Esteem Enlivened by Desire: The Couple from Homer to Shakespeare.

The author of a number of admirable books, not a few of which deal with the emerging ideal of romantic love in early modern art and literature, Hagstrum surpassed himself in this monumental work, which ranges over more than ten centuries (amply fulfilling the promise of its subtitle) in search of a usable past--an "available heritage concerning the loving coupleft To some extent he has also reversed himself, since he now seeks to correct the impression left by his earlier studies, that romantic love came to be associated with marriage only in the modern world. His new book contests this widely accepted interpretation, which Hagstrum attributes to the belated discovery that "love and marriage do not always go together like a horse and carriage." Ever since this disconcerting fact "dawned on us disillusioned moderns .... it has been a continuing scholarly preoccupation to discover just when romantic love came into Western culture." The prevailing consensus--that it came relatively late (in the cruder version of this thesis, only with the "rise of the middle class D--issues decidedly bedraggled, if not altogether demolished, from this determined assault.

Hagstrum does not deny that many authors, both classical and Christian, took a disparaging view of marriage, emphasizing the wife's subordination, the dangerous power of female sexuality, and the incompatibility of sexual passion with the mundane ends marriage was meant to serve. Xenophon spoke for a longstanding tradition in the ancient world when he defined the purpose of marriage as legitimate offspring and the maintenance of the household economy. In the Christian world, an equally strong tradition viewed marriage as an acceptable but hardly exalted alternative to sexual promiscuity, morally much inferior to virginity. Sexual passion had its champions, of course, but it was thought unsuitable for man and wife. In ancient Greece, it was associated with love between men and boys; in the Middle Ages, with adulterous love between men and women. Hagstrum's thesis is not impaired by the recognition that married love had very little place in the dominant tradition of Western patriarchy.

His claim, though it is supported by an imposing structure of erudition, is more modest: that a countertradition, already present in Homer's account of the homecoming that concludes the Odyssey, encouraged a "softening of male power in patriarchy," hedged in that power with "civilizing limitations," idealized marriage as the union of desire and esteem, and held up sexual equality as the precondition of erotic friendship. Hagstrum thinks this "vision of marital love," in a culture that has long been supposed to be without it, owed a good deal to the influence of women, which made itself felt, even in works written by men, in the insight that Eros could be a "force for civility'' as well as disruption. From the beginning, it would seem, the West was able to imagine that marriage might rest on sexual attraction and mutual respect, instead of on the sexual subordination that was taken as the norm elsewhere in the world.

Imagination was often at odds with practice, to be sure, but we should not therefore conclude that married love was to be found only in works of art. A play like Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Hagstrum argues, would have meant nothing to its audience "had not the oikos [the Greek household] been a place much desired by both men and women." That wives could resort to a sexual strike as a form of political protest implied, in the words Hagstrum borrows from Sir Kenneth Dover, that "the marital relationship was much more important in people's actual lives than we would have inferred simply from our knowledge of the law."

The "erotic ideal"--the union of esteem and sexual desire--deserves to be considered "one of the great achievements of Western culture," according to Hagstrum. "But that union did not come easily," he adds. "Esteem had to be divorced from an all-male contest, and sexuality from the stigma of sin or excess." The first of these developments could have occurred only in a culture willing to countenance the possibility that women (and more particularly wives) were good for something besides reproduction and household labor. As for the second, it received support from the tradition of Christian naturalism, as Hagstrum calls it--the refusal to condemn matter as evil or to equate salvation with a disembodied spirituality--which tempered the fear of sexuality that was also present (even dominant) in Christianity. The central importance of the Incarnation, in Christian doctrine, always stood in the way of Platonizing and gnosticizing influences that might otherwise have aligned Christianity with those religions that aspire to Nirvana, the extinction of desire. In Christianity as well as Judaism, the love of God was often evoked with an abundance of sexual imagery, the effect of which was not only to displace or sublimate sexual desire but also to give it a certain legitimacy.

Hagstrum's open and unapologetic admiration for Western achievements, it hardly needs to be said, goes against the current grain. A man of ironic temper, Hagstrum prefers to emphasize his obligations to other scholars rather than his objections to their work; so it is left mostly to a reviewer to point out that his own work takes issue not merely with prevailing interpretations of the history of love but, at a deeper level, with the whole trend of recent scholarship in the humanities. Although he is clearly sympathetic to feminism, he does not subscribe to the kind of feminism that sees nothing in history except the eternal oppression of women and swallows up all distinctions, all cultural variations, in the one all-encompassing, undifferentiated, monolithic category of "patriarchy." Hagstrum's work likewise stands firmly opposed to the cynicism (which runs through so much of the revisionist scholarship on the Renaissance, for example) that seeks to reduce every expression of idealism to the self-interested pursuit of power. Far more worldly than those who aspire to cosmopolitan status by importing their ideas from Paris, he is undismayed by the gap between ideals and reality, often taken to signify the irrelevance of ideals, because he recognizes their power to criticize and even alter reality. His book deals with "our literary and artistic heritage," not with "historical reality as such," but he does not make the current assumption that art has no connection with reality at all or, alternately, that reality represents nothing more than the "social construction" of artists and critics. He rejects the notion that literary works never refer to anything beyond themselves and that it is pointless, therefore, to expect moral instruction from a work of art.

