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by Henry Theophilus Finck
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Title: Primitive Love and Love-Stories
Author: Henry Theophilus Finck
Release Date: April 7, 2004 [EBook #11934]
Language: English
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PRIMITIVE LOVE AND LOVE-STORIES
BY HENRY T. FINCK
1899
_DEDICATED TO ONE WHO TAUGHT THE AUTHOR THAT CONJUGAL AFFECTION IS NOT
INFERIOR TO ROMANTIC LOVE_
PREFACE
On page 654 of the present volume reference is made to a custom
prevalent in northern India of employing the family barber to select
the boys and girls to be married, it being considered too trivial and
humiliating an act for the parents to attend to. In pronouncing such a
custom ludicrous and outrageous we must not forget that not much more
than a century ago an English thinker, Samuel Johnson, expressed the
opinion that marriages might as well be arranged by the Lord
Chancellor without consulting the parties concerned. Schopenhauer had,
indeed, reason to claim that it had remained for him to discover the
significance and importance of love. His ideas on the relations
between love, youth, health, and beauty opened up a new vista of
thought; yet it was limited, because the question of heredity was only
just beginning to be understood, and the theory of evolution, which
has revolutionized all science, had not yet appeared on the horizon.
The new science of anthropology, with its various branches, including
sociology, ethnology, and comparative psychology, has within the last
two or three decades brought together and discussed an immense number
of facts relating to man in his various stages of
development--savagery, barbarism, semi-civilization, and civilization.
Monographs have appeared in great numbers on various customs and
institutions, including marriage, which has been discussed in several
exhaustive volumes. Love alone has remained to be specially considered
from an evolutionary point of view. My own book, _Romantic Love and
Personal Beauty_, which appeared in 1887, did indeed touch upon this
question, but very briefly, inasmuch as its subject, as the title
indicates, was modern romantic love. A book on such a subject was
naturally and easily written _virginibus puerisque_; whereas the
present volume, being concerned chiefly with the love-affairs of
savages and barbarians, could not possibly have been subjected to the
same restrictions. Care has been taken, however, to exclude anything
that might offend a healthy taste.
If it has been necessary in some chapters to multiply unpleasant
facts, the reader must blame the sentimentalists who have so
persistently whitewashed the savages that it has become necessary, in
the interest of truth, to show them in their real colors. I have
indeed been tempted to give my book the sub-title "A Vindication of
Civilization" against the misrepresentations of these sentimentalists
who try to create the impression that savages owe all their depravity
to contact with whites, having been originally spotless angels. If my
pictures of the unadulterated savage may in some cases produce the
same painful impression as the sights in a museum's "chamber of
horrors," they serve, on the other hand, to show us that, bad as we
may be, collectively, we are infinitely superior in love-affairs, as
in everything else, to those primitive peoples; and thus we are
encouraged to hope for further progress in the future in the direction
of purity and altruism.
Although I have been obliged under the circumstances to indulge in a
considerable amount of controversy, I have taken great pains to state
the views of my opponents fairly, and to be strictly impartial in
presenting facts with accuracy. Nothing could be more foolish than the
ostrich policy, so often indulged in, of hiding facts in the hope that
opponents will not see them. Had I found any data inconsistent with my
theory I should have modified it in accordance with them. I have also
been very careful in regard to my authorities. The chief cause of the
great confusion reigning in anthropological literature is that, as a
rule, evidence is piled up with a pitchfork. Anyone who has been
anywhere and expressed a globe-trotter's opinion is cited as a
witness, with deplorable results. I have not only taken most of my
multitudinous facts from the original sources, but I have critically
examined the witnesses to see what right they have to parade as
experts; as in the cases, for instance, of Catlin, Schoolcraft,
Chapman, and Stephens, who are responsible for many "false facts" that
have misled philosophers.
In writing a book like this the author's function is comparable to
that of an architect who gets his materials from various parts of the
world and fashions them into a building of more or less artistic
merit. The anthropologist has to gather his facts from a greater
variety of sources than any other writer, and from the very nature of
his subject he is obliged to quote incessantly. The following pages
embody the results of more than twelve years' research in the
libraries of America and Europe. In weaving my quotations into a
continuous fabric I have adopted a plan which I believe to be
ingenious, and which certainly saves space and annoyance. Instead of
citing the full titles of books every time they are referred to either
in the text or in footnotes, I merely give the author's name and the
page number, if only one of his books is referred to; and if there are
several books, I give the initials--say Brinton, _M.N.W_., 130; which
means Brinton's _Myths of the New World_, page 130. The key to the
abbreviations will be found at the end of the volume in the
bibliography, which also includes an author's index, separate from the
index of subjects. This avoids the repetition of titles or of the
customary useless "_loc. cit_.," and spares the reader the annoyance
of constant interruption of his reading to glance at the bottom of the
page.
Not a few of the critics of my first book, ignoring the difference
between a romantic love-story and a story of romantic love, fancied
they could refute me by simply referring to some ancient romantic
story. To prevent a repetition of that procedure I have adorned these
pages with a number of love-stories, adding critical comments wherever
called for. These stories, I believe, augment, not only the interest
but the scientific value of the monograph. In gathering them I have
often wondered why no one anticipated me, though, to be sure, it was
not an easy task, as they are scattered in hundreds of books, and in
scientific periodicals where few would look for them. At the same time
I confess that to me the tracing of the plot of the evolution of love,
with its diverse obstacles, is more fascinating than the plot of an
individual love-story. At any rate, since we have thousands of such
love-stories, I am perhaps not mistaken in assuming that _the story of
love itself_ will be welcomed as a pleasant change. H.T.F.
NEW YORK, October 27, 1899.
CONTENTS
HISTORY OF AN IDEA
Origin of a Book
Skeptical Critics
Robert Burton
Hegel on Greek Love
Shelley on Greek Love
Macaulay, Bulwer-Lytton, Gautier
Goldsmith and Rousseau
Love a Compound Feeling
Herbert Spencer's Analysis
Active Impulses Must be Added
Sensuality the Antipode of Love
The Word Romantic
Animals Higher than Savages
Love the Last, Not the First, Product of Civilization
Plan of this Volume
Greek Sentimentality
Importance of Love
HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW
No Love of Romantic Scenery
No Love in Early Religion
Murder as a Virtue
Slaughter of the Innocents
Honorable Polygamy
Curiosities of Modesty
Indifference to Chastity
Horror of Incest
WHAT IS ROMANTIC LOVE?
Ingredients of Love.
I. INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE
All Girls Equally Attractive
Shallow Predilection
Repression of Preference
Utility versus Sentiment
A Story of African Love
Similarity of Individuals and Sexes
Primary and Secondary Sexual Characters
Fastidious Sensuality is not Love
Two Stories of Indian Love
Feminine Ideals Superior to Masculine
Sex in Body and Mind
True Femininity and its Female Enemies
Mysteries of Love,--An Oriental Love-Story
II. MONOPOLISM
Juliet and Nothing but Juliet
Butterfly Love
Romantic Stories of Non-Romantic Love
Obstacles to Monopolism
Wives and Girls in Common
Trial Marriages
Two Roman Lovers
III. JEALOUSY
Rage at Rivals
Women as Private Property
Horrible Punishments
Essence of True Jealousy
Absence of Masculine Jealousy
Persian and Greek Jealousy
Primitive Feminine Jealousy
Absence of Feminine Jealousy
Jealousy Purged of Hate
A Virtuous Sin
Abnormal States
Jealousy in Romantic Love
IV. COYNESS
Women Who Woo
Were Hebrew and Greek Women Coy?
Masculine Coyness
Shy but not Coy
Militarism and Mediaeval Women
What Made Women Coy?
Capturing Women
The Comedy of Mock Capture
Why the Women Resist
Quaint Customs
Greek and Roman Mercenary Coyness
Modesty and Coyness
Utility of Coyness
How Women Propose
V. HOPE AND DESPAIR--MIXED MOODS
Amorous Antitheses
Courtship and Imagination
Effects of Sensual Love
VI. HYPERBOLE
Girls and Flowers
Eyes and Stars
Locks and Fragrance
Poetic Desire for Contact
Nature's Sympathy with Lovers
Romantic but not Loving
The Power of Love
VII. PRIDE
Comic Side of Love
A Mystery Explained
Importance of Pride
Varieties and Germs
Natural and Artificial Symptoms of Love
VIII. SYMPATHY
Egotism, Naked or Masked
Delight in the Torture of Others
Indifference to Suffering
Exposing the Sick and Aged
Birth of Sympathy
Women Crueler than Men
Plato Denounces Sympathy
Sham Altruism in India
Evolution of Sympathy
Amorous Sympathy
IX. ADORATION
Deification of Persons
Primitive Contempt for Women
Homage to Priestesses
Kinship Through Females Only
Woman's Domestic Rule
Woman's Political Rule
Greek Estimate of Women
Man-Worship and Christianity
X. UNSELFISH GALLANTRY
The Gallant Rooster
Ungallant Lower Races of Men
Egyptian Love
Arabian Love
The Unchivalrous Greeks
Ovid's Sham Gallantry
Mediaeval and Modern Gallantry
"An Insult to Woman,"
Summary
A Sure Test of Love
XI. ALTRUISTIC SELF-SACRIFICE
The Lady and the Tiger
A Greek Love-Story
Persian Love
Hero and Leander
The Elephant and the Lotos
Suicide is Selfish
XII. AFFECTION
Erotic Assassins
The Wisdom of Solomon
Stuff and Nonsense
Sacrifices of Cannibal Husbands
Inclinations Mistaken for Affection
Selfish Liking and Attachment
Foolish Fondness
Unselfish Affection
XIII. MENTAL PURITY
German Testimony
English Testimony
Maiden Fancies
Pathologic Love
A Modern Sentiment
Persians, Turks, and Hindoos
Love Despised in Japan and China
Greek Scorn for Woman-Love
Penetrative Virginity
XIV. ADMIRATION OF PERSONAL BEAUTY
Darwin's Unfortunate Mistake
Decoration for Protection
War "Decorations,"
Amulets, Charms, Medicines
Mourning Language
Indications of Tribe or Rank
Vain Desire to Attract Attention
Objects of Tattooing
Tattooing on Pacific Islands
Tattooing in America
Tattooing in Japan
Scarification
Alleged Testimony of Natives, Misleading Testimony of
Visitors
"Decoration" at the Age of Puberty
"Decoration" as a Test of Courage
Mutilation, Fashion, and Emulation
Personal Beauty versus Personal Decoration
De Gustibus non est Disputandum?
Indifference to Dirt
Reasons for Bathing
Corpulence versus Beauty
Fattening Girls for the Marriage Market
Oriental Ideals
The Concupiscence Theory of Beauty
Utility is not Beauty
A New Sense Easily Lost Again
Moral Ugliness
Beautifying Intelligence
The Strange Greek Attitude
A COMPOSITE AND VARIABLE SENTIMENT
Definition of Love
Why called Romantic.
SENSUALITY, SENTIMENTALITY, AND SENTIMENT.
Appetite and Longing
Wiles of an Oriental Girl
Rarity of True Love.
MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE
How Romantic Love is Metamorphosed
Why Savages Value Wives
Mourning to Order
Mourning for Entertainment
The Truth about Widow-Burning
Feminine Devotion in Ancient Literature
Wives Esteemed as Mothers Only
Why Conjugal Precedes Romantic Love
OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE
I. Ignorance and Stupidity
II. Coarseness and Obscenity
III. War
IV. Cruelty
V. Masculine Selfishness
VI. Contempt for Women
VII. Capture and Sale of Brides
VIII. Infant Marriages
IX. Prevention of Free Choice
X. Separation of the Sexes
XI. Sexual Taboos
XII. Race Aversions
XIII. Multiplicity of Languages
XIV. Social Barriers
XV. Religious Prejudice
SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE
Bushman Qualifications for Love
"Love in all Their Marriages,"
False Facts Regarding Hottentots
Effeminate Men and Masculine Women
How the Hottentot Woman "Rules at Home,"
"Regard for Women"
Capacity for Refined Love
Hottentot Coarseness
Fat versus Sentiment
South African Love-Poems
A Hottentot Flirt
Kaffir Morals
Individual Preference for--Cows, Bargaining for Brides
Amorous Preferences
Zulu Girls not Coy
Charms and Poems
A Kaffir Love-Story
Lower than Beasts
Colonies of Free Lovers
A Lesson in Gallantry
Not a Particle of Romance
No Love Among Negroes
A Queer Story
Suicides
Poetic Love on the Congo
Black Love in Kamerun
A Slave Coast Love-Story
The Maiden who Always Refused
African Story-Books
The Five Suitors
Tamba and the Princess
The Sewing Match
Baling out the Brook
Proverbs about Women
African Amazons
Where Woman Commands
No Chance for Romantic Love
Pastoral Love
Abyssinian Beauty and Flirtation
Galla Coarseness
Somali Love-Affairs
Arabic Influences
Touareg Chivalry
An African Love-Letter
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE
Personal Charms of Australians
Cruel Treatment of Women
Were Savages Corrupted by Whites?
Aboriginal Horrors
Naked and not Ashamed
Is Civilization Demoralizing?
Aboriginal Wantonness
Lower than Brutes
Indifference to Chastity
Useless Precautions
Survivals of Promiscuity
Aboriginal Depravity
The Question of Promiscuity
Why do Australians Marry?
Curiosities of Jealousy
Pugnacious Females
Wife-Stealing
Swapping Girls
The Philosophy of Elopements
Charming a Woman by Magic
Other Obstacles to Love
Marriage Taboos and "Incest"
Affection for Women and Dogs
A Horrible Custom
Romantic Affliction
A Lock of Hair
Two Native Stories
Barrington's Love-Story
Risking Life for a Woman
Gerstaecker's Love-Story
Local Color in Courtship
Love-Letters.
ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC
Where Women Propose
Bornean Caged Girls
Charms of Dyak Women
Dyak Morals
Nocturnal Courtship
Head Hunters A-Wooing
Fickle and Shallow Passion
Dyak Love-Songs
The Girl With the Clean Face
Fijian Refinements
How Cannibals Treat Women
Fijian Modesty and Chastity
Emotional Curiosities
Fijian Love-Poems
Serenades and Proposals
Suicides and Bachelors
Samoan Traits
Courtship Pantomime
Two Samoan Love-Stories
Personal Charms of South Sea Islanders
Tahitians and Their White Visitors
Heartless Treatment of Women
Two Stories of Tahitian Infatuation
Captain Cook on Tahitian Love
Were the Tongans Civilized?
Love of Scenery
A Cannibal Bargain
The Handsome Chiefs
Honeymoon in a Cave
A Hawaiian Cave-Story
Is this Romantic Love?
Vagaries of Hawaiian Fondness
Hawaiian Morals
The Helen of Hawaii
Intercepted Love-Letters
Maoris of New Zealand
The Maiden of Rotorua
The Man on the Tree
Love in a Fortress
Stratagem of an Elopement
Maori Love-Poems
The Wooing-House
Liberty of Choice and Respect for Women
Maori Morals and Capacity for Love
HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE
The Red Lover
The Foam Woman
The Humpback Magician
The Buffalo King
The Haunted Grove
The Girl and the Scalp
A Chippewa Love-Song
How "Indian Stories" are Written
Reality versus Romance
Deceptive Modesty
Were Indians Corrupted by Whites?
The Noble Red Man
Apparent Exceptions
Intimidating California Squaws
Going A-Calumeting
Squaws and Personal Beauty
Are North American Indians Gallant?
South American Gallantry
How Indians Adore Squaws
Choosing a Husband
Compulsory "Free Choice"
A British Columbia Story
The Danger of Coquetry
The Girl Market
Other Ways of Thwarting Free Choice
Central and South American Examples
Why Indians Elope
Suicide and Love
Love-Charms
Curiosities of Courtship
Pantomimic Love-Making
Honeymoon
Music in Indian Courtship
Indian Love-Poems
More Love-Stories
"White Man Too Much Lie"
The Story of Pocahontas
Verdict: No Romantic Love
The Unloving Eskimo.
INDIA--WILD TRIBES AND TEMPLE GIRLS.
"Whole Tracts of Feeling Unknown to Them"
Practical Promiscuity
"Marvellously Pretty and Romantic"
Liberty of Choice
Scalps and Field-Mice
A Topsy-Turvy Custom
Pahária Lads and Lasses
Child-Murder and Child-Marriage
Monstrous Parental Selfishness
How Hindoo Girls are Disposed of
Hindoos Far Below Brutes
Contempt in Place of Love
Widows and Their Tormentors
Hindoo Depravity
Temple Girls
An Indian Aspasia
Symptoms of Feminine Love
Symptoms of Masculine Love
Lyrics and Dramas
I. The Story of Sakuntala
II. The Story of Urvasi
III. Malavika and Agnimitra
IV. The Story of Savitri
V. Nala and Damayanti
Artificial Symptoms
The Hindoo God of Love
Dying for Love
What Hindoo Poets Admire in Women
The Old Story of Selfishness
Bayadères and Princesses as Heroines
Voluntary Unions not Respectable
DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE ROMANTIC LOVE?
The Story of Jacob and Rachel
The Courting of Rebekah
How Ruth Courted Boaz
No Sympathy or Sentiment
A Masculine Ideal of Womanhood
Not the Christian Ideal of Love
Unchivalrous Slaughter of Women
Four More Bible Stories
Abishag the Shunammite
The Song of Songs
GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS.
Champions of Greek Love
Gladstone on the Women of Homer
Achilles as a Lover
Odysseus, Libertine and Ruffian
Was Penelope a Model Wife?
Hector and Andromache
Barbarous Treatment of Greek Women
Love in Sappho's Poems
Masculine Minds in Female Bodies
Anacreon and Others
Woman and Love in Aeschylus
Woman and Love in Sophocles
Woman and Love in Euripides
Romantic Love, Greek Style
Platonic Love of Women
Spartan Opportunities for Love
Amazonian Ideal of Greek Womanhood
Athenian Orientalism
Literature and Life
Greek Love in Africa
Alexandrian Chivalry
The New Comedy
Theocritus and Callimachus
Medea and Jason
Poets and Hetairai
Short Stories
Greek Romances
Daphnis and Chloe
Hero and Leander
Cupid and Psyche
UTILITY AND FUTURE OF LOVE.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX OF AUTHORS
INDEX OF SUBJECTS
PRIMITIVE LOVE
AND
LOVE-STORIES
HISTORY OF AN IDEA
"Love is always the same. As Sappho loved, fifty years ago, so did
people love ages before her; so will they love thousands of years
hence."
These words, placed by Professor Ebers in the mouth of one of the
characters in his historic novel, _An Egyptian Princess_, express the
prevalent opinion on this subject, an opinion which I, too, shared
fifteen years ago. Though an ardent champion of the theory of
evolution, I believed that there was one thing in the world to which
modern scientific ideas of gradual development did not apply--that
love was too much part and parcel of human nature to have ever been
different from what it is to-day.
ORIGIN OF A BOOK
It so happened that I began to collect notes for a paper on "How to
Cure Love." It was at first intended merely as a personal experiment
in emotional psychology. Afterward it occurred to me that such a
sketch might be shaped into a readable magazine article. This, again,
suggested a complementary article on "How to Win Love"--a sort of
modern Ovid in prose; and then suddenly came the thought,
"Why not write a book on love? There is none in the English
language--strange anomaly--though love is supposed to be the
most fascinating and influential thing in the world. It will
surely be received with delight, especially if I associate
with it some chapters on personal beauty, the chief inspirer
of love. I shall begin by showing that the ancient Greeks
and Romans and Hebrews loved precisely as we love."
Forthwith I took down from my shelves the classical authors that I had
not touched since leaving college, and eagerly searched for all
references to women, marriage, and love. To my growing surprise and
amazement I found that not only did those ancient authors look upon
women as inferior beings while I worshipped them, but in their
descriptions of the symptoms of love I looked in vain for mention of
those supersensual emotions and self-sacrificing impulses which
overcame me when I was in love. "Can it be," I whispered to myself,
"that, notwithstanding the universal opinion to the contrary, love is,
after all, subject to the laws of development?"
This hypothesis threw me into a fever of excitement, without the
stimulus of which I do not believe I should have had the courage and
patience to collect, classify, and weave into one fabric the enormous
number of facts and opinions contained within the covers of _Romantic
Love and Personal Beauty_. I believed that at last something new under
the sun had been found, and I was so much afraid that the discovery
might leak out prematurely, that for two years I kept the first half
of my title a secret, telling inquisitive friends merely that I was
writing a book on Personal Beauty. And no one but 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 which Burton wrote for
himself and his book: "Known to few, unknown to fewer still." However,
after reading Burton, I was surprised that any reader of Burton should
have found anything in common between his book and mine, for he
treated love as an appetite, I as a sentiment; my subject was pure,
supersensual affection, while his subject is frankly indicated in the
following sentences:
"I come at last to that heroical love, which is proper
to men and women ... and deserves much rather to be
called burning lust than by such an honorable title."
"This burning lust ... begets rapes, incests, murders."
"It rages with all sorts and conditions of men, yet is
most evident among such as are young and lusty, in the
flower of their years, nobly descended, high fed, such
as live idly, at ease, and for that cause (which our
divines call burning lust) this mad and beastly passion
... is named by our physicians heroical love, and a
more honorable title put upon it, _Amor nobilis_, as
Savonarola styles it, because noble men and women make
a common practice of it, and are so ordinarily affected
with it." "Carolus à Lorme ... makes a doubt whether
this heroical love be a disease.... Tully ... defines
it a furious disease of the mind; Plato madness
itself."
"Gordonius calls this disease the proper passion of
nobility."
"This heroical passion or rather brutish burning lust
of which we treat."
The only honorable love Burton knows is that between husband and wife,
while of such a thing as the evolution of love he had, of course, not
the remotest conception, as his book appeared in 1621, or two hundred
and thirty-eight years before Darwin's _Origin of Species_.
HEGEL ON GREEK LOVE
In a review of my book which appeared in the now defunct New York
_Star_, the late George Parsons Lathrop wrote that the author
"says that romantic love is a modern sentiment, less than a
thousand years old. This idea, I rather think, he derived
from Hegel, although he does not credit that philosopher
with it."
I read this criticism with mingled emotions. If it was true that Hegel
had anticipated me, my claims to priority of discovery would vanish,
even though the idea had come to me spontaneously; but, on the other
hand, the disappointment at this thought was neutralized by the
reflection that I should gain the support of one of the most famous
philosophers, and share with him the sneers and the ridicule bestowed
upon my theory. I wrote to Mr. Lathrop, begging him to refer me to the
volume and page of Hegel's numerous works where I could find the
passage in question. He promptly replied that I should find it in the
second volume of the _Aesthetik_ (178-182). No doubt I ought to have
known that Hegel had written on this subject; but the fact that of
more than two hundred American, English, and German reviewers of my
book whose notices I have seen, only one knew what had thus escaped my
research, consoled me somewhat. Hegel, indeed, might well have copied
Burton's epitaph. His _Aesthetik_ is an abstruse, unindexed,
three-volume work of 1,575 pages, which has not been reprinted since
1843, and is practically forgotten. Few know it, though all know of
it.
After perusing Hegel's pages on this topic I found, however, that Mr.
Lathrop had imputed to him a theory--my theory--which that philosopher
would have doubtless repudiated emphatically. What Hegel does is
simply to call attention to the fact that in the literature of the
ancient Greeks and Romans love is depicted only as a transient
gratification of the senses, or a consuming heat of the blood, and not
as a romantic, sentimental affection of the soul. He does not
generalize, says nothing about other ancient nations,[1] and certainly
never dreamt of such a thing as asserting that love had been gradually
and slowly developed from the coarse and selfish passions of our
savage ancestors to the refined and altruistic feelings of modern
civilized men and women. He lived long before the days of scientific
anthropology and Darwinism, and never thought of such a thing as
looking upon the emotions and morals of primitive men as the raw
material out of which our own superior minds have been fashioned. Nay,
Hegel does not even say that sentimental love did not exist in the
life of the Greeks and Romans; he simply asserts that it is not to be
found in their literature. The two things are by no means identical.
Professor Rohde, an authority on the erotic writings of the Greeks,
expresses the opinion repeatedly that, whatever their literature may
indicate, they themselves were capable of feeling strong and pure
love; and the eminent American psychologist, Professor William James,
put forth the same opinion in a review of my book.[2] Indeed, this
view was broached more than a hundred years ago by a German author,
Basil von Ramdohr, who wrote four volumes on love and its history,
entitled _Venus Urania_. His first two volumes are almost unreadably
garrulous and dull, but the third and fourth contain an interesting
account of various phases through which love has passed in literature.
Yet he declares (Preface, vol. iii.) that "the nature [_Wesen_] of
love is unchangeable, but the ideas we entertain in regard to it and
the effects we ascribe to it, are subject to alteration."
SHELLEY ON GREEK LOVE
It is possible that Hegel may have read this book, for it appeared in
1798, while the first manuscript sketches of his lectures on esthetics
bear the date of 1818. He may have also read Robert Wood's book
entitled _An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_,
dated 1775, in which this sentence occurs:
"Is it not very remarkable, that Homer, so great a master of
the tender and pathetic, who has exhibited human nature in
almost every shape, and under every view, has not given a
single instance of the powers and effects of love, distinct
from sensual enjoyment, in the _Iliad_?"
This is as far as I have been able to trace back this notion in modern
literature. But in the literature of the first half of the nineteenth
century I have come across several adumbrations of the truth regarding
the Greeks,[3] by Shelley, Lord Lytton, Lord Macaulay, and Théophile
Gautier. Shelley's ideas are confused and contradictory, but
interesting as showing the conflict between traditional opinion and
poetic intuition. In his fragmentary discourse on "The Manners of the
Ancients Relating to the Subject of Love," which was intended to serve
as an introduction to Plato's _Symposium_, he remarks that the women
of the ancient Greeks, with rare exceptions, possessed
"the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably
not extremely beautiful, at least there was no such
disproportion in the attractions of the external form
between the female and male sex among the Greeks, as exists
among the modern Europeans. They were certainly devoid of
that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the
acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment
animates, as with another life of overpowering grace, the
lineaments and the gestures of every form which they
inhabit. Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate
from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no
heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths." Having painted this
life-like picture of the Greek female mind, Shelley goes on
to say perversely:
"Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were
deprived of its legitimate object, that they were
incapable of sentimental love, and that this passion is
the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern
times."
He tries to justify this assertion by adding that
"Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain
degree of civilization and refinement ever produces the want
of sympathies still more intimate and complete; and the
gratification of the senses is no longer all that is sought
in sexual connection. It soon becomes a very small part of
that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love,
which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not
merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual,
imaginative, and sensitive."
Here Shelley contradicts himself flatly by saying, in two consecutive
sentences, that Greek women were "certainly devoid of the moral and
intellectual loveliness" which inspires sentimental love, but that the
men nevertheless could feel such love. His mind was evidently hazy on
the subject, and that is probably the reason why his essay remained a
fragment.
MACAULAY, BULWER-LYTTON, GAUTIER
Macaulay, with deeper insight than Shelley showed, realized that the
passion of love may undergo changes. In his essay on Petrarch he notes
that in the days of that poet love had become a new passion, and he
clearly realizes the obstacles to love presented by Greek
institutions. Of the two classes of women in Greece, the respectable
and the hetairai, he says:
"The matrons and their daughters, confined in the
harem--insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but the
mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were married--could
rarely excite interest; while their brilliant rivals, half
graces, half harpies, elegant and refined, but fickle and
rapacious, could never inspire respect."
Lord Lytton wrote an essay on "The Influence of Love upon Literature
and Real Life," in which he stated that
"with Euripides commences the important distinction in the
analysis of which all the most refined and intellectual of
modern erotic literature consists, viz., the distinction
between love as a passion and love as a sentiment.... He is
the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us
_intellectually_ in the antagonism and affinity between the
sexes."
Théophile Gautier clearly realized one of the differences between
ancient passion and modern love. In _Mademoiselle de Maupin,_ he makes
this comment on the ancient love-poems:
"Through all the subtleties and veiled expressions one
hears the abrupt and harsh voice of the master who
endeavors to soften his manner in speaking to a slave.
It is not, as in the love-poems written since the
Christian era, a soul demanding love of another soul
because it loves.... 'Make haste, Cynthia; the smallest
wrinkle may prove the grave of the most violent
passion.' It is in this brutal formula that all ancient
elegy is summed up."
GOLDSMITH AND ROUSSEAU
In _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ I intimated (116) that Oliver
Goldsmith was the first author who had a suspicion of the fact that
love is not the same everywhere and at all times. My surmise was
apparently correct; it is not refuted by any of the references to love
by the several authors just quoted, since all of these were written
from about a half a century to a century later than Goldsmith's
_Citizen of the World_ (published in 1764), which contains his
dialogue on "Whether Love be a Natural or a Fictitious Passion." His
assertion therein that love existed only in early Rome, in chivalrous
mediaeval Europe, and in China, all the rest of the world being, and
having ever been, "utter strangers to its delights and advantages,"
is, of course a mere bubble of his poetic fancy, not intended to be
taken too seriously, and, is, moreover, at variance with facts. It is
odd that he overlooks the Greeks, whereas the other writers cited
confine themselves to the Greeks and their Roman imitators.
Ten years before Goldsmith thus launched the idea that most nations
were and had ever been strangers to the delights and advantages of
love, Jean Jacques Rousseau published a treatise, _Discours sur
l'inégalité_ (1754), in which he asserted that savages are strangers
to jealousy, know no domesticity, and evince no preferences, being as
well pleased with one woman as with another. Although, as we shall see
later, many savages do have a crude sort of jealousy, domesticity, and
individual preference, Rousseau, nevertheless, hints prophetically at
a great truth--the fact that some, at any rate, of the phenomena of
love are not to be found in the life of savages. Such a thought,
naturally, was too novel to be accepted at once. Ramdohr, for
instance, declares (III. 17) that he cannot convince himself that
Rousseau is right. Yet, on the preceding page he himself had written
that "it is unreasonable to speak of love between the sexes among
peoples that have not yet advanced so far as to grant women humane
consideration."
LOVE A COMPOUND FEELING
All these things are of extreme interest as showing the blind
struggles of a great idea to emerge from the mist into daylight. The
greatest obstacle to the recognition of the fact that love has a
history, and is subject to the laws of evolution lay in the habit of
looking upon it as a simple feeling.
When I wrote my first book on love, I believed that Herbert Spencer
was the first thinker who grasped the idea that love is a composite
state of mind. I now see, however, that Silvius, in Shakspere's _As
You Like It_ (V. 2), gave a broad hint of the truth, three hundred
years ago. Phoebe asks him to "tell what 't is to love," and he
replies:
It is to be all made of sighs and tears....
It is to be all made of faith and service....
It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion, and all made of wishes,
All adoration, duty, and observance,
All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,
All purity, all trial, all obedience.
Coleridge also vaguely recognized the composite nature of love in the
first stanza of his famous poem:
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame.
And Swift adds, in "Cadenus and Vanessa:"
Love, why do we one passion call,
When 'tis a compound of them all?
The eminent Danish critic, George Brandes, though a special student of
English literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one of
his lectures on literary history (1872), that the book in which love
is for the first time looked on as something composite and an attempt
made to analyze it into its elements, is Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_
(which appeared in 1816). "In _Adolphe_," he says,
"and in all the literature associated with that book, we are
informed accurately how many parts, how many grains, of
friendship, devotion, vanity, ambition, admiration, respect,
sensual attraction, illusion, fancy, deception, hate,
satiety, enthusiasm, reasoning calculation, etc., are
contained in the _mixtum compositum_ which the enamoured
persons call love."
This list, moreover, does not accurately name a single one of
the essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated
phenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states of
mind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love--gallant
"service," "adoration," and "purity"--while "patience and impatience"
may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixed
moods of hope and despair.
HERBERT SPENCER'S ANALYSIS
Nevertheless the first thinker who treated love as a compound feeling
and consciously attempted a philosophical analysis of it was Herbert
Spencer. In 1855 he published his _Principles of Psychology_, and in
1870 appeared a greatly enlarged edition, paragraph 215 of which
contains the following exposition of his views:
"The passion which unites the sexes is habitually
spoken of as though it were a simple feeling; whereas
it is the most compound, and therefore the most
powerful, of all the feelings. Added to the purely
physical elements of it are first to be noticed those
highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty;
around which are aggregated a variety of pleasurable
ideas, not in themselves amatory, but which have an
organized relation to the amatory feeling. With this
there is united the complex sentiment which we term
affection--a sentiment which, as it exists between
those of the same sex, must be regarded as an
independent sentiment, but one which is here greatly
exalted. Then there is the sentiment of admiration,
respect, or reverence--in itself one of considerable
power, and which in this relation becomes in a high
degree active. There comes next the feeling called love
of approbation. To be preferred above all the world,
and that by one admired beyond all others, is to have
the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing
every previous experience: especially as there is added
that indirect gratification of it which results from
the preference being witnessed by unconcerned persons.
Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into
play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment
from, and sway over, another, is a proof of power which
cannot fail agreeably to excite the _amour propre_. Yet
again the proprietary feeling has its share in the
general activity: there is the pleasure of
possession--the two belong to each other. Once more,
the relation allows of an extended liberty of action.
Toward other persons a restrained behavior is
requisite. Round each there is a subtle boundary that
may not be crossed--an individuality on which none may
trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown
down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is
gratified. Finally, there is an exaltation of the
sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled
by another's sympathetic participation; and the
pleasures of another are added to the egoistic
pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling forming the
nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings
produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple
attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation,
of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of
sympathy. These, all greatly exalted, and severally
tending to reflect their excitements on one another,
unite to form the mental state we call love. And as
each of them is itself comprehensive of multitudinous
states of consciousness, we may say that this passion
fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary
excitations of which we are capable; and that hence
results its irresistible power."
Ribot has copied this analysis of love in his _Psychologie des
Sentiments_ (p. 249), with the comment that it is the best known to
him (1896) and that he sees nothing to add or to take away from it.
Inasmuch as it forms merely an episodic illustration in course of a
general argument, it certainly bears witness to the keenness of
Spencer's intellect. Yet I cannot agree with Ribot that it is a
complete analysis of love. It aided me in conceiving the plan for my
first book, but I soon found that it covered only a small part of the
ground. Of the ingredients as suggested by him I accepted only
two--Sympathy, and the feelings associated with Personal Beauty. What
he called love of approbation, self-esteem, and pleasure of possession
I subsummed under the name of Pride of Conquest and Possession.
Further reflection has convinced me that it would have been wiser if,
instead of treating Romantic Love as a phase of affection (which, of
course, was in itself quite correct), I had followed Spencer's example
and made affection one of the ingredients of the amorous passion. In
the present volume I have made the change and added also Adoration,
which includes what Spencer calls "the sentiment of admiration,
respect, or reverence," while calling attention to the superlative
phase of these sentiments which is so characteristic of the lover, who
does not say, "I respect you," but "I adore you." I may therefore
credit Spencer with having suggested three or four only of the
fourteen essential ingredients which I find in love.
ACTIVE IMPULSES MUST BE ADDED
The most important distinction between Spencer's analysis of love and
mine is that he treats it merely as a composite feeling, or a group of
emotions, whereas I treat it as a complex state of mind including not
only diverse feelings or sentiments--sympathy, admiration of beauty,
jealousy, affection--but the _active, altruistic impulses_ of
gallantry and self-sacrifice, which are really more essential to an
understanding of the essence of love, and a better test of it, than
the sentiments named by Spencer. He ignores also the absolutely
essential traits of individual preference and monopolism, besides
coyness, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair, and purity,
with the diverse emotions accompanying them. An effort to trace the
evolution of the ingredients of love was first made in my book, though
in a fragmentary way, in which respect the present volume will be
found a great improvement. Apart from the completion of the analysis
of love, my most important contribution to the study of this subject
lies in the recognition of the fact that, "love" being so vague and
comprehensive a term, the only satisfactory way of studying its
evolution is to trace the evolution of each of its ingredients
separately, as I do in the present volume in the long chapter entitled
"What Is Romantic Love?"
In _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ (180) I wrote that perhaps the
main reason why no one had anticipated me in the theory that love is
an exclusively modern sentiment was that no distinction had commonly
been made between romantic love and conjugal affection, noble examples
of the latter being recorded in countries where romantic love was not
possible owing to the absence of opportunities for courtship. I still
hold that conjugal love antedated the romantic variety, but further
study has convinced me that (as will be shown in the chapters on
Conjugal Love and on India, and Greece) much of what has been taken as
evidence of wifely devotion is really only a proof of man's tyrannic
selfishness which compelled the woman always to subordinate herself to
her cruel master. The idea on which I placed so much emphasis, that
opportunity for prolonged courtship is essential to the growth of
romantic love, was some years later set forth by Dr. Drummond in his
_Ascent of Man_ where he comments eloquently on the fact that
"affection needs time to grow."
SENSUALITY THE ANTIPODE OF LOVE
The keynote of my first book lies of course in the distinction between
sensual love and romantic love. This distinction seemed to me so
self-evident that I did not dwell on it at length, but applied myself
chiefly to the task of proving that savages and ancient nations knew
only one kind, being strangers to romantic or pure love. When I wrote
(76) "No one, of course, would deny that sensual passion prevailed in
Athens; but sensuality is the very antipode of love," I never dreamed
that anyone would object to this distinction in itself. Great,
therefore, was my amazement when, on reading the London _Saturday
Review's_ comments on my book, I came across the following:
"and when we find Mr. Finck marking off Romantic Love not
merely from Conjugal Love, but from what he is pleased to
call 'sensuality,' we begin to suspect that he really does
not know what he is talking about."
This criticism, with several others similar to it, was of great use to
me, as it led to a series of studies, which convinced me that even at
the present day the nature of romantic love is not understood by the
vast majority of Europeans and Americans, many of them very estimable
and intelligent individuals.
THE WORD ROMANTIC
Another London paper, the _Academy_, took me to task for using the
word "romantic" in the sense I applied to it. But in this case, too,
further research has shown that I was justified in using that word to
designate pure prematrimonial love. There is a passage in Steele's
_Lover_ (dated 1714) which proves that it must have been in common use
in a similar sense two centuries ago. The passage refers to "the reign
of the amorous Charles the Second," and declares that
"the licenses of that court did not only make the Love which
the Vulgar call Romantick, the object of Jest and Ridicule,
but even common Decency and Modesty were almost abandoned as
formal and unnatural."
Here there is an obvious antithesis between romantic and sensual. The
same antithesis was used by Hegel in contrasting the sensual love of
the ancient Greeks and Romans with what he calls modern "romantic"
love. Waitz-Gerland, too, in the six volumes of their _Anthropologie
der Naturvölker_, repeatedly refer to (alleged) cases of "romantic
love" among savages and barbarians, having in all probability adopted
the term from Hegel. The peculiar appropriateness of the word romantic
to designate imaginative love will be set forth later in the chapter
entitled Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment. Here I will only
add an important truth which I shall have occasion to repeat
often--that _a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of
romantic love_; for it is obvious, for instance, that an elopement
prompted by the most frivolous sensual passion, without a trace of
real love, may lead to the most romantic incidents.
In the chapters on affection, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, I shall
make it clear even to a Saturday Reviewer that the gross sensual
infatuation which leads a man to shoot a girl who refuses him, or a
tramp to assault a woman on a lonely road and afterward to cut her
throat in order to hide his crime, is absolutely antipodal to the
refined, ardent, affectionate Romantic Love which impels a man to
sacrifice his own life rather than let any harm or dishonor come to
the beloved.
ANIMALS HIGHER THAN SAVAGES
Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin, in his second treatise on sexual
anomalies,[4] takes occasion to express his disbelief in my view that
love before marriage is a sentiment peculiar to modern man. He
declares that traits of such love occur even in the courtship of
animals, particularly birds, and implies that this upsets my theory.
On the same ground a reviewer in a New York evening paper accused me
of being illogical. Such criticisms illustrate the vague ideas
regarding evolution that are still current. It is assumed that all the
faculties are developed step by step simultaneously as we proceed from
lower to higher animals, which is as illogical as it would be to
assume that since birds have such beautiful and convenient things as
wings, and dogs belong to a higher genus of animals, therefore dogs
ought to have better wings than birds. Most animals are cleaner than
savages; why should not some of them be more romantic in their
love-affairs? I shall take occasion repeatedly to emphasize this point
in the present volume, though I alluded to it already in my first book
(55) in the following passage, which my critics evidently overlooked:
"In passing from animals to human beings we find at
first not only no advance in the sexual relations, but
a decided retrogression. Among some species of birds,
courtship and marriage are infinitely more refined and
noble than among the lowest savages, and it is
especially in their treatment of females, both before
and after mating, that not only birds but all animals
show an immense superiority over primitive man; for
male animals fight only among themselves and never
maltreat the females."
LOVE THE LAST, NOT THE FIRST, PRODUCT OF CIVILIZATION
Notwithstanding this striking and important fact, there is a large
number of sentimental writers who make the extraordinary claim that
the lower races, however savage they may be in everything else, are
like ourselves in their amorous relations; that they love and admire
personal beauty just as we do. The main object of the present volume
is to demolish this doctrine; to prove that sexual refinement and the
sense of personal beauty are not the earliest but the latest products
of civilization. I have shown elsewhere[5] that Japanese civilization
is in many important respects far superior to ours; yet in their
treatment of women and estimate of love, this race has not yet risen
above the barbarous stage; and it will be shown in this volume that if
we were to judge the ancient Greeks and the Hindoos from this point of
view, we should have to deny them the epithet of civilized. Morgan
found that the most advanced of American Indians, the Iroquois, had no
capacity for love. His testimony in detail will be found in its proper
place in this volume, together with that of competent observers
regarding other tribes and races. Some of this evidence was known to
the founders of the modern science of sociology. It led Spencer to
write _en passant_ (_Pr. Soc_., I., § 337, §339) that "absence of the
tender emotion ... habitually characterizes men of low types;" and
that the "higher sentiments accompanying union of the sexes ... do not
exist among primitive men." It led Sir John Lubbock to write (50)
regarding the lowest races that "love is almost unknown among them;
and marriage, in its lowest phases, is by no means a matter of
affection and companionship."
PLAN OF THIS VOLUME
These are casual adumbrations of a great truth that applies not only
to the lowest races (savages) but to the more advanced barbarians as
well as to ancient civilized nations, as the present volume will
attempt to demonstrate. To make my argument more impressive and
conclusive, I present it in a twofold form. First I take the fourteen
ingredients of love separately, showing how they developed gradually,
whence it follows necessarily that love as a whole developed
gradually. Then I take the Africans, Australians, American Indians,
etc., separately, describing their diverse amorous customs and
pointing out everywhere the absence of the altruistic, supersensual
traits which constitute the essence of romantic love as distinguished
from sensual passion. All this will be preceded by a chapter on "How
Sentiments Change and Grow," which will weaken the bias against the
notion that so elemental a feeling as sexual love should have
undergone so great a change, by pointing out that other seemingly
instinctive and unalterable feelings have changed and developed.
GREEK SENTIMENTALITY
The inclusion of the civilized Greeks in a treatise on Primitive Love
will naturally cause surprise; but I cannot attribute a capacity for
anything more than primitive sensual love to a nation which, in its
prematrimonial customs, manifested none of the essential _altruistic_
traits of Romantic Love--sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice,
affection, adoration, and purity. As a matter of course, the
sensualism of a Greek or Roman is a much less coarse thing than an
Australian's, which does not even include kisses or other caresses.
While Greek love is not a sentiment, it may be sentimental, that is,
an _affectation of sentiment_, differing from real sentiment as
adulation does from adoration, as gallantry or the risking of life to
secure favors do from genuine gallantry of the heart and
self-sacrifice for the benefit of another. This important point which
I here superadd to my theory, was overlooked by Benecke when he
attributed a capacity for real love to the later Greeks of the
Alexandrian period.
IMPORTANCE OF LOVE
One of the most important theses advanced in _Romantic Love and
Personal Beauty_ (323, 424, etc.), was that love, far from being
merely a passing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful
agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the
reign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, the
insane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to
perish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals
and saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, and
hand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediator
between these two agencies, love comes in; for Cupid, as I have said,
"does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of health and
beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of
single-blessedness;" which in these days is not such a hardship as it
used to be. This thought will be enlarged in the last chapter of the
present volume, on the "Utility and Future of Love," which will
indicate how the amorous sense is becoming more and more fastidious
and beneficial. In the same chapter attention will be called, for the
first time, to the three great strata in the evolution of parental
love and morality. In the first, represented by savages, parents think
chiefly of their own comfort, and children get the minimum of
attention consistent with their preservation. In the second, which
includes most of the modern Europeans and Americans, parents exercise
care that their children shall make an advantageous marriage--that is
a marriage which shall secure them wealth or comfort; but the
frequency with which girls are married off to old, infirm, or unworthy
men, shows how few parents as yet have a thought of their
_grandchildren_. In the next stage of moral evolution, which we are
now entering, the grandchildren's welfare also will be considered. In
consequence of the persistent failure to consider the grandchildren,
the human race is now anything but a model of physical, intellectual,
and moral perfection. Luckily love, even in its sensual stages, has
counteracted this parental selfishness and myopia by inducing young
folks to marry for health, youth, and beauty, and creating an aversion
to old age, disease, and deformity. As love becomes more and more
fastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moral
beauty--that is becomes Romantic Love--its sway becomes greater and
greater, and the time will come when questions relating to it will
form the most important chapters in treatises on moral philosophy,
which now usually ignore them altogether.
HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW
In conversation with friends I have found that the current belief that
love must have been always and everywhere the same, because it is such
a strong and elemental passion, is most easily shaken in this _a
priori_ position by pointing out that there are other strong feelings
in our minds which were lacking among earlier and lower races. The
love of grand, wild scenery, for instance--what we call romantic
scenery--is as modern as the romantic love of men and women. Ruskin
tells us that in his youth he derived a pleasure from such scenery
"comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near a
noble and kind mistress."
NO LOVE OF ROMANTIC SCENERY
Savages, on the other hand, are prevented from appreciating snow
mountains, avalanches, roaring torrents, ocean storms, deep glens,
jungles, and solitudes, not only by their lack of refinement, but by
their fears of wild animals, human enemies, and evil spirits. "In the
Australian bush," writes Tylor (_P.C._, II., 203), "demons whistle in
the branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the
trunks to seize the wayfarer;" and Powers (88) writes in regard to
California Indians that they listen to night noises with unspeakable
horror:
"It is difficult for us to conceive of the speechless
terrors which these poor wretches suffer from the screeching
of owls, the shrieking of night-hawks, the rustling of the
trees ... all of which are only channels of poison wherewith
the demons would smite them."
To the primitive mind, the world over, a high mountain is the horror
of horrors, the abode of evil spirits, and an attempt to climb it
certain death. So strong is this superstition that explorers have
often experienced the greatest difficulty in getting natives to serve
as porters of provisions in their ascents of peaks.[6] Even the Greeks
and Romans cared for landscape only in so far as it was humanized
(parks and gardens) and habitable. "Their souls," says Rohde (511),
"could never have been touched by the sublime thrills we
feel in the presence of the dark surges of the sea, the
gloom of a primeval forest, the solitude and silence of
sunlit mountain summits."
And Humboldt, who first noted the absence in Greek and Roman writings
of the admiration of romantic scenery, remarked (24):
"Of the eternal snow of the Alps, glowing in the rosy
light of the morning or evening sun, of the loveliness
of the blue glacier ice, of the stupendous grandeur of
Swiss landscape, no description has come down to us
from them; yet there was a constant procession over
these Alps, from Helvetia to Gallia, of statesmen and
generals with literary men in their train. All these
travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable
roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages
their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar,
when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his
time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical
treatise 'De Analogia.'"
A sceptical reader might retort that the love of romantic scenery is
so subtle a sentiment, and so far from being universal even now, that
it would be rash to argue from its absence among savages, Greeks, and
Romans, that love, a sentiment so much stronger and more prevalent,
could have been in the same predicament. Let us therefore take another
sentiment, the religious, the vast power and wide prevalence of which
no one will deny.
NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION
To a modern Christian, God is a deity who is all-wise, all-powerful,
infinite, holy, the personification of all the highest virtues. To
accuse this Deity of the slightest moral flaw would be blasphemy. Now,
without going so far down as the lowest savages, let us see what
conception such barbarians as the Polynesians have of their gods. The
moral habits of some of them are indicated by their names--"The
Rioter," "The Adulterer," "Ndauthina," who steals women of rank or
beauty by night or by torchlight, "The Human-brain Eater," "The
Murderer." Others of their gods are "proud, envious, covetous,
revengeful, and the subject of every basest passion. They are
demoralized heathen--monster expressions of moral corruption"
(Williams, 184). These gods make war, and kill and eat each other just
as mortals do. The Polynesians believed, too, that "the spirits of the
dead are eaten by the gods or demons" (Ellis, _P.R_., I., 275). It
might be said that since a Polynesian sees no crime in adultery,
revenge, murder, or cannibalism, his attributing such qualities to his
gods cannot, from his point of view, be considered blasphemous. Quite
true; but my point is that men who have made so little progress in
sympathy and moral perception as to see no harm in adultery, revenge,
murder and cannibalism, and in attributing them to their gods, are
altogether too coarse and callous to be able to experience the higher
religious emotions. This inference is borne out by what a most careful
observer (Ellis, _P.R._, I., 291) says:
"Instead of exercising those affections of gratitude,
complacency, and love toward the objects of their
worship which the living God supremely requires, they
regarded their deities with horrific dread, and
worshipped only with enslaving fear."
This "enslaving fear" is the principal ingredient of primitive
religious emotion everywhere. To the savage and barbarian, religion is
not a consolation and a blessing, but a terror. Du Chaillu says of the
equatorial Africans (103) that "their whole lives are saddened by the
fears of evil spirits, witchcraft, and other kindred superstitions
under which they labor." Benevolent deities, even if believed in,
receive little or no attention, because, being good, they are supposed
to do no harm anyway, whereas the malevolent gods must be propitiated
by sacrifices. The African Dahomans, for instance, ignore their Mahu
because his intentions are naturally friendly, whereas their Satan,
the wicked Legba, has hundreds of statues before which offerings are
made. "Early religions," as Mr. Andrew Lang tersely puts it, "are
selfish, not disinterested. The worshipper is not contemplative, so
much as eager to gain something to his advantage." If the gods fail to
respond to the offerings made to them, the sacrificers naturally feel
aggrieved, and show their displeasure in a way which to a person who
knows refined religion seems shocking and sacrilegious. In Japan,
China, and Corea, if the gods fail to do what is expected of them,
their images are unceremoniously walloped. In India, if the rains
fail, thousands of priests send up their prayers. If the drought still
continues, they punish their idols by holding them under water. During
a thunderstorm in Africa, Chapman (I., 45) witnessed the following
extraordinary scene:
"A great number of women, employed in reaping the
extensive corn-fields through which we passed were
raising their hoes and voices to heaven, and, yelling
furiously, cursed 'Morimo' (God), as the terrific
thunder-claps succeeded each vivid flash of lightning.
On inquiry I was informed by 'Old Booy' that they were
indignant at the interruption of their labors, and that
they therefore cursed and menaced the cause. Such
blasphemy was awful, even among heathens, and I fully
expected to see the wrath of God fall upon them."
If any pious reader of such details--which might he multiplied a
thousand-fold--still believes that religious emotion (like love!) is
the same everywhere, let him compare his own devoted feelings during
worship in a Christian church with the emotions which must sway those
who participate in a religious ceremony like that described in the
following passage taken from Rowney's _Wild Tribes of India_ (105). It
refers to the sacrifices made by the Khonds to the God of War, the
victims of which, both male and female, are often bought young and
brought up for this special purpose:
"For a month prior to the sacrifice there was much
feasting and intoxication, with dancing round the
Meriah, or victim ... and on the day before the rite he
was stupefied with toddy and bound at the bottom of a
post. The assembled multitude then danced around the
post to music, singing hymns of invocation to some such
effect as follows: 'O God, we offer a sacrifice to you!
Give us good crops in return, good seasons, and
health.' On the next day the victim was again
intoxicated, and anointed with oil, which was wiped
from his body by those present, and put on their heads
as a blessing. The victim was then carried, in
procession round the village, preceded by music, and on
returning to the post a hog was sacrificed to ... the
village deity ... the blood from the carcass being
allowed to flow into a pit prepared to receive it. The
victim, made senseless by intoxication, was now thrown
into the pit, and his face pressed down till he died
from suffocation in the blood and mire, a deafening
noise with instruments being kept up all the time. The
priest then cut a piece of flesh from the body and
buried it with ceremony near the village idol, all the
rest of the people going through the same form after
him."
Still more horrible details of these sacrifices are supplied by Dalton
(288):
"Major Macpherson notes that the Meriah in some
districts is put to death slowly by fire, the great
object being to draw from the victim as many tears as
possible, in the belief that the cruel Tari will
proportionately increase the supply of rain."
"Colonel Campbell thus describes the _modus operandi_ in
Chinna Kimedy: 'The miserable Meriah is dragged along the
fields, surrounded by a crowd of half-intoxicated Kandhs,
who, shouting and screaming, rush upon him, and with their
knives cut the flesh piece-meal from his bones, avoiding the
head and bowels, till the living skeleton, dying from loss
of blood, is relieved from torture, when its remains are
burnt and the ashes mixed with the new grain to preserve it
from insects.'"
In some respect, the civilized Hindoos are even worse than the wild
tribes of India. Nothing is more sternly condemned and utterly
abhorred by modern religion than licentiousness and obscenity, but a
well-informed and eminently trustworthy missionary, the Abbé Dubois,
declares that sensuality and licentiousness are among the elements of
Hindoo religious life:
"Whatever their religion sets before them, tends to
encourage these vices; and, consequently, all their senses,
passions, and interests are leagued in its favor" (II., 113,
etc.).
Their religious festivals "are nothing but sports; and on no occasion
of life are modesty and decorum more carefully excluded than during
the celebration of their religious mysteries."
More immoral even than their own religious practices are the doings of
their deities. The _Bhagavata_ is a book which deals with the
adventures of the god Krishna, of whom Dubois says (II., 205):
"It was his chief pleasure to go every morning to the
place where the women bathe, and, in concealment, to
take advantage of their unguarded exposure. Then he
rushed amongst them, took possession of their clothes,
and gave a loose to the indecencies of language and of
gesture. He maintained sixteen wives, who had the title
of queens, and sixteen thousand concubines.... In
obscenity there is nothing that can be compared with
the _Bhagavata_. It is, nevertheless, the delight of
the Hindu, and the first book they put into the hands
of their children, when learning to read."
Brahmin temples are little more than brothels, in each of which a
dozen or more young Bayadères are kept for the purpose of increasing
the revenues of the gods and their priests. Religious prostitution and
theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt,
and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series of
obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154): "We are
shocked at the morality of a nation which could supply the deceased
with such literature for the eternal journey." Professor Robertson
Smith says that "in Arabia and elsewhere unrestricted prostitution was
practised at the temples and defended on the analogy of the license
allowed to herself by the unmarried mother goddess." Nor were the
early Greeks much better. Some of their religious festivals were
sensual orgies, some of their gods nearly as licentious as those of
the Hindoos. Their supreme god, Zeus, is an Olympian Don Juan, and the
legend of the birth of Aphrodite, their goddess of love, is in its
original form unutterably obscene.
Before religious emotion could make any approximation to the devout
feelings of a modern Christian, it was necessary to eliminate all
these licentious, cruel, and blasphemous features of worship--the
eating or slaughtering of human victims, the obscene orgies, as well
as the spiteful and revengeful acts toward disobedient gods. The
progress--like the Evolution of Romantic Love--has been from the
sensual and selfish to the supersensual and unselfish. In the highest
religious ideal, love of God takes the place of fear, adoration that
of terror, self-sacrifice that of self-seeking. But we are still very
far from that lofty ideal.
"The lazzarone of Naples prays to his patron saint to favor
his choice of a lottery ticket; if it turns out an unlucky
number he will take the little leaden image of the saint
from his pocket, revile it, spit on it, and trample it in
the mud."
"The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops because
it made their parishioners indifferent to prayers for their crops"
(Brinton, _R.S_., 126, 82). These are extreme cases, but Italian
lazzaroni and Swiss peasants are by no means the only church-goers
whose worship is inspired not by love of God but by the expectation of
securing a personal benefit. All those who pray for worldly
prosperity, or do good deeds for the sake of securing a happy
hereafter for their souls, take a selfish, utilitarian view of the
deity, and even their gratitude for favors received is too apt to be
"a lively sense of possible favors to come." Still, there are now not
a few devotees who love God for his own sake; and who pray not for
luxuries but that their souls may be fortified in virtue and their
sympathies widened. But it is not necessary to dwell on this theme any
longer, now that I have shown what I started out to demonstrate, that
religious emotion is very complex and variable, that in its early
stages it is made up of feelings which are not loving, reverential, or
even respectful, but cruel, sacrilegious, criminal, and licentious;
that religion, in a word, has (like love, as I am trying to prove)
passed through coarse, carnal, degrading, selfish, utilitarian stages
before it reached the comparatively refined, spiritual, sympathetic,
and devotional attitude of our time.
Besides the growing complexity of the religious sentiment and its
gradual ennoblement, there are two points I wish to emphasize. One is
that there are among us to-day thousands of intelligent and refined
agnostics who are utter strangers to all religious emotions, just as
there are thousands of men and women who have never known and never
will know the emotions of sentimental love. Why, then, should it seem
so very unlikely that whole nations were strangers to such love (as
they were strangers to the higher religious sentiment), even though
they were as intelligent as the Greeks and Romans? I offer this
consideration not as a conclusive argument, but merely as a means of
overcoming a preconceived bias against my theory.
The other point I wish to make clear is that our emotions change with
our ideas. Obviously it would be absurd to suppose that a man whose
ideas in regard to the nature of his gods do not prevent him from
flogging them angrily in case they refuse his requests are the same as
those of a pious Christian, who, if his prayers are not answered, says
to his revered Creator: "Thy will be done on earth as it is done in
heaven," and humbly prostrates himself. And if emotions in the
religious sphere are thus metamorphosed with ideas, why is it so
unlikely that the sexual passion, too, should "suffer a sea change
into something rich and strange?"
The existence of the wide-spread prejudice against the notion that
love is subject to the laws of development, is owing to the fact that
the comparative psychology of the emotions and sentiments has been
strangely neglected. Anthropology, the Klondike of the comparative
psychologist, reveals things seemingly much more incredible than the
absence of romantic love among barbarians and partly civilized nations
who had not yet discovered the nobler super-sensual fascinations which
women are capable of exerting. The nuggets of truth found in that
science show that every virtue known to man grew up slowly into its
present exalted form. I will illustrate this assertion with reference
to one general feeling, the horror of murder, and then add a few pages
regarding virtues relating to the sexual sphere and directly connected
with the subject of this book.
MURDER AS A VIRTUE
The committing of wilful murder is looked on with unutterable horror
in modern civilized communities, yet it took eons of time and the
co-operation of many religious, social, and moral agencies before the
idea of the sanctity of human life became what it is now when it might
be taken for an instinct inherent in human nature itself. How far it
is from being such an instinct we shall see by looking at the facts.
Among the lowest races and even some of the higher barbarians, murder,
far from being regarded as a crime, is honored as a virtue and a
source of glory.
An American Indian's chief pride and claim to tribal honor lies in the
number of scalps he has torn from the heads of men he has killed. Of
the Fijian, Williams says (97):
"Shedding of blood is to him no crime, but a glory. Whoever
may be the victim--whether noble or vulgar, old or young,
man, woman, or child--whether slain in war or butchered by
treachery, to be somehow an acknowledged murderer, is the
object of a Fijian's restless ambition."
The Australian feels the same irresistible impulse to kill every
stranger he comes across as many of our comparatively civilized
gentlemen feel toward every bird or wild animal they see. Lumholtz,
while he lived among these savages, took good care to follow the
advice "never have a black fellow behind you;" and he relates a story
of a squatter who was walking in the bush with his black boy hunting
brush monkeys, when the boy touched him on the shoulder from behind
and said, "Let me go ahead." When the squatter asked why he wished to
go before him, the native answered, "Because I feel such an
inclination to kill you."
Dalton (266) says of the Oraons in India: "It is doubtful if they see
any moral guilt in murder." But the most astounding race of
professional murderers are the Dyaks of Borneo. "Among them," says
Earl, "the more heads a man has cut off, the more he is respected."
"The white man reads," said a Dyak to St. John: "_we_ hunt heads
instead." "Our Dyaks," says Charles Brooke, "were eternally requesting
to be allowed to go for heads, and their urgent entreaties often bore
resemblance to children crying after sugar-plums." "An old Dyak,"
writes Dalton, "loves to dwell upon his success on these hunting
excursions, and the terror of the women and children taken affords a
fruitful theme of amusement at their meetings." Dalton speaks of one
expedition from which seven hundred heads were brought home. The young
women were carried off, the old ones killed and all the men's heads
were cut off. Not that the women always escaped. Among the Dusun, as a
rule, says Preyer,
"the heads were obtained in the most cowardly way possible,
a woman's or child's being just as good as a man's ... so,
as easier prey, the cowards seek them by lying in ambush
near the plantations."
Families are sometimes surprised while asleep and their heads cut off.
Brooke tells of a man who for awhile kept company with a countrywoman,
and then slew her and ran off with her head. "It ought to be called
_head-stealing_ not _head-hunting,"_ says Hatton; and Earl remarks:
"The possession of a human head cannot be considered as a proof
of the bravery of the owner for it is not necessary that he
should have killed the victim with his own hands, his friends
being permitted to assist him or even to perform the act
themselves."
It is to be noted that the Dyaks[7] are not in other respects a fierce
and diabolical race, but are at home, as Doty attests, "mild, gentle,
and given to hospitality." I call special attention to this by way of
indirectly answering an objection frequently urged against my theory:
"How is it possible to suppose that a nation so highly civilized as
the Greeks of Plato's time should have known love for women only in
its lower, carnal phases?" Well, we have here a parallel case. The
Dyaks are "mild, gentle, and hospitable," yet their chief delight and
glory is murder! And as one of the main objects of this book is to
dwell on the various obstacles which impeded the growth of romantic
love, it will be interesting to glance for a moment at the causes
which prevented the Dyaks from recognizing the sanctity of life.
Superstition is one of them; they believe that persons killed by them
will be their slaves in the next world. Pride is another. "How many
heads did your father get?" a Dyak will ask; and if the number given
is less than his own, the other will say, "Well, then you have no
occasion to be proud." A man's rank in this world as in the next
depends on the number of his skulls; hence the owner of a large number
may be distinguished by his proud bearing. But the head hunter's
strangest and strongest motive is _the desire to please women_! No
Dyak maiden would condescend to marry a youth who has never killed a
man, and in times when the chances for murder were few and far
between, suitors have been compelled to wait a year or two before they
could bag a skull and lead home their blushing bride. The weird
details of this mode of courtship will be given in the chapter on
Island Love on the Pacific.
SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS.
In all these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of the
sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror at
this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the
victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer
to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of
slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine
myself to a few words regarding the maternal sentiment. The love of a
mother for her offspring is by many philosophers considered the
earliest and strongest of all sympathetic feelings; a feeling stronger
than death. If we can find a wide-spread failure of this powerful
instinct, we shall have one more reason for not assuming as a matter
of course, that the sentiment of love must have been always present.
In Australian families it has been the universal custom to bring up
only a few children in each family--usually two boys and a girl--the
others being destroyed by their own parents, with no more compunction
than we show in drowning superfluous puppies or kittens. The Kurnai
tribe did not kill new-born infants, but simply left them behind. "The
aboriginal mind does not seem to perceive the horrid idea of leaving
an unfortunate baby to die miserably in a deserted camp" (Fison and
Howitt, 14). The Indians of both North and South America were addicted
to the practice of infanticide. Among the Arabs the custom was so
inveterate that as late as our sixth century, Mohammed felt called
upon, in various parts of the Koran, to discountenance it. In the
words of Professor Robertson Smith (281):
"Mohammed, when he took Mecca and received the homage of the
women in the most advanced centre of Arabian civilization,
still deemed it necessary formally to demand from them a
promise not to commit child-murder."
Among the wild tribes of India there are some who cling to their
custom of infanticide with the tenacity of fanatics. Dalton (288-90)
relates that with the Kandhs this custom was so wide-spread that in
1842 Major Macpherson reported that in many villages not a single
female child could be found. The British Government rescued a number
of girls and brought them up, giving them an education. Some of these
were afterward given in marriage to respectable Kandh bachelors,
"and it was expected that they at least would not outrage
their own feeling as mothers by consenting to the
destruction of their offspring. Subsequently, however,
Colonel Campbell ascertained that these ladies had no female
children, and, on being closely questioned, they admitted
that at their husbands' bidding they had destroyed them."
In the South Sea Islands "not less than two-thirds of the children
were murdered by their own parents." Ellis (_P.R_., I., 196-202) knew
parents who had, by their own confession, killed four, six, eight,
even ten of their children, and the only reason they gave was that it
was the custom of the country.
"_No sense of irresolution or horror appeared to exist_ in
the bosoms of those parents, who deliberately resolved on
the deed before the child was born." "The murderous parents
often came to their (the missionaries') houses almost before
their hands were cleansed from their children's blood, and
spoke of the deed with worse than brutal insensibility, or
with vaunting satisfaction at the triumph of their customs
over the persuasions of their teachers."
They refused to spare babies even when the missionaries offered to
take care of them (II., 23). Neither Ellis, during a residence of
eight years, nor Nott during thirty years' residence on the South Sea
Islands, had known a single mother who was not guilty of this crime of
infanticide. Three native women who happened to be together in a room
one day confessed that between them they had killed twenty-one
infants--nine, seven, and five respectively.
These facts have long been familiar to students of anthropology, but
their true significance has been obscured by the additional
information that many tribes addicted to infanticide, nevertheless
displayed a good deal of "affection" toward those whom they spared. A
closer examination of the testimony reveals, however, that there is no
true affection in these cases, but merely a shallow fondness for the
little ones, chiefly for the sake of the selfish gratification it
affords the parents to watch their gambols and to give vent to
inherited animal instincts. True affection is revealed only in
self-sacrifice; but the disposition to sacrifice themselves for their
children is the one quality most lacking in these child-murderers.
Sentimentalists, with their usual lack of insight and logical sense,
have endeavored to excuse these assassins on the ground that necessity
compelled them to destroy their infants. Their arguments have misled
even so eminent a specialist as Professor E.B. Tylor into declaring
(_Anthropology,_ 427) that "infanticide comes from hardness of life
rather than from hardness of heart." What he means, may be made clear
by reference to the case of the Arabs who, living in a desert country,
were in constant dread of suffering from scarcity of food; wherefore,
as Robertson Smith remarks (281), "to bury a daughter was regarded not
only as a virtuous but as a generous deed, which is intelligible if
the reason was that there would be fewer mouths to fill in the tribe."
This explains the murders in question but does not show them to be
excusable; it explains them as being due to the vicious selfishness
and hard-heartedness of parents who would rather kill their infants
than restrain their sexual appetite when they had all the children
they could provide for.
In most cases the assassins of their own children had not even as much
semblance of an excuse as the Arabs. Turner relates (284) that in the
New Hebrides the women had to do all the work, and as it was supposed
that they could not attend to more than two or three, all the others
were buried alive; in other words the babes were murdered to save
trouble and allow the men to live in indolence. In the instances from
India referred to above, various trivial excuses for female
infanticide were offered: that it would save the expenses connected
with the marriage rites; that it was cheaper to buy girls than to
bring them up, or, better still, to steal them from other tribes; that
male births are increased by the destruction of female infants; and
that it is better to destroy girls in their infancy than to allow them
to grow up and become causes of strife afterward. Among the Fijians,
says Williams (154, 155), there is in infanticide "no admixture of
anything like religious feeling or fear, but _merely whim, expediency,
anger, or indolence_." Sometimes the general idea of woman's
inferiority to man underlies the act. They will say to the pleading
missionary: "Why should she live? Will she wield a club? Will she
poise a spear?"
But it was among the women of Hawaii that the motives of infanticide
reached their climax of frivolity. There mothers killed their children
because they were too lazy to bring them up and cook for them; or
because they wished to preserve their own beauty, or were unwilling to
suffer an interruption in their licentious amours; or because they
liked to roam about unburdened by babes; and sometimes for no other
reason than because they could not make them stop crying. So they
buried them alive though they might be months or even years old
(Ellis, _P.R_., IV., 240).
These revelations show that it is not "hardness of life" but "hardness
of heart"--sensual, selfish indulgence--that smothers the parental
instinct. To say that the conduct of such parents is brutal, would be
a great injustice to brutes. No species of animals, however low in the
scale of life, has ever been known to habitually kill its offspring.
In their treatment of females and young ones, animals are indeed, as a
rule, far superior to savages and barbarians. I emphasize this point
because several of my critics have accused me of a lack of knowledge
and thought and logic because I attributed some of the elements of
romantic love to animals and denied them to primitive human beings.
But there is no inconsistency in this. We shall see later on that
there are other things in which animals are superior not only to
savages but to some civilized peoples as high in the scale as Hindoos.
HONORABLE POLYGAMY
Turning now from the parental to the conjugal sphere we shall find
further interesting instances showing How Sentiments Change and Grow.
The monogamous sentiment--the feeling that a man and his wife belong
to each other exclusively--is now so strong that a person who commits
bigamy not only perpetrates a crime for which the courts may imprison
him for five years, but becomes a social outcast with whom respectable
people will have nothing more to do. The Mormons endeavored to make
polygamy a feature of their religion, but in 1882 Congress passed a
law suppressing it and punishing offenders. Did this monogamous
sentiment exist "always and everywhere?"
Livingstone relates (_M.S.A._, I., 306-312) that the King of the
Beetjuans (South Africa) was surprised to hear that his visitor had
only one wife:
"When we explained to him that, by the laws of our country,
people could not marry until they were of a mature age, and
then could never have more than one wife, he said it was
perfectly incomprehensible to him how a whole nation could
submit voluntarily to such laws."
He himself had five wives and one of these queens
"remarked very judiciously that such laws as ours would not
suit the Beetjuans because there were so great a number of
women and the male population suffered such diminutions from
the wars."
Sir Samuel Baker (_A.N._, 147) says of the wife of the Chief of
Latooka:
"She asked many questions, how many wives I had? and was
astonished to hear that I was contented with one. This
amused her immensely, and she laughed heartily with her
daughter at the idea."
In Equatorial Africa, "if a man marries and his wife thinks that he
can afford another spouse, she pesters him to marry again, and calls
him a stingy fellow if he declines to do so" (Reade, 259). Livingstone
(_N.E.Z._, 284) says of the Makalolo women:
"On hearing that a man in England could marry but one wife,
several ladies exclaimed that they would not like to live in
such a country; that they could not imagine how English
ladies could relish such a custom, for, in their way of
thinking, every man of respectability should have a number
of wives, as a proof of his wealth. Similar ideas prevail
all down the Zambesi."
Some amusing instances are reported by Burton (_T.T.G.L._, I., 36, 78,
79). The lord of an African village appeared to be much ashamed
because he had only two wives. His sole excuse was that he was only a
boy--about twenty-two. Regarding the Mpongwe of the Gaboon, Burton
says: "Polygamy is, of course, the order of the day; it is a necessity
to the men, and even the women disdain to marry a 'one-wifer.'" In his
book on the Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, G.S. Robertson writes:
"It is considered a reproach to have only one wife, a
sign of poverty and insignificance. There was on one
occasion a heated discussion at Kamdesh concerning the
best plans to be adopted to prepare for an expected
attack. A man sitting on the outskirts of the assembly
controverted something the priest said. Later on the
priest turned round fiercely and demanded to be told
how a man with 'only one wife' presumed to offer an
opinion at all."
His religion allowed a Mohammedan to take four legitimate wives, while
their prophet himself had a larger number. A Hindoo was permitted by
the laws of Manu to marry four women if he belonged to the highest
caste, but if he was of the lowest caste he was condemned to monogamy.
King Solomon was held in honor though he had unnumbered wives,
concubines, and virgins at his disposal.
How far the sentiment of monogamy--one of the essential ingredients of
Romantic Love--had penetrated the skulls of American Indians may be
inferred from the amusing and typical details related by the historian
Parkman (_O.T._, chap. xi.) of the Dakota or Sioux Indians, among whom
he sojourned. The man most likely to become the next chief was a
fellow named Mahto-Tatonka, whose father had left a family of thirty,
which number the young man was evidently anxious to beat:
"Though he appeared not more than twenty-one years old,
he had oftener struck the enemy, and stolen more horses
and more squaws than any young man in the village. We
of the civilized world are not apt to attach much
credit to the latter species of exploits; but
horse-stealing is well-known as an avenue to
distinction on the prairies, and the other kind of
depredation is esteemed equally meritorious. Not that
the act can confer fame from its own intrinsic merits.
Any one can steal a squaw, and if he chooses afterward
to make an adequate present to her rightful proprietor,
the easy husband for the most part rests content; his
vengeance falls asleep, and all danger from that
quarter is averted. Yet this is esteemed but a pitiful
and mean-spirited transaction. The danger is averted,
but the glory of the achievement also is lost.
Mahto-Tatonka proceeded after a more gallant and
dashing fashion. Out of several dozen squaws whom he
had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for
one, but snapping his fingers in the face of the
injured husband, had defied the extremity of his
indignation, and no one had yet dared to lay the hand
of violence upon him. He was following close in the
footsteps of his father. The young men and the young
squaws, each in their way, admired him. The one would
always follow him to war, and he was esteemed to have
an unrivalled charm in the eyes of the other."
Thus the admiration of the men, the love (Indian style) of the women,
and the certainty of the chieftainship--the highest honor accessible
to an Indian--were the rewards of actions which in a civilized
community would soon bring such a "brave" to the gallows. Some of the
agencies by which the belief that wife-stealing and polygamy are
honorable was displaced by the modern sentiment in favor of monogamy,
will be considered later on. Here I simply wish to enforce the
additional moral that not only the _ideas_ regarding bigamy and
polygamy have changed, but the _emotions_ aroused by such actions;
execration having taken the place of admiration. Judging by such
cases, is it likely that ideas concerning women and love could change
so utterly as they have since the days of the ancient Greeks, without
changing the emotions of love itself? Sentiments consist of ideas and
emotions. If both are altered, the sentiments must have changed as a
matter of course. Let us take as a further example the sentiment of
modesty.
CURIOSITIES OF MODESTY
There are many Christian women who, if offered the choice between
death and walking naked down the street, would choose death as being
preferable to eternal disgrace and social suicide. If they preferred
the other alternative, they would be arrested and, if known to be
respectable, sent to an insane asylum. The English legend relates that
"peeping Tom" was struck blind because he did not stay in the house as
commanded when the good Lady Godiva was obliged to ride naked through
the market-place. So strong, indeed, is the sentiment of modesty in
our community that the old-fashioned philosophers used to maintain it
was an innate instinct, always present under normal conditions. The
fact that every child has to be gradually taught to avoid indecent
exposure, ought to have enlightened these philosophers as to their
error, which is further made plain to the orthodox by the Biblical
story that in the beginning of human life the man and his wife were
both naked and not ashamed.
Naked and not ashamed is the condition of primitive man wherever
climatic and other motives do not prescribe dress. Writing of the
Arabs at Wat El Negur, Samuel Baker says (_N.T.A_., 265):
"Numbers of young girls and women were accustomed to
bathe perfectly naked in the river just before our
tent. I employed them to catch small fish for bait; and
for hours they would amuse themselves in this way,
screaming with excitement and fun, and chasing the
small fry with their long clothes in lieu of nets;
their figures were generally well-shaped.... The men
were constantly bathing in the clear waters of the
Athabara, and were perfectly naked, although close to
the women; we soon became accustomed to this daily
scene, as we do at Brighton and other English bathing
towns."
In his work on German Africa (II., 123) Zöller says that in Togoland
"the young girls did not hesitate in the least to remove
their only article of clothing, a narrow strip of cloth, rub
themselves with a native soap and then take a dip in the
lagoon, before the eyes of white men as well as black."
A page would be required merely to enumerate the tribes in Africa,
Australia, and South America which never wear any clothing.
Max Buchner (352-4) gives a graphic description (1878) of the nude
female surf swimmers in the Hawaiian Islands. Nor is this indifference
to nudity manifested only by these primitive races. In Japan, to the
present day, men and women bathe in the same room, separated merely by
a partition, two or three feet high.[8] Zöller relates of the Cholos
of Ecuador (_P. and A_., 364) that "men and women bathe together in
the rivers with a naïveté surpassing that of the South Sea Islanders."
A writer in the _Ausland_ (1870, p. 294) reports that in Paraguay he
saw the women washing their only dress, and while they waited for the
sun to dry it, they stood by naked calmly smoking their cigars.
But natural indifference to nudity is the least of the curiosities of
modesty. Sometimes nakedness is actually prescribed by law or by
strict etiquette. In Rohl all women who are not Arabic are forbidden
to wear clothing of any sort. The King of Mandingo allowed no women,
not even princesses, to approach him unless they were naked (Hellwald,
77-8). Dubois (I., 265) says that in some of the southern provinces of
India the women of certain castes must uncover their body from the
head to the girdle when speaking to a man: "It would be thought a want
of politeness and good breeding to speak to men with that part of the
body clothed."
In his travels among the Cameroon negroes Zöller (II., 185) came
across a strange bit of religious etiquette in regard to nudity. The
women there wear nothing but a loin cloth, except in case of a death,
when, like ourselves, they appear all in black--with a startling
difference, however. One day, writes Zöller,
"I was astounded to see a number of women and girls
strolling about stark naked before the house of a man who
had died of diphtheria. This, I was told, was their mourning
dress.... The same custom prevails in other parts of West
Africa."
Modesty is as fickle as fashion and assumes almost as many different
forms as dress itself. In most Australian tribes the women (as well as
the men) go naked, yet in a few they not only wear clothes but go out
of sight to bathe. Stranger still, the Pele islanders were so
innocent of all idea of clothing that when they first saw Europeans
they believed that their clothes were their skins. Nevertheless, the
men and women bathed in different places. Among South American Indians
nudity is the rule, whereas some North American Indians used to place
guards near the swimming-places of the women, to protect them from
spying eyes.
According to Gill (230), the Papuans of Southwestern New Guinea "glory
in their nudeness and consider clothing fit only for women." There are
many places where the women alone were clothed, while in others the
women alone were naked. Mtesa, the King of Uganda, who died in 1884,
inflicted the death penalty on any man who dared to approach him
without having every inch of his legs carefully covered; but the women
who acted as his servants were stark naked (Hellwald, 78).
While the etiquette of modesty is thus subject to an endless variety
of details, every nation and tribe enforces its own ideal of propriety
as the only correct thing. In Tahiti and Tonga it would be considered
highly indecent to go about without being tattooed. Among Samoans and
other Malayans the claims of propriety are satisfied if only the navel
is covered. "The savage tribes of Sumatra and Celebes have a like
feeling about the knee, which is always carefully covered"
(Westermarck, 207). In China it is considered extremely indecent if a
woman allows her bare feet to be seen, even by her husband, and a
similar idea prevails among some Turkish women, who carefully wrap up
their feet before they go to bed (Ploss, I., 344). Hindoo women must
not show their faces, but it is not improper to wear a dress so gauzy
that the whole figure is revealed through it. "In Moruland," says Emin
Bey,
"the women mostly go about absolutely naked, a few only
attaching a leaf behind to their waistband. It is curious to
note, on meeting a bevy of these uncovered beauties carrying
water, that the first thing they do with their free hand is
to cover the face."
These customs prevail in all Moslem countries. Mariti relates in his
_Viaggi_ (II., 288):
"Travelling in summer across the fields of Syria I
repeatedly came across groups of women, entirely naked,
washing themselves near a well. They did not move from the
place, but simply covered the face with one hand, their
whole modesty consisting in the desire not to be
recognized."
Sentimental topsy-turviness reaches its climax in those cases where
women who usually go naked are ashamed to be seen clothed. Such cases
are cited by several writers,[9] and appear to be quite common. The
most amusing instance I have come across is in a little-known volume
on Venezuela by Lavayasse, who writes (190):
"It is known that those [Indians] of the warm climates
of South America, among whom civilization has not made
any progress, have no other dress than a small apron,
or kind of bandage, to hide their nakedness. A lady of
my acquaintance had contracted a kindness for a young
Paria Indian woman, who was extremely handsome. We had
given her the name of Grace. She was sixteen years old,
and had lately been married to a young Indian of
twenty-five, who was our sportsman. This lady took a
pleasure in teaching her to sew and embroider. We said
to her one day, 'Grace, you are extremely pretty, speak
French well, and are always with us: you ought not
therefore to live like the other native women, and we
shall give you some clothes. Does not your husband wear
trousers and a shirt?' Upon this she consented to be
dressed. The lady lost no time in arranging her dress,
a ceremony at which I had the honor of assisting. We
put on a shift, petticoats, stockings, shoes, and a
Madras handkerchief on her head. She looked quite
enchanting, and saw herself in the looking-glass with
great complacency. Suddenly her husband returned from
shooting, with three or four Indians, when the whole
party burst into a loud fit of laughter at her, and
began to joke about her new habiliments. Grace was
quite abashed, blushed, wept, and ran to hide herself
in the bed-chamber of the lady, where she stript
herself of the clothes, went out of the window, and
returned naked into the room. A proof that when her
husband saw her dressed for the first time, she felt a
sensation somewhat similar to that which a European
woman might experience who was surprised without her
usual drapery."
Another paradox remains to be noted. Anthropologists have now proved
beyond all possibility of doubt that modesty, far from having led to
the use of clothing, was itself merely a secondary consequence of the
gradual adoption of apparel as a protection. They have also shown[10]
that the earliest forms of dress were extremely scanty, and were
intended not to cover certain parts of the body, but actually and
wantonly to call attention to them, while in other cases the only
parts of the body habitually covered were such as we should consider
it no special impropriety to leave uncovered. But enough has been said
to demonstrate what we started out to prove: that the strong sentiment
of modesty in our community--so strong that many insist it must be
part and parcel of human nature (like love!)--has, like all the other
sentiments here discussed, grown up slowly from microscopic
beginnings.
INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY
Closely connected with modesty, and yet entirely distinct from it, is
another and still stronger sentiment--the regard for chastity. Many an
American officer whose brave wife accompanied him in a frontier war
has been asked by her to promise that he would shoot her with his own
revolver rather than let her fall into the clutches of licentious
Indians. Though deliberate murder is punishable by death, no American
jury has ever convicted a man for slaying the seducer of his wife,
daughter, or sister. Modern law punishes rape with death, and its
victim is held to have suffered a fate worse than death. The brightest
of all jewels in a bride's crown of virtues is chastity--a jewel
without which all the others lose their value. Yet this jewel of
jewels formerly had no more value than a pebble in a brook-bed. The
sentiment in behalf of chastity had no existence for ages, and for a
long time after it came into existence chastity was known not as a
virtue but only as a necessity, inculcated by fear of punishment or
loss of worldly advantages.
In support of this statement a whole volume might be written; but as
abundant evidence will be given in later chapters relating to the
lower races in Africa, Australia, Polynesia, America, and Asia, only a
few instances need be cited here. In his recent work on the _Origin
and Growth of the Moral Sense_ (1898), Alexander Sutherland, an
Australian author, writes (I., 180):
"In the House of Commons papers for 1844 will be found
some 350 printed pages of reports, memoranda, and
letters, gathered by the standing committee appointed
in regard to the treatment of aboriginals in the
Australian colonies. All these have the same unlovely
tale to tell of an absolute incapacity to form even a
rudimentary notion of chastity. One worthy missionary,
who had been for some years settled among tribes of New
South Wales, _as yet brought in contact with no other
white men_, writes with horror of what he had observed.
The conduct of the females, even young children, is
most painful; they are cradled in prostitution and
fostered in licentiousness. Brough Smith (II., 240)
quotes several authorities who record that in Western
Australia the women in early youth were almost
prostitutes. 'For about six months after their
initiation into manhood the youths were allowed an
unbounded licence, and there was no possible blame
attached to the young unmarried girl who entertained
them'" (179).
In Lewis and Clark's account of their expedition across the American
Continent they came to the conclusion that there was an utter absence
of regard for chastity "among all Indians," and they relate the
following as a sample (439):
"Among all the tribes, a man will lend his wife or
daughter for a fish-hook or a strand of beads. To
decline an offer of this sort is indeed to disparage
the charms of the lady, and therefore gives such
offence, that, although we had occasionally to treat
the Indians with rigor, nothing seemed to irritate both
sexes more than our refusal to accept the favors of the
females. On one occasion we were amused by a Clatsop,
who, having been cured of some disorder by our medical
skill, brought his sister as a reward for our kindness.
The young lady was quite anxious to join in this
expression of her brother's gratitude, and mortified we
did not avail ourselves of it."
De Varigny, who lived forty years in the Hawaiian Islands, says (159)
that
"the chief difficulty of the missionaries in the Sandwich
Islands was teaching the women chastity; they knew neither
the word nor the thing. Adultery, incest, fornication, were
the common order of things, accepted by public opinion, and
even consecrated by religion."
The same is true of other Polynesians, the Tahitians, for instance, of
whom Captain Cook wrote that they are
"people who have not even the idea of decency, and who
gratify every appetite and passion before witnesses, with no
more sense of impropriety than we feel when we satisfy our
hunger at a social board with our friends."
Among the highest of all these island peoples, the Tongans, the only
restriction to incontinence was that the lover must not be changed too
often.
What Dalton says of the Chilikata Mishmis, one of the wild tribes of
India, applies to many of the lower races in all parts of the world:
"Marriage ceremony there is, I believe, none; it is
simply an affair of purchase, and the women thus
obtained, if they can be called wives, are not much
bound by the tie. The husbands do not expect them to be
chaste; they take no cognizance of their temporary
liaisons so long as they are not deprived of their
services. If a man is dispossessed of one of his wives,
he has a private injury to avenge, and takes the
earliest opportunity of retaliating, but he cannot see
that a woman is a bit the worse for a little
incontinency."
In many cases not only was there complete indifference to chastity,
but virginity in a bride was actually looked on with disfavor. The
Finnish Votyaks considered it honorable in a girl to be a mother
before she was a wife. The Central American Chibchas were like the
Philippine Bisayos, of whom a sixteenth century writer, quoted by
Jagor, said that a man is unhappy to find his bride above suspicion,
"because, not having been desired by anyone, she must have some bad
quality which will prevent him from being happy with her."
The wide prevalence in all parts of the world of the custom of lending
or exchanging wives, or offering wife or daughter to a guest,[11] also
bears witness to the utter indifference to chastity, conjugal and
maiden; as does the custom known as the _jus primae noctis._ Dr. Karl
Schmidt has tried very hard to prove that such a "right" to the bride
never existed. But no one can read his treatises without noting that
his argument rests on a mere quibble, the word _jus_. There may have
been no codified _law_ or "right" allowing kings, bishops, chiefs,
landlords, medicine men, and priests to claim brides first, but that
the _privilege_ existed in various countries and was extensively made
use of, there can be no doubt. Westermarck (73-80), Letourneau
(56-62), Ploss (I., 400-405), and others have collected abundant
proofs. Here I have room for only a few instances, showing that those
whom we would consider the _victims_ of such a horrible custom, not
only submitted to it with resignation, but actually looked on it as an
_honor_ and a highly coveted privilege.
"The aboriginal inhabitants of Teneriffe are
represented as having married no woman who had not
previously spent a night with the chief, which was
considered a great honor."
"Navarette tells us that, on the coast of Malabar, the
bridegroom brought the bride to the King, who kept her
eight days in the palace; and the man took it 'as a
great honor and favor that the King should make use of
her.'"
"Egede informs us that the women of Greenland thought
themselves fortunate if an Angekokk, or prophet,
honored them with his caresses; and some husbands even
paid him, because they believed that the child of such
a holy man could not but be happier and better than
others." (Westermarck, 77, 80.)
"In Cumana the priests, who were regarded as holy,
slept only with unmarried women, 'porque tenian por
honorosa costumbre que ellos las quitassen la
virginidad.'" (Bastian, _K.A.A._, II., 228.)
From this lowest depth of depravity it would be interesting, if space
and the architectural plan of this volume permitted, to trace the
growth of the sentiment which demands chastity; noting, in the first
place, how married women were compelled, by the jealous fury of their
masters, to practise continence; how, very much later, virginity began
to be valued, not, indeed, at first, as a virtue having a value and
charm of its own, but as a means of enhancing the market value of
brides. Indifference to masculine chastity continued much longer
still. The ancient civilized nations had advanced far enough to value
purity in wives and maidens, but it hardly occurred to them that it
was man's duty to cultivate the same virtue. Even so austere and
eminent a moral philosopher as Cicero declared that one would have to
be very severe indeed to ask young men to refrain from illicit
relations. The mediaeval church fathers endeavored for centuries to
enforce the doctrine that men should be as pure as women, with what
success, every one knows. A more powerful agency in effecting a reform
was the loathsome disease which in the fifteenth century began to
sweep away millions of licentious men, and led to the survival of the
fittest from the moral point of view. The masculine standard is still
low, but immense progress has been made during the last hundred years.
The number of prostitutes in Europe is still estimated at seven
hundred thousand, yet that makes only seven to every thousand females,
and though there are many other unchaste women, it is safe to say that
in England and America, at any rate, more than nine hundred out of
every thousand females are chaste, whereas among savages, as a rule,
nearly all females are prostitutes (in the moral sense of the word),
before they marry. In view of this astounding progress there is no
reason to despair regarding man's future. It would be a great triumph
of civilization if the average man could be made as pure as the
average woman. At the same time, since the consequences of sin are
infinitely more serious in women, it is eminently proper that they
should be in the van of moral progress.
