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Updated: October 14, 2025
I had been accustomed to receive this as a sacred representation of the loves of Christ and the Church: but after I was experimentally acquainted with the playful and extravagant genius of man's love for woman, I saw the Song of Solomon with new eyes, and became entirely convinced that it consists of fragments of love-songs, some of them rather voluptuous.
In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs, those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries especially, you will find a perpetual reproach against woman in the matter of her coldness; ceaseless and stale similes that compare her eyes to northern stars, her heart to ice, or her bosom to snow.
Such a man is Petrarch; and yet, by the irresistible purifying and elevating power of the "Vita Nuova," this man came to write not other albas and serenas, not other love-songs to be added to the love-songs of Provence, but those sonnets and canzoni which for four centuries taught the world, too coarse as yet to receive Dante's passion at first hand, a nobler and more spiritual love.
At these words Dante crossed himself, for all this seemed strange work for commonplace Florence in full day, and he tried to repeat a prayer, but wonderfully could remember none, and only his ears buzzed with the words of all the love-songs he had ever heard, and he entreated, "Leave me in peace." And as he spoke he stretched out his hands in supplication to the quickened image.
His poetry ran through the whole gamut of humanity and of the sensations that come to us from the outer world. In his poems are sweet melodies and passionate cries of revolt, stirring ballads of the sea and tender love-songs strange as these last seem when coming from this cynic.
The Way of the Cross was acted at the Bodiniere, the Child Jesus at the Ambigu, the Passion at the Porte-Saint-Martin, Jesus at the Odeon, orchestral suites on the subject of Christ at the Botanical Gardens. And a certain brilliant talker a poet who wrote passionate love-songs gave a lecture on the Redemption at the Chatelet.
I sing them things from comic operas Offenbach, Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's tricks. How people adore illusions!
Battle-songs, drinking-songs, boat-songs, love-songs, and everything else, they seemed to have a complete assortment of, and I was glad to find that "All in the Downs," "Poor Tom Bowline," "The Bay of Biscay," "List, ye Landsmen!" and all those classical songs of the sea, still held their places.
The ladies sat at their tapestry frames, while Italian poetry and romance was read or love-songs sung by the gentlemen; they had garden games and hunting-parties, with every opening for the ladies to act as sirens to any whom the queen wished to detach from the principles of honour and virtue, and bind to her service.
Such songs, therefore, as tend to promote levity, thoughtlessness, loose imaginations, false views of life, forgetfulness of death, contempt of whatever is serious, and neglect of whatever is sober, whether they be, love-songs, or drinking-songs, will not, can not be sung by any man or any woman who makes a serious profession of Christianity.
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