When he refers to art and literature as our "heritage," Hagstrum reduces to a single word everything that distinguishes him from current fashion. He sees the past as a source of moral wisdom, not just as a record of follies presumably outgrown in our more enlightened (if disillusioned) age. He believes in the "ethical imagination," the exercise of which demands that "we respond correctly and historically when we weigh alternatives, suspend easy belief, and project the dynamics of a work of art into a future that reaches out to our own situation." This procedure carries the danger of reading the past too much in the light of present concerns, and Hagstrum does not always avoid it. There are times when his view of history takes on a Whiggish tinge, as when he congratulates Boccaccio for writing stories that are "modern in feeling," deplores the way in which medieval conventions continued, during the Renaissance, to act as a "dragging, traditional chain on...progress," or complains that The Tempest (almost alone among Shakespeare's plays in upholding a very orthodox, unimaginative view of marriage) "does not put Shakespeare on the frontier of the emergent." An insistently moralizing criticism, as is well known, can interfere with our willingness to take imaginative works on their own terms. Thus Hagstrum misses the satiric intent behind Boccaccio's depiction of the conventional marriage between ill-assorted couples and makes him out to be a reformer instead, the author of an "attack" on the institution of arranged marriage. Admirers of Boccaccio's artistry are likely to be put off by Hagstrum's observation that the Decameron, notwithstanding its "modern" feeling, "fall s short of [upholding] a satisfying ethical norm." Yet this ethical interrogation of a text, even if the norm in question is too much defined by the "emergent," is vastly preferable to a style of criticism that reflects ethical judgment as completely beside the point.

Hagstrum's literary history of romantic love. because it seeks ethical guidance from the past and not just a better understanding of our ancestors' foibles, amounts also to a defense of romantic love, written with a heartbreaking awareness that lifelong marriage no longer serves as the standard to which erotic practice ought to aspire. Not only marriage but romantic love itself has fallen out of favor. Love at first sight, we are told again and again, provides a shaky basis for marriage. Shared hobbies and tastes, a mutual commitment to compromise, and a willingness to admit that things never stay the same are more likely to endure when passion cools. Lovers should not demand too much of each other. They must allow for the possibility that one of them will probably outgrow the other. To expect fidelity, permanence, undying attachment is to court disappointment. Friendship, homosexual or heterosexual seems more reliable to us than love, just because it is less demanding and intense. Friendship easily coexists with sex (these days, at least with sate sex) but not with Eros, the "decoration of sexual impulse by art and thought." We like our sexual impulse unadorned, put securely in its place among the "facts of life."

Sex with us is a science, while art and thought have tuned to other themes, including the inevitable misunderstandings between men and women, their essential incompatibility, the instability of all attachments, and the unreliability of everything in the world except sharp, small, immediate, and more or less interchangeable pleasures.

Even the "joy of sex" is now shadowed by AIDS. The sense of sexuality as a dangerous, dark, and unpredictable presence in human life--all the more so in its "decorated" forms--has returned to us in full force. The idea that anything so disruptive could lead to lasting relationships-that Eros could be a stabilizing, let alone a civilizing influence--strikes us as a consummate piece of mystification. One hears talk, more wistful than ironic, about the wisdom of arranged marriages--all in all, it is said, a better solution than romance to the intractable problem of male-female union.

To explain the twentieth-century revulsion against romantic love lies beyond the scope of Hagstrum's enterprise, already ambitious enough without this added burden. The hint of an explanation, however, lies in his very formulation of the romantic ideal. The elaboration of the sexual impulse in works of art, he observes, makes us "understand that the passion aroused early and mysteriously carries over into a calm and fruitful married life." Elsewhere he speaks of the "notion that suddenly and mysteriously induced erotic 1ove...brings long satisfactions to the couple and also to most of those who witness its formation and wish it well." It is precisely the belief that a "sudden, overwhelming attraction" establishes "unshakable bonds" that the modern mind (or is it the postmodern mind'?.,) finds so shocking. The assertion that this process operates "mysteriously," far from reassuring us, seems to clinch the case against romantic love. We dislike a mystery. We crave what we can control-even if the price we pay for control is drastic shrinkage of our imaginative and emotional horizon.