Chastity, modesty, polygamy, murder, religion, and nature have now
furnished us an abundance of illustrations showing the changeableness
and former non-existence of sentiments which in us are so strong that
we are inclined to fancy they must have been the same always and
everywhere. Before proceeding to prove that romantic love is another
sentiment of which the same may be said, let us pause a moment to
discuss a sentiment which presents one of the most difficult problems
in the psychology of love, the Horror of Incest.
HORROR OF INCEST
A young man does not fall in love with his sister though she be the
most attractive girl he knows. Nor does her father fall in love with
her, nor the mother with the son, or the son with the mother. Not only
is there no sexual love between them, but the very idea of marriage
fills their mind with unutterable horror, and in the occasional cases
where such a marriage is made through ignorance of the relationship,
both parties usually commit suicide, though they are guiltless of
deliberate crime. Here we have the most striking and absolute proof
that circumstances, habits, ideas, laws, customs, can and do utterly
annihilate sexual love in millions of individuals. Why then should it
be so unlikely that the laws and customs of the ancient Greeks, for
instance, with their ideas about women and marriage, should have
prevented the growth of sentimental love? Note the modesty of my
claim. While it is certain that both the sensual and the sentimental
sides of sexual love are stifled by the horror of incest, all that I
claim in regard to ancient and primitive races is that the sentimental
side of love was smothered by unfavorable circumstances and hindered
in growth by various obstacles which will be described later on in
this volume. Surely this is not such a reckless theory as it seemed to
some of my critics.
Like the other sentiments discussed in this chapter, the horror of
incest has been found to be absent among races in various stages of
development. Incestuous unions occurred among Chippewas and other
American Indians. Of the Peruvian Indians, Garcilasso de la Vega says
that some cohabited with their sisters, daughters, or mothers; similar
facts are recorded of some Brazilians, Polynesians, Africans, and wild
tribes of India. "Among the Annamese, according to a missionary who
has lived among them for forty years, no girl who is twelve years old
and has a brother is a virgin" (Westermarck, 292). Gypsies allow a
brother to marry a sister, while among the Veddahs of Ceylon the
marriage of a man with his younger sister is considered _the_ proper
marriage. In the Indian Archipelago and elsewhere there are tribes who
permit marriage between parents and their children. The legends of
India and Hindoo theology abound in allusions to incestuous unions,
and a nation's mythology reflects its own customs. According to Strabo
the ancient Irish married their mothers and sisters. Among the
love-stories of the ancient Greeks, as we shall see later on, there
are a surprising number the subject of which is incest, indicating
that that crime was of not infrequent occurrence. But it is especially
by royal personages that incest has been practised. In ancient Persia,
Parthia, Egypt, and other countries the kings married their own
sisters, as did the Incas of Peru, for political reasons, other women
being regarded as too low in rank to become queens; and the same
phenomenon occurs in Hawaii, Siam, Burma, Ceylon, Madagascar, etc. In
some cases incestuous unions for kings and priests are even prescribed
by religion. At the licentious festivals common among tribes in
America, Africa, India, and elsewhere, incest was one of the many
forms of bestiality indulged in; this gives it a wide prevalence.
Much ingenuity has been expended in attempts to account for the origin
of the horror of incest. The main reason why it has so far remained
more or less of a mystery, is that each writer advanced a single
cause, which he pressed into service to explain all the facts, the
result being confusion and contradiction. In my opinion different
agencies must be assumed in different cases. When we find among
Australians, American Indians (and even the Chinese), customs,
enforced by the strongest feelings, forbidding a man to marry a woman
belonging to the same clan or having the same surname, though not at
all related, while allowing a marriage with a sister or other near
blood relative, we are obviously not dealing with a question of incest
at all, but with some of the foolish taboos prevalent among these
races, the origin of which they themselves have forgotten. Mr. Andrew
Lang probably hit the nail on the head when he said (258) in regard to
the rule which compels savages to marry only outside of the tribe,
that these prohibitions "must have arisen in a stage of culture when
ideas of kindred were confused, included kinship with animals and
plants, and were to us almost, if not quite, unintelligible." To speak
of instinct and natural selection teaching the Veddahs to abhor
marriage with an elder sister while making union with a younger sister
_the_ proper marriage (Westermarck, 292) is surely to assume that
instinct and natural selection act in an asinine way, which they never
do--except in asses.
In a second class of cases, where lower races have ideas similar to
ours, I believe that the origin of domestic chastity must be sought in
utilitarian practices. In the earlier stages of marriage, girls are
usually bought of their parents, who profit by the sale or barter. Now
when a man marries a girl to be his wife and maid of all work, he does
not want to take her to his home hampered by a bevy of young children.
Fathers guilty of incestuous practices would therefore be unable to
dispose of their daughters to advantage, and thus a prejudice in favor
of domestic purity would gradually arise which a shrewd medicine man
would some day raise to the rank of a religious or social taboo.
As regards modern society, Darwin, Brinton, Hellwald, Bentham, and
others have advocated or endorsed the view that the reason why such a
horror of incestuous unions prevails, is that novelty is the chief
stimulus to the sexual feelings, and that the familiarity of the same
household breeds indifference. I do not understand how any thinker can
have held such a view for one moment. When Bentham wrote (_Theory of
Legislation_, pt. iii., chap. V.) that "individuals accustomed to see
each other from an age which is capable neither of conceiving desire
nor of inspiring it, will see each other with the same eyes to the end
of life," he showed infinitely less knowledge of human nature than the
author of _Paul and Virginia_, who makes a boy and a girl grow up
almost like brother and sister, and at the proper time fall violently
in love with one another. Who cannot recall in his own experience love
marriages of schoolmates or of cousins living in intimate association
from their childhood? To say that such bringing up together creates
"indifference" is obviously incorrect; to say that it leads to
"aversion" is altogether unwarranted; and to trace to it such a
feeling as our horror at the thought of marrying a sister, or mother,
is simply preposterous.
The real source of the horror of incest in civilized communities was
indicated more than two thousand years ago by Plato. He believed that
the reason why incestuous unions were avoided and abhorred, was to be
found in the constant inculcation, at home and in literature, that
"They are unholy, hated of God, and most infamous....
Everyone from his earliest childhood has heard men
speaking in the same manner about them always and
everywhere, whether in comedy or in the graver language
of tragedy. When the poet introduces on the stage a
Thyestes or an Oedipus, or a Macareus having secret
intercourse with his sister, he represents him, when
found out, ready to kill himself as the penalty of his
sin." (_Laws,_ VIII., 838.)
Long before Plato another great "medicine man," Moses, saw the
necessity of enforcing a "taboo" against incest by the enactment of
special severe laws relating to intercourse between relatives; and
that there was no "instinct" against incest in his time is shown by
the fact that he deemed it necessary to make such circumstantial laws
for his own people, and by his specific testimony that "in all these
things the nations are defiled which I cast out from before you, and
the land is defiled." Regarding his motives in making such laws,
Milman has justly remarked (_H.J_., I., 220),
"The leading principle of these enactments was to
prohibit near marriage between those parties among
whom, by the usage of their society, early and frequent
intimacy was unavoidable and might lead to abuse."
If Moses lived now, he would still be called upon to enact his laws;
for to this day the horror of incest is a sentiment which it is
necessary to keep up and enforce by education, moral precept,
religion, and law. It is no more innate or instinctive than the
sentiment of modesty, the regard for chastity, or the disapproval of
bigamy. Children are not born with it any more than with the feeling
that it is improper to be seen naked. Medical writers bear witness to
the wide prevalence of unnatural practices among children, even in
good families, while in the slums of the large cities, where the
families are herded like swine, there is a horrible indulgence in
every kind of incest by adults as well as children.
Absolute proof that the horror of incest is not innate lies
furthermore in the unquestionable fact that a man can escape the
calamity of falling in love with his sister or daughter only if he
_knows_ the relationship. There are many instances on record--to which
the daily press adds others--of incestuous unions brought about by
ignorance of the consanguinity. Oedipus was not saved by an instinct
from marrying his mother. It was only after the discovery of the
relationship that his mind was filled with unutterable horror, while
his wife and mother committed suicide. This case, though legendary, is
typical--a mirror of actuality--showing how potent _ideas_ are to
alter _emotions_. Yet I am assailed for asserting that the Greeks and
the lower races, whose ideas regarding women, love, polygamy,
chastity, and marriage were so different from ours, also differed from
us in their feelings--the quality of their love. There were numerous
obstacles to overcome before romantic love was able to
emerge--obstacles so serious and diverse that it is a wonder they were
ever conquered. But before considering those obstacles it will be
advisable to explain definitely just what romantic love is and how it
differs from the sensual "love" or lust which, of course, has always
existed among men as among other animals.
WHAT IS ROMANTIC LOVE?
How does it feel to be in love?
When a man loves a girl, he feels such an overwhelming _individual
preference_ for her that though she were a beggar-maid he would scorn
the offer to exchange her for an heiress, a princess, or the goddess
of beauty herself. To him she seems to have a monopoly of all the
feminine charms, and she therefore monopolizes his thoughts and
feelings to the exclusion of all other interests, and he longs not
only for her reciprocal affection but for a monopoly of it. "Does she
love me?" he asks himself a hundred times a day. "Sometimes she seems
to treat me with cold indifference--is that merely the instinctive
assertion of feminine _coyness_, or does she prefer another man?" The
pangs, the agony of _jealousy_ overcome him at this thought. He hopes
one moment, despairs the next, till his _moods_ become so _mixed_ that
he hardly knows whether he is happy or miserable. He, who is usually
so bold and self-confident, is humbled; feels utterly unworthy of her.
In his fancy she soars so far above all other women that calling her
an angel seems not a _hyperbole_, but a compliment to the angel.
Toward such a superior being the only proper attitude is _adoration_.
She is spotless as an angel, and his feelings toward her are as
_pure_, as free from coarse cravings, as if she were a goddess. How
royally _proud_ a man must feel at the thought of being preferred
above all mortals by this divine being! In _personal beauty_ had she
ever a peer? Since Venus left this planet, has such grace been seen?
In face of her, the strongest of all impulses--selfishness--is
annihilated. The lover is no longer "number one" to himself; his own
pleasures and comforts are ignored in the eager desire to please her,
to show her _gallant_ attentions. To save her from disaster or grief
he is ready to _sacrifice_ his life. His cordial _sympathy_ makes him
share all her joys and sorrows, and his _affection_ for her, though he
may have known her only a few days--nay, a few minutes--is as strong
and devoted as that of a mother for the child that is her own flesh
and blood.
INGREDIENTS OF LOVE
No one who has ever been truly in love will deny that this
description, however romantic it may seem in its apparent
exaggeration, is a realistic reflection of his feelings and impulses.
As this brief review shows, Individual Preference, Monopolism,
Coyness, Jealousy, Mixed Moods of Hope and Despair, Hyperbole,
Adoration, Purity, Pride, Admiration of Personal Beauty, Gallantry,
Self-sacrifice, Sympathy, and Affection, are the essential ingredients
in that very composite mental state, which we call romantic love.
Coyness, of course, occurs only in feminine love, and there are other
sexual differences which will be noted later on. Here I wish to point
out that the fourteen ingredients named may be divided into two groups
of seven each--the egoistic and the altruistic. The prevailing notion
that love is a species of selfishness--a "double selfishness," some
wiseacre has called it--is deplorably untrue and shows how little the
psychology of love has heretofore been understood.
It has indeed an egoistic side, including the ingredients I have
called Individual Preference, Monopolism, Jealousy, Coyness,
Hyperbole, Mixed Moods, and Pride; and it is not a mere accident that
these are also the seven features which may be found in sensual love
too; for sensuality and selfishness are twins. But the later and more
essential characteristics of romantic love are the altruistic and
supersensual traits--Sympathy, Affection, Gallantry, Self-sacrifice,
Adoration, Purity, and Admiration of Personal Beauty. The two
divisions overlap in some places, but in the main they are accurate.
It is certain that the first group precedes the second, but the order
in which the ingredients in each group first made their appearance
cannot be indicated, as we know too little of the early history of
man. The arrangement here adopted is therefore more or less arbitrary.
I shall try in this long chapter to answer the question "What is
Romantic Love?" by discussing each of its fourteen ingredients and
tracing its evolution separately.
I. INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE
If a man pretended to be in love with a girl while confessing that he
liked other girls equally well and would as soon marry one as another,
everybody would laugh at him; for however ignorant many persons may be
as to the subtler traits of sentimental love, it is known universally
that a decided and obstinate preference for one particular individual
is an absolute condition of true love.
ALL GIRLS EQUALLY ATTRACTIVE
As I have just intimated, a modern romantic lover would not exchange a
beloved beggar-maid for an heiress or princess; nor would he give her
for a dozen other girls, however charming, and with permission to
marry them all. Now if romantic love had always existed, the lower
races would have the same violent and exclusive preference for
individuals. But what are the facts? I assert, without fear of
contradiction from any one familiar with anthropological literature,
that a savage or barbarian, be he Australian, African, American, or
Asiatic, would laugh at the idea of refusing to exchange one woman for
a dozen others equally young and attractive. It is not necessary to
descend to the lowest savages to find corroboration of this view. Dr.
Zöller, an unusually intelligent and trustworthy observer, says, in
one of his volumes on German Africa (III., 70-71), that
"on the whole no distinction whatever is made between woman
and woman, between the good-looking and the ugly, the
intelligent and the stupid ones. In all my African
experiences I have never heard of a single young man or
woman who conceived a violent passion for a particular
individual of the opposite sex."
So in other parts of Africa. The natives of Borgou, we are told by R.
and J. Lander, marry with perfect indifference. "A man takes no more
thought about choosing a wife than he does in picking a head of
wheat." Among the Kaffirs, says Fritsch (112) it may occur that a man
has an inclination toward a particular girl; but he adds that "in
such cases the suitor is obliged to pay several oxen more than is
customary, and as he usually takes cattle more to heart than women,
such cases are rare;" and though, when he has several wives, he may
have a favorite, the attachment to her is shallow and transient, for
she is at any moment liable to displacement by a new-comer. Among the
Hottentots at Angra Pequena, when a man covets a girl he goes to her
hut, prepares a cup of coffee and hands it to her without saying a
word. If she drinks half of it, he knows the answer is Yes. "If she
refuses to touch the coffee, the suitor is not specially grieved, but
proceeds to another hut to try his luck again in the same way."
(Ploss, I., 454.)
Of the Fijians Williams (148) says: "Too commonly there is no express
feeling of connubial bliss, men speak of 'our women' and women of 'our
men' without any distinctive preference being apparent." Catlin,
speaking (70-71) of the matrimonial arrangements of the Pawnee
Indians, says that daughters are held as legitimate merchandise, and,
as a rule, accept the situation "with the apathy of the race." A man
who advertised for a wife would hardly be accused of individual
preference or anything else indicating love. From a remark made by
George Gibbs (197) we may infer that the Indians of Oregon and
Washington used to advertise for wives, in their own fashion:
"It is not unusual to find on the small prairies human
figures rudely carved upon trees. These I have
understood to have been cut by young men who were in
want of wives, as a sort of practical intimation that
they were in the market as purchasers."
It might be suggested that such a crude love-letter _to the sex in
general_, as compared with one of our own love-letters to a particular
girl, gives a fair idea of what Indian love is, compared with the love
of civilized men and women.
SHALLOW PREDILECTION
Even where there is an appearance of predilection it is apt to be
shallow and fragile. In the _Jesuit Relations_ (XVIII., 129) we read
how a Huron youth came to one of the missionaries and said he needed a
wife to make his snow-shoes and clothes. "I am in love with a young
girl," said he. "I beg you to call my relatives together and to
consider whether she is suitable for me. If you decide that it is for
my good, I will marry her; if not, I will follow your advice." Other
young Indians used to come to the missionaries to ask them to find
wives for them. I have been struck, in reading Indian love-stories, by
the fact that their gist usually lies not in an exhibition of decided
preference for one man but of violent _aversion_ to another--some old
and disagreeable suitor. It is well known, too, that among Indians, as
among Australians, marriage was sometimes considered an affair of the
tribe rather than of the individual; and we have some curious
illustrations of the way in which various tribes of Indians would try
to crush the germs of individual preference.
REPRESSION OF PREFERENCE
Thus Hunter relates (243) of the Missouri and Arkansas tribes that "It
is considered disgraceful for a young Indian publicly to prefer one
woman to another until he has distinguished himself either in war or
in the chase." Should an Indian pay any girl, though he may have known
her from childhood, special attention before he has won reputation as
a warrior, "he would be sure to suffer the painful mortification of a
rejection; he would become the derision of the warriors and the
contempt of the squaws." In the _Jesuit Relations_ (III., 73) we read
of some of the Canadian Indians that
"they have a very rude way of making love; for the
suitor, as soon as he shows a preference for a girl,
does not dare look at her, nor speak to her, nor stay
near her unless accidentally; and then he must force
himself not to look her in the face, nor to give any
sign of his passion, otherwise he would be the
laughing-stock of all, and his sweetheart would blush
for him."
Not only must he show no preference, but the choice, too, is not left
to him; for the relatives take up the matter and decide whether his
age, skill as a hunter, reputation, and family make him a desirable
match.
In the face of such facts, can we agree with Rousseau that to a savage
one woman is as good as another? The question is very difficult to
answer, because if a man is to marry at all, he must choose a
particular girl, and this choice can be interpreted as preference,
though it may be quite accidental. It is probable, as I have
suggested, that with a people as low as the Australians it would be
difficult to find a man having sufficient predilection for one young
woman to refuse to exchange her for two others. Probably the same is
true of the higher savages and even of the barbarians, as a rule.
UTILITY VERSUS SENTIMENT
We do, indeed, find, at a comparatively early stage, evidences of one
girl or man being chosen in preference to others; but when we examine
these cases closely we see that the choice is not based on _personal_
qualities but on utilitarian considerations of the most selfish or
sensual description. Thus Zöller, in the passage just referred to,
says of the negro:
"It is true that when he buys a woman he prefers a young
one, but his motive for so doing is far from being mental
admiration of beauty. He buys the younger ones because they
are youthful, strong, and able to work for him."
Similarly Belden, who lived twelve years among the Plains Indians,
states (302) that "the squaws are valued by the middle-aged men only
for their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever is
taken of their personal beauty." The girls are no better than the men.
Young Comanche girls, says Parker (Schoolcraft, V., 683) "are not
averse to marry very old men, particularly if they are chiefs, as they
are always sure of something to eat." In describing Amazon Valley
Indians, Wallace says (497-498) that there is
"a trial of skill at shooting with the bow and arrow,
and if the young man does not show himself a good
marksman, the girl refuses him, on the ground that he
will not be able to shoot fish and game enough for the
family."
These cases are typical, and might be multiplied indefinitely; they
show how utterly individual preference on personal grounds is out of
the question here. It is true that many of our own girls marry for
such utilitarian reasons; but no one would be so foolish as to speak
of these marriages as love-matches, whereas in the cases of savages we
are often invited by sentimentalists to witness the "manifestation of
love" whenever a man shows a utilitarian or sensual interest in a
particular girl. A modern civilized lover marries a girl for her own
sake, because he is enamoured of her individuality, whereas the
uncivilized suitor cares not a fig for the other's individuality; he
takes her as an instrument of lust, a drudge, or as a means of raising
a family, in order that the superstitious rites of ancestor-worship
may be kept up and his selfish soul rest in peace in the next world.
He cares not for her personally, for if she proves barren he
repudiates her and marries another. Trial marriages are therefore
widely prevalent. The Dyaks of Borneo, as St. John tells us, often
make as many as seven or eight such marriages; with them marriage is
"a business of partnership for the purpose of having children,
dividing labor, and by means of their offspring providing for their
old age."
A STORY OF AFRICAN LOVE
An amusing incident related by Ernst von Weber (II., 215-6) indicates
how easily utilitarian considerations override such skin-deep
preference as may exist among Africans. He knew a girl named Yanniki
who refused to marry a young Kaffir suitor though she confessed that
she liked him. "I cannot take him," she said, "as he can offer only
ten cows for me and my father wants fifteen." Weber observed, that it
was not kind of her father to let a few cows stand in the way of her
happiness; but the African damsel did not fall in with his sentimental
view of the case. Business and vanity were to her much more important
matters than individual preference for a particular lover, and she
exclaimed, excitedly:
"What! You expect my father to give me away for ten
cows? That would be a fine sort of a bargain! Am I not
worth more than Cilli, for whom the Tambuki chief paid
twelve cows last week? I am pretty, I can cook, sew,
crochet, speak English, and with all these
accomplishments you want my father to dispose of me for
ten miserable cows? Oh, sir, how little you esteem me!
No, no, my father is quite right in refusing to yield
in this matter; indeed, in my opinion he might boldly
ask thirty cows for me, for I am worth that much."
SIMILARITY OF INDIVIDUALS AND SEXES
It is not difficult to explain why among the lower races individual
preference either does not occur at all or is so weak and utilitarian
that the difference of a few cows more or less may decide a lover's
fate. Like sunflowers in the same garden, the girls in a tribe differ
so little from one another that there is no particular cause for
discrimination. They are all brought up in exactly the same way, eat
the same food, think the same thoughts, do the same work--carrying
water and wood, dressing skins, moving tents and utensils, etc.; they
are alike uneducated, and marry at the same childish age before their
minds can have unfolded what little is in them; so that there is small
reason why a man should covet one of them much more than another. A
savage may be as eager to possess a woman as a miser is to own a gold
piece: but he has little more reason to prefer one girl to another
than a miser has to prefer one gold piece to another of the same size.
Humboldt observed (_P.E_., 141) that "in barbarous nations there is a
physiognomy peculiar to the tribe or horde rather than to any
individual." It has been noted by various observers that the lower the
race is the more do its individuals thus resemble one another. Nay,
this approximation goes so far as to make even the two sexes much less
distinct than they are with us. Professor Pritsch, in his classical
treatise on the natives of South Africa (407), dwells especially on
the imperfect sexual differentiation of the Bushmen. The faces,
stature, limbs, and even the chest and hips of the women differ so
little from those of the men that in looking at photographs (as he
says and illustrates by specimens), one finds it difficult to tell
them apart, though the figures are almost nude. Both sexes are equally
lean and equally ugly. The same may be said of the typical
Australians, and in Professor and Mrs. Agassiz's _Journey in Brazil_
(530) we read that
"the Indian woman has a very masculine air, extending
indeed more or less to her whole bearing; for even her
features have rarely the feminine delicacy of higher
womanhood. In the Negro, on the contrary, the
narrowness of chest and shoulder characteristic of the
woman is almost as marked in the man; indeed, it may
well be said, that, while the Indian female is
remarkable for her masculine build, the negro male is
equally so for his feminine aspect."
In the _Jesuit Relations_ there are repeated references to the
difficulty of distinguishing squaws from male Indians except by
certain articles of dress. Burton writes of the Sioux _(C.O.S_., 59)
that "the unaccustomed eye often hesitates between the sexes." In
Schoolcraft (V., 274) we are told concerning the Creek women that
"being condemned to perform all the hard labor, they are _universally
masculine in appearance_, without one soft blandishment to render them
desirable or lovely." Nor is there anything alluringly feminine in the
disposition which, as all observers agree, makes Indian women more
cruel in torture than the most pitiless men. Equally decisive is the
testimony regarding the similarity of the sexes, physical and mental,
in the islands of the Pacific. Hawkesworth (II., 446) found the women
of New Zealand so lacking in feminine delicacy that it was difficult
to distinguish them from the men, except by their voices. Captain Cook
(II., 246) observed in Fiji differences in form between men and
females, but little difference in features; and of the Hawaiians he
wrote that with few exceptions they
"have little claim to those peculiarities that
distinguish the sex in other countries. There is,
indeed, a more remarkable equality in the size, color,
and figure of both sexes, than in most places I have
visited."
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SEXUAL CHARACTERS
A most important inference may be deduced from these facts. A man does
not, normally, fall in love with a man. He falls in love with a woman,
because she is a woman. Now when, as in the cases cited, the men and
women differ only in regard to the coarsest anatomical peculiarities
known as the primary sexual qualities, it is obvious that their "love"
also can consist only of such coarse feelings and longings as these
primary qualities can inspire. In other words they can know the great
passion only on its sensual side. Love, to them, is not a sentiment
but an appetite, or at best an instinct for the propagation of the
species.
Of the secondary sexual qualities--those not absolutely necessary for
the maintenance of the species--the first to appear prominently in
women is _fat_; and as soon as it does appear, it is made a ground of
individual preference. Brough Smyth tells us that in Australia a fat
woman is never safe from being stolen, no matter how old and ugly she
may be. In the chapter on Personal Beauty I shall marshal a number of
facts showing that among the uncivilized and Oriental races in
general, fat is the criterion of feminine attractiveness. It is so
among coarse men (_i.e._, most men) even in Europe and America to this
day. Hindoo poets, from the oldest times to Kalidasa and from Kalidasa
to the present day, laud their heroines above all things for their
large thighs--thighs so heavy that in walking the feet make an
impression on the ground "deep as an elephant's hoofs."
FASTIDIOUS SENSUALITY IS NOT LOVE
It is hardly necessary to say that the "love" based on _these_
secondary qualities is not sentimental or romantic. It may,
however--and this is a very important point to remember--be extremely
violent and stubborn. In other words, there may he a strong individual
preference in love that is entirely sensual. Indeed, lust may he as
fastidious as love. Tarquinius coveted Lucretia; no other woman would
have satisfied him. Yet he did not _love_ her. Had he loved _her_ he
would have sacrificed his own life rather than offered violence to one
who valued her honor more than her life. He loved only _himself_; his
one object was to please his beloved ego; he never thought of her
feelings and of the consequences of his act to her. The literature of
ancient Rome, Greece, and Oriental countries is full of such cases of
individualized "love" which, when closely examined, reduce themselves
to cases of selfish lust--eagerness to gratify an appetite with a
particular victim, for whom the "lover" has not a particle of
affection, respect, or sympathy, not to speak of adoration or gallant,
self-sacrificing devotion. Unless we have positive evidence of the
presence of these traits of unselfish affection, we are not entitled
to assume the existence of genuine love; especially among races that
are coarse, unsympathetic, and cruel.
TWO STORIES OF INDIAN LOVE
From this point of view we must judge two Indian love-stories related
by Keating (II., 164-166):
I. A Chippewa named Ogemans, married to a woman called
Demoya, fell in love with her sister. When she refused
him he affected insanity. His ravings were terrible,
and nothing could appease him but her presence; the
moment he touched her hand or came near her he was
gentle as they could wish. One time, in the middle of a
winter night, he sprang from his couch and escaped into
the woods, howling and screaming in the wildest manner;
his wife and her sister followed him, but he refused to
be calmed until the sister (Okoj) laid her hand on him,
when he became quiet and gentle. This kind of
performance he kept up a long time till all the
Indians, including the girl, became convinced he was
possessed by a spirit which she alone could subdue. So
she married him and never after was he troubled by a
return of madness.
II. A young Canadian had secured the favor of a
half-breed girl who had been brought up among the
Chippewas and spoke only their language. Her name was
Nisette, and she was the daughter of a converted squaw
who, being very pious, induced the young couple to go
to an Algonquin village and get regularly married by a
clergyman. Meanwhile the Canadian's love cooled away,
and by the time they reached the village he cared no
more for the poor girl. Soon thereafter she became the
subject of fits and was finally considered to be quite
insane. The only lucid intervals she had were in the
presence of her inconstant husband. Whenever he came
near her, her reason would return, and she would appear
the same as before her illness. Flattered by what he
deemed so strong an evidence of his influence over her,
the Canadian felt a return of kindness toward her, and
was finally induced to renew his attentions, which,
being well received, they were soon united by a
clergyman. Her reason appeared to be restored, and her
improving health showed that her happiness was
complete.
FEMININE IDEALS SUPERIOR TO MASCULINE
Keating's guide was convinced that in both these cases the insanity
was feigned for the selfish purpose of working upon the feelings of
the unwilling party. Even apart from that, there is no trace of
evidence in either story that the feelings of the lovers rose above
sensual attachment, though the girl, being half white, might have been
capable of an approximation to a higher feeling. Indeed it is among
women that such approximations to a higher type of attachment must be
sought; for the uncivilized woman's basis of individual preference,
while apt to be utilitarian, is less sensual than the man's. She is
influenced by his manly qualities of courage, valor, aggressiveness,
because those are of value to her, while he chooses her for her
physical charms and has little or no appreciation of the higher
feminine qualities. Schoolcraft (V., 612) cites the following as an
Indian girl's ideal:
"My love is tall and graceful as the young pine waving
on the hill---and as swift in his course as the stately
deer. His hair is flowing, and dark as the blackbird
that floats through the air, and his eyes, like the
eagle's, both piercing and bright. His heart, it is
fearless and great--and his arm it is strong in the
fight."
Now it is true that Schoolcraft is a very unreliable witness in such
matters, as we shall see in the chapter on Indians. He had a way of
taking coarse Indian tales, dressing them up in a fine romantic garb
and presenting them as the aboriginal article. An Indian girl would
not be likely to compare a man's hair to a blackbird's feathers, and
she certainly would never dream of speaking of a "tall and graceful
pine waving on the hill." She might, however, compare his swiftness to
a deer's, and she might admire his sharp sight, his fearlessness, his
strong arm in a fight; and that is enough to illustrate what I have
just said--that her preference, though utilitarian, is less sensual
than the man's. It includes mental elements, and as moreover her
duties as mother teach her sympathy and devotion, it is not to be
wondered at that the earliest approximations to a higher type of love
are on the part of women.
SEX IN BODY AND MIND
As civilization progresses, the sexes become more and more
differentiated, thus affording individual preference an infinitely
greater scope. The stamp of sex is no longer confined to the pelvis
and the chest, but is impressed on every part of the body. The women's
feet become smaller and more daintily shaped than the men's, the limbs
more rounded and tapering and less muscular, the waist narrower, the
neck longer, the skin smoother, softer, and less hairy, the hands more
comely, with more slender fingers, the skeleton more delicate, the
stature lower, the steps shorter, the gait more graceful, the features
more delicately cut, the eyes more beautiful, the hair more luxuriant
and lustrous, the cheeks rounder and more susceptible to blushes, the
lips more daintily curved, the smile sweeter.
But the mind has sex as well as the body. It is still in process of
evolution, and too many individuals still approximate the type of the
virago or the effeminate man; but the time will come for all, as it
has already come for many, when a masculine trait in a woman's
character will make as disagreeable an impression as a blacksmith's
sinewy arm on the body of a society belle would make in a ball-room.
To call a woman pretty and sweet is to compliment her; to call a man
pretty and sweet would be to mock or insult him. The ancient Greeks
betrayed their barbarism in amorous matters in no way more
conspicuously than by their fondness for coy, effeminate boys, and
their admiration of masculine goddesses like Diana and Minerva.
Contrast this with the modern ideal of femininity, as summed up by
Shakspere:
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
TRUE FEMININITY AND ITS FEMALE ENEMIES
A woman's voice differs from a man's not only in pitch but in timbre;
its quality suggests the sex. There is great scope for variety, from
the lowest contralto to the highest soprano, as there is in man's from
the lowest bass to the highest tenor; a variety so great that voices
differ as much as faces and can be instantly recognized; but unless it
has the proper sexual quality a voice affects us disagreeably. A
coarse, harsh voice has marred many a girl's best marriage chances,
while, on the other hand, it may happen that "the ear loveth before
the eye." Now what is true of the male and female voice holds true of
the male and female mind in all its diverse aspects. We expect men to
be not only bigger, stronger, taller, hardier, more robust, but more
courageous and aggressive, more active, more creative, more sternly
just, than women; while coarseness, cruelty, selfishness, and
pugnacity, though not virtues in either sex, affect us much less
repulsively in men than in women, for the reason that the masculine
struggle for existence and competition in business foster selfishness,
and men have inherited pugnacious instincts from their fighting
ancestors, while women, as mothers, learned the lessons of sympathy
and self-sacrifice much sooner than men. The distinctively feminine
virtues are on the whole of a much higher order than the masculine,
which is the reason why they were not appreciated or fostered at so
early an epoch. Gentleness, modesty, domesticity, girlishness,
coyness, kindness, patience, tenderness, benevolence, sympathy,
self-sacrifice, demureness, emotionality, sensitiveness, are feminine
qualities, some of which, it is true, we expect also in gentlemen; but
their absence is not nearly so fatal to a man as it is to a woman. And
as men gradually approach women in patience, tenderness, sympathy,
self-sacrifice, and gentleness, it behooves women to keep their
distance by becoming still more refined and feminine, instead of
trying, as so many of them do, to approach the old masculine
standard--one of the strangest aberrations recorded in all social
history.
Men and women fall in love with what is unlike, not with what is like
them. The refined physical and mental traits which I have described in
the preceding paragraphs constitute some of the secondary sexual
characters by which romantic love is inspired, while sensual love is
based on the primary sexual characters. Havelock Ellis (19) has well
defined a secondary sexual character as "one which, by more highly
differentiating the sexes, helps to make them more attractive to each
other," and so to promote marriages. And Professor Weissmann, famed
for his studies in heredity, opens up deep vistas of thought when he
declares (II., 91) that
"all the numerous differences in form and function
which characterize sex among the higher animals, all
the so-called 'secondary sexual characters,' affecting
even the highest mental qualities of mankind, are
nothing but adaptations to bring about the union of the
hereditary tendencies of two individuals."
Nature has been at work on this problem of differentiating the sexes
ever since it created the lowest animal organisms, and this fact,
which stands firm as a rock, gives us the consoling assurance that the
present abnormal attempts to make women masculine by giving them the
same education, employments, sports, ideals, and political aspirations
as men have, must end in ignominious failure. If the viragoes had
their way, men and women would in course of time revert to the
condition of the lowest savages, differing only in their organs of
generation. How infinitely nobler, higher, more refined and,
fascinating, is that ideal which wants women to differ from men by
every detail, bodily and mental; to differ from them in the higher
qualities of disposition, of character, of beauty, physical and
spiritual, which alone make possible the existence of romantic love as
distinguished from lust on one side and friendship on the other.
MYSTERIES OF LOVE
If these secondary sexual characters could be destroyed by the
extraordinary--one might almost say criminal--efforts of unsexed
termagants to make all women ape men and become like them, romantic
love, which was so slow in coming, would disappear again, leaving only
sensual appetite, which may be (selfishly) fastidious and intense, but
has no depth, duration, or altruistic nobility, and which, when
satiated, cares no more for the object for which it had temporarily
hungered. It is these secondary sexual characters, with their subtle
and endless variations, that have given individual preference such a
wide field of choice that every lover can find a girl after his heart
and taste. A savage is like a gardener who has only one kind of
flowers to choose between--all of one color too; whereas we, with our
diverse secondary characters, our various intermixtures of
nationalities, our endless shades of blonde and brunette, and
differences in manners and education can have our choice among the
lilies, roses, violets, pansies, daisies, and thousands of other
flowers--or the girls named after them. Samuel Baker says there are no
broken hearts in Africa. Why should there be when individuals are so
similar that if a man loses his girl he can easily find another just
like her in color, face, rotundity, and grossness? A civilized lover
would mourn the loss of his bride--though he were offered his choice
of the beauties of Baltimore--because it would be _absolutely
impossible to duplicate her_.
In that last line lies the explanation of one of the mysteries of
modern love--its stubborn fidelity to the beloved after the choice has
been made. But there is another mystery of individual preference that
calls for an explanation--its capriciousness, apparent or real, in
making a choice--that quality which has made the poets declare so
often that "love is blind." On this point much confusion of ideas
prevails.
Matters are simplified if we first dispose of those numerous cases in
which the individual preference is only approximate. If a girl of
eighteen has the choice between a man of sixty and a youth of twenty,
she will, if she exercises a _personal_ preference, take the youth, as
a matter of course, though he may be far from her ideal. Such
preference is generic rather than individual. Again, in most cases of
first love, as I have remarked elsewhere (_R.L.P.B_., 139) "man falls
in love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or
woman." Young men and women inherit, from a long series of ancestors,
a disposition to love which at puberty reveals itself in vague
longings and dreams. The "bump of amativeness," as a phrenologist
might say, is like a powder magazine, ready to explode at a touch, and
it makes no great difference what kind of a match is applied. In later
love affairs the match is a matter of more importance.
Robert Burton threw light on the "capriciousness" and accidentally of
this kind of (apparent) amorous preference when he wrote that "it is
impossible, almost, for two young folks equal in years to live
together and not be in love;" and further he says, sagaciously:
"Many a serving man, by reason of this opportunity and
importunity, inveigles his master's daughter, many a
gallant loves a dowdy, many a gentleman runs after his
wife's maids; many ladies dote upon their men, as the
queen in Aristo did upon the dwarf, many matches are so
made in haste and they are compelled, as it were by
necessity, so to love, which had they been free, come
in company with others, seen that variety which many
places afford, or compared them to a third, would never
have looked upon one another."
Such passions are merely pent-up emotions seeking to escape one way or
another. They do not indicate real, intense preference, but at best an
approach to it; for they are not properly individualized, and, as
Schopenhauer pointed out, the differences in the intensity of
love-cases depend on their different degrees of individualization--an
_aperçu_ which this whole chapter confirms. Yet these mere
approximations to real preference embrace the vast majority of
so-called love-affairs. Genuine preference of the highest type finds
its explanation in special phases of sympathy and personal beauty
which will be discussed later on.
What is usually considered the greatest mystery of the amorous passion
is the disposition of a lover to "see Helen's beauty in a brow of
Egypt." "What can Jack have seen in Jill to become infatuated with
her, or she in him?" The trouble with those who so often ask this
question is that they fix the attention on the beloved instead of on
the lover, whose lack of taste explains everything. The error is of
long standing, as the following story related by the Persian poet
Saadi (of the thirteenth century) will show (346):
AN ORIENTAL LOVE-STORY
"A king of Arabia was told that Mujnun, maddened by
love, had turned his face toward the desert and assumed
the manners of a brute. The king ordered him to be
brought in his presence and he wept and said: 'Many of
my friends reproach me for my love of her, namely
Laila; alas! that they could one day see her, that my
excuse might be manifest for me.' The king sent for her
and beheld a person of tawny complexion, and feeble
frame of body. She appeared to him in a contemptible
light, inasmuch as the lowest menial in his harem, or
seraglio, surpassed her in beauty and excelled her in
elegance. Mujnun, in his sagacity, penetrated what was
passing in the king's mind and said: 'It would behove
you, O King, to contemplate the charms of Laila through
the wicket of a Mujnun's eye, in order that the miracle
of such a spectacle might be illustrated to you.'"
This story was referred to by several critics of my first book as
refuting my theory regarding the modernity of true love. They seemed
to think, with the Persian poet, that there must be something
particularly wonderful and elevated in the feelings of a lover who is
indifferent to the usual charms of femininity and prefers ugliness.
This, indeed, is the prevalent sentiment on the subject, though the
more I think of it, the more absurd and topsy turvy it seems to me. Do
we commend an Eskimo for preferring the flavor of rancid fish oil to
the delicate bouquet of the finest French wine? Does it evince a
particularly exalted artistic sense to prefer a hideous daub to a
Titian or Raphael? Does it betoken a laudable and elevated taste in
music to prefer a vulgar tune to one that has the charms of a romantic
or classical work of acknowledged beauty? Why, then, should we
specially extol Mujnun for admiring a woman who was devoid of all
feminine charms? The confusion probably arises from fancying that she
must have had mental charms to offset her ugliness, but nothing
whatever is said about such a notion, which, in fact, would have been
utterly foreign to the Oriental, purely sensual, way of regarding
women.
Fix the attention on the man in the story instead of on the woman and
the mystery vanishes. Mujnun becomes infatuated with an ugly woman
simply because he has no taste, no sense of beauty. There are millions
of such men the world over, just as there are millions who cannot
appreciate choice wines, good music, and fine pictures. Everywhere the
majority of men prefer vulgar tunes, glaring chromos, and coarse
women--luckily for the women, because most of them are coarse, too.
"Birds of a feather flock together"--there you have the philosophy of
preference so far as such love-affairs are concerned. How often do we
see a bright, lovely girl, with sweet voice and refined manners,
neglected by men who crowd around other women of their own rude and
vulgar caste! Most men still are savages so far as the ability to
appreciate the higher secondary sexual qualities in women is
concerned. But the exceptions are growing more numerous. Among savages
there are no exceptions. Romantic love does not exist among them, both
because the women have not the secondary sexual qualities, and
because, even if they had them, the men would not appreciate them or
be guided by them in their choice of mates.
II. MONOPOLISM
Whenever she speaks, my ravished ear
No other voice but hers can hear,
No other wit but hers approve:
Tell me, my heart, if this be love?
--_Lyttleton_.
Every lover of nature must have noticed how the sun monopolizes the
attention of flowers and leaves. Twist and turn them whichever way you
please, on returning afterward you will find them all facing the
beloved sun again with their bright corollas and glossy surface.
Romantic love exacts a similar monopoly of its devotees. Be their
feelings as various, their thoughts as numerous, as the flowers in a
garden, the leaves in a forest, they will always be turned toward the
beloved one.
JULIET AND NOTHING BUT JULIET
A man may have several intimate friends, and a mother may dote on a
dozen or more children with equal affection; but romantic love is a
monopolist, absolutely exclusive of all participation and rivalry. A
genuine Romeo wants Juliet, the whole of Juliet, and nothing but
Juliet. She monopolizes his thoughts by day, his dreams at night; her
image blends with everything he sees, her voice with everything he
hears. His imagination is a lens which gathers together all the light
and heat of a giant world and focuses them on one brunette or blonde.
He is a miser, who begrudges every smile, every look she bestows on
others, and if he had his own way he would sail with her to-day to a
desert island and change their names to Mr. and Mrs. Robinson Crusoe.
This is not fanciful hyperbole, but a plain statement in prose of a
psychological truth. The poets did not exaggerate when they penned
such sentiments as these:
She was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all.
--_Byron_.
Thou art my life, my love, my heart,
The very eyes of me,
And hast command of every part,
To live and die for thee.
--_Herrick_.
Give me but what that ribband bound,
Take all the rest the world goes round.
--_Waller_.
But I am tied to very thee
By every thought I have;
Thy face I only care to see
Thy heart I only crave.
--_Sedley_.
I see her in the dewy flowers,
Sae lovely sweet and fair:
I hear her voice in ilka bird,
Wi' music charm the air:
There's not a bonnie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green;
There's not a bonny bird that sings,
But minds me o' my Jean.
--_Burns_.
For nothing this wide universe I call
Save thou, my rose: in it thou art my all.
--_Shakspere_.
Like Alexander I will reign,
And I will reign alone,
My thoughts shall evermore disdain
A rival on my throne.
--_James Graham_.
Love, well thou know'st no partnerships allows.
Cupid averse, rejects divided vows.
--_Prior_.
O that the desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race
And, hating no one, love but only her.
--_Byron_.
BUTTERFLY LOVE
The imperative desire for an absolute monopoly of one chosen girl,
body and soul--_and one only_--is an essential, invariable ingredient
of romantic love. Sensual love, on the contrary, aims rather at a
monopoly of all attractive women--or at least as many as possible.
Sensual love is not an exclusive passion for one; it is a fickle
feeling which, like a giddy butterfly, flits from flower to flower,
forgetting the fragrance of the lily it left a moment ago in the sweet
honey of the clover it enjoys at this moment. The Persian poet Sadi,
says (_Bustan_, 12), "Choose a fresh wife every spring or New Year's
Day; for the almanack of last year is good for nothing." Anacreon
interprets Greek love for us when he sings:
"Can'st count the leaves in a forest, the waves in the sea?
Then tell me how oft I have loved. Twenty girls in Athens,
and fifteen more besides; add to these whole bevies in
Corinth, and from Lesbos to Ionia, from Caria and from
Rhodos, two thousand sweethearts more.... Two thousand did I
say? That includes not those from Syros, from Kanobus, from
Creta's cities, where Eros rules alone, nor those from
Gadeira, from Bactria, from India--girls for whom I burn."
Lucian vies with Anacreon when he makes Theomestus (_Dial. Amor._)
exclaim: "Sooner can'st thou number the waves of the sea and the
snowflakes falling from the sky than my loves. One succeeds another,
and the new one comes on before the old is off." We call such a thing
libertinism, not love. The Greeks had not the name of Don Juan, yet
Don Juan was their ideal both for men and for the gods they made in
the image of man. Homer makes the king of gods tell his own spouse
(who listens without offence) of his diverse love-affairs (_Iliad_,
xiv., 317-327). Thirteen centuries after Homer the Greek poet Nonnus
gives ([Greek: Dionusiaka], vii.) a catalogue of twelve of Zeus's
amours; and we know from other sources (_e.g., Hygin, fab._, 155) that
these accounts are far from exhaustive. A complete list would match
that yard-long document made for Don Juan by Leporello in Mozart's
opera. A French writer has aptly called Jupiter the "Olympian Don
Juan;" yet Apollo and most of the other gods might lay claim to the
same title, for they are represented as equally amorous, sensual, and
fickle; seeing no more wrong in deserting a woman they have made love
to, than a bee sees in leaving a flower whose honey it has stolen.
Temporarily, of course, both men and gods focus their interest on one
woman--maybe quite ardently--and fiercely resent interference, as an
angry bee is apt to sting when kept from the flower it has
accidentally chosen; but that is a different thing from the monopolism
of true love.
ROMANTIC STORIES OF NON-ROMANTIC LOVE
The romantic lover's dream is to marry one particular woman and her
alone; the sensual lover's dream embraces several women, or many. The
unromantic ideal of the ancient Hindoo is romantically illustrated in
a story told in the _Hitopadesa_ of a Brahman named Wedasarman. One
evening someone made him a present of a dish of barley-meal. He
carried it to the market hall and lay down in a corner near where a
potter had stored his wares. Before going to sleep, the Brahman
indulged in these pleasant reveries:
"If I sell this dish of meal I shall probably get ten
farthings for it. For that I can buy some of these
pots, which I can sell again at a profit; thus my money
will increase. Then I shall begin to trade in
betel-nuts, dress-goods and other things, and thus I
may bring my wealth up to a hundred thousand. With that
I shall be able to marry _four wives_, and to the
youngest and prettiest of them I shall give my
tenderest love. How the others will be tortured by
jealousy! But just let them dare to quarrel. They shall
know my wrath and feel my club!"
With these words he laid about him with his club, and of course broke
his own dish besides many of the potter's wares. The potter hearing
the crash, ran to see what was the matter, and the Brahman was
ignominiously thrown out of the hall.
The polygamous imagination of the Hindoos runs riot in many of their
stories. To give another instance: _The Kathakoça, or Treasury of
Stories_ (translated by C.H. Tawney, 34), includes an account of the
adventures of King Kánchanapura, who had five hundred wives; and of
Sanatkumara who beheld eight daughters of Mánavega and married them.
Shortly afterward he married a beautiful lady and her sister. Then he
conquered Vajravega and married one hundred maidens.
Hindoo books assure us that women, unless restrained, are no better
than men. We read in the same _Hitopadesa_ that they are like
cows--always searching for new herbs in the meadows to graze on. In
polyandrous communities the women make good use of their
opportunities. Dalton, in his book on the wild tribes of Bengal, tells
this quaint story (36):
"A very pretty Dophla girl once came into the station
of Luckimpur, threw herself at my feet and in most
poetical language asked me to give her protection. She
was the daughter of a chief and was sought in marriage
and promised to a peer of her father who had many other
wives. She would not submit to be one of many, and
besides she loved and she eloped with her beloved. This
was interesting and romantic. She was at the time in a
very coarse travelling dress, but assured of protection
she took fresh apparel and ornament from her basket and
proceeded to array herself, and very pretty she looked
as she combed and plaited her long hair and completed
her toilette. In the meantime I had sent for the
'beloved,' who had kept in the background, and alas!
how the romance was dispelled when a _dual_ appeared!
_She had eloped with two men!_"
Every reader will laugh at this denouement, and that laugh is eloquent
proof that in saying there can be no real love without absolute
monopolism of one heart by another I simply formulated and emphasized
a truth which we all feel instinctively. Dalton's tale also brings out
very clearly the world-wide difference between a romantic love-story
and a story of romantic love.
Turning from the Old World to the New we find stories illustrating the
same amusing disregard of amorous monopolism. Rink, in his book of
Eskimo tales and traditions, cites a song which voices the reveries of
a Greenland bachelor:
"I am going to leave the country--in a large ship--for
that sweet little woman. I'll try to get some beads--of
those that look like boiled ones. Then when I've gone
abroad--I shall return again. My nasty little
relatives--I'll call them all to me--and give them a
good thrashing--with a big rope's end. Then I'll go to
marry--_taking two at once_. That darling little
creature--shall only wear clothes of the spotted
seal-skins, and the other little pet shall have clothes
of the young hooded seals."
Powers (227) tells a tragic tale of the California Indians, which in
some respects reminds one of the man who jumped into a bramble-bush
and scratched out both his eyes.
"There was once a man who loved two women and wished to
marry them. Now these two women were magpies, but they
loved him not, and laughed his wooing to scorn. Then he
fell into a rage and cursed these two women, and went
far away to the North. There he set the world on fire,
then made for himself a tule boat, wherein he escaped
to sea, and was never seen more."
Belden, who spent twelve years among the Sioux and other Indians,
writes (302):
"I once knew a young man who had about a dozen horses
he had captured at different times from the enemy, and
who fell desperately in love with a girl of nineteen.
_She loved him in return_, but said she could not bear
to leave her tribe, and go to a Santee village, unless
her two sisters, aged respectively fifteen and
seventeen, went with her. Determined to have his
sweetheart, the next time the warrior visited the
Yankton village he took several ponies with him, and
bought all three of the girls from their parents,
giving five ponies for them."
OBSTACLES TO MONOPOLISM
Heriot, during his sojourn among Canadian Indians, became convinced
from what he saw that love does not admit of divided affections, and
can hardly coexist with polygamy (324). Schoolcraft notes the "curious
fact" concerning the Indian that after a war "one of the first things
he thought of as a proper reward for his bravery was to take another
wife." In the chapter entitled "Honorable Polygamy" we saw how, in
polygamous communities the world over, monogamy was despised as the
"poor man's marriage," and was practised, not from choice, but from
necessity. Every man who was able to do so bought or stole several
women, and joined the honorable guild of polygamists. Such a custom,
enforced by a strong public opinion, created a sentiment which greatly
retarded the development of monopolism in sexual love. A young Indian
might dream of marrying a certain girl, not, however, with a view to
giving her his whole heart, but only as a beginning. The woman, it is
true, was expected to give herself to one husband, but he seldom
hesitated to lend her to a friend as an act of hospitality, and in
many cases, would hire her out to a stranger in return for gifts.
In not a few communities of Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Australia,
Africa, and America polyandry prevailed; that is, the woman was
expected to bestow her caresses in turn on two or more men, to the
destruction of the desire for exclusive possession which is an
imperative trait of love. Rowney describes (154) what we might call
syndicate marriage which has prevailed among the Meeris of India:
"All the girls have their prices, the largest price for the
best-looking girl varying from twenty to thirty pigs, and,
if one man cannot give so many, he has no objection to take
partners to make up the number."
According to Julius Caesar, it was customary among the ancient Britons
for brothers, and sometimes for father and sons, to have their wives
in common, and Tacitus found evidence of a similar custom among the
ancient Germans; while in some parts of Media it was the ambition of
the women to have two or more husbands, and Strabo relates that those
who succeeded looked down with pride on their less fortunate sisters.
When the Spaniards first arrived at Lanzarote, in South America, they
found the women married to several husbands, who lived with their
common spouse in turn each a month. The Tibetans, according to Samuel
Turner, look on marriage as a disagreeable duty which the members of a
family must try to alleviate by sharing its burdens. The Nair woman in
India may have up to ten or twelve husbands, with each of whom she
lives ten days at a time. Among some Himalayan tribes, when the oldest
brother marries, he generally shares his wife with his younger
brothers.
WIVES AND GIRLS IN COMMON
Of the Port Lincoln Tribe in Australia, Schürmann says (223) that the
brothers practically have their wives in common.
"A peculiar nomenclature has arisen from these singular
connections; a woman honors the brothers of the man to
whom she is married by the indiscriminate name of
husbands; but the men make a distinction, calling their
own individual spouses yungaras, and those to whom they
have a secondary claim, by right of brotherhood,
kartetis."
R.H. Codrington, a scientifically educated missionary who had
twenty-four years' experience on the islands of the Pacific, wrote a
valuable book on the Melanesians in which occur the following luminous
remarks:
"All women who may become wives in marriage, and are
not yet appropriated, are to a certain extent looked
upon by those who may be their husbands as open to a
more or less legitimate intercourse. In fact,
appropriation of particular women to their own
husbands, though established by every sanction of
native custom, has by no means so strong a hold in
native society, nor in all probability anything like so
deep a foundation in the history of the native people,
as the severance of either sex by divisions which most
strictly limit the intercourse of men and women to
those of the section or sections to which they
themselves do not belong. Two proofs or
exemplifications of this are conspicuous. (1) There is
probably no place in which the common opinion of
Melanesians approves the intercourse of the unmarried
youths and girls as a thing good in itself, though it
allows it as a thing to be expected and excused; but
intercourse within the limit which restrains from
marriage, where two members of the same division are
concerned, is a crime, is incest.... (2) The feeling,
on the other hand, that the intercourse of the sexes
was natural where the man and woman belonged to
different divisions, was shown by that feature of
native hospitality which provided a guest with a
temporary wife." Though now denied in some places,
"there can be no doubt that it was common everywhere."
Nor can there be any doubt that what Codrington here says of the
Melanesians applies also to Polynesians, Australians, and to
uncivilized peoples in general. It shows that even where monogamy
prevails--as it does quite extensively among the lower races[12]--we
must not look for monopolism as a matter of course. The two are very
far from being identical. Primitive marriage is not a matter of
sentiment but of utility and sensual greed. Monogamy, in its lower
phases, does not exclude promiscuous intercourse before marriage and
(with the husband's permission) after marriage. A man appropriates a
particular woman, not because he is solicitous for a monopoly of her
chaste affections, but because he needs a drudge to cook and toil for
him. Primitive marriage, in short, has little in common with civilized
marriage except the name--an important fact the disregard of which has
led to no end of confusion in anthropological and sociological
literature.[13]
TRIAL MARRIAGES
At a somewhat higher stage, marriage becomes primarily an institution
for raising soldiers for the state or sons to perform ancestor
worship. This is still very far from the modern ideal which makes
marriage a lasting union of two loving souls, children or no children.
Particularly instructive, from our point of view, is the custom of
trial marriage, which has prevailed among many peoples differing
otherwise as widely as ancient Egyptians and modern Borneans.[14] A
modern lover would loathe the idea of such a trial marriage, because
he feels sure that his love will be eternal and unalterable. He may be
mistaken, but that at any rate is his ideal: it includes lasting
monopolism. If a modern sweetheart offered her lover a temporary
marriage, he would either firmly and anxiously decline it, fearing
that she might take advantage of the contract and leave him at the end
of the year; or, what is much more probable, his love, if genuine,
would die a sudden death, because no respectable girl could make such
an offer, and genuine love cannot exist without respect for the
beloved, whatever may be said to the contrary by those who know not
the difference between sensual and sentimental love.
TWO ROMAN LOVERS
While I am convinced that all these things are as stated, I do not
wish to deny that monopolism of a violent kind may and does occur in
love which is merely sensual. In fact, I have expressly classed
monopolism among those seven ingredients of love which occur in its
sensual as well as its sentimental phases. For a correct diagnosis of
love it is indeed of great importance to bear this in mind, as we
might otherwise be led astray by specious passages, especially in
Greek and Roman literature, in which sensual love sometimes reaches a
degree of subtility, delicacy, and refinement, which approximate it to
sentimental love, though a critical analysis always reveals the
difference. The two best instances I know of occur in Tibullus and
Terence. Tibullus, in one of his finest poems (IV., 13), expresses the
monopolistic wish that his favorite might seem beautiful to him only,
displeasing all others, for then he would be safe from all rivalry;
then he might live happy in forest solitudes, and she alone would be
to him a multitude:
Atque utinam posses uni mihi bella videri;
Displiceas aliis: sic ego tutus ero.
Sic ego secretis possum bene vivere silvis
Qua nulla humano sit via trita pede.
Tu mihi curarum requies, tu nocte vel atra
Lumen, et in solis tu mihi turba locis.
Unfortunately, the opening line of this poem:
Nulla tuum nobis subducet femina lectum,
and what is known otherwise of the dissolute character of the poet and
of all the women to whom he addressed his verses, make it only too
obvious that there is here no question of purity, of respect, of
adoration, of any of the qualities which distinguish supersensual love
from lust.
More interesting still is a passage in the _Eunuchus_ of Terence (I.,
2) which has doubtless misled many careless readers into accepting it
as evidence of genuine romantic love, existing two thousand years ago:
"What more do I wish?" asks Phaedria of his girl Thais:
"That while at the soldier's side you are not his, that
you love me day and night, desire me, dream of me,
expect me, think of me, hope for me, take delight in
me, finally, be my soul as I am yours."
Here, too, there is no trace of supersensual, self-sacrificing
affection (the only sure test of love); but it might be argued that
the monopolism, at any rate, is absolute. But when we read the whole
play, even that is seen to be mere verbiage and
affectation--sentimentality,[15] not sentiment. The girl in question
is a common harlot "never satisfied with one lover," as Parmeno tells
her, and she answers: "Quite true, but do not bother me"--and her
Phaedria, though he talks monopolism, does not _feel_ it, for in the
first act she easily persuades him to retire to the country for a few
days, while she offers herself to a soldier. And again, at the end of
the play, when he seems at last to have ousted his military rival, the
latter's parasite Gnatho persuades him, without the slightest
difficulty, to continue sharing the girl with the soldier, because the
latter is old and harmless, but has plenty of money, while Phaedria is
poor.
Thus a passage which at first sight seemed sentimental and romantic,
resolves itself into flabby sensualism, with no more moral fibre than
the "love" of the typical Turk, as revealed, for instance, in a love
song, communicated by Eugene Schuyler (I., 135):
"Nightingale! I am sad! As passionately as thou lovest the
rose, so loudly sing that my loved one awake. Let me die in
the embrace of my dear one, for I envy no one. I know that
thou hast many lovers; but what affair of mine is that?"
One of the most characteristic literary curiosities relating to
monopolism that I have found occurs in the Hindoo drama, _Malavika and
Agnimitra_ (Act V.). While intended very seriously, to us it reads for
all the world like a polygamous parody by Artemus Ward of Byron's
lines just cited ("She was his life, The ocean to the river of his
thoughts, Which terminated all"). An Indian queen having generously
bestowed on her husband a rival to be his second wife, Kausiki, a
Buddhist nun, commends her action in these words:
"I am not surprised at your magnanimity. If wives are kind
and devoted to their husbands they even serve them by
bringing them new wives, like the streams which become
channels for conveying the water of the rivers to the
ocean."
Monopolism has a watch-dog, a savage Cerberus, whose duty it is to
ward off intruders. He goes by the name of Jealousy, and claims our
attention next.
III. JEALOUSY
For love, thou know'st, is full of jealousy.
--_Shakspere_.
Jealousy may exist apart from sexual love, but there can be no such
love without jealousy, potential at any rate, for in the absence of
provocation it need never manifest itself. Of all the ingredients of
love it is the most savage and selfish, as commonly witnessed, and we
should therefore expect it to be present at all stages of this
passion, including the lowest. Is this the case? The answer depends
entirely upon what we mean by jealousy. Giraud-Teulon and Le Bon have
held--as did Rousseau long before them--that this passion is unknown
among almost all uncivilized peoples, whereas the latest writer on the
subject, Westermarck, tries to prove (117) that "jealousy is
universally prevalent in the human race at the present day" and that
"it is impossible to believe that there ever was a time when man was
devoid of that powerful feeling." It seems strange that doctors should
disagree so radically on what seems so simple a question; but we shall
see that the question is far from being simple, and that the dispute
arose from that old source of confusion, the use of one word for
several entirely different things.
RAGE AT RIVALS
It is among fishes, in the scale of animal life, that jealousy first
makes its appearance, according to Romanes. But in animals "jealousy,"
be it that of a fish or a stag, is little more than a transient rage
at a rival who comes in presence of the female he himself covets or
has appropriated. This murderous wrath at a rival is a feeling which,
as a matter of course a human savage may share with a wolf or an
alligator; and in its ferocious indulgence primitive man places
himself on a level with brutes--nay, below them, for in the struggle
he often kills the female, which an animal never does. This wrath is
not jealousy as we know it; it lacks a number of essential moral,
intellectual, imaginative elements as we shall presently see; some of
these are found in the amorous relations of birds, but not of savages,
who are now under discussion. If it is true that, as some authorities
believe, there was a time when human beings had, like animals, regular
and limited annual mating periods, this rage at rivals must have often
assumed the most ferocious aspect, to be followed, as with animals, by
long periods of indifference.[16]
WOMEN AS PRIVATE PROPERTY
It is obvious, however, that since the human infant needs parental
care much longer than young animals need it, natural selection must
have favored the survival of the offspring of couples who did not
separate after a mating period but remained together some years. This
tendency would be further favored by the warrior's desire to have a
private drudge or conjugal slave. Having stolen or bought such a
"wife" and protected her against wild beasts and men, he would come to
feel a sense of _ownership_ in her--as in his private weapons. Should
anyone steal his weapons, or, at a higher stage, his cattle or other
property, he would be animated by a _fierce desire for revenge_; and
the same would be the case if any man stole his wife--or her favors.
This savage desire for revenge is the second phase of "jealousy," when
women are guarded like other property, encroachment on which impels
the owner to angry retaliation either on the thief or on the wife who
has become his accomplice. Even among the lowest races, such as the
Fuegians and Australians, great precautions are taken to guard women
from "robbers." From the nature of the case, women are more difficult
to guard than any other kind of "movable" property, as they are apt to
move of their own accord. Being often married against their will, to
men several times their age, they are only too apt to make common
cause with the gallant. Powers relates that among the California
Indians, a woman was severely punished or even killed by her husband
if seen in company with another man in the woods; and an Australian
takes it for granted, says Curr, "that his wife has been unfaithful to
him whenever there has been an opportunity for criminality." The
poacher may be simply flogged or fined, but he is apt to be mutilated
or killed. The "injured husband" reserves the right to intrigue with
as many women as he pleases, but his wife, being his absolute
property, has no rights of her own, and if she follows his bad example
he mutilates or kills her too.
HORRIBLE PUNISHMENTS
Strangling, stoning, burning, impaling, flaying alive, tearing limb
from limb, throwing from a tower, burying alive, disemboweling,
enslaving, drowning, mutilating, are some of the punishments inflicted
by savages and barbarians in all parts of the world on adulterous men
or women. Specifications would be superfluous. Let one case stand for
a hundred. Maximilian Prinz zu Wied relates (I., 531, 572), that the
Indians (Blackfeet),
"severely punished infidelity on the part of their
wives by cutting off their noses. At Fort Mackenzie we
saw a number of women defaced in this hideous manner.
In about a dozen tents we saw at least half a dozen
females thus disfigured."
Must we not look upon the state of mind which leads to such terrible
actions as genuine jealousy? Is there any difference between it and
the feeling we ourselves know under that name? There is--a world-wide
difference. Take Othello, who though a Moor, acts and feels more like
an Englishman. The desire for revenge animates him too: "I'll tear her
to pieces," he exclaimed when Iago slanders Desdemona--"will chop her
into messes," and as for Cassio,
Oh, that the slave had forty thousand lives!
One is too poor, too weak for my revenge.
* * * * *
Arise, black vengeance from the hollow hell.
ESSENCE OF TRUE JEALOUSY
But this eagerness for revenge is only one phase of his passion.
Though it leads him, in a frenzy of despair, to smother his wife, it
is yet, even in his violent soul, subordinate to those feelings of
_wounded honor and outraged affection_ which constitute the essence of
true jealousy. When he supposes himself betrayed by his wife and his
friend he clutches, as Ulrici remarks (I., 404), with the blind
despair of a shipwrecked man to his sole remaining property--_honor_:
"His honor, as he thinks, demands the sacrifice of the
lives of Desdemona and Cassio. The idea of honor in
those days, especially in Italy, inevitably required
the death of the faithless wife as well as that of the
adulterer. Othello therefore regards it as his duty to
comply with this requirement, and, accordingly it is no
lie when he calls himself 'an honorable murderer,'
doing 'naught in hate, but all in honor,'.... Common
thirst for revenge would have thought only of
increasing the sufferings of its victim, of adding to
its own satisfaction. But how touching, on the other
hand, is Othello's appeal to Desdemona to pray and to
confess her sins to Heaven, that he may not kill her
soul with her body! Here, at the moment of the most
intense excitement, in the desperate mood of a
murderer, his love still breaks forth, and we again see
the indestructible nobility of his soul."
Schlegel erred, therefore, when he maintained that Othello's jealousy
was of the sensual, Oriental sort. So far as it led to the murder, it
was; but Shakspere gave it touches which allied it to the true
jealousy of the heart of which Schlegel himself has aptly said that it
is "compatible with the tenderest feeling and adoration of the beloved
object." Of such tender feeling and adoration there is not a trace in
the passion of the Indian who bites off his wife's nose or lower lip
to disfigure her, or who ruthlessly slays her for doing once what he
does at will. Such expressions as "outraged affection," or "alienated
affection," do not apply to him, as there is no affection in the case
at all; no more than in that of the old Persian or Turk who sews up
one of his hundred wives in a sack and throws her into the river
because she was starving and would eat of the fruits of the tree of
knowledge. This Oriental jealousy is often a "dog-in-the-manger"
feeling. The Iroquois were the most intelligent of North American
Indians, yet in cases of adultery they punished the woman solely, "who
was supposed to be the only offender" (Morgan, 331). Affection is out
of the question in such cases, anger at a slave's disobedience, and
vengeance, being the predominant feelings. In countries where woman is
degraded and enslaved, as Verplanck remarks (III., 61),
"the jealous revenge of the master husband, for real or
imagined evil, is but the angry chastisement of an
offending slave, not the _terrible sacrifice of his own
happiness involved in the victim's punishment._ When
woman is a slave, a property, a thing, all that
jealousy may prompt is done, to use Othello's own
distinction, 'in hate' and 'not in love.'"
Another equally vital distinction between the jealousy of savagery and
civilization is indicated in these lines from _Othello_:
I had rather be a toad,
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon,
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For other's uses.
And again:
I had been happy, if the general camp,
Pioners and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known.
ABSENCE OF MASCULINE JEALOUSY
It is the knowledge, or suspicion, that he has not a monopoly of his
wife that tortures Shakspere's Othello, and constitutes the essence of
his jealousy, whereas a savage is his exact antipode in that respect;
he cares not a straw if the whole camp shares the embraces of his
wife--_provided he knows it and is rewarded for it_. Wounded pride,
violated chastity, and broken conjugal vows--pangs which goad us into
jealousy--are considerations unknown to him. In other words, his
"jealousy" is not a solicitude for marital honor, for wifely purity
and affection, but simply a question of lending his property and being
paid for it. Thus, in the case of the Blackfeet Indians referred to a
moment ago, the author declares that while they mutilated erring wives
by cutting off their noses (the Comanches and other tribes, down to
the Brazilian Botocudos, did the same thing), they eagerly offered
their wives and daughters in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. In this
respect, too, this case is typical. Sutherland found (I., 184) that in
regard to twenty-one tribes of Indians out of thirty-eight there was
express record of unlimited intercourse before marriage and the
loaning or exchanging of wives. In seventeen he could not get express
information, and in only four was it stated that a chaste girl was
more esteemed than an unchaste one. In the chapter on Indifference to
Chastity I cited testimony showing that in Australia, the Pacific
Islands, and among aborigines in general, chastity is not valued as a
virtue. There are plenty of tribes that attempt to enforce it, but for
commercial, sensual, or at best, genealogical reasons, not from a
regard for personal purity; so that among all these lower races
jealousy in our sense of the word is out of the question.
Care must be taken not to be imposed on by deceptive facts and
inaccurate testimony. Thus Westermarck says (119) that
"in the Pelew Islands it is forbidden even to speak
about another man's wife or mention her name. In short,
the South Sea Islanders are, as Mr. Macdonald remarks,
generally jealous of the chastity of their wives."
Nothing could be more misleading than these two sentences. The men are
_not_ jealous of the women's _chastity_, for they unhesitatingly lend
them to other men; they are "jealous" of them simply as they are of
their other movable property. As for the Pelew Islanders in
particular, what Westermarck cites from Ymer is quite true; it is also
true that if a man beats or insults a woman he must pay a fine or
suffer the death penalty; and that if he approaches a place where
women are bathing he must put them on their guard by shouting. But all
these things are mere whimsicalities of barbarian custom, for the
Pelew Islanders are notoriously unchaste even for Polynesians. They
have no real family life; they have club-houses in which men consort
promiscuously with women; and no moral restraint of any sort is put
upon boys and girls, nor have they any idea of modesty or decency.[17]
(Ploss, II., 416; Kotzebue, III., 215.)
A century ago Alexander Mackenzie wrote (66) regarding the Knistenaux
or Cree Indians of the Northwest:
"It does not appear ... that chastity is considered by
them as a virtue; or that fidelity is believed to be
essential to the happiness of wedded life; though it
sometimes happens that the infidelity of a wife is
punished by the husband with the loss of her hair,
nose, and perhaps life; such severity proceeds from its
having been practised without his permission; for a
temporary exchange of wives is not uncommon; and the
offer of their persons is considered as a necessary
part of the hospitality due to strangers."
Of the Natchez Indians Charlevoix wrote (267): "There is no such thing
as jealousy in these marriages; on the contrary the Natchez, without
any ceremony, lend one another their wives." Concerning the Eskimos we
read in Bancroft:
"They have no idea of morality, and the marriage
relation sits so loosely as to hardly excite jealousy
in its abuse. Female chastity is held a thing of value
only as men hold property in it." "A stranger is always
provided with a female companion for the night, and
during the husband's absence he gets another man to
take his place" (I., 81, 80).
The evidence collected by him also shows that the Thlinkeets and
Aleuts freely exchanged or lent their wives. Of the coast Indians of
Southern Alaska and British Columbia, A.P. Niblack says (_Smithson.
Rep_., 1888, 347):
"Jealousy being unknown amongst the Indians, and
sanctioned prostitution a common evil, the woman who
can earn the greatest number of blankets or the largest
sum of money wins the admiration of others for herself
and a high position for her husband by her wealth."
In the same government reports (1886, Pt. I.) C. Willoughby writes of
the Quinault Agency Washington Indians: "In their domestic relations
chastity seems to be almost unknown." Of the Chippewayans Hearne
relates (129) that it is a very common custom among the men to
exchange a night's lodging with each other's wives. But this is so far
from being considered as an act which is criminal, that it is esteemed
by them as one of the strongest ties of friendship between two
families.[18] The Hurons and many other tribes from north to south had
licentious festivals at which promiscuous intercourse prevailed
betraying the absence of jealousy. Of the Tupis of Brazil Southey says
(I., 241): "The wives who found themselves neglected, consoled
themselves by initiating the boys in debauchery. The husbands seem to
have known nothing of jealousy." The ancient inhabitants of Venezuela
lived in houses big enough to hold one hundred and sixty persons, and
Herrera says of them:
"They observed no law or rule in matrimony, but took as
many wives as they would, and they as many husbands,
quitting one another at pleasure, without reckoning any
harm done on either part. There was no such thing as
jealousy among them, all living as best pleased them,
without taking offence at one another."
The most painstaking research has failed to reveal to me a single
Indian tribe in North or South America that showed a capacity for real
jealousy, that is, anguish based on a sense of violated wifely
chastity and alienated affection. The actions represented as due to
jealousy are always inspired by the desire for revenge, never by the
anguish of disappointed affection; they are done in hate, not in love.
A chief who kills or mutilates one of his ten wives for consorting
with another man without his consent, acts no more from jealousy,
properly so called, than does a father who shoots the seducer of his
daughter, or a Western mob that lynches a horse-thief. Among the
Australian aborigines killing an intriguing wife is an every-day
occurrence, though "chastity as a virtue is absolutely unknown amongst
all the tribes of which there are records," as one of the best
informed authorities, J.D. Wood, tells us (403). Detailed evidence
that the same is true of the aborigines of all the continents will be
given in later chapters. The natives usually share their females both
before and after marriage; monopoly of body and soul--of which true
jealousy is the guardian--is a conception beyond their moral horizon.
A few more illustrations may be added.
Burton (_T.T.G.L._, II., 27) cites a writer who says that the natives
of São Paulo had a habit of changing wives for a time, "alleging, in
case of reproof, that they are not able to eat always of the same
dish." Holub testifies (II., 83) that in South Africa jealousy "rarely
shows itself very prominently;" and he uses the word in the widest
sense. The fierce Masai lend their wives to guests. The Mpongwe of the
Gaboon River send out their wives--with a club if necessary--to earn
the wages of shame (Campiègne, 192). In Madagascar Ellis (137) found
sensuality gross and universal, though concealed. Unchastity in either
sex was not regarded as a vice, and on the birth of the king's
daughter "the whole capital was given up to promiscuous debauchery."
According to Mrs. French Sheldon (_Anth. Inst._, XXL, 360), all along
the east coast of Africa no shame attaches to unchastity before
marriage. It is needless to add that in all such cases punishment of a
wife cannot be prompted by real jealousy for her "chastity." It is
always a question of proprietorship. Cameron relates _(Across Africa_,
II., Chap. IV.) that in Urua the chief boasted that he exercised a
right to any woman who might please his fancy, when on his journeys
about the country.
"Morals are very lax throughout the country, and wives
are not thought badly of for being unfaithful; the
worst they may expect being severe chastisement from
the injured husband. But he never uses excessive
violence for fear of injuring a valuable piece of
household furniture."
When Du Chaillu travelled through Ashango Land King Quenqueza rose to
receive him.
"With the figurative politeness of a negro chief, he
assured me that his town, his forests, his slaves, his
wives, were mine (he was quite sincere with regard to
the last") (19).
Asia affords many instances of the absence of jealousy. Marco Polo
already noted that in Thibet, when travellers arrived at a place, it
was customary to distribute them in the houses, making them temporary
masters of all they contained, including the women, while their
husbands meanwhile lodged elsewhere. In Kamtschatka it was considered
a great insult if a guest refused a woman thus offered him. Most
astounding of all is what G.E. Robertson relates of the Kaffirs of
Hindu-Kush (553):
"When a woman is discovered in an intrigue, a great
outcry is made, and the neighbors rush to the scene
with much laughter. A goat is sent for on the spot for
a peace-making feast between the gallant and the
husband. Of course the neighbors also partake of the
feast; _the husband and wife both look very happy_, and
so does every one else except the lover, who has to pay
for the goat, and in addition will have to pay six cows
later on."
Here we see a great value attached apparently to conjugal fidelity,
but in reality an utter and ludicrous indifference to it.
Asia is also the chief home of polyandry, though, as we saw in the
preceding chapter, this custom has prevailed on other continents too.
The cases there cited to show the absence of monopoly also prove the
absence of jealousy. The effect of polyandry is thus referred to by
Colonel King (23):
"A Toda woman often has three or four husbands, who are
all brothers, and with each of whom she cohabits a
month at a time. What is more singular, such men as, by
the paucity of women among the tribe, are prevented
from obtaining a share in a wife, are allowed, with the
permission of the fraternal husbands, to become
temporary partners with them. Notwithstanding these
singular family arrangements, the greatest harmony
appears to prevail among all parties--husbands, wives,
and lovers."
Whatever may have been the causes leading to the strange custom of
marrying one woman to several men--poverty, the desire to reduce the
population in mountainous regions, scarcity of women due to female
infanticide, the need of protection of a woman during the absence of
one husband--the fact stares us in the face that a race of men who
calmly submit to such a disgusting practice cannot know jealousy. So,
too, in the cases of _jus primae noctis_ (referred to in the chapter
on Indifference to Chastity), where the men not only submitted to an
outrage so damnable to our sense of honor, affection, and monopoly,
but actually coveted it as a privilege or a religious blessing and
paid for it accordingly. Note once more how the sentiments associated
with women and love change and grow.
Petherick says (151) that among the Hassangeh Arabs, marriages are
valid only three or four days, the wives being free the rest of the
time to make other alliances. The married men, far from feeling this a
grievance,
"felt themselves highly flattered by any attentions
paid to their better halves during their free-and-easy
days. They seem to take such attentions as evidence
that their wives are attractive."
A readiness to forgive trespasses for a consideration is widely
prevalent. Powers says that with the California Indians "no adultery
is so flagrant but the husband can be placated with money, at about
the same rate that would be paid for murder." The Tasmanians
illustrate the fact that the same tribes that are the most ferocious
in the punishment of secret amours--that is, infringements on their
property rights--are often the most liberal in lending their wives. As
Bonwick tells us (72), they felt honored if white men paid attention
to them. A circumstance which seems to have puzzled some naïve
writers: that Australians and Africans have been known to show less
"jealousy" of whites than of their own countrymen, finds an easy
explanation in the greater ability of the white man to pay for the
husband's complaisance. In some cases, in the absence of a fine, the
husband takes his revenge in other ways, subjecting the culprit's wife
to the same outrage (as among natives of Guiana and New Caledonia) or
delivering his own guilty (or rather disobedient) wife to young men
(as among the Omahas) and then abandoning her. The custom of accepting
compensation for adultery prevailed also among Dyaks, Mandingoes,
Kaffirs, Mongolians, Pahari and other tribes of India, etc. Falkner
says (126) that among the Patagonians in cases of adultery the wife is
not blamed, but the gallant is punished
"unless he atones for the injury by some valuable
present. They have so little decency in this respect,
that oftentimes, at the command of the wizards, they
superstitiously send their wives to the woods to
prostitute themselves to the first person they meet."
PERSIAN AND GREEK JEALOUSY
Enough has been said to prove the incorrectness of Westermarck's
assertion (515) that the lack of jealousy is "a rare exception in the
human race." Real jealousy, as a matter of fact, is unknown to the
lower races, and even the feeling of revenge that passes by that name
is commonly so feeble as to be obliterated by compensations of a more
or less trifling kind. When we come to a stage of civilization like
that represented by Persians and other Orientals, or by the ancient
Greeks, we find that men are indeed no longer willing to lend their
wives. They seem to have a regard for chastity and a desire for
conjugal monopoly. Other important traits of modern jealousy are,
however, still lacking, notably affection. The punishments are
hideously cruel; they are still inflicted "in hate, not in love." In
other words, the jealousy is not yet of the kind which may form an
ingredient of love. Its essence is still "bloody thoughts and
revenge."
Reich cites (256) a typical instance of Oriental ferocity toward an
erring wife, from a book by J.J. Strauss, who relates that on June 9,
1671, a Persian avenged himself on his wife for a trespass by flaying
her alive, and then, as a warning to other women, hanging up her skin
in the house. Strauss saw with his own eyes how the flayed body was
thrown into the street and dragged out into a field. Drowning in
sacks, throwing from towers, and other fiendish modes of vengeance
have prevailed in Persia as far back as historic records go; and the
women, when they got a chance, were no better than the men. Herodotus
relates how the wife of Xerxes, having found her husband's cloak in
the house of Masista, cut off his wife's breasts and gave them to the
dogs, besides mutilating her otherwise, as well as her daughter.
The monogamous Greeks were not often guilty of such atrocities, but
their custom (nearly universal and not confined to Athens, as is often
erroneously stated) of locking up their women in the interior of the
houses, shutting them off from almost everything that makes life
interesting, betrays a kind of jealousy hardly less selfish than that
of the savages who disposed of their wives as they pleased. It
practically made slaves and prisoners of them, quite in the Oriental
style. Such a custom indicates an utter lack of sympathy and
tenderness, not to speak of the more romantic ingredients of love,
such as adoration and gallantry; and it implies a supreme contempt for
and distrust of, character in wives, all the more reprehensible
because the Greeks did not value purity _per se_ but only for
genealogical reason, as is proved by the honors they paid to the
disreputable hetairai. There are surprisingly few references to
masculine jealousy in Greek erotic literature. The typical Greek lover
seems to have taken rivalry as blandly as the hero of Terence's play
spoken of in the last chapter, who, after various outbursts of
sentimentality, is persuaded, in a speech of a dozen lines, to share
his mistress with a rich officer. Nor can I see anything but maudlin
sentimentality in such conceits as Meleager utters in two of his poems
(_Anthology_, 88, 93) in which he expresses jealousy of sleep, for its
privilege of closing his mistress's eyes; and again of the flies which
suck her blood and interrupt her slumber. The girl referred to is
Zenophila, a common wanton (see No. 90). This is the sensual side of
the Greek jealousy, chastity being out of the question.
The purely genealogical side of Greek masculine jealousy is strikingly
revealed in the _Medea_ of Euripides. Medea had, after slaying her own
brother, left her country to go with Jason to Corinth. Here Jason,
though he had two children by her, married the daughter of the King
Creon. With brutal frankness, but quite in accordance with the selfish
Greek ideas, he tries to explain to Medea the motives for his second
marriage: that they might all dwell in comfort instead of suffering
want,
"and that I might rear my sons as doth befit my house;
further, that I might be the father of brothers for the
children thou hast borne, and raise these to the same
high rank, uniting the family in one--_to my lasting
bliss_. Thou, indeed, hast no need of more children,
but me it profits to help my present family by that
which is to be. Have I miscarried here? Not even thou
wouldst say so unless a rival's charms rankled in thy
bosom. No, but you women have such strange ideas, that
you think all is well so long as your married life runs
smooth; but if some mischance occur to ruffle your
love, all that was good and lovely erst you reckon as
your foes. Yea, men should have begotten children from
some other source, no female race existing; thus would
no evil ever have fallen on mankind."
Jason, Greek-fashion, looked upon a woman's jealousy as mere unbridled
lust, which must not be allowed to stand in the way of the men's
selfish desire to secure filial worship of their precious shades after
death. As Benecke remarks (56): "For a woman to wish to keep her
husband to herself was a sign that she was at once unreasonable and
lascivious." The women themselves were trained and persuaded to take
this view. The chorus of Corinthian women admonishes Medea: "And if
thy lord prefers a fresh love, be not angered with him for that; Zeus
will judge 'twixt thee and him herein." Medea herself says to Jason:
"Hadst thou been childless still, I could have pardoned thy desire for
this new union." And again: "Hadst thou not had a villain's heart,
thou shouldst have gained my consent, then made this match, instead of
hiding it from those who loved thee"--a sentiment which would seem to
us astounding and inexplicable had we not became familiar with it in
the preceding pages relating to savages and barbarians, by whom what
we call infidelity was considered unobjectionable, provided it was not
done secretly.
By her subsequent actions Medea shows in other ways that her jealousy
is entirely of the primitive sort--fiendish revenge proceeding from
hate. Of the chorus she asks but one favor: "Silence, if haply I can
some way or means devise to _avenge_ me on my husband for this cruel
treatment;" and the chorus agrees: "Thou wilt be taking a just
vengeance on thy husband, Medea." Creon, having heard that she had
threatened with mischief not only Jason but his bride and her father,
wants her to leave the city. She replies, hypocritically:
"Fear me not, Creon, my position scarce is such that I
should seek to quarrel with princes. Why should I, for how
hast thou injured me? Thou hast betrothed thy daughter where
thy fancy prompted thee. No, 'tis my husband I hate."
But as soon as the king has left her, she sends to the innocent bride
a present of a beautifully embroidered robe, poisoned by witchcraft.
As soon as the bride has put it on she turns pale, foam issues from
her mouth, her eyeballs roll in their sockets, a flame encircles her,
preying on her flesh. With an awful shriek she sinks to the earth,
past all recognition save to the eye of her father, who folds her in
his arms, crying, "Who is robbing me of thee, old as I am and ripe for
death? Oh, my child! would I could die with thee!" And his wish is
granted, for he
"found himself held fast by the fine-spun robe...and then ensued
a fearful struggle. He strove to rise but she still held him
back; and if ever he pulled with all his might, from off his
bones his aged flesh he tore. At last he gave it up, and breathed
forth his soul in awful suffering; for he could no longer master
the pain."
Not content with this, Medea cruelly slays Jason's children--her own
flesh and blood--not in a frenzied impulse, for she has meditated that
from the beginning, but to further glut her revengeful spirit. "I did
it," she says to Jason, "to vex thy heart." And when she hears of the
effect of the garment she had sent to his bride, she implores the
messenger, "Be not so hasty, friend, but tell the manner of her death,
for thou wouldst give me double joy, if so they perished miserably."
PRIMITIVE FEMININE JEALOUSY
A passion of which such horrors are a possible outcome may well have
led Euripides to write: "Ah me! ah me! to mortal man how dread a
scourge is love!" But this passion is not love, or part of love. The
horrors of such "jealousy" are often witnessed in modern life, but not
where true love--affection--ever had its abode. It is the jealousy of
the savage, which still survives, as other low phases of sexual
passion do. The records of missionaries and others who have dwelt
among savages contain examples of deeds as foul, as irrational, as
vindictive as Medea's; deeds in which, as in the play of Euripides,
the fury is vented on innocent victims, while the real culprit escapes
with his life and sometimes even derives amusement from the situation.
In _Oneota_ (187-90), Schoolcraft relates the story of an Indian's
wife who entered the lodge when his new bride was sitting by his side
and plunged a dagger in her heart. Among the Fuegians Bove found (131)
that in polygamous households many a young favorite lost her life
through the fury of the other wives. More frequently this kind of
jealousy vents itself in mutilations. Williams, in his book on the
Fijians (152), relates that one day a native woman was asked, "How is
it that so many of you women are without a nose?" The answer was: "It
grows out of a plurality of wives. Jealousy causes hatred, and then
the stronger tries to cut or bite off the nose of the one she hates,"
He also relates a case where a wife, jealous of a younger favorite,
"pounced on her, and tore her sadly with nails and teeth, and injured
her mouth by attempting to slit it open," A woman who had for two
years been a member of a polygamous family told Williams that
contentions among the women were endless, that they knew no comfort,
that the bitterest hatred prevailed, while mutual cursings and
recriminations were of daily occurrence. When one of the wives is so
unfortunate as to fall under the husband's displeasure too, the others
"fall upon her, cuffing, kicking, scratching, and even trampling on
the poor creature, so unmercifully as to leave her half dead." Bourne
writes (89), that Patagonian women sometimes "fight like tigers.
Jealousy is a frequent occasion. If a squaw suspects her liege lord of
undue familiarity with a rival, she darts upon the fair enchantress
with the fury of a wild beast; then ensues such a pounding,
scratching, hair-pulling, as beggars description." Meanwhile the gay
deceiver stands at a safe distance, chuckling at the fun. The
licentiousness of these Indians, he says, is equal to their cruelty.
Powers (238) gives this graphic picture of a domestic scene common
among the Wintun Indians of California. A chief, he says, may have two
or more wives, but the attempt to introduce a second frequently leads
to a fight.
"The two women dispute for the supremacy, often in a
desperate pitched battle with sharp stones, seconded by
their respective friends. They maul each other's faces
with savage violence, and if one is knocked down her
friends assist her to regain her feet, and the brutal
combat is renewed until one or the other is driven from
the wigwam. The husband stands by and looks placidly
on, and when all is over he accepts the situation,
retaining in his lodge the woman who has conquered the
territory."
ABSENCE OF FEMININE JEALOUSY
As a rule, however, there is more bark than bite in the conduct of the
wives of a polygamous household, as is proved by the ease with which
the husband, if he cares to, can with words or presents overcome the
objections of his first wife to new-comers; even, for instance, in the
case of such advanced barbarians as the Omaha Indians, who are said to
have actually allowed a wife to punish a faithless husband--an
exception so rare as to be almost incredible. Dorsey says of the
Omahas (26):
"When a man wishes to take a second wife he always
consults his first wife, reasoning thus with her: 'I
wish you to have less work to do, so I think of taking
your sister, your aunt, or your brother's daughter for
my wife. You can then have her to aid you with your
work.' Should the first wife refuse, the man cannot
marry the other woman. Generally no objection is
offered, if the second woman be one of the kindred of
the first wife. Sometimes the wife will make the
proposition to her husband: 'I wish you to marry my
brother's daughter, as she and I are one flesh.'"
Concerning the inhabitants of the Philippine island of Mindanao, a
German writer says (_Zeit. für Ethn_., 1885, 12):
"The wives are in no way jealous of one another; on the
contrary, they are glad to get a new companion, as that
enables them to share their work with another."
Schwaner says of the Borneans that if a man takes a second wife he
pays to the first the _batu saki_, amounting to from sixty to one
hundred guilders, and moreover he gives her presents, consisting of
clothes, "in order to appease her completely," In reference to the
tribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon, Gibbs says
(198):
"The accession of a new wife in the lodge very
naturally produces jealousy and discord, and the first
often returns for a time in dudgeon to her friends, to
be reclaimed by her husband when he chooses, perhaps
after propitiating her by some presents."
Such instances might be multiplied _ad libitum_.
In a still larger number of cases primitive woman's objection to
rivals is easily overcome by the desire for the social position,
wealth, and comfort which polygamy confers. I have already cited, in
the chapter on Honorable Polygamy, a number of typical incidents
showing how vanity, the desire to belong to a man who can afford
several wives, or the wish to share the hard domestic or field work
with others, often smothers the feeling of jealousy so completely that
wives laugh at the idea of having their husbands all to themselves,
beg them to choose other companions, or even use their own hard-earned
money to buy them for their husbands. As this point is of exceptional
importance, as evidencing radical changes in the ideas relating to
sexual relations--and the resulting feelings themselves--further
evidence is admissible.
