ut an author who is in
love with his theme and whose theme is love can quite realize what a
supreme delight it was--with occasional moments of anxious
suspense--to go through thousands of books in the libraries of
America, England, France, and Germany and find that all discoverable
facts, properly interpreted, bore out my seemingly paradoxical and
reckless theory.

SKEPTICAL CRITICS

When the book appeared some of the critics accepted my conclusions,
but a larger number pooh-poohed them. Here are a few specimen
comments:

"His great theses are, first, that romantic love is an
entirely modern invention; and, secondly, that romantic
love and conjugal love are two things essentially
different.... Now both these theses are luckily false."

"He is wrong when he says there was no such thing as pre-matrimonial
love known to the ancients."

"I don't believe in his theory at all, and ... no one is likely to
believe in it after candid examination."

"A ridiculous theory."

"It was a misfortune when Mr. Finck ran afoul of this theory."

"Mr. Finck will not need to live many years in order to be ashamed of
it."

"His thesis is not worth writing about."

"It is true that he has uttered a profoundly original thought, but,
unfortunately, the depth of its originality is surpassed by its
fathomless stupidity."

"If in the light of these and a million other facts, we should
undertake to explain why nobody had anticipated Mr. Finck's theory
that love is a modern sentiment, we should say it might be because
nobody who felt inspired to write about it was ever so extensively
unacquainted with the literature of the human passions."

"Romantic love has always existed, in every clime and age, since man
left simian society; and the records of travellers show that it is to
be found even among the lowest savages."

ROBERT BURTON

While not a few of the commentators thus rejected or ridiculed my
thesis, others hinted that I had been anticipated. Several suggested
that Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ had been my model. As a matter
of fact, although one of the critics referred to my book as "a marvel
of epitomized research," I must confess, to my shame, that I was not
aware that Burton had devoted two hundred pages to what he calls
Love-Melancholy, until I had finished the first sketch of my
manuscript and commenced to rewrite it. My experience thus furnished a
striking verification of the witty epitaph w