The Old High Way of Love

Valentine’s day has come and gone but are we still feeling the love? There’s more to romance than cardboard hearts and forced red roses, as its origins suggest.

Now that the flurry of advertising, overpriced chocolates and flowers, and the hail of love poems on social media has abated let’s take a step back and consider what exactly constitutes romance. Dubliners take pride in the presence of relics of St. Valentine in Whitefriar Street Church. Couples visit the shrine all year round seeking the saint’s blessing on their relationship, especially if they are recently engaged. The saint’s origins and significance, however, are ambivalent. There may have been two Valentines in third century Italy, both martyred, or maybe the two were one and the same.

Legend has it that Valentine secretly married Christian couples to protect the men from being conscripted and that when imprisoned for his beliefs Valentine cured a young woman of blindness, whereupon they fell passionately in love. On the eve of his death he sent her a note signed ‘your Valentine’. His feast day coincided with the ancient Roman festival of Lupercal. This fertility rite was associated with the she-wolf who raised Romulus and Remus and involved the sacrifice of two goats (symbols of sex – still celebrated in the Irish Puck Fair).

Naked men tore strips from the goats’ hides (februa) then tore about flaying women with them. The women thus caught might remain with their partners throughout the festival and even afterwards. The Pope eventually replaced this bloody orgy with a more sober celebration, hence Valentine’s Day.

So where’s the romance? Where indeed. On Valentine’s Day last week I heard a radio vox pop in which people were asked to describe the most romantic gestures they had received or made. Most of the respondents havered before saying they couldn’t think of any, apart from the man who had proposed to his girlfriend and the ones who had gone to McDonald’s. If romance is absent from our lives, we look for it in one of the most enduringly popular genres on the page, the screen and in song.

The word ‘romance’ was first coined to describe the chivalric tales of the middle ages, such as those associated with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Written in vernacular French or Italian, Romance languages, not Latin, they were accessible to a wide audience. From those legends of the Crusades we have distilled several famous love stories, including those of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Isolde.

The dangers of reading too much medieval romance had been signalled by Dante in The Divine Comedy (1308-21), (see What’s the Story? 10 October 2023). In Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) Miguel Cervantes took up that theme, and, parodying the old tales, sent his hero, an elderly knight, on an illusory quest to rescue a fair maid, Dulcinea. Quixote comes to his senses, with regret, at the end of his life.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in San Sebastian

 A little over a century later, Charlotte Lennox published The Female Quixote (1752). The heroine, Arabella, isolated in the country, finds ‘great Store of Romances’ in her father’s library:

The surprising Adventures with which they were filled, provided a most pleasing Entertainment to a young Lady, who was wholly secluded from the World; . . . supposing Romances were real Pictures of Life, from them she drew all her Notions and Expectations. By them she was taught to believe that Love was the ruling Principle of the World; that every other Passion was subordinate to this; and that it caused all the Happiness and Miseries of Life.

This is a fair definition of the enduring romantic ideal but poor Arabella takes the notion literally and applies the rigorous chivalric codes to her life. In so doing she blinkers herself from the truth of her position as an heiress compelled to marry a cousin in order to keep her fortune. The novel has comedy aplenty but is also a comment on the position of women in eighteenth century England. When Arabella is made to realise her folly she is silenced, as sad an ending in its way as the deathbed disillusionment of Cervantes’ knight. It’s said that, unsure how to rescue her heroine, Lennox turned to Samuel Johnson for advice, hence the downbeat ending, and in itself an apt reflection on women’s status at the time.

   Scrolling a century forward we come to another female Quixote, in Madame Bovary (1857). So her creator, Gustave Flaubert, described her. Married to a provincial doctor, Emma Bovary yearns for a fulfilling erotic life and sets her cap at the local squire who toys with her affections. Determined to escape into her dream she takes another lover. The rest is ruin. As Margaret Atwood says, Emma does not die of a broken heart but of debt, having bought too many fancy gowns.

While we may dismiss Arabella and Emma as absurd, contemporary women can also be deceived by romance. Elena Ferrante demonstrates this in The Lying Life of Adults (2019), set in Naples of the 1990s. Nella, a proofreader of romantic novels, continues to pine for the ex-husband who cheated on her for fifteen years, with her best friend. Her daughter accuses her of speaking like one of the novels she corrects. The ex tells her she writes the stories.

W.B. Yeats understood this mistake. Here he is addressing Maud Gonne, who could never reciprocate his ardour:  

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

(‘Adam’s Curse’)

Today the word romance applies to love stories whose plot, broadly, follows the characters’ obstacle-strewn course to true love. A classic, brilliant and funny example is Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827) set in seventeenth century Lombardy. Yet the best-loved stories end in sorrow, from the original ‘star-cross’d lovers’ of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, to Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957). The last two are equally famous as epic films, not least for their leading men, Clark Gable and Omar Sharif, who in turn inspired many a romantic schoolgirl crush. There was once a nightclub in Dublin called ‘Zhivago – Where love stories begin’. Hardly an auspicious name and I’ll bet some of those stories ended there too.

  Even the least romantic of us has probably at some point believed that there was such a thing as a transcendent, if austere, ideal of Love, beribboned by the traditions of romance. Our roses and chocolates are a faded reflection of that vision. But is it innate in us to yearn for such a mystical Love or have we been conditioned to it by too much reading or viewing of romantic fiction? Happily, most of us discover that true love is far more varied, tender and diverse and can be celebrated every day.

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 So what do you think? Is the desire for romance a naturally occurring phenomenon or are we raised to hanker for it by exposure to love stories?

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