Of the Plains Indians in general Colonel Dodge remarks (20):
"Jealousy would seem to have no place in the
composition of an Indian woman, and many prefer to be,
even for a time, the favorite of a man who already has
a wife or wives, and who is known to be a good husband
and provider, rather than tempt the precarious chances
of an untried man."
And again:
"I have known several Indians of middle age, with already
numerous wives and children, who were such favorites with
the sex that they might have increased their number of wives
to an unlimited extent had they been so disposed, and this,
too, from among the very nicest girls of the tribe."
E.R. Smith, in his book on the Araucanians (213-14) tells of a Mapuché
wife who, when he saw her,
"was frequently accompanied by a younger and handsomer
woman than herself, whom she pointed out, with evident
satisfaction, as her 'other self'--that is, her
husband's wife number two, a recent addition to the
family. Far from being dissatisfied, or entertaining
any jealousy toward the newcomer, she said that she
wished her husband would marry again; for she
considered it a great relief to have someone to assist
her in her household duties and in the maintenance of
her husband."
McLean, who spent twenty-five years among the Tacullies and other
Indians of the Hudson Bay region, says (301) that while polygamy
prevails "the most perfect harmony seems to subsist among them."
Hunter, who knew the Missouri and Arkansas Indians well, says (255)
that "jealousy is a passion but little known, and much less indulged,
among the Indians." In cases of polygamy the wives have their own
lodges, separated by a short distance. They "occasionally visit each
other, and generally live on the most friendly terms." But even this
separation is not necessary, as we see from Catlin, who relates (I.,
119) that among the Mandans it is common to see six or eight wives of
a chief or medicine man "living under one roof, and all apparently
quiet and contented."
In an article on the Zulus (_Humanitarian_, March, 1897), Miss Colenso
refers to the fact that while polygamy is the custom, each wife has
her own hut, wherefore
"you have none of the petty jealousies and quarrelling
which distinguish the harems of the East, among the
Zulu women, who, as a rule, are most friendly to each
other, and the many wives of a great chief will live in
a little colony of huts, each mistress in her own house
and family, and interchanging friendly visits with the
other ladies similarly situated."
But in Africa, too, separation is not essential to secure a peaceful
result. Paulitschke (_B.E.A.S_., 30) reports that among the Somali
polygamy is customary, two wives being frequent, and he adds that "the
wives live together in harmony and have their household in common."
Among the Abyssinian Arabs, Sir Samuel Baker found (127) that
"concubinage is not considered a breach of morality; neither is it
regarded by the legitimate wives with jealousy." Chillié (_Centr.
Afr_., 158), says of the Landamas and Nalous: "It is very remarkable
that good order and perfect harmony prevail among all these women who
are called to share the same conjugal couch." The same writer says of
the polygamous Foulahs (224):
"In general the women appear very happy, and by no
means jealous of each other, except when the husbands
make a present to one without giving anything to the
rest."
Note the last sentence; it casts a strong light on our problem. It
suggests that even where a semblance of jealousy is manifested by such
women it may often be an entirely different thing from the jealousy we
associate with love; envy, greed, or rivalry being more accurate terms
for it. Here is another instance in point. Drake, in his work on the
Indians of the United States has the following (I., 178):
"Where there is a plurality of wives, if one gets finer
goods than the others, there is sure to be some
quarrelling among the women; and if one or two of them
are not driven off, it is because the others have not
strength enough to do so. The man sits and looks on,
and lets the women fight it out. If the one he loves
most is driven off, he will go and stay with her, and
leave the others to shift for themselves awhile, until
they can behave better, as he says."
The Rev. Peter Jones gives this description (81) of a fight he
witnessed between the two wives of an Ojibway chief:
"The quarrel arose from the unequal distribution of a
loaf of bread between the children. The husband being
absent, the wife who had brought the bread to the
wigwam gave a piece of it to each child, but the best
and largest portion to her _own_. Such partiality
immediately led to a quarrel. The woman who brought the
bread threw the remainder in anger to the other; she as
quickly cast it back again; in this foolish way they
kept on for some time, till their fury rose to such a
height that they at length sprang at one another,
catching hold of the hair of the head; and when each
had uprooted a handful their ire seemed satisfied."
To make clear the difference between such ebullitions of temper and
the passion properly called jealousy, let us briefly sum up the
contents of this chapter. In its first stage it is a mere masculine
rage in presence of a rival. An Australian female in such a case
calmly goes off with the victor. A savage looks upon his wife, not as
a person having rights and feelings of her own, but as a piece of
property which he has stolen or bought, and may therefore do with
whatever he pleases. In the second stage, accordingly, women are
guarded like other movable property, infringement on which is fiercely
resented and avenged, though not from any jealous regard for chastity,
for the same husband who savagely punishes his wife for secret
adultery, willingly lends her to guests as a matter of hospitality, or
to others for a compensation. In some cases the husband's "wounded
feelings" may be cured by the payment of a fine, or subjecting the
culprit's wife to indignities. At a higher stage, where some regard is
paid to chastity--at least in the women reserved for genealogical
purposes--masculine jealousy is still of the sensual type, which leads
to the life-long imprisonment of women in order to enforce a fidelity
which in the absence of true love could not be secured otherwise. As
for the wives in primitive households, they often indulge in "jealous"
squabbles, but their passion, though it may lead to manifestations of
rage and to fierce and cruel fights, is after all only skin deep, for
it is easily overcome with soft words, presents, or the desire for the
social position and comfort which can be secured in the house of a man
who is wealthy enough to marry several women--especially if the
husband is rich and wise enough to keep the women in separate lodges;
though even that is often unnecessary.
There is no difficulty in understanding why primitive feminine
"jealousy," despite seeming exceptions, should have been so shallow
and transient a feeling. Everything conspired to make it so. From the
earliest times the men made systematic efforts to prevent the growth
of that passion in women because it interfered with their own selfish
desires. Hearne says of the women of the Northern Indians that "they
are kept so much in awe of their husbands, that the liberty of
thinking is the greatest privilege they enjoy" (310); and A.H. Keane
(_Journ. of Anthrop. Inst_., 1883) remarks that while the Botocudos
often indulge in fierce outbreaks of jealousy, "the women have not yet
acquired the right to be jealous, a sentiment implying a certain
degree of equality between the sexes." Everywhere the women were
taught to subordinate themselves to the men, and among the Hindoos as
among the Greeks, by the ancient Hebrews as well as by the mediaeval
Arabs freedom from jealousy was inculcated as a supreme virtue. Rachel
actually fancied she was doing a noble thing in giving her handmaids
to Jacob as concubines. Lane (246) quotes the Arab historian
El-Jabartee, who said of his first wife:
"Among her acts of conjugal piety and submission was
this that she used to buy for her husband beautiful
slave girls, with her own wealth, and deck them with
ornaments and apparel, and so present them to him
confidently looking to the reward and recompense which
she should receive [in Paradise] for such conduct."
"In case of failure of an heir," says Griffis, in his famous work on
Japan (557), "the husband is fully justified, often strongly advised
even by his wife, to take a handmaid to raise up seed to preserve
their ancestral line." A Persian instance is given by Ida Pfeiffer
(261), who was introduced at Tabreez to the wives of Behmen-Mirza,
concerning whom she writes:
"They presented to me the latest addition to the
harem--a plump brown little beauty of sixteen; and they
seemed to treat their new rival with great good nature
and told me how much trouble they had been taking to
teach her Persian."
JEALOUSY PURGED OF HATE
Casting back a glance over the ground traversed, we see that women as
well as men--primitive, ancient, oriental--were either strangers to
jealousy of any kind, or else knew it only as a species of anger,
hatred, cruelty, and selfish sensuality; never as an ingredient of
love. Australian women, Lumholtz tells us (203), "often have bitter
quarrels about men whom they love[19] and are anxious to marry. If the
husband is unfaithful, the wife frequently becomes greatly enraged."
As chastity is not by Australians regarded as a duty or a virtue, such
conduct can only be explained by referring to what Roth, for instance,
says (141) in regard to the Kalkadoon. Among these, where a man may
have as many as four or five wives,
"the discarded ones will often, through jealousy, fight with
her whom they consider more favored; on such occasions they
may often resort to stone-throwing, or even use fire-sticks
and stone-knives with which to mutilate the genitals."
Similarly, various cruel disfigurements of wives by husbands or other
wives, previously referred to as customary among savages, have their
motive in the desire to mar the charms of a rival or a disobedient
conjugal slave. The Indian chief who bites off an intriguing wife's
nose or lower lip takes, moreover, a cruel delight at sight of the
pain he inflicts--a delight of which he would be incapable were he
capable of love. To such an Indian, Shakspere's lines
But O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves,
would be as incomprehensible as a Beethoven symphony. With his usual
genius for condensation, Shakspere has in those two lines given the
essentials of true jealousy--suspicion causing agony rather than
anger, and proceeding from love, not from hate. The fear, distress,
humiliation, anguish of modern jealousy are in the mind of the injured
husband. He suffers torments, but has no wish to torment either of the
guilty ones. There are, indeed, even in civilized countries, husbands
who slay erring wives; but they are not civilized husbands: like
Othello, they still have the taint of the savage in them. Civilized
husbands resort to separation, not to mutilation or murder; and in
dismissing the guilty wife, they punish themselves more than her--for
she has shown by her actions that she does not love him and therefore
cannot feel the deepest pang of the separation. There is no anger, no
desire for revenge.
How comes this gentle concord in the world,
That hatred is so far from jealousy?
It comes in the world through love--through the fact that a man--or a
woman--who truly loves, cannot tolerate even the thought of punishing
one who has held first place in his or her affections. Modern law
emphasizes the essential point when it punishes adultery because of
"alienation of the affections."
A VIRTUOUS SIN
Thus, whereas the "jealousy" of the savage who is transported by his
sense of proprietorship to bloody deeds and to revenge is a most
ignoble passion, incompatible with love, the jealousy of modern
civilization has become a noble passion, justified by moral ideals and
affection--"a kind of godly jealousy which I beseech you call a
virtuous sin."
Where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy
Doth call himself Affection's sentinel.
And let no one suppose that by purging itself of bloody violence,
hatred, and revenge, and becoming the sentinel of _affection_,
jealousy has lost any of its intensity. On the contrary, its depth is
quintupled. The bluster and fury of savage violence is only a
momentary ebullition of sensual passion, whereas the anguish of
jealousy as we feel it is
Agony unmix'd, _incessant_ gall,
Corroding every thought, and blasting all
Love's paradise.
Anguish of mind is infinitely more intense than mere physical pain,
and the more cultivated the mind, the deeper is its capacity for such
"agony unmix'd." Mental anguish doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw
the inwards, and create a condition in which "not poppy, nor
mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever
medicine" the victim to that sleep which he enjoyed before. His heart
is turned to stone; he strikes it and it hurts his hand. Trifles light
as air are proofs to him that his suspicions are realities, and life
is no longer worth living.
O now for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars
That make ambition virtue!
ABNORMAL STATES
The assertion that modern jealousy is a noble passion is of course to
be taken with reservations. Where it leads to murder or revenge it is
a reversion to the barbarous type, and apart from that it is, like all
affections of the mind, liable to abnormal and morbid states. Harry
Campbell writes in the _Lancet_ (1898) that
"the inordinate development of this emotion always betokens a
neurotic diathesis, and not infrequently indicates the oncoming
of insanity. It is responsible for much useless suffering and not
a little actual disease."
Dr. O'Neill gives a curious example of the latter, in the same
periodical. He was summoned to a young woman who informed him that she
wished to be cured of jealousy: "I am jealous of my husband, and if
you do not give me something I shall go out of my mind." The husband
protested his innocence and declared there was no cause whatever for
her accusations:
"The wife persisted in reiterating them and so the
wrangle went on till suddenly she fell from her chair
on the floor in a fit, the spasmodic movements of which
were so strange and varied that it would be almost
impossible to describe them. At one moment the patient
was extended at full length with her body arched
forward in a state of opisthotonos. The next minute she
was in a sitting position with the legs drawn up,
making, while her hands clutched her throat, a guttural
noise. Then she would throw herself on her back and
thrust her arms and legs about to the no small danger
of those around her. Then becoming comparatively quiet
and supine she would quiver all over while her eyelids
trembled with great rapidity. This state perhaps would
be followed by general convulsive movements in which
she would put herself into the most grotesque postures
and make the most unlovely grimaces. At last the fit
ended, and exhausted and in tears she was put to bed.
The patient was a lithe, muscular woman and to restrain
her movements during the attack with the assistance at
hand was a matter of impossibility, so all that could
be done was to prevent her injuring herself and to
sprinkle her freely with cold water. The
after-treatment was more geographical than medical. The
husband ceased doing business in a certain town where
the object of his wife's suspicions lived."
I have been told by a perfectly healthy married woman that when
jealous of her husband she felt a sensation as of some liquid welling
up in her throat and suffocating her. Pride came into play in part;
she did not want others to think that her husband preferred an
ignorant girl to her--a woman of great physical and mental charm.
Such jealousy, if unfounded, may be of the "self-harming" kind of
which one of Shakspere's characters exclaims "Fie! beat it hence!" Too
often, however, women have cause for jealousy, as modern civilized man
has not overcome the polygamous instincts he has inherited from his
ancestors since time immemorial. But whereas cause for feminine
jealousy has existed always, the right to feel it is a modern
acquisition. Moreover, while Apache wives were chaste from fear and
Greek women from necessity, modern civilized women are faithful from
the sense of honor, duty, affection, and in return for their devotion
they expect men to be faithful for the same reasons. Their jealousy
has not yet become retrospective, like that of the men; but they
justly demand that after marriage men shall not fall below the
standard of purity they have set up for the women, and they insist on
a conjugal monopoly of the affections as strenuously as the men do. In
due course of time, as Dr. Campbell suggests, "we may expect the
monogamous instinct in man to be as powerful as in some of the lower
animals; and feminine jealousy will help to bring about this result;
for if women were indifferent on this point men would never improve."
JEALOUSY IN ROMANTIC LOVE
The jealousy of romantic love, preceding marriage, differs from the
jealousy of conjugal love in so far as there can be no claim to a
monopoly of affection where the very existence of any reciprocated
affection still remains in doubt. Before the engagement the uncertain
lover in presence of a rival is tortured by doubt, anxiety, fear,
despair, and he may violently hate the other man, though (as I know
from personal experience) not necessarily, feeling that the rival has
as much claim to the girl's attention as he has. Duels between rival
lovers are not only silly, but are an insult to the girl, to whom the
choice ought to be submitted and the verdict accepted manfully. A man
who shoots the girl herself, because she loves another and refuses
him, puts himself on a level below the lowest brute, and cannot plead
either true love or true jealousy as his excuse. After the engagement
the sense of monopoly and the consciousness of plighted troth enter
into the lover's feelings, and intruders are properly warded off with
indignation. In romantic jealousy the leading role is played by the
imagination; it loves to torture its victim by conjuring visions of
the beloved smiling on a rival, encircled by his arm, returning his
kisses. Everything feeds his suspicions; he is "dwelling in a
continual 'larum of jealousy." Oft his jealousy "shapes faults that
are not" and he taints his heart and brain with needless doubt. "Ten
thousand fears invented wild, ten thousand frantic views of horrid
rivals, hanging on the charms for which he melts in fondness, eat him
up." Such passion inflames love but corrodes the soul. In perfect
love, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, jealousy is
potential only, not actual.
IV. COYNESS
When a man is in love he wears his heart on his sleeve and feels eager
to have the beloved see how passionately it throbs for her. When a
girl is in love she tries to conceal her heart in the innermost
recesses of her bosom, lest the lover discover her feelings
prematurely. In other words, coyness is a trait of feminine love--the
only ingredient of that passion which is not, to some extent, common
to both sexes. "The cruel nymph well knows to feign, ... coy looks and
cold disdain," sang Gay; and "what value were there in the love of the
maiden, were it yielded without coy delay?" asks Scott.
'Tis ours to be forward and pushing;
'Tis yours to affect a disdain,
Lady Montagu makes a man say, and Richard Savage sings:
You love; yet from your lover's wish retire;
Doubt, yet discern; deny, and yet desire.
Such, Polly, are your sex--part truth, part fiction,
Some thought, much whim, and all a contradiction.
"Part truth, part fiction;" the girl romances regarding her feelings;
her romantic love is tinged with coyness. "She will rather die than
give any sign of affection," says Benedick of Beatrice; and in that
line Shakspere reveals one of the two essential traits of genuine
modern coyness--_dissemblance of feminine affection_.
Was coyness at all times an attribute of femininity, or is it an
artificial product of modern social conditions and culture? Is coyness
ever manifested apart from love, or does its presence prove the
presence of love? These two important questions are to be answered in
the present section.
WOMEN WHO WOO
The opinion prevails that everywhere and always the first advances
were made by the men, the women being passive, and coyly reserved.
This opinion--like many other notions regarding the relations of the
sexes--rests on ignorance, pure ignorance. In collecting the scattered
facts bearing on this subject I have been more and more surprised at
the number of exceptions to the rule, if, indeed, rule it be. Not only
are there tribes among whom women _must_ propose--as in the Torres
Straits Islands, north of Australia, and with the Garos of India,
concerning whom interesting details will be given in later chapters;
but among many other savages and barbarians the women, instead of
repelling advances, make them.
"In all Polynesia," says Gerland (VI., 127), "it was a common
occurrence that the women wooed the men." "A proposal of marriage,"
writes Gill (_Savage Life in Polynesia_, II.), "may emanate with
propriety from a woman of rank to an equal or an inferior." In an
article on Fijian poetry (731-53), Sir Arthur Gordon cites the
following native poem:
The girls of Vunivanua all had lovers,
But I, poor I, had not even one.
Yet I fell desperately in love one day,
My eye was filled with the beauty of Vasunilawedua.
She ran along the beach, she called the canoe-men.
She is conveyed to the town where her beloved dwells.
Na Ulumatua sits in his canoe unfastening its gear.
He asks her, "Why have you come here, Sovanalasikula?"
"They have been falling in love at Vunivanua," she answers;
"I, too, have fallen in love. I love your lovely son,
Vasunilawedua."
Na Ulumatua rose to his feet. He loosened a tambua whale's
tooth from the canoe.
"This," he said, presenting it to her, "is my offering to
you for your return. My son cannot wed you, lady."
Tears stream from her eyes, they stream down on her breast.
"Let me only live outside his house," she says;
"I will sleep upon the wood-pile. If I may only light his
seluka [cigarrette] for him, I shall rejoice.
If I may only hear his voice from a distance, it will
suffice. Life will be pleasant to me."
Na Ulumatua replied, "Be magnanimous, lady, and return.
We have many girls of our own. Return to your own land.
Vasunilawedua cannot wed a stranger."
Sovanalasikula went away crying.
She returned to her own town, forlorn.
Her life was sadness.
Ia nam bosulu.
Tregear (102) describes the "wooing house" in which New Zealand girls
used to stand up in the dark and say: "I love so-and-so, I want him
for a husband;" whereupon the chosen lover, if willing, would say yes,
or cough to signify his assent. Among the Pueblo Indians
"the usual order of courtship is reversed; when a girl is
disposed to marry, she does not wait for a young man to
propose to her, but selects one to her own liking and
consults her father, who visits the parents of the youth and
acquaints them with his daughter's wishes. It seldom happens
that any objections to the match are made" (Bancroft, I.,
547);
and concerning the Spokane Indians the same writer says (276) that a
girl "may herself propose if she wishes." Among the Moquis, "instead
of the swain asking the hand of the fair one, she selects the young
man who is to her fancy, and then her father proposes the match to the
sire of the lucky youth" (Schoolcraft, IV., 86). Among the Dariens,
says Heriot (325), "it is considered no mark of forwardness" in a
woman "openly to avow her inclination," and in Paraguay, too, women
were allowed to propose (Moore, 261). Indian girls of the Hudson River
region
"were not debarred signifying their desire to enter
matrimonial life. When one of them wished to be married, she
covered her face with a veil and sat covered as an
indication of her desire. If she attracted a suitor,
negotiations were opened with parents or friends, presents
given, and the bride taken" (Ruttenber).
A comic mode of catching a husband is described in an episode from the
tale "Owasso and Wayoond" (Schoolcraft, _A.R._ II., 210-11):
"Manjikuawis was forward in her advances toward him.
He, however, paid no attention to it, and shunned her.
She continued to be very assiduous in attending to his
wants, such as cooking and mending his mocassins. She
felt hurt and displeased at his indifference, and
resolved to play him a trick. Opportunity soon offered.
The lodge was spacious, and she dug a hole in the
ground, where the young man usually sat, covering it
very carefully. When the brothers returned from the
chase the young man threw himself down carelessly at
the usual place, and fell into the cavity, his head and
feet remaining out, so that he was unable to extricate
himself. 'Ha! ha!' cried Manjikuawis, as she helped him
out, 'you are mine, I have caught you at last, and I
did it on purpose.' A smile came over the young man's
face, and he said, 'So be it, I will be yours;' and
from that moment they lived happily as man and wife."
It was a common thing among various Indian tribes for the women to
court distinguished warriors; and though they might have no choice in
the matter, they could at any rate place themselves temptingly in the
way of these braves, who, on their part, had no occasion to be coy,
since they could marry all the squaws they pleased. The squaws, too,
did not hesitate to indulge, if not in two husbands, in more than one
lover. Commenting on the Mandans, for instance, Maximilian Prinz zu
Wied declares (II., 127) that "coyness is not a virtue of the Indian
women; they often have two or three lovers at a time." Among the
Pennsylvania Indians it was a common thing for a girl to make suit to
a young man.
"Though the first address may be by the man, yet the other
is the most common. The squaws are generally very immodest
in their words and actions, and will often put the young men
to the blush. The men commonly appear to be possessed of
much more modesty than the women." (Bancroft, II., 140.)
Even a coating of culture does not seem to curb the young squaw's
propensity to make the first advances. Captain R.H. Pratt (_U.S. Geol.
and G.S_., IX., 260), of the Carlisle School, relates an amusing story
of a Kiowa young man who, under a variety of circumstances, "never
cared for girl. 'But when Laura say she love me, then I began to care
for girl.'"
In his _First Footsteps_ (85, 86) Burton gives a glimpse of the
"coyness" of Bedouin women:
"We met a party of Esa girls, who derided my color and
doubted the fact of my being a Moslem. The Arabs
declared me to be a shaykh of shaykhs, and translated
to the prettiest of the party an impromptu proposal of
marriage. She showed but little coyness and stated her
price to be an Andulli or necklace, a couple of
Tobes--she asked one too many--a few handfuls of beads,
and a small present for her papa. She promised, naïvely
enough, to call next day and inspect the goods. The
publicity of the town did not deter her, but the
shamefacedness of my two companions prevented our
meeting again."
In his book on Southern Abyssinia Johnston relates how, while staying
at Murroo, he was strongly recommended to follow the example of his
companions and take a temporary wife. There was no need of hunting for
helpmates--they offered themselves of their own accord. One of the
girls who presented herself as a candidate was stated by her friends
to be a very strong woman, who had already had four or five husbands.
"I thought this a rather strange recommendation," he adds, "but it was
evidently mentioned that she might find favor in my eyes." He found
that the best way out of such a dilemma was to engage the first old
hag that came along and leave it to her to ward off the others.
Masculine coyness under such conditions has its risks. Johnston
mentions the case of an Arab who, in the region of the Muzeguahs,
scorned a girl who wanted to be his temporary wife; whereupon "the
whole tribe asserted he had treated them with contempt by his haughty
conduct toward the girl, and demanded to know if she was not good
enough for him." He had to give them some brass wire and blue sood
before he could allay the national indignation aroused by his refusal
to take the girl. Women have rights which must be respected, even in
Africa!
In Dutch Borneo there is a special kind of "marriage by stratagem"
called _matep_. If a girl desires a particular man he is inveigled
into her house, the door is shut, the walls are hung with cloth of
different colors and other ornaments, dinner is served up and he is
informed of the girl's wish to marry him. If he declines, he is
obliged to pay the value of the hangings and the ornaments. (Roth,
II., CLXXXI.)
"Uncertain, coy, and hard to please" obviously cannot be sung of such
women.
In one of the few native Australian stories on record the two wives of
a man are represented as going to his brother's hut when he was
asleep, and imitating the voice of an emu. The noise woke him, and he
took his spear to kill them; but as soon as he ran out the two women
spoke and requested him to be their husband. (Wood's _Native Tribes_,
210.)
The fact that Australian women have absolutely no choice in the
assignment of husbands, must make them inclined to offer themselves to
men they like, just as Indian girls offer themselves to noted warriors
in the hope of thus calling attention to their personal attractions.
As we shall see later, one of the ways in which an Australian wins a
wife is by means of magic. In this game, as Spencer and Gillen tell us
(556), the women sometimes take the initiative, thus inducing a man to
elope with them.
WERE HEBREW AND GREEK WOMEN COY?
The English language is a queer instrument of thought. While coyness
has the various meanings of shyness, modest reserve, bashfulness,
shrinking from advances or familiarity, disdainfulness, the verb "to
coy" may mean the exact opposite--to coax, allure, entice, woo, decoy.
It is in _this_ sense that "coyness" is obviously a trait of primitive
maidens. What is more surprising is to find in brushing aside
prejudice and preconceived notions, that among ancient nations too it
is in this second sense rather than in the first that women are "coy."
The Hebrew records begin with the story of Adam and Eve, in which Eve
is stigmatized as the temptress. Rebekah had never seen the man chosen
for her by her male relatives, yet when she was asked if she would go
with his servant, she answered, promptly, "I will go." Rachel at the
well suffers her cousin to kiss her at first sight. Ruth does all the
courting which ends in making her the wife of Boaz. There is no
shrinking from advances, real or feigned, in any of these cases; no
suggestion of disguised feminine affection; and in two of them the
women make the advances. Potiphar's wife is another biblical case. The
word coy does not occur once in the Bible.
The idea that women are the aggressors, particularly in criminal
amours, is curiously ingrained in the literature of ancient Greece. In
the _Odyssey_ we read about the fair-haired goddess Circe, decoying
the companions of Odysseus with her sweet voice, giving them drugs and
potions, making them the victims of swinish indulgence of their
appetites. When Odysseus comes to their rescue she tries to allure him
too, saying, "Nay, then, pat up your blade within its sheath, and let
us now approach our bed that there we too may join in love and learn
to trust each other." Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the
Sirens, who are always "casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting
within a meadow," in order to decoy passing sailors. Charybdis is
another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymph
Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until
after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home "because
the nymph pleased him no more." Nor does the human Nausicäa manifest
the least coyness when she meets Odysseus at the river. Though he has
been cast on the shore naked, she remains, after her maids have run
away alarmed, and listens to his tale of woe. Then, after seeing him
bathed, anointed, and dressed, she exclaims to her waiting maids: "Ah,
might a man like this be called my husband, having his home here and
content to stay;" while to him later on she gives this broad hint:
"Stranger, farewell! when you are once again in your own land,
remember me, and how before all others it is to me you owe the saving
of your life."
Nausicäa is, however, a prude compared with the enamoured woman as the
Greek poets habitually paint her. Pausanias (II., Chap. 31), speaking
of a temple of Peeping Venus says:
"From this very spot the enamoured Phaedra used to
watch Hippolytus at his manly exercises. Here still
grows the myrtle with pierced leaves, as I am told. For
being at her wit's ends and finding no ease from the
pangs of love, she used to wreak her fury on the leaves
of this myrtle."
Professor Rohde, the most erudite authority on Greek erotic
literature, writes (34):
"It is characteristic of the Greek popular tales which
Euripides followed, in what might be called his
tragedies of adultery, that they _always make the woman
the vehicle of the pernicious passion_; it seems as if
Greek feeling could not conceive of a _man_ being
seized by an unmanly soft desire and urged on by it to
passionate disregard of all human conventions and
laws."
MASCULINE COYNESS
Greek poets from Stesichorus to the Alexandrians are fond of
representing coy men. The story told by Athenaeus (XIV., ch. 11) of
Harpalyke, who committed suicide because the youth Iphiclus coyly
spurned her, is typical of a large class. No less significant is the
circumstance that when the coy backwardness happens to be on the side
of a female, she is usually a woman of masculine habits, devoted to
Diana and the chase. Several centuries after Christ we still find in
the romances an echo of this thoroughly Greek sentiment in the coy
attitude, at the beginning, of their youthful heroes.[20]
The well-known legend of Sappho--who flourished about a thousand years
before the romances just referred to were written--is quite in the
Greek spirit. It is thus related by Strabo:
"There is a white rock which stretches out from Leucas
to the sea and toward Cephalonia, that takes its name
from its whiteness. The rock of Leucas has upon it a
temple of Apollo, and the leap from it was supposed to
stop love. From this it is said that Sappho first, as
Menander says somewhere, in pursuit of the haughty
Phaon, urged on by maddening desire, threw herself from
its far-seen rocks, imploring thee [Apollo], lord and
king."
Four centuries after Sappho we find Theocritus harping on the same
theme. His _Enchantress_ is a monologue in which a woman relates how
she made advances to a youth and won him. She saw him walking along
the road and was so smitten that she was prostrated and confined to
her bed for ten days. Then she sent her slave to waylay the youth,
with these instructions: "If you see him alone, say to him: 'Simaitha
desires you,' and bring him here." In this case the youth is not coy
in the least; but the sequel of the story is too bucolic to be told
here.
SHY BUT NOT COY
It is well-known that the respectable women of Greece, especially the
virgins, were practically kept under lock and key in the part of the
house known as the gynaikonitis. This resulted in making them shy and
bashful--but not coy, if we may judge from the mirror of life known as
literature. Ramdohr observes, pertinently (III., 270):
"Remarkable is the easy triumph of lovers over the
innocence of free-born girls, daughters of citizens,
examples of which may be found in the _Eunuchus_ and
_Adelphi_ of Terence. They call attention to the low
opinion the ancients had of a woman's power to guard
her sensual impulses, and of her own accord resist
attacks on her honor."
The Abbé Dubois says the same thing about Hindoo girls, and the reason
why they are so carefully guarded. It is hardly necessary to add that
since no one would be so foolish as to call a man honest who refrains
from stealing merely because he has no opportunity, it is equally
absurd to call a woman honest or coy who refrains from vice only
because she is locked up all the time. The fact (which seems to give
Westermarck (64-65) much satisfaction), that some Australians,
American Indian and other tribes watch young girls so carefully, does
not argue the prevalence of chaste coyness, but the contrary. If the
girls had an instinctive inclination to repel improper advances it
would not be necessary to cage and watch them. This inclination is not
inborn, does not characterize primitive women, but is a result of
education and culture.
MILITARISM AND MEDIAEVAL WOMEN
Greatly as Greeks and Indians differ in some respects, they have two
things in common--a warlike spirit and contempt for women. "When Greek
meets Greek then comes a tug of war," and the Indian's chief delight
is scalp hunting. The Greeks, as Rohde notes (42),
"depict their greatest heroes as incited to great deeds only
by eagerness for battle and desire for glory. The love of
women barely engages their attention transiently in hours of
idleness."
Militarism is ever hostile to love except in its grossest forms. It
brutalizes the men and prevents the growth of feminine qualities,
coyness among others. Hence, wherever militarism prevails, we seek in
vain for feminine reserve. An interesting illustration of this may be
found in a brochure by Theodor Krabbes, _Die Frau im Altfranzösischen
Karls-Epos_ (9-38). The author, basing his inferences on an exhaustive
study and comparison of the Chansons de Geste of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, draws the following general conclusions:
"Girlish shyness is not a trait of the daughters, least
of all those of heathen origin. Masculine tendencies
characterize them from childhood. Fighting pleases them
and they like to look on when there is a battle....
Love plays an important role in nearly all the Chansons
de Geste.... The woman wooes, the man grants: nearly
always in these epics we read of a woman who loves,
rarely of one who is loved.... In the very first hour
of their acquaintance the girl is apt to yield herself
entirely to the chosen knight, and she persists in her
passion for him even if she is entirely repulsed. There
is no more rest for her. Either she wooes him in
person, or chooses a messenger who invites the coveted
man to a rendezvous. The heathen woman who has to guard
captured Franks and who has given her heart to one of
them, hies herself to the dungeon and offers him her
love. She begs for his love in return and seeks in
every way to win it. If he resists, she curses him,
makes his lot less endurable, withholds his food or
threatens him with death until he is willing to accede
to her wishes. If this has come to pass she overwhelms
him with caresses at the first meeting. She is eager to
have them reciprocated; often the lover is not tender
enough to please her, then she repeatedly begs for
kisses. She embraces him delightedly even though he be
in full armor and in presence of all his companions.
Girlish shyness and modest backwardness are altogether
foreign to her nature.... She never has any moral
scruples.... If he is unwilling to give up his
campaign, she is satisfied to let him go the next
morning if he will only marry her.
"The man is generally described as cold in love.
References to a knight's desire for a woman's love are
very scant, and only once do we come across a hero who
is quite in love. The young knight prefers more serious
matters; his first desire is to win fame in battle,
make rich booty.[21] He looks on love as superfluous,
indeed he is convinced that it incapacitates him from
what he regards as his proper life-task. He also fears
the woman's infidelity. If he allows her to persuade
him to love, he seeks material gain from it; delivery
from captivity, property, vassals.... The lover is
often tardy, careless, too deficient in tenderness, so
that the woman has to chide him and invite his
caresses. A rendezvous is always brought about only
through her efforts, and she alone is annoyed if it is
disturbed too soon. Even when the man desires a woman,
he hardly appears as a wooer. He knows he is sure of
the women's favor; they make it easy for him; he can
have any number of them if he belongs to a noble
family.... Even when the knight is in love--which is
very rare--the first advances are nearly always made by
the woman; it is she who proposes marriage.
"Marriage as treated in the epics is seldom based on
love. The woman desires wedlock, because she hopes
thereby to secure her rights and better her chances of
protection. It is for this reason that we see her so
often eagerly endeavoring to secure a promise of
marriage."
WHAT MADE WOMEN COY?
Sufficient evidence has now been adduced to make it clear that the
first of the two questions posed at the outset of this chapter must be
answered in the negative. Coyness is _not_ an innate or universal
trait of femininity, but is often absent, particularly where man's
absorption in war and woman's need of protection prevent its growth
and induce the females to do the courting. This being the case and war
being the normal state of the lower races, our next task is to
ascertain what were the influences that induced woman to adopt the
habit of repelling advances instead of making them. It is one of the
most interesting questions in sexual psychology, which has never been
answered satisfactorily; it and gains additional interest from the
fact that we find among the most ancient and primitive races phenomena
which resemble coyness and have been habitually designated as such. As
we shall see in a moment, this is an abuse of language, confounding
genuine resistance or aversion with coyness.
Chinese maidens often feel so great an aversion to marriage as
practised in their country that they prefer suicide to it. Douglas
says (196) that Chinese women often ask English ladies, "Does your
husband beat you?" and are surprised if answered "No." The gallant
Chinaman calls his wife his "dull thorn," and there are plenty of
reasons apart from Confucian teachings why "for some days before the
date fixed, the bride assumes all the panoply of woe, and weeps and
wails without ceasing." She is about to face the terrible ordeal of
being confronted for the first time with the man who has been chosen
for her, and who may be the ugliest, vilest wretch in the
world--possibly even a leper, such cases being on record. Douglas
(124) reports the case of six girls who committed suicide together to
avoid marriage. There exist in China anti-matrimonial societies of
girls and young widows, the latter doubtless, supplying the experience
that serves as the motive for establishing such associations.
Descending to the lowest stratum of human life as witnessed in
Australia, we find that, as Meyer asserts (11), the bride appears
"generally to go very unwillingly" to the man she has been assigned
to. Lumholtz relates that the man seizes the woman by the wrists and
carries her off "despite her screams, which can be heard till she is a
mile away." "The women," he says, "always make resistance; for they do
not like to leave their tribe, and in many instances they have the
best of reasons for kicking their lovers." What are these reasons? As
all observers testify, they are not allowed any voice in the choice of
their husbands. They are usually bartered by their father or brothers
for other women, and in many if not most cases the husbands assigned
to them are several times their age. Before they are assigned to a
particular man the girls indulge in promiscuous intercourse, whereas
after marriage they are fiercely guarded. They may indeed attempt to
elope with another man more suited to their age, but they do so at the
risk of cruel injury and probable death. The wives have to do all the
drudgery; they get only such food as the husbands do not want, and on
the slightest suspicion of intrigue they are maltreated horribly.
Causes enough surely for their resistance to obligatory marriage. This
resistance is a frank expression of genuine unwillingness, or
aversion, and has nothing in common with real coyness, which signifies
the mere _semblance_ of unwillingness on the part of a woman who is at
least _half-willing_. Such expressions as Goldsmith's "the coy maid,
half willing to be pressed," and Dryden's
When the kind nymph would coyness feign,
And hides but to be found again,
indicate the nature of true coyness better than any definitions. There
are no "coy looks," no "feigning" in the actions of an Australian girl
about to be married to a man who is old enough to be her grandfather.
The "cold disdain" is real, not assumed, and there is no "dissemblance
of feminine affection."
CAPTURING WOMEN
The same reasoning applies to the customs attending wife-capturing in
general, which has prevailed in all parts of the world and still
prevails in some regions. To take one or two instances of a hundred
that might be cited from books of travel in all parts of the world:
Columbus relates that the Caribs made the capture of women the chief
object of their expeditions. The California Indians worked up their
warlike spirit by chanting a song the substance of which was, "let us
go and carry off girls" (Waitz, IV., 242). Savages everywhere have
looked upon women as legitimate spoils of war, desirable as concubines
and drudges. Now even primitive women are attached to their homes and
relatives, and it is needless to say their resistance to the enemy who
has just slain their father and brothers and is about to carry them
off to slavery, is genuine, and has no more trace of coyness in it
than the actions of an American girl who resists the efforts of
unknown kidnappers to drag her from her home.
But besides real capture of women there has existed, and still exists
in many countries, what is known as sham-capture--a custom which has
puzzled anthropologists sorely. Herbert Spencer illustrates it
(_P.S._, I., § 288) by citing Crantz, who says, concerning the
Eskimos, that when a damsel is asked in marriage, she
"directly falls into the greatest apparent
consternation, and runs out of doors tearing her hair;
for single women always affect the utmost bashfulness
and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they
should lose their reputation for modesty."
Spencer also quotes Burckhardt, who describes how the bride among
Sinai Arabs defends herself with stones, even though she does not
dislike the lover; "for according to custom, the more she struggles,
bites, kicks, cries, and strikes, the more she is applauded ever after
by her own companions." During the procession to the husband's camp
"decency obliges her to cry and sob most bitterly." Among the
Araucanians of Chili, according to Smith (215) "it is a point of honor
with the bride to resist and struggle, however willing she may be."
While conceding that "the manners of the inferior races do not imply
much coyness," Spencer, nevertheless, thinks "we cannot suppose
coyness to be wholly absent." He holds that in the cases just cited
coyness is responsible for the resistance of the women, and he goes so
far as to make this coyness "an important factor," in accounting for
the custom of marriage by capture which has prevailed among so many
peoples in all parts of the world. Westermarck declares (388) that
this suggestion can scarcely be disproved, and Grosse (105) echoes his
judgment. To me, on the contrary, it seems that these distinguished
sociologists are putting the cart before the horse. They make the
capture a sequence of "coyness," whereas in truth the coyness (if it
may be so called) is a result of capture. The custom of wife capture
can be easily explained without calling in the aid of what we have
seen to be so questionable a thing as primitive female coyness.
Savages capture wives as the most coveted spoils of war. They capture
them, in other instances, because polygamy and female infanticide have
disturbed the equilibrium of the sexes, thus compelling the young men
to seek wives elsewhere than in their own tribes; and the same result
is brought about (in Australia, for instance), by the old men's habit
of appropriating all the young women by a system of exchange, leaving
none for the young men, who, therefore, either have to persuade the
married women to elope--at the risk of their lives--or else are
compelled to steal wives elsewhere. In another very large number of
cases the men stole brides--willing or unwilling--to avoid paying
their parents for them.
THE COMEDY OF MOCK CAPTURE
Thus the custom of real capture is easily accounted for. What calls
for an explanation is the _sham_ capture and resistance in cases where
both the parents and the bride are perfectly willing. Why should
primitive maidens who, as we have seen, are rather apt than not to
make amorous advances, repel their suitors so violently in these
instances of mock capture? Are they, after all, coy--more coy than
civilized maidens? To answer this question let us look at one of
Spencer's witnesses more carefully. The reason Crantz gives for the
Eskimo women's show of aversion to marriage is that they do it, "lest
they lose their reputation for modesty." Now modesty of any kind is a
quality unknown to Eskimos. Nansen, Kane, Hayes, and other explorers
have testified that the Eskimos of both sexes take off all their
clothes in their warm subterranean homes. Captain Beechey has
described their obscene dances, and it is well-known that they
consider it a duty to lend their wives and daughters to guests. Some
of the native tales collected by Rink (236-37; 405) indicate most
unceremonious modes of courtship and nocturnal frolics, which do not
stop even at incest. To suppose that women so utterly devoid of moral
sensibility could, of their own accord and actuated by modesty and
bashfulness manifest such a coy aversion to marriage that force has to
be resorted to, is manifestly absurd. In attributing their antics to
modesty, Crantz made an error into which so many explorers have
fallen--that of interpreting the actions of savages from the point of
view of civilization--an error more pardonable in an unsophisticated
traveller of the eighteenth century than in a modern sociologist.
If we must therefore reject Herbert Spencer's inference as to the
existence of primitive coyness and its consequences, how are we to
account for the comedy of mock capture? Several writers have tried to
crack the nut. Sutherland (I., 200) holds that sham capture is not a
survival of real capture, but "the festive symbolism of the contrast
in the character of the sexes--courage in the man and shyness in the
woman"--a fantastic suggestion which does not call for discussion,
since, as we know, the normal primitive woman is anything but shy.
Abercromby (I., 454) is another writer who believes that sham capture
is not a survival of real capture, but merely a result of the innate
general desire on the part of the men to display courage--a view which
dodges the one thing that calls for an explanation--the resistance of
the women. Grosse indulges in some curious antics (105-108). First he
asks: "Since real capture is everywhere an exception and is looked on
as punishable, why should the semblance of capture have ever become a
general and approved custom?" Then he asks, with a sneer, why
sociology should be called upon to answer such questions anyhow; and a
moment later he, nevertheless, attempts an answer, on Spencerian
lines. Among inferior races, he remarks, women are usually coveted as
spoils of war. The captured women become the wives or concubines of
the warriors and thus represent, as it were, trophies of their valor.
Is it not, therefore, inevitable that the acquisition of a wife by
force should be looked on, among warlike races, as the most honorable
way of getting her, nay, in course of time, as the only one worthy of
a warrior? But since, he continues, not all the men can get wives in
that way, even among the rudest tribes, these other men consoled
themselves with investing the peaceful home-taking of a bride also
with the show of an honorable capture.
In other words, Grosse declares on one page that it is absurd to
derive approved sham capture from real capture because real capture is
everywhere exceptional only and is always considered punishable; yet
two pages later he argues that sham capture _is_ derived from real
capture because the latter is so honorable! As a matter of fact, among
the lowest races known, wife-stealing is not considered honorable.
Regarding the Australians, Curr states distinctly (I., 108) that it
was not encouraged because it was apt to involve a whole tribe in war
for one man's sake. Among the North American Indians, on the other
hand, where, as we saw in the chapter on Honorable Polygamy, a
wife-stealer is admired by both men and women, sham capture does _not_
prevail. Grosse's argument, therefore, falls to the ground.
WHY THE WOMEN RESIST
Prior to all these writers Sir John Lubbock advanced (98) still
another theory of capture, real and sham. Believing that men once had
all their wives in common, he declares that
"capture, and capture alone, could originally give a
man the right to monopolize a woman to the exclusion of
his fellow-clansmen; and that hence, even after all
necessity for actual capture had long ceased, the
symbol remained; capture having, by long habit, come to
be received as a necessary preliminary to marriage."
This theory has the same shortcoming as the others. While accounting
for the capture, it does not explain the resistance of the women. In
real capture they had real reasons for kicking, biting, and howling,
but why should they continue these antics in cases of sham capture?
Obviously another factor came into play here, which has been strangely
overlooked--parental persuasion or command. Among savages a father
owns his daughter as absolutely as his dog; he can sell or exchange
her at pleasure; in Australia, "swapping" daughters or sisters is the
commonest mode of marriage. Now, stealing brides, or eloping to avoid
having to pay for them, is of frequent occurrence everywhere among
uncivilized races. To protect themselves against such loss of personal
property it must have occurred to parents at an early date that it
would be wise to teach their daughters to resist all suitors until it
has become certain that their intentions are honorable--that is, that
they intend to pay. In course of time such teaching (strengthened by
the girls' pride at being purchased for a large sum) would assume the
form of an inviolable command, having the force of a taboo and, with
the stubbornness peculiar to many social customs, persisting long
after the original reasons have ceased to exist.
In other words, I believe that the peculiar antics of the brides in
cases of sham capture are neither due to innate feminine coyness nor
are they a direct survival of the genuine resistance made in real
capture; but that they are simply a result of parental dictation which
assigns to the bride the rôle she must play in the comedy of
"courtship." I find numerous facts supporting this view, especially in
Reinsberg-Düringsfeld's _Hochzeitsbuch_ and Schroeder's
_Hochzeitsgebräuche der Esten_.
Describing the marriage customs of the Mordvins, Mainow says that the
bridegroom sneaks into the bride's house before daybreak, seizes her
and carries her off to where his companions are waiting with their
wagons. "Etiquette," he adds, "_demands_ she should resist violently
and cry loudly, even if she is entirely in favor of the elopement."
Among the Votyaks girl-stealing (kukem) occurs to this day. If the
father is unwilling or asks too much, while the young folks are
willing, the girl goes to work in the field and the lover carries her
off. _On the way to his house she is cheerful, but when they reach the
lover's house she begins to cry and wail_, whereupon she is locked up
in a cabin that has no window. The father, having found out where she
is, comes and demands payment. If the lover offers too little, the
parent plies his whip on him. Among the Ostyaks such elopements, to
avoid payment, are frequent. Regarding the Esthonians, Schroeder says
(40): "When the intermediary comes, the girl _must_ conceal herself in
some place until she is either found, _with her father's consent_,
or appears of her own accord."
In the old epic "Kalewipoeg," Salme hides in the garret and Linda in
the bath-room, and refuse to come out till after much coaxing and
urging.
QUAINT CUSTOMS
The words I have italicized indicate the passive rôle played by the
girls, who simply carry out the instructions given to them. The
parents are the stage-managers, and they know very well what they
want--money or brandy. Among the Mordvins, as soon as the suitor and
his friends are seen approaching the bride's house, it is barricaded,
and the defenders ask, "Who are you?" The answer is, "Merchants."
"What do you wish?" "Living goods." "We do not trade!" "We shall take
her by force." A show of force is made, but finally the suitors are
admitted, after paying twenty kopeks. In Little Russia it is customary
to barricade the door of the bride's house with a wheel, but after
offering a bottle of brandy as a "pass" the suitor's party is allowed
to enter.
Among the Esthonians custom _demands_ (Schroeder, 36), that a comedy
like the following be enacted. The intermediary comes to the bride's
house and pretends that he has lost a cow or a lamb, and asks
permission to hunt for it. The girl's relatives at first stubbornly
deny having any knowledge of its whereabouts, but finally they allow
the suitors to search, and the bride is usually found without much
delay. In Western Prussia (Berent district), after the bridegroom has
made his terms with the bride and her parents, he comes to their house
and says: "We were out hunting and saw a wounded deer run into this
house. May we follow its tracks?" Permission is granted, whereupon the
men start in pursuit of the bride, who has hidden away with the other
village maidens. At last the "hound"--one of the bridegroom's
companions--finds her and brings her to the lover.
Similar customs have prevailed in parts of Russia, Roumania, Servia,
Sardinia, Hungary, and elsewhere. In Old Finland the comedy continues
even after the nuptial knot has been tied. The bridal couple return
each to their home. Soon the groom appears at the bride's house and
demands to be admitted. Her father refuses to let him in. A "pass" is
thereupon produced and read, and this, combined with a few presents,
finally secures admission. In some districts the bride remains
invisible even during the wedding-dinner, and it is "good form" for
her to let the guests wait as long as possible, and not to appear
until after considerable coaxing by her mother. When a Votyak
bridegroom comes after the bride on the wedding-day she is denied to
him three times. After that she is searched for, dragged from her
hiding-place, and her face covered with a cloth, while she screams and
struggles. Then she is carried to the yard, placed on a blanket with
her face down, and the bridegroom belabors her with a stick on a
pillow which has been tied on her back. After that she becomes
obedient and amiable. A Mordvin bride must try to escape from the
wagon on the way to the church. In Old Finland the bride was
barricaded in her house even after the wedding, and the Island Swedes
have the same custom. This burlesque of bridal resistance after
marriage occurs also among the wild tribes of India. "After remaining
with her husband for ten days only," writes Dalton (192), "it is _the
correct thing_ for the wife to run away from him, and tell all her
friends that she loves him not and will see him no more." The
husband's duty is to seek her eagerly.
"I have seen a young wife thus found and claimed, and borne
away, screeching and struggling in the arms of her husband,
from the midst of a crowded bazaar. No one interferes on
these occasions."
More than enough has now been said to prove that in cases of sham
capture the girls simply follow their village customs blindly. Left to
themselves they might act very differently, but as it is, all the
girls in each district _must_ do the same thing, however silly. About
the real feelings of the girls these comedies tell us nothing
whatever. With coyness--that is, a woman's concealment of her feelings
toward a man she likes--these actions have no more to do than the man
in the moon has with anthropology. Least of all do they tell us
anything about love, for the girls must all act alike, whether they
favor a man or not. Regarding the absence of love we have, moreover,
the direct testimony of Dr. F. Kreutzwald (Schroeder, 233). That
marriages are made in heaven is, he declares, true in a certain sense,
so far as the Esthonians are concerned; for "the parties concerned
usually play a passive rôle.... Love is not one of the requisites, it
is an unknown phenomenon." Utilitarianism, he adds, is the basis of
their marriages. The suitor tries to ascertain if the girl he wants is
a good worker; to find this out he may even watch her secretly while
she is spinning, thrashing, or combing flax.
"Most of the men proceed at random, and it is not unusual
for a suitor who has been refused in one place and another
to proceed at once to a third or fourth.... Many a
bridegroom sees his bride for the first time at the ceremony
of the priestly betrothal, and he cannot therefore be blamed
for asking: 'Which of these girls is my bride?'"
GREEK AND ROMAN MERCENARY COYNESS
So far our search for that coyness which is an ingredient of modern
love has been in vain. At the same time it is obvious that since
coyness is widely prevalent at the present day it must have been in
the past of use to women, else it would not have survived and
increased. The question is: how far down in the scale of civilization
do we find traces of it? The literature of the ancient Greeks
indicates that, in a certain phase and among certain classes, it was
known to them. True, the respectable women, being always locked up and
having no choice in the selecting of their partners, had no occasion
for the exercise of any sort of coyness. But the hetairai appear to
have understood the advantages of assumed disdain or indifference in
making a coveted man more eager in his wooing. In the fifteenth of
Lucian's [Greek: Etairikoi dialogoi] we read about a wanton who locked
her door to her lover because he had refused to pay her two talents
for the privilege of exclusive possession. In other cases, the poets
still feel called upon to teach these women how to make men submissive
by withholding caresses from them. Thus in Lucian, Pythias exclaims:
"To tell the truth, dear Joessa, you yourself spoiled
him with your excessive love, which you even allowed
him to notice. You should not have made so much of him:
men, when they discover that, easily become
overweening. Do not weep, poor girl! Follow my advice
and keep your door locked once or twice when he tries
to see you again. You will find that that will make him
flame up again and become frantic with love and
jealousy."
In the third book of his treatise on the Art of Love, Ovid advises
women (of the same class) how to win men. He says, in substance:
"Do not answer his letters too soon; all delay inflames
the lover, provided it does not last too long.... What
is too readily granted does not long retain love. Mix
with the pleasure you give mortifying refusals, make
him wait in your doorway; let him bewail the 'cruel
door;' let him beg humbly, or else get angry and
threaten. Sweet things cloy, tonics are bitter."
MODESTY AND COYNESS
Feigned unwillingness or indifference in obedience to such advice may
perhaps be called coyness, but it is only a coarse primitive phase of
that attitude, based on sordid, mercenary motives, whereas true modern
coyness consists in an impulse, grounded in modesty, to conceal
affection. The germs of Greek venal coyness for filthy lucre may be
found as low down as among the Papuan women who, as Bastian notes
(Ploss, I., 460) exact payment in shell-money for their caresses. Of
the Tongans, highest of all Polynesians, Mariner says (Martin, II.,
174):
"It must not be supposed that these women are always
easily won; the greatest attentions and fervent
solicitations are sometimes requisite, even though
there be no other lover in the way. This happens
sometimes from a spirit of coquetry, at other times
from a dislike to the party, etc."
Now coquetry is a cousin of coyness, but in whatever way this Tongan
coquetry may manifest itself (no details are given) it certainly lacks
the regard for modesty and chastity which is essential to modern
coyness; for, as the writer just referred to attests, Tongan girls are
permitted to indulge in free intercourse before marriage, the only
thing liable to censure being a too frequent change of lovers.
That the anxious regard for chastity, modesty, decorum, which cannot
be present in the coquetry of these Tongan women, is one of the
essential ingredients of modern coyness has long been felt by the
poets. After Juliet has made her confession of love which Romeo
overhears in the dark, she apologizes to him because she fears that he
might attribute her easy yielding to light love. Lest he think her too
quickly won she "would have frowned and been perverse, and said him
nay." Then she begs him trust she'll "_prove more true_ than those
that have more cunning to be strange." Wither's "That coy one in the
winning, _proves a true one_ being won," expresses the same sentiment.
UTILITY OF COYNESS
Man's esteem for virtues which he does not always practise himself, is
thus responsible, in part at least, for the existence of modern
coyness. Other factors, however, aided its growth, among them man's
fickleness. If a girl did not say nay (when she would rather say yes),
and hold back, hesitate, and delay, the suitor would in many cases
suck the honey from her lips and flit away to another flower.
Cumulative experience of man's sensual selfishness has taught her to
be slow in yielding to his advances. Experience has also taught women
that men are apt to value favors in proportion to the difficulty of
winning them, and the wisest of them have profited by the lesson.
Callimachus wrote, two hundred and fifty years before Christ, that his
love was "versed in pursuing what flies (from it), but flits past what
lies in its mid path"--a conceit which the poets have since echoed a
thousand times. Another very important thing that experience taught
women was that by deferring or withholding their caresses and smiles
they could make the tyrant man humble, generous, and gallant. Girls
who do not throw themselves away on the first man who happens along,
also have an advantage over others who are less fastidious and coy,
and by transmitting their disposition to their daughters they give it
greater vogue. Female coyness prevents too hasty marriages, and the
girls who lack it often live to repent their shortcomings at leisure.
Coyness prolongs the period of courtship and, by keeping the suitor in
suspense and doubt, it develops the imaginative, sentimental side of
love.
HOW WOMEN PROPOSE
Sufficient reasons, these, why coyness should have gradually become a
general attribute of femininity. Nevertheless, it is an artificial
product of imperfect social conditions, and in an ideal world women
would not be called upon to romance about their feelings. As a mark of
modesty, coyness will always have a charm for men, and a woman devoid
of it will never inspire genuine love. But what I have elsewhere
called "spring-chicken coyness"--the disposition of European girls to
hide shyly behind their mammas--as chickens do under a hen at the
sight of a hawk--is losing its charm in face of the frank
confidingness of American girls in the presence of gentlemen; and as
for that phase of coyness which consists in concealing affection for a
man, girls usually manage to circumvent it in a more or less refined
manner. Some girls who are coarse, or have little control of their
feelings, propose bluntly to the men they want. I myself have known
several such cases, but the man always refused. Others have a thousand
subtle ways of betraying themselves without actually "giving
themselves away." A very amusing story of how an ingenious maiden
tries to bring a young man to bay has been told by Anthony Hope.
Dowden calls attention to the fact that it is Juliet "who proposes and
urges on the sudden marriage." Romeo has only spoken of love; it is
she who asks him, if his purpose be marriage, to send her word next
day. In _Troilus and Cressida_ (III., 2), the heroine exclaims:
But, though I loved you well, I woo'd you not;
And yet, good faith, I wished myself a man,
Or that we women had men's privilege
Of speaking first.
In his _Old Virginia_ (II., 127) John Fiske tells a funny story of how
Parson Camm was wooed. A young friend of his, who had been courting
Miss Betsy Hansford of his parish, asked him to assist him with his
eloquence. The parson did so by citing to the girl texts from the
Bible enjoining matrimony as a duty. But she beat him at his own game,
telling him to take his Bible when he got home and look at 2 Sam. xii.
7, which would explain her obduracy. He did so, and found this: "And
Nathan said to David, _thou art the man._" The parson took the
hint--and the girl.
V. HOPE AND DESPAIR--MIXED MOODS
_She never told her love_;
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought;
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat, like Patience on a monument,
_Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed_?
asks Viola in _As You Like It_. It _was_ love indeed; but only two
phases of it are indicated in the lines quoted--coyness ("She never
told her love") and the mixture of emotions ("smiling at grief"),
which is another characteristic of love. Romantic love is a pendulum
swinging perpetually between hope and despair. A single unkind word or
sign of indifference may make a lover feel the agony of death, while a
smile may raise him from the abyss of despair to heavenly heights of
bliss. As Goethe puts it:
Himmelhoch jauchzend
Zum Tode betrübt,
Glücklich allein
Ist die Seele die liebt.
AMOROUS ANTITHESES
When a Marguerite plucks the petals of a marguerite, muttering "he
loves me--he loves me not," her heart flutters in momentary anguish
with every "not," till the next petal soothes it again.
I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe;
Under love's heavy burden do I sink,
wails Romeo; and again:
Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O anything, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
* * * * *
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears;
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
In commenting on Romeo, who in his love for Rosaline indulges in
emotion for emotion's sake, and "stimulates his fancy with the
sought-out phrases, the curious antitheses of the amorous dialect of
the period," Dowden writes:
"Mrs. Jameson has noticed that in _All's Well that Ends
Well_ (I., 180-89), Helena mockingly reproduces this style
of amorous antithesis. Helena, who lives so effectively in
the world of fact, is contemptuous toward all unreality and
affectation."
Now, it is quite true that expressions like "cold fire" and "sick
health" sound unreal and affected to sober minds, and it is also true
that many poets have exercised their emulous ingenuity in inventing
such antitheses just for the fun of the thing and because it has been
the fashion to do so. Nevertheless, with all their artificiality, they
were hinting at an emotional phenomenon which actually exists.
Romantic love is in reality a state of mind in which cold and heat may
and do alternate so rapidly that "cold fire" seems the only proper
expression to apply to such a mixed feeling. It is literally true
that, as Bailey sang, "the sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love;"
literally true that "the sweets of love are washed with tears," as
Carew wrote, or, as H.K. White expressed it, "'Tis painful, though
'tis sweet to love." A man who has actually experienced the feeling of
uncertain love sees nothing unreal or affected in Tennyson's
The cruel madness of love
The honey of poisoned flowers,
or in Drayton's
'Tis nothing to be plagued in hell
But thus in heaven tormented,
or in Dryden's
I feed a flame within, which so torments me
That it both pains my heart, and yet enchants me:
'Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it,
That I had rather die than once remove it,
or in Juliet's
Good-night! good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.
This mysterious mixture of moods, constantly maintained through the
alternations of hope and doubt, elation and despair,
And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,
An undistinguishable throng
as Coleridge puts it; or
Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet,
In all their equipages meet;
Where pleasures mixed with pains appear,
Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear
as Swift rhymes it, is thus seen to be one of the essential and most
characteristic ingredients of modern romantic love.
COURTSHIP AND IMAGINATION
Here, again, the question confronts us, How far down among the strata
of human life can we find traces of this ingredient of love? Do we
find it among the Eskimos, for instance? Nansen relates (II., 317),
that
"In the old Greenland days marriage was a simple and
speedy affair. If a man took a fancy to a girl, he
merely went to her home or tent, caught her by the hair
or anything else which offered a hold, and dragged her
off to his dwelling without further ado."
Nay, in some cases, even this unceremonious "courtship" was
perpetrated by proxy! The details regarding the marriage customs of
lower races already cited in this volume, with the hundreds more to be
given in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader that
primitive courtship--where there is any at all--is habitually a
"simple and speedy affair"--not always as simple and speedy as with
Nansen's Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and play
of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains. Fancy the
difference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I.,
161), "thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of
corn," and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the inferno
because a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him so
happy that he would not change places with a king, unless his beloved
were to be queen. Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguish
and rapture, because they have no imagination. It is only when the
imagination comes into play that we can look for the joys and sorrows,
the hopes and fears, that help to make up the sum and substance of
romantic love.
EFFECTS OF SENSUAL LOVE
At the same time it would be a great mistake to assume that the
manifestation of mixed moods proves the presence of romantic love.
After all, the alternation of hope and despair which produces those
bitter-sweet paradoxes of the varying and mixed emotions, is one of
the _selfish_ aspects of passion: the lover fears or hopes for
_himself_, not for the other. There is, therefore, no reason why we
should not read of troubled or ecstatic lovers in the poems of the
ancient writers, who, while knowing love only as selfish lust,
nevertheless had sufficient imagination to suffer the agonies of
thwarted purpose and the delights of realized hopes. As a boat-load of
shipwrecked sailors, hungry and thirsty, may be switched from deadly
despair to frantic joy by the approach of a rescuing vessel, so may a
man change his moods who is swayed by what is, next to hunger and
thirst, the most powerful and imperious of all appetites. We must not,
therefore, make the reckless assumption that the Greek and Sanscrit
writers must have known romantic love, because they describe men and
women as being prostrated or elated by strong passion. When Euripides
speaks of love as being both delectable and painful; when Sappho and
Theocritus note the pallor, the loss of sleep, the fears and tears of
lovers; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim, at sight of
Leucippe: "I was overwhelmed by conflicting feelings: admiration,
astonishment, agitation, shame, assurance;" when King Pururavas, in
the Hindoo drama, _Urvasi_ is tormented by doubts as to whether his
love is reciprocated by the celestial Bayadère (apsara); when, in
_Malati_, a love-glance is said to be "anointed with nectar and
poison;" when the arrows of the Hindoo gods of love are called hard,
though made of flowers; burning, though not in contact with the skin;
voluptuous, though piercing--when we come across such symptoms and
fancies we have no right as yet to infer the existence of romantic
love; for all these things also characterize sensual passion, which is
love only in the sense of _self_-love, whereas, romantic love is
affection for _another_--a distinction which will be made more and
more manifest as we proceed in our discussion of the ingredients of
love, especially the last seven, which are altruistic. It is only when
we find these altruistic ingredients associated with the hopes and
fears and mixed moods that we can speak of romantic love. The symptoms
referred to in this paragraph tell us about selfish longings, selfish
pleasures and selfish pains, but nothing whatever about affection for
the person who is so eagerly coveted.
VI. HYPERBOLE
As long as love was supposed to be an uncompounded emotion and no
distinction was made between appetite and sentiment--that is between
the selfish desire of eroticism and the self-sacrificing ardor of
altruistic affection--it was natural enough that the opinion should
have prevailed that love has been always and everywhere the same,
inasmuch as several of the traits which characterize the modern
passion--stubborn preference for an individual, a desire for exclusive
possession, jealousy toward rivals, coy resistance and the resulting
mixed moods of doubt and hope--were apparently in existence in earlier
and lower stages of human development. We have now seen, however, that
these indications are deceptive, for the reason that lust as well as
love can be fastidious in choice, insistent on a monopoly, and jealous
of rivals; that coyness may spring from purely mercenary motives, and
that the mixed moods of hope and despair may disquiet or delight men
and women who know love only as a carnal appetite. We now take up our
sixth ingredient--Hyperbole--which has done more than any other to
confuse the minds of scholars as regards the antiquity of romantic
love, for the reason that it presents the passion of the ancients in
its most poetic and romantic aspects.
GIRLS AND FLOWERS
Amorous hyperbole may be defined as obvious exaggeration in praising
the charms of a beloved girl or youth; Shakspere speaks of
"exclamations hyperbolical ... praises sauced with lies." Such
"praises sauced with lies" abound in the verse and prose of Greek and
Roman as well as Sanscrit and other Oriental writers, and they assume
as diverse forms as in modern erotic literature. The commonest is that
in which a girl's complexion is compared to lilies and roses. The
Cyclops in Theocritus tells Galatea she is "whiter than milk ...
brighter than a bunch of hard grapes." The mistress of Propertius has
a complexion white as lilies; her cheeks remind him of "rose leaves
swimming on milk."
Lilia non domina sunt magis alba mea;
Ut Moeotica nix minio si certet Eboro,
Utque rosae puro lacte natant folia.
(II., 2.)
Achilles Tatius wrote that the beauty of Leucippe's countenance
"might vie with the flowers of the meadow; the narcissus was
resplendent in her general complexion, the rose blushed upon
her cheek, the dark hue of the violet sparkled in her eyes,
her ringlets curled more closely than do the clusters of the
ivy--her face, therefore, was a reflex of the meadows."
The Persian Hafiz declares that "the rose lost its color at sight of
her cheeks and the jasmines silver bud turned pale." A beauty in the
_Arabian Nights_, however, turns the tables on the flowers. "Who dares
to liken me to a rose?" she exclaims.
"Who is not ashamed to declare that my bosom is as lovely as
the fruit of the pomegranate-tree? By my beauty and grace!
by my eyes and black hair, I swear that any man who repeats
such comparison shall be banished from my presence and
killed by the separation; for if he finds my figure in the
ban-tree and my cheeks in the rose, what then does he seek
in me?"
This girl spoke more profoundly than she knew. Flowers are beautiful
things, but a spot red as a rose on a cheek would suggest the hectic
flush of fever, and if a girl's complexion were as white as a lily she
would be shunned as a leper. In hyperbole the step between the sublime
and the ridiculous is often a very short one; yet the rose and lily
simile is perpetrated by erotic poets to this day.
EYES AND STARS
The eyes are subjected to similar treatment, as in Lodge's lines
Her eyes are sapphires set in snow
Resembling heaven by every wink.
Thomas Hood's Ruth had eyes whose "long lashes veiled a light that had
else been all too bright." Heine saw in the blue eyes of his beloved
the gates of heaven. Shakspere and Fletcher have:
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn!
When Romeo exclaims:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
... her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night,
he excels, both in fancy and in exaggeration, all the ancient poets;
but it was they who began the practice of likening eyes to bright
lights. Ovid declares (_Met._, I., 499) that Daphne's eyes shone with
a fire like that of the stars, and this has been a favorite comparison
at all times. Tibullus assures us (IV., 2) that "when Cupid wishes to
inflame the gods, he lights his torches at Sulpicia's eyes." In the
Hindoo drama _Malati and Madhava_, the writer commits the extravagance
of making Madhava declare that the white of his mistresses eyes
suffuses him as with a bath of milk!
Theocritus, Tibullus ("candor erat, qualem praefert Latonia Luna"),
Hafiz, and other Greek, Roman, and Oriental poets are fond of
comparing a girl's face or skin to the splendors of the moon, and even
the sun is none too bright to suggest her complexion. In the _Arabian
Nights_ we read: "If I look upon the heaven methinks I see the sun
fallen down to shine below, and thee whom I desire to shine in his
place." A girl may, indeed, be superior to sun and moon, as we see in
the same book: "The moon has only a few of her charms; the sun tried
to vie with her but failed. Where has the sun hips like those of the
queen of my heart?" An unanswerable argument, surely!
LOCKS AND FRAGRANCE
When William Allingham wrote: "Her hair's the brag of Ireland, so
weighty and so fine," he followed in the wake of a hundred poets, who
had made a girl's tresses the object of amorous hyperbole. Dianeme's
"rich hair which wantons with the love-sick air" is a pretty conceit.
The fanciful notion that a beautiful woman imparts her sweetness to
the air, especially with the fragrance of her hair, occurs frequently
in the poems of Hafiz and other Orientals. In one of these the poet
chides the zephyr for having stolen its sweetness while playing with
the beloved's loose tresses. In another, a youth declares that if he
should die and the fragrance of his beloved's locks were wafted over
his grave, it would bring him back to life. Ben Jonson's famous lines
to Celia:
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honoring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be;
But thou thereon did'st only breathe
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee!
are a free imitation of passages in the Love Letters (Nos. 30 and 31)
of the Greek Philostratus: "Send me back some of the roses on which
you slept. Their natural fragrance will have been increased by that
which you imparted to them." This is a great improvement on the
Persian poets who go into raptures over the fragrant locks of fair
women, not for their inherent sweetness, however, but for the
artificial perfumes used by them, including the disgusting musk! "Is a
caravan laden with musk returning from Khoten?" sings one of these
bards in describing the approach of his mistress.
POETIC DESIRE FOR CONTACT
Besides such direct comparisons of feminine charms to flowers, to sun
and moon and other beautiful objects of nature, amorous hyperbole has
several other ways of expressing itself. The lover longs to be some
article of dress that he might touch the beloved, or a bird that he
might fly to her, or he fancies that all nature is love-sick in
sympathy with him. Romeo's
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!
is varied in Heine's poem, where the lover wishes he were a stool for
her feet to rest on, a cushion for her to stick pins in, or a
curl-paper that he might whisper his secrets into her ears; and in
Tennyson's dainty lines:
It is the miller's daughter,
And she is grown so dear, so dear,
That I would be the jewel
That trembles at her ear;
For hid in ringlets day and night
I'd touch her neck so warm and white.
And I would be the girdle
About her dainty, dainty waist,
And her heart would beat against me
In sorrow and in rest;
And I should know if it beat right,
I'd clasp it round so close and tight.
And I would be the necklace,
And all day long to fall and rise
Upon her balmy bosom
With her laughter or her sighs,
And I would be so light, so light,
I scarce should be unclasped at night.
Herein, too, our modern poets were anticipated by the ancients.
Anacreon wishes he were a mirror that he might reflect the image of
his beloved; or the gown she wears every day; or the water that laves
her limbs; or the balm that anoints her body; or the pearl that adorns
her neck; or the cloth that covers her breast; or the shoes that are
trodden by her feet.
The author of an anonymous poem in the Greek _Anthology_ wishes he
were a breath of air that he might be received in the bosom of his
beloved; or a rose to be picked by her hand and fastened on her bosom.
Others wish they were the water in the fountain from which a girl
drinks, or a dolphin to carry her on its back, or the ring she wears.
After the Hindoo Sakuntala has lost her ring in the river the poet
expresses surprise that the ring should have been able to separate
itself from that hand. The Cyclops of Theocritus wishes he had been
born with the gills of a fish so that he might dive into the sea to
visit the nymph Galatea and kiss her hands should her mouth be
refused. One of the goatherds of the same bucolic poet wishes he were
a bee that he might fly to the grotto of Amaryllis. From such fancies
it is but a short step to the "were I a swallow, to her I would fly"
of Heine and other modern poets.
NATURE'S SYMPATHY WITH LOVERS
In the ecstasy of his feeling Rosalind's lover wants to have her name
carved on every tree in the forest; but usually the lover assumes that
all things in the forests, plants or animals, sympathize with him even
without having his beloved's name thrust upon them.
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, 't is with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
"Why are the roses so pale?" asks Heine.
"Why are the violets so dumb in the green grass? Why does
the lark's song seem so sad, and why have the flowers lost
their fragrance? Why does the sun look down upon the meadows
so cold and morose, and why is the earth so gray and
desolate? Why am I ill and melancholy, and why, my love, did
you leave me?"
In another poem Heine declares:
"If the flowers knew how deeply my heart is wounded,
they would weep with me. If the nightingales knew how
sad I am, they would cheer me with their refreshing
song. If the golden stars knew my grief, they would
come down from their heights to whisper consolation to
me."
This phase of amorous hyperbole also was known to the ancient poets.
Theocritus (VII., 74) relates that Daphnis was bewailed by the oaks
that stood on the banks of the river, and Ovid (151) tells us, in
Sappho's epistle to Phaon, that the leafless branches sighed over her
hopeless love and the birds stopped their sweet song. Musaeus felt
that the waters of the Hellespont were still lamenting the fate which
overtook Leander as he swam toward the tower of Hero.
ROMANTIC BUT NOT LOVING
If a romantic love-poem were necessarily a poem of romantic love, the
specimens of amorous hyperbole cited in the preceding pages would
indicate that the ancients knew love as we know it. In reality,
however, there is not, in all the examples cited, the slightest
evidence of genuine love. A passion which is merely sensual may
inspire a gifted poet to the most extravagantly fanciful expressions
of covetous admiration, and in all the cases cited there is nothing
beyond such sensual admiration. An African Harari compares the girl he
likes to "sweet milk fresh from the cow," and considers that coarse
remark a compliment because he knows love only as an appetite. A gypsy
poet compares the shoulders of his beloved to "wheat bread," and a
Turkish poem eulogizes a girl for being like "bread fried in butter."
(Ploss, L, 85, 89.)
The ancient poets had too much taste to reveal their amorous desires
quite so bluntly as an appetite, yet they, too, never went beyond the
confines of self-indulgence. When Propertius says a girl's cheeks are
like roses floating on milk; when Tibullus declares another girl's
eyes are bright enough to light a torch by; when Achilles Tatius makes
his lover exclaim: "Surely you must carry about a bee on your lips,
they are full of honey, your kisses wound"--what is all this except a
revelation that the poet thinks the girl pretty, that her beauty
_gives him pleasure_, and that he tries to express that pleasure by
comparing her to some other object--sun, moon, honey, flowers--that
pleases his senses? Nowhere is there the slightest indication that he
is eager to _give her pleasure_, much less that he would be willing to
sacrifice his own pleasures for her, as a mother, for instance, would
for a child. His hyperboles, in a word, tell us not of love for
another but of a self-love in which the other figures only as a means
to an end, that end being his own gratification.
When Anacreon wishes he were the gown worn by a girl, or the water
that laves her limbs, or the string of pearls around her neck, he does
not indicate the least desire to make _her_ happy, but an eagerness to
please _himself_ by coming in contact with her. The daintiest poetic
conceit cannot conceal this blunt fact. Even the most fanciful of all
forms of amorous hyperbole--that in which the lover imagines that all
nature smiles or weeps with him--what is it but the most colossal
egotism conceivable?
The amorous hyperbole of the ancients is romantic in the sense of
fanciful, fictitious, extravagant, but not in the sense in which I
oppose romantic love to selfish sensual infatuation. There is no
intimation in it of those things that differentiate love from
lust--the mental and moral charms of the women, or the adoration,
sympathy, and affection, of the men. When one of Goethe's characters
says: "My life began at the moment I fell in love with you;" or when
one of Lessing's characters exclaims: "To live apart from her is
inconceivable to me, would be my death"--we still hear the note of
selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the
result of a change in the way of regarding women. Where women are
looked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbole
cannot be sincere; it is either nothing but "spruce affectation" or
else an illustration of the power of sensual love. No ancient author
could have written what Emerson wrote in his essay on Love, of the
visitations of a power which
"made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the
morning and the night varied enchantments; when a
single tone of one voice could make the heart bound,
and the most trivial circumstance associated with one
form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all
eye when one was present, and all memory when one was
gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and
studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of
a carriage.... When the head boiled all night on the
pillow with the generous deed it resolved on.... When
all business seemed an impertinence, and all men and
women running to and fro in the streets, mere
pictures."
THE POWER OF LOVE
In the essay "On the Power of Love," to which I have referred in
another place, Lichtenberg bluntly declared he did not believe that
sentimental love could make a sensible adult person so extravagantly
happy or unhappy as the poets would have us think, whereas he was
ready to concede that the sexual appetite may become irresistible.
Schopenhauer, on the contrary, held that sentimental love is the more
powerful of the two passions. However this may be, either is strong
enough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole in
literature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, "speaking in a
perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love." "The major part
of lovers," writes Robert Burton,
"are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason
counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace,
danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow;
yet this furious lust precipitates, counterpoiseth, weighs
down on the other."
Professor Bain, discussing all the human emotions in a volume of 600
pages, declares, regarding love (138), that
"the excitement at its highest pitch, in the torrent of
youthful sensations and ungratified desires is probably
the most furious and elated experience of human
nature."
In whatever sense we take this, as referring to sensual or sentimental
love, or a combination of the two, it explains why erotic writers of
all times make such lavish use of superlatives and exaggerations.
Their strong feelings can only be expressed in strong language.
"Beauty inflicts a wound sharper than any arrow," quoth Achilles
Tatius. Meleager declares: "Even the winged Eros in the air became
your prisoner, sweet Timarion, because your eye drew him down;" and in
another place: "the cup is filled with joy because it is allowed to
touch the beautiful lips of Zenophila. Would that she drank my soul in
one draught, pressing firmly her lips on mine" (a passage which
Tennyson imitated in "he once drew with one long kiss my whole soul
through my lips"). "Not stone only, but steel would be melted by
Eros," cried Antipater of Sidon. Burton tells of a cold bath that
suddenly smoked and was very hot when Coelia came into it; and an
anonymous modern poet cries:
Look yonder, where
She washes in the lake!
See while she swims,
The water from her purer limbs
New clearness take!
The Persian poet, Saadi, tells the story of a young enamoured Dervish
who knew the whole Koran by heart, but forgot his very alphabet in
presence of the princess. She tried to encourage him, but he only
found tongue to say, "It is strange that with thee present I should
have speech left me;" and having said that he uttered a loud groan and
surrendered his soul up to God.
To lovers nothing seems impossible. They "vow to weep seas, live in
fire, eat rocks, tame tigers," as Troilus knew. Mephistopheles
exclaims:
So ein verliebter Thor verpufft
Euch Sonne, Mond und alle Sterne
Zum Zeitvertreib dem Liebchen in die Luft.
(Your foolish lover squanders sun and moon and all the stars to
entertain his darling for an hour.) Romantic hyperbole is the realism
of love. The lover is blind as to the beloved's faults, and
color-blind as to her merits, seeing them differently from normal
persons and all in a rosy hue. She really seems to him superior to
every one in the world, and he would be ready any moment to join the
ranks of the mediaeval knights who translated amorous hyperbole into
action, challenging every knight to battle unless he acknowledged the
superior beauty of his lady. A great romancer is the lover; he
retouches the negative of his beloved, in his imagination, removes
freckles, moulds the nose, rounds the cheeks, refines the lips, and
adds lustre to the eyes until his ideal is realized and he sees
Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
... For to be wise and love
Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above.
VII. PRIDE
I dare not ask a kiss,
I dare not beg a smile,
Lest having that or this
I might grow proud the while.
--_Herrick_.
Let fools great Cupid's yoke disdain,
Loving their own wild freedom better,
Whilst proud of my triumphant chain
I sit, and court my beauteous fetter.
--_Beaumont_.
COMIC SIDE OF LOVE
"There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the
lover doth of the person beloved," said Bacon; "and therefore it is
well said that it is impossible to love and be wise."
Like everything else in this world, love has its comic side. Nothing
could be more amusing, surely, than the pride some men and women
exhibit at having secured for life a mate whom most persons would not
care to own a day. The idealizing process just described is
responsible for this comedy; and a very useful thing it is, too; for
did not the lover's fancy magnify the merits and minify the faults of
the beloved, the number of marriages would not be so large as it is.
Pride is a great match-maker. "It was a proud night with me," wrote
Walter Scott,
"when I first found that a pretty young woman could think it
worth her while to sit and talk with me hour after hour in a
corner of the ball-room, while all the world were capering
in our view."
Such an experience was enough to attune the heart-strings to
love. The youth felt flattered, and flattery is the food of love.
A MYSTERY EXPLAINED
Pride explains some of the greatest mysteries of love. "How _could_
that woman have married such a manikin?" is a question one often
hears. Money, rank, opportunity, lack of taste, account for much, but
in many instances it was pride that first opened the heart to love;
that is, pride was the first of the ingredients of love to capitulate,
and the others followed suit. Probably that manikin was the first
masculine being who ever showed her any attentions. "He appreciates
me!" she mused. "I admire his taste--he is not like other men--I like
him--I love him."
The compliment of a proposal touches a girl's pride and may prove the
entering-wedge of love; hence the proverbial folly of accepting a
girl's first refusal as final. And if she accepts, the thought that
she, the most perfect being in the world, prefers him above all men,
inflates his pride to the point of exultation; thenceforth he can talk
and think only in "three pil'd hyperboles." He wants all the world to
know how he has been distinguished. In a Japanese poem translated by
Lafcadio Hearn (_G.B.F._, 38) a lover exclaims:
I cannot hide in my heart the happy knowledge that fills it;
Asking each not to tell, I spread the news all round.
IMPORTANCE OF PRIDE
To realize fully how important an ingredient in love pride is, we need
only consider the effect of a refusal. Of all the pangs that make up
its agony none is keener than that of wounded pride or vanity. Hence
the same lover who, if successful, wants all the world to know how he
has been distinguished, is equally anxious, in case of a refusal, to
keep it a secret. Schopenhauer went so far as to assert that both in
the pain of unrequited love and the joy of success, vanity is a more
important factor than the thwarting of sensual desires, because only a
psychic disturbance can stir us so deeply.
Shakspere knew that while there are many kinds of pride, the best and
deepest is that which a man feels in his love. Some, he says, glory in
their birth, some in their skill, some in their wealth, some in their
body's force, or their garments, or horses; but
All these I better in one general best,
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost,
Of more delight than hawks and horses be
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast.
--_Sonnet XCI_.
VARIETIES AND GERMS
While amorous pride has also an altruistic aspect in so far as the
lover is proud not only of being chosen but also of another's
perfections, it nevertheless belongs, in the main, in the egoistic
group, and there is therefore no reason why we should not look for it
in the lower stages of erotic evolution. Pride and vanity are feelings
which characterize all grades of human beings from the highest to the
lowest. As regards amorous pride, however, it is obvious that the
conditions for its existence are not favorable among such aboriginals,
_e.g._, as the Australians. What occasion is there for pride on the
part of a man who exchanges his sister or daughter for another man's
sister or daughter, or on the part of the female who is thus
exchanged? An American Indian's pride consists not in having won the
favor of one particular girl, but in having been able to buy or steal
as many women as possible, married or unmarried; and the bride's pride
is proportionate to her lover's prowess in this direction. I need not
add that the pride at being a successful squaw-stealer differs not
only in degree but in kind from the exultation of a white American
lover at the thought that the most beautiful and perfect girl in the
world has chosen him above all men as her sole and exclusive
sweetheart.
Gibbs says (I., 197-200) of the Indians of Western Washington and
Northwestern Oregon that they usually seek their wives among other
tribes than their own.
"It seems to be a matter of pride, in fact, to unite
the blood of several different ones in their own
persons. The expression, I am half Snokwalmu, half
Klikatat, or some similar one, is of every-day
occurrence. With the chiefs, this is almost always the
case."
This feeling, however, is of a tribal kind, lacking the individuality
of amorous pride. It would approach the latter if a chief won another
chiefs daughter in the face of rivalry and felt elated at this feat.
Such cases doubtless occur among the Indians.
Shooter gives an amusing account of how the African Kaffirs, when a
girl is averse to a marriage, attempt to influence her feelings before
resorting to compulsion.
"The first step is to speak well of the man in her
presence; the Kraal conspire to praise him--her mother
praises him--all the admirers of his cattle praise
him--he was never so praised before."
If these praises make her feel proud at the thought of marrying such a
man, all is well; if not, she has to suffer the consequences. It is
not likely that this praising practice would prevail were it not
sometimes successful.
If it ever is, we would have here a germ of amorous pride. Others may
be found in Hindoo literature, as in _Malati and Madhava_, where the
intermediary speaks of having dwelt on the lover's merits and rank in
the presence of the heroine, in the hope of influencing her.
"Extolling the lover's merits" is mentioned as one of the ten stages
of love in the Hindoo _ars amandi_.
In Oriental countries in general, where it is difficult or impossible
for young men and women to see one another before the wedding-day, the
praising of candidates by and to intermediaries has been a general
custom. Dr. T. Löbel (9-14) relates that before a Turk reaches the age
of twenty-two his parents look about for a bride for him. They send
out female friends and intermediaries who "praise and exaggerate the
accomplishments of the young man" in houses where they suspect the
presence of eligible girls. These female intermediaries are called
kyz-görüdschü or "girl-seers." Having found a maiden that appears
suitable, they exclaim, "What a lovely girl! She resembles an angel!
What beautiful eyes! True gazelle-eyes! And her hair! Her teeth are
like pearls." When the young man hears the reports of this beauty, he
forthwith falls in love with her, and, although he has never seen her,
declares he "will marry her and no other." A sense of humor is not
given to every man: Dr. Löbel remarks seriously that this disproves
the slanderous assertion so often made that the Turks are incapable of
true love!
In their treatment and estimate of women the ancient Greeks resembled
the modern Turks. The poets joined the philosophers in declaring that
"nature herself," as Becker sums them up (Ill., 315), "assigned to
woman a position far beneath man." As there is little occasion for
pride in having won the favor of so inferior a being, the erotic
literature of the Greeks is naturally not eloquent on this subject.
Such evidence of amorous pride as we find in it, and in Roman poetry,
is usually in connection with mercenary women. The poets, being poor,
had only one way of winning the favor of these wantons: they could
celebrate their charms in verse. This aroused the pride of the
hetairai, and their grateful caresses made the poets proud at having a
means of winning favor more powerful even than money. But with genuine
love these feelings have nothing to do.
NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS OF LOVE
In common with ambition and other strong passions, love has the power
of changing a man's character for the time being. One of the speakers
in Plutarch's dialogue on love ([Greek: Erotikos], 17) declares that
every lover becomes generous and magnanimous, though he may have been
niggardly before; but, characteristically enough, it is the love for
boys, not for women, that is referred to. A modern lover is affected
that way by love for women. He feels proud of being distinguished by
the preference of such a girl, and on the principle of _noblesse
oblige_, he tries to become worthy of her. This love makes the
cowardly brave, the weak strong, the dull witty, the prosy poetic, the
slouches tidy. Burton glows eloquent on this subject (Ill., 2),
confounding, as usual, love with lust. Ovid notes that when Polyphemus
courted Galatea the desire to please made him arrange his hair and
beard, using the water as a mirror; wherein the Roman poet shows a
keener sense of the effect of infatuation than his Greek predecessor,
Theocritus, who (Id., XIV.) describes the enamoured Aischines as going
about with beard neglected and hair dishevelled; or than Callimachus,
concerning whose love-story of Acontius and Cydippe Mahaffy says (_G.
L. and T.,_ 239):
"The pangs of the lover are described just as they are
described in the case of his [Shakspere's]
Orlando--dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes,
disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit
of writing the girl's name on every tree--symptoms
which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which
many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because
they found them in literature, and thought them the
spontaneous expression of the grief of love, while they
were really the artificial invention of Callimachus and
his school, who thus fathered them upon human nature."
Professor Mahaffy overlooks, however, an important distinction which
Shakspere makes. The witty Rosalind declares to Orlando, in her
bantering way, that
"there is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our
young plants with carving 'Rosalind' on their barks;
hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all,
forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind ... _he seems
to have the quotidian of love upon him_."
And when Orlando claims that he is that man, she replies, "There is
none of my uncle's marks upon you; he taught me to know a man in
love."
Orlando: "What were his marks?"
Rosalind:
"A lean cheek, _which you have not_, a blue eye and sunken,
_which you have not_ ... a beard neglected, _which you have
not_ ... Then your hose _should be_ ungartered, your bonnet
unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and
everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation."
Shakspere knew that love makes a man tidy, not untidy, hence Rosalind
fails to find the artificial Greek symptoms of love in Orlando, while
she admits that he carves her name on trees and hangs poems on them;
acts of which lovers are quite capable. In Japan it is a national
custom to hang love-poems on trees.
VIII. SYMPATHY
"Egotism," wrote Schopenhauer
"is a colossal thing; it overtops the world. For, if every
individual had the choice between his own destruction and
that of every other person in the world, I need not say what
the decision would be in the vast majority of cases."
"Many a man," he declares on another page,[22] "would be capable of
killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The
grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as
a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration
after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he
would have been fully justified in this doubt. An Australian has been
known to bait his fish-hook with his own child when no other meat was
at hand; and murders committed for equally trivial and selfish reasons
are every-day affairs among wild tribes.
EGOTISM, NAKED OK MASKED
Egoism manifests itself in a thousand different ways, often in subtle
disguise. Its greatest triumph lies in its having succeeded up to the
present day in masquerading as love. Not only many modern egotists,
but ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans,
barbarians and savages, have been credited with love when in reality
they manifested nothing but sexual self-love, the woman in the case
being valued only as an object without which the beloved Ego could not
have its selfish indulgence. By way of example let us take what Pallas
says in his work on Russia (III., 70) of the Samoyedes:
"The wretched women of this nomadic people are obliged
not only to do all the house-work, but to take down and
erect the huts, pack and unpack the sleigh, and at the
same time perform slavish duties for their husbands,
who, except on a few amorous evenings, hardly bestow on
them a look or a pleasant word, while expecting them to
anticipate all their desires."
The typical shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much to
prevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if he
happened to see a Samoyede on one of these "amorous evenings," that he
"loved" his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse that
he loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means of
gratifying his selfish appetites. In the preceding pages I endeavored
to show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman,
individual preference, monopolism, jealousy, hope and despair and
hyperbolic expression of feeling, yet without giving the slightest
indication of love--that is, of affection--for her. It is all egoism,
and egoism is the antipode of love, which is a phase of altruism. Not
that these selfish ingredients are absent in genuine love. Romantic
love embraces both selfish and altruistic elements, but the former are
subdued and overpowered by the latter, and sexual passion is not love
unless the altruistic ingredients are present. It is these altruistic
ingredients that we must now consider, beginning with sympathy, which
is the entering wedge of altruism.
