A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern.

  • Iwan Bloch
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tasting forbidden fruit; rather do they stake their whole life upon it1. Finck maintains that modern romantic love originated in England. 6 Love in England and America is romantic love, pure and simple, as it was first presented by Shakespeare and after him, with more or less exactness, by a hundred other poets and novelists. This love does not lack colour, warm glowing colour, but it is no longer mere local colour, of a kind peculiar to nation or province: it is love in its very essence, in its universal form: love such as in the course of time will hold sway and must hold sway over the whole of this planet. England wears in the crown, which her many services to civilisation have won for her, many a jewel; but the brightest of them is the fact that she was the first country in the world—the world of antiquity, the world of the Middle Ages, and the world of to-day—to remove the bars from the windows of the great women-prison, to open all doors for the unhindered entry of Cupid and to make him everywhere at home and everywhere welcome2.' The sacredness of marriage, which Burke in his treatise on The Sublime and Beautiful praised in such glowing terms, is still to be met with in England, perhaps more frequently than in other countries. Travellers and writers have always praised this inwardness of English family life, as for example Goldsmith pictures it in the first chapter of The Vicar of Wakefield, or as Miss Burney shows us in her diary, where she describes a walk of the Royal family at Windsor3. The pessimistic conception of marital happiness which Byron expresses in the third canto of Don Juan (verses 5-10) is to be attributed rather to personal incidents than to any general experience. 1 H. Taine, History of English Literature, Vol. I, pp. 407-409. 2 Finck, loc. cit., Vol. II, pp. 40-46. 3 Cf. W. M. Thackeray, The Four Georges. [51]