
The Sappho translations come from various anthologies. Two are from the Lindsay Homage to Sappho, which, for some incomprehensible reason, is on the restricted list of the British Museum Reading Room, and so must be read very close to the main desk, under the attendant’s suspicious eye. It really isn’t as shocking as all that. Thanks are due the attendant.
EMILY HAHN
Preface
Most decidedly, love does not conquer all. Why we have all grown up believing the tarradiddle that it does, handing it on to our children as an article of faith, passes my comprehension. It should be banished to a corner with such other quaint oddities among proverbs as “Early to bed and early to rise,” or “Cold hands, warm heart.” Love seldom conquers anything; it only makes a mess of arrangements once in a while and for a little time.
History proves it with negative evidence. Where did love conquer? Who are the great lovers we immediately think of, when we are asked to think of great lovers? Well, there are Cleopatra and Antony, for two; there are Tristan and Isolde, and Dante and Beatrice, and so forth. Cleopatra and Antony, when you come down to facts, were a political and economic merger. I cannot swallow that famous saying about the length of Cleopatra’s nose. It might have been a good deal shorter or longer for all Antony would have cared. Egypt, not her nose, was what Antony admired about Cleopatra. Dante and Beatrice were hardly a love affair; had they been, we would never have had Dante’s poetry; there would have been a lot of little Dantes instead. Tristan and Isolde, I grant you, are a model couple and everything lovers ought to be—fated to meet, constant if not faithful through long years of separation, clinging to hopes of each other, and dying tragically at the end for their love. But, alas, they never lived in fact. They are myths, like most of the other great lovers.
Not for a minute do I wish to deny that love meddles in things. It does. It swings the course of events this way and that way, so that history runs like a meandering river and not the neat canal we always try to build. Love does not, however, deflect the river so far as to carve out a new path that winds somewhere, unlike Swinburne’s, to a different sea. It would take a mighty love and a long-lived lover to do that, and humanity affords neither. The longer the river the easier it is to see the unflattering truth that we are puny people, with truncated lives and swiftly passing loves even shorter than our lives.
This, I grant you, is a pity. It would be a better thing for the world if love did conquer, for then all the captains and the kings would forget to go out and make conquests of their own. Love instead of power! It is not a new ideal, but it never seems to be attained. All the world loves a lover, and with reason, for a genuine lover is not a dangerous nuisance. Soothed and happy, or at least hopeful that he will soon be soothed and happy, he wanders harmlessly under his own bright star and doesn’t try to hurt anyone, or grab things. The other sort of lover, the type who goes in for short fierce affairs, like Henry VIII or Napoleon, is not a lover at all. He is love’s archenemy, the maker of history.
I have tried in this book to give a few examples of the struggle that goes on ceaselessly between love and ambition, and how it affected, or was affected by, people whose ambitions won the argument. There will be some characters you recognize, and perhaps a few who are unfamiliar. All of them, however, made a splash in their time. All of them played a part in spoiling the line, the neat, canal-like river bed of history as it might have happened. All, fortunately or unfortunately, had their weaknesses as well as their strength. Otherwise, who knows where we would be now? Catching cold, perhaps, in More’s Utopia, or doing each his bit in an artificial fertilizer factory dreamed up by H.G. Wells.
The thoughts of might-have-been are endless, but the facts are these: we are still, as we have always been, caught between two strong desires—love and ambition. Ambition still wins in the long run, as it always did.
Love does not conquer all. It tries to, but as far as we can make out from the archives, ambition is forever slamming doors in love’s face. Love in history usually runs a bad second. When it does win the race you have no history at all. Happy men do not make history.
Unhappy Helen
Helen of Troy
BASED ON E. V. RIEU’S TRANSLATION OF THE Iliad
Considering that the gods on Mount Olympus are not ours, we are well acquainted with them. There is good reason for our fondness for Homer; the ties between the godlike company and us are many, though our feelings are those of fellowship rather than worship. We know where we are with those imposing rapscallions. We do not know where we are, in the same way, with God, and that is as it should be. The Galilean, in spite of all the centuries we have spent trying to understand Him, remains an enigma; perhaps it is because of the centuries rather than in spite of them, but there it is. Save for those clear moments of exaltation vouchsafed to very few humans, we are left to wonder. There is, of course, no comparison. Jesus was born of woman, but He is God. The gods of the Greeks were human. Certainly they were too unpleasant on occasion to be anything else.