DELIGHT IN THE TORTURE OF OTHERS
Sympathy means sharing the pains and pleasures of another--feeling the
other's joys and sorrows as if they were our own, and therefore an
eagerness to diminish the other's pains and increase the pleasures.
Does uncivilized man exhibit this feeling? On the contrary, he gloats
over another's anguish, while the other's joys arouse his envy. Pity
for suffering men and animals does not exist in the lower strata of
humanity. Monteiro says (_A. and C._, 134) that the negro
"has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or
compassion for suffering. A fellow-creature, or animal,
writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highly
provocative of merriment and enjoyment. I have seen a
number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children,
stand round, roaring with laughter, at seeing a poor
mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and
roll about in agony on the ground till a white man put
it out of its misery."
Cozzens relates (129-30) an instance of Indian cruelty which he
witnessed among the Apaches. A mule, with his feet tied, was thrown on
the ground. Thereupon two of these savages advanced and commenced with
knives to cut the meat from the thighs and fleshy parts of the animal
in large chunks, while the poor creature uttered the most terrible
cries. Not till the meat had been cut clean to the bone did they kill
the beast. And this hideous cruelty was inflicted for no other reason
than because meat cut from a live animal "was considered more tender,"
Custer, who knew the Indian well, describes him as "a savage in every
sense of the word; one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds
that of any wild beast of the desert." In the _Jesuit Relations_ (Vol.
XIII., 61) it takes _ten_ pages to describe the tortures inflicted by
the Hurons on a captive. Theodore Roosevelt writes in his _Winning of
the West_ (I., 95):
"The nature of the wild Indians has not changed. Not
one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes
torments which a civilized man cannot so much as look
another in the face and speak of. Impalement on charred
stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints
chewed off, eyes burned out--these tortures can be
mentioned, but there are others, equally normal and
customary, which cannot even be hinted at, especially
when women are the victims."
In his famous book, _The Jesuits in North America_, the historian
Parkman gives many harrowing details of Indian cruelty toward
prisoners; harmless women and children being subjected to the same
fiendish tortures as the men. On one occasion he relates of the
Iroquois (285) that
"they planted stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace,
and bound to them those of their prisoners whom they
meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old age to
infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side.
Then, as they retreated, they set the town on fire, and
laughed with savage glee at the shrieks of anguish that
rose from the blazing dwellings."
On page 248 he relates another typical instance of Iroquois cruelty.
Among their prisoners
"were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who
had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the
first halt, their captors took the infants from them,
tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly
before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of
the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and
frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were
met with mockery and laughter."
Later on all the prisoners were subjected to further tortures
"designed to cause all possible suffering without
touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and
cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, cutting off
their fingers with clamshells, scorching them with
firebrands, and other indescribable tortures."
They cut off the breasts of one of the women and compelled her to eat
them. Then all the women were stripped naked, and forced to dance to
the singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of
the crowd.
If anyone in this hostile crowd had shown the slightest sympathy with
the victims of this satanic cruelty, he would have been laughed at and
insulted; for to the American Indians ferocity was a virtue, while
"pity was a cowardly weakness at which their pride revolted." They
were deliberately trained to cruelty from infancy, children being
taught to break the legs of animals and otherwise to torture them. Nor
were the women less ferocious than the men; indeed, when it came to
torturing prisoners, the squaws often led the men. In the face of such
facts, it seems almost like mockery to ask if these Indians were
capable of falling in love. Could a Huron to whom cruelty was a
virtue, a duty, and whose chief delight was the torture of men and
women or animals, have harbored in his mind such a delicate,
altruistic sentiment as romantic love, based on sympathy with
another's joys and sorrows? You might as well expect a tiger to make
romantic love to the Bengal maiden he has carried into the jungle for
his supper. Cruelty is not incompatible with appetite, but it is a
fatal obstacle to love based on affection. Facts prove this natural
inference. The Iroquois girls were coarse wantons who indulged in free
lust before marriage, and for whom the men felt such passion as is
possible under the circumstances.
The absurdity of the claim that these cruel Indians felt love is made
more glaringly obvious if we take a case nearer home; imagining a
neighbor guilty of torturing harmless captive women with the obscene
cruelty of the Indians, and yet attributing to him a capacity for
refined love! The Indians would honor such a man as a colleague and
hero; we should send him to the penitentiary, the gallows, or the
madhouse.
INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING
It would be foolish to retort that the savage's delight in the torture
of others is manifested only in the case of his enemies, for that is
not true; and where he does not directly exult over the sufferings of
others, he still shows his lack of sympathy by his indifference to
those sufferings, often even in the case of his nearest relatives. The
African explorer Andersson (_O.R._, 156) describes the
"heart-rendering sorrow--at least outwardly," of a Damara woman whose
husband had been killed by a rhinoceros, and who wailed in a most
melancholy way:
"I heartily sympathized with her, and I am sure I was
the only person present of all the members assembled
... who at all felt for her lonely condition. Many a
laugh was heard, but no one looked sad. No one asked or
cared about the man, but each and all made anxious
inquiries after the rhinoceros--such is the life of
barbarians. Oh, ye sentimentalists of the Rousseau
school--for some such still remain--witness what I have
witnessed, and do witness daily, and you will soon
cease to envy and praise the life of the savages."
"A sick person," writes Galton (190), "meets with no
compassion; he is pushed out of his hut by his
relations away from the fire into the cold; they do all
they can to expedite his death, and when he appears to
be dying, they heap oxhides over him till he is
suffocated. Very few Damaras die a natural death."
In his book on the Indian Tribes of Guiana (151, 225) the Rev. W.H.
Brett gives two typical instances of the lack of sympathy in the New
World. The first is that of a poor young girl who was dreadfully burnt
by lying in a hammock when it caught fire:
"She seemed a very meek and patient child, and her look of
gratitude for our sympathy was most affecting. Her friends,
however, took no trouble about her, and she probably died
soon after."
The second case is that of an Arawak boy who, during a canoe voyage,
was seized with cholera. The Indians simply cast him on the edge of
the shore, to be drowned by the rising tide.
Going to the other end of the continent we find Le Jeune writing of
the Canadian Indians (in the _Jesuit Relations_, VI., 245): "These
people are very little moved by compassion. They give the sick food
and drink, but otherwise show no regard for them." In the second
volume of the _Relations_ (15) the missionary writer tells of a sick
girl of nine, reduced to skin and bone. He asked the permission of the
parents to baptize her, and they answered that he might take her and
keep her, "for to them she was no better than a dead dog." And again
(93) we read that in case of illness "they soon abandon those whose
recovery is deemed hopeless."
Crossing the Continent to California we find in Powers (118) a
pathetic account of the lack of filial piety, or sympathy with old
age, which, he says, is peculiar to Indians in general. After a man
has ceased to be useful as a warrior, though he may have been a hero
of a hundred battles, he is compelled to go with his sons into the
forest and bear home on his poor old shoulders the game they have
killed. He totters along behind them "almost crushed to earth beneath
a burden which their unencumbered strength is greatly more able to
support, but they touch it not with so much as one of their fingers."
EXPOSING THE SICK AND AGED
"The Gallinomeros kill their aged parents in a most coldblooded
manner," says Bancroft (I., 390), and this custom, too, prevails on
both sides of the Continent. The Canadians, according to Lalemant
(_Jesuit Relations_, IV., 199),
"kill their fathers and mothers when they are so old that
they can walk no longer, thinking that they are thus doing
them a good service; for otherwise they would be compelled
to die of hunger, as they have become unable to follow
others when they change their location."
Henry Norman, in his book on the Far East, explains (553) why so few
deaf, blind, and idiots are found among savages: they are destroyed or
left to perish. Sutherland, in studying the custom of killing the aged
and diseased, or leaving them to die of exposure, found express
testimony to the prevalence of this loveless habit in twenty-eight
different races of savages, and found it denied of only one. Lewis and
Clarke give a list of Indian tribes by whom the aged were abandoned to
starvation (II., Chap. 7), adding:
"Yet in their villages we saw no want of kindness to the
aged: on the contrary, probably because in villages the
means of more abundant subsistence renders such cruelty
unnecessary, old people appeared to be treated with
attention."
But it is obvious that kindness which does not go beyond the point
where it interferes with our own comfort, is not true altruism. If one
of two men who are perishing of thirst in the desert finds a cupful of
water and shares it with the other, he shows sympathy; but if he finds
a whole spring and shares it with the companion, his action does not
deserve that name. It would be superfluous to make this remark were it
not that the sentimentalists are constantly pointing to such sharing
of abundance as evidence of sympathetic kindness. There is a whole
volume of philosophy in Bates's remark (293) concerning Brazilian
Indians: "The good-fellowship of our Cucámas seemed to arise, not from
warm sympathy, but simply from the absence of eager selfishness in
small matters." The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune devotes a whole chapter
(V., 229-31) to such good qualities as he could find among the
Canadian Indians. He is just to the point of generosity, but he is
compelled to end with these words: "And yet I would not dare to assert
that I have seen one act of real moral virtue in a savage. They have
nothing but their own pleasure and satisfaction in view."
BIRTH OF SYMPATHY
Schoolcraft relates a story of an Indian girl who saved her aged
father's life by carrying him on her back to the new camping-place
(_Oneota,_ 88). Now Schoolcraft is not a witness on whom one can rely
safely, and his case could be accepted as an illustration of an
aboriginal trait only if it had been shown that the girl in question
had never been subject to missionary influences. Nevertheless, such an
act of filial devotion may well have occurred on the part of a woman.
It was in a woman's heart that human sympathy was first born
--together with her child. The helpless infant could not have survived
without her sympathetic care, hence there was an important use for
womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow, while man,
immersed in wars and selfish struggles, remained hard of heart and
knew not tenderness.
Yet in woman, too, the growth of sympathy was painfully slow. The
practice of infanticide, for selfish reasons, was, as we shall see in
later chapters, horribly prevalent among many of the lower races, and
even where the young were tenderly reared, the feeling toward them was
hardly what we call affection--a conscious, enduring devotion--but a
sort of animal instinct which is shared by tigers and other fierce and
cruel animals, and which endures but a short time. In Agassiz's book
on Brazil we read (373), that the Indians "are cold in their family
affections; and though the mothers are very fond of their babies, they
seem comparatively indifferent to them as they grow up." As an
illustration of this trait Agassiz mentions a sight he witnessed one
day. A child who was to be taken far away to Rio stood on the deck
crying, "while the whole family put off in a canoe, talking and
laughing gaily, without showing him the least sympathy."
WOMEN CRUELER THAN MEN
Apart from instinctive maternal love, sympathy appears to be as far to
seek in the savage women as in the men. Authorities agree that in
respect of cruelty the squaws even surpass the warriors. Thus Le Jeune
attests (_Jes. Rel._, VI., 245), that among the Canadians the women
were crueler toward captives than the men. In another place (V., 29),
he writes that when prisoners were tortured the women and girls "blew
and drove the flames over in their direction to burn them." In every
Huron town, says Parkman (_Jes. in N.A._, XXXIV.), there were old
squaws who "in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the
men." The same is asserted of the Comanche women, who "delight in
torturing the male prisoners." Concerning Chippewa war captives,
Keating says (I., 173): "The marriageable women are reduced to
servitude and are treated with great cruelty by the squaws." Among the
Creeks the women even used to pay a premium of tobacco for the
privilege of whipping prisoners of war (Schoolcraft, V., 280). These
are typical instances. In Patagonia, writes Falkner (97), the Indian
women follow their husbands, armed with clubs, sometimes and swords,
and ravage and plunder the houses of everything they can find. Powers
relates that when California Indians get too old to fight they have to
assist the women in their drudgery. Thereupon the women, instead of
setting them a good example by showing sympathy for their weakness,
take their revenge and make them feel their humiliation keenly.
Obviously among these savages, cruelty and ferocity have no sex,
wherefore it would be as useless in one sex as in the other to seek
for that sympathy which is an ingredient and a condition of romantic
love.
PLATO DENOUNCES SYMPATHY
From a Canadian Indian to a Greek philosopher it seems a far cry; yet
the transition is easy and natural. To the Indian, as Parkman points
out, "pity was a cowardly weakness," to be sternly repressed as
unworthy of a man. Plato, for his part, wanted to banish poetry from
his ideal republic because it overwhelms our feelings and makes us
give way to sympathies which in real life our pride causes us to
repress and which are "deemed the part of a woman" (_Repub._, X.,
665). As for the special form of sympathy which enters into the nobler
phases of the love between men and women--fusing their hearts and
blending their souls--Plato's inability to appreciate such a thing may
be inferred from the fact that in this same ideal republic he wanted
to abolish the marriage even of individual bodies. Of the marriage of
souls he, like the other Greeks, knew nothing. To him, as to his
countrymen in general, love between man and woman was mere animal
passion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, or
friendship, or to filial, parental, or brotherly love.
From the point of view of sympathy, the difference between ancient
passion and modern love is admirably revealed in Wagner's
_Tannhäuser_. As I have summed it up elsewhere[23]:
"Venus shares only the joys of Tannhäuser, while
Elizabeth is ready to suffer with him. Venus is carnal
and selfish, Elizabeth affectionate and
self-sacrificing. Venus degrades, Elizabeth ennobles;
the depth of her love atones for the shallow, sinful
infatuation of Tannhäuser. The abandoned Venus
threatens revenge, the forsaken Elizabeth dies of
grief."
There are stories of wifely devotion in Greek literature, but, like
Oriental stories of the same kind (especially in India) they have a
suspicious appearance of having been invented as object-lessons for
wives, to render them more subservient to the selfish wishes of the
husbands. Plutarch counsels a wife to share her husband's joys and
sorrows, laugh when he laughs, weep when he weeps; but he fails to
suggest the virtue of reciprocal sympathy on the husband's part; yet
Plutarch had much higher notions regarding conjugal life than most of
the Greeks. An approximation to the modern ideal is found only when we
consider the curious Greek adoration of boys. Callicratides, in
Lucian's [Greek: Erotes], after expressing his contempt for women and
their ways, contrasts with them the manners of a well-bred youth who
spends his time associating with poets and philosophers, or taking
gymnastic and military exercises. "Who would not like," he continues,
"to sit opposite such a boy, hear him talk, share his
labors, walk with him, nurse him in illness, go to sea with
him, share darkness and chains with him if necessary? Those
who hated him should be my enemies, those who loved him my
friends. When he dies, I too should wish to die, and one
grave should cover us."
Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism.
Callicratides does not say he will die _for_ the other, or that the
other's pleasures are to him more important than his own.[24]
SHAM ALTRUISM IN INDIA
India is generally credited with having known and practised altruism
long before Christ came to preach it. Kalidasa anticipates a modern
idea when he remarks, in _Sakuntala_, that "Among persons who are very
fond of each other, grief shared is grief halved." India, too, is
famed for its monks or penitents, who were bidden to be compassionate
to all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless those
that cursed them (Mann, VI., 48). But in reality the penitents were
actuated by the most selfish of motives; they believed that by obeying
those precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they would
get such power that even the gods would dread them; and the Sanscrit
dramas are full of illustrations of the detestably selfish use they
made of the power thus acquired. In _Sakuntala_ we read how a poor
girl's whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one of
these "saints," for the trivial reason that, being absorbed in
thoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to his
personal comforts at once; while _Kausika's Rage_ illustrates the
diabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes a
king and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations. It
is possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest and
having no other companions, learned to love the animals that came to
see them; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos in
general is merely a matter of superstition and not an outcome of
sympathy. He has not even a fellow-feeling for suffering human beings.
How far he was from realizing Christ's "blessed are the merciful," may
be inferred from what the Abbé Dubois says:
"The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as
respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his
heart. He will see an unhappy being perish on the road,
or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste;
and will not stir to help him to a drop of water,
though it were to save his life."
"To kill a cow," says the same writer (I., 176), "is a crime which the
Hindoo laws punish with death;" and these same Hindoos treat women,
especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd to
suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be
actuated by sympathy in their devout attitude toward some animals.
Superstition is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person who
kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive.
In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally.
What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such
superstitions:
"The enraged multitude did not wait for the slow
process of law, but put the offender to death with
their own hands." At the same time some animals "which
were deemed divinities in one home, were treated as
nuisances and destroyed in others." (Kendrick, II.,
I-21.)
EVOLUTION OF SYMPATHY
If we study the evolution of human sympathy we find that it begins,
not in reference to animals but to human beings. The first stage is a
mother's feeling going out to her child. Next, the family as a whole
is included, and then the tribe. An Australian kills, as a matter of
course, everyone he comes across in the wilderness not belonging to
his tribe. To the present day race hatred, jingoism, and religious
differences obstruct the growth of cosmopolitan sympathy such as
Christ demanded. His religion has done much, however, to widen the
circle of sympathy and to make known its ravishing delights. The
doctrine that it is more blessed to give than to receive is literally
true for those who are of a sympathetic disposition. Parents enjoy the
pleasures of their children as they never did their own egotistic
delights. In various ways sympathy has continued to grow, and at the
present day the most refined and tender men and women include animals
within the range of their pity and affection. We organize societies
for their protection, and we protest against the slaughter of birds
that live on islands, thousands of miles away. Our imagination has
become so sensitive and vivid that it gives us a keen pang to think of
the happy lives of these birds as being ruthlessly cut short and their
young left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation.
If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom
Burton wrote in his _Two Trips to Gorilla Land_, that "Cruelty seems
to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are
connected with causing pain and inflicting death"--we need no other
argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic
love, because that implies a capacity for the tenderest and subtlest
sympathy. I would sooner believe a tiger capable of such love than a
savage, for the tiger practises cruelty unconsciously and accidentally
while in quest of food, whereas the primitive man indulges in cruelty
for cruelty's sake, and for the delight it gives him. We have here one
more illustration of the change and growth of sentiments. Man's
emotions develop as well as his reasoning powers, and one might as
well expect an Australian, who cannot count five, to solve a problem
in trigonometry as to love a woman as we love her.
AMOROUS SYMPATHY
In romantic love altruism reaches its climax. Turgenieff did not
exaggerate when he said that "it is in a man really in love as if his
personality were eliminated." Genuine love makes a man shed egoism as
a snake sheds its skin. His one thought is: "How can I make her happy
and save her from grief" at whatever cost to his own comfort. Amorous
sympathy implies a complete self-surrender, an exchange of
personalities:
My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given.
--_Sidney_.
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind.
--_Scott_.
To a woman who wishes to be loved truly and permanently, a sympathetic
disposition is as essential as modesty, and more essential than
beauty. The author of _Love Affairs of Some Famous Men_ has wittily
remarked that "Love at first sight is easy enough; what a girl wants
is a man who can love her when he sees her every day." That, he might
have added, is impossible unless she can enter into another's joys and
sorrows. Many a spark of love kindled at sight of a pretty face and
bright eyes is extinguished after a short acquaintance which reveals a
cold and selfish character. A man feels instinctively that a girl who
is not a sympathetic sweetheart will not be a sympathetic wife and
mother, so he turns his attention elsewhere. Selfishness in a man is
perhaps a degree less offensive, because competition and the struggle
for existence necessarily foster it; yet a man who does not merge his
personality in that of his chosen girl is not truly in love, however
much he may be infatuated. There can be sympathy without love, but no
love without sympathy. It is an essential ingredient, an absolute
test, of romantic love.
IX. ADORATION
Silvius, in _As You Like It_, says that love is "all adoration," and
in _Twelfth Night_, when Olivia asks: "How does he love me?" Viola
answers: "With adorations." Romeo asks: "What shall I swear by?" and
Juliet replies:
Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I'll believe thee.
DEIFICATION OF PERSONS
Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the
"deification of persons," and that women adore as well as men. Helena,
in _All's Well that Ends Well_, says of her love for Bertram:
Thus, Indian-like
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun that looks upon his worshipper,
But knows of him no more.
"Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau,
Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of
humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the
last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of
instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modern
lover is like a sculptor who takes an ordinary block of marble and
carves a goddess out of it. His belief that his idol is a living
goddess is, of course, an illusion, but the _feeling_ is real, however
fantastic and romantic it may seem. He is so thoroughly convinced of
the incomparable superiority of his chosen divinity that "it is
marvellous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is
in a panic when he thinks of it," as Charles Dudley Warner puts it.
Ouida speaks of "the graceful hypocrisies of courtship," and no doubt
there are many such; but in romantic love there is no hypocrisy; its
devotion and adoration are absolutely sincere.
The romantic lover adores not only the girl herself but everything
associated with her. This phase of love is poetically delineated in
Goethe's _Werther_:
"To-day," Werther writes to his friend, "I could not go
to see Lotta, being unavoidably detained by company.
What was there to do? I sent my valet to her, merely in
order to have someone about me who had been near her.
With what impatience I expected him, with what joy I
saw him return! I should have liked to seize him by the
hand and kiss him, had I not been ashamed.
"There is a legend of a Bononian stone which being
placed in the sun absorbs his rays and emits them at
night. In such a light I saw that valet. The knowledge
that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, the
buttons and the collar of his coat, made all these
things valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I
would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand
dollars, so happy was I in his presence. God forbid
that you should laugh at this. William, are these
things phantasms if they make us happy?"
Fielding wrote a poem on a half-penny which a young lady had given to
a beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half-crown. Sir Richard
Steele wrote to Miss Scurlock:
"You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have
worn, or I cannot live; otherwise you must expect that I'll
kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your
handkerchief."
Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fair
sex. The lover worships the very ground she trod on, and is enraptured
at the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her.
To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, in
perpetual hyperbole:
It's a year almost that I have not seen her;
Oh! last summer green things were greener,
Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer.
--_C.G. Rossetti_.
PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN
The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an
entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being
universal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345): "Among
ourselves woman-worship nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost,
if not entirely, absent among the peasantry." Still less would we
expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike
times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more
useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor worship,
which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For
these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of
natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior
to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter
was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--or
rather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.
A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts
from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt
for women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by the
lower races in all parts of the world. But as the attitude of
Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be
fully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to a
few sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss,
II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread
that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to and
fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was
only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored. If an Indian refuses to
quarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains
(VI., 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of a
warrior, as she is too far beneath him. In Tahiti the head of a
husband or father was sacred from a woman's touch. Offerings to the
gods would have been polluted if touched by a woman. In Siam the wife
had to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband's, to remind her of
her inferiority. No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maori
chief. Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in any
corner of the tent except her own; after pitching the tent she was
obliged to fumigate it before the men would enter. The Zulus regard
their women "with haughty contempt." Among Mohammedans a woman has a
definite value only in so far as she is related to a husband;
unmarried she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her.
(Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls by
elders and priests is the insulting
"Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive
thee." "On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that
she is an unwelcome guest in the family." (Ramabai
Saravasti, 13.)
William Jameson Reid, who visited some of the unexplored regions of
Northeastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness and
misery of woman's lot among the Pa-Urgs:
"Although, owing to the scarcity, a woman is a valuable
commodity, she is treated with the utmost contempt, and
her existence is infinitely worse than the very animals
of her lord and master. Polyandry is generally
practised, increasing the horror of her position, for
she is required to be a slave to a number of masters,
who treat her with the most rigorous harshness and
brutality. From the day of her birth until her death
(few Pa-Urg women live to be fifty) her life is one
protracted period of degradation. She is called upon to
perform the most menial and degrading of services and
the entire manual labor of the community, it being
considered base of a male to engage in other labor than
that of warfare and the chase....
"When a child is to be born the mother is driven from
the village in which she lives, and is compelled to
take up her abode in some roadside hut or cave in the
open country, a scanty supply of food, furnished by her
husbands, being brought to her by the other women of
the tribe. When the child is born the mother remains
with it for one or two months, and then leaving it in a
cave, returns to the village and informs her eldest
husband of its birth and the place where she has left
it. If the child is a male, some consideration is shown
to her; should it be a female, however, her lot is
frightful, for aside from the severe beating to which
she is subjected by her husband, she suffers the scorn
and contumely of the rest of the tribe. If a male
child, the husband goes to the cave and brings it back
to the village; if it is of the opposite sex he is left
to his own volition; sometimes he returns with the
female infant; as often he ignores it entirely and
allows it to perish, or may dispose of it to some other
man as a prospective wife."[26]
In Corea women are so little esteemed that they do not even receive
separate names, and a husband considers it an act of condescension to
speak to his wife. When a young man of the ruling classes marries, he
spends three or four days with his bride, then returns to his
concubine, "in order to prove that he does not care much for the
bride." (Ploss, II., 434.) "The condition of Chinese women is most
pitiable," writes the Abbé Hue:
"Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery
and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and
accompany her to the tomb. Her birth is commonly
regarded as a humiliation and a disgrace to the
family--an evident sign of the malediction of heaven.
If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is
regarded and treated as a creature radically
despicable, and scarcely belonging to the human race."
He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for the
bride is to commit suicide. Even the Japanese, so highly civilized in
some respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likening
themselves to heaven and the women to earth. There are ten stations on
the way up the sacred mount Fuji. Formerly no woman was allowed to
climb above the eighth. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of the
University of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his _Things Japanese_ (274) in
which he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the
_Kojiki_ he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women in
ancient as in modern Japan. Some years afterward six of the chief
literati of the old school translated this introduction into Japanese.
They patted the author on the head for many things, but when they
reached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrath
exploded:
"The subordination of women to men," so ran their
commentary, "is an extremely correct custom. To think
the contrary is to harbor European prejudice.... For
the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand
law of heaven and earth. To ignore this, and to talk of
the contrary as barbarous, is absurd."
The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated by
the men, Chamberlain says on another page,
"has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any
generous European heart.... At the present moment the
greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still
her husband's drudge. She fetches and carries for him,
bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth
on his walks abroad, waits upon him at meals, may be
divorced at his good pleasure."
This testimony regarding a nation which in some things--especially
aesthetic culture and general courteousness--surpasses Europe and
America, is of special value, as it shows that love, based on sympathy
with women's joys and sorrows, and adoration of their peculiar
qualities, is everywhere the last flower of civilization, and not, as
the sentimentalists claim, the first. If even the advanced Japanese
are unable to feel romantic love--for you cannot adore what you
egotistically look down on--it is absurd to look for it among
barbarians and savages, such as the Fuegians, who, in times of
necessity, eat their old women, or the Australians, among whom not
many women are allowed to die a natural death, "they being generally
despatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good food
may not be lost."[27]
There are some apparent exceptions to the universal contempt for
females even among cannibals. Thus it is known that the Peruvian
Casibos never eat women. It is natural to jump to the conclusion that
this is due to respect for the female sex. It is, however, as Tschudi
shows, assignable to exactly the opposite feeling:
"All the South American Indians, who still remain under
the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women
in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated
to injure them. Among a few of the less rude nations
this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a
certain unconquerable contempt of females. With the
anthropophagi the feeling extends, fortunately, to
their flesh, which is held to be poisonous."
The Caribs had a different reason for making it unlawful to eat women.
"Those who were captured," says P. Martyr, "were kept for breeding, as
we keep fowl, etc," Sir Samuel Baker relates (_A.N._, 240), that among
the Latookas it was considered a disgrace to kill a woman--not,
however, because of any respect felt for the sex, but because of the
scarcity and money value of women.
HOMAGES TO PRIESTESSES
Equally deceptive are all other apparent exceptions to the customary
contempt for women. While the women of Fiji, Tonga, and other islands
of the Pacific were excluded from all religious worship, and Papuan
females were not even allowed to approach a temple, it is not uncommon
among the inferior races for women to be priestesses. Bosnian relates
(363) that on the African Slave Coast the women who served as
priestesses enjoyed absolute sway over their husbands, who were in the
habit of serving them on their knees. This, however, was contrary to
the general rule, wherefore it is obvious that the homage was not to
the woman as such, but to the priestess. The feeling inspired in such
cases is, moreover, fear rather than respect; the priestess among
savages is a sorceress, usually an old woman whose charms have faded,
and who has no other way of asserting herself than by assuming a
pretence to supernatural powers and making herself feared as a
sorceress. Hysterical persons are believed by savages to be possessed
of spirits, and as women are specially liable to hysteria and to
hallucinations, it was natural that they should be held eligible for
priestly duties. Consequently, if there was any respect involved here
at all, it was for an infirmity, not for a virtue--a result of
superstition, not of appreciation or admiration of special feminine
qualities.[28]
KINSHIP THROUGH FEMALES ONLY
Dire confusion regarding woman's status has been created in many minds
by three distinct ethnologic phenomena, which are, moreover, often
confounded: (1) kinship and heredity through females; (2) matriarchy,
or woman's rule in the family (domestic); (3) gynaicocracy, or woman's
rule in the tribe (political).
(1) It is a remarkable fact that among many tribes, especially in
Australia, America, and Africa, children are named after their mother,
while rank and property, too, are often inherited in the female line
of descent. Lafitau observed this custom among American Indians more
than a century ago, and in 1861 a Swiss jurist, Bachofen, published a
book in which he tried to prove, with reference to this "kinship
through mothers only," that it indicated that there was a time when
women everywhere ruled over men. A study of ethnologic data shows,
however, that this inference is absolutely unwarranted by the facts.
In Australia, for instance, where children are most commonly named
after their mother's clan, there is no trace of woman's rule over man,
either in the present or the past. The man treats the woman as a
master treats his slaves, and is complete master of her children.
Cunow, an authority on Australian relationships, remarks (136):
"Nothing could be more perverse than to infer from the
custom of reasoning kinship through females, that woman
rules there, and that a father is not master of his
children. On the contrary, the father regards himself
everywhere, even in tribes with a female line of
descent, as the real procreator. He is considered to be
the one who plants the germ and the woman as merely the
soil in which it grows. And as the wife belongs to him,
so does the child that comes from her womb. Therefore
he claims also those children of his wife concerning
whom he knows or assumes that he did not beget them;
for they grew on his soil."
Similarly with the American Indians. Grosse has devoted several pages
(73-80) to show that with the tribes among which kinship through
females prevails woman's position is not in the least better than with
the others. Everywhere woman is bought, obliged to submit to polygamy,
compelled to do the hardest and least honorable work, and often
treated worse than a dog. The same is true of the African tribes among
whom kinship in the female line prevails.
If, therefore, kinship through mothers does not argue female
supremacy, how did that kinship arise? Le Jeune offered a plausible
explanation as long ago as 1632. In the _Jesuit Relations_ (VI., 255),
after describing the immorality of the Indians, he goes on to say:
"As these people are well aware of this corruption,
they prefer to take the children of their sisters as
heirs, rather than their own, or than those of their
brothers, calling in question the fidelity of their
wives, and being unable to doubt that these nephews
come from their own blood. Also among the Hurons--who
are more licentious than our Montagnais, because they
are better fed--it is not the child of a captain but
his sister's son, who succeeds the father."
The same explanation has been advanced by other writers and by the
natives of other countries where kinship through females prevails;[29]
and it doubtless holds true in many cases.
In others the custom of naming children after their mothers is
probably simply a result of the fact that a child is always more
closely associated with the mother than with the father. She brings it
into the world, suckles it, and watches over it; in the primitive
times, even if promiscuity was not prevalent, marriages were of short
duration and divorces frequent, wherefore the male parentage would be
so constantly in doubt that the only feasible thing was to name the
children after their mothers. For our purposes, fortunately, this
knotty problem of the origin of kinship through females, which has
given sociologists so much trouble,[30] does not need to be solved. We
are concerned solely with the question, "Does kinship in the female
line indicate the supremacy of women, or their respectful treatment?"
and that question, as we have seen, must be answered with a most
emphatic No. There is not a single fact to bear out the theory that
man's rule was ever preceded by a period when woman ruled. The lower
we descend, the more absolute and cruelly selfish do we find man's
rule over woman. The stronger sex everywhere reduces the weaker to
practical slavery and holds it in contempt. Primitive woman has not
yet developed these qualities in which her peculiar strength lies, and
if she had, the men would be too coarse to appreciate them.
WOMAN'S DOMESTIC RULE
(2) As we ascend in the scale we find a few cases where women rule or
at least share the rule with the men; but these occur not among
savages but with the lower and higher barbarians, and at the same time
they are, as Grosse remarks (161), "among the scarcest curiosities of
ethnology." The Garos of Assam have women at the head of their clans.
Dyak women are consulted in political matters and have equal rights
with the men. Macassar women in Celebes also are consulted as regards
public affairs, and frequently ascend the throne. A few similar cases
have been noted in Africa, where, _e.g._, the princesses of the
Ashantees domineer over their husbands; but these apply only to the
ruling class, and do not concern the sex as a whole. Some strange
tales of masculine submission in Nicaragua are told by Herrera. But
the best-known instance is that of the Iroquois and Hurons. Their
women, as Lafitau relates (I., 71), owned the land, and the crops,
they decided upon peace or war, took charge of slaves, and made
marriages. The Huron Wyandots had a political council consisting of
four women. The Iroquois Seneca women could chase lazy husbands from
the premises, and could even depose a chief. Yet these cases are not
conclusive as to the real status of the women in the tribe. The facts
cited are, as John Fiske remarks (_Disc. Amer_., I., 68), "not
incompatible with the subjection of women to extreme drudgery and
ill-treatment." Charlevoix, one of the eye-witnesses to these
exceptional privileges granted to some Indian women, declares
expressly that their domination was illusory; that they were, at home,
the slaves of their husbands; that the men despised them thoroughly,
and that the epithet "woman" was an insult.[31] And Morgan, who made
such a thorough study of the Iroquois, declares (322) that "the Indian
regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man,
and, from nature and habit, she actually considered herself to be so."
The two honorable employments among Indians were war and hunting, and
these were reserved for the men. Other employments were considered
degrading and were therefore gallantly reserved for the women.
WOMAN'S POLITICAL RULE
Comanche Indians, who treated their squaws with especial contempt,
nevertheless would not hesitate on occasion to submit to the rule of a
female chief (Bancroft, I., 509); and the same is true of other tribes
in America, Africa, etc. (Grosse, 163). In this respect, barbarians do
not differ from civilized races; queenship is a question of blood or
family and tells us nothing whatever about the status of women in
general. As regards the "equal rights" of the Dyak women just referred
to, if they really have them, it is not as women, but as men, that is,
in so far as they have become like men. This we see from what Schwaner
says (I., 161) of the tribes in the Southeast:
"The women are allowed great privileges and liberties.
Not infrequently they rule at home and over whole
tribes with manly power, incite to war, and often
personally lead the men to battle."
Honors paid to such viragoes are honors to masculinity, not to
femininity.
GREEK ESTIMATE OF WOMEN
Here again the transition from the barbarian to the Greek is easy and
natural. The ancient Greek looked down on women as women. "One man,"
exclaims Iphigenia in Euripides, "is worth more than ten thousand
women." There were, of course, certain virtues that were esteemed in
women, but these, as Becker has said, differed but little from those
required of an obedient slave. It is only in so far as women displayed
masculine qualities that they were held worthy of higher honor. The
heroines of Plutarch's essay on "The Virtues of Women" are women who
are praised for patriotic, soldier-like qualities, and actions. Plato
believed that men who were bad in this life would, on their next
birth, be women. The elevation of women, he held, could be best
accomplished by bringing them up to be like men. But this matter will
be discussed more fully in the chapter on Greece, as will that of the
_adulation_ which was paid to wanton women by Greek and Roman poets,
and which has been often mistaken for _adoration_. George Eliot speaks
of "that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to
be greater and better than himself." No Greek ever felt a woman to be
"greater and better than himself," wherefore true adoration--the
deification of persons--was out of the question. But there was no
reason why a Greek or Roman should not have indulged in servile
flattery and hypocritical praise for the selfish purpose of securing
the carnal favors of a mercenarily coy courtesan. He was capable of
adulation but not of adoration, for one cannot adore a slave, a drudge
or a wanton. The author of the _Lover's Lexicon_ claims, indeed, that
"love can and does exist without respect," but that is false.
Infatuation of the senses may exist without respect, but refined,
sentimental love is blighted by the discovery of impurity or
vulgarity. Adoration is essential to true love, and adoration includes
respect.
MAN-WORSHIP AND CHRISTIANITY
If we must, therefore, conclude that man in primitive and ancient
times was unable to feel that love of which adoration is an essential
ingredient, how is it with women? From the earliest times, have they
not been taught, with club and otherwise, to look up to man as a
superior being, and did not this enable them to adore him with true
love? No, for primitive women, though they might fear or admire man
for his superior power, were too coarse, obscene, ignorant, and
degraded--being as a rule even lower than the men--to be able to share
even a single ingredient of the refined love that we experience. At
the same time it may be said (though it sounds sarcastic) that woman
had a natural advantage over man in being gradually trained to an
attitude of devotion. Just as the care of her infants taught her
sympathy, so the daily inculcated duty of sacrificing herself for her
lord and master fostered the germs of adoration. Consequently we find
at more advanced stages of civilization, like those represented by
India, Greece, and Japan, that whenever we come across a story whose
spirit approaches the modern idea of love, the embodiment of that love
is nearly always a woman. Woman had been taught to worship man while
he still wallowed in the mire of masculine selfishness and despised
her as an inferior. And to the present day, though it is not
considered decorous for young women to reveal their feelings till
after marriage or engagement, they adore their chosen ones:
For love's insinuating fire they fan
With sweet ideas of a god like man.
In this respect, as in so many others, woman has led civilization.
Man, too, gradually learned to doff his selfishness, and to respect
and adore women, but it took many centuries to accomplish the change,
which was due largely to the influence of Christ's teachings. As long
as the aggressive masculine virtues alone were respected, feminine
gentleness and pity could not but be despised as virtues of a lower
grade, if virtues at all. But as war became less and less the sole or
chief occupation of the best men, the feminine virtues, and those who
exercised them, claimed and received a larger share of respect.
Christianity emphasized and honored the feminine virtues of patience,
meekness, humility, compassion, gentleness, and thus helped to place
women on a level with man, and in the noblest of moral qualities even
above him. Mariolatry, too, exerted a great influence. The worship of
one immaculate woman gradually taught men to respect and adore other
women, and as a matter of course, it was the lover who found it
easiest to get down on his knees before the girl he worshipped.
X. UNSELFISH GALLANTRY.
One day while lunching at an African foudak, half way between Tangier
and Tetuan, I was led to moralize on the conjugal superiority of
Mohammedan roosters to Mohammedan men. Noticing a fine large cock in
the yard, I threw him a handful of bread-crumbs. He was all alone at
the moment and might have easily gobbled them all up. Instead of doing
such a selfish thing, he loudly summoned his harem with that peculiar
clucking sound which is as unmistakable to fowls as is the word dinner
or the boom of a gong to us. In a few seconds the hens had gathered
and disposed of the bread, leaving not a crumb to their gallant lord
and master. I need not add that the Sultan of a human harem in Morocco
would have behaved very differently under analogous circumstances.
THE GALLANT ROOSTER
The dictionary makers derive the word gallant from all sorts of roots
in divers languages, meaning gay, brave, festive, proud, lascivious,
and so on. Why not derive if from the Latin _gallus_, rooster? A
rooster combines in himself all the different meanings of the word
gallant. He is showy in appearance, brave, daring, attentive to
females, and, above all, chivalrous, that is, inclined to show
disinterested courtesy to the weaker sex, as we have just seen. In
this last respect, it is true, the rooster stands not alone. It is a
trait of male animals in general to treat their females unselfishly in
regard to feeding and otherwise.
UNGALLANT LOWER RACES OF MEN
If we now turn to human beings, we have to ascend many strata of
civilization before we come across anything resembling the unselfish
gallantry of the rooster. The Australian savage, when he has speared a
kangaroo, makes his wife cook it, then selects the juiciest cuts for
himself and the other men, leaving the bones to the women and dogs.
Ascending to the much higher Polynesians and American Indians we still
find that the women have to content themselves with what the men
leave. A Hawaiian even considers it a disgrace to eat at the same
place as his wife, or with the same utensils.
What Kowney says (173) of the Nagas of India--"she does everything the
husband will not, and he considers it effeminate to do anything but
fight, hunt, and fish"--is true of the lower races in general. An
African Kaffir, says Wood (73), would consider it beneath his dignity
to as much as lift a basket of rice on the head of even his favorite
wife; he sits calmly on the ground and allows some woman to help his
busy wife. "One of my friends," he continues,
"when rather new to Kaffirland, happened to look into a
hut and there saw a stalwart Kaffir sitting and smoking
his pipe, while the women were hard at work in the sun,
building huts, carrying timber, and performing all
kinds of severe labor. Struck with a natural
indignation at such behavior, he told the smoker to get
up and work like a man. This idea was too much even for
the native politeness of the Kaffir, who burst into a
laugh at so absurd a notion. 'Women work,' said he,
'men sit in the house and smoke.'"
MacDonald relates (in _Africana_, I., 35) that "a woman always kneels
when she has occasion to talk to a man." Even queens must in some
cases go on their knees before their husbands. (Ratzel, I., 254.)
Caillé gives similar testimony regarding the Waissulo, and Mungo Park
(347) describes the return of one of his companions to the capital of
Dentila, after an absence of three years:
"As soon as he had seated himself upon a mat, by the
threshold of his door, a young woman (his intended
bride) brought a little water in a calabash, and
kneeling down before him, desired him to wash his
hands; when he had done this, the girl, with a tear of
joy sparkling in her eyes, drank the water; this being
considered as the greatest proof she could possibly
give him of her fidelity and attachment."
An Eskimo, when building a house, looks on lazily while his women
carry stones "almost heavy enough to break their backs." The ungallant
men not only compel the women to be their drudges, but slyly create a
sentiment that it is disgraceful for a man to assist them. Of the
Patagonian Indians Falkner asserts that the women are so rigidly
"obliged to perform their duty, that their husbands cannot help them
on any occasion, or in the greatest distress, without incurring the
highest ignominy," and this is the general feeling, of which other
illustrations will be given in later chapters. Foolish sentimentalists
have tried to excuse the Indians on the ground that they have no time
to attend to anything but fighting and hunting. But they always make
the squaws do the hard work, whether there be any war and hunting or
not. A white American girl, accustomed to the gallant attentions of
her lover, would not smile on the red Dacota suitor of whom Riggs
writes (205):
"When the family are abed and asleep, he often visits
her in her mother's tent, or he finds her out in the
grove in the day time gathering fuel. She has the load
of sticks made up, and when she kneels down to take it
on her back, possibly he takes her hand and helps her
up and then walks home by her side. Such was the custom
In the olden time."
Still, there is a germ of gallantry here. The Dacota at least helps to
load his human donkey, while the Kaffir refuses to do even that.
Colonel James Smith, who had been adopted by the Indians, relates (45)
how one day he helped the squaws to hoe corn. They approved of it, but
the old men afterward chid him for degrading himself by hoeing corn
like a squaw. He slyly adds that, as he was never very fond of work,
they had no occasion to scold him again. We read in Schoolcraft (V.,
268) that among the Creeks, during courtship, the young man used to
help the girl hoe the corn in her field, plant her beans and set poles
for them to run upon. But this was not intended as an act of gallant
assistance; it had a symbolic meaning. The running up of the beans on
the poles and the entwining of their vines was "thought emblematical
of their approaching union and bondage." Morgan states expressly in
his classical work on the Iroquois (332) that "no attempts by the
unmarried to please or gratify each other by acts of personal
attention were ever made." In other words the Indians knew not
gallantry in the sense of disinterested courtesy to the weaker
sex--the gallantry which is an essential ingredient of romantic love.
Germs of gallantry may perhaps be found in Borneo where, as St. John
relates (I., 161), a young Dyak may help the girl he wants to marry in
her farm work, carrying home her load of vegetables or wood, or make
her presents of rings, a petticoat, etc. But such a statement must be
interpreted with caution.
The very fact that they make the women do the field work and carry the
wood habitually, shows that the Dyaks are not gallant. Momentary
favors for the sake of securing favors in return, or of arranging an
ephemeral Bornean "marriage," are not acts of disinterested courtesy
to the weaker sex. The Dyaks themselves clearly understand that such
attentions are mere bids for favors. As a missionary cited by Ling
Roth (1., 13.1) remarks:
"If a woman handed to a man betel-nut and sirah to eat,
or if a man paid her the smallest attention, such as we
should term only common politeness, it would be
sufficient to excuse a jealous husband for striking a
man."
It is the same in India.
"The politeness, attention, and gallantry which the
Europeans practise toward the ladies, although often
proceeding from esteem and respect, are invariably ascribed
by the Hindoos to a different motive."
(Dubois, I., 271.) Here, as everywhere in former times, woman existed
not for her own sake but for man's convenience, comfort, and pleasure;
why, therefore, should he bother to do anything to please her? In the
_Kaniasoutram_ there is a chapter on the duties of a model wife, in
which she is instructed to do all the work not only at home but in
garden, field, and stable. She must go to bed after her husband and
get up before him. She must try to excel all other wives in faithfully
serving her lord and master. She must not even allow the maid-servant
to wash his feet, but must do it with her own hands. The _Laws of
Manu_ are full of such precepts, most of them amazingly ungallant. The
horrible maltreatment of women in India, which it would be an
unpardonable euphuism to call simply ungallant, will be dwelt on in a
later chapter.
It has been said a thousand times that the best measure of a nation's
civilization is its treatment of women. It would be more accurate to
say that kind, courteous treatment of women is the last and highest
product of civilization. The Greeks and Hindoos had reached a high
level of culture in many respects, yet, judged by their treatment of
women, the Greeks were barbarians and the Hindoos incarnate fiends.
Scholars are sometimes surprisingly reckless in their assumptions.
Thus Hommel (1., 417) declares that woman must have held an honored
position in Babylonia,[32] because in the ancient texts that have come
down to us the words mother and wife always precede the words father
and husband. Yet, as Dubois mentions incidentally, the Brahmin texts
also place the feminine word before the masculine, and the Brahmins
treat women more cruelly than the lowest savages treat them.
EGYPTIAN LOVE
I have not been able to find evidence of a gallant, chivalrous,
magnanimous attitude toward women in the records of any ancient
nation, and as romantic love is inconceivable without such an
attitude, and a constant interchange of kindnesses, we may infer from
this alone that these nations were strangers to such love. Professor
Ebers makes a special plea for the Egyptians. Noting the statements of
Herodotus and Diodorus regarding the greater degree of liberty enjoyed
by their women as compared with the Greek, he bases thereon the
inference that in their treatment of women the Egyptians were superior
to all other nations of antiquity. Perhaps they were; it is not
claiming much. But Professor Kendrick notes (I., 46) that although it
may be true that the Egyptian women went to market and carried on
trades while the men remained at home working at the loom, this is
capable of receiving quite a different interpretation from that given
by Ebers. The Egyptians regarded work at the loom more as a matter of
skill than the Greeks did; and if they allowed the women to do the
marketing, that may have been because they preferred to have them
carry the heavy burdens and do the harder work, after the fashion of
savages and barbarians.
If the Egyptians ever did show any respect for women they have
carefully wiped out all traces of it in modern life. To-day,
"among the lower classes and in rural districts the wife is
her husband's servant. She works while he smokes and
gossips. But among the higher classes, too, the woman
actually stands far below the man. He never chats with her,
never communicates to her his affairs and cares. Even after
death she does not rest by his side, but is separated from
him by a wall." (Ploss, II., 450.)
Polygamy prevails, as in ancient times, and polygamy everywhere
indicates a low position of woman. Ebers comments on the
circumspection shown by the ancient Egyptians in drawing up their
marriage contracts, adding that "in many cases there were even trial
marriages"--a most amazing "even" in view of what he is trying to
prove. A modern lover, as I have said before, would reject the very
idea of such a trial marriage with the utmost scorn and indignation,
because he feels certain that his love is eternal and unalterable.
Time may show that he was mistaken, but that does not affect his
present feeling. That sublime confidence in the eternity of his
passion is one of the hall-marks of romantic love. The Egyptian had it
not. He not only sanctioned degrading trial marriages, but enacted a
barbarous law which enabled a man to divorce any wife at pleasure by
simply pronouncing the words "thou art expelled." In modern Egypt,
says Lane (I., 247-51), there are many men who have had twenty,
thirty, or more wives, and women who have had a dozen or more
husbands. Some take a new wife every month. Thus the Egyptians are
matrimonially on a level with the savage and barbarian North American
Indians, Tasmanians, Samoans, Dyaks, Malayans, Tartars, many negro
tribes, Arabs, etc.
ARABIAN LOVE
Arabia is commonly supposed to be the country in which chivalry
originated. This belief seems to rest on the fact that the Arabs
spared women in war. But the Australians did the same, and where women
are saved only to be used as slaves or concubines we cannot speak of
chivalry. The Arabs treated their own women well only when they were
able to capture or buy slaves to do the hard work for them; in other
cases their wives were their slaves. To this day, when the family
moves, the husband rides on the camel while the wife trudges along on
foot, loaded down with kitchen utensils, bedding, and her child on
top. If a woman happens to ride on a camel she must get off and walk
if she meets a man, by way of showing her respect for the superior
sex. (Niebuhr, 50.) The birth of a daughter is regarded as a calamity,
mitigated only by the fact that she will bring in some money as a
bride. Marriage is often little more than a farce. Burckhardt knew
Bedouins who, before they were fifty years old, had been married to
more than fifty different women. Chavanne, in his book on the Sahara
(397-401), gives a pathetic picture of the fate of the Arab girls:
"Usually wedded very young (the marriage of a youth of
fourteen to a girl of eleven is nothing unusual), the
girl finds in most cases, after five or six years, that
her conjugal career is at an end. The husband tires of
her and sends her back, without cogent reasons, to her
parents. If there are no parents to return to, she
abandons herself, in many cases, to the vice of
prostitution."
If not discarded, her fate is none the less deplorable. "While young
she receives much attention, but when her charms begin to fade she
becomes the servant of her husband and of his new wife."
Chavanne gives a glowing description of the ravishing but short-lived
beauty of the Arab girl; also a specimen of the amorous songs
addressed to her while she is young and pretty. She is compared to a
gazelle; to a palm whose fruits grow high up out of reach; she is
equal in value to all Tunis and Algiers, to all the ships on the
ocean, to five hundred steeds and as many camels. Her throat is like a
peach, her eyes wound like arrows. Exaggerations like these abound in
the literature of the Arabs, and are often referred to as proof that
they love as we do. In truth, they indicate nothing beyond selfish,
amorous desires. The proof of unselfish affection lies not in words,
however glowing and flattering, but in kind _actions_; and the actions
of the Arabs toward their women are disgustingly selfish, except
during the few years that they are young and pretty enough to serve as
toys. The Arabs, with all their fine talk, are practically on a level
with the Samoyedes who, as we saw, ignore or maltreat their wives,
"except on an occasional amorous evening"; on a level with the Sioux
Indian, of whom Mrs. Eastman remarks that a girl is to him an object
of contempt and neglect from her birth to her grave, except during the
brief period when he wants her for his wife and may have a doubt of
his success.
THE UNCHIVALROUS GREEKS
A few pages back I cited the testimony of Morgan, who lived many years
among the Indians and studied them with the intelligence of an expert
ethnologist, that "no attempts by the unmarried to please or gratify
each other by acts of personal attention were ever made." From this we
can, once more, make a natural transition from the aboriginal American
to the ancient Greek. The Greek men, says the erudite Becker (III.,
335), "were quite strangers to that considerate, self-sacrificing
courtesy and those minute attentions to women which we commonly call
gallantry," Greek literature and all that we know of Greek life, bear
out this assertion fully. It is true the Alexandrian poets and their
Roman imitators frequently use the language of sentimental gallantry;
they declare themselves the slaves of their mistresses, are eager to
wear chains, to go through fire, to die for them, promising to take
their love to the next world. But all these things are mere "words,
words, words"--adulation the insincerity of which is exposed as soon
as we examine the actions and the motives of these poets, of whom more
will be said in a later chapter. Their flatteries are addressed
invariably to hetairai; they are conceived and written with the
selfish desire to tickle the vanity of these wantons in the hope and
expectation of receiving favors for which the poets, who were usually
poor, were not able to pay in any other way. Thus these poets are
below the Arabs, for these sons of the desert at least address their
flatteries to the girls whom they are eager to marry, whereas the
Greek and Roman poets sought merely to beguile a class of women whose
charms were for sale to anyone. One of these profligate men might
cringe and wail and cajole, to gain the good will of a capricious
courtesan, but he never dreamed of bending his knees to win the honest
love of the maid he took to be his wife (that he might have male
offspring.) Roman love was not romantic, nor was Greek. It was frankly
sensual, and the gallantry of the men was of a kind that made them
erect golden images in public places to honor Phryne and other
prostitutes. In a word, their gallantry was sham gallantry; it was
gallantry not in the sense of polite attentions to women, springing
from unselfish courtesy and esteem, but in the sinister sense of
profligacy and amorous intrigue. There were plenty of gallants, but no
real gallantry.
OVID'S SHAM GALLANTRY
While it is undoubtedly true that Ovid exercised a greater influence
on mediaeval bards, and through them on modern erotic writers, than
any other ancient poet, and while I still maintain that he anticipated
and depicted some of the imaginative phases of modern love (see my
_R.L.P.B_., 90-92), a more careful study of the nature of gallantry
has
convinced me that I erred in finding the "morning dawn of romantic
love" in the counsels regarding gallant behavior toward women given in
the pages of Ovid.[33] He does, indeed, advise a lover never to notice
the faults of a woman whose favor he wishes to win, but to compliment
her, on the contrary, on her face, her hair, her tapering fingers, her
pretty foot; to applaud at the circus whatever she applauds; to adjust
her cushion and put the footstool in its place; to keep her cool by
fanning her; and at dinner, when she has put her lips to the wine-cup
to seize the cup and put his lips to the same place. But when Ovid
wrote this, nothing was farther from his mind than what we understand
by gallantry--an eagerness to perform acts of disinterested courtesy
and deference for the purpose of pleasing a respected or adored woman.
His precepts are, on the contrary, grossly utilitarian, being intended
not for a man who wishes to win the heart and hand of an honest girl,
but for a libertine who has no money to buy the favors of a wanton,
and therefore must rely on flatteries and obsequious fawning.
The poet declares expressly that a rich man will not need his _Ars
Amandi_, but that it is written for the poor, who may be able to
overcome the greed of the hetairai by tickling their vanity. He
therefore teaches his readers how to deceive such a girl with false
flattery and sham gallantry. The Roman poet uses the word _domina_,
but this _domina_, nevertheless, is his mistress, not in the sense of
one who dominates his heart and commands his respect and affection,
but of a despised being lower than a concubine, on whom he smiles only
till he has beguiled her. It is the story of the cat and the mouse.
MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN GALLANTRY
How different this from the modern chivalry which in face of womanhood
makes a gentleman even out of a rough California miner. Joaquin Miller
relates how the presence of even an Indian girl--"a bud that in
another summer would unfold itself wide to the sun," affected the men
in one of the camps. Though she seldom spoke with the miners, yet the
men who lived near her hut dressed more neatly than others, kept their
beards in shape, and shirt-bosoms buttoned up when she passed by:
"On her face, through the tint of brown, lay the blush
and flush of maidenhood, the indescribable sacred
something that makes a maiden holy to every man of a
manly and chivalrous nature; that makes a man utterly
unselfish and perfectly content to love and be silent,
to worship at a distance, as turning to the holy
shrines of Mecca, to be still and bide his time; caring
not to possess in the low, coarse way that
characterizes your common love of to-day, but choosing
rather to go to battle for her--bearing her in his
heart through many lands, through storms and death,
with only a word of hope, a smile, a wave of the hand
from a wall, a kiss, blown far, as he mounts his steed
below and plunges into the night. That is love to live
for. I say the knights of Spain, bloody as they were,
were a noble and a splendid type of men in their
day."[34]
While the knights of Spain and other parts of mediaeval Europe
doubtless professed sentiments of chivalry like those uttered by
Joaquin Miller, there was as a rule nearly as much sham in their
pretensions as in Ovid's rules for gallant conduct. In the days of
militant chivalry, in the midst of deeds of extravagant homage to
individual ladies, women in general were as much despised and
maltreated as at any other time. "The chivalrous spirit is above all
things a class spirit," as Freeman wrote (V., 482):
"The good knight is bound to endless fantastic courtesies
toward men, and still more toward women, of a certain rank;
he may treat all below that rank with any degree of scorn
and cruelty."
This is still very far removed from the modern ideal; the knight may
be considered to stand half-way between the boor and the gentleman: he
is polite, at least, to some women, while the gentleman is polite to
all, kind, gentle, sympathetic, without being any the less manly.
Nevertheless there was an advantage in having some conception of
gallantry, a determination and vow to protect widows and orphans, to
respect and honor ladies. Though it was at first only a fashion, with
all the extravagances and follies usual to fashions, it did much good
by creating an ideal for later generations to live up to. From this
point of view even the quixotic pranks of the knights who fought duels
in support of their challenge that no other lady equalled theirs in
beauty, were not without a use. They helped to enforce the fashion of
paying deference to women, and made it a point of honor, thus forcing
many a boor to assume at least the outward semblance and conduct of a
gentleman. The seed sown in this rough and stony soil has slowly
grown, until it has developed into true civilization--a word of which
the last and highest import is civility or disinterested devotion to
the weak and unprotected, especially to women.
In our days chivalry includes compassion for animals too. I have never
read of a more gallant soldier than that colonel who, as related in
_Our Animal Friends_ (May, 1899), while riding in a Western desert at
the head of five hundred horsemen, suddenly made a slight
detour--which all the men had to follow--because in the direct path a
meadow lark was sitting on her nest, her soft brown eyes turned
upward, watching, wondering, fearing. It was a nobler deed than many
of the most gallant actions in battle, for these are often done from
selfish motives--ambition, the hope of promotion--while this deed was
the outcome of pure unselfish sympathy.
"Five hundred horses had been turned aside, and five hundred
men, as they bent over the defenceless mother and her brood,
received a lesson in that broad humanity which is the
essence of higher life."
To this day there are plenty of ruffians--many of them in fine
clothes--who are strangers to chivalrous feelings toward defenceless
women or animals--men who behave as gentlemen only under compulsion of
public opinion. The encouraging thing is that public opinion has taken
so strong a stand in favor of women; that it has written _Place aux
Dames_ on its shield in such large letters. While the red American
squaw shared with the dogs the bones left by her contemptuous
ungallant husband, the white American woman is served first at table
and gets the choicest morsels; she receives the window-seat in the
cars, the lower berth in the sleeper; she has precedence in society
and wherever she is in her proper place; and when a ship is about to
sink, the captain, if necessary (which is seldom the case), stands
with drawn revolver prepared to shoot any man who would ungallantly
get into a boat before all the women are saved.
"AN INSULT TO WOMAN"
This change from the primitive selfishness described in the preceding
pages, this voluntary yielding by man of the place of honor and of the
right of the strongest, is little less than a miracle; it is the
grandest triumph of civilization. Yet there are viragoes who have had
the indecency to call gallantry an "insult to woman." There is indeed
a kind of gallantry--the Ovidian--which is an insult to women; but
true masculine gallantry is woman's chief glory and conquest,
indicating the transformation of the savage's scorn for woman's
physical weakness into courteous deference to her as the nobler, more
virtuous and refined sex. There are some selfish, sour, disappointed
old maids, who, because of their lack of feminine traits, repel men
and receive less than their share of gallant courtesy. But that is
their own fault. Ninety-nine per cent. of all women have a happier lot
to-day than at any previous time in history, and this change is due to
the growth of the disinterested courtesy and sympathy known as
gallantry. At the same time the change is strikingly illustrated in
the status of old maids themselves. No one now despises an unselfish
woman simply because she prefers to remain single; but formerly old
maids were looked on nearly everywhere with a contempt that reached
its climax among the Southern Slavs, who, according to Krauss (Ploss,
II., 491), treated them no better than mangy dogs. No one associated
with them; they were not tolerated in the spinning-room or at the
dances; they were ridiculed and derided; were, in short, regarded as a
disgrace to the family.
SUMMARY
To sum up: among the lower races man habitually despises and maltreats
woman, looking on her as a being made, not for her own sake, but for
his comfort and pleasure. Gallantry is unknown. The Australian who
fights for his family shows courage, not gallantry, for he is simply
protecting his private property, and does not otherwise show the
slightest regard for his women. Nor does the early custom of serving
for a wife imply gallantry; for here the suitor serves the parents,
not the maid; he simply adopts a primitive way of paying for a bride.
Sparing women in battle for the purpose of making concubines or slaves
of them is not gallantry. One might as well call a farmer gallant
because, when he kills the young roosters for broilers, he saves the
young hens. He lets these live because he needs eggs. The motive in
both cases is utilitarian and selfish. Ovidian gallantry does not
deserve such a name, because it is nothing but false flattery for the
selfish purpose of beguiling foolish women. Arabic flatteries are of a
superior order because sincere at the time being and addressed to
girls whom the flatterer desires to marry. But this gallantry, too, is
only skin deep. Its motives are sensual and selfish, for as soon as
the girl's physical charm begins to fade she is contemptuously
discarded.
Our modern gallantry toward women differs radically from all those
attitudes in being unselfish. It is synonymous with true
chivalry--disinterested devotion to those who, while physically
weaker, are considered superior morally and esthetically. It treats
all women with polite deference, and does so not because of a vow or a
code, but because of the natural promptings of a kind, sympathetic
disposition. It treats a woman not as a toper does a whiskey bottle,
applying it to his lips as long as it can intoxicate him with pleasure
and then throwing it away, but cherishes her for supersensual
attributes that survive the ravages of time. To a lover, in
particular, such gallantry is not a duty, but a natural impulse. He
lies awake nights devising plans for pleasing the object of his
devotion. His gallantry is an impulse to sacrifice himself for the
beloved--an instinct so inbred by generations of practice that now
even a child may manifest it. I remember how, when I was six or seven
years old, I once ran out the school-house during recess to pick up
some Missouri hailstones, while others, large as marbles, were falling
about me, threatening to smash my skull. I gave the trophies to a
dark-eyed girl of my age--not with a view to any possible reward, but
simply because I loved her more than all the other girls combined and
wanted to please her.
A SURE TEST OF LOVE
Black relates in his _Things Chinese_, that after the wedding ceremony
"the bride tries hard ... to get a piece of her husband's
dress under her when she sits down, for if she does, it will
insure her having the upper hand of him, while he tries to
prevent her and to do the same thing himself."
Similar customs prevail in other parts of the world, as among the
Esthonians. (Schroeder, 234.) After the priest has united the couple
they walk toward the wagon or sleigh, and in doing so each of the two
tries to be first to step on the other's foot, because that will
decide who is to rule at home. Imagine such petty selfishness, such a
disgraceful lack of gallantry, on the very wedding-day! In our own
country, when we hear of a bride objecting to the word "obey" in the
wedding ceremony, we may feel absolutely sure that the marriage is not
a love-match, at least as far as she is concerned. A girl truly in
love with a man laughs at the word, because she feels as if she would
rather be his slave than any other man's queen; and as for the lover,
the bride's promise to "obey" him seems mere folly, for he is
determined she shall always remain the autocratic queen of his heart
and actions. Conjugal disappointments may modify that feeling, to be
sure, but that does not alter the fact that while romantic love
exists, one of its essential ingredients is an impulse of gallant
devotion and deference on both sides--an impulse which on occasion
rises to self-sacrifice, which is simply an extreme phase of
gallantry.
XI. ALTRUISTIC SELF-SACRIFICE
In the very olden time, if we may confide in the ingenious Frank
Stockton, there lived a semi-barbaric king who devised a highly
original way of administering justice, leaving the accused man's fate
practically in his own hands. There was an arena with the king's
throne on one side and galleries for the people all around. On a
signal by the king a door beneath him opened and the accused subject
stepped out into the amphitheatre. Directly opposite the throne were
two doors, exactly alike, and side by side. The person on trial had to
walk to those doors and open either of them. If he opened one, there
sprang out a fierce tiger who immediately tore him to pieces; if the
other, there came forth a beautiful lady, to whom he was forthwith
married. No one ever knew behind which of the doors was the tiger, so
that the audience no more than the prisoner knew whether he was to be
devoured or married.
This semi-barbaric king had a daughter who fell in love with a
handsome young courtier. When the king discovered this love-affair he
cast the youth into prison and had his realm searched for the fiercest
of tigers. The day came when the prisoner had to decide his own fate
in the arena by opening one of the doors. The princess, who was one of
the spectators, had succeeded, with the aid of gold, in discovering
the secret of the doors; she knew from which the tiger, from which the
lady, would issue. She knew, too, who the lady was behind the other
door--one of the loveliest of the damsels of the court--one who had
dared to raise her eyes to her loved one and had thereby aroused her
fiercest jealousy. She had thought the matter over, and was prepared
for action. The king gave the signal, and the courtier appeared. He
had expected the princess to know on which side lay safety for him,
nor was he wrong. To his quick and anxious glance at her, she replied
by a slight, quick movement of her arm to the right. The youth turned,
and without the slightest hesitation opened the door on the right.
Now, "which came out of the opened door--the lady or the tiger?"
THE LADY AND THE TIGER
With that question Stockton ends his story, and it is generally
supposed that he does not answer it. But he does, on the preceding
page, in these words:
"Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of the
question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded,
semi-barbaric princess, her soul at white heat beneath the
combined fires of despair and jealousy. She had lost him,
but who should have him?"
In these words the novelist hints plainly enough that the question was
decided by a sort of dog-in-the-manger jealousy. If the princess could
not have him, certainly her hated rival should never enjoy his love.
The tiger, we may be sure, was behind the door on the right.
In allowing the tiger to devour the courtier, the princess showed that
her love was of the primitive, barbarous type, being in reality
self-love, not other-love. She "loved" the man not for his own sake,
but only as a means of gratifying her desires. If he was lost to
_her_, the tiger might as well dine on him. How differently an
American girl would have acted, under the impulse of romantic love!
Not for a moment could she have tolerated the thought of his dying,
through her fault--the thought of his agony, his shrieks, his blood.
She would have _sacrificed her own happiness instead of her beloved's
life_. The lady would have come out of the door opened by him. Suppose
that, overcome by selfish jealousy, she acted otherwise; and suppose
that an amphitheatre full of cultured men and women witnessed her
deed: would there not be a cry of horror, condemning her as worse than
the tiger, as absolutely incapable of the feeling of true love? And
would not this cry of horror reveal on the part of the spectators an
instinctive perception of the truth which this chapter, this whole
book, is written to enforce, that voluntary self-sacrifice, where
called for, is the supreme, the infallible, test of love?
A GREEK LOVE-STORY
If we imagine the situation reversed--a man delivering his "beloved"
into the clutches of a tiger rather than to the legitimate caresses of
a rival--our horror at his loveless selfishness would be doubled. Yet
this is the policy habitually followed by savages and barbarians. In
later chapters instances will be given of such wooers killing coveted
girls with their own spears as soon as they find that the rival is the
winner. After what has been said about the absence of unselfish
gallantry among the lower races it would, of course, be useless to
look for instances of altruistic self-sacrifice for a woman's sake,
since such sacrifice implies so much more than gallantry. As for the
Greeks, in all my extensive reading I have come across only one author
who seemingly appreciates the significance of self-sacrifice for a
woman loved. Pausanias, in his _Description of Greece_ (Bk. VII.,
chap. 21), relates this love-story:
"When Calydon still existed there was among the
priests of Dionysus one named Coresus, whom love made,
without any fault of his own, the most wretched of
mortals. He loved a girl Callirrhoe, but as great as
his love for her was her hatred of him. When all his
pleadings and offerings of presents failed to change
the girl's attitude, he at last prostrated himself
before the image of Dionysus, imploring his help. The
god granted the prayers of his priest, for suddenly the
Calydonians began to lose their senses, like drunkards,
and to die in fits of madness. They appealed to the
oracle of Dodona ... which declared that the calamity
was due to the wrath of the god Dionysus, and that it
would not cease until Coresus had sacrificed to
Dionysus either Callirrhoe or anyone else willing to
die for her. Now when the girl saw no way of escaping,
she sought refuge with her former educators, but when
they too refused to receive her, nothing remained for
her but death. When all the preparations for the
sacrifice had been made in accordance with the precepts
of the oracle of Dodona, she was brought to the altar,
adorned like an animal that is to be sacrificed;
Coresus, however, whose duty it was to offer the
sacrifice, let love prevail in place of hate, and slew
himself instead of Callirrhoe, thus proving by his deed
that he had been animated by the purest love. But when
Callirrhoe saw Coresus as a corpse, overcome by pity
and repentance for her treatment of him, she went and
drowned herself in the fountain not far from the
Calydonian harbor, which since that time is known as
the fountain of Callirrhoe."
If a modern lover, desiring to possess a girl, got her into a
predicament which culminated in the necessity of his either slaying
her with his own hands or killing himself, and did not choose the
latter alternative, we should regard him as more contemptible than the
vilest assassin. To us self-sacrifice in such a case would seem not a
test of love, nor even of honor so much as of common decency, and we
should expect a man to submit to it even if his love of the poor girl
had been a mere infatuation of the senses. However, in view of the
contempt for women, and for love for women, prevalent among the Greeks
in general, we may perhaps discover at least a gleam of better things
in this legend of masculine self-sacrifice.
PERSIAN LOVE
A closer approximation to our ideal may be found in a story related by
the Persian poet Saadi (358):
"There was a handsome and well-disposed young man, who
was embarked in a vessel with a lovely damsel: I have
read that, sailing on the mighty deep, they fell
together into a whirlpool: When the pilot came to offer
him assistance; God forbid that he should perish in
that distress; he was answering, from the midst of that
overwhelming vortex, Leave me and take the hand of my
beloved! The whole world admired him for this speech,
which, as he was expiring, he was heard to make; learn
not the tale of love from that faithless wretch who can
neglect his mistress when exposed to danger. In this
manner ended the lives of those lovers; listen to what
has happened, that you may understand; for Saadi knows
the ways and forms of courtship, as well as the Tazi,
or modern Arabic, is understood at Baghdad."
How did this Persian poet get such a correct and modern notion about
love into his head? Obviously not from his experiences and
observations at home, for the Persians, as the scholarly Dr. Polak
observes in his classical work on them (I., 206), do not know love in
our sense of the word. The love of which their poets sing has either a
symbolical or an entirely carnal meaning. Girls are married off
without any choice of their own at the early age of twelve or
thirteen; they are regarded as capital and sold for cash, and children
are often engaged in the cradle. When a Persian travels, he leaves his
wife at home and enters into a temporary marriage with other women in
the towns he visits. In rural districts if the traveller is a person
of rank, the mercenary peasants eagerly offer their daughters for such
"marriages." (Hellwald, 439.) Like the Greek poets the Persians show
their contempt for women by always speaking of boy-favorites when
their language rises above the coarsest sensuality. Public opinion
regarding Persian stories and poems has been led astray by the changes
of sex and the expurgations made freely by translators. Burton, whose
version of the _Thousand and One Nights_ was suppressed in England,
wrote _(F.F._, 36), that "about one-fifth is utterly unfit for
translation, and the most sanguine Orientalist would not dare to
render literally more than three-quarters of the remainder."
Where, then, I repeat, did Saadi get that modern European idea of
altruistic self-sacrifice as a test of love? Evidently from Europe by
way of Arabia. His own language indicates this--his suspicious boast
of his knowledge of real love as of one who has just made a strange
discovery, and his coupling it with the knowledge of Arabic. Now it is
well known that ever since the ninth century the Persian mind had been
brought into a contact with the Arabic which became more and more
intimate. The Arabs had a habit of sacrificing their lives in
chivalrous efforts to save the life or honor of maidens whom the enemy
endeavored to kidnap. The Arabs, on their part, were in close contact
with the European minds, and as they helped to originate the
chivalrous spirit in Europe, so they must have been in turn influenced
by the developments of the troubadour spirit which culminated in such
maxims as Montagnogout's declaration that "a true lover desires a
thousand times more the happiness of his beloved than his own." As
Saadi lived in the time of the troubadours--the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries--it was easy for him to get a knowledge of the European
"ways and forms of courtship." In Persia itself there was no courtship
or legitimate lovemaking, for the "lover" hardly ever had met his
bride before the wedding-day. Nevertheless, if we may believe William
Franklin,[35] a Persian woman might command a suitor to spend all day
in front of her house reciting verses in praise of her beauty; and
H.C. Trumbull naïvely cites, as evidence that Orientals love just as
we do, the following story:
"Morier tells ... of a large painting in a
pleasure-house in Shiraz, illustrative of the treatment
of a loyal lover by a heartless coquette, which is one
of the popular legends of Persia. Sheik Chenan, a
Persian of the true faith, and a man of learning and
consequence, fell in love with an Armenian lady of
great beauty who would not marry him unless he changed
his religion. To this he agreed. Still she would not
marry him unless he would drink wine. This scruple also
he yielded. She resisted still, unless he consented to
eat pork. With this also he complied. Still she was
coy, and refused to fulfil her engagement, unless he
would be contented to drive swine before her. Even this
condition he accepted. She then told him that she would
not have him at all, and laughed at him for his pains.
The picture represents the coquette at her window,
laughing at Sheik Chenan as he is driving his pigs
before her."
This story suggests and may have been invented in imitation of the
foolish and capricious tests to which mediaeval dames in Europe put
their quixotic knights. Few of these knights, as I have said elsewhere
_(R.L.P.B._, 100), "were so manly as the one in Schiller's ballad,
who, after fetching his lady's glove from the lion's den, threw it in
her face," to show how his feelings toward her had changed. If the
Persian in Trumbull's story had been manly and refined enough to be
capable of genuine love, his feelings toward a woman who could
wantonly subject him to such persistent insults and degradation, would
have turned into contempt. Ordinary sensual infatuation, on the other
hand, would be quite strong enough and unprincipled enough to lead a
man to sacrifice religion, honor, and self-respect, for a capricious
woman. This kind of self-sacrifice is not a test of true love, for it
is not altruistic. The sheik did not make his sacrifice to benefit the
woman he coveted, but to benefit himself, as he saw no other way of
gratifying his own selfish desires.[36]
HERO AND LEANDER
Very great importance attaches to this distinction between selfish and
altruistic self-sacrifice. The failure to make this distinction is
perhaps more than anything else responsible for the current belief
that romantic love was known to the ancients. Did not Leander risk and
sacrifice his life _for Hero_, swimming to her at night across the
stormy Hellespont? Gentle reader, he did not. He risked his life for
the purpose of continuing his illicit amours with a priestess of Venus
in a lonely tower. As we shall see in the chapter devoted to Greek
romances, there is in the story told by Musaeus not a single trait
rising above frank sensuality. In his eagerness to gratify his
appetite, Leander risked Hero's life as well as his own. His swimming
across the strait was, moreover, no more than any animal would do to
meet its mate on the other side of a river. It was a romantic thing to
do, but it was no proof of romantic love. Bearing in mind what
Westermarck says (134)--
"With wild animals sexual desire is not less powerful as an
incentive to strenuous exertion than hunger and thirst. In
the rut-time, the males, even of the most cowardly species,
engage in mortal combats"
--we see that Hero's risking of death for the sake
of his intrigue was not even a mark of exceptional courage; and
regarding the quality and nature of his "love" it tells us nothing
whatever.
THE ELEPHANT AND THE LOTOS
In the Hindoo drama _Malavika and Agnimitra_, Kalidasa represents the
king as seeking an interview with a new flame of his. When his
companion warns him that the queen might surprise them, the king
answers:
When the elephant sees the lotos leaves
He fears no crocodile.
Lotos leaves being the elephant's favorite food, these lines admirably
sum up the Hindoo idea of risking life for "love"--cupboard love. But
would the elephant risk his life to save the beautiful lotos flowers
from destruction? Foolish question! Was not the lotos created to
gratify the elephant's appetite just as beautiful women were created
to subserve man's desires?
Fighting crocodiles for the sake of the sweet lotos is a
characteristic of primitive "love" in all its various strata. "Nothing
is more certain," writes M'Lean (135), "than that the enamoured
Esquimau will risk life and limb in the pursuit of his object." Women,
he says, are the main cause of all quarrels among the Esquimaux; and
the same is true of the lower races in general. If an Australian wants
to run away with another man's wife, the thought of risking his
life--and hers too--does not restrain him one moment. Ascending to the
Greeks, we may cite Robert Burton's summing up of one of their
legends:
"Thirteen proper young men lost their lives for that
fair Hipodamia's sake, the daughter of Onomaus, King of
Elis: when that hard condition was proposed of death or
victory [in a race], they made no account of it, but
courageously for love died, till Pelops at last won her
by a sleight."
What is this but another version of the story of the lotos and the
elephant? The prize was great, and worth the risk. Men risk their
lives daily for gold, and for objects infinitely less attractive to
the senses and the selfish ambitions than a beautiful princess. In the
following, which Burton quotes from Hoedus, the sensual and selfish
basis of all such confronting of death for "love's" sake is laid bare
to the bone:
"What shall I say of the great dangers they undergo,
single combats they undertake, how they will venture
their lives, creep in at windows, gutters, climb over
walls to come to their sweethearts, and if they be
surprised, leap out at windows, cast themselves
headlong down, bruising or breaking their legs or arms,
and sometimes losing life itself, as Calisto did for
his lovely Meliboea?"
I have known rich young Americans and Europeans risk their lives over
and over again in such "gallant" adventures, but if I had asked them
if they loved these women, _i.e._, felt such a disinterested affection
for them (like a mother's for her child) that they would have risked
their lives to _benefit them_ when there was _nothing to gain for
themselves_--they would have laughed in my face. Whence we see how
foolish it is to infer from such instances of "gallantry" and
"self-sacrifice" that the ancients knew romantic love in our sense of
the word. It is useless to point to passages like this (again from
Burton):
"Polienus, when his mistress Circe did but frown upon
him, in Petronius, drew his sword, and bade her kill,
stab, or whip him to death, he would strip himself
naked and not resist."
Such fine talk occurs in Tibullus and other poets of the time; but
where are the _actions_ corresponding to it? Where do we read of these
Romans and Greeks ever braving the crocodile for the sake of
preserving the purity of the lotos herself? Or of sparing a lotos
belonging to another, but at their mercy? Perseus himself, much
vaunted for his chivalry, did not undertake to save the rock-chained
Andromeda from the sea monster until he had extorted a promise that
she should be his prize. Fine sort of chivalry, that!
SUICIDE IS SELFISH
One more species of pseudo-self-sacrifice remains to be considered.
When Hero finds Leander's dead body on the rocks she commits suicide.
Is not this self-sacrifice for love's sake? It is always so
considered, and Eckstein, in his eagerness to prove that the ancient
Greeks knew romantic love,[37] gives a list of six legendary suicides
from hopeless or foiled love. The question of suicide is an
interesting one and will be considered in detail in the chapter on the
American Indians, who, like other savages, were addicted to it, in
many cases for the most trivial reasons. In this place I will content
myself with noting that if Eckstein had taken the pains to peruse the
four volumes of Ramdohr's _Venus Urania_ (a formidable task, I admit),
he would have found an author who more than a hundred years ago knew
that suicide is no test of true love. There are indeed, he says (III.,
46), plenty of old stories of self-sacrifice, but they are all of the
kind where a man risks comfort and life to secure possession of a
coveted body for his own enjoyment, or else where he takes his own
life because he feels lonely after having failed to secure the desired
union. These actions are no index of love, for they "may coexist with
the cruelest treatment" of the coveted woman. Very ambitious persons
or misers may commit suicide after losing honor or wealth, and
"a coarse negro, in face of the danger of losing his
sweetheart, is capable of casting himself into the ocean
with her, or of plunging his dagger into her breast and then
into his own."
All this is selfish. The only true index of love, Ramdohr continues,
lies in the sacrifice of one's own happiness _for another's sake_; in
resigning one's self to separation from the beloved, or even to death,
if that is necessary to secure her happiness or welfare. Of such
self-sacrifice he declares he cannot find a single instance in the
records and stories of the ancients; nor can I.
The suicide of Dido after her desertion by Aeneas is often cited as
proof of love, but Ramdohr insists (338) that, apart from the fact
that "a woman really in love would not have pursued Aeneas with
curses," such an act as hers was the outcome of purely selfish
despair, on a par with the suicide of a miser after the loss of his
money. It is needless to add to this that Hero's suicide was likewise
selfish; for of what possible benefit was it to the dead Leander that
she took her own life in a cowardly fit of despondency at having lost
her chief source of delight? Had she lost her life in an effort to
save his, the case would have been different.
Instances of women sacrificing themselves for men's sake abound in
ancient literature, though I am not so sure that they abounded in
life, except under compulsion, as in the Hindoo suttee.[38] As we
shall see in the chapter on India, tales of feminine self-sacrifice
were among the means craftily employed by men to fortify and gratify
their selfishness. Still, in the long run, just as man's fierce
"jealousy" helped to make women chaster than men, so the inculcation
in women of self-sacrifice as a duty, gradually made them naturally
inclined to that virtue--an inclination which was strengthened by
inveterate, deep-rooted, maternal love. Thus it happened that
self-sacrifice assumed rank in course of time as a specifically
feminine virtue; so much so that the German metaphysician Fichte could
declare that "the woman's life should disappear in the man's without a
remnant," and that this process is love. No doubt it is love, but love
demands at the same time that the man's life should disappear in the
woman's.
It is interesting to note the sexual aspects of gallantry and
self-sacrifice. Women are prevented by custom, etiquette, and inbred
coyness from showing gallant attentions to men before marriage,
whereas the impulse to sacrifice happiness or life for love's sake is
at least as strong in them as in men, and of longer standing. If a
girl of affectionate impulses on hearing that the man she
loved--though he might not have proposed to her--lay wounded, or ill
of yellow fever, in a hospital, threw away all reserve, coyness, and
fear of violating decorum, and went to nurse him day and night, at
imminent risk of her own life, all the world would applaud her,
convinced that she had done a more feminine thing than if she had
allowed coyness to suppress her sympathetic and self-sacrificing
impulses.
XII. AFFECTION
A German poem printed in the _Wunderhorn_ relates how a young man,
after a long absence from home, returns and eagerly hastens to see his
former sweetheart. He finds her standing in the doorway and informs
her that her beauty pleases his heart as much as ever:
Gott grüss dich, du Hübsche, du Feine,
Von Herzen gefallst du mir.
To which she retorts: "What need is there of my pleasing you? I got a
husband long ago--a handsome man, well able to take care of me."
Whereupon the disappointed lover draws his knife and stabs her through
the heart.
In his _History of German Song_ (chap, v.), Edward Schuré comments on
this poem in the following amazing fashion:
"How necessary yet how tragic is this answer with the
knife to the heartless challenge of the former
sweetheart! How fatal and terrible is this sudden
change of a passionate soul from ardent love to the
wildest hatred! We see him taking one step back, we see
how he trembles, how the flush of rage suffuses his
face, and how his love, offended, injured, and dragged
in the dust, slakes its thirst with the blood of the
faithless woman."
EROTIC ASSASSINS
It seems almost incredible that such a villanous sentiment should have
been allowed to appear in a book without sending its author to prison.
"Necessary" to _murder_ a sweetheart because she has changed her mind
during a man's long absence! The wildest anarchist plot never included
a more diabolical idea. Brainless, selfish, impulsive young idiots are
only too apt to act on that principle if their proposals are not
accepted; the papers contain cases nearly every week of poor girls
murdered for refusing an unwelcome suitor; but the world is beginning
to understand that it is illogical and monstrous to apply the sacred
word of love to the feeling which animates these cowardly assassins,
whose only motives are selfish lust and a dog-in-the-manger jealousy.
_Love_ never "slakes its thirst" with the blood of a woman. Had that
man really loved that woman, he would have been no more capable of
murdering her than of murdering his father for disinheriting him.
Schuré is by no means the only author who has thus confounded love
with murderous, jealous lust. A most astounding instance occurs in
Goethe's _Werther_--the story of a common servant who conceived a
passion for a well-to-do widow.
He lost his appetite, his sleep, forgot his errands; an evil spirit
pursued him. One day, finding her alone in the garret, he made an
improper proposal to her, and on her refusing he attempted violence,
from which she was saved only through the timely arrival of her
brother. In defending his conduct the servant, in a most ungallant,
unmanly, and cowardly way, tried to fasten the guilt on the widow by
saying that she had previously allowed him to take some liberties with
her. He was of course promptly ejected from the house, and when
subsequently another man was engaged to take his place, and began to
pay his addresses to the widow, the discharged servant fell upon him
and assassinated him. And this disgusting exhibition of murderous lust
and jealousy leads Goethe to exclaim, rapturously:
"This love, this fidelity(!), this passion, is thus
seen to be no invention of the poets(!). It lives, it
is to be found in its greatest purity(!) among that
class of people whom we call uneducated and coarse."
In view of the sensual and selfish attitude which Goethe held toward
women all his life, it is perhaps not strange that he should have
written the silly words just quoted. It was probably a guilty
conscience, a desire to extenuate selfish indulgence at the expense of
a poor girl's virtue and happiness, that led him to represent his
hero, Werther, as using every possible effort in court to secure the
pardon of that erotomaniac who had first attempted rape and then
finished up by assassinating his rival.
If Werther's friend had murdered the widow herself, Goethe would have
been logically bound to see in his act still stronger evidence of the
"reality," "fidelity," and "purity" of love among "people whom we call
uneducated and coarse." And if Goethe had lived to read the Rev. W.W.
Gill's _Savage Life in Polynesia_, he might have found therein (118) a
story of cannibal "love" still more calculated to arouse his rapturous
enthusiasm--
"An ill-looking but brave warrior of the cannibal tribe
of Ruanae, named Vete, fell violently in love with a
pretty girl named Tanuau, who repelled his advances and
foolishly reviled him for his ugliness. His only
thought now was how to be revenged for this
unpardonable insult. He could not kill her, as she
wisely kept to the encampment of Mantara. After some
months Tanuau sickened and died. The corpse was
conveyed across the island to be let down the chasm of
Raupa, the usual burial-place of her tribe."
Vete chose this as the time for revenge. Arrangements were made to
intercept the corpse secretly, and he had it carried away. It was too
decomposed to be eaten, so they cut it in pieces and burned
it--burning anything belonging to a person being the greatest injury
one can inflict on a native.
THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON
But what have all these disgusting stories to do with affection, the
subject of this chapter? Nothing whatever--and that is why I have put
them here--to show in a glaring light that what Goethe and Schuré, and
doubtless thousands of their readers accepted as love is not love,
since there is no affection in it. A true patriot, a man who feels an
affection for his country, lays down his life for it without a thought
of personal advantage; and if his country treats him ungratefully he
does not turn traitor and assassin--like the German and Polynesian
"lovers" we have just read about. A real lover is indeed overjoyed to
have his affection returned; but if it is not reciprocated he is none
the less affectionate, none the less ready to lay down his life for
the other, and, above all, he is utterly incapable of taking hers.
What creates this difference between lust and love is affection, and,
so far at least as maternal love is concerned, the nature of affection
was known thousands of years ago. When two mothers came before King
Solomon, each claiming the same child as her own, the king sent for a
sword and said, "Divide the living child in two, and give half to the
one and half to the other." To this the false claimant agreed, but the
real mother exclaimed, "O my lord, give her the living child and in no
wise slay it." Then the king knew that she was the child's mother and
gave him to her. "And all Israel saw that the wisdom of God was in
Solomon, to do judgment."
If we ask why this infallible test of love was not applied to the
sexual passion, the answer is that it would have failed, because
ancient love between the sexes was, as all the testimony collected in
this book shows, too sensual and selfish to stand such a test. Yet it
is obvious that if we to-day are to apply the word love to the sexual
relations, we must use the same test of disinterested affection that
we use in the case of maternal love or love of country; and that love
is not love before affection is added to all the other ingredients
heretofore considered. In that servant's "love" which so excited the
wonder of Goethe, only three of the fourteen ingredients of love were
present--individual preference, monopoly, and jealousy--and those
three, as we have seen, occur also in plain lust. Of the tender,
altruistic, loving traits of love--sympathy, adoration, gallantry,
self-sacrifice, affection--there is not a trace.
STUFF AND NONSENSE
When a great poet can blunder so flagrantly in his diagnosis of love,
we cannot wonder that minor writers should often be erratic. For
instance, in _The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona_ (45-46),
Captain J.D. Bourke exclaims:
"So much stuff and nonsense has been written about the
entire absence of affection from the Indian character,
especially in the relations between the sexes, that it
affords me great pleasure to note this little incident"
--namely, a scene between an Indian and a young squaw:
"They had evidently only lately had a quarrel, for
which each was heartily sorry. He approached, and was
received with a disdain tempered with so much sweetness
and affection that he wilted at once, and, instead of
boldly asserting himself, dared do nothing but timidly
touch her hand. The touch, I imagine, was not
disagreeable, because the girl's hand was soon firmly
held in his, and he, with earnest warmth, was pouring
into her ear words whose purport it was not difficult
to conjecture."
That the simplest kind of a sensual caress--squeezing a young woman's
hand and whispering in her ear--should be accepted as evidence of
_affection_ is naïve, to say the least, and need not be commented on
after what has just been said about the true nature of affection and
its altruistic test. Unfortunately many travellers who came in contact
with the lower races shared Bourke's crude conception of the nature of
affection, and this has done much to mislead even expert
anthropologists; Westermarck, for instance, who is induced by such
testimony to remark (358) that conjugal affection has among certain
uncivilized peoples "reached a remarkably high degree of development."
Among those whom he relies on as witnesses is Schweinfurth, who says
of the man-eating African Niam-Niam that "they display an affection
for their wives which is unparalleled among natives of so low a grade.
... A husband will spare no sacrifice to redeem an imprisoned wife"
(I., 472).
