and it was suggested that,
owing to the limited number of musical combinations and the unlimited
number of musical compositions, a time would come when all music would
only be a repetition of exhausted harmonies. Hinton remarked that then
would come a man so inspired by a new spirit that his feeling would be,
not that _all_ music has been written, but that no _music_ has yet been
written. It was a memorable saying. In every field that is the perpetual
proclamation of genius: Behold! I create all things new. And in this
field of love we can conceive of no age in which to the inspired seer it
will not be possible to feel: There has yet been no _love_!

FOOTNOTES:

[69] See especially Sidney Lee, "Ovid and Shakespeare's Sonnets,"
_Quarterly Review_, April, 1909.

[70] Montaigne, _Essais_, Book III, chap. V.

[71] See e.g. Mrs. Fraser, _World's Work and Play_, December, 1906.

[72] A more modern feeling for love and marriage begins to emerge,
however, at a much earlier period, with Menander and the New Comedy.
E.F.M. Benecke, in his interesting little book on _Antimachus of
Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry_, believes that the
romantic idea (that is to say, the idea that a woman is a worthy object
for a man's love, and that such love may well be the chief, if not the
only, aim of a man's life) had originally been propounded by Antimachus
at the end of the fifth century B.C. Antimachus, said to have been the
friend of Plato, had been united to a woman of Lydia (where women, we
know, occupied a very high position) and her death inspired him to write
a long poem, _Lyde_, "the first love poem ever addressed by a Greek to
his wife after death." Only a few lines of this poem survive. But
Antimachus seems to have greatly influenced Philetas (whom Croiset calls
"the first of the Alexandrians") and Asclepiades of Samos, tender and
exquisite poets whom also we only know by a few fragments. Benecke's
arguments, therefore, however probable, cannot be satisfactorily
substantiated.

[73] As I have elsewhere pointed out (_Studies in the Psychology of Sex_,
Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. IX), most modern
authorities--Friedlaender, Dill, Donaldson, etc.--consider that there was
no real moral decline in the later Roman Empire; we must not accept the
pictures presented by satirists, pagan or Christian, as of general
application.

[74] I have discussed this phase of early Christianity in the sixth
volume