In those enormous beautiful bodies dwelt correspondingly enormous passions; pride, greed, jealousy, and lust. Their lives and those
of the mortals they directed (with great interest in the smallest detail) evoke in us delighted sensations of recognition and agreement. That is, they have this effect when we reread the Iliad, but unfortunately we don’t read it much, because it’s a classic. It is very bad luck on Helen’s memory that her story should have become a classic; one is apt to forget the true versions of such literature. Helen and Paris have become stereotyped characters, great lovers in the worst sense of the phrase. White Helen is a cliché. This is not fair. Helen was better than that; she was a personality and a riddle; she had a most unfortunate life, but not a banal one. (For my purposes of argument, as the reader must already be aware, Homer was retailing history, not fiction. I cannot see that at this late date there is very much difference between the two.)
Helen, the daughter of mortal Leda and immortal Zeus, was a very pretty woman. I say “pretty” rather than “beautiful” deliberately, because of an idiosyncrasy which I may possibly share with my readers; the word “beautiful” in such a connection immediately bringing to my mind cold white marble, a broad waist, and one of those straight noses that make the ancient Greeks seem so heavily in earnest. Helen could not possibly have looked like that. She was a very pretty woman, then, and she was married to Menelaus, who was brother to the great Agamemnon, King of Argos. They had one child, a daughter, and were presumably happy enough together—though one feels that Menelaus may have been rather too old for his wife—until Prince Paris appeared on the scene. Yet sometimes I wonder how happy an intelligent woman could have been with Menelaus, or any other Greek king of his stamp.
If her husband had been able to make of her an important queen, Helen might have calmed her restlessness with pride of power. But Menelaus wasn’t head of the family; he deferred to his elder brother Agamemnon, and no doubt Helen’s secondary position as his wife was irritating. It wasn’t very amusing at best to be a married woman. The households of ancient Greece were always crowded with females as a matter of course, overflowing with wives and handmaidens who occupied themselves endlessly with weaving cloth, sewing it, and washing it. Life was dull for women, as it is apt to be in a polygamous society; their only outlets were domestic or sex intrigues. Helen, like the other females, was a chattel, something to be seized by the conqueror after a war and sold for a slave with the rest of the weaklings in the community.
Slaves, of course, enjoy certain advantages. Even a male slave is free from responsibility; someone else must see to his keep. And a Greek woman, who was always something of a slave even though she might not be in legal bondage, was not held responsible for her virtue. There was a certain amount of lip service paid to the ideal of chastity, but no girl seems to have been blamed when she was abducted. Abduction is a term which is significant in itself; women were not seduced so much as carried off. The term “seduction” places on a woman the onus of choice, and the Greeks never took a woman’s choice into consideration. (N.B.: The name of Helen came to my mind in the Belgian Congo, when a native girl accused a man of her village in open court, saying he had raped her. The white magistrate asked her to describe the crime, and she said, “I met him by chance on the forest path and he asked me to sleep with him. I refused. Then he asked me again. Again I refused. Then he asked me again, and then he slept with me.” “But why did you allow it?” “Bwana, I have just told you. He asked me three times.”)
Very well, then. The situation was hopeless from the start. Helen, a famous beauty, was married to a dull though able man, and languished among her looms and laundresses. It is difficult not to believe that Paris was merely a means to an end, that if it hadn’t been Paris it would inevitably have been someone else. Moreover, we must not forget the gods, who were forever meddling with the Greeks. Aphrodite less than any of them would have let Menelaus alone in domestic bliss. She was a restless goddess at the best of times, a snapper-up of idle mortals; she fidgeted, owing, I think, to a strong sense of inferiority. One can scarcely blame her for this. The other goddesses, perpetually jealous, never missed a chance to snub Aphrodite, and the male gods were not much better in their own way. Though they were swayed with admiration and desire of her beauty, they balanced these occasional moments of weakness with an attitude of affectionate contempt for Aphrodite. They were always telling her to stick to her own line and not to attempt any other activity. It was enough to annoy any goddess, and set her to experimental mischief-making.
As a bribe for his bestowal on her of the golden apple (we all know that story) Aphrodite had promised the beautiful youth, Paris, the most desirable prize in the world, which was Helen. It was not playing fair to get the apple in this manner, of course, and it was gratuitous besides. Aphrodite would have been entitled to it in any case, but that fatal sense of inferiority overwhelmed her judgment and robbed her of self-confidence, and so she stooped to bribery. Alas, the gods hardly ever did play fair, and that is one reason, no doubt, why humanity eventually deserted them in search of a less human code of honor. However, in those days they still flourished, which was convenient for mortals, because they always had an excuse for unpleasant behavior. Paris, for example, was not just a cad. He didn’t abduct Helen, the wife of his host, merely because he suddenly wanted her, or because of the evil in his heart. It was Aphrodite who put the idea into his head.