SACRIFICES OF CANNIBAL HUSBANDS
This looks like strong evidence, but when we examine the facts the
illusion vanishes. The Nubians, it appears, are given to stealing the
wives of these Niam-Niam, to induce them to ransom them with ivory. A
case occurred within Dr. Schweinfurth's own experience (II., 180-187).
Two married women were stolen, and during the night
"it was touching, through the moaning of the wind, to catch
the lamentations of the Niam-Niam men bewailing the loss of
their captured wives; cannibals though they were, they were
evidently capable of true conjugal affection. The Nubians
remained quite unaffected by any of their cries, and never
for a moment swerved from their purpose of recovering the
ivory before they surrendered the women."
Here we see what the expression that the Niam-Niam "spare no sacrifice
to redeem their imprisoned women" amounts to: the Nubians counted on
it that they would rather part with their ivory than with their wives!
This, surely, involved no "sacrifice"; it was simply a question of
which the husbands preferred, the useless ivory or the useful
women--desirable as drudges and concubines. Why should buying back a
wife be evidence of affection any more than the buying of a bride,
which is a general custom of Africans? As for their howling over their
lost wives, that was natural enough; they would have howled over lost
cows too--as our children cry if their milk is taken away when they
are hungry. Actions which can be interpreted in such sensual and
selfish terms can never be accepted as proof of true affection. That
the captured wives, on their part, were not troubled by conjugal
affection is evident from Schweinfurth's remark that they "were
perfectly composed and apparently quite indifferent."
INCLINATIONS MISTAKEN FOR AFFECTION
Let us take one more case. There are plenty of men who would like to
kiss every pretty girl they see, and no one would be so foolish as to
regard a kiss as proof of _affection_. Yet Lyon (another of the
witnesses on whom Westermarck relies) accepts, with a naïveté
equalling Captain Bourke's, the rubbing together of noses, which among
the Eskimos is an equivalent of our kissing, as a mark of "affection."
In the case of unscientific travellers, such a loose use of words may
perhaps be pardonable, but a specialist who writes a history of
marriage should not put the label of "affection" on everything that
comes into his drag-net, as Westermarck does (pp. 358-59); a
proceeding the less excusable because he himself admits, a few pages
later (362), that affection is chiefly provoked by "intellectual,
emotional, and moral qualities" which certainly could not be found
among some of the races he refers to. I have investigated a number of
the alleged cases of conjugal "affection" in books of travel, and
found invariably that some manifestation of sensual attachment was
recklessly accepted as an indication of "affection."
In part, it is true, the English language is to be blamed for this
state of affairs. The word affection has been used to mean almost any
disposition of the mind, including passion, lust, animosity, and a
morbid state. But in good modern usage it means or implies an
altruistic feeling of devotion which urges us to seek the welfare of
another even at the expense of our own. We call a mother affectionate
because she willingly and eagerly sacrifices herself for her child,
toils for it, loses sleep and food and health for its sake. If she
merely cared for it [note the subtle double sense of "caring for"]
because it is pretty and amusing, we might concede that she "liked"
it, was "attached" to it, or "fond" of it; but it would be incorrect
to speak of affection. Liking, attachment, and fondness differ from
affection not only in degree but in kind; they are selfish, while
affection is unselfish; they occur among savages, while affection is
peculiar to civilized persons and perhaps some animals.
SELFISH LIKING AND ATTACHMENT
Liking is the weakest kind of inclination toward another. It "never
has the intensity of love." To say that I like a man is to indicate
merely that he pleases me, gives me selfish pleasure--in some way or
other. A man may say of a girl who pleases him by her looks, wit,
vivacity, or sympathy, "I like her," though he may have known her only
a few minutes; while a girl who will rather die than give any sign of
affection, may be quite willing to confess that she likes him, knowing
that the latter means infinitely less and does not betray her; that
is, it merely indicates that he pleases her and not that she is
particularly anxious to please him, as she would be if she loved him.
Girls "like" candy, too, because it gives them pleasure, and cannibals
may like missionaries without having the least affection for them.
Attachment is stranger than liking, but it also springs from selfish
interests and habits. It is apt to be similar to that gratitude which
is "a lively sense of favors to come." Mrs. Bishop (Isabella Bird)
eloquently describes (II, 135-136) the attachment to her of a Persian
horse, and incidentally suggests the philosophy of the matter in one
sentence: "To him I am an embodiment of melons, cucumbers, grapes,
pears, peaches, biscuits, and sugar, with a good deal of petting and
ear-rubbing thrown in." Cases of attachment between husband and wife
no doubt abound among savages, even when the man is usually
contemptuous and rude in his treatment of the wife. The Niam-Niam
husbands of Schweinfurth did not, as we saw, give any evidence of
unselfish affection, but they were doubtless attached to their wives,
for obvious reasons. As for the women among the lower races, they are
apt, like dogs, to cling to their master, no matter how much he may
kick them about. They get from him food and shelter, and blind habit
does the rest to attach them to his hearth. What habit and association
can do is shown in the ease with which "happy families" of hostile
animals can be reared. But the beasts of prey must be well fed; a day
or two of fasting would result in the lamb lying down inside the lion.
The essential selfishness of attachment is shown also in the way a man
becomes attached to his pipe or his home, etc. At the same time,
personal attachment may prove the entering wedge of something higher.
"The passing attachments of young people are seldom entitled to
serious notice; although sometimes they may ripen by long intercourse
into a laudable and steady affection" (Crabb).
FOOLISH FONDNESS
The word fondness is sometimes used in the sense of a tender, loving
disposition; yet there is nearly always an implication of silly
extravagance or unseemly demonstrativeness, and in the most accurate
usage it means a foolish, doting indulgence, without discriminating
intelligence, or even common-sense. As Crabb puts it in his _English
Synonyms_, "A fond parent does not rise above a fool." Everybody knows
fathers and mothers whose fondness induces them to indulge all the
appetites, desires, and whims of their children, thereby ruining their
health and temper, making them greedy and selfish, and laying the
foundation for a wretched life for the children themselves and all who
are unfortunate enough to come into contact with them. This irrational
fondness is what travellers and anthropologists have so often mistaken
for genuine affection in the cases of savages and barbarians who were
found to be fondling their babes, doting upon them, playing with them,
and refusing to punish them for any naughtiness. But it is far from
being affection, because it is not only foolish, but _selfish_. To
some of my readers this may seem a strange accusation, but it is a
fact recognized in the best literary usage, for, as Crabb remarks, "a
person is fond, who caresses an object or makes it a source of
pleasure _to himself_." Savages fondle their children because in doing
so they please and amuse themselves. Their pranks entertain the
fathers, and as for the mothers, nature (natural selection) has
implanted in them an unconscious instinct of race preservation which,
recognizing the selfishness of primitive man, has brought it about
that it gives the mother a special pleasure to suckle and fondle her
infant. The essential selfishness of this fondness is revealed when
there is a conflict between the mother's comfort and the child's
welfare. The horrible prevalence among many of the lower races, of
infanticide--merely to save trouble--of which many examples are given
in various parts of this book (see index)--shows not only how selfish,
but how shallow, fondness is. There are thousands of mothers in our
modern cities who have not risen above this condition. An Italian,
Ferriani, has written a book on degenerate mothers (_Madri
Snaturate_), and I have in my note-books a statement of the London
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children referring to a
record of 2,141 cases of proved cruelty in the one month of August,
1898; which would make at least 25,000 cases a year, in one city
alone, or possibly double that number, for many cases are never found
out, or else consist of mental torture which is worse than bodily
maltreatment. Yet there can be no doubt that all, or nearly all, of
these mothers were fond of their babies--_i.e._, fondled them at
first, till the animal instinct implanted in them was overcome by the
desire for personal comfort. This animal instinct, given to them by
nature, is no virtue, for it is unconscious. A tigress has it, but we
do not call it a virtue in her any more than we call her cruelty to
her prey a vice; she is acting unconsciously in either case, knowing
no distinction between good and evil. Fondness, in a word, is not an
ethical virtue. In addition to all its enumerated shortcomings, it is,
moreover, transient. A dog mother will care for her young for a few
months with the watchfulness and temporary ferocity implanted in her
by natural selection, but after that she will abandon them and
recognize them no more as her own. Sometimes this instinctive fondness
ceases with startling rapidity. I remember once in a California yard,
how a hen flew in my face angrily because I had frightened her chicks.
A few days later she deserted them, before they were really quite old
enough to take care of themselves, and all my efforts to make her
return and let them sleep again under her warm feathers failed. She
even pecked at them viciously. Some of the lower savages similarly
abandon their young as soon as they are able to get along, while those
who care for them longer, do so not from affection, but because sons
are useful assistants in hunting and fighting, and daughters can be
sold or traded off for new wives. That they do not keep them from
affection is proved by the fact that in all cases where any selfish
advantage can be gained they marry them off without reference to their
wishes or chances of happiness.[39]
UNSELFISH AFFECTION
While the fondness of savages, which has been so often mistaken for
affection, is thus seen to be foolish, unconscious, selfish, shallow,
and transient, true affection is rational, conscious, unselfish, deep,
and enduring. Being rational, it looks not to the enjoyment or comfort
of the moment, but to future and enduring welfare, and therefore does
not hesitate to punish folly or misdeeds in order to avert future
illness or misfortune. Instead of being a mere instinctive impulse,
liable to cease at any moment, like that of the California hen
referred to, it is a conscious altruism, never faltering in its
ethical sense of duty, utterly incapable of sacrificing another's
comfort or well-being to its own. While fondness is found coexisting
with cruelty and even with infanticide and cannibalism (as in those
Australian mothers, who feed their children well and carry them when
tired, but when a real test of altruism comes--during a famine--kill
and eat them,[40] just as the men do their wives when they cease to be
sensually attractive), affection is horrified at the mere suggestion
of such a thing. No man into whose love affection enters as an
ingredient would ever injure his beloved merely to gratify himself.
Crabb is utterly wrong when he writes that
"love is more selfish in its nature than friendship; in
indulging another it seeks its own, and when this is not to
be obtained, it will change into the contrary passion of
hatred."
This is a definition of lust, not of love--a definition of the passion
as known to the Greek Euripides, of whose lovers Benecke says (53):
"If, or as soon as, they fail in achieving the
gratification of their sensual desires, their 'love'
immediately turns to hate. The idea of devotion or
self-sacrifice for the good of the beloved person, as
distinct from one's own, is absolutely unknown. 'Love
is irresistible,' they say, and, in obedience to its
commands, they set down to reckon how they can satisfy
themselves, at no matter what cost to the objects of
their passion."
How different this unaffectionate "love" from the love of which our
poets sing! Shakspere knew that absorbing affection is an ingredient
of love: Beatrice loves Benedick "with an enraged affection," which is
"past the infinite of the night." Rosalind does not know how many
fathom deep she is in love: "It cannot he sounded; my affection hath
an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal." Dr. Abel has truly said
that
"affection is love tested and purified in the fire of
the intellect. It appears when, after the veil of fancy
has dropped, a beloved one is seen in the natural
beauty with various human limitations, and is still
found worthy of the warmest regards. It comes slowly,
but it endures; gives more than it takes and has a
tinge of tender gratitude for a thousand kind actions
and for the bestowal of enduring happiness. According
to English ideas, a deep affection, through whose clear
mirror the gold of the old love shimmers visibly,
should be the fulfilment of marriage."
Of romantic love affection obviously could not become an ingredient
till minds were cultured, women esteemed, men made altruistic, and
opportunities were given for youths and maidens to become acquainted
with each other's minds and characters before marriage; as Dr. Abel
says, affection "comes slowly--but it endures." The love of which
affection forms an ingredient can never change to hatred, can never
have any murderous impulses, as Schuré and Goethe believed. It
survives time and sensual charms, as Shakspere knew:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.
* * * * *
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:--
If this be error, and upon me proved;
I never writ nor no man ever loved.
XIII. MENTAL PURITY
Romantic love has worked two astounding miracles. We have seen how,
with the aid of five of its ingredients--sympathy, adoration,
gallantry, self-sacrifice, and affection--it has overthrown the
Goliath of selfishness. We shall now see how it has overcome another
formidable foe of civilization--sensualism--by means of two other
modern ingredients, one of which I will call mental purity (to
distinguish it from bodily purity or chastity) and the other
_esthetic_ admiration of personal beauty.
GERMAN TESTIMONY
Modern German literature contains many sincere tributes, in prose and
verse, to the purity and nobility of true love and its refining
influence. The psychologist Horwicz refers briefly (38) to the way in
which
"love, growing up as a mighty passion from the substratum of
sexual life, has, under the repressing influence of
centuries of habits and customs, taken on an entirely new,
_supersensual, ethereal_ character, so that to a lover every
thought of _naturalia_ seems indelicate and improper." "I
feel it deeply that love must ennoble, not crush me,"
wrote the poet Korner; and again,
"Your sweet name was my talisman, which led me undefiled
through youth's wild storms, amid the corruption of the
times, and protected my inner sanctum." "O God!" wrote
Beethoven, "let me at last find her who is destined to be
mine, and who shall strengthen me in virtue."
According to Dr. Abel, while love longs ardently to possess the
beloved, to enjoy her presence and sympathy, it has also a more or
less prominent mental trait which ennobles the passion and places it
at the service of the ideal of its fancy. It is accompanied by an
enthusiasm for the good and the beautiful in general, which comes to
most people only during the brief period of love. "It is a temporary
self-exaltation, _purifying the desires_ and urging the lover to
generous deeds."
Des höchste Glück hat keine Lieder,
Der Liebe Lust ist still und mild;
Ein Kuss, ein Blicken hin und wieder,
Und alle Sehnsucht ist gestillt.
--_Geibel_.
Schiller defined love as an eager "desire for another's happiness."
"Love," he adds, "is the most beautiful phenomenon in all animated
nature, the mightiest magnet in the spiritual world, the source of
veneration and the sublimest virtues." Even Goethe had moments when he
appreciated the purity of love, and he confutes his own coarse
conception that was referred to in the last section when he makes
Werther write: "She is sacred to me. _All desire is silent in her
presence."_[41]
The French Edward Schuré exclaims, in his _History of German Song_:
"What surprises us foreigners in the poems of this
people is the unbounded faith in love, as the supreme
power in the world, as the most beautiful and _divine
thing_ on earth, ... the first and last word of
creation, its only principle of life, because it alone
can urge us to complete self-surrender."
Schuré's intimation that this respect for love is peculiar to the
Germans is, of course, absurd, for it is found in the modern
literature of all civilized countries of Europe and America; as for
instance in Michael Angelo's
The might of one fair face sublimes my love,
For it _hath weaned my heart from low desires_.
ENGLISH TESTIMONY
English literature, particularly, has been saturated with this
sentiment for several centuries. Love is "all purity," according to
Shakspere's Silvius. Schlegel remarked that by the manner in which
Shakspere handled the story of _Romeo and Juliet_, it has become
"a glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling
which _ennobles the soul_ and gives to it its highest
sublimity, and which _elevates even the senses_ themselves
into soul;"
--which reminds one of Emerson's expression that the body is
"ensouled" through love. Steele declared that "Love is a passion of
the mind (_perhaps the noblest_), which was planted in it by the same
hand that created it;" and of Lady Elizabeth Hastings he wrote that
"to love her was a liberal education." In Steel's _Lover_ (No. 5) we
read:
"During this emotion I am highly elated in my Being, and my
every sentiment improved by the effects of that Passion....
I am more and more convinced that this Passion is in lowest
minds the strongest Incentive that can move the Soul of Man
to laudable Accomplishments."
And in No. 29: "Nothing can _mend the Heart_ better than an honorable
Love, except Religion." Thomas Otway sang:
O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
To temper man: we had been brutes without you.
There's in you all that we believe of heaven,
Amazing brightness, purity, and truth,
Eternal joy, and everlasting love.
"Love taught him shame," said Dryden, and Spenser wrote a Hymn in
Honor of Love, in which he declared that
Such is the power of that sweet passion
That it _all sordid baseness doth expel_,
And the refined mind doth newly fashion
Unto a fairer form, which now doth dwell
In his high thought, that would itself excel.
Leigh Hunt wrote: "My love has made me better and more desirous of
improvement than I have been."
Love, indeed, is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire,
With angels shared, by Allah given,
To _lift from earth our low desire_.
Devotion wafts the mind above,
But heaven itself descends in love.
--_Byron_.
Why should we kill the _best of passions_, love?
It aids the hero, bids ambition rise
To nobler heights, inspires immortal deeds,
Ev'n _softens brutes_, and adds a grace to virtue.
--_Thomson_.
Dr. Beddoe, author of the _Browning Cyclopaedia_, declares that "the
passion of love, throughout Mr. Browning's works, is treated as the
most _sacred_ thing in the human soul." How Browning himself loved we
know from one of his wife's letters, in which she relates how she
tried to discourage his advances:
"I showed him how he was throwing away into the ashes
his best affections--how the common gifts of youth and
cheerfulness were behind me--how I had not strength,
even of heart, for the ordinary duties of
life--everything I told him and showed him. 'Look at
this--and this--and this,' throwing down all my
disadvantages. To which he did not answer by a single
compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose,
and that I might be right or he might be right, he was
not there to decide; but that he loved me and should to
his last hour. He said that the freshness of youth had
passed with him also, and that he had studied the world
out of books and seen many women, yet had never loved
one until he had seen me. That he knew himself, and
knew that, if ever so repulsed, he should love me to
his last hour--it should be first and last."
No poet understood better than Tennyson that purity is an ingredient
of love:
For indeed I know
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only _to keep down the base in man_,
But teach high thoughts and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
MAIDEN FANCIES
Bryan Waller Proctor fell in love when he was only five years old: "My
love," he wrote afterward, "had the fire of passion, but not the clay
which drags it downward; it partook of the innocence of my years,
while it etherealized me."
Such ethereal love too is the prerogative of a young maiden, whose
imagination is immaculate, ignorant of impurity.
Her feelings have the fragrancy,
The freshness of young flowers.
No, no, the utmost share
Of my desire shall be,
Only to kiss that air
That lately kissed thee.
In high school, when sentimental impulses first manifest themselves in
a girl, she is more likely than not to transfer them to a girl. Her
feelings, in these cases, are not merely those of a warm friendship,
but they resemble the passionate, self-sacrificing attitude of
romantic love. New York schoolgirls have a special slang phrase for
this kind of love--they call it a "crush," to distinguish it from a
"mash," which refers to an impression made on a man. A girl of
seventeen told me one day how madly she was in love with another girl
whose seat was near hers; how she brought her flowers, wiped her pens,
took care of her desk; "but I don't believe she cares for me at all,"
she added, sadly.
PATHOLOGIC LOVE
Such love is usually as innocent as a butterfly's flirtation with a
flower.[42] It has a pathologic phase, in some cases, which need not
be discussed here. But I wish to call attention to the fact that even
in abnormal states modern love preserves its purity. The most eminent
authority on mental pathology, Professor Krafft-Ebing, says,
concerning erotomania:
"The kernel of the whole matter is the delusion of
being singled out and loved by a person of the other
sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social class.
And it should be noted that the love felt by the
patient toward this person is a romantic, ecstatic, but
entirely 'Platonic' affection."
I have among my notes a remarkable case, relating to that most awful
of diseases that can befall a woman--nymphomania.[43] The patient
relates:
"I have also noticed that when my affections are
aroused, they counteract animal passion. I could never
love a man because he was a man. My tendency is to
worship the good I find in friends. I feel just the
same toward those of my own sex. If they show any
regard for me, the touch of a hand has power to take
away all morbid feelings."
A MODERN SENTIMENT
There are all sorts and conditions of love. To those who have known
only the primitive (sensual) sort, the conditions described in the
foregoing pages will seem strange and fantastic if not
fictitious--that is, the products of the writers' imaginations.
Fantastic they are, no doubt, and romantic, but that they are real I
can vouch for by my own experience whenever I was in love, which
happened several times. When I was a youth of seventeen I fell in love
with a beautiful, black-eyed young woman, a Spanish-American of
Californian stock. She was married, and I am afraid she was amused at
my mad infatuation. Did I try to flirt with her? A smile, a glance of
her eyes, was to me the seventh heaven beyond which there could be no
other. I would not have dared to touch her hand, and the thought of
kissing her was as much beyond my wildest flights of fancy as if she
had been a real goddess. To me she was divine, utterly unapproachable
by mortal. Every day I used to sit in a lonely spot of the forest and
weep; and when she went away I felt as if the son had gone out and all
the world were plunged into eternal darkness.
Such is romantic love--a supersensual feeling of crystalline purity
from which all gross matter has been distilled. But the love that
includes this ingredient is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand
years old, and not to be found among savages, barbarians, or
Orientals. To them, as the perusal of past and later chapters must
convince the reader, it is inconceivable that a woman should serve any
other than sensual and utilitarian purposes. The whole story is told
in what Dodge says of the Indians, who, "animal-like, approach a woman
only to make love to her"; and of the squaws who do not dare even go
with a beau to a dance, or go a short distance from camp, without
taking precautions against rape--precautions without which they "would
not be safe for an instant" (210, 213).
PERSIANS, TURKS, AND HINDOOS
We shall read later on of the obscene talk and sights that poison the
minds of boys and girls among Indians, Polynesians, etc., from their
infancy; in which respect Orientals are not much better than Hurons
and Botocudos. "The Persian child," writes Mrs. Bishop (I., 218),
"from infancy is altogether interested in the topics of
adults; and as the conversation of both sexes is said
by those who know them best to be without reticence or
modesty, the purity which is one of the greatest charms
of childhood is absolutely unknown."
Of the Turks (at Bagdad) Ida Pfeiffer writes _(L.J.R.W._, 202-203)
that she found it
"very painful to notice the tone of the conversation
that goes on in these harems and in the baths. Nothing
can exceed the demureness of the women in public; but
when they come together in these places, they indemnify
themselves thoroughly for the restraint. While they
were busy with their pipes and coffee, I took the
opportunity to take a glance into the neighboring
apartments, and in a few minutes I saw enough to fill
me at once with disgust and compassion for these poor
creatures, whom idleness and ignorance have degraded
almost below the level of humanity. A visit to the
women's baths left a no less melancholy impression.
There were children of both sexes, girls, women, and
elderly matrons. The poor children! how should they in
after life understand what is meant by modesty and
purity, when they are accustomed from their infancy to
witness such scenes, and listen to such conversation?"
These Orientals are too coarse-fibred to appreciate the spotless,
peach-down purity which in our ideal is a maiden's supreme charm. They
do not care to prolong, even for a year what to us seems the sweetest,
loveliest period of life, the time of artless, innocent maidenhood.
They cannot admire a rose for its fragrant beauty, but must needs
regard it as a thing to be picked at once and used to gratify their
appetite. Nay, they cannot even wait till it is a full-blown rose, but
must destroy the lovely bud. The "civilized" Hindoos, who are allowed
legally to sacrifice girls to their lusts before the poor victims have
reached the age of puberty, are really on a level with the African
savages who indulge in the same practice. An unsophisticated reader of
_Kalidasa_ might find in the King's comparison of Sakuntala to "a
flower that no one has smelt, a sprig that no one has plucked, a pearl
that has not yet been pierced," a recognition of the charm of maiden
purity. But there is a world-wide difference between this and the
modern sentiment. The King's attitude, as the context shows, is simply
that of an epicure who prefers his oysters fresh. The modern sentiment
is embodied in Heine's exquisite lines:
DU BIST WIE EINE BLUME.
E'en as a lovely flower
So fair, so pure, thou art;
I gaze on thee and sadness
Comes stealing o'er my heart.
My hands I fain had folded
Upon thy soft brown hair,
Praying that God may keep thee
So lovely, pure, and fair.
--_Trans, of Kate Freiligrath Kroeker_.
It is not surprising that this intensely modern poem should have been
set to music--the most modern of all the arts--more frequently than
any other verses ever written. To Orientals, to savages, to Greeks, it
would be incomprehensible--as incomprehensible as Ruskin's "there is
no true conqueror of lust but love," or Tennyson's
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
To them the love between men and women seems not a purifying,
ennobling emotion, a stimulus to self-improvement and an impulse to do
generous, unselfish deeds, but a mere animal passion, low and
degrading.
LOVE DESPISED IN JAPAN AND CHINA
The Japanese have a little more regard for women than most Orientals,
yet by them, too, love is regarded as a low passion--as, in fact,
identical with lust. It is not considered respectable for young folks
to arrange their own marriages on a basis of love.
"Among the lower classes, indeed," says Küchler,[44] "such direct
unions are not infrequent; but they are held in contempt, and are
known as yago (meeting on a moor), a term of disrespect, showing the
low opinion entertained of it." Professor Chamberlain writes, in his
_Things Japanese_ (285):
"One love marriage we have heard of, one in eighteen years!
But then both the young people had been brought up in
America. Accordingly they took the reins in their own hands,
to the great scandal of all their friends and relations."
On another page (308) he says:
"According to the Confucian ethical code, which the Japanese
adopted, a man's parents, his teacher, and his lord claim
his life-long service, his wife standing on an immeasurably
lower plane."[45]
Ball, in his _Things Chinese_ comments on the efforts made by Chinamen
to suppress love-matches as being immoral; and the French author, L.A.
Martin, says, in his book on Chinese morals (171):
"Chinese philosophers know nothing of Platonic love;
they speak of the relations between men and women with
the greatest reserve, and we must attribute this to the
low esteem in which they generally hold the fair sex;
in their illustrations of the disorders of love, it is
almost always the woman on whom the blame of seduction
is laid."
GREEK SCORN FOR WOMAN-LOVE
The Greeks were in the same boat. They did indeed distinguish between
two kinds of love, the sensual and the celestial, but--as we shall see
in detail in the special chapter devoted to them--they applied the
celestial kind only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love
between men and women. That love was considered impure and degrading,
a humiliating affliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable to
the friendship between men or the feelings that unite parents and
children. This is the view taken in Plato's writings, in Xenophon's
_Symposium_ and everywhere. In Plutarch's _Dialogue on Love_, written
five hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faint
protest against the current notion that "there is no gust of
friendship or heavenly ravishment of mind," in the love for women; but
this is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which is
thus brutally expressed by one of the interlocutors in the same
dialogue:
"True love has nothing to do with women, and I assert that
you who are passionately inclined toward women and maidens
do not love any more than flies love milk or bees honey, or
cooks the calves and birds whom they fatten in the dark....
The passion for women consists at the best in the gain of
sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty."
Another interlocutor sums up the Greek attitude in these words: "It
behooves respectable women neither to love nor to be loved."
Goethe had an aperçu of the absence of purity in Greek love when he
wrote, in his _Roman Elegies:_
In der heroischen Zeit, da Götter und Göttinnen liebten.
Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.
PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY
The change in love from the barbarian and ancient attitude to the
modern conception of it as a refining, purifying feeling is closely
connected with the growth of the altruistic ingredients of
love--sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, and especially
adoration. It is one of the points where religion and love meet.
Mariolatry greatly affected men's attitude toward women in general,
including their notions about love. There is a curious passage in
Burton worth citing here (III., 2):
"Christ himself, and the Virgin Mary, had most
beautiful eyes, as amiable eyes as any persons, saith
Baradius, that ever lived, yet withal so modest, so
chaste, that whosoever looked on them was freed from
that passion of burning lust, if we may believe Gerson
and Bonaventure; there was no such antidote against it
as the Virgin Mary's face."
Mediaeval theologians had a special name for this faculty--Penetrative
Virginity--which McClintock and Strong's _Cyclopedia of Biblical
Literature_ defines as
"such an extraordinary or perfect gift of chastity, to
which some have pretended that it overpowered those by
whom they have been surrounded, and created in them an
insensibility to the pleasures of the flesh. The Virgin
Mary, according to some Romanists, was possessed of
this gift, which made those who beheld her,
notwithstanding her beauty, to have no sentiments but
such as were consistent with chastity."
In the eyes of refined modern lovers, every spotless maiden has that
gift of penetrative virginity. The beauty of her face, or the charm of
her character, inspires in him an affection which is as pure, as
chaste, as the love of flowers. But it was only very gradually and
slowly that human beauty gained the power to inspire such a pure love;
the proof of which assertion is to be unfolded in our next section.
XIV. ADMIRATION OF PERSONAL BEAUTY
"When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind," exclaimed
Dryden; and Romeo asks:
Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
In full-fledged romantic love of the masculine type the admiration of
a girl's personal beauty is no doubt the most entrancing ingredient.
But such love is rare even to-day, while in ordinary love-affairs the
sense of beauty does not play nearly so important a role as is
commonly supposed. In woman's love, as everybody knows, the regard for
masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient; and a man's
love, provided sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice,
affection, and purity enter into it, may be of the genuine romantic
type, even though he has no sense of beauty at all. And this is lucky
for the prospects of love, since, even among the most civilized races
to-day, the number of men and women who, while otherwise refined and
estimable, have no real appreciation of beauty, personal or otherwise,
is astonishingly large.
DARWIN'S UNFORTUNATE MISTAKE
This being true of the average man and woman among the most cultured
races, we ought to be able to conclude, as a matter of course and
without the necessity of argumentation, that the admiration of
personal beauty has still less to do with the motives that lead a
savage to marry this or that girl, or a savage girl to prefer this or
that suitor. Strange to say, this simple corollary of the doctrine of
evolution has been greatly obscured by Darwin himself, by his theory
of sexual selection, which goes so far as to attribute the beauty of
the male _animals_ to the continued preference by the females of the
more showy males, and the consequent hereditary transmission of their
colors and other ornaments. When we bear in mind how unimportant a
role the regard for personal beauty plays even among the females of
the most advanced human beings, the idea that the females of the lower
animals are guided in their pairing by minute subtle differences in
the beauty of masculine animals seems positively comic. It is an idea
such as could have emanated only from a mind as unesthetic as Darwin's
was.
So far as animals are concerned, Alfred Russell Wallace completely
demolished the theory of sexual selection,[46] after it had created a
great deal of confusion in scientific literature. In regard to the
lower races of man this confusion still continues, and I therefore
wish to demonstrate here, more conclusively than I did in my first
book (60, 61, 327-30), that among primitive men and women, too, the
sense of beauty does not play the important rôle attributed to it in
their love-affairs. "The Influence of Beauty in determining the
Marriages of Mankind" is one of the topics discussed in the _Descent
of Man_. Darwin tries to show that, "especially" during the earlier
period of our long history, the races of mankind were modified by the
continued selection of men by women and women by men in accordance
with their peculiar standards of beauty. He gives some of the numerous
instances showing how savages "ornament" or mutilate their bodies;
adding:
"The motives are various; the men paint their bodies to
make themselves appear terrible in battle; certain
mutilations are connected with religious rites, or they
mark the age of puberty, or the rank of the man, or
they serve to distinguish the tribes. Among savages the
same fashions prevail for long periods, and thus
mutilations, from whatever cause first made, soon come
to be valued as distinctive marks. _But self-adornment,
vanity, and the admiration of others seem to be the
commonest motives_."
Among those who were led astray by these views of Darwin is
Westermarck, who declares (257, 172) that "in every country, in every
race, beauty stimulates passion," and that
"it seems to be beyond doubt that men and women began to
ornament, mutilate, paint, and tattoo themselves chiefly in
order to make themselves attractive to the opposite
sex--that they might court successfully, or be courted"
--an opinion in which Grosse follows him, in his interesting
treatise on the _Beginnings of Art_ (111, etc.), thereby marring his
chapter on "Personal Decoration." In the following pages I shall show,
on the contrary, that when we subject these primitive customs of
"ornamentation" and mutilation to a critical examination we find in
nearly every case that they are either not at all or only indirectly
(not esthetically), connected with the relations of the sexes; and
that neither does personal beauty exist as a rule among savages, nor
have they the esthetic sense to appreciate its exceptional occurrence.
They nearly always paint, tattoo, decorate, or mutilate themselves
without the least reference to courtship or the desire to please the
other sex. It is the easiest thing in the world to fill page after
page--as Darwin, Westermarck, Grosse, and others have done--with the
remarks of travellers regarding the addiction of savages to personal
"ornamentation"; but this testimony rests, as we shall see, on the
unwarranted assumptions of superficial observers, who, ignorant of the
real reasons why the lower races paint, tattoo, and otherwise "adorn"
themselves, recklessly inferred that they did it to "make themselves
beautiful." The more carefully the customs and traditions of these
races are studied, the more obvious becomes the non-esthetic and
non-erotic origin of their personal "decorations." In my extensive
researches, for every single fact that seemed to favor the sexual
selection theory I have found a hundred against it; and I have become
more and more amazed at the extraordinary _sang froid_ with which its
advocates have ignored the countless facts that speak against it while
boosting into prominence the very few that at first sight appear to
support it. In the following pages I shall attempt to demolish the
theory of sexual selection in reference to the lower races of man as
Wallace demolished it in reference to animals; premising that the mass
of cumulative evidence here presented is only a very small part of
what might be adduced on my side. Let us consider the different
motives for personal "decoration" in succession.
"DECORATION" FOR PROTECTION
Many of the alleged personal "decorations" of inferior races are
merely measures to protect themselves against climate, insects, etc.
The Maoris of New Zealand besmear themselves with grease and red ochre
as a defence against the sand-flies.[47] The Andaman islanders plaster
themselves with a mixture of lard and colored earth to protect their
skins from heat and mosquitoes.[48] Canadian Indians painted their
faces in winter as a protection against frost-bite. In Patagonia
"both sexes smear their faces, and occasionally their bodies
with paint, the Indians alleging as the reasons for using
this cosmetic that it is a protection against the effects of
the wind; and I found from personal experience that it
proved a complete preservative from excoriation or chapped
skin."[49]
C. Bock notes that in Sumatra rice powder is lavishly employed by many
of the women, but "not with the object of preserving the complexion or
reducing the color, but to prevent perspiration by closing the pores
of the skin."[50] Baumann says of the African Bakongo that many of
their peculiar ways of arranging the hair "seem to be intended less as
ornamental head-dresses than as a bolster for the burdens they carry
on their heads;"[51] and Squier says that the reason given by the
Nicaraguans for flattening the heads of their children is that they
may be better fitted in adult life to bear burdens.[52]
WAR "DECORATIONS"
Equally remote as the foregoing from all ideas of personal beauty or
of courtship and the desire to inspire sexual passion is the custom so
widely prevalent of painting and otherwise "adorning" the body for
war. The Australians diversely made use of red and yellow ochre, or of
white pigment for war paint.[53] Caesar relates that the ancient
Britons stained themselves blue with woad to give themselves a more
horrid aspect in war. "Among ourselves," as Tylor remarks, "the guise
which was so terrific in the Red Indian warrior has comedown to make
the circus clown a pattern of folly,"[54] Regarding Canadian Indians
we read that
"some may be seen with blue noses, but with cheeks and
eyebrows black; others mark forehead, nose, and cheeks with
lines of various colors; one would think he beheld so many
hobgoblins. They believe that in colors of this description
they are dreadful to their enemies, and that otherwise their
own line of battle will be concealed as by a veil; finally,
that it hardens the skin of the body, so that the cold of
the winter is easily borne."[55]
The Sioux Indians blackened their faces when they went on the warpath.
They
"highly prize personal bravery, and therefore constantly
wear the marks of distinction which they received for their
exploits; among these are, especially, tufts of human hair
attached to the arms and legs, and feathers on their
heads."[56]
When Sioux warriors return from the warpath with scalps "the squaws as
well as the men paint with vermilion a semicircle in front of each
ear."[57] North Carolina Indians when going to war painted their faces
all over red, while those of South Carolina, according to DeBrahm,
"painted their faces red in token of friendship and black in
expression of warlike intentions." "Before charging the foe," says
Dorsey, "the Osage warriors paint themselves anew. This is called the
death paint." The Algonquins, on the day of departure for war, dressed
in their best, coloring the hair red and painting their faces and
bodies red and black. The Cherokees when going to war dyed their hair
red and adorned it with feathers of various colors.[58] Bancroft says
(I., 105) that when a Thlinkit arms himself for war he paints his face
and powders his hair a brilliant red. "He then ornaments his head with
a white eagle feather as a token of stern, vindictive determination."
John Adair wrote of the Chickasaws, in 1720, that they "readily know
achievements in war by the blue marks over their breasts and arms,
they being as legible as our alphabetical characters are to us"--which
calls attention to a very frequent use of what are supposed to be
ornaments as merely part of a language of signs. Irving remarks in
_Astoria,_ regarding the Arikara warriors, that "some had the stamp of
a red hand across their mouths, a sign that they had drunk the
life-blood of an enemy." In Schoolcraft we read (II., 58) that among
the Dakotas on St. Peter's River a red hand means that the wearer has
been wounded by an enemy, while a black hand indicates "I have slain
an enemy." The Hidatsa Indians wore eagle feathers "to denote acts of
courage or success in war"; and the Dakotas and others indicated by
means of special spots or colored bars in their feathers or cuts in
them, that the wearer had killed an enemy, or wounded one, or taken a
scalp, or killed a woman, etc. A black feather denoted that an Ojibwa
woman was killed. The marks on their blankets had similar
meanings.[59] Peter Carder, an Englishman captive among the
Brazilians, wrote:
"This is to be noted, that how many men these savages
doe kill, so many holes they will have in their visage,
beginning first in the nether lippe, then in the
cheekes, thirdly, in both their eye-browes, and lastly
in their eares."[60]
Of the Abipones we read that,
"distrusting their courage, strength, and arms, they
think that paint of various colors, feathers, shouting,
trumpets, and other instruments of terror will forward
their success."[61]
Fancourt(314) says of the natives of Yucatan that "in their wars, and
when they went to their sacrificial dances and festivals, they had
their faces, arms, thighs, and legs painted and naked." In Fiji the
men bore a hole through the nose and put in a couple of feathers, nine
to twelve inches long, which spread out over each side of the face
like immense mustaches. They do this "to give themselves a fiercer
appearance."[62] Waitz notes that in Tahiti mothers compressed the
heads of their infant boys "to make their aspect more terrible and
thus turn them into more formidable warriors." The Tahitians, as Ellis
informs us, "went to battle in their best clothes, sometimes perfumed
with fragrant oil, and adorned with flowers."[63] Of the wild tribes
in Kondhistan, too, we read that "it is only, however, when they go
out to battle ... that they adorn themselves with all their
finery."[64]
AMULETS, CHARMS, MEDICINES.
The African tribes along the Congo wear on their bodies
"the horn, the hoof, the hair, the teeth, and the bones of
all manner of quadrupeds; the feathers, beaks, claws,
skulls, and bones of birds; the heads and skins of snakes;
the shells and fins of fishes, pieces of old iron, copper,
wood, seeds of plants, and sometimes a mixture of all, or
most of them, strung together."
Unsophisticated travellers speak of these things as "ornaments"
indicating the strange "sense of beauty" of these natives. In reality,
they have nothing to do with the sense of beauty, but are merely a
manifestation of savage superstition. In Tuckey's _Zaire_, from which
the above citation is made (375), they are properly classed as
fetiches, and the information is added that in the choice of them the
natives consult the fetich men. A picture is given in the book of one
appendage to the dress "which the weaver considered an infallible
charm against poison." Others are "considered as protection against
the effects of thunder and lightning, against the attacks of the
alligator, the hippopotamus, snakes, lions, tigers," etc., etc.
Winstanley relates (II., 68) that in Abyssinia
"the Mateb, or baptismal cord, is _de rigueur_, and worn
when nothing else is. It formed the only clothing of the
young at Seramba, but was frequently added to with amulets,
sure safeguards against sorcery."
Concerning the Bushmen, Mackenzie says:
"Certain marks on the face, or bits of wood on his hair, or
tied around his neck, are medicines or charms to be taken in
sickness, or proximity to lions, or in other circumstances
of danger."[65]
Bastian relates that in many parts of Africa every infant is tattooed
on the belly, to dedicate it thereby to a certain fetich.[66] The
inland negroes mark all sorts of patterns on their skins, partly "to
expel evil influences."[67] The Nicaraguans punctured and scarified
their tongues because, as they explained to Oviedo, it would bring
them luck in bargains. The Peruvians, says Cieza, pulled out three
teeth of each jaw in children of very tender age because that would be
acceptable to the gods; and Garcilassa notes that the Peruvians pulled
out a hair of an eyebrow when making an offering. Jos. d'Acosta also
describes how the Peruvians pulled out eyelashes and eyebrows and
offered them to the deities. The natives of Yucatan, according to
Fancourt, wore their hair long as "a sign of idolatry."[68] When
Franklin relates that Chippewayan Indians "prize pictures very highly
and esteem any they can get," we seem to have come across a genuine
esthetic sense, till we read that it makes no difference how badly
they are executed, and that they are valued "as efficient charms."[69]
All Abipones of both sexes
"pluck up the hair from the forehead to the crown of the
head, so that the forepart of the head is bald almost for
the space of two inches; this baldness they ... account a
religious mark of their nation."[70]
The Point Barrow Eskimos believe that clipping their hair on the back
of the head in a certain way "prevents snow-blindness in the spring."
These Eskimos painted their faces when they went whaling, and the
Kadiaks did so before any important undertaking, such as crossing a
wide strait, chasing the sea-otter, etc.[71] In regard to the amulets
or charms worn by Eskimos, Crantz says:
"These powerful preventives consist in a bit of old wood
hung around their necks, or a stone, or a bone, or a beak or
claw of a bird, or else a leather strap tied round their
forehead, breast, or arm."[72]
Marcano says that "the Indians of French Guiana paint themselves in
order to drive away the devil when they start on a journey or for
war."[73] In his treatise on the religion of the Dakotas, Lynd
remarks:
"Scarlet or red is the religious color for sacrifices....
The use of paint, the Dakotas aver, was taught them by the
gods. Unkteh taught the first medicine men how to paint
themselves when they worshipped him and what colors to use.
Takushkanshkan (the moving god) whispers to his favorites
what colors to use. Heyoka hovers over them in dreams, and
informs them how many streaks to employ upon their bodies
and the tinge they must have. No ceremony of worship is
complete without the wakan, or sacred application of
paint."[74]
By the Tasmanians "the bones of relatives were worn around the neck,
less, perhaps, as ornaments than as charms."[75] The Ainos of Japan
and the Fijians held that tattooing was a custom introduced by the
gods. Fijian women believed "that to be tattooed is a passport to the
other world, where it prevents them from being persecuted by their own
sex."[76] An Australian custom ordained that every person must have
the septum of the nose pierced and must wear in it a piece of bone, a
reed, or the stalks of some grass. This was not done, however, with
the object of adorning the person, but for superstitious reasons: "the
old men used to predict to those who were averse to this mutilation
all kinds of evil." The sinner, they said, would suffer in the next
world by having to eat filth. "To avoid a punishment so horrible, each
one gladly submitted, and his or her nose was pierced accordingly."
(Brough Smyth, 274.) Wilhelmi says that in the Northwest the men place
in the head-band behind the ears pieces of wood decorated with very
thin shavings and looking like plumes of white feathers. They do this
"on occasions of rejoicings and when engaged in their mystic
ceremonies." Nicaraguans trace the custom of flattening the heads of
children to instructions from the gods, and Pelew Islanders believed
that to win eternal bliss the septum of the nose must be perforated,
while Eskimo girls were induced to submit to having long stitches made
with a needle and black thread on several parts of the face by the
superstitious fear that if they refused they would, after death, be
turned into train tubs and placed under the lamps in heaven.[77] In
order that the ghost of a Sioux Indian may travel the ghost road in
safety, it is necessary for each Dakota during his life to be tattooed
in the middle of the forehead or on the wrists. If found without
these, he is pushed from a cloud or cliff and falls back to this
world.[78] In Australia, the Kurnai medicine men were supposed to be
able to communicate with ghosts only when they had certain bones
thrust through the nose.[79] The _American Anthropologist_ contains
(July, 1889) a description of the various kinds of face-coloring to
indicate degrees in the Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa. These
Indians frequently tattooed temples, forehead, or cheeks of sufferers
from headache or toothache, in the belief that this would expel the
demons who cause the pain. In Congo, scarifications are made on the
back for therapeutic reasons; and in Timor-Laut (Malay Archipelago),
both sexes tattooed themselves "in imitation of immense smallpox
marks, in order to ward off that disease."[80]
MOURNING LANGUAGE
Australian women of the Port Lincoln tribes paint a ring around each
eye and a streak over the stomach, and men mark their breasts with
stripes and paints in different patterns. An ignorant observer, or an
advocate of the sexual selection theory, would infer that these
"decorations" are resorted to for the purpose of ornamentation, to
please individuals of the opposite sex. But Wilhelmi, who understood
the customs of these tribes, explains that these divers stripes and
paints have a practical object, being used to "indicate the different
degrees of relationship between a dead person and the mourners."[81]
In South Australia widows in mourning "shave their heads, cover them
with a netting, and plaster them with pipe-clay"[82]. A white band
around the brow is also used as a badge of mourning[83]. Taplin says
that the Narrinyeri adorn the bodies of the dead with bright-red
ochre, and that this is a wide-spread custom in Australia. A Dyeri, on
being asked why he painted red and white spots on his skin, answered:
"Suppose me no make-im, me tumble down too; that one [the corpse]
growl along-a-me." A further "ornament" of the women on these
occasions consists in two white streaks on the arm to indicate that
they have eaten some of the fat of the dead, according to their
custom. (Smyth, I., 120.) In some districts the mourners paint
themselves white on the death of a blood relation, and black when a
relative by marriage dies. The corpse is often painted red. Red is
used too when boys are initiated into manhood, and with most tribes it
is also the war-color. Hence it is not strange that they should
undertake long journeys to secure fresh supplies of ochre: for war,
mourning, and superstition are three of the strongest motives of
savage activity. African Bushmen anoint the heads of the dead with a
red powder mixed with melted fat. Hottentots, when mourning, shave
their heads in furrows. Damaras wear a dark-colored skin-cap: a piece
of leather round the neck, to which is attached a piece of ostrich
egg-shell. Coast negroes bury the head of a family in his best clothes
and ornaments, and Dahomans do the same[84]. Schweinfurth says that
"according to the custom, which seems to belong to all Africa, as a
sign of grief the Dinka wear a cord round the neck."[85] Mourning New
Zealanders tie a red cloth round the head or wear headdresses of dark
feathers. New Caledonians cut off their hair and blacken and oil their
faces[85]. Hawaiians cut their hair in various forms, knock out a
front tooth, cut the ears and tattoo a spot on the tongue[86]. The
Mineopies use three coloring substances for painting their bodies; and
by the way they apply them they let it be known whether a person is
ill or in mourning, or going to a festival.[87] In California the
Yokaia widows make an unguent with which they smear a white band two
inches wide all around the edge of the hair[88]. Of the Yukon Indians
of Alaska "some wore hoops of birch wood around the neck and waists,
with various patterns of figures cut on them. These were said to be
emblems of mourning for the dead."[89] Among the Snanaimuq "the face
of the deceased is painted with red and black paint... After the death
of husband or wife the survivor must paint his legs and his blanket
red."[90] Numerous other instances may be found in Mallery, who
remarks that "many objective modes of showing mourning by styles of
paint and markings are known, the significance of which are apparent
when discovered in pictographs."[91]
INDICATIONS OF TRIBE OR RANK
Among the customs which, in Darwin's opinion, show "how widely the
different races of man differ in their taste for the beautiful," is
that of moulding the skull of infants into various unnatural shapes,
in some cases making the head "appear to us idiotic." One would think
that before accepting such a monstrous custom as evidence of any kind
of a sense of beauty, Darwin, and those who expressed the same opinion
before and after him, would have inquired whether there is not some
more rational way of accounting for the admiration of deformed heads
by these races than by assuming that they approved of them for
_esthetic_ reasons. There is no difficulty in finding several
non-esthetic reasons why peculiarly moulded skulls were approved of.
The Nicaraguans, as I have already stated, believed that heads were
moulded in order to make it easier to bear burdens, and the Peruvians
also said they pressed the heads of children to make them healthier
and able to do more work. But vanity--individual or tribal--and
fashion were the principal motives. According to Torquemada, the kings
were the first who had their heads shaped, and afterward permission to
follow their example was granted to others as a special favor. In
their classical work on Peruvian antiquities (31-32) Eivero and
Tschudi describe the skulls they examined., including many varieties
"artificially produced, and differing according to their respective
localities."
"These irregularities were undoubtedly produced by
mechanical causes, and were considered as the _distinctive
marks of families_; for in one Huaca [cemetery] will always
be found the same form of crania; while in another, near by,
the forms are entirely different from those in the first."
The custom of flattening the head was practised by various Indian
tribes, especially in the Pacific States, and Bancroft (I., 180) says
that, "all seem to admire a flattened forehead as _a sign of noble
birth_;" and on p. 228, he remarks:
"Failure properly to mould the cranium of her offspring
gives the Chinook matron the reputation of a lazy and
un-dutiful mother, and subjects the neglected children to
the ridicule of their companions; so despotic is fashion."
The Arab races of Africa alter the shapes of their children's heads
because they are jealous of their noble descent. (Bastian, _D.M_.,
II., 229.)
"The genuine Turkish skull," says Tylor _(Anth.,_ 240),
"is of the broad Tatar form, while the natives of Greece and
Asia Minor have oval skulls, which gives the reason why at
Constantinople it became the fashion to mould the babies'
skulls round, so that they grew up with the broad head of
the conquering race. Relics of such barbarism linger on in
the midst of civilization, and not long ago a French
physician surprised the world by the fact that nurses in
Normandy were still giving the children's heads a sugar-loaf
shape by bandages and a tight cap, while in Brittany they
preferred to press it round."
Knocking out some of the teeth, or filing them into certain shapes, is
another widely prevalent custom, for which it is inadmissible to
invoke a monstrous and problematic esthetic taste as long as it can be
accounted for on simpler and less disputable grounds, such as vanity,
the desire for tribal distinction, or superstition. Holub found (II.,
259), that in one of the Makololo tribes it was customary to break out
the top incisor teeth, for the reason that it is "only horses that eat
with all their teeth, and that men ought not to eat like horses." In
other cases it is not contempt for animals but respect for them that
accounts for the knocking out of teeth. Thus Livingstone relates
_(L. Tr_., II., 120), in speaking of a boy from Lomaine, that "the
upper teeth extracted seemed to say that the tribe have cattle. The
knocking out of the teeth is in imitation of the animals they almost
worship." The Batokas also give as their reason for knocking out their
upper front teeth that they wish to be like oxen. Livingstone tells us
_(Zamb.,_ 115), that the Manganja chip their teeth to resemble those
of the cat or crocodile: which suggests totemism, or superstitious
respect for an animal chosen as an emblem of a tribe. That the
Australian custom of knocking out the upper front teeth at puberty is
part of a religious ceremonial, and not the outcome of a desire to
make the boys attractive to the girls, as Westermarck naïvely assumes
(174, 172), is made certain by the details given in Mallery (1888-89,
513-514), including an excerpt from a manuscript by A.W. Howitt, in
which it is pointed out that the humming instrument kuamas, the
bull-roarer, "has a sacred character with all the Australian tribes;"
and that there are marked on it "two notches, one at each end,
representing the gap left in the upper jaw of the novice after his
teeth have been knocked out during the rites."[92] But perhaps the
commonest motive for altering the teeth is the desire to indicate
tribal connections. "Various tribes," says Tylor _(Anthr._ 240),
"grind their front teeth to points, or cut them away in angular
patterns, so that in Africa and elsewhere a man's tribe is often known
by the cut of his teeth."
Peculiar arrangements of the hair also have misled unwary observers
into fancying that they were made for beauty's sake and to attract the
opposite sex, when in reality they were tribal marks or had other
utilitarian purposes, serving as elements in a language of signs, etc.
Frazer, _e.g._, notes (27) that the turtle clan of the Omaha Indians
cuts off all the hair from a boy's head except six locks which hang
down in imitation of the legs, head, and tail of a turtle; while the
Buffalo clan arranges two locks of hair in imitation of horns. "Nearly
all the Indian tribes," writes Mallery (419), "have peculiarities of
the arrangement of the hair and of some article of apparel or
accoutrement by which they can always be distinguished." Heriot
relates (294) that among the Indians
"the fashion of trimming the hair varies in a great degree,
and an enemy may by this means be discovered at a
considerable distance." "The Pueblos generally, when
accurate and particular in delineation [pictographs],
designate the women of that tribe by a huge coil of hair
over either ear. This custom prevails also among the
Coyotèro Apaches, the woman wearing the hair in coil to
denote a virgin or an unmarried person, while the coil is
absent in the case of a married woman."
By the Mokis, maidenhood is indicated by wearing the hair as a disk on
each side of the head. (Mallery, 231-32.) Similar usages on other
continents might be cited.
Besides these arbitrary modifications of the skull and the teeth, and
the divers arrangements of the hair, there are various other ways in
which the lower races indicate tribal connection, rank, or other
conditions. Writing about negroes Burton says _(Abeok.,_ I., 106),
that lines, welts, and all sorts of skin patterns are used, partly for
superstitious reasons, partly to mark the different tribes and
families. "A volume would not suffice to explain all the marks in
detail." Of the Dahomans, Forbes says (I., 28), "that _according to
rank and wealth_ anklets and armlets of all metals, and necklaces of
glass, coral, and Popae beads, are worn by both sexes." Livingstone
relates _(Mis. Trav_., 276) that the copper rings worn on their ankles
by the chiefs of Londa were so large and heavy that they seriously
inconvenienced them in walking. That this custom was entirely an
outcome of vanity and emulation, and not a manifestation of the
esthetic sense, is made clear by the further observations of
Livingstone. Men who could not afford so many of these copper rings
would still, he found, strut along as if they had them. "That is the
way," he was informed, "in which they show off their lordship in these
parts." Among the Mojave Indians "nose-jewels designate a man of
wealth and rank," and elaborate headdresses of feathers are the
insignia of the chiefs[93]. Champlain says that among the Iroquois
those who wore three large plumes were chiefs. In Thurn says (305)
that each of the Guiana tribes makes its feather head-dresses of
special colors; and Martins has the following regarding the Brazilian
Indians: "Commonly all the members of a tribe, or a horde, or a
family, agree to wear certain ornaments or signs as characteristic
marks." Among these are various ornaments of feathers on the head,
pieces of wood, stones, or shells, in the ears, the nose, and lips,
and especially tattoo marks.
VAIN DESIRE TO ATTRACT ATTENTION
Thus we see that an immense number of mutilations of the body and
alleged "decorations" of it are not intended by these races as things
of beauty, but have special meanings or uses in connection with
protection, war, superstition, mourning, or the desire to mark
distinctions between the tribes, or degrees of rank within one tribe
or horde. Usually the "ornamentations" are prescribed for all members
of a tribe of the same sex, and their acceptance is rigidly enforced.
At the same time there is scope for variety in the form of deviations
or exaggerations, and these are resorted to by ambitious individuals
to attract attention to their important selves, and thus to gratify
vanity, which, in the realm of fashion, is a thing entirely apart
from--and usually antagonistic to--the sense of beauty[94]. At
Australian dances various colors are used with the object of
attracting attention. Especially fantastic are their "decorations" at
the corroborees, when the bodies of the men are painted with white
streaks that make them look like skeletons. Bulmer believed that their
object was to "make themselves as terrible as possible to the
beholders and not beautiful or attractive," while Grosse thinks (65)
that as these dances usually take place by moonlight, the object of
the stripes is to make the dancers more conspicuous--two explanations
which are not inconsistent with each other.
Fry relates[95] that the Khonds adorn their hair till they may be seen
"intoxicated with vanity on its due decoration." Hearne (306) saw
Indians who had a single lock of hair that "when let down would trail
on the ground as they walked." Anderson expresses himself with
scientific precision when he writes (136) that in Fiji the men "who
like to _attract the attention_ of the opposite sex, don their best
plumage." The attention may be attracted by anything that is
conspicuous, entirely apart from the question whether it be regarded
as a thing of beauty or not. Bourne makes the very suggestive
statement (69-70) that in Patagonia the beautiful plumage of the
ostrich was not appreciated, but allowed to blow all over the country,
while the natives adorned themselves with beads and cheap brass and
copper trinkets. We may therefore assume that in those cases where
feathers are used for "adornment" it is not because their beauty is
appreciated but because custom has given them a special significance.
In many cases they indicate that the wearer is a person of rank--chief
or medicine man--as we saw in the preceding pages. We also saw that
special marks in feathers among Dakotas indicated that the wearer had
taken a human life, which, more than anything else, excites the
admiration of savage women; so that what fascinates them in such a
case is not the feather itself but the deed it stands for.
Panlitzschke informs us (_E.N.O.Afr.,_ chap. ii.), that among the
African Somali and Gallas every man who had killed someone, boastfully
wore an ostrich feather on his head to call attention to his deed. The
Danâkil wore these feathers for the same purpose, adding ivory rods in
their ear-lobes and fastening a bunch of white horsehair to their
shield. A strip of red silk round the forehead served the same
purpose. Lumholtz, describing a festival dance in Australia (237),
says that some of the men hold in their mouths tufts of talegalla
feathers "for the purpose of giving themselves a savage look." By some
Australians bunches of hawk's or eagle's feathers are worn "either
when fighting or dancing, and also used as a fan" (Brough Smyth, I.,
281-282), which suggests the thought that the fantastic head-dresses
of feathers, etc., often seen in warm countries, may be worn as
protection against the sun[96].
I doubt, too, whether the lower races are able to appreciate flowers
esthetically as we do, apart from their fragrance, which endears them
to some barbarians of the higher grades. Concerning Australian women
we find it recorded by Brough Smyth (I., 270) that they seem to have
no love of flowers, and do not use them to adorn their persons. A New
Zealander explained his indifference to flowers by declaring that they
were "not good to eat."[97] Other Polynesians were much given to
wearing flowers on the head and body; but whether this was for
_esthetic_ reasons seems to me doubtful on account of the revelations
made by various missionaries and others. In Ellis, _e.g._ (_P.R._, I.,
114), we read that in Tahiti the use of flowers in the hair, and
fragrant oil, has been in a great degree discontinued, "partly from
the connection of these ornaments with the evil practices to which
they were formerly addicted."
OBJECTS OF TATTOOING
So far tattooing has been mentioned only incidentally; but as it is
one of the most widely prevalent methods of primitive personal
"decoration" a few pages must be devoted to it in order to ascertain
whether it is true that it is one of those ornamentations which, as
Darwin would have us believe, help to determine the marriages of
mankind, or, as Westermarck puts it, "men and women began to... tattoo
themselves chiefly in order to make themselves attractive to the
opposite sex--that they might court successfully, or be courted." We
shall find that, on the contrary, tattooing has had from the earliest
recorded times more than a dozen practical purposes, and that its use
as a stimulant of the passion of the opposite sex probably never
occurred to a savage until it was suggested to him by a philosophizing
visitor.
Twenty-four centuries ago Herodotus not only noted that the Thracians
had punctures on their skins, but indicated the reason for them: they
are, he said, "a mark of nobility: to be without them is a testimony
of mean descent."[98] This use of skin disfigurements prevails among
the lower races to the present day, and it is only one of many
utilitarian and non-esthetic functions subserved by them. In his
beautifully illustrated volume on Maori tattooing, Major-General
Robley writes:
"Native tradition has it that their first settlers used to
mark their faces for battle with charcoal, and that the
lines on the face thus made were the beginnings of the
tattoo. To save the trouble of this constantly painting
their warlike decorations on the face, the lines were made
permanent. Hence arose the practice of carving the face and
the body with dyed incisions. The Rev. Mr. Taylor ...
assumes that the chiefs being of a lighter race, and having
to fight side by side with slaves of darker hues, darkened
their faces in order to appear of the same race."
TATTOOING ON PACIFIC ISLANDS
When Captain Cook visited New Zealand (1769) he was much interested in
the tattooing of the Maoris, and noted that each tribe seemed to have
a different custom in regard to it; thus calling attention to one of
its main functions as a means to distinguish the tribes from each
other. He described the different patterns on divers parts of the body
used by various tribes, and made the further important observation
that "by adding to the tattooing they grow old and honorable at the
same time." The old French navigator d'Urville found in the Maori
tattooing an analogy to European heraldry, with this difference: that
whereas the coat-of-arms attests the merits of ancestors, the Maori
moko illustrates the merits of the persons decorated with it. It makes
them, as Robley wittily says, "men of mark." One chief explained that
a certain mark just over his nose was his name; it served the purposes
of a seal in signing documents. It has been suggested that the body of
a warrior may have been tattooed for the sake of identification in
case the head was separated from it; for the Maoris carried on a
regular trade in heads. Rutherford, who was held for a long time as a
captive, said that only the great ones of the tribe were allowed to
decorate the forehead, upper lip, and chin. Naturally such marks were
"a source of pride" (a sign of rank), and "the chiefs were very
pleased to show the tattooing on their bodies." To have an untattooed
face was to be "a poor nobody." Ellis (_P.R._, III., 263) puts the
matter graphically by saying the New Zealander's tattooing answers the
purpose of the particular stripe or color of the Highlander's plaid,
marking the clan or tribe to which they belong, and is also said to be
employed as "a means of enabling them to distinguish their enemies in
battle."
In his great work on Borneo (II., 83), Roth cites Brooke Low, who said
that tattooing was a custom of recent introduction: "I have seen a few
women with small patterns on their breasts, but they were the
exception to the rule and were not regarded with favor." Burns says
that the Kayan men do not tattoo, but
"many of the higher classes have small figures of stars,
beasts, or birds on various parts of their body, chiefly the
arms, distinctive of rank. The highest mark is that of
having the back of the hands colored or tattooed, which is
only conferred on the brave in battle."
St. John says that "a man is supposed to tattoo one finger only, if he
has been present when an enemy has been killed, but tattoos hand and
fingers if he has taken an enemy's head." Among the Ida'an a man makes
a mark on his arm for each enemy slain. One man was seen with
thirty-seven such stripes on the arm. A successful head-hunter is also
allowed to "decorate" his ears with the canine teeth of a Bornean
leopard. "In some cases tatu marks appear to be used as a means of
communicating a fact," writes Roth (II., 291). Among the Kayan it
indicates rank. Slaughter of an enemy, or mere murder of a slave, are
other reasons for tattooing. "A Murut, having run away from the enemy,
was tatued on his back. So that we may justly conclude that tatuing
among the natives of Borneo is one method of writing." Among the Dusun
the men that took heads generally had a tattoo mark for each one on
the arm, and were looked upon as very brave, though their victim might
have been only a woman or a child (159).
In the fifth volume of Waitz-Gerland's _Anthropologie_ (Pt. II.,
64-67), a number of authors are cited testifying that in the
Micronesian Archipelago the natives of each island had special kinds
of tattoo marks on different parts of the body, to distinguish them
from others. These marks were named after the islands. The
Micronesians themselves attached also a religious significance to
these marks. The natives of Tobi believed that their island would be
destroyed if the English visitors who came among them were not at once
tattooed. Only those completely marked could enter the temple. The men
were more tattooed than the women, who were regarded as inferiors.
In the sixth volume of Waitz-Gerland (30-40) is gathered a large mass
of evidence, all of which shows that on the Polynesian islands, too,
tattooing was indulged in, not for aesthetic and amorous but for
religious and practical reasons. In Tonga it was a mark of rank, not
permitted to common people or to slaves. Not to be tattooed was
considered improper. In the Marquesas the older and more distinguished
a man, the more he was tattooed. Married women were distinguished by
having marks on the right hand and left foot. In some cases tattoo
marks were used as signs to call to mind certain battles or festivals.
A woman in Ponapé had marks for all her successive husbands made on
her arm--everything and anything, in fact, except the purpose of
decorating for the sake of attracting the other sex. Gerland (33-40)
makes out a very strong case for the religions origin of tattooing,
which he aptly compares to our confirmation.
In Samoa the principal motive of tattooing seems to have been
licentiousness. It was prohibited by the chiefs on account of the
obscene practices always connected with it, and there is a legend of
the incestuous designs of two divine brothers on their sister which
was successful.
"Tattooing thus originated among the gods and was first
practised by the children of Taaroa, their principal deity.
In imitation of their example, and for the accomplishment of
the same purpose, it was practised among men." (Ellis,
_P.R._, I., 262.)
TATTOOING IN AMERICA
On the American continent we find tattooing practised from north to
south, from east to west, for the most diverse reasons, among which
the desire to facilitate courtship is never even hinted at. The
Eskimos, about the age of puberty, apply paint and tattooing to their
faces, cut holes and insert plugs or labrets. The object of these
disfigurements is indicated by Bancroft (I., 48): "Different tribes,
and different ranks of the same tribe, have each their peculiar form
of tattooing." Moreover, "these operations are supposed to possess
some significance other than that of mere ornament. Upon the occasion
of piercing the lip, for instance, a religious feast is given." John
Murdoch relates (Mallery, 396) that the wife of an Eskimo chief had "a
little mark tattooed in each corner of her mouth, which she said were
'whale marks,' indicating that she was the wife of a successful
whaleman." Of the Kadiaks Bancroft says (72): "The more the female
chin is riddled with holes, the greater the respectability." Among the
Chippewayan Indians Mackenzie found (85) that both sexes had "blue or
black bars, or from one to four straight lines, on their cheeks or
foreheads to distinguish the tribe to which they belong." Swan writes
(Mallery, 1882-83, 67) that
"the tattoo marks of the Haidas are heraldic designs or the
family totem, or crests of the wearers, and are similar to
the carvings depicted in the pillars and monuments around
the homes of the chiefs."
A Haida Indian remarked to Swan (69): "If you were tattooed with the
design of a swan, the Indians would know your family name." It is at
festivals and masquerade performances, says the same writer, that "the
tatoo marks show with the best effect, and the rank and family
connection [are] known by the variety of design," Lafitan reports
(II., 43) regarding the Iroquois and Algonquins that the designs which
they have tattooed on their faces and bodies are employed as
hieroglyphics, writing, and records, to indicate victories, etc. The
designs tattooed on an Indian's face or body distinguish him, he adds,
as we do a family by its armorial bearings.
"In James's Long it is reported that the Omahas are often
neatly tattooed.... The daughters of chiefs and those of
wealthy Indians generally are denoted by a small round spot
tattooed on the forehead."
(Mallery, 1888-89, 395.) Bossu says regarding the practice of
tattooing by the Osages (in 1756): "It is a kind of knighthood to
which they are only entitled by great actions." Blue marks tattooed
upon the chin of a Mojave woman indicate that she is married. The
Serrano Indians near Los Angeles had, as late as 1843, a custom of
having special tattoo marks on themselves which were also made on
trees to indicate the corner boundaries of patches of land. (Mallery,
1882-83, 64, 182.) In his book on the California Indians, Powers
declares (109) that in the Mattoal tribe the men tattoo themselves; in
the others the women alone tattoo. The theory that the women are thus
marked in order that the men may be able to recognize them and redeem
them from captivity seems plausible for the reasons that these Indians
are rent into a great number of divisions and that "the squaws almost
never attempt any ornamental tattooing, but adhere closely to the
plain regulation mark of the tribe." The Hupâ Indians have discovered
another practical use for body-marks. Nearly every man has ten lines
tattooed across the inside of his left arm, and these lines serve as a
measurement of shell-money.
The same non-esthetic motives for tattooing prevail in South and
Central America. In Agassiz's book on Brazil we read (318) concerning
the Mundurucu Indians:
"Major Coutinho tells us that the tattooing _has nothing to
do with individual taste_, but that the pattern is appointed
for both sexes, and is _invariable throughout the tribe_. It
is connected with their caste, the limits of which are very
precise, and with their religion."
The tattooing "is also an indication of aristocracy; a man who
neglected this distinction would not be respected in his tribe."
Concerning the Indians of Guiana we read in Im Thurn (195-96) that
they have small distinctive tribal marks tattooed at the corners of
the mouth or on the arms. Nearly all have "indelibly excised lines"
which are
"scars originally made for _surgical_, not ornamental
purposes." "Some women specially affect certain little
figures, like Chinese characters, which looks as if some
meaning were attached to them, but which the Indians are
either unable or unwilling to explain."
In Nicaragua, as Squire informs us (III., 341), the natives tattooed
themselves to designate by special marks the tribes to which they
belonged; and as regards Yucatan, Landa writes (§ XXI.) that as
tattooing was accompanied by much pain, they thought themselves the
more gallant and strong the more they indulged in it; and that those
who omitted it were sneered at--which gives us still another motive
for tattooing--the fear of being despised and ridiculed for not being
in fashion.
TATTOOING IN JAPAN
Many more similar details might be given regarding the races of
various parts of the world, but the limits of space forbid. But I
cannot resist the temptation to add a citation from Professor
Chamberlain's article on tattooing in his _Things Japanese_, because
it admirably illustrates the diversity of the motives that led to the
practice. A Chinese trader, "early in the Christian era," Chamberlain
tells us, "wrote that the men all tattoo their faces and ornament
their bodies with designs, differences of rank being indicated by the
position and size of the patterns." "But from the dawn of regular
history," Chamberlain adds,
"far down into the middle ages, tattooing seems to have been
confined to criminals. It was used as branding was formerly
in Europe, whence probably the contempt still felt for
tattooing by the Japanese upper classes. From condemned
desperadoes to bravoes at large is but a step. The
swashbucklers of feudal times took to tattooing, apparently
because some blood and thunder scene of adventure, engraven
on their chest and limbs, helped to give them a terrific air
when stripped for any reason of their clothes. Other classes
whose avocations led them to baring their bodies in public
followed--the carpenters, for instance, and running grooms;
and the tradition remained of ornamenting almost the entire
body and limbs with a hunting, theatrical, or other showy
scene."
Shortly after 1808 "the government made tattooing a penal offence."
It will be noticed that in this account the fantastic notion that the
custom was ever indulged in for the purpose of beautifying the body in
order to attract the other sex is, as in all the other citations I
have made, not even hinted at. The same is true in the summary made by
Mallery of the seventeen purposes of tattooing he found. No. 13 is,
indeed, "to charm the other sex;" but it is "magically," which is a
very different thing from esthetically. I append the summary (418):
"1, to distinguish between free and slave, without reference
to the tribe of the latter; 2, to distinguish between a high
and low status in the same tribe; 3, as a certificate of
bravery exhibited by supporting the ordeal of pain; 4, as
marks of personal prowess, particularly; 5, as a record of
achievements in war; 6, to show religious symbols; 7, as a
therapeutic remedy for disease; 8, as a prophylactic against
disease; 9, as a brand of disgrace; 10, as a token of a
woman's marriage, or, sometimes, 11, of her marriageable
condition; 12, identification of the person, not as a
tribesman, but as an individual; 13, to charm the other sex
magically; 14, to inspire fear in the enemy; 15, to
magically render the skin impenetrable to weakness; 16, to
bring good fortune, and, 17, as the device of a secret
society."
SCARIFICATION.
Dark races, like the Africans and Australians, do not practise
tattooing, because the marks would not show conspicuously on their
black skins. They therefore resort to the process of raising scars by
cutting the skin with flint or a shell and then rubbing in earth, or
the juice of certain plants, etc. The result is a permanent scar, and
these scars are arranged by the different tribes in different
patterns, on divers parts of the body. In Queensland the lines,
according to Lumholtz (177),
"always denote a certain order of rank, and here it depends
upon age. Boys under a certain age are not decorated; but in
time they receive a few cross-stripes upon their chests and
stomachs. The number of stripes is gradually increased, and
when the subjects have grown up, a half-moon-shaped line is
cut around each nipple."
The necessity for such distinctive marks on the body is particularly
great among the Australians, because they are subdivided in the most
complicated ways and have an elaborate code of sexual permissions and
prohibitions. Therefore, as Frazer suggests (38),
"a chief object of these initiation ceremonies was to teach
the youths with whom they might or might not have
connection, and to put them in possession of a visible
language, ... by means of which they might be able to
communicate their totems to, and to ascertain the totems of,
strangers whose language they did not understand."
In Africa, too, as we have seen, the scars are used as tribal names,
and for other practical purposes. Holub (7) found that the Koranna of
Central South Africa has three cuts on the chest. They confessed to
him that they indicated a kind of free-masonry, insuring their being
well received by Koranna everywhere. On the Congo, scarifications are
made on the back for therapeutic reasons, and on the face as tribal
marks. (Mallery, 417; H. Ward, 136.) Bechuana priests make long scars
on a warrior's thigh to indicate that he has slain an enemy in battle.
(Lichtenstein, II., 331.) According to d'Albertis the people of New
Guinea use some scars as a sign that they have travelled (I., 213).
And so on, _ad infinitum_.
ALLEGED TESTIMONY OF NATIVES
In face of this imposing array of facts revealing the non-esthetic
character of primitive personal "decorations," what have the advocates
of the sexual selection theory to say? Taking Westermarck as their
most erudite and persuasive spokesman, we find him placing his
reliance on four things: (1) the practical ignoring of the vast
multitude of facts contradicting his theory; (2) the alleged testimony
of a few savages; (3) the testimony of some of their visitors; (4) the
alleged fact that "the desire for self-decoration is strongest at the
beginning of the age of puberty," the customs of ornamenting,
mutilating, painting, and tattooing being "practised most zealously at
that period of life." Concerning (1) nothing more need be said, as the
large number of decisive facts I have collected exposes and
neutralizes that stratagem. The other three arguments must be briefly
considered.
A native of Lukunor being asked by Mertens what was the meaning of
tattooing, answered: "It has the same object as your clothes; that is,
to please the women," In reply to the question why he wore his
ornaments, an Australian answered Bulmer: "In order to look well and
make himself agreeable to the women," (Brough Smyth, I., 275.) To one
who has studied savages not only anthropologically but
psychologically, these stories have an obvious cock-and-bull aspect. A
native of the Caroline Islands would have been as incapable of
originating that philosophical comparison between the object of our
clothes and of his tattooing as he would have been of writing
Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_. Human beings in his stage of evolution
never consciously reflect on the reasons of things, and considerations
of comparative psychology or esthetics are as much beyond his mental
powers as problems in algebra or trigonometry. That such a sailor's
yarn could be accepted seriously in an anthropologic treatise shows
that anthropology is still in its cradle. The same is true of that
Australian's alleged answer. The Australian is unequal to the mental
effort of counting up to ten, and, like other savages, is easily
fatigued by the simplest questions[99]. It is quite likely that Bulmer
asked that native whether he ornamented himself "in order to look well
and make himself agreeable to the women," and that the native answered
"yes" merely to gratify him or to get rid of the troublesome question.
The books of missionaries are full of such cases, and no end of
confusion has been created in science by such false "facts." The
answer given by that native is, moreover, utterly opposed to all the
well-attested details I have given in the preceding pages regarding
the real motives of Australians in "decorating" themselves; and to
those facts I may now add this crushing testimony from Brough Smyth
(_I.,_ 270):
"The proper arrangement of their apparel, the ornamentation
of their persons by painting, and attention to deportment,
were important only when death struck down a warrior, when
war was made, and when they assembled for a corroboree. In
ordinary life little attention was given to the ornamenting
of the person."
MISLEADING TESTIMONY OF VISITORS
"The Australians throughout the continent scar their persons, as Mr.
Curr assures us, only as a means of decoration," writes Westermarck
(169), and in the pages preceding and following he cites other
evidence of the same sort, such as Carver's assertion that the
Naudowessies paint their faces red and black, "which they esteem as
greatly ornamental;" Tuckey's assumption that the natives of the Congo
file their teeth and raise scars on the skin for purposes of ornament
and principally "with the idea of rendering themselves agreeable to
the women;" Kiedel's assertion, that in the Tenimber group the lads
decorate their locks with leaves, flowers, and feathers, "only in
order to please the women;" Taylor's statement that in New Zealand it
was the great ambition of the young to have fine tattooed faces, "both
to render themselves attractive to the ladies, and conspicuous in
war," etc.
Beginning with Curr, it must be conceded that he is one of the leading
authorities on Australia, the author of a four-volume treatise on that
country and its natives. Yet his testimony on the point in question
happens to be as worthless as that of the most hasty globe-trotter,
partly because he had evidently paid little attention to it, and
partly also, I fancy, because of the fatal tendency of men of science
to blunder as soon as they touch the domain of esthetics. What he
really wrote (II., 275) is that Chatfield had informed him that scars
were made by the natives on the right thigh "for the purpose of
denoting the particular class to which they belong." This Curr doubts,
"without further evidence," because it would conflict with the custom
prevalent throughout the continent, "as far as known, which is to make
these marks for ornament only." Now this is a pure assumption of
Curr's, based on a preconceived notion, and contradicted by the
specific evidence of a number of explorers who, as even Grosse is
obliged to admit (75), "unanimously account for a part at least of the
scars as tribal marks."[100]
If so eminent an authority as Curr can err so grievously, it is
obvious that the testimony of other writers and casual observers must
be accepted with extreme caution. Europeans and Americans are so
accustomed to regard personal decorations as attempts to beautify the
appearance that when they see them in savages there is a natural
disposition to attribute them to the same motive. They do not realize
that they are dealing with a most subtle psychological question. The
chief source of confusion lies in their failure to distinguish between
what is admired as a thing of beauty as such and what pleases them for
other reasons. As Professor Sully has pointed out in his _Handbook of
Psychology_ (337):
"At the beginning of life there is no clear separation of
what is beautiful from what is simply pleasing to the
individual. As in the history of the race, so in that of the
individual, the sense of beauty slowly extricates itself
from pleasurable consciousness in general, and
differentiates itself from the sense of what _is personally
useful and agreeable_."
Bearing in mind this very important distinction between what is
beautiful and what is merely pleasing because of its being useful and
agreeable, we see at once that the words "decorative," "ornamental,"
"attractive," "handsome," etc., are constantly used by writers on this
subject in a misleading and question-begging way. We can hardly blame
a man like Barrington for writing (11) that among the natives of
Botany Bay "scars are, by both sexes, deemed highly ornamental"; but a
scientific author who quotes such a sentence ought to be aware that
the evidence did not justify Barrington in using any word but
_pleasing_ in place of "ornamental," because the latter implies and
takes for granted the esthetic sense, the existence of which is the
very thing to be proved. This remark applies generally to the evidence
of this kind which Westermarck has so industriously collected, and
which, on account of this undiscriminating, question-begging
character, is entirely worthless. In all these cases the fact is
overlooked that the "decorations" of one sex may be agreeable to the
other for reasons that have nothing to do with the sense of beauty.
Briefly summed up, Westermarck's theory is that in painting,
tattooing, and otherwise decorating his person, primitive man's
original and conscious object was to beautify himself for the sake of
gaining an advantage in courtship; whereas my theory is that all these
decorations originally subserved useful purposes alone, and that even
where they subsequently may have served in some instances as means to
please the women, this was not as things of beauty but indirectly and
unintentionally through their association with rank, wealth,
distinction in war, prowess, and manly qualities in general. When
Dobrizhoffer says (II., 12) that the Abipones, "more ambitious to
be dreaded by their enemies than to be loved, to terrify than attract
beholders, think the more they are scarred and sunburnt, the
_handsomer_ they are," he illustrates glaringly the slovenly and
question-begging use of terms to which I have just referred; for, as
his own reference to being loved and to attracting beholders shows, he
does not use the word "handsome" in an esthetic sense, but as a
synonyme for what is pleasing or worthy of approval on other grounds.
If the scars of these Indians do please the women it is not because
they are considered beautiful, but because they are tokens of martial
prowess. To a savage woman nothing is so useful as manly valor, and
therefore nothing so agreeable as the signs of it. In that respect the
average woman's nature has not changed. The German high-school girl
admires the scars in the face of a "corps-student," not, certainly,
because she considers them beautiful, but because they stand for a
daredevil, masculine spirit which pleases her.
When the Rev. R. Taylor wrote (321) that among the New Zealanders "to
have fine tattooed faces was the great ambition of the young, both to
render themselves attractive to the ladies and conspicuous in war," he
would have shown himself a better philosopher if he had written that
by making themselves conspicuous in war with their tattooing they also
make themselves attractive to the "ladies." That the sense of beauty
is not concerned here becomes obvious when we include Robley's
testimony (28, 15) that a Maori chief's great object was to excite
fear among enemies, for which purpose in the older days he "rendered
his countenance as terrible as possible with charcoal and red ochre";
while in more recent times,
"not only to become more terrible in war, when fighting was
carried on at close quarters, but to appear more
distinguished and attractive to the opposite sex, must
certainly be included"
among the objects of tattooing. It is hardly necessary to point out
that if we accept the sexual selection theory this expert testimony
lands us in insuperable difficulty; for it is clearly impossible that
on the same island, and in the same race, the painting and tattooing
of the face should have the effect of terrifying the men and of
appearing beautiful to the women. But if we discard the beauty
theory and follow my suggestion, we have no difficulty whatever. Then
we may grant that the facial daubs or skin mutilations may seem
terrible or hideous to an enemy and yet please the women, because the
women do not regard them as things of beauty, but as distinguishing
marks of valiant warriors.
By way of illustrating his maxim that "in every country, in every
race, beauty stimulates passion," Westermarck cites (257) part of a
sentence by Lumholtz (213) to the effect that Australian women take
much notice of a man's face, particularly of the part about the eyes.
He does not cite the rest of the sentence--"and they like to see a
frank and open, _or perhaps, more correctly, a wild expression of
countenance,_" which makes it clear to the reader that what stimulates
the passion of these women is not the lines of beauty in the
[never-washed] faces of these men, but the unbeautiful aspect peculiar
to a wild hunter, ferocious warrior, and intrepid defender of his
home. Their admiration, in other words, is not esthetic, but
instinctively utilitarian.
"DECORATION" AT THE AGE OF PUBERTY
We come now to the principal argument of Westermarck--the alleged fact
that in all parts of the world the desire for self-decoration is
strongest at the beginning of the age of puberty, the customs of
ornamenting, painting, mutilating, and tattooing the person being
practised most zealously at that period. This argument is as futile as
the others, for several reasons. In the first place, it is not true
that in all parts of the world self-decoration is practised most
zealously at that period. More frequently, perhaps, it is begun some
years earlier, before any idea of courtship can have entered the heads
of these children. The Congo cannibals begin the process of scarring
the face at the age of four.[101] Dyak girls are tattooed at
five.[102] The Botocudos begin the mutilating of children's lips at
the age of seven.[103] Eskimo girls are tattooed in their eighth
year,[104] and on the Andaman Islands few children are allowed to pass
their eighth year without scarification.[105] The Damaras chip the
teeth with a flint "when the children are young."[106] The female
Oraons are "all tattooed in childhood."[107] The Tahitians began
tattooing at eight.[108] The Chukchis of Siberia tattoo girls at
nine;[109] and so on in various parts of the world. In the second
place, of the divers personal "decorations" indulged in by the lower
races it is only those that are intended to be of a permanent
character (tattooing, scarring, mutilating) that are made chiefly,
though by no means exclusively[110] about or before the age of
puberty.
All the other methods of "decorating" described in the preceding pages
as being connected with the rites of war, superstition, mourning,
etc., are practised throughout life; and that they constitute by far
the greater proportion of "ornamentations" is evidenced by the
citation I have already made, from Brough Smyth, that the
ornamentation of their persons was considered important by Australians
only in connection with such ceremonies, and that "in ordinary life
little attention was given to the ornamenting of the person"; to which
much similar testimony might be added regarding other races; such as
Kane's (184), regarding the Chinooks: "Painting the face is not much
practised among them, except on extraordinary occasions, such as the
death of a relative, some solemn feast, or going on a war-party;" or
Morgan's (263), that the feather and war dances were "the chief
occasions" when the Iroquois warrior "was desirous to appear in his
best attire," etc.
Again, even if it were true that "the desire for self-decoration is
strongest at the beginning of the age of puberty," it does not by any
means follow that this must be due to the desire to make one's self
attractive to the opposite sex. Whatever their desire may be, the
children have no choice in the matter. As Curr remarks regarding
Australians (11., 51),
"The male must commonly submit, _without hope of escape_, to
have one or more of his teeth knocked out, to have the
septum of his nose pierced, to have certain painful cuttings
made in his skin, ...before he is allowed the rights of
manhood."
There are, however, plenty of reasons why he should desire to be
initiated. What Turner writes regarding the Samoans has a general
application:
"Until a young man was tattooed, he was considered in his
minority. He could not think of marriage, and he was
constantly exposed to taunts and ridicule, as being poor and
of low birth, and as having no right to speak in the society
of men. But as soon as he was tattooed he passed into his
majority, and considered himself entitled to the respect and
privileges of mature years. When a youth, therefore, reached
the age of sixteen, he and his friends were all anxiety that
he should be tattooed."[111]
No one can read the accounts of the initiatory ceremonies of
Australian and Indian boys (convenient summaries of which may be found
in the sixth volume of Waitz-Gerland and in Southey's _Brazil_ III.,
387-88) without becoming convinced that with them, as with the
Samoans, etc., there was no thought of women or courtship. Indeed the
very idea of such a thing involves an absurdity, for, since all the
boys in each tribe were tattooed alike, what advantage could their
marks have secured them? If all men were equally rich, would any woman
ever marry for money? Westermarck accepts (174) seriously the
assertion of one writer that the reason why Australians knock out some
of the teeth of the boys at puberty is because they know "that
otherwise they would run the risk of being refused on account of
ugliness." Now, apart from the childish supposition that Australian
women could allow their amorous inclinations to depend on the presence
or absence of two front teeth, this assertion involves the assumption
that these females can exercise the liberty of choice in the selection
of a mate--an assumption which is contrary to the truth, since all the
authorities on Australia agree on at least one point, which is that
women have absolutely no choice in the selection of a husband, but
have to submit in all cases to the dispositions made by their male
relatives. These Australian women, moreover, perversely act in a
manner utterly inconsistent with the theory of sexual selection. Since
they do not choose, but are chosen, one would naturally expect, in
accordance with that theory, that they would decorate themselves in
order to "stimulate the passion" of the _desirable_ men; but they do
no such thing.
While the men are apt to dress their hair carefully, the women "let
their black locks grow as irregular and tangled as do the Fuegians"
(Grosse, 87); and Buhner says they "did little to improve their
appearance;" while such ornaments as they had "were not much regarded
by the men." (Brough Smyth, I, 275.)[112]
"DECORATION" AS A TEST OF COURAGE
One of the most important reasons why young savages approaching
puberty are eager to receive their "decorations" remains to be
considered. Tattooing, scarring, and mutilating are usually very
painful processes. Now, as all who are familiar with the life of
savages know, there is nothing they admire so much as courage in
enduring torture of any kind. By showing fortitude in bearing the pain
connected with tattooing, etc., these young folks are thus able to win
admiration, gratify their vanity, and show that they are worthy to be
received in the ranks of adults. The Sea Dyaks are proud of their
scars, writes Brooke Low.
"The women often prove the courage and endurance of the
youngsters by placing a lighted ball of tinder in the arm
and letting it burn into the skin. The marks ... are much
valued by the young men as so many proofs of their power of
endurance."
(Roth, II., 80.) Here we have an illustration which explains in the
most simple way why scars _please_ both the men and the women, without
making necessary the grotesque assumption that either sex admires them
as things of beauty. To take another case, equally eloquent: Bossu
says of the Osage Indians that they suffer the pain of tattooing with
pleasure in order to pass for men of courage. If one of them should
have himself marked without having previously distinguished himself in
battle, he would be degraded and looked upon as a coward, unworthy of
such an honor. (Mallery, 1889-90, 394.)
Grosse is inclined to think (78) that it is in the male only that
courage is expected and admired, but he is mistaken, as we may see,
_e.g._, in the account given by Dobrizhoffer (II., 21) of the
tattooing customs of the Abipones, whom he studied so carefully. The
women, he says,
"have their face, breast, and arms covered with black
figures of various shapes, so that they present the
appearance of a Turkish carpet." "This savage ornament is
purchased with blood and many groans."
The thorns used to puncture the skin are poisonous, and after the
operation the girl has her eyes, cheeks, and lips so horribly swelled
that she "looks like a Stygian fury." If she groans while undergoing
the torture, or shows signs of pain in her face, the old woman who
operates on her exclaims, in a rage: "You will die single, be assured.
Which of our heroes would think _so cowardly a girl_ worthy to be his
wife?" Such courage, Dobrizhoffer explains further, is admired in a
girl because it makes her "prepared to bear the pains of parturition
in time." In some cases vanity supplies an additional motive why the
girls should submit to the painful operation with fortitude; for those
of them who "are most pricked and painted you may know to be of high
rank."
Here again we see clearly that the tattooing is admired for other than
esthetic reasons, and we realize how foolish it is to philosophize
about the peculiar "taste" of these Indians in admiring a girl who
looks like "a Turkish carpet" or "a Stygian fury." If they had even
the rudiments of a sense of beauty they would not indulge in such
disgusting disfigurements.
MUTILATION, FASHION, AND EMULATION
Grosse declares (80) that "we know definitely at least, that tattooing
is regarded by the Eskimo as an embellishment." He bases this
inference on Cranz's assertion that Eskimo mothers tattoo their
daughters in early youth "for fear that otherwise they would not get a
husband." Had Grosse allowed his imagination to paint a particular
instance, he would have seen how grotesque his inference is. A
favorite way among the Eskimo of securing a bride is, we are told, to
drag her from her tent by the hair. This young woman, moreover, has
never washed her face, nor does any man object to her filth. Yet we
are asked to believe that an Eskimo could be so enamoured of the
_beauty_ of a few simple lines tattooed on a girl's dirty face that he
would refuse to marry her unless she had them! Like other champions of
the sexual selection theory, Grosse searches in the clouds for a
comically impossible motive when the real reason lies right before his
eyes. That reason is fashion. The tattoo marks are tribal signs
(Bancroft, I., 48) which _every_ girl _must_ submit to have in
obedience to inexorable custom, unless she is prepared to be an object
of scorn and ridicule all her life.
The tyranny of fashion in prescribing disfigurements and mutilations
is not confined to savages. The most amazing illustration of it is to
be found in China, where the girls of the upper classes are obliged to
this day to submit to the most agonizing process of crippling their
feet, which finally, as Professor Flower remarks in his book on
_Fashion and Deformity_, assume "the appearance of the hoof of some
animal rather than a human foot." There is a popular delusion that the
Chinese approve of such deformed small feet because they consider them
beautiful--a delusion which Westermarck shares (200). Since the
Chinese consider small feet "the chief charm of women," it might be
supposed, he says, that the women would at least have the pleasure of
fascinating men by a "beauty" to acquire which they have to undergo
such horrible torture;
"but Dr. Strieker assures us that in China a woman is
considered immodest if she shows her artificially distorted
feet to a man. It is even improper to speak of a woman's
foot, and in decent pictures this part is always concealed
under the dress."
To explain this apparent anomaly Westermarck assumes that the object
of the concealment "is to excite through the unknown!" To such
fantastic nonsense does the doctrine of sexual selection lead. In
reality there is no reason for supposing that the Chinese consider
crippled feet--looking like "the hoof of an animal"--beautiful any
more than mutilations of other parts of the body. In all probability
the origin of the custom of crippling women's feet must be traced to
the jealousy of the men, who devised this procedure as an effective
way of preventing their wives from leaving their homes and indulging
in amorous intrigues; other practices with the same purpose being
common in Oriental countries. In course of time the foot-binding
became an inexorable fashion which the foolishly conservative women
were more eager to continue than the men. All accounts agree that the
anti-foot-binding movement finds its most violent and stubborn
opponents in the women themselves. The _Missionary Review_ for July,
1899, contains an article summing up a report of the _Tien Tsu Hui,_
or "Natural Foot Society," which throws a bright light on the whole
question and from which I quote as follows:
"The male members of a family may be opposed to the maiming
of their female relatives by the senseless custom, but the
women will support it. One Chinese even promised his
daughter a dollar a day to keep her natural feet, and
another, having failed with his older girls, arranged that
his youngest should be under his personal supervision night
and day. The one natural-footed girl was sought in marriage
for the dollars that had been faithfully laid by for her.
But at her new home she was so _ridiculed_ by the hundreds
who came to see her--and her feet--that she lost her reason.
The other girl also became insane as a result of the
_persecutions_ which she had to endure."
Thus we see that what keeps up this hideous custom is not the women's
desire to arouse the esthetic admiration and amorous passion of the
_men_ by a hoof of beauty, but the fear of ridicule and persecution by
the other women, slaves of fashion all. These same motives are the
source of most of the ugly fashions prevalent even in civilized Europe
and America. Théophile Gautier believed that most women had no sense
of beauty, but only a sense of fashion; and if explorers and
missionaries had borne in mind the fundamental difference between
fashion and esthetics, anthropological literature would be the poorer
by hundreds of "false facts" and ludicrous inferences.[113]
The ravages of fashion are aggravated by emulation, which has its
sources in vanity and envy. This accounts for the extremes to which
mutilations and fashions often go among both, civilized and
uncivilized races, and of which a startling instance will be described
in detail in the next paragraph. Few of our rich women wear their
jewels because of their intrinsic beauty. They wear them for the same
reason that Polynesian or African belles wear all the beads they can
get. In Mariner's book on the Tongans (Chap. XV.) there is an amusing
story of a chiefs daughter who was very anxious to go to Europe. Being
asked why, she replied that her great desire was to amass a large
quantity of beads and then return to Tonga, "because in England beads
are so common that no one would admire me for wearing them, and _I
should not have the pleasure of being envied."_ Bancroft (I., 128)
says of the Kutchin Indians: "_Beads are their wealth,_ used in the
place of money, and the rich among them literally load themselves with
necklaces and strings of various patterns." Referring to the tin
ornaments worn by Dyaks, Carl Bock says he has "counted as many as
sixteen rings in a single ear, each of them the size of a dollar";
while of the Ghonds Forsyth tells us (148) that they "deck themselves
with an inordinate amount of what they consider ornaments. _Quantity
rather than quality is aimed at."_
PERSONAL BEAUTY VERSUS PERSONAL DECORATION
Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced so
far in this long chapter, assume that savages and barbarians have no
esthetic sense at all, not even a germ of it? Not necessarily. I
believe that the germ of a sense of visible beauty _may_ exist even
among savages as well as the germ of a musical sense; but that it is
little more than a childish pleasure in bright and lustrous shells and
other objects of various colors, especially red and yellow, everything
beyond that being usually found to belong to the region of utility
(language of signs, desire to attract attention, etc.) and not to
_esthetics_--that is, _the love of beauty for its own sake._ Such a
germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants _years before they
have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty;_ and
this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it,
I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the
sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least
yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration
of personal beauty is not one of the motives which induce a savage to
marry a particular girl or man; for most of the "decorations"
described in the preceding pages are not elements of _personal_ beauty
at all, but are either external appendages to that beauty, or
mutilations of it. I have shown by a superabundance of facts that
these "decorations" do not serve the purpose of exciting the amorous
passion and preference of the opposite sex, except non-esthetically
and indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as marks of
rank, wealth, distinction in war, etc. I shall now proceed to show,
much more briefly, that still less does personal beauty proper serve
among the lower races as a stimulant of sexual passion. This we should
expect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure in
bright baubles must long precede the pleasure in beautiful faces or
figures. Every one who has been among Indians or other savages knows
that nature produces among them fine figures and sometimes even pretty
faces; but these are not appreciated. Galton told Darwin that he saw
in one South African tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls, but
they were not attractive to the natives. Zöller saw at least one
beautiful negress; Wallace describes the superb figures of some of the
Brazilian Indians and the Aru Islanders in the Malay Archipelago
(354); and Barrow says that some of the Hottentot girls have beautiful
figures when young--every joint and limb well turned. But as we shall
see presently, the criterion of personal charm among Hottentots, as
among savages in general, is fat, not what we call beauty. Ugliness,
whether natural or inflicted by fashion, does not among these races
act as a bar to marriage. "Beauty is of no estimation in either sex,"
we read regarding the Creeks in Schoolcraft (V., 272): "It is
strength or agility that recommends the young man to his mistress; and
to be a skilful or swift hunter is the highest merit with the woman he
may choose for a wife." Belden found that the squaws were valued "only
for their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever is
taken of their personal beauty," etc., etc. Nor can the fact that
savages kill deformed children be taken as an indication of a regard
for personal beauty. Such children are put out of the way for the
simple reason that they may not become a burden to the family or the
tribe.
Advocates of the sexual selection theory make much ado over the fact
that in all countries the natives prefer their own peculiar color and
features--black, red, or yellow, flat noses, high cheek bones, thick
lips, etc.--and dislike what we consider beautiful. But the likes of
these races regarding personal appearance have no more to do with a
sense of beauty than their dislikes. It is merely a question of habit.
They like their own faces because they are used to them, and dislike
ours because they are strange. In their aversion to our faces they are
actuated by the same motive that makes a European child cry out and
run away in terror at sight of a negro--not because he is ugly, for he
may be good-looking, but because he is strange.
Far from admiring such beauty as nature may have given them, the lower
races exercise an almost diabolical ingenuity in obliterating or
mutilating it. Hundreds of their visitors have written of certain
tribes that they would not be bad looking if they would only leave
nature alone. Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeballs, has
escaped the uglifying process. "Nothing is too absurd or hideous to
please them," writes Cameron. The Eskimos afford a striking
illustration of the fact that a germ of taste for ornamentation in
general is an earlier manifestation of the esthetic faculty than the
appreciation of personal beauty; for while displaying considerable
skill and ingenuity in the decorations of their clothes, canoes, and
weapons, they mutilate their persons in various ways and allow them to
be foul and malodorous with the filth of years. One of the most
disgusting mutilations on record is that practised by the Indians of
British Columbia, who insert a piece of bone in the lower lip, which,
gradually enlarged, makes it at last project three inches. Bancroft
(I., 98) devotes three pages to the lip mutilation indulged in by the
Thlinkeet females. When the operation is completed and the block is
withdrawn "the lip drops down upon the chin like a piece of leather,
displaying the teeth, and presenting altogether a ghastly spectacle."
The lower teeth and gum, says one witness, are left quite naked;
another says that the plug "distorts every feature in the lower part
of the face"; a third that an old woman, the wife of a chief, had a
lip "ornament" so large "that by a peculiar motion of her under-lip
she could almost conceal her whole face with it"; and a fourth gives a
description of this "abominably revolting spectacle," which is too
nauseating to quote.
DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM (?)
"Abominably revolting," "hideous," "filthy," "disgusting,"
"atrocious"--such are usually the words of observers in describing
these shocking mutilations. Nevertheless they always apply the word
"ornamentation" to them, with the implication that the savages look
upon them as beautiful, although all that the observers had a right to
say was that they pleased the savages and were approved by fashion.
What is worse, the philosophers fell into the pitfall thus dug for
them. Darwin thinks that the mutilations indulged in by savages show
"how different is the standard of _taste_"; Humboldt (III., 236)
reflects on the strange fact that nations "attach the idea of beauty"
to whatever configuration nature has given them; and Ploss (I., 48)
declares bluntly that there is no such thing as an absolute standard
of beauty and that savages have "just as much right" to their ideas on
the subject as we have to admire a madonna of Raphael. This view,
indeed, is generally held; it is expressed in the old saw, _De
gustibus non est disputandum_. Now it is true that it is _unwise_ to
dispute about tastes _conversationally_; but scientifically speaking,
that old saw has not a sound tooth in it.
If a peasant who has never had an opportunity to cultivate his musical
sense insisted that a certain piano was exquisitely in tune and had as
beautiful a tone as any other piano, whereas an expert musician
declared that it had a shrill tone and was terribly out of tune, would
anybody be so foolish as to say that the peasant had as much right to
his opinion as the musician? Or if an Irish toper declared that a
bottle of Chambertin, over which French epicures smacked their lips,
was insipid and not half as fine as the fusel-oil on which he daily
got drunk, would not everybody agree that the Irishman was no judge of
liquors, and that the reason why he preferred his cheap whiskey to the
Burgundy was that his nerves of taste were too coarse to detect the
subtle and exquisite bouquet of the French wine? In both these
examples we are concerned only with simple questions of sense
perception; yet in the matter of personal beauty, which involves not
only the senses, but the imagination, the intellect, and the subtlest
feelings, we are asked to believe that any savage who has never seen a
woman but those of his own race has as much right to his opinion as a
Ruskin or a Titian, who have given their whole life to the study of
beauty!
If an astronomer--to take another illustration--were told that _de
astronomia non est disputandum_, and that the Namaquas, who believe
that the moon is made of bacon, or the Brazilian tribes who think that
an eclipse consists in an attempt on the part of a monstrous jaguar to
swallow the sun--have as much right to their opinion as he has, he
would consider the person who advanced such an argument either a wag
or a fool. Only a wag or a fool, again, would argue that a Fijian has
just as much right as we have to his opinions on medical matters, or
on the morality of polygamy, infanticide, and cannibalism. Yet when we
come across a dirty, malodorous savage, so stupid that he cannot count
ten, who mutilates every part of his body till he has lost nearly all
semblance to a human being, we are soberly asked to look upon this as
merely a "difference in the standard of esthetic taste," and to admit
that the savage has "as much right to his taste," as we have. The more
I think of it, the more I am amazed at this unjust and idiotic
discrimination against the esthetic faculty--a discrimination for
which I can find no other explanation than the fact already referred
to, that most men of science know so much less about matters of beauty
than about everything else in the world. They labor under the delusion
that the sense of beauty is one of the earliest products of mental
evolution, whereas their own attitude in the matter affords painful
proof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day that
a steatopygous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because an
African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlot
is beautiful because she pleases a drunken libertine.
What makes the traditional attitude of scientific men in this matter
the less pardonable is that--as we have seen--there is always a
simple, practical explanation for the predilections of these savages,
so that there is no necessity whatever for assuming the existence of
so paradoxical and impossible a thing as an esthetic admiration of
these hideous deformities. Thus, in regard to the nauseating lip
"ornaments" of the Thlinkeets just referred to, the testimony
collected by Bancroft indicates unmistakably that they are approved
of, perpetuated, and aggravated for two reasons--both
non-esthetic--namely, as indications of rank, and from the necessity
of conforming to fashion. Ladies of distinction, we read, increase the
size of their lip plug. Langsdorff even saw women "of very high rank"
with this "ornament" full five inches long and three broad; Dixon says
the mutilation is always in proportion to the person's wealth; and
Mayne relates, in his book on the British Columbia Indians, that "a
woman's rank among women is settled according to the size of her
wooden lip."
INDIFFERENCE TO DIRT
That savages can have no sense of personal beauty is further proved by
their habitual indifference to personal cleanliness, the most
elementary and imperative of esthetic requirements. When we read in
McLean (II., 153) that some Eskimo girls "might pass as pretty if
divested of their filth;" or in Cranz (I., 134) that "it is almost
sickening to view their hands and faces smeared with grease ... and
their filthy clothes swarming with vermin;" and when we further read
in Kotzebue (II., 56) regarding the Kalush that his "filthy
countrywomen with their lip-trough ... often awaken in him the most
vehement passion," we realize vividly that that passion is a coarse
appetite which exists quite apart from, and independently of, anything
that might be considered beautiful or ugly.
The subject is not a pleasant one; but as it is one of my strongest
arguments, I must be pardoned for giving some more unsavory details.
Among some of the British Columbia Indians "pretty women may be seen;
nearly all have good eyes and hair, but the state of filth in which
they live generally neutralizes any natural charms they may possess."
(Mayne, 277.) Lewis and Clarke write (439) regarding the Chinook
Indians:
"Their broad, flat foreheads, their falling breasts, their
ill-shaped limbs, the awkwardness of their positions, and
_the filth which intrudes through their finery_--all these
render a Chinook or Clatsop beauty in full attire one of the
most disgusting objects in nature."
Muir says of the Mono Indians of the California Mountains (93): "The
dirt on their faces was fairly stratified, and seemed so ancient and
so undisturbed it might also possess a geological significance."
Navajo girls "usually evince a catlike aversion to water."
(Schoolcraft, IV., 214.) Cozzens relates (128) how, among the
Apaches, "the sight of a man washing his face and hands almost
convulsed them with laughter." He adds that their personal appearance
explained their surprise. Burton (80) found among the Sioux a dislike
to cleanliness "which nothing but the fear of the rod will subdue."
"In an Indian village," writes Neill (79), "all is filth and
litter.... Water, except in very warm weather, seldom touches their
bodies."
The Comanches are "disgustingly filthy in their persons."
(Schoolcraft, I., 235.) The South American Waraus "are exceedingly
dirty and disgusting in their habits, and their children are so much
neglected that their fingers and toes are frequently destroyed by
vermin." (Bernau, 35.) The Patagonians "are excessively filthy in
their personal habits." (Bourne, 56.) The Mundrukus "are very dirty"
(Markham, 172), etc.
Of the Damara negroes, Anderson says (_N._, 50): "Dirt often
accumulates to such a degree on their persons as to make the color of
their skins totally undistinguishable;" and Galton (92) "could find no
pleasure in associating or trying to chat with these Damaras, they
were so filthy and disgusting in every way." Thunberg writes of the
Hottentots (73) that they "find a peculiar pleasure in filth and
stench;" wherein they resemble Africans in general. Griffith declares
that the hill tribes of India are "the dirtier the farther we
advance;" elsewhere[114] we read:
"Both males and females, as a class, are very dirty and
filthy in both person and habits. They appear to have an
antipathy to bathing, and to make matters worse, they have a
habit of anointing their bodies with _ghee_ (melted
butter);"
and of another of these tribes:
"The Karens are a dirty people. They never use soap, and
their skins are enamelled with dirt. When water is thrown on
them, it rolls off their backs like globules of quicksilver
on a marble slab. To them bathing has a cooling, but no
cleansing effect."
The Mishinis are "disgustingly dirty." By the Kirgliez "uncleanliness
is elevated into a virtue hallowed by tradition." The Kalmucks are
described as filthy, the Kamtschadales as exceedingly so, etc.
REASONS FOR BATHING.
Among the inhabitants of the islands of the Pacific we meet with
apparent exceptions. These natives are practically amphibious,
spending half their time in the ocean, and are therefore of necessity
clean. So are certain coast negroes and Indian tribes living along
river-banks. But Ellis _(Pol. Res._, I., 110) was shrewd enough to see
that the habit of frequent bathing indulged in by the South Sea
Islanders was a luxury--a result of the hot climate--and not an
indication of the virtue of cleanliness. In this respect Captain Cook
showed less acumen, for he remarks (II., 148) that "nothing appears to
give them greater pleasure than personal cleanliness, to produce which
they frequently bathe in ponds." His confusion of ideas is made
apparent in the very next sentence, where he adds that the water in
most of these ponds "stinks intolerably." That it is merely the desire
for comfort and sport that induces the Polynesians to bathe so much is
proved further by the attitude of the New Zealanders. Hawksworth
declares (III., 451) that they "stink like Hottentots;" and the reason
lies in the colder climate which makes bathing less of a luxury to
them. The Micronesians also spend much of their time in the water, for
comfort, not for cleanliness. Gerland cites grewsome details of their
nastiness. (Waitz, V., Pt. II., 81, 188.) The Kaffirs, says Gardiner
(101), "although far from cleanly," are fond of bathing. In some other
cases the water is sought for its warmth instead of its coolness. In
Brazil the morning air is much colder than the water, wherefore the
natives take to the river for comfort, as the Japanese do in winter to
their hot tubs. All Indians, says Bancroft (I., 83), "attach great
importance to their sweatbaths," not for cleanliness--for they are
"extremely filthy in their persons and habits"--but "as a remedial
measure."
Unless they happen to indulge in bathing for comfort, the lowest of
savages are also the dirtiest. Leigh writes (147) that in South
Australia many of the women, including the wives of chiefs, had "sore
eyes from the smoke, the filth, and their abominable want of
cleanliness." Sturt (II., 53) refers to the Australian women as
"disgusting objects." At funerals, "the women besmear themselves with
the most disgusting filth." The naked boys in Taplin's school "had no
notion of cleanliness." The youths from the age of ten to sixteen or
seventeen were compelled by custom to let their hair grow, the result
being "a revolting mass of tangled locks and filth." (Woods, 20, 85.)
Sturt sums up his impressions by declaring (II., 126): "Really, the
loathsome condition and hideous countenances of the women would, I
should imagine, have been a complete antidote to the sexual passion."
CORPULENCE VERSUS BEAUTY
An instructive instance of the loose reasoning which prevails in the
esthetic sphere is provided by the Rev. H.N. Hutchinson, in his
_Marriage Customs in Many Lands_. After describing some of the customs
of the Australians, he goes on to say:
"One would think that such degraded creatures as these men
are would be quite incapable of appreciating female beauty,
but that is not the case. Good-looking girls are much
admired and consequently frequently stolen away."
As a matter of fact, beauty has nothing to do with the stealing of the
women. The real motive is revealed in the following passage from
Brough Smyth (79):
"_A very fat woman_ presents such an attractive appearance
to the eyes of the blacks that she is always liable to be
stolen. _However old and ugly she way be_, she will be
courted and petted and sought for by the warriors, who
seldom hesitate to risk their lives if there is a chance for
obtaining so great a prize."
An Australian Shakspere obviously would have written "Fat provoketh
thieves sooner than gold," instead of "beauty provoketh thieves." And
the amended maxim applies to savages in general, as well as to
barbarians and Orientals. In his _Savage Life in Polynesia_, the Rev.
W.W. Gill remarks:
"The great requisites for a Polynesian beauty are to be fat
and as fair as their dusky skins will permit. To insure
this, favorite children, whether boys or girls, were
regularly fattened and imprisoned till nightfall when a
little gentle exercise was permitted. If refractory, the
guardian would whip the culprit for not eating more."[115]
American Indians do not differ in this respect from Australians and
Polynesians. The horrible obesity of the squaws on the Pacific Coast
used to inspire me with disgust, as a boy, and I could not understand
how anyone could marry such fat abominations. Concerning the South
American tribes, Humboldt says (_Trav.,_ I., 301): "In several
languages of these countries, to express the beauty of a woman, they
say that she is fat, and has a narrow forehead."
FATTENING GIRLS FOR THE MARRIAGE MARKET
The population of Africa comprises hundreds of different peoples and
tribes, the vast majority of whom make bulk and weight the chief
criterion of a woman's charms. The hideous deformity known as
steatopyga, or hypertrophy of the buttocks, occurs among South African
Bushman, Koranna, and Hottentot women. Darwin says that Sir Andrew
Smith
"once saw a woman who was considered a beauty, and she was
so immensely developed behind that when seated on level
ground she could not rise, and had to push herself along
until she came to a slope. Some of the women in various
negro tribes have the same peculiarity; and according to
Burton, the Somal men, 'are said to choose their wives by
ranging them in a line and by picking her out who projects
farthest _a tergo_. Nothing can be more hateful to a negro
than the opposite form.'"[116]
The notions of the Yoruba negroes regarding female perfection consist,
according to Lander, in "the bulk, plumpness, and rotundity of the
object."
Among the Karagué, women were exempted from hard labor because the men
were anxious to have them as fat as possible. To please the men, they
ate enormous quantities of bananas and drank milk by the gallon. Three
of Rumanika's wives were so fat that they could not go through an
ordinary door, and when they walked they needed two men each to
support them.
Speke measured one of the much-admired African wonders of obesity, who
was unable to stand except on all fours. Result: around the arms, 1
foot 11 inches; chest, 4 feet 4 inches; thigh, 2 feet 7 inches; calf,
1 foot 8 inches; height, 5 feet 8 inches.
"Meanwhile, the daughter, a lass of sixteen, sat stark-naked
before us, sucking at a milk-pot, on which her father kept
her at work by holding a rod in his hand; for as fattening
is the first duty of fashionable female life, it must be
duly enforced by the rod if necessary. I got up a bit of
flirtation with missy, and induced her to rise and shake
hands with me. Her features were lovely, but her body was
round as a ball."
Speke also tells (370) of a girl who, a mere child when the king died,
was such a favorite of his, that he left her twenty cows, in order
that she might fatten upon milk after her native fashion.
ORIENTAL IDEALS
Mungo Park declared that the Moorish women
"seem to be brought up for no other purpose than that of
ministering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious
masters. Voluptuousness is therefore considered as their
chief accomplishment.... The Moors have singular ideas of
feminine perfection. The gracefulness of figure and motion,
and a countenance enlivened by expression, are by no means
essential points in their standard: With them _corpulence
and beauty seem to be terms nearly synonymous_: A woman of
even moderate pretensions must be one who cannot walk
without a slave under each arm, to support her; and a
perfect beauty is a load for a camel.... Many of the young
girls are compelled, by their mothers, to devour a great
quantity of kouskous, and drink a large bowl of camel's milk
every morning.... I have seen a poor girl sit crying, with
the bowl at her lips, for more than an hour; and her mother,
with a stick in her hand watching her all the while, and
using the stick without mercy, whenever she observed that
her daughter was not swallowing."
A Somali love-song says: "You are beautiful and your limbs are fat;
but if you would drink camel's milk you would be still more
beautiful." Nubian girls are especially fattened for their marriage by
rubbing grease over them and stuffing them with polenta and goat milk.
When the process is completed they are poetically likened to a
hippopotamus. In Egypt and India, where the climate naturally tends to
make women thin, the fat ones are, as in Australia, the ideals of
beauty, as their poets would make plain to us if it were not known
otherwise. A Sanscrit poet declares proudly that his beloved is so
borne down by the weight of her thighs and breasts that she cannot
walk fast; and in the songs of Halâ there are numerous "sentiments"
like that. The Arabian poet Amru declares rapturously that his
favorite beauty has thighs so delightfully exuberant that she can
scarcely enter the tent door. Another Arabian poet apostrophizes "the
maid of Okaib, who has haunches like sand-hills, whence her body rises
like a palm-tree." And regarding the references to personal appearance
in the writings of the ancient Hebrews, Rossbach remarks:
"In all these descriptions human beauty is recognized in the
luxurious fulness of parts, not in their harmony and
proportion. Spiritual expression in the sensual form is not
adverted to" (238).
Thus, from the Australian and the Indian to the Hebrew, the Arab, and
the Hindoo, what pleases the men in women is not their beauty, but
their voluptuous rotundity; they care only for those sensual aspects
which emphasize the difference between the sexes. The object of the
modern wasp waist (in the minds of the class of females who, strange
to say, are allowed by respectable women to set the fashion for them)
is to grossly exaggerate the bust and the hips, and it is for the same
reason that barbarian and Oriental girls are fattened for the marriage
market. The appeal is to the appetite, not to the esthetic sense.
THE CONCUPISCENCE THEORY OF BEAUTY
In writing this I do not ignore the fact that many authors have held
that personal beauty and sensuality are practically identical or
indissolubly associated. The sober philosopher, Bain, gravely advances
the opinion that, on the whole, personal beauty turns, 1, upon
qualities and appearances that heighten the expression of favor or
good-will; and, 2, upon qualities and appearances that suggest the
endearing embrace. Eckstein expresses the same idea more coarsely by
saying that "finding a thing beautiful is simply another way of
expressing the manifestation of the sexual appetite." But it remained
for Mantegazza to give this view the most cynical expression:
"We look at woman through the prism of desire, and she looks
at us in the same way; her beauty appears to us the more
perfect the more it arouses our sexual desires--that is, the
more voluptuous enjoyment the possession of her promises
us."
He adds that for this reason a man of twenty finds nearly all women
beautiful.
Thus the beauty of a woman, in the opinion of these writers, consists
in those physical qualities which arouse a man's concupiscence. I
admit that this theory applies to savages and to Orientals; the
details given in the preceding pages prove that. It applies also, I
must confess, to the majority of Europeans and Americans. I have paid
special attention to this point in various countries and have noticed
that a girl with a voluptuous though coarse figure and a plain face
will attract much more masculine attention than a girl whose figure
and face are artistically beautiful without being voluptuous. But this
only helps to prove my main thesis--that the sense of personal beauty
is one of the latest products of civilization, rare even at the
present day. What I deny most emphatically is that the theory
advocated by Bain, Eckstein, and Mantegazza applies to those persons
who are so lucky as to have a sense of beauty. These fortunate
individuals can admire the charms of a living beauty without any more
concupiscence or thought of an endearing embrace than accompanies
their contemplation of the Venus de Milo or a Madonna painted by
Murillo; and if they are in love with a particular girl their
admiration of her beauty is superlatively free from carnal
ingredients, as we saw in the section on Mental Purity. Since in such
a question personal evidence is of importance, I will add that,
fortunately, I have been deeply in love several times in my life and
can therefore testify that each time my admiration of the girl's
beauty was as purely esthetic as if she had been a flower. In each
case the mischief was begun by a pair of brown eyes.
Eyes, it is true, can be as wanton and as voluptuous as a plump
figure. Powers notes (20) that some California Indian girls are pretty
and have "large, voluptuous eyes." Such eyes are common among the
lower races and Orientals; but they are not the eyes which inspire
romantic love. Lips, too, it might be said, invite kisses; but a lover
would consider it sacrilege to touch his idol's lips unchastely.
Savages are strangers to kissing for the exactly opposite reason--that
it is too refined a detail of sensuality to appeal to their coarse
nerves. How far they are from being able to appreciate lips
esthetically appears from the way in which they so often deform them.
The mouth is peculiarly the index of mental and moral refinement, and
a refined pair of lips can inspire as pure a love as the celestial
beauty of innocent eyes. As for the other features, what is there to
suggest lascivious thoughts in a clear complexion, an oval chin, ivory
teeth, rosy cheeks, or in curved eyebrows, long, dark lashes, or
flowing tresses? Our admiration of these, and of a graceful gait, is
as pure and esthetic--as purely esthetic--as our admiration of a
sunset, a flower, a humming-bird, a lovely child. It has been truly
said that a girl's marriage chances have been made or marred by the
size or shape of her nose. What has the size or shape of a girl's nose
to do with the "endearing embrace?" This question alone reduces the
concupiscence theory _ad absurdum_.
UTILITY IS NOT BEAUTY
Almost as repulsive as the view which identifies the sense of personal
beauty with concupiscence is that which would reduce it to a matter of
coarse utility. Thus Eckstein, misled by Schopenhauer, holds that
healthy teeth are beautiful for the reason that they guarantee the
proper mastication of the food; while small breasts are ugly because
they do not promise sufficient nourishment to the child that is to be
born.
This argument is refuted by the simple statement that our teeth, if
they looked like rusty nails, might be even more useful than now, but
could no longer be beautiful. As for women's breasts, if utility were
the criterion, the most beautiful would be those of the African
mothers who can throw them over their shoulders to suckle the infants
on their backs without impeding their work. As a matter of fact, the
loveliest breast is the virginal, which serves no use while it remains
so. A dray horse is infinitely more useful to us than an Arab racer,
but is he as beautiful? Tigers and snakes are anything but useful to
the human race, but we consider their skins beautiful.
A NEW SENSE EASILY LOST AGAIN
No, the sense of personal beauty is neither a synonyme for libidinous
desires nor is it based on utilitarian considerations. It is
practically a new sense, born of mental refinement and imagination. It
by no means scorns a slight touch of the voluptuous, so far as it does
not exceed the limits of artistic taste and moral refinement--a
well-rounded figure and "a face voluptuous, yet pure"--but it is an
entirely different thing from the predilection for fat and other
coarse exaggerations of sexuality which inspire lust instead of love.
This new sense is still, as I have said, rare everywhere; and, like
the other results of high and recent culture, it is easily
obliterated. In his treatise on insanity Professor Krafft-Ebing shows
that in degeneration of the brain the esthetic and moral qualities are
among the first to disappear. It is the same with normal man when he
descends into a lower sphere. Zoller relates (III., 68) that when
Europeans arrive in Africa they find the women so ugly they can hardly
look at them without a feeling of repulsion. Gradually they become
habituated to their sight, and finally they are glad to accept them as
companions. Stanley has an eloquent passage on the same topic (_II. I.
F.L_., 265):
"The eye that at first despised the unclassic face of the
black woman of Africa soon loses its regard for fine lines
and mellow pale color; it finds itself ere long lingering
_wantonly_ over the inharmonious and heavy curves of a
negroid form, and looking lovingly on the broad,
unintellectual face, and into jet eyes that never flash with
the dazzling love-light that makes poor humanity beautiful."
The word I have italicized explains it all. The sense of personal
beauty is displaced again by the concupiscence which had held its
place in the early history of mankind.
MORAL UGLINESS
To realize fully what such a relapse may mean, read what Galton says
(123) of the Hottentots. They have
"that peculiar set of features which is so characteristic of
bad characters in England, and so general among prisoners
that it is usually, I believe, known by the name of the
'felon-face;' I mean that they have prominent cheek-bones,
bullet-shaped head, cowering but restless eyes, and heavy
sensual lips, and added to this a shackling dress and
manner."
Of the Damaras Galton says (99) that "their features are often
beautifully chiselled, though the expression in them is always coarse
and disagreeable." And to quote Mungo Park on the Moors once more
(158):
"I fancied that I discovered in the features of most of them
a disposition toward cruelty and low cunning.... From the
staring wildness of their eyes, a stranger would immediately
set them down as a nation of lunatics. The treachery and
malevolence of their character are manifested in their
plundering excursions against the negro villages."
BEAUTIFYING INTELLIGENCE
Galton's reference to the Damaras illustrates the well-known fact
that, even where nature makes an effort at chiselling beautiful
features the result is a failure if there is no moral and intellectual
culture to inspire them, and this puts the grave-stone on the
Concupiscence Theory--for what have moral and intellectual culture to
do with carnal desires? A noble soul even possesses the magic power of
transforming a plain face into a radiant vision of beauty, the emotion
changing not only the expression but the lines of the face. Goethe
(Eckermann, 1824) and others have indeed maintained that intellect in
a woman does not help a man to fall in love with her. This is true in
so far as brains in a woman will not make a man fall in love with her
if she is otherwise unattractive or unfeminine. But Goethe forgot that
there is such a thing as _hereditary intellectual culture incarnated
in the face_. This, I maintain, makes up more than half of the
personal beauty which makes a man fall in love. A girl with good
features is twice as beautiful if she is morally pure and has a bright
mind. Sometimes a face is accidentally moulded, into such a regular
beauty of form that it seems to mirror mental beauty too. A man may
fall in love with such a face, but as soon as he finds out that it is
inhabited by a stupid or coarse mind he will make haste to fall out
again, unless his love was predominantly sensual. I remember once
falling in love with a country girl at first sight; her face and
figure seemed to me extremely beautiful, except that hard work had
enlarged and hardened her hands. But when I found that her intellect
was as coarse as her hands, my ardor cooled at once.
If intellect, as revealed in the face, in words, and in actions, did
not assist in inspiring the amorous sentiment, it would be as easy to
fall in love with a doll-faced, silly girl as with a woman of culture;
it would even be possible to fall in love with a statue or with a
demented person. Let us imagine a belle who is thrown from a horse and
has become insane from the shock. For a time her features will remain
as regular, her figure as plump, as before; but the mind will be gone,
and with it everything that could make a man fall in love with her.
Who has ever heard of a beautiful idiot, of anyone falling in love
with an imbecile? The vacant stare, the absence of intellect, make
beauty and love alike impossible in such a case.
THE STRANGE GREEK ATTITUDE
The important corollary follows, from all this, that in countries
where women receive no education sensual love is the only kind men can
feel toward them. Oriental women are of that kind, and so were the
ancient Greeks. The Greeks are indeed renowned for their statuary, yet
their attitude toward personal beauty was of a very peculiar kind.
Their highest ideal was not the feminine but the masculine type, and
accordingly we find that it was toward men only that they professed to
feel a noble passion. The beauty of the women was regarded merely from
a sensual point of view. Their respectable women were deliberately
left without education, wherefore their charms can have been at best
of a bodily kind and capable of inspiring love of body only. There is
a prevalent superstition that the Greeks of the day of Perikles had a
class of intelligent women known as hetairai, who were capable of
being true companions and inspirers of men; but I shall show, in a
later chapter, that the mentality of these women has been ludicrously
exaggerated; they were coarse and obscene in their wit and
conversation, and their morals were such that no man could have
respected them, much less loved them with a pure affection; while the
men whom they are supposed to have inspired were in most cases
voluptuaries of the most dissolute sort.
A COMPOSITE AND VARIABLE SENTIMENT
Our attempt to answer the question "What is romantic love," has taken
up no fewer than two hundred and thirty-five pages, and even this
answer is a mere preliminary sketch, the details of which will be
supplied in the following chapters, chiefly, it is true, in a negative
way, by showing what is _not_ romantic love; for the subject of this
book is Primitive Love.
DEFINITION OF LOVE
Can love be defined in one sentence? The _Century Dictionary's_
definition, which is as good as any, is: "Intimate personal affection
between individuals of opposite sex capable of intermarriage; the
emotional incentive to and normal basis of conjugal union." This is
correct enough as far as it goes; but how little it tells us of the
nature of love! I have tried repeatedly to condense the essential
traits of romantic love into one brief definition, but have not
succeeded. Perhaps the following will serve as an approximation. Love
is an intense longing for the reciprocal affection and jealously
exclusive possession of a particular individual of the opposite sex; a
chaste, proud, ecstatic adoration of one who appears a paragon of
personal beauty and otherwise immeasurably superior to all other
persons; an emotional state constantly hovering between doubt and
hope, aggravated in the female heart by the fear of revealing her
feelings too soon; a self-forgetful impulse to share the tastes and
feelings of the beloved, and to go so far in affectionate and gallant
devotion as to eagerly sacrifice, for the other's good, all comfort
and life itself if necessary.
These are the essential traits. But romantic love is altogether too
complex and variable to be defined in one sentence; and it is this
complexity and variability that I wish to emphasize particularly.
Eckermann once suggested to Goethe that no two cases of love are quite
alike, and the poet agreed with him. They did not, however, explain
their seeming paradox, so diametrically opposed to the current notion
that love is everywhere and always the same, in individuals as in
nations; nor could they have explained it unless they had analyzed
love into its component elements as I have done in this volume. With
the aid of this analysis it is easy to show how and why love has
changed and grown, like other sentiments; to explain how and why the
love of a civilized white man must differ from that of an Australian
or African savage, just as their faces differ. Since no two races look
alike, and no two individuals in the same race, why should their loves
be alike? Is not love the heart of the soul and the face merely its
mirror? Love is varied through a thousand climatic, racial, family,
and cultural peculiarities. It is varied through individual tastes and
proclivities. In one case of love admiration of personal beauty may be
the strongest ingredient, in another jealous monopoly, in a third
self-sacrificing affection, and so on. The permutations and
combinations are countless, and hence it is that love-stories are
always fresh, since they can be endlessly varied. A lover's varied
feelings in relation to the beloved become gradually blended into a
sentiment which is a composite photograph of all the emotions she has
ever aroused in him. This has given rise to the delusion that love is
a simple feeling.[117]
WHY CALLED ROMANTIC
In the introductory chapter of this book I alluded briefly to my
reasons for calling pure prematrimonial infatuation romantic love,
giving some historic precedents for such a use of the word. We are now
in a position to appreciate the peculiar appropriateness of the term.
What is the dictionary definition of "romantic"?
"Pertaining to or resembling romance, or an ideal state of
things; partaking of the heroic, the marvellous, the
supernatural, or the imaginative; chimerical, fanciful,
extravagantly enthusiastic."
Every one of these terms applies to love in the sense in which I use
the word. Love is ideal, heroic, marvellous, imaginative, chimerical,
fanciful, extravagantly enthusiastic; its hyperbolic adoration even
gives it a supernatural tinge, for the adored girl seems more like an
angel or a fairy than a common mortal. The lover's heroine is as
fictitious as any heroine of romance; he considers her the most
beautiful and lovable person in the world, though to others she may
seem ugly and ill-tempered. Thus love is called romantic, because it
is so great a romancer, attributing to the beloved all sorts of
perfections which exist only in the lover's fancy. What could be more
fantastic than a lover's stubborn preference for a particular
individual and his conviction that no one ever loved so frantically as
he does? What more extravagant and unreasonable than his imperious
desire to completely monopolize her affection, sometimes guarding her
jealously even from her girl friends or her nearest relatives? What
more romantic than the tortures and tragedies, the mixed emotions,
that doubt or jealousy gives rise to? Does not a willing but coyly
reserved maiden romance about her feelings? What could be more
fanciful and romantic than her shy reserve and coldness when she is
longing to throw herself into the lover's arms? Is not her proud
belief that her lover--probably as commonplace and foolish a fellow as
ever lived--is a hero or a genius a romantic exaggeration? Is not the
lover's purity of imagination, though real as a feeling, a romantic
illusion, since he craves ultimate possession of her and would be the
unhappiest of mortals if she went to a nunnery, though she promised to
love him always? What could be more marvellous, more chimerical, than
this temporary suppression of a strong appetite at the time when it
would be supposed to manifest itself most irresistibly--this
distilling of the finer emotions, leaving all the gross, material
elements behind? Can you imagine anything more absurdly romantic than
the gallant attentions of a man on his knees before a girl whom, with
his stronger muscles, he could command as a slave? Who but a romantic
lover would obliterate his selfish ego in sympathetic devotion to
another, trying to feel her feelings, forgetting his own? Who but a
romantic lover would sacrifice his life in the effort to save or
please another? A mother would indeed do the same for her child; but
the child is of her own flesh and blood, whereas the beloved may have
been a stranger until an hour ago. How romantic!
The appropriateness of the word romantic is still further emphasized
by the consideration that, just as romantic art, romantic literature,
and romantic music are a revolt against artificial rules and barriers
to the free expression of feeling, so romantic love is a revolt
against the obstacles to free matrimonial choice imposed by parental
and social tyranny.
Indeed, I can see only one objection to the use of the word--its
frequent application to any strange or exciting incidents, whence some
confusion may ensue. But the trouble is obviated by simply bearing in
mind the distinction between romantic _incidents_ and romantic
_feelings_ which I have summed up in the maxim that _a romantic
love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love_. Nearly all
the tales brought together in this volume are romantic love-stories,
but not one of them is a story of romantic love. In the end the
antithesis will aid us in remembering the distinction.
In place of "romantic" I might have used the word "sentimental"; but
in the first place that word fails to indicate the essentially
romantic nature of love, on which I have just dwelt; and secondly, it
also is liable to be misunderstood, because of its unfortunate
association with the word sentimentality, which is a very different
thing from sentiment. The differences between sentiment,
sentimentality, and sensuality are indeed important enough to merit a
brief chapter of elucidation.
SENSUALITY, SENTIMENTALITY, AND SENTIMENT
From beginnings not yet understood--though Haeckel and others have
speculated plausibly on the subject--there has been developed in
animals and human beings an appetite which insures the perpetuation of
the species as the appetite for food does that of the individual. Both
these appetites pass through various degrees of development, from the
utmost grossness to a high degree of refinement, from which, however,
relapses occur in many individuals. We read of Indians tearing out the
liver from living animals and devouring it raw and bloody; of Eskimos
eating the contents of a reindeer's stomach as a vegetable dish; and
the books of explorers describe many scenes like the following from
Baker's _Ismailia_ (275) relating to the antics of negroes after
killing a buffalo:
"There was now an extraordinary scene over the carcass; four
hundred men scrambling over a mass of blood and entrails,
fighting and tearing with each other and cutting off pieces
of flesh with their lance-heads, with which they escaped as
dogs may retreat with a bone."
APPETITE AND LONGING
What aeons of culture lie between such a scene and a dinner party in
Europe or America, with its refined, well-behaved guests, its table
etiquette, its varied menu, its choice viands, skilfully cooked and
blended so as to bring out the most diverse and delicate flavors, its
esthetic features--fine linen and porcelains, silver and cut glass,
flowers, lights--its bright conversation, and flow of wit. Yet there
are writers who would have us believe that these Indians, Eskimos, and
Africans, who manifest their appetite for food in so disgustingly
coarse a way, are in their love-affairs as sentimental and aesthetic
as we are! In truth they are as gross, gluttonous, and selfish in the
gratification of one appetite as in that of the other. To a savage a
woman is not an object of chaste adoration and gallant devotion, but a
mere bait for wanton lust; and when his lust hath dined he kicks her
away like a mangy dog till he is hungry again. In Ploss-Bartels[118]
may be found an abundance of facts culled from various sources in all
parts of the world, showing that the bestiality of many savages is not
even restrained by the presence of spectators. At the phallic and
bacchanalian festivals of ancient and Oriental nations all
distinctions of rank and all family ties were forgotten in a carnival
of lust. Licentious orgies are indeed carried on to this day in our
own large cities; but their participants are the criminal classes, and
occasionally some foolish young men who would be very much ashamed to
have their doings known; whereas the orgies and phallic festivals of
savages and barbarians are national or tribal institutions, approved
by custom, sanctioned by religion, and indulged in openly by every man
and woman in the community; often regardless even of incest.
More shockingly still are the grossness and diabolical selfishness of
the savage's carnal appetite revealed by his habit of sacrificing
young girls to it years before they have reached the age of puberty.
Some details will be found in the chapters on Australia, Africa, and
India. Here it may be noted--to indicate the wide prevalence of a
custom which it would be unjust to animals to call bestial, because
beasts never sink so low--that Borneans, as Schwaner notes, marry off
girls from three to five; that in Egypt child-wives of seven or eight
can be seen; that Javanese girls may be married at seven; that North
American Indians often took brides of ten or eleven, while in Southern
Australia girls were appropriated as early as seven. Hottentot girls
were not spared after the age of seven, nor were Bushman girls, though
they did not become mothers till ten or twelve years old; while Kaffir
girls married at eight, Somals at six to eight. The cause of these
early marriages is not climatic, as some fancy, but simply, as
Roberton has pointed out, the coarseness of the men. The list might be
extended indefinitely. In Old Calabar sometimes, we read in Ploss,
"a man who has already several wives may be seen with an
infant of two or three weeks on his lap, caressing and
kissing it as his wife. Wives of four to six years we found
occasionally (in China, Guzuate, Ceylon, and Brazil); from
seven to nine years on they are no longer rare, and the
years from ten to twelve are a widely prevalent marriage
age."
The amorous savage betrays his inferiority to animals not only in his
cruel maltreatment of girls before they have reached the age of
puberty,[119] but in his ignorance, in most cases, of the simplest
caresses and kisses for which we often find corresponding acts in
birds and other animals. The nerves of primitive men are too coarse
for such a delicate sensation as labial contact, and an embrace would
leave them cold. An African approximation to a kiss is described by
Baker (_Ismailia_, 472). He had liberated a number of female slaves,
and presently, he says, "I found myself in the arms of a naked beauty,
who kissed me almost to suffocation, and, with a most unpleasant
embrace, licked both my eyes with her tongue." If we may venture an
inference from Mr. A.H. Savage Landor's experience[120] among the
aboriginal Ainos of Yezo (Japan), one of the lowest of human races, we
may conclude that, in the course of evolution, biting preceded
kissing. He had made the acquaintance of an Ainu maiden, the most
lovely Ainu girl he had ever come across. They strolled together into
the woods, and he sketched her picture. She clutched his hand tightly,
and pressed it to her chest:
"I would not have mentioned this small episode if her ways
of flirting had not been so extraordinary and funny. Loving
and biting went together with her.... As we sat on a stone
in the semi-darkness she began by gently biting my fingers
without hurting me, as affectionate dogs often do their
masters; she then bit my arm, then my shoulder, and when she
had worked herself up into a passion she put her arms round
my neck and bit my cheeks. It was undoubtedly a curious way
of making love, and when I had been bitten all over, and was
pretty tired of the new sensation, we retired to our
respective homes."
Sensuality has had its own evolution quite apart and distinct from
that of love. The ancient Greeks and Romans, and the Orientals,
especially the Hindoos, were familiar, thousands of years ago, with
refinements and variations of lust beyond which the human imagination
cannot go. According to Burton,
"Kornemannus in his book _de linea amoris,_ makes five
degrees of lust, out of Lucian belike, which he handles in
five chapters, _Visus, Colloquium, Convictus, Oscula,
Tactus_--sight, conference, association, kisses, touch."
All these degrees are abundantly illustrated in Burton, often in a way
that would not bear quotation in a modern book intended for general
reading.
It is interesting to observe, furthermore, that among the higher
barbarians and civilized races, lust has become to a certain extent
mentalized through hereditary memory and association. Aristotle made a
marvellous anticipation of modern scientific thought when he suggested
that what made birds sing in spring was the memory of former seasons
of love. In men as in animals, the pleasant experiences of love and
marriage become gradually ingrained in the brain, and when a youth
reaches the age for love-making the memory of ancestral amorous
experiences courses through his nerves vaguely but strongly. He longs
for something, he knows not what, and this mental longing is one of
the earliest and strongest symptoms of love. But it characterizes all
sorts of love; it may accompany pure fancies of the sentimental lover,
but it may also be a result of the lascivious imaginings and
anticipations of sensualism. It does not, therefore, in itself prove
the presence of romantic love; a point on which I must place great
emphasis, because certain primitive poems expressing a longing for an
absent girl or man have been quoted as positive evidence of romantic
love, when as a matter of fact there is nothing to prove that they may
not have been inspired by mere sensual desires. I shall cite and
comment on these poems in later chapters.
Loss of sleep, loss of appetite, leanness, hollow eyes, groans,
griefs, sadness, sighing, sobbing, alternating blushes and pallor,
feverish or unequal pulse, suicidal impulses, are other symptoms
occurring among such advanced nations as the Greeks and Hindoos and
often accepted as evidence of true love; but since, like longing, they
also accompany lust and other strong passions or violent emotions,
they cannot be accepted as reliable symptoms of romantic love. The
only certain criteria of love are to be found in the manifestation of
the altruistic factors--sympathy, gallantry, and self-sacrificing
affection. Romantic love is, as I have remarked before, not merely an
emotional phenomenon, but an _active impulse._ The true lover does
not, like the sensualist and the sentimentalist, ululate his time away
in dismal wailing about his bodily aches and tremors, woes and
pallors, but lets his feelings expend themselves in multitudinous acts
revealing his eagerness to immolate his personal pleasures on the
altar of his idol.
It must not be supposed that sensual love is necessarily coarse and
obscene. An antique love-scene may in itself be proper and exquisitely
poetic without rising to the sphere of romantic love; as when
Theocritus declares: "I ask not for the land of Pelops nor for talents
of gold. But under this rock will I sing, holding you in my arms,
looking at the flocks feeding together toward the Sicilian Sea." A
pretty picture; but what evidence is there in it of affection? It is
pleasant for a man to hold a girl in his arms while gazing at the
Sicilian Sea, even though he does not love her any more than a
thousand other girls.
Even in Oriental literature, usually so gross and licentious, one may
come across a charmingly poetic yet entirely sensual picture like the
following from the Persian _Gulistan_ (339). On a very hot day, when
he was a young man, Saadi found the hot wind drying up the moisture of
his mouth and melting the marrow of his bones. Looking for a refuge
and refreshment, he beheld a moon-faced damsel of supreme loveliness
in the shaded portico of a mansion:
"She held in her hand a goblet of snow-cold water, into
which she dropt some sugar, and tempered it with spirit of
wine; but I know not whether she scented it with attar, or
sprinkled it with a few blossoms from her own rosy cheek. In
short, I received the beverage from her idol-fair hand: and
having drunk it off, found myself restored to new life."
Ward writes (115) that the following account of Sharuda, the daughter
of Brumha, translated from the Shiva Purana, may serve as a just
description of a perfect Hindoo beauty. This girl was of a yellow
color; had a nose like the flower of a secamum; her legs were taper,
like the plantain-tree; her eyes large, like the principal leaf of the
lotos; her eyebrows extended to her ears; her lips were red, like the
young leaves of the mango-tree; her face was like the full moon; her
voice like the sound of the cuckoo; her throat was like that of a
pigeon; her loins narrow, like those of a lion; her hair hung in curls
down to her feet; her teeth were like the seeds of the pomegranate;
and her gait like that of a drunken elephant or a goose.
There is nothing coarse in this description, yet every detail is
purely sensual, and so it is with the thousands of amorous rhapsodies
of Hindoo, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other Eastern poets.
Concerning the Persians, Dr. Polak remarks (I., 206) that the word
_Ischk_ (love) is always associated with the idea of carnality
(_Was'l_). Of the Arabs, Burckardt says that "the passion of love
is indeed much talked of by the inhabitants of the towns; but I doubt
whether anything is meant by them more than the grossest animal
desire." In his letters from the East the keen-eyed Count von Moltke
notes that the Turk "passes over all the preliminary rigmarole of
falling in love, paying court, languishing, revelling in ecstatic joy,
as so much _faux frais_, and goes straight to the point."
WILES OF AN ORIENTAL GIRL
But is the German field-marshal quite just to the Turk? I have before
me a passage which seems to indicate that these Orientals do know a
thing or two about the "rigmarole of love-making." It is cited by
Kremer[121] from the Kitâb almowaschâ, a book treating of social
matters in Baghdad. Its author devotes a special chapter to the
dangers lurking in female singers and musical slaves, in the course of
which he says:
"If one of these girls meets a rich young man, she sets
about ensnaring him, makes eyes at him, invites him with
gestures, sings for him ... drinks the wine he left in his
cup, throws kisses with her hands, till she has the poor
fellow in her net and he is enamoured. ... Then she sends
messages to him and continues her crafty arts, lets him
understand that she is losing sleep for love of him, is
pining for him; maybe she sends him a ring, or a lock of her
hair, a paring of her nails, a splinter from her lute, or
part of her toothbrush, or a piece of fragrant gum (chewed
by her) as a substitute for a kiss, or a note written and
folded with her own hands and tied with a string from her
lute, with a tearstain on it; and finally sealed with
Ghâlija, her ring, on which some appropriate words are
carved."
Having captured her victim, she makes him give her valuable presents
till his purse is empty, whereupon she discards him.
Was Count Moltke, then, wrong? Have we here, after all, the
sentimental symptoms of romantic love? Let us apply the tests provided
by our analysis of love--tests as reliable as those which chemists use
to analyze fluids or gases. Did the Baghdad music-girl prefer that man
to all other individuals? Did she want to monopolize him jealously?
Oh, no! any man, however old and ugly, would have suited her, provided
he had plenty of money. Was she coy toward him? Perhaps; but not from
a feeling of modesty and timidity inspired by love, but to make him
more ardent and ready to pay. Was she proud of his love? She thought
him a fool. Were her feelings toward him chaste and pure? As chaste
and pure as his. Did she sympathize with his pleasures and pains? She
dismissed him as soon as his purse was empty, and looked about for
another victim. Were his presents the result of gallant impulses to
please her, or merely advance payment for favors expected? Would he
have sacrificed his life to save her any more than she would hers to
save him? Did he respect her as an immaculate superior being, adore
her as an angel from above--or look on her as an inferior, a slave in
rank, a slave to passion?
The obvious moral of this immoral episode is that it is not
permissible to infer the existence of anything higher than sensual
love from the mere fact that certain romantic tricks are associated
with the amorous dalliance of Orientals, or Greeks and Romans.
Drinking from the same cup, throwing kisses, sending locks of hair or
tear-stained letters, adjusting a foot-stool, or fanning a heated
brow, are no doubt romantic _incidents_, but they are no proof of
romantic _feeling_ for the reason that they are frequently associated
with the most heartless and mercenary sensuality. The coquetry of the
Baghdad girl is romantic, but there is no _sentiment_ in it. Yet--and
here we reach the most important aspect of that episode--there is an
_affectation of sentiment_ in that sending of locks, notes, and
splinters from her lute; and this affectation of sentiment is
designated by the word _sentimentality_. In the history of love
sentimentality precedes sentiment; and for a proper understanding of
the history and psychology of love it is as important to distinguish
sentimentality from sentiment as it is to differentiate love from
lust.
When Lowell wrote, "Let us be thankful that in every man's life there
is a holiday of romance, _an illumination of the senses by the soul_,
that makes him a poet while it lasts," he made a sad error in assuming
that there is such a holiday of romance in every man's life; millions
never enjoy it; but the words I have italicized--"an illumination of
the senses by the soul"--are one of those flashes of inspiration which
sometimes enable a poet to give a better description of a psychic
process than professional philosophers have put forth.
From one point of view the love sentiment may be called an
illumination of the senses by the soul. Elsewhere Lowell has given
another admirable definition: "Sentiment is intellectualized emotion,
emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals of thought."
Excellent, too, is J.F. Clarke's definition: "Sentiment is nothing but
thought blended with feeling; _thought made affectionate, sympathetic,
moral_." The Century Dictionary throws further light on this word:
"Sentiment has a peculiar place between thought and feeling,
in which it also approaches the meaning of principle. It is
more than that feeling which is sensation or emotion, by
containing more of thought and by being _more lofty_, while
it contains too much feeling to be merely thought, and it
_has large influence over the will_; for example, the
sentiment of patriotism; the sentiment of honor; the world
is ruled by sentiment. The thought in a sentiment is often
that of _duty_, and is penetrated and _exalted_ by feeling."
Herbert Spencer sums up the matter concisely _(Psych_., II., 578) when
he speaks of "that remoteness from sensations and appetites and from
ideas of such sensations and appetites which is the common trait of
the feelings we call sentiments."
It is hardly necessary to point out that in our Baghdad girl's
love-affairs there is no "remoteness from sensations and appetites,"
no "illumination of the senses by the soul," no "intellectualized
emotion," no "thought made affectionate, sympathetic, moral." But
there is in it, as I have said, a touch of sentimentality. If
sentiment is properly defined as "higher feeling," sentimentality is
"_affectation_ of fine or tender feeling or exquisite sensibility."
Heartless coquetry, prudery, mock modesty, are bosom friends of
sentimentality. While sentiment is the noblest thing in the world,
sentimentality is its counterfeit, its caricature; there is something
theatrical, operatic, painted-and-powdered about it; it differs from
sentiment as astrology differs from astronomy, alchemy from chemistry,
the sham from the real, hypocrisy from sincerity, artificial posing
from natural grace, genuine affection from selfish attachment.
RARITY OF TRUE LOVE
Sentimentality, as I have said, precedes sentiment in the history of
love, and it has been a special characteristic of certain periods,
like that of the Alexandrian Greeks and their Roman imitators, to whom
we shall recur in a later chapter, and the mediaeval Troubadours and
Minnesingers. To the present day sentimentality in love is so much
more abundant than sentiment that the adjective sentimental is
commonly used in an uncomplimentary sense, as in the following passage
from one of Krafft-Ebing's books (_Psch. Sex_., 9):
"Sentimental love runs the risk of degenerating into
caricature, especially in cases where the sensual ingredient
is weak.... Such love has a flat, saccharine tang. It is apt
to become positively ludicrous, whereas in other cases the
manifestations of this strongest of all feelings inspire in
us sympathy, respect, awe, according to circumstances."
Steele speaks in _The Lover_ (23, No. 5) of the extraordinary skill of
a poet in making a loose people "attend to a Passion which they never,
or that very faintly, felt in their own Bosoms." La Rochefoucauld
wrote: "It is with true love as with ghosts; everybody speaks of it,
but few have seen it." A writer in _Science_ expressed his belief that
romantic love, as described in my first book, could really be
experienced only by men of genius. I think that this makes the circle
too small; yet in these twelve years of additional observation I have
come to the conclusion that even at this stage of civilization only a
small proportion of men and women are able to experience full-fledged
romantic love, which seems to require a special emotional or esthetic
gift, like the talent for music. A few years ago I came across the
following in the London _Tidbits_ which echoes the sentiments of
multitudes:
"Latour, who sent a pathetic complaint the other day that
though he wished to do so he was unable to fall in love, has
called forth a sympathetic response from a number of readers
of both sexes. These ladies and gentlemen write to say that
they also, like Latour, cannot understand how it is that
they are not able to feel any experience of tender passion
which they read about so much in novels, and hear about in
actual life."
At the same time there are not a few men of genius, too, who never
felt true love in their own hearts. Herder believed that Goethe was
not capable of genuine love, and Grimm, too, thought that Goethe had
never experienced a self-absorbing passion. Tolstoi must have been
ever a stranger to genuine love, for to him it seems a degrading thing
even in marriage. A suggestive and frank confession may be found in
the literary memoirs of Goncourt.[122] At a small gathering of men of
letters Goncourt remarked that hitherto love had not been studied
scientifically in novels. Zola thereupon declared that love was not a
specific emotion; that it does not affect persons so absolutely as the
writers say; that the phenomena characterizing it are also found in
friendship, in patriotism, and that the intensity of this emotion is
due entirely to the anticipation of carnal enjoyment. Turgenieff
objected to these views; in his opinion love is a sentiment which has
a unique color of its own--a quality differentiating it from all other
sentiments--eliminating the lover's own personality, as it were. The
Russian novelist obviously had a conception of the purity of love, for
Goncourt reports him as "speaking of his first love for a woman as a
thing entirely spiritual, having nothing in common with materiality."
And now follows Goncourt's confession:
"In all this, the thing to regret is that neither Flaubert
... nor Zola, nor myself, have ever been very seriously in
love and that we are therefore unable to describe love.
Turgenieff alone could have done that, but he lacks
precisely the critical sense which we could have exercised
in this matter had we been in love after his fashion."
The vast majority of the human race has not yet got beyond
the sensual stage of amorous evolution, or realized the
difference
between sentimentality and sentiment. There is much
food for thought in this sentence from Henry James's charming
essay on France's most poetic writer--Théophile Gautier:
"It has seemed to me rather a painful exhibition of the
prurience of the human mind that in most of the notices of
the author's death (those at least published in England and
America), this work alone [_Mile. de Maupin_] should have
been selected as the critic's text."
Readers are interested only in emotions with which they are familiar
by experience. Howells's refined love-scenes have often been sneered
at by men who like raw whiskey but cannot appreciate the delicate
bouquet of Chambertin. As Professor Ribot remarks: in the higher
regions of science, art, religion, and morals there are emotions so
subtle and elevated that
"not more than one individual in a hundred thousand or even
in a million can experience them. The others are strangers
to them, or do not know of their existence except vaguely,
from what they hear about them. It is a promised land, which
only the select can enter."
I believe that romantic love is a sentiment which more than one person
in a million can experience, and more than one in a hundred thousand.
How many more, I shall not venture to guess. All the others know love
only as a sensual craving. To them "I love you" means "I long for you,
covet you, am eager to enjoy you"; and this feeling is not love of
another but self-love, more or less disguised--the kind of "love"
which makes a young man shoot a girl who refuses him. The mediaeval
writer Leon Hebraeus evidently knew of no other when he defined love
as "a desire to enjoy that which is good"; nor Spinoza when he defined
it as _laetetia concomitante idea externae causae_--a pleasure
accompanied by the thought of its external cause.
MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE
Having distinguished romantic or sentimental love from sentimentality
on one side and sensuality on the other, it remains to show how it
differs from conjugal affection.
HOW ROMANTIC LOVE IS METAMORPHOSED
On hearing the words "love letters," does anybody ever think of a
man's letters to his wife? No more than of his letters to his mother.
He may love both his wife and his mother dearly, but when he writes
love letters he writes them to his sweetheart. Thus, public opinion
and every-day literary usage clearly recognize the difference between
romantic love and conjugal affection. Yet when I maintained in my
first book that romantic love differs as widely from conjugal
affection as maternal love differs from friendship; that romantic love
is almost as modern as the telegraph, the railway, and the electric
light; and that perhaps the main reasons why no one had anticipated me
in an attempt to write a book to prove this, were that no distinction
had heretofore been made between conjugal and romantic love, and that
the apparent occurrence of noble examples of conjugal attachment among
the ancient Greeks had obscured the issue--there was a chorus of
dissenting voices. "The distinction drawn by him between romantic and
conjugal love," wrote one critic, "seems more fanciful than real." "He
will not succeed," wrote another, "in convincing anybody that romantic
and conjugal love differ in kind instead of only in degree or place";
while a third even objected to my theory as "essentially immoral!"
Mr. W.D. Howells, on the other hand, accepted my distinction, and in a
letter to me declared that he found conjugal affection an even more
interesting field of study than romantic love. Why, indeed, should
anyone be alarmed at the distinction I made? Is not a man's feeling
toward his sweetheart different from his feeling toward his mother or
sister? Why then should it be absurd or "immoral" to maintain that it
differs from his feeling toward his wife? What I maintain is that
romantic love disappears gradually, to be replaced, as a rule, by
conjugal affection, which is sometimes a less intense, at other times
a more intense, feeling than the emotions aroused during courtship.
The process may be compared to a modulation in music, in which some of
the tones in a chord are retained while others are displaced by new
ones. Such modulations are delightful, and the new harmony may be as
beautiful as the old. A visitor to Wordsworth's home wrote:
"I saw the old man walking in the garden with his wife. They
were both quite old, and he was almost blind; but they
seemed like sweethearts courting, they were so tender to
each other and attentive."
A husband may be, and should be, quite as tender, as attentive, as
gallant and self-sacrificing, as sympathetic, proud, and devoted as a
lover; yet all his emotions will appear in a new orchestration, as it
were. In the gallant attentions of a loving husband, the anxious
eagerness to please is displaced by a pleasant sense of duty and
gentlemanly courtesy. He still prefers his wife to all other women and
wants a monopoly of her love; but this feeling has a proprietary tinge
that was absent before. Jealousy, too, assumes a new aspect; it may,
temporarily, bring back the uncertainty of courtship, but the emotion
is colored by entirely different ideas: jealousy in a lover is a
green-eyed monster gnawing merely at his hopes, and not, as in a
husband, threatening to destroy his property and his family
honor--which makes a great difference in the quality of the feeling
and its manifestation. The wife, on her part, has no more use for
coyness, but can indulge in the luxury of bestowing gallant attentions
which before marriage would have seemed indelicate or forward, while
after marriage they are a pleasant duty, rising in some cases to
heroic self-sacrifice.
If even within the sphere of romantic love no two cases are exactly
alike, how could love before marriage be the same as after marriage
when so many new experiences, ideas, and associations come into play?
Above all, the feelings relating to the children bring an entirely new
group of tones into the complex harmony of affection. The intimacies
of married life, the revelation of characteristics undiscovered before
marriage, the deeper sympathy, the knowledge that theirs is "one glory
an' one shame"--these and a hundred other domestic experiences make
romantic love undergo a change into something that may be equally rich
and strange but is certainly quite different. A wife's charms are
different from a girl's and inspire a different kind of love. The
husband loves
Those virtues which, before untried,
The wife has added to the bride,
as Samuel Bishop rhymes it. In their predilection for maidens, poets,
like novelists, have until recently ignored the wife too much. But
Cowper sang:
What is there in the vale of life
Half so delightful as a wife,
When friendship, love and peace combine
To stamp the marriage bond divine?
The stream of pure and genuine love
Derives its current from above;
And earth a second Eden shows,
Where'er the healing water flows.
Some of the specifically romantic ingredients of love, on the other
hand--adoration, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair--do
not normally enter into conjugal affection. No one would fail to see
the absurdity of a husband's exclaiming
O that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek.
He _may_ touch that cheek, and kiss it too--and that makes a
tremendous difference in the tone and tension of his feelings. Unlike
the lover, the husband does not think, feel, and speak in perpetual
hyperboles. He does not use expressions like "beautiful tyrant, fiend
angelical," or speak of
The cruel madness of love
The honey of poisonous flowers.
There is no madness or cruelty in conjugal love: in its normal state
it is all peace, contentment, happiness, while romantic love, in its
normal state, is chiefly unrest, doubt, fear, anxiety, torture and
anguish of heart--with alternating hours of frantic elation--until the
Yes has been spoken.
The emotions of a husband are those of a mariner who has entered into
the calm harbor of matrimony with his treasure safe and sound, while
the romantic lover is as one who is still on the high seas of
uncertainty, storm-tossed one moment, lifted sky-high on a wave of
hope, the next in a dark abyss of despair. It is indeed lucky that
conjugal affection does differ so widely from romantic love; such
nervous tension, doubt, worry, and constant friction between hope and
despair would, if continued after marriage, make life a burden to the
most loving couples.
WHY SAVAGES VALUE WIVES
The notion that genuine romantic love does not undergo a metamorphosis
in marriage is the first of five mistakes I have undertaken to correct
in this chapter. The second is summed up in Westermarck's assertion
(359-60) that it is
"impossible to believe that there ever was a time when
conjugal affection was entirely wanting in the human race
... it seems, in its most primitive form, to have been as
old as marriage itself. It must be a certain degree of
affection that induces the male to defend the female during
her period of pregnancy."
Now I concede that natural selection must have developed at an early
period in the history of man, as in the lower animals, some kind of an
_attachment_ between male and females. A wife could not seek her daily
food in the forest and at the same time defend herself and her
helpless babe against wild beasts and human enemies. Hence natural
selection favored those groups in which the males attached themselves
to a particular female for a longer time than the breeding-season,
defending her from enemies and giving her a share of their game. But
from this admitted fact to the inference that it is "affection" that
makes the husband defend his wife, there is a tremendous logical skip
not warranted by the situation. Instead of making such an assumption
offhand, the scientific method requires us to ask if there is not some
other way of accounting for the facts more in accordance with the
selfish disposition and habits of savages. The solution of the problem
is easily found. A savage's wife is his property, which he has
acquired by barter, service, fighting, or purchase, and which he would
be a fool not to protect against injury or rivals. She is to him a
source of utility, comfort, and pleasure, which is reason enough why
he should not allow a lion to devour her or a rival to carry her off.
She is his cook, his slave, his mule; she fetches wood and water,
prepares the food, puts up the camp, and when it is time to move
carries the tent and kitchen utensils, as well as her child to the
next place. If his motive in protecting her against men and beasts
were _affection_, he would not thus compel her to do all the work
while he walks unburdened to the next camping-place.
Apart from these home comforts there are selfish reasons enough why
savages should take the trouble to protect their wives and rear
children. In Australia it is a universal custom to exchange a daughter
for a new wife, discarding or neglecting the old one; and the habit of
treating children as merchandise prevails in various other parts of
the world. The gross utilitarianism of South African marriages is
illustrated in Dr. Fritsch's remarks on the Ama-Zulus. "As these women
too are slaves, there is not much to say about love, marriage, or
conjugal life," he says. The husband pays for his wife, but expects
her to repay him for his outlay by hard work and _by bearing children
whom he can sell_. "If she fails to make herself thus useful, if she
falls ill, becomes weak, or remains childless, he often sends her back
to her father and demands restitution of the cattle he had paid for
her;" and his demand has to be complied with. Lord Randolph Churchill
(249) was informed by a native of Mashonaland that he had his eye on a
girl whom he desired to marry, because "if he was lucky, his wife
might have daughters whom he would be able to sell in exchange for
goats." Samuel Baker writes in one of his books of African exploration
(_Ism_., 341):
"Girls are always purchased if required as wives. It would
be quite impossible to obtain a wife for love from any tribe
that I have visited. 'Blessed is he that hath his quiver
full of them' (daughters). A large family of girls is a
source of wealth to the father, as he sells each daughter
for twelve or fifteen cows to her suitor."
Of the Central African, Macdonald says (I., 141):
"The more wives he has the richer he is. It is his wives
that maintain him. They do all his ploughing, milling,
cooking, etc. They may be viewed as superior servants, who
combine all the capacities of male servants and female
servants in Britain--who do all his work and ask no wages."
We need not assume a problematic affection to explain why such a man
marries.
But the savage's principal marriage motive is, of course, sensualism.
If he wants to own a particular girl he must take care of her. If he
tires of her it is easy enough to get rid of her or to make her a
drudge pure and simple, while her successor enjoys his caresses.
Speaking of Pennsylvania Indians, Buchanan remarks naïvely (II., 95)
that "the wives are the true servants of their husbands; otherwise the
men are very affectionate to them." On another page (102) he
inadvertently explains what he means by this paradox: "the ancient
women are used for cooks, barbers, and other services, the younger for
dalliance." In other words, Buchanan makes the common mistake of
applying the altruistic word affection to what is nothing more than
selfish indulgence of the sensual appetite. So does Pajeken when he
tells us in the _Ausland_ about the "touching tenderness" of a Crow
chief toward a fourteen-year-old girl whom he had just added to the
number of his wives.
"While he was in the wigwam he did not leave her a
moment. With his own hands he adorned her with chains,
and strings of teeth and pearls, and he found a special
pleasure in combing her black, soft, silken hair. He
gambolled with her like a child and rocked her on his
knees, telling her stories. Of his other wives he
demanded the utmost respect in their treatment of his
little one."
This reference to the other wives ought to have opened Pajeken's eyes
as to the silliness of speaking of the "touching" tenderness of the
Crow chief to his latest favorite. In a few years she was doomed to be
discarded, like the others, in favor of a new victim of his carnal
appetite. Affection is entirely out of the question in such cases.
The Malayans of Sumatra have, as Carl Bock tells us (314), a local
custom allowing a wife to marry again if her faithless spouse has
deserted her for three months:
"The early age at which marriage is contracted is an
obstacle to any real affection between couples; for
girls to be wives at fourteen is a common occurrence;
indeed, that age may be put down as the average age of
first marriage. The girls are then frequently
good-looking, but hard work and the cares of maternity
soon stamp their faces with the marks of age, and spoil
their figures, and then the Malay husband forsakes his
wife, if, indeed, he keeps her so long."
Marriage with these people is, as Bock adds, a mere matter of pounds,
shillings, and pence. His servant had married a "grass-widow" of three
months' desertion. But
"before she had enjoyed her new title six weeks, a coolness
sprang up between her and her husband. I inquired the
reason, and she naïvely confessed that her husband had no
more rupees to give her, and so she did not care for him any
longer."
Concerning Damara women Galton writes (197):
"They were extremely patient, though not feminine,
according to our ideas: they had no strong affections
either for spouse or children; in fact, the spouse was
changed almost weekly, and I seldom knew without
inquiry who the _pro tempore_ husband of each lady was
at any particular time."
Among the Singhalese, if a wife is sick and can no longer minister to
her husband's comforts and pleasure he repudiates her. Bailey
says[123] that this heartless desertion of a sick wife is "the worst
trait in the Kandyan character, and the cool and unconcerned manner in
which they themselves allude to it shows that it is as common as it is
cruel."
"How can a man be contented with one wife," exclaimed an Arab sheik to
Sir Samuel Baker (_N.T.A._, 263). "It is ridiculous, absurd." And then
he proceeded to explain why, in his opinion, monogamy is such an
absurdity:
"What is he to do when she becomes old? When she is
young, if very lovely, perhaps, he might be satisfied
with her, but even the young must some day grow old,
and the beautiful must fade. The man does not fade like
a woman; therefore, as he remains the same for many
years, Nature has arranged that the man shall have
young wives to replace the old; does not the prophet
allow it?"
He then pointed out what further advantage there was in having several
wives:
"This one carries water, that one grinds corn; this
makes the bread; the last does not do much, as she is
the youngest and my favorite; and if they neglect their
work they get a taste of this!"
shaking a long and tolerably thick stick.
There you have the typical male polygamist with his reasons frankly
stated--sensual gratification and utilitarianism.
MOURNING TO ORDER
One of the most gossipy and least critical of all writers on primitive
man, Bonwick, declares (97), in describing Tasmanian funerals, that
"the affectionate nature of women appeared on such
melancholy occasions.... The women not only wept, but
lacerated their bodies with sharp shells and stones, even
burning their thighs with fire-sticks.... The hair cut off
in grief was thrown upon the mound."
Descriptions of the howling and tortures to which savages subject
themselves as part of their funeral rites abound in works of travel,
and although every school-boy knows that the deepest waters are
silent, it is usually assumed that these howling antics betray the
deep grief and affection of the mourners. Now I do not deny that the
lower races do feel grief at the loss of a relative or friend; it is
one of the earliest emotions to develop in mankind. What I object to
in particular is the notion that the penances to which widows submit
on the death of their husbands indicate deep and genuine conjugal
affection. As a matter of fact, these penances are not voluntary but
prescribed, each widow in a tribe being expected to indulge in the
same howlings and mutilations, so that this circumstance alone would
make it impossible to say whether her lamentations over her late
spouse came under the head of affection, fondness, liking, or
attachment, or whether they are associated with indifference or
hatred. It is instructive to note that, in descriptions of mourning
widows, the words "must" or "obliged to" nearly always occur. Among
the Mandans, we read in Catlin (I., 95), "in mourning, like the Crows
and most other tribes, the women _are obliged_ to crop their hair all
off; and the usual term of that condolence is until the hair has grown
again to its former length." The locks of the men (who make them do
this), "are of much greater importance," and only one or two can be
spared. According to Schomburgk, on the death of her husband, an
Arawak wife _must_ cut her hair; and until this has again grown to a
certain length she _cannot_ remarry. (Spencer, _D.S._, 20.) Among the
Patagonians, "the widow, or widows, of the dead, are _obliged_ to
mourn and fast for a whole year after the death of their husbands."
They _must_ abstain from certain kinds of food, and _must not_ wash
their faces and hands for a whole year; while "during the year of
mourning they are _forbidden_ to marry." (Falkner, 119.) The grief is
all prescribed and regulated according to tribal fancy. The Brazilians
"repeat the lamentation for the dead twice a day." (Spix and Martins,
II., 250.) The Comanches
"mourn for the dead _systematically and periodically_ with
great noise and vehemence; at which time the _female_
relatives of the deceased scarify their arms and legs with
sharp flints until the blood trickles from a thousand pores.
The duration of these lamentations depends on the quality
and estimation of the deceased; varying from three to five
or seven days."
(Schoolcraft, I., 237.) James Adair says in his _History of the
American Indians_ (188), "They _compel_ the widow to act the part of
the disconsolate dove, for the irreparable loss of her mate."
In Dahomey, during mourning "the weeping relatives _must_ fast and
refrain from bathing," etc. (Burton, II., 164.) In the Transvaal,
writes the missionary Posselt,
"there are a number of heathenish customs which the widows
are _obliged_ to observe. There is, first, the terrible
lamentation for the dead. Secondly, the widows _must_ allow
themselves to be fumigated," etc.
Concerning the Asiatic Turks Vambéry writes that the women are not
allowed to attend the funeral, but "are _obliged_ meanwhile to remain
in their tent, and, while lamenting incessantly, scratch their cheeks
with their nails, _i.e._, mar their beauty." The widow _must_ lament
or sing dirges for a whole year, etc. Chippewa widows are _obliged_ to
fast and must not comb their hair for a year or wear any ornament. A
Shushwap widow _must not_ allow her shadow to fall on any one, and
must bed her head on thorns. Bancroft notes (I., 731) that among the
Mosquito Indians
"the widow was _bound_ to supply the grave of her husband
with provisions for a year, after which she took up the
bones and carried them with her for another year, at last
placing them upon the roof of her house, and then only was
she _allowed_ to marry again."
The widows of the Tolkotin Indians in Oregon were subjected to such
maltreatment that some of them committed suicide to escape their
sufferings. For nine days they were obliged to sleep beside the corpse
and follow certain rules in regard to dressing and eating. If a widow
neglected any of these, she was on the tenth day thrown on the funeral
pile with the corpse and tossed about and scorched till she lost
consciousness. Afterward she was obliged to perform the function of a
slave to all the other women and children of the tribe.[124]
So far as I am aware, no previous writer on the subject has emphasized
the obligatory character of all these performances by widows. To me
that seems by far the most important aspect of the question, as it
shows that the widows were not prompted to these actions by
affectionate grief or self-sacrificing impulses, but by the command of
the men; and if we bear in mind the superlative selfishness of these
men we have no difficulty in comprehending that what makes them compel
the women to do these penances is the desire to make them eager to
care for the comfort and welfare of their husbands lest the latter die
and they thus bring upon themselves the discomforts arid terrors of
widowhood.
Martius justly remarks that the great dependance of savage women makes
them eager to please their husbands (121); and this eagerness would
naturally be doubled by making widowhood forbidding. Bruhier wrote, in
1743, that in Corsica it was customary, in case a man died, for the
women to fall upon his widow and give her a sound drubbing. This
custom, he adds significantly, "prompted the women to take good care
of their husbands."
It is true that the widowers also in some cases subjected themselves
to penance; but usually they made it very much easier for themselves
than for the widows. In his _Lettres sur le Congo_ (152) Edouard
Dupont relates that a man who has lost his wife and wants to show
grief shaves his head, blackens himself, _stops work_, and sits in
front of his chimbeque several days. His neighbors meanwhile feed him
[no fasting for _him_!], and at last a friend brings him a calabash of
malofar and tells him "stop mourning or you will die of starvation."
"It does not happen often," Dupont adds, "that the advice is not
promptly followed."
Selfish utilitarianism does not desert the savage even at the grave of
his wife. An amusing illustration of the shallowness of aboriginal
grief where it seems "truly touching" may be found in an article by
the Rev. F. McFarlane on British New Guinea.[125] Scene: "A woman is
being buried. The husband is lying by the side of the grave,
apparently in an agony of grief; he sobs and cries as if his heart
would break." Then he jumps into the grave and whispers into the ears
of the corpse--what? a last farewell? Oh, no! "He is asking the spirit
of his wife to go with him when he goes fishing, and make him
successful also when he goes hunting, or goes to battle," etc.; his
last request being, "_And please don't be angry if I get another
wife_!"
The simple truth is that in their grief, as in everything else,
savages are nothing but big children, crying one moment, laughing the
next. Whatever feelings they may have are shallow and without
devotion. If the widows of Mandans, Arawaks, Patagonians, etc., do not
marry until a year after the death of their husband this is not on
account of affectionate grief, but, as we have seen, because they are
not allowed to. Where custom prescribes a different course, they
follow that with the same docility. When a Kansas or Osage wife finds,
on the return of a war-party, that she is a widow, she howls dismally,
but forthwith seeks an avenger in the shape of a new husband. "After
the death of a husband, the sooner a squaw marries again, the greater
respect and regard she is considered to show for his memory." (Hunter,
246.) The Australian custom for women, especially widows, is to mourn
by scratching the face and branding the body. As for the grief itself,
its quality may be inferred from the fact that these women sit day
after day by the grave or platform, howling their monotonous dirge,
but, as soon as they are allowed to pause for a meal they indulge in
the merriest pranks. (K.E. Jung, 111.)
MOURNING FOR ENTERTAINMENT
In many cases the mourning of savages, instead of being an expression
of affection and grief, appears to be simply a mode of gratifying
their love of ceremonial and excitement. That is, they mourn for
entertainment--I had almost said for fun; and it is easy to see too,
that vanity and superstition play their rôle here as in their
"ornamenting" and everything else they do. By the Abipones "women are
appointed to go forward on swift steeds to dig the grave, and _honor_
the funeral with lamentations." (Dobrizhoffer II., 267.) During the
ceremony of making a skeleton of a body the Patagonians, as Falkner
informs us (119), indulge in singing in a mournful tone of voice, and
striking the ground, to _frighten away_ the Valichus or Evil Beings.
Some of the Indians also visit the relatives of the dead, indulging in
antics which show that the whole thing is done for effect and pastime.
"During this visit of condolence," Falkner continues,
"they cry, howl, and sing, in the most dismal manner;
straining out tears, and pricking their arms and thighs with
sharp thorns, to make them bleed. For this _show of grief_
they are _paid_ with glass beads," etc.
The Rev. W. Ellis writes that the Tahitians, when someone had died,
"not only wailed in the loudest and most affecting tone, but tore
their hair, rent their garments, and cut themselves with shark's teeth
or knives in a most shocking manner." That this was less an expression
of genuine grief than a result of the barbarous love of excitement,
follows from what he adds: that in a milder form, this loud wailing
and cutting with shark's teeth was "an expression of joy as well as of
grief." (_Pol. Res_., I., 527.) The same writer relates in his book on
Hawaii (148) that when a chief or king died on that island,
"the people ran to and fro without their clothes,
appearing and acting more like demons than human
beings; every vice was practised and almost every
species of crime perpetrated."
J.T. Irving tells a characteristic story (226-27) of an Indian girl
whom he found one day lying on a grave singing a song "so despairing
that it seemed to well out from a broken heart." A half-breed friend,
who thoroughly understood the native customs, marred his illusion by
informing him that he had heard the girl say to her mother that as she
had nothing else to do, she believed she would go and take a bawl over
her brother's grave. The brother had been dead five years!
The whole question of aboriginal mourning is patly summed up in a
witty remark made by James Adair more than a century ago (1775). He
has seen Choctaw mourners, he declares (187), "pour out tears like
fountains of water; but after thus tiring themselves they might with
perfect propriety have asked themselves, '_ And who is dead?_'"
THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDOW-BURNING
Instructive, from several points of view, is an incident related by
McLean (I., 254-55): A carrier Indian having been killed, his widow
threw herself on the body, shrieking and tearing her hair. The other
females "evinced all the external symptoms of extreme grief, chanting
the death-song in a most lugubrious tone, the tears streaming down
their cheeks, and beating their breasts;" yet as soon as the rites
were ended, these women "were seen as gay and cheerful as if they had
returned from a wedding." The widow alone remained, being "obliged by
custom" to mourn day and night.
"The bodies were formerly burned; the relatives of the
deceased, as well as those of the widow, being present, all
armed; a funeral pile was erected, and the body placed upon
it. The widow then set fire to the pile, and was compelled
to stand by it, anointing her breast with the fat that oozed
from the body, until the heat became insupportable; when the
wretched creature, however, attempted to draw back, she was
thrust forward by her husband's relatives at the point of
their spears, and forced to endure the dreadful torture
until either the body was reduced to ashes, or she herself
almost scorched to death. Her relatives were present merely
to preserve her life; when no longer able to stand they
dragged her away, and this intervention often led to bloody
quarrels."
Obviously the compulsory mourning enforced in McLean's day was simply
a mild survival of this former torture, which, in turn, was a survival
of the still earlier practice of actually burning the widows alive, or
otherwise killing them, which used to prevail in various parts of the
world, as in India, among some Chinese aboriginal tribes, the old
Germans, the Thracians and Scythians, some of the Greeks, the
Lithuanians, the Basutos, the natives of Congo and other African
countries, the inhabitants of New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, New
Hebrides, Fiji Islands, the Crees, Comanches, Caribs, and various
other Indian tribes in California, Darien, Peru, etc.[126]
Some writers have advanced the opinion that jealousy prompted the men
to compel their wives to follow them into death. But the most widely
accepted opinion is that expressed long ago by St. Boniface when he
declared regarding the Wends that
"they _preserve their conjugal love_ with such ardent zeal
that the wife refuses to survive her husband; and _she_ is
especially admired among women who takes her own life in
order to be burnt on the same pile with her master."
This view is the fourth of the mistakes I have undertaken to demolish
in this chapter.
In the monumental work of Ploss and Bartels (II., 514), the opinion is
advanced that the custom of slaughtering widows on the death of their
husbands is the result of the grossly materialistic view the races in
question hold in regard to a future world. It is supposed that a
warrior will reappear with all his physical attributes and wants; for
which reason he is arranged in his best clothes, his weapons are
placed by his side, and often animals and slaves are slaughtered to be
useful to him in his new existence. His principal servant and provider
of home comforts, however, is his wife, wherefore she, too, is
expected to follow him.
This, no doubt, is the truth about widow-burning; but it is not the
whole truth. To comprehend all the horrors of the situation we must
realize clearly that it was the fiendish selfishness of the men,
extending even beyond death, which thus subjected their wives to a
cruel death, and that the widows, on their part, did not follow them
because of the promptings of affection, but either under physical
compulsion or in consequence of a systematic course of moral
reprobation and social persecution which made death preferable to
life. In Peru, for instance, where widows were not killed against
their will, but were allowed to choose between widowhood and being
buried alive,
"the wife or servant who preferred life to the act of
martyrdom, which was to attest their fidelity, was an
object of general contempt, and devoted or doomed to a
life worse than death."
The consequence of this was that
"generally the wives and servants offered themselves
voluntarily, and there are even instances of wives who
preferred suicide to prove their conjugal devotion when
they were prevented from descending to the grave with
the body of their consort." (Rivero and Tschudi, 186.)
Usually, too, superstition was called to aid to make the widows
docile. In Fiji, for instance, to quote Westermarck's summing up (125)
of several authorities, widows
"were either buried alive or strangled, often at their
own desire, because they believed that in this way
alone could they reach the realms of bliss, and that
she who met her death with the greatest devotedness
would become the favorite wife in the abode of spirits.
On the other hand, a widow who did not permit herself
to be killed was considered an adulteress."
To realize vividly how far widow-burning is from being an act of
voluntary wifely devotion one must read Abbé Dubois's account of the
matter (I., chap. _21_). He explains that, however chaste and devoted
a wife may have been during her husband's life, she is treated worse
than the lowest outcast if she wants to survive him. By a "voluntary"
death, on the contrary, she becomes "an illustrious victim of conjugal
attachment," and is "considered in the light of a deity." On the way
to the funeral pyre the accompanying multitude stretch out their hands
toward her in token of admiration. They behold her as already
translated into the paradise of Vishnu and seem to envy her happy lot.
The women run up to her to receive her blessing, and she knows that
afterward crowds of votaries will daily frequent her shrine. The
Brahmans compliment her on her heroism. (Sometimes drugs are
administered to stifle her fears.) She knows, too, that it is useless
to falter at the last moment, as a change of heart would be an eternal
disgrace, not only to herself but to her relatives, who, therefore,
stand around with sabres and rifles to _intimidate_ her. In short,
with satanic ingenuity, every possible appeal is made to her family
pride, vanity, longing for future bliss and divine honors after life,
enforced by the knowledge that if she lives earth will be a hell to
her, so that refusal is next to impossible. And this is the
much-vaunted "conjugal affection and fidelity" of Hindoo widows!
FEMININE DEVOTION IN ANCIENT LITERATURE
The practice of "voluntary" widow-burning is, as the foregoing shows,
about as convincing proof of wifely devotion as the presence of an ox
in the butcher's stall is proof of his gastronomic devotion to man. In
reality it is, as I have said, simply the most diabolical aspect of
man's aboriginal disposition to look on woman as made solely for his
own comfort and pleasure, here and hereafter. Now it is very
instructive to note that whenever there is a story of conjugal
devotion in Oriental or ancient classical literature it is nearly
always inspired by the same spirit--the idea that the woman, as an
inferior being, should subject herself to any amount of suffering if
she can thereby save her sacred lord and master the slightest pang.
For instance, an old Arabic writer (Kamil Mobarrad, p. 529) relates
how a devoted wife whose husband was condemned to death disfigured her
beautiful face in order to let him die with the consoling feeling that
she would not marry again. The current notion that such stories are
proof of conjugal devotion is the fifth of the mistakes to be
corrected in this chapter. These stories were written by men, selfish
men, who intended them as lessons to indicate to the women what was
expected of them. Were it otherwise, why should not the men, too, be
represented, at least occasionally, as devoted and self-sacrificing?
Hector is tender to Andromache, and in the Sanscrit drama, _Kanisika's
Wrath,_ the King and the Queen contend with one another as to who
shall be the victim of that wrath; but these are the only instances of
the kind that occur to me. This interesting question will be further
considered in the chapters on India and Greece, where corroborative
stories will be quoted. Here I wish only to emphasize again the need
of caution and suspicion in interpreting the evidence relating to the
human feelings.
WIVES ESTEEMED AS MOTHERS ONLY
So much for the feminine aspect of conjugal devotion. In regard to the
masculine aspect something must be added to what was said in preceding
pages (307-10). We saw there that primitive man desires wives chiefly
as drudges and concubines. It was also indicated briefly that wives
are valued as mothers of daughters who can be sold to suitors. As a
rule, sons are more desired than daughters, as they increase a man's
power and authority, and because they alone can keep up the
superstitious rites which are deemed necessary for the salvation of
the father's selfish old soul. Now the non-existence or extreme rarity
of conjugal attachment--not to speak of affection--is painfully
indicated by the circumstance that wives were, among many races,
valued (apart from grossly utilitarian and sensual motives) as mothers
only, and that the men had a right, of which they commonly availed
themselves, of repudiating a wife if she proved barren. On the lower
Congo, says Dupont (96), a wife is not respected unless she has at
least three children. Among the Somali, barren women are dieted and
dosed, and if that proves unavailing they are usually chased away.