As moderns we are apt to deprecate his action the more, perhaps, because he did not content himself with Helen. He took as well all of Menelaus’s portable property that he could manage to get aboard his swift-sailing ship: the cooking pots and spears, the lumps of iron, the gold drinking cups and fine linen, all those valuable goods which meant wealth to the Greeks. Today we feel, in keeping with our code but erroneously, that what Helen did with her person was her own affair, but that it was shocking for Paris to steal caldrons and clothing. We forget that Helen wasn’t responsible. Like the rest of Menelaus’s household utensils she was, quite simply, stolen.
I am sure she enjoyed it, nevertheless.
What was Prince Paris like? According to the book, he was very beautiful; supple, young, and foppish. He departs from the customary pattern of the time; the usual Homeric hero was bigger than Paris and less volatile in his emotions. I feel, though I do not speak with authority, that Menelaus and Agamemnon and Hector and the other great warriors cultivated their beards and were proud of the resulting growths, whereas Paris, with more sense of the aesthetic, kept himself clean-shaven. As a child, no doubt, he trotted after his brother Hector in the nursery. He had a wide selection of companions, Priam having begotten fifty sons, but Hector was his chosen hero. Hector must have been pleased and flattered by this preference, and so he made a pet of his golden-haired baby brother. The women petted him, too, with the inevitable result: Paris grew up a sissy. He wasn’t a weakling; he was good at games, and his enormous vanity kept him up to the mark at fighting, but he was unstable emotionally.
A good many women adored him. This fact is not in accordance with the Greek conventions, which decreed that women should prefer great hulking males who habitually knocked down other enormous males and abducted their wives in proof of superiority. It is obvious, nevertheless, that women loved Paris. Nor should we wonder at this, knowing as we do that Aphrodite herself once fell in love with Adonis, a beardless boy. Besides, why should not any girl like Paris, who was lovely and sweet-smelling and sympathetic? In the monotony of household life, would not any woman welcome a man who obviously preferred her company to that of his companions-at-arms? Paris loved women and was not ashamed of it. He didn’t merely use them for mating; he loved to talk to them about things they understood—personal comment on their friends, linen, fur, jewelry. He must have been the complete antithesis of Menelaus, and thus a great relief to Helen at the moment.
At the moment only, mark you. Here, undoubtedly, we come to the heart of the matter, and here, too, we must pause to consider Helen’s character, which was not that of an ordinary woman. She had been endowed with certain gifts at her birth; she was practically a professional charmer, with w
hatever a charmer needs and nothing she doesn’t. Helen aroused desire and admiration in all men, evidently, but she did not in turn desire or admire all men. She liked powerful men, not ingratiating, pettable creatures. She liked men she could respect. She was not like the women who had brought up Paris; Paris was not really her type.
Nevertheless, she must have been infatuated with him at the beginning. She was carried away, figuratively as well as literally. Her captor’s person must have appeared to her in a glowing light, and besides, there were all the trappings of royal abduction: the excitement of flight in the dark, the blessed sense of escape from all the cats in her husband’s house, the speeding ship cutting the water and throwing up phosphorescent foam. Then the delight of a stolen honeymoon must have been intoxicating. Honeymoons come to an end, however, and so did Helen’s. Once more she found herself an inmate of a king’s palace, weaving and embroidering and sitting all day indoors with the women. It was then that she first looked with clear eyes at her new husband, and realized that she had committed herself to a flighty stripling. It must have been an unpleasant shock.
To love a pretty boy like Paris one wants a strong maternal instinct. As far as I can see, Helen was devoid of all that sort of thing. Her emotions went into love-making rather than motherliness; she had run away from home, for instance, without giving a thought to her baby daughter. If such a thing had been permitted to females in those days I would dare to say that she was more in love with herself than with any man, and she naturally wanted her mate to be worthy of her. As a Greek she could enjoy certain qualities only by proxy—position and power and strength—and yet she was now farther from them than she had been with Menelaus. Paris was a younger son, like Menelaus, which status automatically deprived him of position and power. His strength lay more in amorous talents than anywhere else, and Helen was not sensualist enough to find complete satisfaction in bed. The unfortunate woman must often have looked wistfully at her brother-in-law, mighty Hector. Hector would have been the perfect answer to all her longing thoughts.