(Paulitschke, _B.E.A.S_., 30.) If a Greenlander's wife did not bear
him any children he generally took another one. (Cranz, I., 147.)
Among the Mexican Aztecs divorce, even from a concubine, was not easy;
but in case of barrenness even the principal wife could be repudiated.
(Bancroft, II., 263-65.) The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Germans, the
Chinese and Japanese, could divorce a wife on account of barrenness.
For a Hindoo the laws of Manu indicate that "a barren wife may be
dispensed with in the eighth year; one whose children all die, in the
tenth; one who bears only daughters, in the eleventh." The tragic
import of such bare statements is hardly realized until we come upon
particular instances like those related by the Indian authoress
Ramabai (15):
"Of the four wives of a certain prince, the eldest had
borne him two sons; she was therefore his favorite, and
her face beamed with happiness.... But oh! what
contrast to this happiness was presented in the
apartments of the childless three. Their faces were sad
and careworn; there seemed no hope for them in this
world, since their lord was displeased with them on
account of their misfortune."
"A lady friend of mine in Calcutta told me that her husband had warned
her not to give birth to a girl, the first time, or he would never see
her face again." Another woman
"had been notified by her husband that if she persisted
in bearing daughters she should be superseded by
another wife, have coarse clothes to wear, scanty food
to eat," etc.[127]
WHY CONJUGAL PRECEDES ROMANTIC LOVE
The conclusion to be drawn from the testimony collected in this
chapter is that genuine conjugal love--the affection for a wife _for
her own sake_--is, like romantic love, a product chiefly of modern
civilization.
I say chiefly, because I am convinced that conjugal love was known
sooner than romantic love, and for a very simple reason. Among those
of the lower races where the sexes were not separated in youth, a
license prevailed which led to shallow, premature, temporary alliances
that precluded all idea of genuine affection, even had these folk been
capable of such a sentiment; while among those tribes and peoples that
practised the custom of separating the boys and girls from the
earliest age, and not allowing them to become acquainted till after
marriage, the growth of real, prematrimonial affection was, of course,
equally impossible. In married life this was different. Living
together for years, having a common interest in their children,
sharing the same joys and sorrows, husband and wife would learn the
rudiments of sympathy, and in happy cases there would be an
opportunity for the growth of liking, attachment, fondness, or even,
in exceptional instances, of affection. I cannot sufficiently
emphasize the fact that my theory is psychological or cultural, not
chronological. The fact that a man lives in the year 1900 makes it no
more self-evident that he should be capable of sexual affection than
the fact that a man lived seven centuries before Christ makes it
self-evident that he could not love affectionately. Hector and
Andromache existed only in the brain of Homer, who was in many
respects thousands of years ahead of his contemporaries. Whether such
a couple could really have existed at that time among the Trojans, or
the Greeks, we do not know, but in any case it would have been an
exception, proving the rule by the painful contrast of the surrounding
barbarism.
Exceptions may possibly occur among the lower races, through happy
combinations of circumstances. C.C. Jones describes (69) a picture of
conjugal devotion among Cherokee Indians:
"By the side of the aged Mico Tomo-chi-chi, as, thin
and weak, he lies upon his blanket, hourly expecting
the summons of the pale-king, we see the sorrowing form
of his old wife, Scenauki, bending over and fanning him
with a bunch of feathers."
In his work on the Indians of California (271), Powers writes:
"An aged Achomauri lost his wife, to whom he had been
married probably half a century, and he tarred his face
in mourning for her as though he were a woman--_an act
totally unprecedented_, and regarded by the Indians as
evincing an _extraordinary_ affection."
St. John relates the following incident in his book on Borneo:
"Ijan, a Balau chief, was bathing with his wife in the
Lingga River, a place notorious for man-eating
alligators, when Indra Lela, passing in a boat,
remarked, 'I have just seen a very large animal
swimming up the stream.' Upon hearing this, Ijan told
his wife to go up the steps and he would follow. She
got safely up, but he, stopping to wash his feet, was
seized by the alligator, dragged into the middle of the
stream, and disappeared from view. His wife, hearing a
cry, turned round, and seeing her husband's fate,
sprang into the river, shrieking 'Take me also,' and
dived down at the spot where she had seen the alligator
sink with his prey. No persuasion could induce her to
come out of the water; she swam about, diving in all
the places most dreaded from being a resort of
ferocious reptiles, seeking to die with her husband; at
last her friends came down and forcibly removed her to
their house."
These stories certainly imply conjugal attachment, but is there any
indication in them of affection? The Cherokee squaw mourns the
impending death of her husband, which is a selfish feeling. The
Californian, similarly, laments the loss of his spouse. The only thing
he does is to "tar his face in mourning," and even this is regarded by
the other Indians as "extraordinary" and "unprecedented." As for the
woman in the third story, it is to be noted that her act is one of
selfish despair, not of self-sacrifice for her husband's sake. We
shall see in later chapters that women of her grade abandon themselves
to suicidal impulses, not only where there is occasion for real
distress, but often on the most trivial pretexts. A few days later, in
all probability, that same woman would have been ready to marry
another man. There is no evidence of altruistic action--action for
another's benefit--in any of these incidents, and altruism is the only
test of genuine affection as distinguished from mere liking,
attachment, and fondness, which, as was explained in the chapter on
Affection, are the products of selfishness, more or less disguised. If
this distinction had been borne in mind a vast amount of confusion
could have been avoided in works of exploration and the
anthropological treatises based on them. Westermarck, for instance,
cites on page 357 a number of authors who asserted that sexual
affection, or even the appearance of it, was unknown to the Hovas of
Madagascar, the Gold Coast, and Winnabah natives, the Kabyles, the
Beni-Amer, the Chittagong Hill Tribes, the Ponape islanders, the
Eskimo, the Kutchin, the Iroquois, and North American Indians in
general; while on the next pages he cites approvingly authors who
fancied they had discovered sexual affection among tribes some of whom
(Australians, Andamanese, Bushmans) are far below the peoples just
mentioned. The cause of this discrepancy lies not in these races
themselves, but in the inaccurate use of words, and the different
standards of the writers, some accepting the rubbing of noses or other
sexual caresses as evidence of "affection," while others take any acts
indicating fondness, attachment, or a suicidal impulse as signs of it.
In a recent work by Tyrrell (165), I find it stated that the Eskimo
marriage is "purely a love union;" and in reading on I discover that
the author's idea of a "love union" is the absence of a marriage
ceremony! Yet I have no doubt that Tyrrell will be cited hereafter as
evidence that love unions are common among the Eskimos. So, again,
when Lumholtz writes (213) that an Australian woman
"may happen to change husbands many times in her life, but
sometimes, despite the fact that her consent is not asked,
she gets the one she loves--for a black woman can love too"
--we are left entirely in the dark as to what kind of "love" is
meant--sensual or sentimental, liking, attachment, fondness, or real
affection. Surely it is time to put an end to such confusion, at least
in scientific treatises, and to acquire in psychological discussions
the precision which we always employ in describing the simplest weeds
or insects.
Morgan, the great authority on the Iroquois--the most intelligent of
North American Indians--lived long enough among them to realize
vaguely that there must be a difference between sexual attachment
before and after marriage, and that the latter is an earlier
phenomenon in human evolution. After declaring that among the Indians
"marriage was not founded on the affections ... but was regulated
exclusively as a matter of physical necessity," he goes on to say:
"Affection after marriage would naturally spring up
between the parties from association, from habit, and
from mutual dependence; but of that marvellous passion
which originates in a higher development of the
passions of the human heart, and is founded upon a
cultivation of the affections between the sexes, they
were entirely ignorant. In their temperaments they were
below this passion in its simplest forms."
He is no doubt right in declaring that the Indians before marriage
were "in their temperaments" below affectionate love "in its simplest
forms"; but, that being so, it is difficult to see how they could have
acquired real affection after marriage. As a matter of fact we know
that they treated their wives with a selfishness which is entirely
incompatible with true affection. The Rev. Peter Jones, moreover, an
Indian himself, tells us in his book on the Ojibwas:
"I have scarcely ever seen anything like social
intercourse between husband and wife, and it is
remarkable that the women say little in presence of the
men."
Obviously, at the beginning of the passage quoted, Morgan should have
used the word attachment in place of affection. Bulmer (by accident, I
suspect) uses the right word when he says (Brough Smyth, 77) that
Australians, notwithstanding their brutal forms of marriage, often
"get much attached to each other." At the same time it is easy to show
that, if not among Australians or Indians, at any rate with such a
people as the ancient Greeks, conjugal affection may have existed
while romantic love was still impossible. The Greeks looked down on
their women as inferior beings. Now one can feel affection--conjugal
or friendly--toward an inferior, but one cannot feel adoration--and
adoration is absolutely essential to romantic love. Before romantic
love could be born it was necessary that women should not only be
respected as equal to man but worshipped as his superior. This was not
done by any of the lower or ancient races; hence romantic love is a
peculiarly modern sentiment, later than any other form of human
affection.
OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE
When Shakspere wrote that "The course of true love never did run
smooth" he had in mind individual cases of courtship. But what is true
of individuals also applies to the story of love itself. For many
thousands of years savagery and barbarism "proved an unrelenting foe
to love," and it was with almost diabolical ingenuity that obstacles
to its birth and growth were maintained and multiplied. It was
crushed, balked, discountenanced, antagonized, discredited,
disheartened so persistently that the wonder is not that there should
be so little true love even at the present day, but that there is any
at all. A whole volume might be written on the Obstacles to Love; my
original plan for this book included a long chapter on this matter;
but partly to avoid repetition, partly to save space, I will condense
my material to a few pages, considering briefly the following
obstacles: I. Ignorance and stupidity. II. Coarseness and obscenity.
III. War. IV. Cruelty. V. Masculine selfishness. VI. Contempt for
women. VII. Capture and sale of brides. VIII. Infant marriages. IX.
Prevention of free choice. X. Separation of the sexes. XI. Sexual
taboos. XII. Race aversion. XIII. Multiplicity of languages. XIV.
Social barriers. XV. Religious prejudice.
I. IGNORANCE AND STUPIDITY
Intelligence alone does not imply a capacity for romantic love. Dogs
are the most intelligent of all animals, but they know nothing of
love; the most intelligent nations of antiquity--the Greeks, Romans
and Hebrews--were strangers to this feeling; and in our times we have
seen that such intelligent persons as Tolstoi, Zola, Groncourt,
Flaubert have been confessedly unable to experience real love such as
Turgenieff held up to them. On the other hand, there can be no genuine
love without intelligence. It is true that maternal love exists among
the lowly, but that is an instinct developed by natural selection,
because without it the race could not have persisted. Conjugal
attachment also was, as we have seen, necessary for the preservation
of the race; whereas romantic love is not necessary for the
preservation of the race, but is merely a means for its improvement;
wherefore it developed slowly, keeping pace with the growth of the
intellectual powers of discrimination, the gradual refinement of the
emotions, and the removal of diverse obstacles created by selfishness,
coarseness, foolish taboos, and prejudices. A savage lives entirely in
his senses, hence sensual love is the only kind he can know. His love
is as coarse and simple as his music, which is little more than a
monotonous rhythmic noise. Just as a man, unless he has musical
culture, cannot understand a Schumann symphony, so, unless he has
intellectual culture, he cannot love a woman as Schumann loved Clara
Wieck.
Stupid persons, men and women with blunt intellects, also have blunt
feelings, excepting those of a criminal, vengeful kind. Savages have
keener senses than we have, but their intellect and emotions are blunt
and untrained. An Australian cannot count above ten, and Galton says
(132) that Damaras in counting "puzzle very much after five, because
no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are
required for units." Spix and Martins (384) found it very difficult to
get any information from the Brazilian (Coroado) because "scarcely has
one begun to question him about his language when he gets impatient,
complains of headache, and shows that he cannot endure this
effort"--for he is used to living entirely in and for his senses.
Fancy such savages writing or reading a book like _The Reveries of a
Bachelor_ and you will understand why stupidity is an obstacle to
love, and realize the unspeakable folly of the notion that love is
always and everywhere the same. The savage has no imagination, and
imagination is the organ of romantic love; without it there can be no
sympathy, and without sympathy there can be no love.
II. COARSENESS AND OBSCENITY
Kissing and other caresses are, as we have seen, practices unknown to
savages. Their nerves being too coarse to appreciate even the more
refined forms of sensualism, it follows of necessity that they are too
coarse to experience the subtle manifestations of imaginative
sentimental love. Their national addiction to obscene practices and
conversation proves an insuperable obstacle to the growth of refined
sexual feelings. Details given in later chapters will show that what
Turner says of the Samoans, "From their childhood their ears are
familiar with the most obscene conversation;" and what the Rev. George
Taplan writes of the "immodest and lewd" dances of the Australians,
applies to the lower races in general. The history of love is, indeed,
epitomized in the evolution of the dance from its aboriginal obscenity
and licentiousness to its present function as chiefly a means of
bringing young people together and providing innocent opportunities
for courtship; two extremes differing as widely as the coarse drum
accompaniment of a primitive dance from the sentimental melodies,
soulful harmonies, and exquisite orchestral colors of a Strauss waltz.
A remark made by Taine on Burns suggests how even acquired coarseness
in a mind naturally refined may crush the capacity for true love:
"He had enjoyed too much.... Debauch had all but
spoiled his fine imagination, which had before been
'the chief source of his happiness'; and he confessed
that, instead of tender reveries, he had now nothing
but sensual desires."
The poets have done much to confuse the public mind in this matter by
their fanciful and impossible pastoral lovers. The remark made in my
first book, that "only an educated mind can feel romantic love," led
one of its reviewers to remark, half indignantly, half mournfully,
"There goes the pastoral poetry of the world at a single stroke of the
pen." Well, let it go. I am quite sure that if these poetic dreamers
had ever come across a shepherdess in real life--dirty, unkempt,
ignorant, coarse, immoral--they would themselves have made haste to
disavow their heroines and seek less malodorous "maidens" for
embodiments of their exalted fancies of love[128]. Richard Wagner was
promptly disillusioned when he came across some of those modern
shepherdesses, the Swiss dairy-maids. "There are magnificent women
here in the Oberland," he wrote to a friend, "but only so to the eye;
they are all tainted with rabid vulgarity."
III. WAR
Herbert Spencer has devoted some eloquent pages[129] to showing that
along with chronic militancy there goes a brutal treatment of women,
whereas industrial tribes are likely to treat their wives and
daughters well. To militancy is due the disregard of women's claims
shown in stealing or buying them, the inequality of status between the
sexes entailed by polygamy; the use of women as laboring slaves, the
life-and-death power over wife and child. To which we may add that war
proves an obstacle to love, by fostering cruelty and smothering
sympathy, and all the other tender feelings; by giving the coarsest
masculine qualities of aggressiveness and brute prowess the aspect of
cardinal virtues and causing the feminine virtues of gentleness,
mercy, kindness, to be despised, and women themselves to be esteemed
only in so far as they appropriate masculine qualities; and by
fostering rape and licentiousness in general. When Plutarch wrote that
"the most warlike nations are the most addicted to love," he meant, of
course, lust. In wars of the past no incentive to brutal courage
proved so powerful as the promise that the soldiers might have the
women of captured cities. "Plunder if you succeed, and paradise if you
fall. Female captives in the one case, celestial houris in the
other"--such was, according to Burckhardt, the promise to their men
given by Wahabi chiefs on the eve of battle.
IV. CRUELTY
Love depends on sympathy, and sympathy is incompatible with cruelty.
It has been maintained that the notorious cruelty of the lower and
war-like races is manifested only toward enemies; but this is an
error. Some of the instances cited under "Sentimental Murder" and
"Sympathy" show how often superstitious and utilitarian considerations
smother all the family feelings. Three or four more illustrations may
be added here. Burton says of the East Africans, that "when childhood
is past, the father and son become natural enemies, after the manner
of wild beasts." The Bedouins are not compelled by law or custom to
support their aged parents, and Burckhardt (156) came across such men
whom their sons would have allowed to perish. Among the Somals it
frequently occurs that an old father is simply driven away and exposed
to distress and starvation. Nay, incredible cases are related of
fathers being sold as slaves, or killed. The African missionary,
Moffat, one day came across an old woman who had been left to die
within an enclosure. He asked her why she had been thus deserted, and
she replied:
"I am old, you see, and no longer able to serve them [her
grown children]. When they kill game, I am too feeble to aid
in carrying home the flesh; I am incapable of gathering wood
to make fire, and I cannot carry their children on my back
as I used to do."
V. MASCULINE SELFISHNESS
The South American Chiquitos, as Dobrizhoffer informs us (II., 264),
used to kill the wife of a sick man, believing her to be the cause of
his illness, and fancying that his recovery would follow her
disappearance. Fijians have been known to kill and eat their wives,
when they had no other use for them. Carl Bock (275) says of the
Malays of Sumatra, that the men are extremely indolent and make the
women their beasts of burden (as the lower races do in general).
"I have," he says,
"continually met a file of women carrying loads of rice or
coffee on their heads, while the men would follow, lazily
lounging along, with a long stick in their hands, like
shepherds driving a flock of sheep.... I have seen a man go
into his house, where his wife was lying asleep on the bed,
rudely awake her, and order her to lie on the floor, while
he made himself comfortable on the cushions."
But I need not add in this place any further instances to the hundreds
given in other parts of this volume, revealing uncivilized man's
disposition to regard woman as made for his convenience, both in this
world and the next. Nor is it necessary to add that such an attitude
is an insuperable obstacle to love, which in its essence is
altruistic.
VI. CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN
As late as the sixth century the Christian Provincial Council of Macon
debated the question whether women have souls. I know of no early
people, savage, barbarous, semi-civilized or civilized--from the
Australian to the Greek--in which the men did not look down on the
women as inferior beings. Now contempt is the exact opposite of
adoration, and where it prevails there can of course be no romantic
love.[130]
VII. CAPTURE AND SALE OF BRIDES
In the Homeric poems we read much about young women who were captured
and forced to become the concubines of the men who had slain their
fathers, brothers, and husbands. Other brides are referred to as
[Greek: alphesiboiai], wooed with rich presents, literally "bringing
in oxen." Among other ancient nations--Assyrians, Hebrews,
Babylonians, Chaldeans, etc., brides had to be bought with property or
its equivalent in service (as in the case of Jacob and Rachel).
Serving for a bride until the parents feel repaid for their selfish
trouble in bringing her up, also prevails among savages as low as the
African Bushman and the Fuegian Indians, and is not therefore, as
Herbert Spencer holds, a higher or later form of "courtship" than
capture or purchase. But it is less common than purchase, which has
been a universal custom. "All over the earth," says Letourneau (137),
"among all races and at all times, wherever history gives us
information, we find well-authenticated examples of marriage
by purchase, which allows us to assert that during the
middle period of civilization, the right of parents over
their children, and especially over their daughters,
included in all countries the privilege of selling them."
In Australia a knife or a glass bottle has been held sufficient
compensation for a wife. A Tartar parent will sell his daughter for a
certain number of sheep, horses, oxen, or pounds of butter; and so on
in innumerable regions. As an obstacle to free choice and love unions,
nothing more effective could be devised; for what Burckhardt writes
(_B. and W._, I., 278) of the Egyptian peasant girls has a general
application. They are, he says, "sold in matrimony by their fathers
_to the highest bidders_; a circumstance that frequently causes the
most mean and unfeeling transactions."
In his collection of Esthonian folk-songs Neus has a poem which
pathetically pictures the fate of a bartered bride. A girl going to
the field to cut flax meets a young man who informs her bluntly that
she belongs to him, as he has bought her. "And who undertook to sell
me?" she asks. "Your father and mother, your sister and brother," he
replies, adding frankly that he won the father's favor with a present
of a horse, the mother's with a cow, the sister's with a bracelet, the
brother's with an ox. Then the unwilling bride lifts her voice and
curses the family: "May the father's horse rot under him; may the
mother's cow yield blood instead of milk!" Hundreds of millions of
bartered brides have borne their fate more meekly. It is needless to
add that what has been said here applies _a fortiori_ to captured
brides.
VIII. INFANT MARRIAGES
Of the diabolical habit of forcing girls into marriage before they had
reached the age of puberty and its wide prevalence I have already
spoken (293), and reference will be made to it in many of the pages
following this. Here I may, therefore, confine myself to a few details
relating to one country, by way of showing vividly what a deadly
obstacle to courtship, free choice, love, and every tender and
merciful feeling, this cruel custom forms. Among all classes and
castes of Hindoos it has been customary from time immemorial to unite
boys of eight; seven, even six years, to girls still younger. It is
even prescribed by the laws of Manu that a man of twenty-four should
marry a girl of eight. Old Sanscrit verses have been found declaring
that "the mother, father, and oldest brother of a girl shall all be
damned if they allow her to reach maturity without being married;" and
the girl herself, in such a case, is cast out into the lowest class,
too low for anyone to marry her.[131] In some cases marriage means
merely engagement, the bride remaining at home with her parents, who
do not part with her till some years later. Often, however, the
husband takes immediate possession of his child-wife, and the
consequences are horrible. Of 205 cases reported in a Bengal
Medico-Legal Report, 5 ended fatally, 38 were crippled, and the
general effect of such cruelty is pathetically touched on by Mme.
Ryder, who found it impossible to describe the anguish she felt when
she saw these half-developed females, with their expression of
hopeless suffering, their skeleton arms and legs, marching behind
their husbands at the prescribed distance, with never a smile on their
faces.
It would be a mistake to seek a partial excuse for this inhumanity in
the early maturing effects of a warm climate. Mme. Ryder expressly
states that a Hindoo girl of ten, instead of seeming older than a
European girl of that age, resembles our children at five or six
years.
IX. PREVENTION OF FREE CHOICE
One of the unfortunate consequences of Darwin's theory of sexual
selection was that it made him assume that
"in utterly barbarous tribes the women have more power in
choosing, rejecting, and tempting their lovers, or of
afterward exchanging their husbands than might have been
expected. As this is a point of importance,"
he adds, "I will give in detail such evidence as I have been able to
collect;" which he proceeds to do. This "evidence in detail" consists
of three cases in Africa, five among American Indians, and a few
others among Fijians, Kalmucks, Malayans, and the Korarks of
Northeastern Asia. Having referred to these twelve cases, he proceeds
with his argument, utterly ignoring the twelve hundred facts that
oppose his assumption--a proceeding so unlike his usual candid habit
of stating the difficulties confronting him, that this circumstance
alone indicates how shaky he felt in regard to this point. Moreover,
even the few instances he cites fail to bear out his doctrine. It is
incomprehensible to me how he could claim the Kaffirs for his side.
Though these Africans "buy their wives, and girls are severely beaten
by their fathers if they will not accept a chosen husband, it is
nevertheless manifest," Darwin writes, "from many facts given by the
Rev. Mr. Shooter, that they have considerable power of choice. Thus,
very ugly, though rich men, have been known to fail in getting wives."
What Shooter really does (50) is to relate the case of a man so
ill-favored that he had never been able to get a wife till he offered
a big sum to a chief for one of his wards. She refused to go, but "her
arms were bound and she was delivered like a captive. Later she
escaped and claimed the protection of a rival chief."
In other words, this man did _not_ fail to get a wife, and the girl
had _no_ choice. Darwin ignores the rest of Shooter's narrative
(55-58), which shows that while perhaps as a rule moral persuasion is
first tried before physical violence is used, the girl in any case is
obliged to take the man chosen for her. The man is highly praised in
her presence, and if she still remains obstinate she has to
"encounter the wrath of her enraged father ... the furious parent will
hear nothing--go with her husband she must--if she return she shall be
slain." Even if she elopes with another man she "may be forcibly
brought back and sent to the one chosen by her father," and only by
the utmost perseverance can she escape his tyranny. Leslie (whom
Darwin cites) is therefore wrong when he says "it is a mistake to
imagine that a girl is sold by her father in the same manner, and with
the same authority, with which he would dispose of a cow." Those who
knew the Kaffirs most intimately agree with Shooter; the Rev. W.C.
Holden, _e.g._, who writes in his elaborate work, _The Past and Future
of the Kaffir Races_ (189-211) that "it is common for the youngest,
the healthiest, ... the handsomest girls to be sold to old men who
perhaps have already half-a-dozen concubines," and whom the work of
these wives has made rich enough to buy another. A girl is in many
instances "compelled by torture to accept the man she hates. The whole
is as purely a business transaction as the bartering of an ox or
buying a horse." From Dugmore's _Laws and Customs_ he cites the
following: "It sometimes occurs that the entreaties of the daughter
prevail over the avarice of the father; but such cases, the Kaffirs
admit, are rare ... the highest bidder usually gains the prize."
Holden adds that when a girl is obstreperous "they seize her by main
strength, and drag her on the ground, as I have repeatedly seen;" and
in his chapter on polygamy he gives the most harrowing details of the
various cruelties practised on the poor girls who do not wish to be
sold like cows.
That Kaffir girls "have been known to propose to a man," as Darwin
says, does not indicate that they have a choice, any more than the
fact that they "not rarely run away with a favored lover." They might
propose to a hundred men and not have their choice; and as for the
elopement, that in itself shows they have no liberty of choice; for if
they had they would not be obliged to run away. Finally, how could
Darwin reconcile his attitude with the remark of C. Hamilton, cited by
himself, that with the Kaffirs "the chiefs generally have the pick of
the women for many miles round, and are most persevering in
establishing or confirming their privilege"?
I have discussed this case "in detail" in order to show to what
desperate straits a hopeless theory may reduce a great thinker. To
suppose that in this "utterly barbarous tribe" the looks of the race
can be gradually improved by the women accepting only those males who
"excite or charm them most" is simply grotesque. Nor is Darwin much
happier with his other cases. When he wrote that "Among the degraded
Bushmen of Africa" (citing Burchell) "'when a girl has grown up to
womanhood without having been betrothed, _which, however, does not
often happen_, her lover must gain her approbation as well as that of
her parents'"--the words I have italicized ought to have shown him
that this testimony was not for but against his theory. Burchell
himself tells us that Bushman girls "are most commonly betrothed" when
about seven years old, and become mothers at twelve, or even at ten.
To speak of choice in such cases, in any rational sense of the word,
would be farcical even if the girls were free to do as they please,
which they are not. With regard to the Fuegians, Darwin cites King and
Fitzroy to the effect that the Indian obtains the consent of the
parents by doing them some service, and then attempts to carry off the
girl; "but if she is unwilling, she hides herself in the woods until
her admirer is heartily tired of looking for her and gives up his
pursuit; _but this seldom happens_." If this passage means anything,
it means that it is customary for the parents to decide upon who is to
marry their daughters, and that, though she may frustrate the plan,
"this seldom happens." Darwin further informs us that "Hearne
describes how a woman in one of the tribes of Arctic America
repeatedly ran away from her husband and joined her lover." How much
this single instance proves in regard to woman's liberty of choice or
power to aid sexual selection, may be inferred from the statement by
the same "excellent observer" of Indian traits (as Darwin himself
calls him) that "it has ever been the custom among these people to
wrestle for any woman to whom they are attached; and, of course, the
strongest party always carries off the prize"--an assertion borne out
by Richardson (II., 24) and others. But if the strongest man "always
carries off the prize," where does woman's choice come in? Hearne adds
that "this custom prevails throughout all their tribes" (104). And
while the other Indian instances referred to by Darwin indicate that
in case of decided aversion a girl is not absolutely compelled, as
among the Kaffirs, to marry the man selected for her, the custom
nevertheless is for the parents to make the choice, as among most
Indians, North and South.
Whereas Darwin's claim that primitive women have "more power" to
decide their fate as regards marriage "than might have been expected,"
is comparatively modest, Westermarck goes so far as to declare that
these women "are not, _as a rule,_ married without having any voice of
their own in the matter." He feels compelled to this course because he
realizes that his theory that savages originally ornamented themselves
in order to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex
"presupposes of course that savage girls enjoy great liberty in the
choice of a mate." In the compilation of his evidence, unfortunately,
Westermarck is even less critical and reliable than Darwin. In
reference to the Bushmen, he follows Darwin's example in citing
Burchell, but leaves out the words "which, however, does not often
happen," which show that liberty of choice on the woman's part is not
the rule but a rare exception.[132] He also claims the Kaffirs,
though, as I have just shown, such a claim is preposterous. To the
evidence already cited on my side I may add Shooter's remarks (55),
that if there are several lovers the girl is asked to decide for
herself. "This, however, is merely formal," for if she chooses one who
is poor the father recommends to her the one of whom he calculated to
get the most cattle, and that settles the matter. Not even the widows
are allowed the liberty of choice, for, as Shooter further informs us
(86), "when a man dies those wives who have not left the kraal remain
with the eldest son. If they wish to marry again, they must go to one
of their late husband's brothers." Among the African women "who have
no difficulty in getting the husbands whom they may desire,"
Westermarck mentions the Ashantees, on the authority of Beecham (125).
On consulting that page of Beecham I find that he does indeed declare
that "no Ashantee compels his daughter to become the wife of one she
dislikes;" but this is a very different thing from saying that she can
choose the man she may desire. "In the affair of courtship," writes
Beecham, "the wishes of the female are but little consulted; the
business being chiefly settled between the suitor and her parents."
And in the same page he adds that "it is not infrequently the case
that infants are married to each other ... and infants are also
frequently wedded to adults, and even to elderly men," while it is
also customary "to contract for a child before it is born." The same
destructive criticism might be applied to other negroes of Western
Africa whom both Darwin and Westermarck claim on the very dubious
evidence of Reade.[133]
Among other peoples to whom Westermarck looks for support of his
argument are the Fijians, Tongans, and natives of New Britain, Java,
and Sumatra. He claims the Fijians on the peculiar ground (the italics
are mine) that among them "forced marriages are _comparatively_ rare
among the _higher classes_." That may be; but are not the higher
classes a small minority? And do not all classes indulge in the habits
of infant betrothal and of appropriating women by violence without
consulting their wishes? Regarding the Tongans, Westermarck cites the
supposition of Mariner that perhaps two-thirds of the girls had
married with their own free consent; which does not agree with the
observations of Vason (144), who spent four years among them:
"As the choice of a husband is not in the power of the
daughters but he is provided by the discretion of the
parents, an instance of refusal on the part of the daughter
is unknown in Tonga."
He adds that this is not deemed a hardship there, where divorce and
unchastity are so general.
"In the New Britain Group, according to Mr. Romilly, after
the man has worked for years to pay for his wife, and is
finally in a position to take her to his house, she may
refuse to go, and _he cannot claim back from the parents the
large sums he has paid_ them in yams, cocoa-nuts, and
sugar-canes."
This Westermarck guilelessly accepts as proof of the liberty of choice
on the girl's part, missing the very philosophy of the whole matter.
Why are girls not allowed in so many cases to choose their own
husbands? Because their selfish parents want to benefit by selling
them to the highest bidder. In the above case, on the contrary, as the
italics show, the selfish parents benefit by making the girl refuse to
go with that man, keeping her as a bait for another profitable suitor.
In all probability she refuses to go with him at the positive command
of her parents. What the real state of affairs is on the New Britain
Group we may gather from the revelations given in an article on the
marriage customs of the natives by the Rev. B. Danks in the _Journal
of the Anthropological Institute_ (1888, 290-93): In New Britain, he
says, "the marriage tie has much the appearance of a money tie." There
are instances of sham capture, when there is much laughter and fun;
"but in many cases which came under my notice it was not a
matter of form but painful earnestness." "It often happens
that the young woman has a liking for another and none for
the man who has purchased her. She may refuse to go to him.
In that case her friends consider themselves disgraced by
her conduct. She ought, according to their notions, to fall
in with their arrangements with thankfulness and gladness of
heart! They drag her along, beat her, kick and abuse her,
and it has been my misfortune to see girls dragged past my
house, struggling in vain to escape from their fate.
Sometimes they have broken loose and then ran for the only
place of refuge in all the country, the mission-house. I
could render them no assistance until they had bounded up
the steps of my veranda into our bedroom and hidden
themselves under the bed, trembling for their lives. It has
been my privilege and duty to stand between the infuriated
brother or father, who has followed close upon the poor
girl, spear in hand, vowing to put her to death for the
disgrace she has brought upon them." "Liberty of choice,"
indeed!
"In some parts of Java, much deference is paid to the bride's
inclinations," writes Westermarck. But Earl declares (58) that among
the Javanese "courtship is carried on entirely through the medium of
the parents of the young people, and any interference on the part of
the bride would be considered highly indecorous," And Raffles writes
(I., Ch. VII.) that in Java "marriages are invariably contracted, not
by the parties themselves, but by their parents or relations on their
behalf." Betrothals of children, too, are customary. Regarding the
Sumatrans, Westermarck cites Marsden to the effect that among the
Rejang a man may run away with a virgin without violating the laws,
provided he pays her parents for her afterward--which tells us little
about the girl's choice. But why does he ignore Marsden's full
account, a few pages farther on, of Sumatran marriages in general?
There are four kinds, one of which, he says, is a regular treaty
between the parties on a footing of equality; this is called marriage
by _semando_. In the _jujur_ a sum of money is given by one man to
another "as a consideration for the person of his daughter, whose
situation in this case differs not much from that of a slave to the
man she marries, and to his family." In other cases one virgin is
given in exchange for another, and in the marriage by _ambel anak_ the
father of a young man chooses a wife for him. Finally he shows that
the customs of Sumatrans do not favor courtship, the young men and
women being kept carefully apart.
At first sight Westermarck's chapter on the Liberty of Choice seems
rather imposing, as it consists of twenty-seven pages, while Darwin
devoted only two to the subject. In reality, however, Westermarck has
filled only eight pages with what he considers proofs of his theory,
and after scouring the whole world he has not succeeded in bringing
together thirty cases which stand the test of critical examination. I
grant him, though in several instances with suspicions, some American
Indian tribes, natives of Arorae, of the Society Islands, Micronesians
in general (?), Dyaks, Minabassers of Celebes, Burmese, Shans,
Chittagong Hill tribes, and a few other wild tribes of India, possibly
some aboriginal Chinese tribes, Ainos, Kamchadales, Jakuts, Ossetes,
Kalmucks, Aenezes, Touaregs, Shulis, Madis, the ancient Cathaei and
Lydians. My reasons for rejecting his other instances have already
been given in part, and most of the other cases will be disposed of in
the pages relating to Australians, New Zealanders, American Indians,
Hindoos, and Wild Tribes of India. In the chapter on Australia, after
commenting on Westermarck's preposterous attempt to include that race
in his list in the face of all the authorities, I shall explain also
why it is not likely that, as he maintains, still more primitive races
allowed their women greater freedom of choice than modern savages
enjoy in his opinion.
To become convinced that the women of the lower races do not "as a
rule" enjoy the liberty of choice, we need only contrast the meagre
results obtained by Darwin and Westermarck with the vast number of
races and tribes whose customs indicate that women are habitually
given in marriage without being consulted as to their wishes. Among
these customs are infant marriage, infant betrothal, capture,
purchase, marrying whole families of sisters, and the levirate. It is
true that some of these customs do not affect all members of the
tribes involved, but the very fact of their prevalence shows that the
idea of consulting a woman's preference does not enter into the heads
of the men, barring a few cases, where a young woman is so
obstreperous that she may at any rate succeed in escaping a hated
suitor, though even this (which is far from implying liberty of
choice) is altogether exceptional. We must not allow ourselves to be
deceived by appearances, as in the case of the Moors of Senegambia,
concerning whom Letourneau says (138) that a daughter has the right to
refuse the husband selected for her, on condition of remaining
unmarried; if she marries another, she becomes the slave of the man
first selected for her. Of the Christian Abyssinians, Combes and
Tamisier say (II., 106) that the girls are never "seriously"
consulted; and "at Sackatou a girl is usually consulted by her
parents, but only as a matter of form; she never refuses."
(Letourneau, 139.) The same may be said of China and Japan, where the
sacred duty of filial obedience is so ingrained in a girl's soul that
she would never dream of opposing her parents' wishes.
Of the horrible custom of marrying helpless girls before they are
mature in body or mind--often, indeed, before they have reached the
age of puberty--I have already spoken, instancing some Borneans,
Javanese, Egyptians, American Indians, Australians, Hottentots,
natives of Old Calabar, Hindoos; to which may be added some Arabs and
Persians, Syrians, Kurds, Turks, natives of Celebes, Madagascar,
Bechuanas, Basutos, and many other Africans, etc. As for those who
practise infant betrothal, Westermarck's own list includes Eskimos,
Chippewayans, Botocudos, Patagonians, Shoshones, Arawaks, Macusis,
Iroquois; Gold Coast negroes, Bushmen, Marutse, Bechuanas, Ashantees,
Australians; tribes of New Guinea, New Zealand, Tonga, Tahiti, and
many other islands of the South Sea; some tribes of the Malay
Archipelago; tribes of British India; all peoples of the Turkish
stock; Samoyedes and Tuski; Jews of Western Russia.
As regards capture, good authorities now hold that it was not a
universal practice in all parts of the world; yet it prevailed very
widely--for instance, among Aleutian Islanders, Ahts, Bonaks, Macas
Indians of Ecuador, all Carib tribes, some Brazilians, Mosquito
Indians, Fuegians; Bushmen, Bechuanas, Wakamba, and other Africans;
Australians, Tasmanians, Maoris, Fijians, natives of Samoa, Tukopia,
New Guinea, Indian Archipelago; wild tribes of India; Arabs, Tartars,
and other Central Asians; some Russians, Laplanders, Esthonians,
Finns, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Scandinavians, Slavonians, etc. "The
list," says Westermarck (387), "might easily be enlarged." As for the
list of peoples among whom brides were sold--usually to the highest
bidder and without reference to feminine choice--that would be much
larger still. Eight pages are devoted to it and two only to the
exceptions, by Westermarck himself, who concludes (390) that "Purchase
of wives may, with even more reason than marriage by capture, be said
to form a general stage in the social history of mankind," How nearly
universal the practice is, or has been, may be inferred from the fact
that Sutherland (I., 208), after examining sixty-one negro races,
found fifty-seven recorded as purchasing their wives.
Widely prevalent also was the custom of allowing a man who had married
a girl to claim all her sisters as soon as they reached a marriageable
age. Whatever their own preferences might be, they had no choice.
Among the Indian tribes alone, Morgan mentions forty who indulged in
this custom. As for the levirate, that is another very wide-spread
custom which shows an utter disregard of woman's preference and
choice. It might be supposed that widows, at any rate, ought always to
be allowed, in case they wished to marry again, to follow their own
choice. But they are, like the daughters, regarded as personal
property, and are inherited by their late husband's brother or some
other male relative, who marries them himself or disposes of them as
he pleases. Whether the acceptance of a brother's widow or widows is a
right or a duty (prescribed by the desire for sons and
ancestor-worship) is immaterial for our purpose; for in either case
the widow must go as custom commands, and has no liberty of choice.
The levirate prevails, or has prevailed, among a great number of
races, from the lowest to those considerably advanced.
The list includes Australians, many Indians, from the low Brazilians
to the advanced Iroquois, Aleuts, Eskimos, Fijians, Samoans, Caroline
Islanders, natives of New Caledonia, New Guinea, New Britain, New
Hebrides, the Malay Archipelago, Wild tribes of India, Kamchadales,
Ostiaks, Kirghiz, Mongolians in general, Arabs, Egyptians, Hebrews,
natives of Madagascar, many Kaffir tribes, negroes of the Gold Coast,
Senegambians, Bechuanas, and a great many other Africans, etc.
Twelve pages of Westermarck's chapter on the Liberty of Choice are
devoted to peoples among whom not even a son is, or was, allowed to
marry without the father's consent. The list includes Mexicans,
Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrews, Egyptians,
Romans, Greeks, Hindoos, Germans, Celts, Russians, etc. In all these
cases the daughters, of course, enjoyed still less liberty of
disposing of their hand. In short, the argument against Darwin and
Westermarck is simply overwhelming--all the more when we look at the
numbers of the races who do not permit women their choice--the
400,000,000 Chinese, 300,000,000 Hindoos, the Mohammedan millions, the
whole continent of Australia, nearly all of aboriginal America and
Africa, etc.
A drowning man clings to a straw. "In Indian and Scandinavian tales,"
Westermarck informs us,
"virgins are represented as having the power to dispose of
themselves freely. Thus it was agreed that Skade should
choose for herself a husband among the Asas, but she was to
make her choice by the feet, the only part of their persons
she was allowed to see."
Obviously the author of this tale from the _Younger Edda_ had more
sense of humor than some modern anthropologists have. No less
topsy-turvy is the Hindoo _Svayamvara_ or "Maiden's Choice," to which
Westermarck alludes (162). This is an incident often referred to in
epics and dramas. "It was a custom in royal circles," writes
Samuelson, "when a princess became marriageable, for a tournament to
be held, and the _victor was chosen_ by the princess as her husband."
If the sarcasm of the expression "Maiden's Choice" is unconscious, it
is all the more amusing. How far Hindoo women of all classes were and
are from enjoying the liberty of choice, we shall see in the chapter
on India.
X. SEPARATION OF THE SEXES
I have given so much space to the question of choice because it is one
of exceptional importance. Where there is no choice there can he no
real courtship, and where there is no courtship there is no
opportunity for the development of those imaginative and sentimental
traits which constitute the essence of romantic love. It by no means
follows, however, that where choice is permitted to girls, as with the
Dyaks, real love follows as a matter of course; for it may be
prevented, as it is in the case of these Dyaks, by their sensuality,
coarseness, and general emotional shallowness and sexual frivolity.
The prevention of choice is only one of the obstacles to love, but it
is one of the most formidable, because it has acted at all times and
among races of all degrees of barbarism or civilization up to modern
Europe of two or three centuries ago. And to the frustration and free
choice was added another obstacle--the separation of the sexes. Some
Indians and even Australians tried to keep the sexes apart, though
usually without much success. In their cause no harm was done to the
cause of love, because these races are constitutionally incapable of
romantic love; but in higher stages of civilization the strict
seclusion of the women was a fatal obstacle to love. Wherever
separation of the sexes and chaperonage prevails, the only kind of
amorous infatuation possible, as a rule, is sensual passion, fiery but
transient. To love a girl sentimentally--that is, for her mental
beauty and moral refinement as well as her bodily charms--a man must
get acquainted with her, be allowed to meet her frequently. This was
not possible until within a few generations. The separation of the
sexes, by preventing all possibility of refined and legitimate
courtship, favored illicit amours on one side, loveless marriages on
the other, thus proving one of the most formidable obstacles to love.
"It is not enough to give time for mutual knowledge and affection
after marriage," wrote the late Henry Drummond.
"Nature must deepen the result by extending it to the time
before marriage.... Courtship, with its vivid perceptions
and quickened emotions, is a great opportunity for
evolution; and to institute and lengthen reasonably a period
so rich in impression is one of its latest and brightest
efforts."
XI. SEXUAL TABOOS
If a law were passed compelling every man living in Rochester, N.Y.,
who wanted a wife to get her outside of that city, in Buffalo,
Syracuse, Utica, or some other place, it would be considered an
outrageous restriction of free choice, calculated to diminish greatly
the chances of love-matches based on intimate acquaintance. If such a
law had existed for generations and centuries, sanctioned by religion
and custom and so strictly enforced that violation of it entailed the
danger of capital punishment, a sentiment would have grown up in
course of time making the inhabitants of Rochester look upon marriage
within the city with the same horror as they do upon incestuous
unions. This is not an absurd or fanciful supposition. Such laws and
customs actually did prevail in this very section of New York State.
The Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Indians was divided into two
phratries, each of which was again subdivided into four clans, named
after their totems or animals; the Bear, Wolf, Beaver, and Turtle
clans belonging to one phratry, while the other included the Deer,
Snipe, Heron, and Hawk clans. Morgan's researches show that originally
an Indian belonging to one phratry could marry a woman belonging to
the other only. Subsequently the line was drawn less strictly, but
still no Indian was allowed to marry a squaw of his own clan, though
there might be no blood, relationship between them. If an Algonkin
married a girl of his clan he committed a crime for which his nearest
relatives might put him to death. This law has prevailed widely among
the wild races in various parts of the globe. McLennan, who first
called attention to its prevalence and importance, called it exogamy,
or marrying-out.
What led to this custom is not known definitely; nearly every
anthropologist has his own theory on the subject.[134] Luckily we are
not concerned here with the origin and causes of exogamy, but only
with the fact of its existence. It occurs not only among barbarians of
a comparatively high type, like the North American Indians, but among
the lowest Australian savages, who put to death any man who marries or
assaults a woman of the same clan as his. In some Polynesian islands,
among the wild tribes of India as well as the Hindoos, in various
parts of Africa, the law of exogamy prevails, and wherever it exists
it forms a serious obstacle to free choice--_i.e._, free love, in the
proper sense of the expression. As Herbert Spencer remarks,
"The exogamous custom as at first established [being
connected with capture] implies an extremely abject
condition of women; a brutal treatment of them; an entire
absence of the higher sentiments that accompany the
relations of the sexes."
While exogamy thwarts love by minimizing the chances of intimate
acquaintance and genuine courtship, there is another form of sexual
taboo which conversely and designedly frustrates the tendency of
intimate acquaintance to ripen into passion and love. Though we do not
know just how the horror of incest arose, there can be no doubt that
there must be a natural basis for so strong and widely prevalent a
sentiment.
In so far as this horror of incest prevents the marriage of near
relatives, it is an obstacle to love that must be commended as
doubtless useful to the race. But when we find that in China there are
only 530 surnames, and that a man who marries a woman of the same
surname is punished for the crime of "incest"; that the Church under
Theodosius the Great forbade the union of relatives to the seventh
degree; that in many countries a man could not wed a relative by
marriage; that in Rome union with an adopted brother or sister was as
rigidly forbidden as with a real sister or brother;--when we come
across such facts we see that artificial and foolish notions regarding
incest must be added to the long list of agencies that have retarded
the growth of free choice and true love. And it should be noted that
in all these cases of exogamy and taboos of artificial incest, the
man's liberty of choice was restricted as well as the woman's. Thus
our cumulative evidence against the Darwin-Westermarck theory of free
choice is constantly gaining in weight.
XII. RACE AVERSION
Max O'Rell once wrote that he did not understand how there could be
such a thing as mulattoes in the world. It is certainly safe to say
that there are none such as a consequence of love. The features,
color, odor, tastes, and habits of one race have ever aroused the
antagonism of other races and prevented the growth of that sympathy
which is essential to love. In a man strong passion may overcome the
aversion to a more or less enduring union with a woman of a lower
race, just as extreme hunger may urge him to eat what his palate would
normally reject; but women seem to be proof against this temptation to
stoop: in mixed marriages it is nearly always the man who belongs to
the superior race. At first thought it might seem as if this racial
aversion could not do much to retard the growth of free choice and
love, since in early times, when facilities for travel were poor, the
races could not mix anyway as they do now. But this would be a great
error. Migrations, wars, slave-making and plundering expeditions have
at all times commingled the peoples of the earth, yet nothing is more
remarkable than the stubborn tenacity of racial prejudices.
"Count de Gobineau remarks that not even a common
religion and country can extinguish the hereditary
aversion of the Arab to the Turk, of the Kurd to the
Nestorian of Syria, of the Magyar to the Slav. Indeed,
so strong, among the Arabs, is the instinct of ethnical
isolation that, as a traveller relates, at Djidda,
where sexual morality is held in little respect, a
Bedouin woman may yield herself for money to a Turk or
European, but would think herself forever dishonored if
she were joined to him in lawful wedlock."[135]
We might suppose that the coarser races would be less capable of such
aversions than the half-civilized, but the contrary is true. In
Australia nearly every tribe is the deadly enemy of every other tribe,
and according to Chapman a Bushman woman would consider herself
degraded by intercourse with anyone not belonging to her tribe.
"Savage nations," says Humboldt, in speaking of the Chaymas of New
Andalusia,
"are subdivided into an infinity of tribes, which, bearing a
cruel hatred toward each other, form no intermarriages, even
when their languages spring from the same root, and when
only a small arm of a river, or a group of hills, separates
their habitation."
Here there is no chance for Leanders to swim across the waters to meet
their Heros. Poor Cupid! Everybody and everything seems to be against
him.
XIII. MULTIPLICITY OF LANGUAGES
Apart from racial prejudice there is the further obstacle of language.
A man cannot court a girl and learn to love her sentimentally unless
he can speak to her. Now Africa alone has 438 languages, besides a
number of dialects. Dr. Finsch says (38) that on the Melanasian island
of Tanua nearly every village has a dialect of its own which those of
the next village cannot understand; and this is a typical case.
American Indians usually communicate with each other by means of a
sign language. India has countless languages and dialects, and in
Canton the Chinamen from various parts of the Empire have to converse
with each other in "pidjin English." The Australians, who are perhaps
all of one race, nevertheless have no end of different names for even
so common a thing as the omnipresent kangaroo.[136] In Brazil, says
von Martins, travellers often come across a language
"used only by a few individuals connected with each other by
relationship, who are thus completely isolated, and can hold
no communication with any of their other countrymen far or
near";
and how great was the confusion of tongues among other South American
Indians may be inferred from the statement (Waitz, III., 355) that the
Caribs were so much in the habit of capturing wives from different
tribes and peoples that the men and women of each tribe never spoke
the same language. Under such circumstances a wife might become
attached to her husband as a captured, mute, and maltreated dog might
to his master; but romantic love is as utterly out of the question as
it is between master and dog.
XIV. SOCIAL BARRIERS
Not content with hating one another cordially, the different races,
peoples, and tribes have taken special pains at all times and
everywhere to erect within their own limits a number of barriers
against free choice and love. In France, Germany, and other European
countries there is still a strong prejudice against marriages between
nobles and commoners, though the commoner may be much nobler than the
aristocrat in everything except the genealogical table. Civilization
is gradually destroying this obstacle to love, which has done so much
to promote immorality and has led to so many tragedies involving a
number of kings and princes, victims to the illusion that accident of
birth is nobler than brains or refinement. But among the ancient
civilized and mediaeval peoples the social barrier was as rigidly held
up as the racial prejudices. Milman remarks, in his _History of Latin
Christianity_ (I., 499, 528), that among the ancient Romans
"there could be no marriages with slaves [though
slaves, being captives, were not necessarily of a lower
rank, but might be princesses].... The Emperor
Valentinian further defined low and abject persons who
might not aspire to lawful union with
freemen--actresses, daughters of actresses,
tavern-keepers, the daughters of tavern-keepers,
procurers (leones) or gladiators, or those who had kept
a public shop.... Till Roman citizenship had been
imparted to the whole Roman Empire, it would not
acknowledge marriage with barbarians to be more than a
concubinage. Cleopatra was called only in scorn the
wife of Antony. Berenice might not presume to be more
than the mistress of Titus. The Christian world closed
marriages again within still more and more jealous
limits. Interdictory statutes declared marriages with
Jews and heathens not only invalid but adulterous."
"The Salic and Ripuarian law condemned the freeman
guilty of this degradation [marrying a slave] to
slavery; where the union was between a free woman and a
slave, that of the Lombards and of the Burgundians,
condemned both parties to death; but if her parents
refused to put her to death, she became a slave of the
crown. The Ripuarian law condemned the female
delinquent to slavery; but the woman had the
alternative of killing her base-born husband. She was
offered a distaff and a sword. If she chose the distaff
she became a slave; if a sword she struck it to the
heart of her paramour and emancipated herself from her
degrading connection."
In mediaeval Germany the line was so sharply drawn between the social
classes that for a long time slavery, or even death, was the
punishment for a mixed marriage. In course of time this barbarous
custom fell into disuse, but free choice continued to be discouraged
by the law that if a man married a woman beneath him in rank, neither
she nor her children were raised to his rank, and in case of his death
she had no claim to the usual provisions legally made for widows.
In India the caste prejudices are so strong and varied that they form
almost insuperable barriers to free love-choice. "We find castes
within castes," says Sir Monier Williams (153), "so that even the
Brahmans are broken up and divided into numerous races, which again
are subdivided into numerous tribes, families, or sub-castes," and all
these, he adds, "do not intermarry." In Japan, until three decades
ago, social barriers as to marriage were rigidly enforced, and in
China, to this day, slaves, boatmen, actors, policemen, can marry
women of their own class only. Nor are these difficulties eliminated
at once as we descend the ladder of civilization. In Brazil, Central
America, in the Polynesian and other Pacific Islands and elsewhere we
find such barriers to free marriage, and among the Malayan Hovas of
Madagascar even the slaves are subdivided into three classes, which do
not intermarry! It is only among those peoples which are too low to be
able to experience sentimental love anyway that this formidable
obstacle of class prejudice vanishes, while race and tribal hatred
remain in full force.
XV. RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE
Among peoples sufficiently advanced to have dogmas, religion has
always proved a strong barrier in the way of the free bestowal of
affection. Not only have Mohammedans and Christians hated and shunned
each other, but the different Christian sects for a long time detested
and tabooed one another as cordially as they did the heathen and the
Jews. Tertullian denounced the marriage of a Christian with a heathen
as fornication, and Westermarck cites Jacobs's remark that
"the folk-lore of Europe regarded the Jews as something
infra-human, and it would require an almost impossible
amount of large toleration for a Christian maiden of
the Middle Ages to regard union with a Jew as anything
other than unnatural."
There are various minor obstacles that might be dwelt on, but enough
has been said to make it clear why romantic love was the last of the
sentiments to be developed.
Having considered the divers ingredients and different kinds of love
and distinguished romantic love from sensual passion and
sentimentality, as well as from conjugal affection, we are now in a
position to examine intelligently and in some detail a number of races
in all parts of the world, by way of further corroborating and
emphasizing the conclusions reached.
SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE
What is the lowest of all human races? The Bushmen of South Africa,
say some ethnologists, while others urge the claims of the natives of
Australia, the Veddahs of Ceylon, or the Fuegians of South America. As
culture cannot be measured with a yardstick, it is impossible to
arrive at any definite conclusion. For literary and geographic
reasons, which will become apparent later on, I prefer to begin the
search for traces of romantic love with the Bushmen of South Africa.
And here we are at once confronted by the startling assertion of the
explorer James Chapman, that there is "love in all their marriages."
If this is true--if there is love in all the marriages of what is one
of the lowest human races--then I have been pursuing a
will-o'-the-wisp in the preceding pages of this book, and it will be a
waste of ink and paper to write another line. But _is_ it true? Let us
first see what manner of mortals these Bushmen are, before subjecting
Mr. Chapman's special testimony to a cross-examination. The following
facts are compiled from the most approved authorities.
BUSHMAN QUALIFICATIONS FOR LOVE
The eminent anatomist Fritsch, in his valuable work on the natives of
South Africa (386-407), describes the Bushmen as being even in
physical development far below the normal standard. Their limbs are
"horribly thin" in both sexes; both women and men are "frightfully
ugly," and so much alike that, although they go about almost naked, it
is difficult to tell them apart. He thinks they are probably the
aboriginal inhabitants of Africa, scattered from the Cape to the
Zambesi, and perhaps beyond. They are filthy in their habits, and
"washing the body is a proceeding unknown to them." When the French
anatomist Cuvier examined a Bushman woman, he was reminded of an ape
by her head, her ears, her movements, and her way of pouting the lips.
The language of the Bushmen has often been likened to the chattering
of monkeys. According to Bleek, who has collected their tales, their
language is of the lowest known type. Lichtenstein (II., 42) found the
Bushman women like the men, "ugly in the extreme," adding that "they
understand each other more by their gestures than by their speaking."
"No one has a name peculiar to himself." Others have described them as
having protuberant stomachs, prominent posteriors, hollowed-out backs,
and "few ideas but those of vengeance and eating." They have only two
numerals, everything beyond two being "much," and except in those
directions where the struggle for life has sharpened their wits, their
intellectual faculties in general are on a level with their
mathematics. Their childish ignorance is illustrated by a question
which some of them seriously asked Chapman (I., 83) one day--whether
his big wagons were not the mothers of the little ones with slender
tires.
How well their minds are otherwise adapted for such an
intellectualized, refined, and esthetic feeling as love, may also be
inferred from the following observations. Lichtenstein points out that
while necessity has given them acute sight and hearing,
"they might almost be supposed to have neither taste, smell,
nor feeling; no disgust is ever evinced by them at even the
most nauseous kind of food, nor do they appear to have any
feeling of even the most striking changes in the temperature
of the atmosphere."
"No meat," says Chapman (I., 57), "in whatever state of decomposition,
is ever discarded by Bushmen." They dispute carrion with wolves and
vultures. Rabbits they eat skins and all, and their menu is varied by
all sorts of loathsome reptiles and insects.
No other savages, says Lichtenstein, betray "so high a degree of
brutal ferocity" as the Bushmen. They "kill their own children without
remorse." The missionary Moffat says (57) that "when a mother dies
whose infant is not able to shift for itself, it is, without any
ceremony, buried alive with the corpse of its mother." Kicherer,
another missionary, says
"there are instances of parents throwing their tender
offspring to the hungry lion, who stands roaring before
their cavern, refusing to depart till some peace-offering be
made to him."
He adds that after a quarrel between husband and wife the one beaten
is apt to take revenge by killing their child; and that, on various
occasions, parents smother their children, cast them away in the
desert, or bury them alive without remorse. Murder is an amusement,
and is considered a praiseworthy act. Livingstone (_M.T._, 159) tells
of a Bushman who thought his god would consider him a "clever fellow"
because he had murdered a man, two women, and two children. When
fathers and mothers become too old to be of any use, or to take care
of themselves, they are abandoned in the desert to be devoured alive
by wild beasts. "I have often reasoned with the natives on this cruel
practice," says the missionary Moffat (99); "in reply to which, they
would only laugh." "It appears an awful exhibition of human
depravity," he adds, "when children compel their parents to perish for
want, or to be devoured by beasts of prey in a desert, _from no other
motive but sheer laziness._" Kicherer says there are a few cases of
"natural affection" sufficient to raise these creatures to "a level
with the brute creation," Moffat, too, refers to exceptional cases of
kindness, but the only instance he gives (112) describes their terror
on finding he had drunk some water poisoned by them, and their
gladness when he escaped--which terror and gladness were, however,
very probably inspired not by sympathy but by the idea of punishment
at causing the death of a white man. Chapman himself, the chosen
champion of the Bushmen, relates (I., 67) how, having heard of Bushmen
rescuing and carrying home some Makalolos whom they had found dying of
thirst in the desert, he believed it at first; but he adds:
"Had I at that time possessed a sufficient knowledge of
native character, I should not have been so credulous
as to have listened to this report, for the idea of
Bushmen carrying human beings whom they had found half
dead out of a desert implies an act of charity quite
inconsistent with their natural disposition and
habits."
Barrow declares (269) that if Bushmen come across a Hottentot guarding
his master's cattle,
"not contented with putting him to immediate death,
they torture him by every means of cruelty that their
invention can frame, as drawing out his bowels, tearing
off his nails, scalping, and other acts equally
savage."
They sometimes bury a victim up to the neck in the ground and thus
leave him to be pecked to death by crows.
"LOVE IN ALL THEIR MARRIAGES"
And yet--I say it once more--we are asked to believe there is "love in
all the marriages" of these fiendish creatures--beings who, as
Kicherer says, live in holes or caves, where they "lie close together
like pigs in a sty" and of whom Moffat declares that with the
exception of Pliny's Troglodites "no tribe or people are surely more
brutish, ignorant, and miserable." Our amazement at Chapman's
assertion increases when we examine his argument more closely. Here it
is (I., 258-59):
"Although they have a plurality of wives, which they
also obtain by purchase, there is still love in all
their marriages, and courtship among them is a very
formal and, in some respects, a rather punctilious
affair. When a young Bushman falls in love, he sends
his sister to ask permission to pay his addresses; with
becoming modesty the girl holds off in a playful, yet
not scornful or repulsive manner if she likes him. The
young man next sends his sister with a spear, or some
other trifling article, which she leaves at the door of
the girl's home. If this be not returned within the
three or four days allowed for consideration, the
Bushman takes it for granted that he is accepted, and
gathering a number of his friends, he makes a grand
hunt, generally killing an elephant or some other large
animal and bringing the whole of the flesh to his
intended father-in-law. The family now riot in an
abundant supply.... After this the couple are
proclaimed husband and wife, and the man goes to live
with his father-in-law for a couple of winters, killing
game, and always laying the produce of the chase at his
feet as a mark of respect, duty, and gratitude."
It would take considerable ingenuity to condense into an equal number
of lines a greater amount of ignorance and naïveté than this passage
includes. And yet a number of anthropologists have accepted this
passage serenely as expert evidence that there is love in all the
marriages of the lowest of African races. Peschel was misled by it;
Westermarck triumphantly puts it at the head of his cases intended to
prove that "even very rude savages may have conjugal affection;" Moll
meekly accepts it as a fact (_Lib. Sex._, Bd. I., Pt. 2, 403); and it
seems to have made an impression on Katzel, and even on Fritsch. If
these writers had taken the trouble to examine Chapman's
qualifications for serving as a witness in anthropological questions,
they would have saved themselves the humiliation of being thus duped.
His very assertion that there is love in _all_ Bushman marriages ought
to have shown them what an untrustworthy witness he is; for a more
reckless and absurd statement surely was never penned by any
globe-trotter. There is not now, and there never has been, a people
among whom love could be found in all marriages, or half the
marriages. In another place (I., 43) Chapman gives still more striking
evidence of his unfitness to serve as a witness. Speaking of the
family of a Bamanwato chief, he says:
"I was not aware of this practice of early marriages
until the wife of an old man I had engaged here to
accompany us, a child of about eight years of age, was
pointed out to me, and in my ignorance I laughed
outright, until my interpreter explained the
matrimonial usages of their people."
Chapman's own editor was tempted by this exhibition of ignorance to
write the following footnote: "The author seems not to have been aware
that such early marriages are common among the Hindoos." He might have
added "and among most of the lower races."
The ignorance which made Chapman "laugh outright" when he was
confronted by one of the most elementary facts of anthropology, is
responsible for his reckless assertions in the paragraph above quoted.
It is an ignorant assumption on his part that it is the feelings of
"respect, duty, and gratitude" that make a Bushman provide his bride's
father with game for a couple of winters. Such feelings are unknown to
the Bushman's soul. Working for the bride's father is simply his way
(if he has no property to give) of paying for his wife--an
illustration of the widespread custom of service. If polygamy and the
custom of purchasing wives do not, as Chapman intimates, prevent love
from entering into all Bushman marriages, then these aborigines must
be constructed on an entirely different plan from other human beings,
among whom we know that polygamy crushes monopoly of affection, while
a marriage by purchase is a purse-affair, not a heart-affair--the girl
going nearly always to the highest bidder.
But Chapman's most serious error--the one on which he founded his
theory that there is love in all Bushman marriages--lies in his
assumption that the ceremony of sham capture indicates modesty and
love, whereas, as we saw in the chapter on Coyness, it is a mere
survival of capture, the most ruffianly way of securing a bride, in
which her choice or feelings are absolutely disregarded, and which
tells us nothing except that a man covets a woman and that she feigns
resistance because custom, as taught by her parents, compels her to do
so. Inasmuch as she _must_ resist whether she likes the man or not,
how could such sham "coyness" be a symptom of love? Moreover, it
appears that even this sham coyness is exceptional, since, as Burchell
informs us (II., 59), it is only when a girl grows up to womanhood
without having been betrothed--"which, however, seldom happens"--that
the female receives the man's attentions with such an "affectation of
great alarm and disinclination on her part."
Burchell also informs us that a Bushman will take a second wife when
the first one has become old, "not in years but in constitution;" and
Barrow discovered the same thing (I., 276): "It appeared that it was
customary for the elderly men to have two wives, one old and past
child-bearing, the other young." Chapman, too, relates that a Bushman
will often cast off his early wife and take a younger one, and as that
does not prevent him from finding affection in their conjugal unions,
we are enabled from this to infer that "love" means to him not
enduring sympathy or altruistic capacity and eagerness for
self-sacrifice, but a selfish, transient fondness continuing only as
long as a woman is young and can gratify a man's sexual appetite. That
kind of love doubtless does exist in all Bushman marriages.
Chapman further declares (II., 75) that these people lead
"comparatively" chaste lives. I had supposed that, as an egg is either
good or bad, so a man or woman is either chaste or unchaste. Other
writers, who had no desire to whitewash savages, tell us not only
"comparatively" but positively what Bushman morals are. A Bushman told
Theophilus Halm (_Globus_, XVIII., 122) that quarrels for the
possession of women often lead to murder; "nevertheless, the
lascivious fellow assured me it was a fine thing to appropriate the
wives of others." Wake (I., 205) says they lend their wives to
strangers, and Lichtenstein tells us (II., 48) that "the wife is not
indissolubly united to the husband; but when he gives her permission,
she may go whither she will and associate with any other man." And
again (42):
"Infidelity to the marriage compact is not considered a
crime, it is scarcely regarded by the offended
person.... They seem to have no idea of the distinction
of girl, maiden, and wife; they are all expressed by
one word alone. I leave every reader to draw from this
single circumstance his own inference with regard to
the nature of love and every kind of moral feeling
among them."[137]
That this is not too severe a criticism is obvious from the fact that
Lichtenstein, in judging savages, was rather apt to err on the side of
leniency. The equally generous and amiable missionary Moffat (174-75)
censures him, for instance, for his favorable view of the Bechuanas,
saying that he was not with them long enough to know their real
character. Had he dwelt among them, accompanied them on journeys, and
known them as he (Moffat) did, "he would not have attempted to revive
the fabled delights and bliss of ignorance reported to exist in the
abodes of heathenism."
It is in comparison with these Bechuanas that Chapman calls the
Bushmen moral, obviously confounding morality with licentiousness.
Without having any moral principles at all, it is quite likely that
the Bushmen are less licentious than their neighbors for the simple
reason that they are less well-fed; for as old Burton remarks, for the
most part those are "aptest to love that are young and lusty, live at
ease, stall-fed, free from cares, like cattle in a rank
pasture"--whereas the Bushmen are nearly always thin, half-starved
denizens of the African deserts, enervated by constant fears, and so
unmanly that "a single musket shot," says Lichtenstein, "will put a
hundred to flight, and whoever rushes upon them with only a good stick
in his hand has no reason to fear any resistance from ever so large a
number."
Such men are not apt to be heroes among women in any sense. Indeed,
Galton says (_T.S.A._, 178), "I am sure that Bushmen are, generally
speaking, henpecked. They always consult their wives. The Damaras do
not." Chapman himself, with unconscious humor, gives us (I., 391) a
sample of the "love" which he found in "all Bushman marriages;" his
remarks confirming at the same time the truth I dwelt on in the
chapter on Individual Preference, that among savages the sexes are
less individualized than with us, the men being more effeminate, the
women viragoes:
"The passive and _effeminate_ disposition of the men,
of which we have had frequent reason to complain in the
course of this narrative, was illustrated in the revel
which accompanied the parting feast, when the men
allowed themselves to be beaten by the women, who, I am
told, are in the constant habit of belaboring their
devoted husbands, in order to keep them in proper
subjection. On this occasion the men got broken heads
at the hands of their gentle partners; one had his
nose, another his ear, nearly bitten off."
Notwithstanding this affectionate "constant habit" of breaking their
husbands' heads, the Bushman women have not succeeded in teaching them
even the rudiments of gallantry. "The woman is a beast of burden,"
says Hahn; "at the same time she is subjected to ill-treatment which
not seldom leads to death." When camp is moved, the gallant husband
carries his spear and quiver, the wife "does the rest," carrying the
baby, the mat, the earthen cooking-pot, the ostrich shells, and a
bundle of skins. If it happens, as it often does, that there is not
enough to eat, the wife has to go hungry. In revenge she usually
prepares her own food only, leaving him to do his own cooking. If a
wife falls ill on the way to a new camping-place, she is left behind
to perish. (Ratzel, I., 7.)
In conclusion, and as a climax to my argument, I will quote the
testimony of three missionaries who did not simply make a flying visit
or two to the country of the Bushmen, as Chapman did, but lived among
them. The Rev. R. Moffat (49) cites the missionary Kicherer, "whose
circumstances while living among them afforded abundant opportunities
of becoming intimately acquainted with their real condition," and who
wrote that the Bushmen "are total strangers to domestic happiness. The
men have several wives, but conjugal affection is little known." This
opinion is thus endorsed by Moffat, and a third missionary, the Rev.
F. Fleming, wrote (167) that among Bushmen "conjugal affection seems
totally unknown," and pre-matrimonial love is of course out of
question in a region where girls are married as infants. The wife
always has to work harder than the husband. If she becomes weak or ill
she is unceremoniously left behind to starve. (Ratzel, I., 72.)
FALSE FACTS REGARDING HOTTENTOTS
Darwin has well observed that a false argument is comparatively
harmless because subsequent discussion is sure to demolish it, whereas
a false fact may perplex speculation for ages. Chapman's assertion
that there is love in all Bushman marriages is one of these false
facts, as our cross-examination has shown. In passing now to the
neighbors of the Bushmen, the Hottentots, let us bear in mind the
lesson taught. They called themselves Khoi-Khoin, "men of men," while
Van Riebeck's followers referred to them as "black stinking hounds."
There is a prevalent impression that nearly all Africans are negroes.
But the Hottentots are not negroes any more than are the Bushmen, or
the Kaffirs, whom we shall consider next. Ethnologists are not agreed
as to the relationship that exists between Bushmen and Hottentots, but
it is certain that the latter represent a somewhat higher level of
civilization. Yet, here again we must guard carefully against "false
facts," especially in reference to the topic that interests us--the
relations of the sexes. As late as 1896 the eminent American
anthropologist, Dr. Brinton, had an article in _Science_ (October
16th), in which he remarked that "one trait which we admire in
Hottentots is their regard for women," He was led into making this
assertion by an article entitled "Woman in Hottentot Poetry," which
appeared in the German periodical _Globus_ (Vol. 70, pp. 173-77). It
was written by Dr. L. Jakobowski, and is quite as misleading as
Chapman's book. Its logic is most peculiar. The writer first shows (to
his own satisfaction) that the Hottentots treat their women somewhat
better than other South Africans do, and from this "fact" he goes on
to infer that they must have love-songs! He admits, indeed, that (with
a few exceptions, to be presently considered) we know nothing of these
songs, but it "seems certain" that they must be sung at the erotic
dances of the natives; these, however, carefully conceal them from the
missionaries, and as Jakobowski naïvely adds, to heed the missionaries
"would be tantamount to giving up their old sensual dances."
What facts does Jakobowski adduce in support of his assertion that
Hottentots have a high regard for their women? He says:
"Without his wife's permission a Hottentot does not
drink a drop of milk, and should he dare to do so, the
women of his family will take away the cows and sheep
and add them to their flocks. A girl has the right to
punish her brother if he violates the laws of courtesy.
The oldest sister may have him chained and punished,
and if a slave who is being castigated implores his
master by the name of his (the master's) sister to
desist, the blows must cease or else the master is
bound to pay a fine to the sister who has been
invoked."
EFFEMINATE MEN AND MASCULINE WOMEN
If all these statements were real facts--and we shall presently see
that they are not--they would prove no more than that the modern
Hottentots, like their neighbors, the Bushmen, are hen-pecked. Barrow
(I., 286) speaks of the "timid and pusillanimous mind which
characterizes the Hottentots," and elsewhere (144) he says that their
"impolitic custom of hording together in families, and of
not marrying out of their own kraals, has, no doubt, tended
to enervate this race of men, and reduced them to their
present degenerated condition, which is that of a languid,
listless, phlegmatic people, in whom the prolific powers of
nature seem to be almost exhausted."
It does not, therefore, surprise us to be told (by Thunberg) that "it
frequently happens that a woman marries two husbands." And these women
are anything but feminine and lovable. One of the champions of the
Hottentots, Theophilus Hahn, says (_Globus_, XII., 304) of the Namaqua
women that they love to torture their slaves: "When they cudgel a
slave one can easily read in their faces the infernal joy it gives
them to witness the tortures of their victims." He often saw women
belaboring the naked back of a slave with branches of the cruel
_acacia delinens_, and finally rub salt or saltpetre into the wounds.
Napier (I., 59) says of the Hottentots, that
"if the parents of a newly born child found him or her _de
trop_, the poor little wretch was either mercilessly buried
alive, or exposed in a thicket, there to be devoured by
beasts of prey."
While he had to take it for granted that there must be love-songs
among these cruel Hottentots, Jakobowski had no trouble in finding
songs of hate, of defiance, and revenge. Even these cannot be cited
without omitting objectionable words. Here is one, properly
expurgated:
"Take this man away from me that he may be beaten and
his mother weep over him and the worms eat him.... Let
this man be brought before your counsel and cudgelled
until not a shred of flesh remains on his ... that the
worms would care to eat; for the reason that he has
done me such a painful injury," etc.
HOW THE HOTTENTOT WOMAN "RULES AT HOME"
Jakobowski's assertion that a man's oldest sister may have him chained
and punished is obviously a cock-and-bull story. It is diametrically
opposed to what Peter Kolben says: "The eldest son has in a manner an
absolute authority over all his brothers and sisters." "Among the
Hottentots an eldest son may after his father's death retain his
brothers and sisters in a sort of slavery." Kolben is now accepted as
the leading authority on the aboriginal Hottentots, as he found them
two centuries ago, before the missionaries had had time to influence
their customs. What makes him the more unimpeachable as a witness in
our case is that he is decidedly prejudiced in favor of the
Hottentots.[138] What was the treatment of women by Hottentots as
witnessed by Kolben? Is it true that, as Jakobowski asserts, the
Hottentot woman rules at home? Quite true; most emphatically so. The
husband, says Kolben (I., 252-55), after the hut is built,
"has absolutely nothing more to do with the house and
domestic affairs; he turns the care for them over to
his wife, who is obliged to procure provisions as well
as she can and cook them. The husband devotes himself
to drinking, eating, smoking, loafing, and sleeping,
and takes no more concern about the affairs of his
family than if he had none at all. _If he goes out to
fish or hunt, it is rather to amuse himself than to
help his wife and children...._ Even the care of his
cattle the poor wife, despite all her other work,
shares with him. The only thing she is not allowed to
meddle with is the sale. This is a prerogative which
constitutes the man's honor and which he would not
allow anyone to take away from him with impunity."
The wife, he goes on to say, has to cut the fire-wood and carry it to
the house, gather roots and other food and prepare it for the whole
family, milk the cows, and take care of the children. The older
daughters help her, but need so much watching that they are only an
additional care; and all this time the husband "lies lazily on his
back." "Such is the wretched life of the Hottentot woman," he sums up;
"she lives in a perpetual slavery." Nor is there any family life or
companionship, they eat separately, and
"the wife never sets foot in the husband's room, which is
separated from the rest of the house; she seldom enjoys his
company. He commands as master, she obeys as slave, without
ever complaining."
"REGARD FOR WOMEN"
"What we admire in Hottentots is their regard for women." Here are
some more illustrations of this loving "regard for women." The Rev. J.
Philip (II., 207) says that the Namaqua women begged Moffat to remain
with them, telling him that before he came "we were treated by the men
as brutes, and worse than they treated brutes." While the men loafed
they had to go and collect food, and if they returned unsuccessful, as
was often the case, they were generally beaten. They had to cook for
the men and were not allowed a bite till they had finished their meal.
"When they had eaten, we were obliged to retire from their presence to
consume the offals given to us." When twins are born, says Kolben
(304), there is great rejoicing if they are boys; two fat buffaloes
are killed, and all the neighbors invited to the feast; but if the
twins are girls, two sheep only are killed and there is no feast or
rejoicing. If one of the twins is a girl she is invariably killed,
buried alive, or exposed on a tree or in the bushes. When a boy has
reached a certain age he is subjected to a peculiarly disgusting
ceremony, and after that he may insult his mother with impunity
whenever he chooses: "he may cudgel her, if he pleases, to suit his
whim, without any danger of being called to an account for it." Kolben
says he often witnessed such insolence, which was even applauded as a
sign of manliness and courage. "What barbarity!" he exclaims. "It is a
result of the contempt which these peoples feel for women." He used to
remonstrate with them, but they could hardly restrain their
impatience, and the only answer he could get was "_it is the custom of
the Hottentots, they have never done otherwise_."
Andersson (_Ngami_, 332) says of the Namaqua Hottentots:
"If a man becomes tired of his wife, he unceremoniously
returns her to the parental roof, and however much she (or
the parents) may object to so summary a proceeding, there is
no remedy."
In Kolben's time wives convicted of adultery were killed, while the
men could do as they chose. In later times a lashing with a strap of
rhinoceros hide was substituted for burning. Kolben thought that the
serious punishment for adultery prevalent in his time argued that
there must be love among the Hottentots, though he confessed he could
see no signs of it. He was of course mistaken in his assumption, for,
as was made clear in our chapter on Jealousy, murderous rage at an
infringement on a man's conjugal property does not constitute or prove
love, but exists entirely apart from it.
CAPACITY FOR REFINED LOVE
The injuriousness of "false facts" to science is illustrated by a
remark which occurs in the great work on the natives of South Africa
by Dr. Fritsch, who is justly regarded as one of the leading
authorities on that subject. Speaking of the Hottentots (Namaqua) he
says (351) that "whereas Tindall indicates sensuality and selfishness
as two of their most prominent characteristics, Th. Hahn lauds their
conjugal attachment independent of fleshly love." Here surely is
unimpeachable evidence, for Theophilus Hahn, the son of a missionary,
was born and bred among these peoples. But if we refer to the passage
which Fritsch alluded to (_Globus_, XII., 306), we find that the
reasons Hahn gives for believing that Hottentots are capable of
something higher than carnal desires are that many of them, though
rich enough to have a harem, content themselves with one wife, and
that if a wife dies before her husband, he very seldom marries again.
Yet in the very next sentence Hahn mentions a native trait which
sufficiently explains both these customs. "Brides," he says, "cost
many oxen and sheep, and the men, as among other South African
peoples, the Kaffirs, for instance, would rather have big herds of
cattle than a good-looking wife." Apart from this explanation, I fail
to see what necessary connection there is between a man's being
content with one wife and his capacity for sentimental love, since his
greed for cattle and his lack of physical stamina and appetite fully
account for his monogamy. This matter must be judged from the
Hottentot point of view, not from ours. It is well known that in
regions where polygamy prevails a man who wishes to be kind to his
wife does not content himself with her, but marries another, or
several others, to share the hard work with her. These Hottentots have
not enough consideration for their hard-worked wives to do even that.
HOTTENTOT COARSENESS
The coarseness and obscenity of the Hottentots constitute further
reasons for believing them incapable of refined love. Their eulogist,
Kolben, himself was obliged to admit that they "find a peculiar
pleasure in filth and stench" and "are in the matter of diet the
filthiest people in the world." The women eat their own vermin, which
swarm in their scant attire. Nor is decency the object for which they
wear this scant dress---quite the reverse. Speaking of the male
Hottentot's very simple dress, Barrow says (I., 154) that
"if the real intent of it was the promotion of decency,
it should seem that he has widely missed his aim, as it
is certainly one of the most immodest objects, in such
a situation as he places it, that could have been
contrived."
And concerning the little apron worn by the women he says:
"Great pains seem to be taken by the women to attract notice
toward this part of their persons. Large metal buttons ...
or anything that makes a great show, are fastened to the
borders of this apron."
Kolben relates that when a Hottentot desires to marry a girl he goes
with his father to the girl's father, who gives the answer after
consulting with his wife. If the verdict is unfavorable "the gallant's
love for the beauty is readily cured and he casts his eyes on another
one." But a refusal is rarely given unless the girl is already
promised to another. The girl, too, is consulted, but only nominally,
for if she refuses she can retain her liberty only by an all-night
struggle with her suitor in which she usually succumbs, after which
she has to marry him whether she wishes to or not. Kolben gives other
details of the marriage ceremony which are too filthy to be even
hinted at here.
FAT VERSUS SENTIMENT
By persons who had lived many years among the Colonial Hottentots,
Fritsch (328) was assured that these people, far from being the models
of chastity Kolben tried to prove them, indulged in licentious
festivals lasting several days, at which all restraints were cast
aside. And this brings us back to our starting-point--Dr. Jakobowski's
peculiar argument concerning the "love poems" which he feels sure must
be sung at the erotic dances of the natives, though they are carefully
concealed from the missionaries. If they were poems of sentiment, the
missionaries would not disapprove, and there would be no reason for
concealing them; but the foregoing remarks show clearly enough what
kind of "love" they would be likely to sing about. If any doubt
remained on the subject the following delightful confession, which the
eugolist Hahn makes in a moment of confidence, would settle the
matter. To appreciate the passage, bear in mind that the Hottentots
are the people among whom excessive posterior corpulence (steatopyga)
is especially admired as the acme of physical attractions. Now Hahn
says (335):
"The young girls drink whole cups of liquid fat, and
for a good reason, the object being to attain a very
rotund body by a fattening process, in order that Hymen
may claim them as soon as possible. They do not grow
sentimental and sick from love and jealousy, nor do
they die from the anguish and woes of love, as our
women do, nor engage in love-intrigues, but they look
at the whole matter in a very materialistic and sober
way. _Their sole love-affair is the fattening process,
on the result of which, as with a pig, depends the
girl's value and the demand for her._"
In this last sentence, which I have taken the liberty to italicize,
lies the philosophy of African "love" in general, and I am glad to be
able to declare it on such unquestionable authority. What a Hottentot
"regards" in a woman is _Fat_; _Sentiment_ is out of the question.
When Hottentots are together, says Kolben,
"you never see them give tender kisses or cast loving
glances at each other. Day and night, on every
occasion, they are so cold and so indifferent to each
other that you would not believe that they love each
other or are married. If in a hut there were twenty
Hottentots with their wives, it would be impossible to
tell, either from their words or actions, which of them
belonged together."
SOUTH AFRICAN LOVE-POEMS
As intimated on a preceding page, there are, among Dr. Jakobowski's
examples of Hottentot lyrics[139] a few which may be vaguely included
in the category of love-poems. "Where did you hear that I love you
while you are unloving toward me?" complained one Hottentot; while
another warned his friend: "That is the misfortune pursuing you that
you love where you ought not to!" A third declared. "I shall not cease
to love however much they (_i.e._, the parents or guardians) may
oppose me," A fourth addresses this song to a young girl:
My lioness!
Are you afraid that I may bewitch you?
You milk the cow with fleshy hand.
Bite me!
Pour out (the milk) for me!
My lioness!
Daughter of a great man!
It is needless to say that in the first three of these aboriginal
"lyrics" there is not the slightest indication that the "love"
expressed rises above mere covetous desire of the senses; and as for
the fourth, what is there in it besides reference to the girl's
fatness (fleshy hand), her utility in milking and serving the milk and
her carnal bites? Yet in this frank avowal of masculine selfishness
and sensuality Hahn finds "a certain refinement of sentiment"!
A HOTTENTOT FLIRT
Though a Hottentot belle's value in the marriage market is determined
chiefly by the degree of her corpulence, girls of the higher families
are not, it seems, devoid of other means of attracting the attention
of men. At least I infer so from the following passage in Dalton's
book (_T.S.A._, 104) relating to a certain chief:
"He had a charming daughter, the greatest belle among
the blacks that I had ever seen, and the most
thorough-paced coquette. Her main piece of finery, and
one that she flirted about in a most captivating
manner, was a shell of the size of a penny-piece. She
had fastened it to the end of a lock of front hair,
which was of such length as to permit the shell to
dangle to the precise level of her eyes. She had
learned to move her head with so great precision as to
throw the shell exactly over whichever eye she pleased,
and the lady's winning grace consisted in this feat of
bo-peep, first eclipsing an eye and languishing out of
the other, and then with an elegant toss of the head
reversing the proceedings."
KAFFIR MORALS
Our search for true love in Africa has thus far resulted in failure,
the alleged discoveries of a few sanguine sentimentalists having
proved to be illusory. If we now turn to the Kaffirs, who share with
the Hottentots the southern extremity of Africa, we find that here
again we must above all things guard against "false facts."
Westermarck (61), after citing Barrow (I., 206) to the effect that "a
Kaffir woman is chaste and extremely modest," adds:
"and Mr. Cousins informs me that between their various
feasts the Kaffirs, both men and women, have to live in
strict continence, the penalty being banishment from the
tribe if this law is broken."
It would be interesting to know what Barrow means by "extremely
modest" since he admits that that attribute
"might be questioned. If, for instance, a young woman
be asked whether she be married, not content with
giving the simple negative, she throws open her cloak
and displays her bosom; and as most frequently she has
no other covering beneath, she perhaps may discover at
the same time, though unintentionally, more of her
charms."
But it is his assertion that "a Kaffir woman is chaste" that clashes
most outrageously with all recorded facts and the testimony of the
leading authorities, including many missionaries. Dr. Fritsch says in
the preface to his standard book on the natives of South Africa that
the assertions of Barrow are to be accepted "with caution, or rather
with suspicion." It is the absence of this caution and suspicion that
has led Westermarck into so many erroneous conclusions. In the present
instance, however, it is absolutely incomprehensible why he should
have cited the one author who calls the Kaffirs chaste, ignoring the
crushing weight of countless facts showing them to be extremely
dissolute.
It is worthy of note that testimony as to the chastity of wild races
generally comes from mere travellers among them, ignorant of their
language and intimate habits, whereas the writings of those who have
dwelt among them give one a very different idea. As the Rev. Mr.
Holden remarks (187), those who have "boasted of the chastity, purity,
and innocence of heathen life" have not been "behind the scenes."
Here, for instance, is Geo. McCall Theal, who lived among the Kaffir
people twenty years, filling various positions among them, varying
from a mission teacher to a border magistrate, and so well acquainted
with their language that he was able to collect and print a volume on
_Kaffir Folk Lore_. Like all writers who have made a specialty of a
subject, he is naturally somewhat biased in favor of it, and this
gives still more weight to his words on negative points. Regarding the
question of chastity he says:
"Kaffir ideas of some kinds of morality are very low.
The custom is general for a married woman to have a
lover who is not her husband, and little or no disgrace
attaches to her on this account. The lover is generally
subject to a fine of no great amount, and the husband
may give the woman a beating, but that finishes the
penalty."
The German missionary Neuhaus bears witness to the fact that (like the
Bushmen and most other Africans) the Kaffirs are in one respect lower
than the lowest beasts, inasmuch as for the sake of filthy lucre
parents often marry off their daughters before they have attained
maturity. Girls of eight to ten are often given into the clutches of
wealthy old men who are already supplied with a harem. Concerning
girls in general, and widows, we are told that they can do whatever
they please, and that they only ask their lovers not to be imprudent,
as they do not wish to lose their liberty and assume maternal duties
too soon if they can help it. Lichtenstein says (I., 264) that
"a traveller remaining some time with a horde easily
finds an unmarried young woman with whom he contracts
the closest intimacy; nay, it is not uncommon, as a
mark of hospitality, to offer him one as a companion,"
and no wonder, for among these Kaffirs there is "no feeling of love in
marriage" (161). The German missionary Alberti relates (97) that
sometimes a Kaffir girl is offered to a man in marriage. Having
assured himself of her health, he claims the further privilege of a
night's acquaintance; after which, if she pleases him, he proceeds to
bargain for her permanent possession. Another competent and reliable
observer, Stephen Kay, corresponding member of the South African
Institution, who censures Barrow sharply for his incorrect remarks on
Kaffir morals, says:
"No man deems it any sin whatever to seduce his
neighbor's wife: his only grounds of fear are the
probability of detection, and the fine demanded by law
in such cases. The females, accustomed from their youth
up to this gross depravity of manners, neither
manifest, nor apparently feel, any delicacy in stating
and describing circumstances of the most shameful
nature before an assemblage of men, whose language is
often obscene beyond description" (105). "Fornication
is a common and crying sin. The women are well
acquainted with the means of procuring miscarriage; and
those means are not unfrequently resorted to without
bringing upon the offender any punishment or disgrace
whatever.... When adultery is clearly proved the
husband is generally fully satisfied with the fine
usually levied upon the delinquent.... So degraded
indeed are their views on subjects of this nature ...
that the man who has thus obtained six or eight head of
cattle deems it a fortunate circumstance rather than
otherwise; he at once renews his intimacy with the
seducer, and in the course of a few days becomes as
friendly and familiar with him as ever" (141-42).
"Whenever the Kaffir monarch hears of a young woman
possessed of more than ordinary beauty, and at all
within his reach, he unceremoniously sends for her or
fetches her himself.... Seldom or never does any young
girl, residing in his immediate neighborhood, escape
defilement after attaining the age of puberty (165)."
"Widows are constantly constrained to be the servants
of sin" (177).
"The following singular usage obtains universally ...
all conjugal intercourse is entirely suspended from the
time of accouchement until the child be completely
weaned, which seldom takes place before it is able to
run about. Hence during the whole of that period, an
illicit and clandestine intercourse with strangers is
generally kept up by both parties, to the utter
subversion of everything like attachment and connubial
bliss. Something like affection is in some instances
apparent for awhile, but it is generally of
comparatively short duration."
Fritsch (95) describes a Kaffir custom called _U'pundhlo_ which has
only lately been abolished:
"Once in awhile a troupe of young men was sent from the
principal town to the surrounding country to capture
all the unmarried girls they could get hold of and
carry them away forcibly. These girls had to serve for
awhile as concubines of strangers visiting the court.
After a few days they were allowed to go and their
places were taken by other girls captured in the same
way."
Before the Kaffirs came under the influence of civilization, this
custom gave no special offence; "and why should it?" adds Fritsch,
"since with the Kaffirs marriageable girls are morally free and their
purity seems a matter of no special significance." When boys reach the
age of puberty, he says (109), they are circumcised;
"thereupon, while they are in the transition stage between
boyhood and manhood, they are almost entirely independent of
all laws, especially in their sexual relations, so that they
are allowed to take possession with impunity of any
unmarried women they choose."
The Kaffirs also indulge in obscene dances and feasts. Warner says
(97) that at the ceremony of circumcision virtue is polluted while yet
in its embryo. "A really pure girl is unknown among the raw Kaffirs,"
writes Hol. "All demoraln sense of purity and shame is lost." While
superstition forbids the marrying of first cousins as incestuous, real
"incest in its worst forms"--between mother and sons--prevails. At the
ceremony called _Ntonjane_ the young girls "are degraded and polluted
at the very threshold of womanhood, and every spark of virtuous
feeling annihilated" (197, 207, 185).
"Immorality," says Fritsch (112),
"is too deeply rooted in African blood to make it difficult
to find an occasion for indulging in it; wherefore the
custom of celebrating puberty, harmless in itself, is made
the occasion for lascivious practices; the unmarried girls
choose companions with whom they cohabit as long as the
festival lasts ... usually three or four days."
After giving other details, Fritsch thus sums up the situation:
"These diverse facts make it clear that with these tribes
(Ama-Xosa) woman stands, if not morally, at least
judicially, little above cattle, and consequently it is
impossible to speak of family life in one sense of the
word."
In his _Nursery Tales of the Zulus_ (255) Callaway gives an account,
in the native language as well as in the English, of the license
indulged in at Kaffir puberty festivals. Young men assemble from all
quarters. The maidens have a "girl-king" to whom the men are obliged
to give a present before they are allowed to enter the hut chosen for
the meeting. "The young people remain alone and sport after their own
fancies in every way." "It is a day of filthiness in which everything
may be done according to the heart's desire of those who gather around
the _umgongo_." The Rev. J. MacDonald, a man of scientific
attainments, gives a detailed account of the incredibly obscene
ceremonies to which the girls of the Zulu-Kaffirs are subjected, and
the licentious yet Malthusian conduct of the young folks in general
who "separate into pairs and sleep _in puris naturalibus_, for that is
strictly ordained by custom." The father of a girl thus treated feels
honored on receiving a present from her partner.[140]
INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE FOR--COWS
The utter indifference of the Kaffirs to chastity and their
licentiousness, approved and even prescribed by national custom, were
not the only obstacle to the growth of sentiments rising above mere
sensuality. Commercialism was another fatal obstacle. I have already
quoted Hahn's testimony that a Kaffir "would rather have big herds of
cattle than a good-looking wife." Dohne asserts (Shooter, 88) that "a
Kaffir loves his cattle more than his daughter," and Kay (111) tells
us that
"he is scarcely ever seen shedding tears, excepting
when the chief lays violent hands upon some part of his
horned family; this pierces him to the heart and
produces more real grief than would be evinced over the
loss of wife and child."
On another page (85) he says that in time of war the poor women fall
into the enemy's hands, because
"their husbands afford them no assistance or protection
whatever. The preservation of the cattle constitutes
the grand object of their solicitude; and with these,
which are trained for the purpose, they run at an
astonishing rate, leaving both wives and children to
take their chances."
Such being the Kaffir's relative estimation of cows and women, we
might infer that in matrimonial arrangements bovine interests were
much more regarded than any possible sentimental considerations; and
this we find to be the case. Barrow (149) tells us that
"the females being considered as the property of their
parents, are always disposed of by sale. The common
price of a wife is an ox or a couple of cows. Love with
them is a very confined passion, taking but little hold
on the mind. When an offer is made for the purchase of
a daughter, she feels little inclination to refuse; she
considers herself as an article at market, and is
neither surprised, nor unhappy, nor interested, on
being told that she is about to be disposed of. There
is no previous courtship, no exchange of fine
sentiments, no nice feelings, no attentions to catch
the affections and to attach the heart."[141]
BARGAINING FOR BRIDES
The Rev. L. Grout says in his _Zululand_ (166):
"So long as the government allows the custom called
_ukulobolisha_, the selling of women in marriage for
cattle, just so long the richer and so, for the most
part, the older and the already married man will be
found, too often, the successful suitor--not indeed at
the feet of the maiden, for she is allowed little or no
right to a voice as to whom she shall marry, but at the
hands of her heathen proprietor, who, in his
degradation, looks less at the affections and
preferences of his daughter than at the surest way of
filling his kraal with cattle, and thus providing for
buying another wife or two."
So purely commercial is the transaction that if a wife proves very
fruitful and healthy, a demand for more cattle is made on her husband
(165). Should she be feeble or barren he may send her back to her
father and demand compensation. A favorite way is to retain a wife as
a slave and go on marrying other girls as fast as the man's means
allow. Theal says (213) that if a wife has no children the husband has
a right to return her to her parents and if she has a marriageable
sister, take her in exchange. But the acme of commercialism is reached
in a Zulu marriage ceremony described by Shooter. At the wedding the
matrons belonging to the bridegroom's party tell the bride that too
many cows have been given for her; that she is rather plain than
otherwise, and will never be able to do a married woman's work, and
that altogether it is very kind of the bridegroom to condescend to
marry her. Then the bride's friends have their innings. They condole
with her parents on the very inadequate number of cows paid for her,
the loveliest girl in the village; declare that the husband is quite
unworthy of her, and ought to be ashamed for driving such a hard
bargain with her parents.
Leslie's assertion (194) that it is "a mistake to imagine that a girl
is sold by her father in the same manner and with the same authority
with which he would dispose of a cow," is contradicted by the
concurrent testimony of the leading authorities. Some of these have
already been cited. The reliable Fritsch says (112) of the Ama-Xosa
branch:
"It is characteristic that as a rule the inclination of
the girl to be married is never consulted, but that her
nearest male relatives select a husband for her to whom
she is unceremoniously sent. They choose, of course, a
man who can pay."
If she is a useful girl he is not likely to refuse the offer, yet he
bargains to get her as cheaply as possible (though he knows that a
Kaffir girl's chief pride is the knowledge that many heads of cattle
were paid for her). Regarding the Ama-Zulu, Fritsch says (141-42) that
the women are slaves and a wife is regarded as so much invested
capital. "If she falls ill, or remains childless, so that the man does
not get his money's worth, he often returns her to her father and asks
his cattle back." Older and less attractive women are sometimes
married off on credit, or to be paid for in instalments. "In all
this," Fritsch sums up, "there is certainly little of poetry and
romance, but it cannot be denied that under the influence of European
residents an improvement has been effected in some quarters." He
himself saw at Natal a young couple who "showed a certain interest in
each other," such as one expects of married persons; but in parts
untouched by European influence, he adds, true conjugal devotion is an
unusual thing.
AMOROUS PREFERENCES
It is probably owing to such European influences that Theal (209)
found that although a woman is not legally supposed to be consulted in
the choice of a husband, in point of fact "matches arising from mutual
love are not uncommon. In such cases, if any difficulties are arranged
by the guardians on either side, the young people do not scruple to
run away together." The word "love" in this passage is of course used
in that vague sense which indicates nothing but a preference of one
man or woman to others. That a Kaffir girl should prefer a young man
to an old suitor to the point of running away with him is to be
expected, even if there is nothing more than a merely sensual
attachment. The question how far there are any amorous preferences
among Kaffirs is an interesting one. From the fact that they prefer
their cows to their wives in moments of danger, we infer that though
they might also like one girl better than another, such preference
would be apt to prove rather weak; and this inference is borne out by
some remarks of the German missionary Alberti which I will translate:
"The sentiment of tender and chaste love is as unknown
to the Kaffir as that respect which is founded on
agreement and moral worth. The need of mutual aid in
domestic life, combined with the natural instinct for
the propagation of the species, alone seem to occasion
a union of young men and women which afterward gains
permanence through habitual intercourse and a community
of interests."
"It is true that the young man commonly seeks to gain
the favor of the girl he likes before he applies to her
parents, in which case, if his suit is accepted, the
supreme favor is at once granted him by the girl; but
inasmuch as he does not need her good will necessarily,
the parental consent being sufficient to secure
possession of her, he shows little zeal, and his peace
of mind is not in the least disturbed by a possible
refusal. Altogether, he is much less solicitous about
gaining her predilection than about getting her for the
lowest possible price."
Alberti was evidently a thinker as well as a careful observer. His
lucid remarks gives us a deep insight into primitive conditions when
love had hardly yet begun to germinate. What a worldwide difference
between this languid Kaffir wooer, hardly caring whether he gets this
girl or another, and the modern lover who thinks life not worth
living, unless he can gain the love of his chosen one. In all the
literature on the subject, I have been able to find only one case of
stubborn preference among Kaffirs. Neuhaus knew a young man who
refused for two years to marry the girl chosen for him by his father,
and finally succeeded in having his way with another girl whom he
preferred. As a matter of course, strong aversion is more frequently
manifested than decided preference, especially in the case of girls
who are compelled to marry old men. Neuhaus[142] saw a Zulu girl whose
hands had been nearly burned off by her tormentors; he knew of two
girls who committed suicide, one just before, the other just after, an
enforced marriage. Grout (167) speaks of the "various kinds of torture
resorted to by the father and friends of a girl to compel her to marry
contrary to her choice." One girl, who had fled to his house for
refuge, told him repeatedly that if delivered into the hands of her
tormentors "she would be cruelly beaten as soon as they were out of
sight and be subjected to every possible abuse, till she should comply
with the wishes of her proprietor."
ZULU GIRLS NOT COY
Where men are so deficient in sentiment and manly instincts that one
young woman seems to them about as good as another, it is hardly
strange that the women too should lack those qualities of delicacy,
gentleness, and modesty which make the weaker sex adorable. The
description of the bloody duels often fought by Kaffir women given by
the British missionary Beste (Ploss, II., 421) indicates a decidedly
Amazonian disposition. But the most suggestive trait of Kaffir women
is the lack of feminine coyness in their matrimonial preliminaries.
According to Gardiner (97),
"it is not regarded as a matter either of etiquette or
of delicacy from which side the proposal of marriage
may proceed--the overture is as often made by the women
as the men."
"Courtship," says Shooter (50), "does not always begin with the men."
Sometimes the girl's father proposes for her; and when a young woman
does not receive an early proposal, her father or brother go from
kraal to kraal and offer her till a bidder is found. Callaway (60)
relates that when a young Zulu woman is ready to be married she goes
to the kraal of the bridegroom, to stand there. She remains without
speaking, but they understand her. If they "acknowledge" her, a goat
is killed and she is entertained. If they do not like her, they give
her a burning piece of firewood, to intimate that there is no fire in
that kraal to warm herself by; she must go and kindle a fire for
herself.[143]
CHARMS AHD POEMS
Though in all this there is considerable romance, there is no evidence
of romantic love. But how about love-charms, poems, and stories?
According to Grout (171), love-charms are not unknown in Zulu land.
They are made of certain herbs or barks, reduced to a powder, and sent
by the hand of some unsuspected friend to be given in a pinch of
snuff, deposited in the dress, or sprinkled upon the person of the
party whose favor is to be won. But love-powders argue a very
materialistic way of regarding love and tell us nothing about
sentiments. A hint at something more poetic is given by the Rev. J.
Tyler (61), who relates that flowers are often seen on Zulu heads, and
that one of them, the "love-making posy," is said to foster "love."
Unfortunately that is all the information he gives us on this
particular point, and the further details supplied by him (120-22)
dash all hopes of finding traces of sentiment. The husband "eats
alone," and when the wife brings him a drink of home-made beer "she
must first sip to show there is no 'death in the pot.'" While he
guzzles beer, loafs, smokes, and gossips, she has to do all the work
at home as well as in the field, carrying her child on her back and
returning in the evening with a bundle of firewood on her head. "In
the winter the natives assemble almost daily for drinking and dancing,
and these orgies are accompanied by the vilest obscenities and evil
practices."
As regards poems Wallaschek remarks (6) that "the Kaffir in his poetry
only recognizes a threefold subject: war, cattle, and excessive
adulation of his ruler." One Kaffir love-poem, or rather
marriage-poem, I have been able to find (Shooter, 236), and it is
delightfully characteristic:
We tell you to dig well,
Come, girl of ours,
Bring food and eat it;
Fetch fire-wood
And don't be lazy.
A KAFFIR LOVE-STORY
Among the twenty-one tales collected in Theal's _Kaffir Folk Lore_
there is one which approximates what we call a love-story. As it takes
up six pages of his book it cannot be quoted entire, but in the
following condensed version I have retained every detail that is
pertinent to our inquiry. It is entitled _The Story of Mbulukazi_.
There was once a man who had two wives; one of them had
no children, wherefore he did not love her. The other
one had one daughter, who was very black, and several
children besides, but they were all crows. The barren
wife was very downcast and often wept all day.
One day two doves perching near her asked why she
cried. When they had heard her story they told her to
bring two earthen jars. Then they scratched her knees
until the blood flowed, and put it into the jars. Every
day they came and told her to look in the jars, till
one day she found in them two beautiful children, a boy
and a girl. They grew up in her hut, for she lived
apart from her husband, and he knew nothing of their
existence.
When they were big, they went to the river one day to
fetch water. On the way they met some young men, among
whom was Broad Breast, a chief's son who was looking
for a pretty girl to be his wife. The men asked for a
drink and the boy gave them all some water, but the
young chief would take it only from the girl. He was
very much smitten with her beauty, and watched her to
see where she lived. He then went home to his father
and asked for cattle with which to marry her. The
chief, being rich, gave him many fine cattle, and with
these the young man went to the husband of the girl's
mother and said: "I want to marry your daughter." So
the girl who was very black was told to come, but the
young chief said: "That is not the one I want; the one
I saw was lighter in color and much prettier." The
father replied: "I have no other children but crows."
But Broad Breast persisted, and finally the
servant-girl told the father about the other daughter.
In the evening he went to his neglected wife's hut and
to his great joy saw the boy and his sister. He
remained all night and it was agreed that the young
chief should have the girl. When Broad Breast saw her
he said: "This is the girl I meant." So he gave the
cattle to the father and married the girl, whose name
was Mbulukazi.
To appease the jealousy of the very black girl's mother
he also married that girl, and each of them received
from her father an ox, with which they went to their
new home. But the young chief did not care for the very
black girl and gave her an old rickety hut to live in
while Mbulukazi had a very nice new house. This made
the other girl jealous, and she plotted revenge, which
she carried out one day by pushing her rival over the
edge of a rock, so that she fell into the river and was
drowned. The corpse was, however, found by her favorite
ox, who licked her till her life came back, and as soon
as she was strong once more she told what had happened.
When the young chief heard the story he was angry with
the dark wife and said to her: "Go home to your father;
I never wanted you at all; it was your mother who
brought you to me." So she had to go away in sorrow and
Mbulukazi remained the great wife of the chief.
In this interesting story there are two suspicious details. Theal says
he has taken care in his collection not to give a single sentence that
did not come from native sources. He calls attention, however, to the
fact that tens of thousands of Kaffirs have adopted the religion of
Europeans and have accepted ideas from their teachers, wherefore "it
will surprise no one to learn that these tales are already undergoing
great changes among a very large section of the natives on the
border." I suspect that the touch of sentiment in the place where the
young chief will accept a drink from the girl's hand alone is such a
case of European influence, and so, in all probability is the
preference for a light complexion implied in the tale; for Shooter (p.
I) tells us expressly that to be told that he is light-colored "would
be esteemed a very poor compliment by a Kaffir."
The following passage, which occurs in another of Theal's stories
(107), shows how unceremonious Kaffir "courtship" is in relation to
the girl's wishes.
"Hlakanyana met a girl herding some goats.
"He said: 'Where are the boys of your village, that the
goats are herded by a girl?'
"The girl answered: 'There are no boys in the village.'
"He went to the father of the girl and said: 'You must
give me your daughter to be my concubine, and I will
herd the goats.'
"The father of the girl agreed to that. Then Hlakanyana
went with the goats, and every day he killed one and
ate it till all were done."
LOWER THAN BEASTS
If we now leave the degraded and licentious Kaffirs, going northward
in Eastern Africa, into the region of the lakes--Nyassa, Victoria
Nyanza and Albert Nyanza--embracing British Central, German East, and
British East Africa, we are doomed to disappointment if we expect to
find conditions more favorable to the growth of refined romantic or
conjugal love. We shall not only discover no evidence of what is
vaguely called Platonic love, but we shall find men ignoring even
Plato's injunction (_Laws_, VIII., 840) that they should not be lower
than beasts, which do not mate till they have reached the age of
maturity. H.H. Johnston, in his recent work on British Central Africa,
gives some startling revelations of aboriginal depravity. As these
regions have been known a few years only, the universality of this
depravity disproves most emphatically the ridiculous notion that
savages are naturally pure in their conduct and owe their degradation
to intercourse with corrupt white men. Johnston (409) says:
"A medical missionary who was at work for some time on
the west coast of Lake Nyassa gave me information
regarding the depravity prevalent among the young boys
in the Atonga tribe of a character not even to be
described in obscure Latin. These statements might be
applied with almost equal exactitude to boys and girls
in many other parts of Africa. As regards the little
girls, over nearly the whole of British Central Africa,
chastity before puberty is an unknown condition....
Before a girl becomes a woman (that is to say, before
she is able to conceive), it is a matter of absolute
indifference what she does, and scarcely any girl
remains a virgin after about five years of age."
Girls are often betrothed at birth, or even before, and when four or
five years old are placed at the mercy of the degraded husbands.
Capture is another method of getting a wife, and Johnston's
description of this custom indicates that individual preference is as
weak as we have found it among Kaffirs:
"The women as a rule make no very great resistance on
these occasions. It is almost like playing a game. A
woman is surprised as she goes to get water at the
stream, or when she is on her way to or from the
plantation. The man has only got to show her she is
cornered and that escape is not easy or pleasant and
she submits to be carried off. Of course there are
cases where the woman takes the first opportunity of
running back to her first husband if her captor treats
her badly, and again she may be really attached to her
first husband and make every effort to return to him
for that reason. But as a general rule they seem to
accept very cheerfully these abrupt changes in their
matrimonial existence."
In a footnote he adds:
"The Rev. Duff Macdonald, a competent authority on Yao
manners and customs, says in his book _Africana_: 'I was
told ... that a native man would not pass a solitary woman,
and that her refusal of him would be so contrary to custom
that he might kill her.' Of course this would apply only to
females that are not engaged."
COLONIES OF FREE LOVERS
Of the Taveita forest region Johnston says:
"After marriage the greatest laxity of manners is allowed
among the women, who often court their lovers under their
husband's gaze; provided the lover pays, no objection is
raised to his addresses."
And regarding the Masai (415):
"The Masai men rarely marry until they are twenty-five nor
the women until twenty. But both sexes, _avant de se
ranger_, lead a very dissolute life before marriage, the
young warriors and unmarried girls living together in free
love."
The fullest account of the Masai and their neighbors we owe to
Thomson. With the M-teita marriage is entirely a question of cows.
"There is a very great disproportion between the sexes, the
female predominating greatly, and yet very few of the young
men are able to marry for want of the proper number of
cows--a state of affairs which not unfrequently leads to
marriage with sisters, though this practice is highly
reprobated."
Of the Wa-taveta, Thomson says (113): "Conjugal fidelity is unknown,
and certainly not expected on either side; they might almost be
described as colonies of free lovers." As for life among the Masai
warriors, he says (431) that it
"was promiscuous in a remarkable degree. They may
indeed be proclaimed as a colony of free lovers.
Curiously enough the sweetheart system was largely in
vogue; though no one confined his or her attentions to
one only. Each girl in fact had several sweethearts,
and what is still stranger, this seemed to give rise to
no jealousies. The most perfect equality prevailed
between the Ditto and Elmoran, and in their savage
circumstances it was really pleasant to see how common
it was for a young girl to wander about the camp with
her arm round the waist of a stalwart warrior."[144]
A LESSON IN GALLANTRY
Crossing the waters of the Victoria Nyanza we come to Uganda, a region
which has been entertainingly described by Speke. One day, he tells us
(379), he was crossing a swamp with the king and his wives:
"The bridge was broken, as a matter of course; and the
logs which composed it, lying concealed beneath the
water, were toed successively by the leading men, that
those who followed should not be tripped up by them.
This favor the King did for me, and I in return for the
women behind; they had never been favored in their
lives with such gallantry and therefore could not
refrain from laughing. He afterward helped the girls
over a brook. The king noticed it, but instead of
upbraiding me, passed it off as a joke, and running up
to the Kamraviona, gave him a poke in the ribs and
whispered what he had seen, as if it had been a secret.
'Woh, woh!' says the Kamraviona, 'what wonders will
happen next?'"
There is perhaps no part of Africa where such an act of gallantry
would not have been laughed at as an absurd prank. In Eastern Central
Africa
"when a woman meets any man on the path, the etiquette is
for her to go off the path, to kneel, and clasp her hands to
the 'lords of creation' as they pass. Even if a female
possesses male slaves of her own she observes the custom
when she meets them on the public highway. A woman always
kneels when she has occasion to talk to a man" (Macdonald,
I., 129).
"It is interesting to meet a couple returning from a journey for
firewood," says the same writer (137). "The man goes first, carrying
his gun, bow and arrows, while the woman carries the invariable bundle
of firewood on her head." He used to amuse such parties by taking the
wife's load and putting it on the husband, telling him, 'This is the
custom in our country.' The wife has to do not only all the domestic
but all the hard field work, and the only thing the lazy husband does
in return is to mend her clothes. That constitutes her "rights;"
neglect of it is a cause for divorce! Burton notes the absence of
chivalrous ideas among the Somals (_F.F._, 122), adding that
"on first entering the nuptial hut, the bridegroom draws
forth his horsewhip and inflicts memorable chastisement upon
the fair person of his bride, with the view of taming any
lurking propensity to shrewishness."
Among the natives of Massua, on the eighth of the month of Ashur,
"boys are allowed," says Munzinger,
"to mercilessly whip any girl they may meet--a liberty
of which they make use in anything but a sentimental
way. As the girls naturally hide themselves in their
houses on this day, the boys disguise themselves as
beggars, or use some other ruse to get them out."
Adults sometimes take part in this gallant sport. But let us return to
Uganda.
The Queen of Uganda offered Speke the choice between two of her
daughters as a wife. The girls were brought and made to squat in front
of him. They had never seen him.
"The elder, who was in the prime of youth and beauty,
very large of limb, dark in color, cried considerably;
whilst the younger one ... laughed as if she thought
the change in her destiny very good fun."
He had been advised that when the marriage came off he was to chain
the girl two or three days, until she became used to him, else, from
mere fright, she might run away.
A high official also bestowed on him a favor which throws light on the
treatment of Uganda women. He had his women come in, made them strip
to the waist, and asked Speke what he thought of them. He assured him
he had paid him an unusual compliment, the Uganda men being very
jealous of one another, so much so that anyone would be killed if
found staring upon a woman, even in the highways. Speke asked him what
use he had for so many women, to which he replied,
"None whatever; the King gives them to us to keep up
our rank, sometimes as many as one hundred together,
and we either turn them into wives, or make servants of
them, as we please."
NOT A PARTICLE OF ROMANCE
The northeastern boundary of Uganda is formed by the waters of the
lake whose name Sir Samuel Baker chose for the title of one of his
fascinating books on African travel, the _Albert N'yanza_. Baker was a
keen observer and he had abundant experience on which to base the
following conclusions (148):
"There is no such thing as love in these countries, the
feeling is not understood, nor does it exist in the
shape in which we understand it. Everything is
practical, without a particle of romance. Women are so
far appreciated as they are valuable animals. They
grind the corn, fetch the water, gather firewood,
cement the floors, cook the food, and propagate the
race; but they are mere servants, and as such are
valuable.... A savage holds to his cows and to his
women, but especially to his cows. In a razzia fight he
will seldom stand for the sake of his wives, but when
he does fight it is to save his cattle."
The sentimentalist's heart will throb with a flutter of hope when he
reads in the same book (240) that among the Latookas it is considered
a disgrace to kill a woman in war. Have these men that respect for
women which makes romantic love possible? Alas, no! They spare them
because women are scarce and have a money value, a female being worth
from five to ten cows, according to her age and appearance. It would
therefore be a waste of money to kill them.
I may as well add here what Baker says elsewhere (_Ismailia_, 501) by
way of explaining why there is no insanity in Central Africa: there
are "no hearts to break with overwhelming love." Where coarseness is
bliss, 'twere folly to be refined.
NO LOVE AMONG NEGROES
Let us now cross Central Africa into the Congo region on the Western
side, returning afterward to the East for a bird's-eye view of the
Abyssinians, the Somali, and their neighbors.
In his book _Angola and the River Congo_ (133-34) Monteiro says that
negroes show less tenderness and love than some animals:
"In all the long years I have been in Africa I have
never seen a negro manifest the least tenderness for or
to a negress.... I have never seen a negro put his arm
round a woman's waist or give or receive any caress
whatever that would indicate the slightest loving
regard or affection on either side. They have no words
or expressions in their language indicative of
affection or love. Their passion is purely of an animal
description, unaccompanied by the least sympathetic
affections of love or endearment."[145]
In other words, these negroes not only do not show any tenderness,
affection, sympathy, in their sexual relations, they are too coarse
even to appreciate the more subtle manifestations of sensual passion
which we call caresses. Jealousy, too, Monteiro says, hardly exists.
In case of adultery "the fine is generally a pig, and rum or other
drink, with which a feast is celebrated by all parties. The woman is
not punished in any way, nor does any disgrace attach to her conduct."
As a matter of course, where all these sentiments are lacking,
admiration of personal beauty cannot exist.
"From their utter want of love and appreciation of female
beauty or charms they are quite satisfied and content with
any woman possessing even the greatest amount of hideous
ugliness with which nature has so bountifully provided
them."
A QUEER STORY
Thus we find the African mind differing from ours as widely as a
picture seen directly with the eyes differs from one reflected in a
concave mirror. This is vividly illustrated by a quaint story recorded
in the _Folk Tales of Angola_ (_Memoirs of Amer. Folk Lore Soc._, Vol.
I., 1804, 235-39), of which the following is a condensed version:
An elderly man had an only child, a daughter. This
daughter, a number of men wanted her. But whenever a
suitor came, her father demanded of him a living deer;
and then they all gave up, saying, "The living deer, we
cannot get it."
One day two men came, each asking for the daughter. The
father answered as usual, "He who brings me the living
deer; the same, I will give him my daughter."
The two men made up their minds to hunt for the living
deer in the forest. They came across one and pursued
it; but one of them soon got tired and said to himself:
"That woman will destroy my life. Shall I suffer
distress because of a woman? If I bring her home, if
she dies, would I seek another? I will not run again to
catch a living deer. I never saw it, that a girl was
wooed with a living deer." And he gave up the chase.
The other man persevered and caught the deer. When he
approached with it, his companion said, "Friend, the
deer, didst thou catch it indeed?" Then the other: "I
caught it. The girl delights me much. Rather I would
sleep in forest, than to fail to catch it."
Then they returned to the father and brought him the
deer. But the father called four old men, told them
what had happened, and asked them to choose a
son-in-law for him among the two hunters. Being
questioned by the aged men, the successful hunter said:
"My comrade pursued and gave up; I, your daughter
charmed me much, even to the heart, and I pursued the
deer till it gave in.... My comrade he came only to
accompany me."
Then the other was asked why he gave up the chase, if
he wanted the girl, and he replied: "I never saw that
they wooed a girl with a deer.... When I saw the great
running I said, 'No, that woman will cost my life.
Women are plentiful,' and I sat down to await my
comrade."
Then the aged men: "Thou who gavest up catching the
deer, thou art our son-in-law. This gentleman who
caught the deer, he may go with it; he may eat it or he
may sell it, for he is a man of great heart. If he
wants to kill he kills at once; he does not listen to
one who scolds him, or gives him advice. Our daughter,
if we gave her to him, and she did wrong, when he would
beat her he would not hear (one) who entreats for her.
We do not want him; let him go. This gentleman who gave
up the deer, he is our son-in-law; because, our
daughter, when she does wrong, when we come to pacify
him, he will listen to us. Although he were in great
anger, when he sees us, his anger will cease. He is our
good son-in-law, whom we have chosen."
SUICIDES
According to Livingstone, in Angola suicide is sometimes committed by
a girl if it is predicted to her that she will never have any
children, which would be a great disgrace. A writer in the _Globus_
(Vol. 69, p. 358) sums up the observations of the medical missionary,
G. Liengme, on suicides among the peoples of Africa. The most frequent
cause is a family quarrel. Sometimes a girl commits suicide rather
than marry a man whom she detests, "whereas on the other hand suicide
from unhappy love seems to be unknown." In another number of the
_Globus_ (70: 100), however, I find mention of a negro who killed
himself because he could not get the girl he wanted. This, of course,
does not of itself suffice to prove the existence of true love, for we
know that lust may be as maddening and as obstinate as love itself;
moreover, as we shall see in the chapter on American Indians, suicide
does not argue strong feelings, but a weak intellect. Savages are apt
to kill themselves, as we shall see, on the slightest and most trivial
provocation.
POETIC LOVE ON THE CONGO
In his entertaining book on the Congo, H.H. Johnston says (423) of the
races living along the upper part of that river: "They are decidedly
amorous in disposition, but there is a certain poetry in their
feelings which ennobles their love above the mere sexual lust of the
negro." If this is true, it is one of the most important discoveries
ever made by an African explorer, one on which we should expect the
author to dwell at great length. What does he tell us about the Congo
tribes? "The women," he says of the Ba-Kongo, "have little regard for
their virtue, either before or after marriage, and but for the
jealousy of the men there would be promiscuous intercourse between the
sexes." These women, he says, rate it as especially honorable to be a
white man's mistress:
"Moreover, though the men evince some marital jealousy
among themselves, they are far from displaying anything
but satisfaction when a European is induced to accept
the loan of a wife, either as an act of hospitality or
in consideration of some small payment. Unmarried girls
they are more chary of offering, as their value in the
market is greater; but it may be truly said that among
these people womanly chastity is unknown and a woman's
honor is measured by the price she costs."
These remarks, it is true, refer to the lower Congo, and it is only of
the upper river that Johnston predicates the poetic features which
ennoble love. Stanley Pool being accepted by him as the dividing line,
we may there perhaps begin our search for romantic love. One day, the
author relates, rain had driven him to a hut on the shore of the Pool,
where there was a family with two marriageable daughters. The father
"was most anxious I should become his son-in-law,
'moyennant' several 'longs' of cloth. Seeing my
hesitation, he mistook it for scorn and hastened to
point out the manifold charms of his girls, whilst
these damsels waxed hotly indignant at my coldness.
Then another inspiration seized their father--perhaps I
liked a maturer style of beauty, and his wife, by no
means an uncomely person, was dragged forward while her
husband explained with the most expressive gestures,
putting his outspread hands before his eyes and
affecting to look another way, that, again with the
simple intermediary of a little cloth, he would remain
perfectly unconscious of whatever amatory passages
might occur between us."
Evidently the poetry of love had not drifted down as far as the Pool.
Let us therefore see what Johnston has to say of the Upper Congo
(423):
"Husbands are fond of their own wives, _as well as of those
of other people_." "Marriage is _a mere question of
purchase_, and is attended by no rejoicings or special
ceremony. A man procures _as many wives as possible_, partly
because they labor for him and also because soon after one
wife becomes with child _she leaves him for two or three
years_ until her baby is weaned." Apart from these facts
Johnston gives us no hint as to what he understands by
affection except what the following sentence allows us to
infer (429):
"The attachment between these dogs and their African
masters is deep and fully reciprocated. They are
_considered very dainty eating_ by the natives, and are
indeed such a luxury that by an unwritten law only _the
superior sex_--the men--are allowed to partake of
roasted dog."
The amusing italics are mine.
If Johnston really found traces of poetic, ennobling love in this
region, surely so startling a novelty in West Africa would have called
for a full "bill of particulars," which would have been of infinitely
greater scientific value than the details he gives regarding
unchastity, infidelity, commercialism, separation from wives and
contempt for women, which are so common throughout the continent as to
call for no special notice. Evidently his ideas regarding "poetic
love" were as hazy as those of some other writers quoted in this
chapter, and we have once more been led on by the mirage of a "false
fact."[146]
In 1891 the Swedish explorer Westermarck published a book describing
his adventures among the cannibal tribes of the Upper Congo. I have
not seen the book, but the Rev. James Johnston, in summing up its
contents, says (193):
"A man can sell wife and children according to his own
depraved pleasure. Women are the slave drudges, the men
spending their hours in eating, drinking, and sleeping.
Cannibalism in its worst features prevails. Young women
are prized as special delicacies, particularly girls'
ears prepared in palm oil, and, in order to make the
flesh more palatable, the luckless victims are kept in
water up to their necks for three or four days before
they are slaughtered and served as food."
BLACK LOVE IN KAMERUN
From the banks of the Congo to Kamerun is not a very far cry as
distances go in Africa. Kamerun is under the German flag, and a German
writer, Hugo Zöller, has described life in that colony with the eyes
of a shrewd observer. What he says about the negro's capacity for love
shows deep psychological insight (III., 68-70):
"Europeans residing in Africa who have married a negro
woman declare unanimously that there is no such thing
there as love and fidelity in the European sense. It
happens with infinitely greater frequency that a
European falls in love with his black companion than
she with him; or rather the latter does not happen at
all. A hundred times I have listened to discussions of
this topic in many different places, but I have never
heard of a single case of a genuine full-blooded
negress falling in love with a white man.... The
stupidest European peasant girl is, in comparison with
an African princess, still an ideally endowed being."
Zöller adds that in all his African experiences he never found a
negress of whom he should have been willing to assume that she would
sacrifice herself for a man she was attached to. On another page he
says:
"A negro woman does not fall in love in the same sense
as a European, not even as the least civilized peasant
girl. Love, in our sense of the word, is a product of
our culture belonging to a higher stage in the
development of latent faculties than the negro race has
reached. Not only is the negro a stranger to the
diverse intellectual and sentimental qualities which we
denote by the name of love: nay, even in a purely
bodily sense it may be asserted that his nervous system
is not only less sensitive, but less well-developed.
The negro loves as he eats and drinks.... And just as
little as a black epicure have I ever been able to
discover a negro who could rise to the imaginative
phases of amorous dalliance. A negro ... may buy dozens
upon dozens of wives without ever being drawn by an
overpowering feeling to any one of them. Love is, among
the blacks, as much a matter of money as the palm oil
or ivory trade. The black man buys his wife when she is
still a child; when she reaches the age at which our
maidens go to their first ball, her nervous system,
which never was particularly sensitive anyway, is
completely blunted, so that she takes it as a matter of
course to be sold again and again as a piece of
property. One hears often enough of a 'woman palaver,'
which is regarded exactly like a 'goat palaver,' as a
damage to property, but one never, positively never,
hears of a love-affair. The negress never has a
sweetheart, either in her youngest days or after her
so-called marriage. She is regarded, and regards
herself, as a piece of property and a beast of burden."
A SLAVE COAST LOVE-STORY
Travelling a short distance northwest from Kamerun we reach the Slave
Coast of West Africa, to which A.B. Ellis has devoted two interesting
books, including chapters in the folklore of the Yoruba and
Ewe-speaking peoples of this region. Among the tales recorded are two
which illustrate African ideas regarding love. I copy the first
verbatim from Ellis's book on the Yoruba (269-70):
"There was a young maiden named Buje, the slender, whom
all the men wanted. The rich wanted her, but she
refused. Chiefs wanted her, and she refused. The King
wanted her, and she still refused.
"Tortoise came to the King and said to him, 'She whom
you all want and cannot get, I will get. I will have
her, I.' And the King said, 'If you succeed in having
her, I will divide my palace into two halves and will
give you one-half.'
"One day Buje, the slender, took an earthen pot and
went to fetch water. Tortoise, seeing this, took his
hoe, and cleared the path that led to the spring. He
found a snake in the grass, and killed it. Then he put
the snake in the middle of the path.
"When Buje, the slender, had filled her pot, she came
back. She saw the snake in the path, and called out,
'Hi! hi! Come and kill this snake.'
"Tortoise ran up with his cutlass in his hand. He
struck at the snake and wounded himself in the leg.
"Then he cried out, 'Buje the slender, has killed me. I
was cutting the bush, I was clearing the path for her.
She called to me to kill the snake, but I have wounded
myself in the leg. O Buje, the slender, Buje, the
slender, take me upon your back and hold me close.'
"He cried this many times, and at last Buje, the
slender, took Tortoise and put him on her back. And
then he slipped his legs down over her hips....
"Next day, as soon as it was light, Tortoise went to
the King. He said, 'Did I not tell you I should have
Buje, the slender? Call all the people of the town to
assemble on the fifth day, and you will hear what I
have to say.'
"When it was the fifth day, the King sent out his crier
to call all the people together. The people came.
Tortoise cried out, 'Everybody wanted Buje, the
slender, and Buje refused everybody, but I have had
her.'
"The King sent a messenger, with his stick, to summon
Buje, the slender. When she came the King said, 'We
have heard that Tortoise is your husband; is it so?'
"Buje, the slender, was ashamed, and could not answer.
She covered her head with her cloth, and ran away into
the bush.
"And there she was changed into the plant called Buje."
THE MAIDEN WHO ALWAYS REFUSED
Robert Hartmann (480) describes the Yoruba people as vivacious and
intelligent. But the details given by Ellis (154) regarding the
peculiar functions of bridesmaids, and the assertion that "virginity
in a bride is only of paramount importance when the girl has been
betrothed in childhood," explain sufficiently why we must not look for
sentimental features in a Yoruba love-story. The most noticeable thing
in the above tale is the girl's power to refuse chiefs and even the
King. In Ellis's book on the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast,
there is also a love-story (271) concerning a "Maiden who always
refused." It has a moral which seems to indicate masculine disapproval
of such a feminine privilege. The following is a condensed version:
There was a beautiful girl whose parents were rich. Men
came to marry her, but she always said "Not yet." Men
continued to come, but she said "My shape is good, my
skin is good, therefore I shall stay;" and she stayed.
Now the leopard, in the leopard's place, hears this. He
turns himself to resemble man. He takes a musical
instrument in his hand and makes himself a fine young
man. His shape is good. Then he goes to the parents of
the maiden and says, "I look strong and manly, but I do
not look stronger than I love." Then the father says,
"Who looks strong takes;" and the young man says, "I am
ready."
The young man comes in the house. His shape pleases the
young girl. They give him to eat and they give him to
drink. Then the young man asks the maiden if she is
ready to go, and the maiden says she is ready to go.
Her parents give her two female slaves to take along,
and goats, sheep, and fowls. Ere long, as they travel
along the road, the husband says, "I am hungry." He
eats the fowls, but is still hungry: he eats the goats
and sheep and is hungry still. The two slaves next fall
a victim to his voracity, and then he says, "I am
hungry."
Then the wife weeps and cries aloud and throws herself
on the ground. Immediately the leopard, having resumed
his own shape, makes a leap toward her. But there is a
hunter concealed in the bush; he has witnessed the
scene; he aims his gun and kills the leopard on the
leap. Then he cuts off his tail and takes the young
woman home.
"This is the way of young women," the tale concludes.
"The young men come to ask; the young women meet them,
and continue to refuse--again, again, again--and so the
wild animals turn themselves into men and carry them
off."
AFRICAN STORY-BOOKS
While the main object of this discussion is to show that Africans are
incapable of feeling sentimental love, I have taken the greatest pains
to discover such traces of more refined feelings as may exist. These
one might expect to find particularly in the collections of African
tales such as Callaway's _Nursery Tales of the Zulus_, Theal's _Kaffir
Folk Lore_, the _Folk Lore of Angola_, Stanley's _My Dark Companions
and their Stories_, Koelle's _African Native Literature_, Jacottet's
_Contes Populaires des Bassoutos_. All that I have been able to find
in these books and others bearing on our topic is included in this
chapter--and how very little it is! Love, even of the sensual kind,
seems to be almost entirely ignored by these dusky story-tellers in
favor of a hundred other subjects--in striking contrast to our own
literature, in which love is the ruling passion. I have before me
another interesting collection of South and North African stories and
fables--Bleek's _Reinecke Fuchs in Afrika_. Its author had unusual
facilities for collecting them, having been curator of Sir G. Grey's
library at Cape Town, which includes a fine collection of African
manuscripts. In Bleek's book there are forty-four South African,
chiefly Hottentot, fables and tales, and thirty-nine relating to North
Africans. Yet among these eighty-three tales there are only three that
come under the head of love-stories. As they take up eight pages, I
can give only a condensed version of them, taking care, however, to
omit no essential feature.[147]
THE FIVE SUITORS
Four handsome youths tried to win a beautiful girl
living in the same town. While they were quarrelling
among themselves a youth came from another town, lifted
the girl on his horse and galloped away with her. The
father followed in pursuit on his camel, entered the
youth's house, and brought back the girl.
One day the father called together all the men of his
tribe. The girl stepped among them and said, "Whoever
of you can ride on my father's camel without falling
off, may have me as wife." Dressed in their best
finery, the young men tried, one after another, but
were all thrown. Among them sat the stranger youth,
wrapped only in a mat. Turning toward him the girl
said, "Let the stranger make a trial." The men
demurred, but the stranger got on the camel, rode about
the party three times safely, and when he passed the
girl for the fourth time he snatched her up and rode
away with her hastily.
Quickly the father mounted his fleet horse and followed
the fugitives. He gained on them until his horse's head
touched the camel's tail. At that moment the youth
reached his home, jumped off the camel and carried the
bride into the house. He closed the door so violently
that one foot of the pursuing horse caught between the
posts. The father drew it out with difficulty and
returned to the four disappointed suitors.
TAMBA AND THE PRINCESS
A king had a beautiful daughter and many desired to
marry her. But all failed, because none could answer
the King's question: "What is enclosed in my amulet?"
Undismayed by the failure of men of wealth and rank,
Tamba, who lived far in the East and had nothing to
boast of, made up his mind to win the princess. His
friends laughed at him but he started out on his trip,
taking with him some chickens, a goat, rice,
rice-straw, millet-seed, and palm-oil. He met in
succession a hungry porcupine, an alligator, a horned
viper, and some ants, of all of whom he made friends by
feeding them the things he had taken along. He reserved
some of the rice, and when he arrived at the King's
court he gave it to a hungry servant who in turn told
him the secret of the amulet. So when he was asked what
the amulet contained, he replied: "Hair clipped from
the King's head when he was a child; a piece of the
calabash from which he first drank milk; and the tooth
of the first snake he killed."
This answer angered the King's minister, and Tamba was
put in chains. He was subjected to various tests which
he overcame with the aid of the animals he had fed on
his trip. But again he was fettered and even lashed.
One day the King wanted to bathe, so he sent his four
wives to fetch water. A young girl accompanying them
saw how all of them were bitten by a horned viper and
ran back to tell the news. The wives were brought back
unconscious, and no one could help them. The King then
thought of Tamba, who was brought before him. Tamba
administered an antidote which the viper he had fed had
given him, the wives recovered, the wicked minister was
beheaded and Tamba was rewarded with the hand of the
princess.
THE SEWING MATCH
The third tale is herewith translated verbatim:
"There was a man who had a most beautiful daughter, the
favorite of all the young men of the place; two,
especially, tried to win her regard. One day these two
came together and begged her to choose one of them. The
young girl called her father; when the young men had
told him that they were suing for his daughter's hand,
he requested them to come there the next day, when he
would set them a task and the one who got through with
it first should have the girl.
"Meanwhile the father bought in the market a piece of
cloth and cut it up for two garments. Now when the two
rivals appeared the next morning he gave to each the
materials for a garment and told them to sew them
together, promising his daughter to the one who should
get done first. The daughter he ordered to thread the
needles for both the men.
"Now the girl knew very well which of the two young men
she would rather have for a husband; to him, therefore,
she always handed needles with short threads, while the
other was always supplied with long threads. Noon came
and neither of them had finished his garment. After
awhile, however, the one who always got the short
threads finished his task.
"The father was then summoned and the young man showed
him the garment; whereupon the father said: 'You are a
quick worker and will therefore surely be able to
support your wife. Take my daughter as your wife and
always do your work rapidly, then you will always have
food for yourself and your wife.'
"Thus did the young man win his beloved by means of her
cunning. Joyfully he led her home as his wife."
BALING OUT THE BROOK
This tale reveals the existence of individual preference, but does not
hint at any other ingredient of love, while the father's promise of
the girl to the fastest worker shows a total indifference to what that
preference might be. In the following tale (also from Koelle) the girl
again is not consulted.
"A certain man had a most beautiful daughter who was
beset by many suitors. But as soon as they were told
that the sole condition on which they could obtain her
was to bale out a brook with a ground-nut shell (which
is about half the size of a walnut shell), they always
walked away in disappointment. However, at last one
took heart of grace, and began the task. He obtained
the beauty; for the father said, '_Kam ago tsuru
baditsia tsido_--he who undertakes whatever he says,
will do it.'"
PROVERBS ABOUT WOMEN
The last two tales I have cited were gathered among the Bornu people
in the Soudan. In Burton's _Wit and Wisdom from West Africa_ we find a
few proverbs about women that are current in the same region.
"If a woman speaks two words, take one and leave the other."
"Whatever be thy intimacy, never give thy heart to a woman."
"If thou givest thy heart to a woman, she will kill thee."
"If a man tells his secrets to his wife, she will bring him
into the way of Satan." "A woman never brings a man into the
right way." "Men who listen to what women say, are counted
as women."
It is significant that in the four hundred and fifty-five pages of
Burton's book, which includes over four hundred proverbs and tales,
there are only half a dozen brief references to women, and those are
sneers.
AFRICAN AMAZONS
As I have had occasion to remark before, African women lack the finer
feminine qualities, both bodily and mental, wherefore even if an
African man were able to feel sentimental love he could not find an
object to bestow it on. An incident related by Du Chaillu (_Ashango
Land_, 187) illustrates the martial side of African femininity. A
married man named Mayolo had called another man's wife toward him. His
own wife, hearing of this, got jealous, told him the other must be his
sweetheart, and rushed out to seek her rival. A battle ensued:
"Women's fights in this country always begin by their
throwing off their _dengui_--that is, stripping
themselves entirely naked. The challenger having thus
denuded herself, her enemy showed pluck and answered
the challenge by promptly doing the same; so that the
two elegant figures immediately went at it literally
tooth and nail, for they fought like cats, and between
the rounds reviled each other in language the most
filthy that could possibly be uttered. Mayolo being
asleep in his house, and no one seeming ready to
interfere, I went myself and separated the two furies."
In Dahomey, as everybody knows, the bellicose possibilities of the
African woman have been utilized in forming bands of Amazons which are
described as "the flower of the army." They are made up of female
captives and other women, wear special uniforms, and in battle are
credited with even greater ferocity than the men. These women are
Amazons not of their own accord but by order of the king. But in other
parts of Africa there is reason to believe that bands of
self-constituted female warriors have existed at various times.
Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the time of Julius Caesar, says that on
the western coast of Libya (Africa) there used to live a people
governed by women, who carried on wars and the government, the men
being obliged to do domestic work and take care of the children. In
our time Livingstone found in the villages of the Bechuanas and Banyas
that men were often badly treated by the women, and the eminent German
anthropologist Bastian says(_S.S._, 178) that in "the Soudan the power
of the women banded together for mutual protection is so great that
men are often put under ban and obliged to emigrate." Mungo Park
described the curious bugaboo(_mumbo-jumbo_)by means of which the
Mandingo negroes used to keep their rebellious women in subjection.
According to Bastian, associations for keeping women in subjection are
common among men along the whole African West Coast. The women, too,
have their associations, and at their meetings compare notes on the
meanness and cruelty of their husbands. Now it is easy to conceive
that among tribes where many of the men have been killed off in wars
the women, being in a great majority, may, for a time at least, turn
the tables on the men, assume their weapons and make them realize how
it feels to be the "inferior sex." For this reason Bastian sees no
occasion to share the modern disposition to regard all the Amazon
legends as myths.
WHERE WOMAN COMMANDS
If we now return from the West Coast to Eastern Africa we find on the
northern confines of Abyssinia a strange case of the subjection of
men, which Munzinger has described in his _Ostafrikanische Studien_
(275-338). The Beni Amer are a tribe of Mohammedan shepherds among
whom "the sexes seem to have exchanged rôles, the women being more
masculine in their work." Property is legally held in common,
wherefore the men rarely dare to do anything without consulting their
wives. In return for this submission they are treated with the utmost
contempt:
"For every angry word that the husband utters he is
compelled to pay a fine, and perhaps spend a whole
rainy night outdoors till he has promised to give his
weaker half a camel and a cow. Thus the wife acquires a
property of her own, which the husband never is allowed
to touch; many women have in this way ruined their
husbands and then left them. The women have much
_esprit de corps_; if one of them has ground for
complaint, all the others come to her aid.... Of course
the man is always found in the wrong; the whole village
is in a turmoil. This _esprit de corps_ demands that
every woman, whether she loves her husband or not, must
conceal her love and treat him contemptuously. It is
considered disgraceful for her to show her love to her
husband. This contempt for men goes so far that if a
wife laments the death of her husband who has died
without issue, her companions taunt her.... One often
hears women abuse their husbands or other men in the
most obscene language, even on the street, and the men
do not dare to make the least retort." "The wife can at
any time return to her mother's house, and remain there
months, sending word to her husband that he may come to
her if he cares for her."
NO CHANCE FOR ROMANTIC LOVE
The causes of this singular effeminacy of the men and masculinity of
the women are not indicated by Munzinger; but so much is clear that,
although the tables are turned, Cupid is again left in the cold. Nor
is there any romance in the courtship which leads to such hen-pecked
conjugal life:
"The children are often married very early, and engaged
earlier still. The bridegroom goes with his companions
to fetch his bride; but after having talked with her
parents he returns without having seen her. The bride
thereafter remains another whole year with her parents.
After its expiration the bridegroom sends women and a
camel to bring her to his home; she is taken away with
her tent, but the bridal escort is often fooled by the
substitution in the bride's place of another girl, who
allows herself to be taken along, carefully veiled, and
after the village has been left behind betrays herself
and runs away."
These Beni Amer are of course far superior in culture to the Bushmen,
Hottentots, Kaffirs, and West Coast peoples we have been considering
so far, having long been in contact with Oriental influences. It is
therefore as strange as it is instructive to note that as soon as a
race becomes civilized enough to feel a kind of love exalted above
mere sensuality, special pains are taken to interpose fresh obstacles,
as in the above case, where it is good form to suppress all affection,
and where a young man may not see his bride even after engagement.
This last custom seems to be of common occurrence in this part of
Africa. Munzinger (387) says of the Kunama: "As among the border
peoples engagements are often made at a very early age, after which
time bride and bridegroom avoid each other;" and again (147)
concerning the region of Massua, on the Red Sea:
"From the day of the engagement the young man is
obliged to carefully avoid the bride and her mother.
The desire to see her after the engagement is
considered very improper, and often leads to a
breaking-up of the affair. If the youth meets the girl
accidentally, she veils her face and her friends
surround her to cover her from the bridegroom's sight."
PASTORAL LOVE
These attachments are so shallow that if the fortune-teller who is
always consulted gives an unfavorable forecast, the engagement is
forthwith broken off. It is instructive to note further that the rigid
separation of a man from his betrothed serves merely to stifle
legitimate love; its object cannot be to prevent improper intimacies,
for before engagement the girls enjoy perfect liberty to do what they
please, and after engagement they may converse with _anyone except the
lover_. As Parkyns (II., 41) tells us, he is never allowed to see his
intended wife even for a moment, unless he can bribe some female
friend to arrange it so he can get a peep at her by concealing
himself; but if the girl discovers him she covers her face, screams,
runs away, and hides. This "coyness" is a pure sham. In reality the
Abyssinian girl is anything but coy. Munzinger thus describes her
character:
"The shepherd girls in the neighborhood of Massua
always earn some money by carrying water and provisions
to the city. The youngest girls are sent there
heedlessly, and are often cheated out of more than
their money, and therefore they do not usually make the
best of wives, being coquettish and very eager for
money. The refinements of innocence must not be sought
for in this country; they are incompatible with the
simple arrangement of the houses and the unrestrained
freedom of conversation. No one objects to this, a
family's only anxiety being that the girl should not
lose the semblance of virginity.... If a child is born
it is mercilessly killed by the girl's grandmother."
Sentimental admirers of what they suppose to be genuine "pastoral love
poetry" will find further food for thought in the following Abyssinian
picture from Parkyns (II., 40):
"The boys are turned out wild to look after the sheep
and cattle; and the girls from early childhood are sent
to fetch water from the well or brook, first in a
gourd, and afterward in a jar proportioned to their
strength. These occupations are not conducive to the
morality of either sex. If the well be far from the
village, the girls usually form parties to go thither,
and amuse themselves on the road by singing sentimental
or love songs, which not unfrequently verge upon the
obscene, and indulge in conversation of a similar
description; while, during their halt at the well for
an hour or so, they engage in romps of all kinds, in
which parties of the other sex frequently join. This
early license lays the foundation for the most corrupt
habits, when at a later period they are sent to the
woods to collect fuel."
James Bruce, one of the earliest Europeans to visit the Abyssinians,
describes them as living practically in a state of promiscuity,
divorce being so frequent that he once saw a woman surrounded by seven
former husbands, and there being hardly any difference between
legitimacy and illegitimacy. Another old writer, Rev. S. Gobat,
describes the Abyssinians as light-minded, having nothing constant but
inconstancy itself. A more recent writer, J. Hotten (133-35),
explains, in the following sentence, a fact which has often misled
unwary observers:
"Females are rarely gross or immodest outwardly, seeing that
they need in no way be ashamed of the freest intercourse
with the other sex," "Rape is venial, and adultery regards
only the husband."
The Christian Abyssinians are in this respect no better than
the others, regarding lewd conduct with indifference. But the most
startling exhibition of Abyssinian grossness is given by the Habab and
Mensa concerning whom Munzinger says (150), that whenever a girl
decides to give herself up to a dissolute life "a public festival is
arranged, cows are butchered and a night is spent amid song and
dances."
The four volumes of Combes and Tamisier on Abyssinia give a vivid idea
of the utter absence of sexual morality in that country. With an
intelligence rare among explorers they distinguish between love of the
senses and love of the heart, and declare that the latter is not to be
found in this country. "Abyssinian women love everybody for money and
no one gratis." They do not even suspect the possibility of any other
kind of love, and the only distinction they make is that a man who
pleases them pays less.
"But what one never finds with anyone in Abyssinia is
that refined and pure sentiment which gives so much
charm to love in Europe. Here the heart is seldom
touched; tender words are often spoken, but they are
banal and rarely sincere; never do these people
experience those extraordinary emotions of which the
very remembrance agitates us a long time, those
celestial feelings which convert an atheist into a
believer. In this country love has all its existence in
a moment, having neither a past nor a future."
The authors go so far as to doubt a story they heard of a girl who was
said to have committed suicide to escape a hated suitor forced on her;
but there is nothing improbable in this, as we know that a strong
aversion may exist even where there is no capacity for true love, and
the former by no means implies the latter. Jealousy, they found
further,
"is practically unknown in Abyssinia," "If jealousy is
manifested occasionally by women we must not deceive
ourselves regarding the nature of this feeling; when an
Abyssinienne envies the love another inspires she is jealous
only of the comfort which that love may insure for the
other" (II., Chap. V.).
ABYSSINIAN BEAUTY AND FLIRTATION
Abyssinian women are not deficient in a certain sensual kind of
beauty. Their fine figures, large black eyes, and white teeth have
been admired by many travellers. But Parkyns (II., 5) avers that
"though flowers of beauty nowhere bloom with more luxuriance than in
Aethiopia, yet, alas! there shines on them no mental sun." They make
use of their eyes to great advantage--but not to express soul-love.
What flirtation in this part of the world consists in, may be inferred
from Donaldson Smith's amusing account (245, 270) of a young Boran
girl who asked permission to accompany his caravan, offering to cook,
bring wood, etc. She was provided with a piece of white sheeting for a
dress, but when tired from marching, being unused to so much clothing,
she threw the whole thing aside and walked about naked. Her name was
Ola. Some time afterward one of the native guides began to make love
to Ola:
"I oversaw the two flirting and was highly amused at the
manner in which they went about it. It consisted almost
entirely in tickling and pinching, each sally being
accompanied by roars of laughter. They never kissed, as such
a thing is unknown in Africa."
GALLA COARSENESS
South of Abyssinia there are three peoples--the Galla, Somali, and
Harari--among some of whom, if we may believe Dr. Paulitschke, the
germs of true love are to be found. Let us briefly examine them in
turn, with Paulitschke's arguments. Hartmann (401) assigns to the
Gallas a high rank among African races, and Paulitschke (_B.z.E_.,
51-56) describes them as more intelligent than the Somali, but also
more licentious. Boys marry at sixteen to eighteen, girls at twelve to
sixteen. The women are compelled to do most of the hard work; wives
are often badly treated, and when their husbands get tired of them
they send them away. Good friends lend each other their wives, and
they also lend them to guests. If a man kills his wife no one minds
it. Few Schoa girls are virgins when they marry (_Eth. N. Afr.,_ 195),
and the married women are easily led from the path of virtue by small
presents. In other parts girls take a pride in preserving their
purity, but atone for it by a dissolute life after marriage. Brides
are subjected to an obscene examination, and if not found pure are
supposed to be legally disqualified from marriage. To avoid the
disgrace, the parents bribe the bridegroom to keep the secret, and to
assert the bride's innocence. A curious detail of Galla courtship
consists in the precautions the parents of rich youths have to take to
protect them from designing poor girls and their mothers. Often, when
the parents of a rich youth are averse to the match, the coy bride
goes to their hut, jumps over the surrounding hedge, and remains there
enduring the family's abuse until they finally accept her. To prevent
such an invasion--a sort of inverted capture, in which the woman is
the aggressor--the parents of rich sons build very high hedges round
their houses to keep out girls! Not infrequently, boys and girls are
married when only six or eight years old, and forthwith live together
as husband and wife.
SOMALI LOVE-AFFAIRS
It is among the neighbors of these Gallas that Paulitschke (30)
fancied he discovered the existence of refined love:
"Adult youths and maidens have occasion, especially
while tending the cattle, to form attachments. These
are of an idealized nature, because the young folks are
brought up in a remarkably chaste and serious manner.
The father is proud of his blooming daughter and guards
her like a treasure.... In my opinion, marriages among
the Western Somals are mostly based on cordial mutual
affection. A young man renders homage to his beloved in
song. 'Thou art beautiful,' he sings, 'thy limbs are
plump, if thou wouldst drink camel's milk thou wert
more beautiful still.' The girl, on her part, gives
expression to her longing for the absent lover in this
melancholy song: 'The camel needs good grazing, and
dislikes to leave it. My beloved has left the country.
On account of the children of Sahál (the lover's
family), my heart is always so heavy. Others throw
themselves into the ocean, but I perish from grief.
Could I but find the beloved.'"
What evidence of "idealized" love is there in these poems? The girl
expresses longing for an absent man, and longing, as we have seen,
characterizes all kinds of love from the highest to the lowest. It is
one of the selfish ingredients of love, and is therefore evidence of
self-love, not of other-love. As for the lover's poem, what is it but
the grossest sensualism, the usual African apotheosis of fat? Imagine
an American lover saying to a girl, "You are beautiful for you are
plump, but you would be more beautiful still if you ate more pork and
beans"--would she regard this as evidence of refined love, or would
she turn her back and never speak to him again? Anthropologists are
sometimes strangely naïve. We have just seen what kind of
"attachments" are formed by African youths and girls while tending
cattle; Burton adds to the evidence _(F.F_., 120) by telling us that
among the Somali "the bride, as usual in the East, is rarely
consulted, but frequent _tête-à-têtes_ at the well and in the bush
when tending cattle effectually obviate this inconvenience." "At the
wells," says Donaldson Smith (15), "you will see both sexes bathing
together, with little regard for decency." They are indeed lower than
brutes in their impulses, for the only way parents can save their
infant girls from being maltreated is by the practice of infibulation,
to which, as Paulitschke himself tells us, the girls are subjected at
the early age of four, or even three; yet, even this, he likewise
informs us, is not always effectual.
As for the father's great pride in his daughter, and his guarding her
like a treasure, that is, by the concurrent testimony of the
authorities, not a token of affection or a regard for virtue, but a
purely commercial matter. Paulitschke himself says (30) that while the
mother is devoted to her child, "the father pays no attention to it."
On the following page he adds:
"The more well-to-do the father is, and the more beautiful
his daughter, the longer he seeks to keep her under the
paternal roof, for the purpose of securing a bigger price
for her through the competition of suitors."
Of the Western Somali tribes at Zayla, Captain J.S. King says[148]
that when a man has fixed his choice on a girl he pays her father $100
to $800. After that
"the proposer is entitled (on payment of $5 each time)
to private interviews with his fiancée to enable him by
a closer inspection to judge better of her personal
charms. But it frequently happens that the young man
squanders all his money on these 'interviews' before
paying the _dafa_ agreed upon. The girl then (at her
parents' instigation) breaks off the match, and her
father, when expostulated with, replies that he will
not force his daughter's inclinations. Hence arise
innumerable breach-of-promise-of-marriage suits, in
which the man is invariably the plaintiff. I have known
instances of a girl being betrothed to three or four
different men in about a year's time, their father
receiving a certain amount of _dafa_ from each
suitor."[149]
Donaldson Smith remarks (12) that Somali women "are regarded merely as
goods and chattels. In a conversation with one of my boys he told me
that he only owned five camels, but that he had a sister from whom he
expected to get much money when he sold her in marriage." The gross
commercialism of Somali love-affairs is further illustrated by the
Ogaden custom (Paulitschke, _E.N.A._, 199) of pouring strong perfumes
over the bride in order to stimulate the ardor of the suitor and make
him willing to pay more for her--a trick which is often successful.
How, under such circumstances, Somal marriages can be "mostly based on
cordial mutual affection" is a mystery for Dr. Paulitschke to explain.
Burton proved himself a keener observer and psychologist when he wrote
(_F.F._, 122), "The Somal knows none of the exaggerated and chivalrons
ideas by which passion becomes refined affection among the Arab
Bedouins and the sons of civilization." I may add what this writer
says regarding Somal poetry:
"The subjects are frequently pastoral; the lover, for
instance, invites his mistress to walk with him toward
the well in Lahelo, the Arcadia of the land; he
compares her legs to the tall, straight Libi tree, and
imprecates the direst curses on her head if she refuses
to drink with him the milk of his favorite camel."
ARABIC INFLUENCES
The Harari, neighbors of the Somals, are another people among whom
Paulitschke fancied that he discovered signs of idealized love
(_B.E.A.S._, 70). Their youthful attachments, he says, are intense and
noble, and in proof of this he translates two of their poems on the
beauty of a bride.
I. "I tell thee this only: thy face is like silk, Aisa;
I say it again, I tell thee nothing but that. Thou art
slender as a lance-shaft; thy father and thy mother are
Arabs; they all are Arabs; I tell thee this only."
II. "Thy form is like a burning lamp, Aisa; I love
thee. When thou art at the side of Abrahim, thou
burnest him with the light of thy beauty. To-morrow I
shall see thee again."
In a third (freely translated and printed in the appendix of the same
volume) occur these lines:
"The honey is already taken out and I come with it. The
milk is already drawn and I bring it. And now thou art
the pure honey, and now thou art the fresh milk. The
gathered honey is very sweet, and therefore it was
drunk to thy health. Thine eyes are black, dyed with
Kahul. The fresh milk is very sweet and therefore it
was drunk to thy health. I have seen Sina--oh, how
sweet was Sina.... Thine eyes are like the full moon,
and thy body is fragrant as the fragrance of
rose-water. And she lives in the garden of her father
and the garments on her body become fragrant as
basil.... And thou art like a king's garden in which
all perfumes are united."
It is easy to note Arabic influences in these poems. The Harari are
largely Arabic; their very language is being absorbed in the Arabic;
yet I cannot find in these poems the least evidence of amorous
idealism or "noble" sentiment. To have a lover compare a girl's face
to silk, her form to a lance-shaft or a burning lamp, her eyes to the
full moon, may be an imaginative sort of sensualism, but it is purely
sensual nevertheless. If an American lover told a girl, "I bought some
delicious candy and ate it, thinking of you; I ordered a glass of
sweet soda-water and drank it to your health"--would she regard that
as evidence of "noble" love, or of any kind of love at all, except a
kind of cupboard love?
No, not even here, where Arabian influences prevail, do we come across
the germs of true love. It is the same all over Africa. Nowhere do we
find indications that men admire other things in women except, at
most, voluptuous eyes and plump figures; nowhere do the men perform
unselfish acts of gallantry and self-sacrifice; nowhere exhibit
sympathy with their females, who, far from being goddesses, are not
even companions, but simply drudges and slaves to lust. A whole volume
would be required to demonstrate that this holds true of all parts of
Africa; but the present chapter is already too long and I must close
with a brief reference to the Berbers of Algeria (Kabyles) to show
that at the northern extremity of Africa, as at the southern, the
eastern, the western, love spells lust. Here, too, man is lower than
animals. Camille Sabatier, who was a justice of the peace at
Tizi-Ouzan, speaks[150] of "_la brutalité du male qui, souvent même
chez les Kabyles, n'attend pas la nubilité pour déflorer la jeune
enfant._" The girls, he adds,
"detest their husbands with all their heart. Love is
almost always unknown to them--I mean by love that
ensemble of refined sentiments, which, among civilized
peoples, ennoble the sexual appetite."
TOUAREG CHIVALRY
A guileless reader of Chavanne's book on the Sahara is apt to get the
impression that there is, after all, an oasis in the desert of African
lovelessness and contempt for women. Touareg women, we are told
therein (208-10), are allowed to dispose of their hands and to eat
with the men, certain dishes being reserved for them, others
(including tea and coffee) for the men. In the evening the women
assemble and improvise songs while the men sit around in their best
attire. The women write mottoes on the men's shields, and the men
carve their chosen one's name in the rocks and sing her praises. The
situation has been compared to mediaeval chivalry. But when we examine
it more critically than the biassed Chavanne did, we find, using his
own data, more of Africa than appeared to be there at first sight. The
woman, we are informed, owes the husband obedience, and he can divorce
her at pleasure. When a woman talks to a man she veils her face "as a
sign of respect." And when the men travel, they are accompanied by
those of their female slaves who are young and pretty. Their morals
are farther characterized by the fact that descent is in the female
line, which is usually due to uncertain paternity. The women are ugly
and masculine, and Chavanne does not mention a single fact or act
which proves that they experience supersensual, altruistic love.
So far as the position of Touareg women is superior to that of other
Africans, it is due to the fact that slaves are kept to do the hard
work and to certain European and Christian influences and the
institution of theoretical monogamy. Possibly the germs of a better
sort of love may exist among them, as they may among the Bedouins;
they must make a beginning somewhere.
AN AFRICAN LOVE-LETTER
T.J. Hutchinson declares that the gentle god of love is unknown in the
majority of African kingdoms: "It in fact seems to be crawling into
life only in one or two places where our language is the established
one." He prints a quaint love-letter addressed by a Liberian native to
his colored sweetheart. The substance of the letter, it is true, is
purely egotistic; it might be summed up in the words, "Oh, how I wish
you were here to make me happy." Yet it opens up vistas of future
possibilities. I cite it verbatim:
"My Dear Miss,--I take my pen in hand to Embrac you of
my health, I was very sick this morning but know I am
better but I hope it may find you in a state of
Enjoying good health and so is your Relation. Oh my
dear Miss what would I give if I could see thy lovely
Face this precious minnit O miss you had promis me to
tell me something, and I like you to let you know I am
very anxious to know what it is give my Respect to the
young mens But to the young ladys especially O I am
long to see you O miss if I don't see you shortly
surely I must die I shut my mouth to hold my breath
Miss don't you cry O my little pretty turtle dove I
wont you to write to me, shall I go Bound or shall I go
free or shall I love a pretty girl a she don't love me
give my Respect all enquiring Friend Truly Your
respectfully,
"J----H----
"Nothing more to say O miss."
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE
The founders of the Australian race, Curr believes, were Africans, and
may have arrived in one canoe. The distance from Africa to Australia
is, however, great, and there are innumerable details of structure,
color, custom, myth, implements, language, etc., which have led the
latest authorities to conclude that the Australian race was formed
gradually by a mixture of Papuans, Malayans, and Dravidians of Central
India.[151] Topinard has given reasons for believing that there are
two distinct races in Australia. However that may be, there are
certainly great differences in the customs of the natives. As regards
the relations of the sexes, luckily, these differences are not so
great as in some other respects, wherefore it is possible to give a
tolerably accurate bird's-eye view of the Australians as a whole from
this point of view.
PERSONAL CHARMS OF AUSTRALIANS
Once in awhile, in the narrative of those who have travelled or
sojourned among Australians, one comes across a reference to the
symmetrical form, soft skin, red lips, and white teeth of a young
Australian girl. Mitchell in his wanderings saw several girls with
beautiful features and figures. Of one of these, who seemed to be the
most influential person in camp, he says (I., 266):
"She was now all animation, and her finely shaped mouth,
beautiful teeth, and well-formed person appeared to great
advantage as she hung over us both, addressing me
vehemently,"
etc. Of two other girls the same writer says (II., 93):
"The youngest was the handsomest female I had ever seen
amongst the natives. She was so far from black that the
red color was very apparent in her cheeks. She sat
before me in a corner of the group, nearly in the
attitude of Mr. Bailey's fine statue of Eve at the
fountain, and apparently equally unconscious that she
was naked. As I looked upon her for a moment, while
deeply regretting the fate of her mother, the chief,
who stood by, and whose hand had been more than once
laid upon my cap, as if to feel whether it were proof
against the blow of a waddy, begged me to accept of her
in exchange for a tomahawk!"
Eyre, another famous early traveller, writes on this topic (II.,
207-208):
"Occasionally, though rarely, I have met with females
in the bloom of youth, whose well-proportioned limbs
and symmetry of figure might have formed a model for
the sculptor's chisel. In personal appearance the
females are, except in early youth, very far inferior
to the men. When young, however, they are not
uninteresting. The jet black eyes, shaded by their long
dark lashes, and the delicate and scarcely formed
features of incipient womanhood give a soft and
pleasing expression to a countenance that might often
be called good-looking--occasionally pretty."
"Occasionally, though rarely," and then only for a few years, is an
Australian woman attractive from _our_ point of view. As a rule she is
very much the reverse--dirty, thin-limbed, course-featured, ungainly
in every way;[152] and Eyre tells us why this is so. The extremities
of the women, he says, are more attenuated than those of the men;
probably because "like most other savages, the Australian looks upon
his wife as a slave," makes her undergo great privations and do all
the hard work, such as bringing in wood and water, tending the
children, carrying all the movable property while on the march, _often
even her husband's weapons_:
"In wet weather she attends to all the outside work,
whilst her lord and master is snugly seated at the
fire. If there is a scarcity of food, she has to endure
the pangs of hunger, often, perhaps, in addition to
ill-treatment and abuse. No wonder, then, that the
females, and especially the younger ones (for it is
then they are exposed to the greatest hardships), are
not so fully or so roundly developed in person as the
men."
The rule that races admire those personal characteristics which
climate and circumstances have impressed on them is not borne out
among Australians. An arid soil and a desiccating climate make them
thin as a race, but they do not admire thinness. "Long-legged,"
"thin-legged," are favorite terms of abuse among them, and Grey once
heard a native sing scornfully
Oh, what a leg,
* * * * *
You kangaroo-footed churl!
Nor is it beauty, in our sense of the word, that attracts them, but
fat, as in Africa and the Orient. I have previously quoted Brough
Smyth's assertion that an Australian woman, however old and ugly, is
in constant danger of being stolen if she is fat. That women have the
same standard of "taste," appears from the statement of H.E.A. Meyer
(189), that the principal reason why the men anoint themselves with
grease and ochre is that it makes them look fat and "gives them an air
of importance in the eyes of the women, for they admire a fat man
however ugly." But whereas these men admire a fat woman for sensual
reasons, the women's preference is based on utilitarian motives. Low
as their reasoning powers are, they are shrewd enough to reflect that
a man who is in good condition proves thereby that he is
"somebody"--that he can hunt and will be able to bring home some meat
for his wife too. This interpretation is borne out by what was said on
a previous page (278) about one of the reasons why corpulence is
valued in Fiji, and also by an amusing incident related by the eminent
Australian explorer George Grey (II., 93). He had reproached his
native guide with not knowing anything, when the guide replied:
"I know nothing! I know how to keep myself fat; the
young women look at me and say, 'Imbat is very
handsome, he is fat'--they will look at you and say,
'He not good--long legs--what do you know? Where is
your fat? What for do you know so much, if you can't
keep fat?"
CRUEL TREATMENT OF WOMEN
Eyre was no doubt right in his suggestion that the inferiority of
Australian women to the men in personal appearance was due to the
privations and hardships to which the women were subjected. Much as
the men admire fat in a woman, they are either too ignorant, or too
selfish otherwise, to allow them to grow fat in idleness. Women in
Australia never exist for their own sake but solely for the
convenience of the men. "The man," says the Rev. H.E.A. Meyer (11),
"regarding them more as slaves than in any other light, employs them
in every possible way to his own advantage." "The wives were the
absolute property of the husband," says the Rev. G. Taplin (XVII. to
XXXVII.),
"and were given away, exchanged, or lent, as their owners
saw fit." "The poor creatures ... are always seen to a
disadvantage, being ... the slaves of their husbands and of
the tribes." "The women in all cases came badly off when
they depended upon what the men of the tribes chose to give
them."
"The woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the
greatest cruelty and indignity, has to do all laborious
work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest
offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddy
or a yam-stick, and not unfrequently speared. The records of
the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances
of blacks being tried for murdering their lubras. The
woman's life is of no account if her husband chooses to
destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her
part under any circumstances. In times of scarcity of food,
she is the last to be fed and the last considered in any
way. That many of them die in consequence cannot be a matter
of wonder.... The condition of the women has no influence
over their treatment, and a pregnant female is dealt with
and is expected to do as much as if she were in perfect
health.... The condition of the native women is wretched and
miserable in the extreme; in fact, in no savage nation of
which there is any record can it be any worse."
And again (p. 72):
"The men think nothing of thrashing their wives,
knocking them on the head, and inflicting frightful
gashes; but they never beat the boys. And the sons
treat their mothers very badly. Very often mere lads
will not hesitate to strike and throw stones at them."
"Women," says Eyre (322), "are frequently beaten about the head with
waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the
most trivial offences."
There is hardly one, he says, that has not some frightful
scars on the body; and he saw one who "appeared to have been
almost riddled with spear-wounds." "Does a native meet a
woman in the woods and violate her, he is not the one to
feel the vengeance of the husband, but the poor victim whom
he has abused" (387). "Women surprised by strange blacks are
always abused and often massacred" (Curr, I., 108). "A black
hates intensely those of his own race with whom he is
unacquainted, always excepting the females. To one of these
he will become attached if he succeeds in carrying one off;
otherwise he will kill the women out of mere savageness and
hatred of their husbands" (80). "Whenever they can, blacks
in their wild state never neglect to massacre all male
strangers who fall into their power. Females are ravished,
and often slain afterward if they cannot be conveniently
carried off."
The natives of Victoria "often break to pieces their six-feet-long
sticks on the heads of the women" (Waitz, VI., 775). "In the case of a
man killing his own gin [wife], he has to deliver up one of his own
sisters for his late wife's friends to put to death" (W.E. Roth, 141).
After a war, when peace is patched up, it sometimes happens that "the
weaker party give some nets and women to make matters up" (Curr, II.,
477). In the same volume (331) we find a realistic picture of
masculine selfishness at home:
"When the mosquitoes are bad, the men construct with
forked sticks driven into the ground rude bedsteads, on
which they sleep, a fire being made underneath to keep
off with its smoke the troublesome insects. No
bedsteads, however, fall to the share of the women,
whose business it is to keep the fires burning whilst
their lords sleep."
Concerning woman in the lower Murray tribes, Bulmer says[153] that "on
the journey her lord would coolly walk along with merely his war
implements, weighing only a few pounds, while his wife was carrying
perhaps sixty pounds."
The lives of the women "are rated as of the less value than those of
the men." "Their corpses are often thrown to dogs for food" (Waitz,
VL, 775). "These poor creatures," says Wilkinson of the South
Australian women (322),
"are in an abject state, and are only treated with about the
same consideration as the dogs that accompany them; they are
obliged to give any food that may be desired to the men, and
sit and see them eat it, considering themselves amply repaid
if they are rewarded by having a piece of gizzle, or any
other leavings, pitched to them."
J.S. Wood (71) relates this characteristic story:
"A native servant was late in keeping his appointment
with his master, and, on inquiry, it was elicited that
he had just quarrelled with one of his wives, and had
speared her through the body. On being rebuked by his
master, he turned off the matter with a laugh, merely
remarking that white men had only one wife, whereas he
had two, and did not mind losing one till he could buy
another."
Sturt. who made two exploring expeditions (1829-1831), wrote (II., 55)
that the men oblige their women to procure their own food, or they
"throw to them over their shoulders the bones they have already
picked, with a nonchalance that is extremely amusing." The women are
also excluded from religious ceremonies; many of the best things to
eat are taboo to them; and the cruel contempt of the men pursues them
even after death. The men are buried with ceremony (Curr, I., 89), but
"as the women and children are held to be very inferior to the men
whilst alive, and their spirits are but little feared after death,
they are interred with but scant ceremony... the women alone wailing."
Thus they show their contempt even for the ghosts of women, though
they are so afraid of other ghosts that they never leave camp in the
dark or have a nocturnal dance except by moonlight or with big fires!
WERE SAVAGES CORRUPTED BY WHITES?
Such is the Australian's treatment of woman--a treatment so selfish,
so inconsistent with the altruistic traits and impulses of romantic
love--sympathy, gallantry, and self-sacrificing affection, not to
speak of adoration--that it alone proves him incapable of so refined a
sentiment. If any doubt remained, it would be removed by his utter
inability to rise above the sensual sphere. The Australian is
absolutely immoral and incredibly licentious. Here, however, we are
confronted by a spectre with which the sentimentalists try to frighten
the searchers for truth, and which must therefore be exorcised first.
They grant the wantonness of savages, but declare that it is "due
chiefly to the influence of civilization." This is one of the favorite
subterfuges of Westermarck, who resorts to it again and again. In
reference to the Australians he cites what Edward Stephens wrote
regarding the former inhabitants of the Adelaide Plains:
"Those who speak of the natives as a naturally degraded
race, either do not speak from experience, or they
judge them by what they have become when the abuse of
intoxicants and contact with the most wicked of the
white race have begun their deadly work. As a rule to
which there are no exceptions, if a tribe of blacks is
found away from the white settlement, the more vicious
of the white men are most anxious to make the
acquaintance of the natives, and that, too, solely for
purposes of immorality. ... I saw the natives and was
much with them before those dreadful immoralities were
well known ... and I say it fearlessly, that nearly all
their evils they owed to the white man's immorality and
to the white man's drink."
Now the first question a conscientious truth-seeker feels inclined to
ask regarding this "fearless" Stephens who thus boldly accuses of
ignorance all those who hold that the Australian race was degraded
before it came in contact with whites, is, "Who is he and what are his
qualifications for serving as a witness in this matter?" He is, or
was, a simple-minded settler, kindly no doubt, who for some
inscrutable reason was allowed to contribute a paper to the _Journal
of the Royal Society of New South Wales_ (Vol. XXXIII.). His
qualifications for appearing as an expert in Australian anthropology
may be inferred from various remarks in his paper. He naïvely tells a
story about a native who killed an opossum, and after eating the meat,
threw the intestines to his wife. "Ten years before that," he adds,
"that same man would have treated his wife as himself." Yet we have
just seen that all the explorers, in all parts of the country, found
that the natives who had never seen a white man treated their women
like slaves and dogs.
ABORIGINAL HORRORS
If the savage learned his wantonness from the whites, did he get all
his other vicious habits from the same source? We know on the best
authorities that the disgusting practice of cannibalism prevailed
extensively among the natives. "They eat the young men when they die,
and the young women if they are fat" (Curr, III., 147). Lumholtz
entitled his book on Australia _Among Cannibals_. The Rev. G. Taplin
says (XV.):
"Among the Dieyerie tribe cannibalism is the universal
practice, and all who die are indiscriminately devoured
... the mother eats the flesh of her children, and the
children that of their mother," etc.
"If a man had a fat wife," says the same writer (2), "he was always
particularly careful not to leave her unprotected, lest she might be
seized by prowling cannibals." Among the wilder tribes few women are
allowed to die a natural death, "they being generally despatched ere
they become old and emaciated, that so much good food may not be
lost."[154] Would the "fearless" Stephens say that the natives learned
these practices from the whites? Would he say they learned from the
whites the "universal custom ... to slay every unprotected male
stranger met with" (Curr, I., 133)?
"Infanticide is very common, and appears to be practised solely to get
rid of the trouble of rearing children," wrote Eyre (II., 324). Curr
(I., 70) heard that "some tribes within the area of the Central
Division cut off the nipples of the females' breasts, in some
instances, for the purpose of rendering their rearing of children
impossible." On the Mitchell River, "children were killed for the most
trivial offences, such as for accidentally breaking a weapon as they
trotted about the camp" (Curr, II., 403). Twins are destroyed in South
Australia, says Leigh (159), and if the mother dies "they throw the
living infant into the grave, while infanticide is an every-day
occurrence." Curr (I., 70) believes that the average number of
children borne by each woman was six, the maximum ten; but of all
these only two boys and one girl as a rule were kept, "the rest were
destroyed immediately after birth," as we destroy litters of puppies.
Sometimes the infants were smothered over a fire (Waitz, VI., 779),
and deformed children were always killed. Taplin (13) writes that
before his colony was established among them infanticide was very
prevalent among the natives. "One intelligent woman said she thought
that if the Europeans had waited a few more years they would have
found the country without inhabitants." Strangulation, a blow of the
waddy, or filling the ears with red-hot embers, were the favorite ways
of killing their own babies.
Did the whites teach the angelic savages all these diabolical customs?
If so, they must have taught them customs invented for the occasion,
since they are not practised by whites in any part of the world. But
perhaps Stephens would have been willing to waive this point.
Sentimentalists are usually more or less willing to concede that
savages are devils in most things if we will only admit in return that
they are angels in their sexual relations. For instance, if we may
believe Stephens, no nun was ever more modest than the native
Australian woman. Once, he says, he was asked to visit a poor old
black woman in the last stages of consumption:
"Her case was hopeless, and when she was in almost the
last agony of mortal dissolution I was astounded at her
efforts at concealment, indicative of extreme modesty.
As I drew her opossum rug over her poor emaciated body
the look of gratitude which came from her dying eyes
told me in language more eloquent than words that
beneath that dark and dying exterior there was a soul
which in a few hours angels would delight to honor."
The poor woman was probably cold and glad to be covered; if she had
any modesty regarding exposure of the body she could have learned it
from no one but the dreadful, degraded whites, for the Australian
himself is an utter stranger to such a feeling. On this point the
explorers and students of the natives are unanimous. Both men and
women went absolutely naked except in those regions where the climate
was cold.
NAKED AND NOT ASHAMED
"They are as innocent of shame as the animals of the forest," says E.
Palmer; and J. Bonwick writes: "Nakedness is no shame with them. As a
French writer once remarked to a lady, 'With a pair of gloves you
could clothe six men.'" Even ornaments are worn by the men only:
"females are content with their natural charms." W.E. Roth, in his
standard work on the Queensland natives, says that "with both sexes
the privates are only covered on special public occasions, or when in
close proximity to white settlements." With the Warburton River tribe
(Curr, II, 18) "the women go quite naked, and the men have only a belt
made of human hair round the waist from which a fringe spun of hair of
rats hangs in front." Sturt wrote (I., 106): "The men are much better
looking than the women; both go perfectly naked."
At the dances a covering of feathers or leaves is sometimes worn by
the women, but is removed as soon as the dance is over. Narrinyeri
girls, says Taplin (15), "wear a sort of apron of fringe, called
Kaininggi, until they bear their first child. If they have no children
it is taken from them and burned by their husbands while they are
asleep." Meyer (189) says the same of the Encounter Bay tribe, and
similar customs prevailed at Port Jackson and many other places.
Summing up the observations of Cook, Turnbull, Cunningham, Tench,
Hunter, and others, Waitz remarks (VI., 737):
"In the region of Sydney, too, the natives used to be
entirely nude, and as late as 1816 men would go about
the streets of Paramatta and Sydney naked, despite many
prohibitions and attempts to clothe them, which always
failed"
--so ingrained was the absence of shame in the native mind.
Jackman, the "Australian Captive," an Englishman who spent seventeen
months among the natives, describes them as being "as nude as Adam and
Eve" (99). "The Australians' utter lack of modesty is remarkable,"
writes F. Müller (207):
"it reveals itself in the way in which their clothes
are worn. While an attempt is made to cover the upper,
especially the back part of the body, the private parts
are often left uncovered."
One early explorer, Sturt (II., 126), found the natives of the
interior, without exception, "in a complete state of nudity."
The still earlier Governor Philipps (1787) found that the inhabitants
of New South Wales had no idea that one part of the body ought to be
covered more than any other. Captain Flinders, who saw much of
Australia in 1795, speaks in one place (I., 66) of "the short skin
cloak which is of kangaroo, and worn over the shoulders, leaving the
rest of the body naked." This was in New South Wales. At Keppel Bay
(II., 30) he writes: "These people ... go entirely naked;" and so on
at other points of the continent touched on his voyage. In Dawson (61)
we read: "They were perfectly naked, as they always are." Nor has the
Australian in his native state changed in the century or more since
whites have known him. In the latest book on Central Australia (1899)
by Spencer and Gillen we read (17) that to this day a native woman
"with nothing on except an ancient straw hat and an old pair of boots
is perfectly happy."
IS CIVILIZATION DEMORALIZING?
The reader is now in a position to judge of the reliability of the
"fearless" Stephens as a witness, and of the blind bias of the
anthropologist who uses him as such. It surely ought not to be
necessary to prove that races among whom cannibalism, infanticide,
wife enslavement and murder, and other hideous crimes are rampant as
unreproved national customs, could not possibly be refined and moral
in their sexual relations, which offer the greatest of all temptations
to unrestrained selfishness. Yet Stephens tells us in his article that
before the advent of the whites these people were chaste, and
"conjugal infidelity was almost if not entirely unknown;" while
Westermarck (61, 64, 65) classes the Australians with those savages
"among whom sexual intercourse out of wedlock is of rare occurrence."
On page 70 he declares that "in a savage condition of life ... there
is comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations;" and on
page 539, in summing up his doctrines, he asserts that "we have some
reason to believe that irregular connections between the sexes have,
on the whole, exhibited a tendency to increase along with the progress
of civilization." The refutation of this libel on civilization--which
is widely believed--is one of the main objects of the following
pages--is, in fact, one of the main objects of this whole volume.
There are a few cities in Southern Europe where the rate of
illegitimacy equals, and in one or two cases slightly exceeds, the
legitimate births; but that is owing to the fact that betrayed girls
from the country nearly always go to the cities to find a refuge and
hide their shame. Taking the countries as a whole we find that even
Scotland, which has always had a somewhat unsavory reputation in this
respect, had, in 1897, only 6.98 per cent of illegitimate births--say
seven in a hundred; the highest rate since 1855 having been 10.2.
There are, of course, besides this, cases of uncertain paternity, but
their number is comparatively small, and it certainly is much larger
in the _less_ civilized countries of Europe than in the more
civilized. Taking the five or six most advanced countries of Europe
and America, it is safe to say that the paternity is certain in ninety
cases out of a hundred. If we now look at the Australians as described
by eye-witnesses since the earliest exploring tours, we find a state
of affairs which makes paternity uncertain _in all cases without
exception_, and also a complete indifference on the subject.
ABORIGINAL WANTONNESS
One of the first explorers of the desert interior was Eyre (1839). His
experiences--covering ten years--led him to speak (378) of "the
illicit and almost unlimited intercourse between the sexes." "Marriage
is not looked upon as any pledge of chastity; indeed, no such virtue
is recognized" (319). "Many of the native dances are of a grossly
licentious character." Men rarely get married before they are
twenty-five, but that does not mean that they are continent. From
their thirteenth year they have promiscuous intercourse with girls who
abandon themselves at the age of ten, though they rarely become
mothers before they are sixteen.[155]
Another early explorer of the interior (1839), T.L. Mitchell, gives
this glimpse of aboriginal morality (I., 133):
"The natives ... in return for our former disinterested
kindness, persisted in their endeavors to introduce us
very particularly to their women. They ordered them to
come up, divested of their cloaks and bags, and placed
them before us. Most of the men appeared to possess
two, the pair in general consisting of a fat plump gin
and one much younger. Each man placed himself before
his gins, and bowing forward with a shrug, the hands
and arms being thrown back pointing to each gin, as if
to say, Take which you please. The females, on their
part, evinced no apprehension, but seemed to regard us
as beings of a race so different, without the slightest
indication of either fear, aversion, or surprise. Their
looks were rather expressive of a ready acquiescence in
the proffered kindness of the men, and when at length
they brought a sable nymph _vis-a-vis_ to Mr. White, I
could preserve my gravity no longer, and throwing the
spears aside, I ordered the bullock-drivers to
proceed."
George Grey, who, during his two exploring expeditions into
Northwestern and Western Australia, likewise came in contact with the
"uncontaminated" natives, found that, though "a spear through the calf
of the leg is the least punishment that awaits" a faithless wife if
detected, and sometimes the death-penalty is inflicted, yet "the
younger women were much addicted to intrigue" (I., 231, 253), as
indeed they appear to be throughout the continent, as we shall see
presently.
Of all Australian institutions none is more characteristic than the
corrobborees or nocturnal dances which are held at intervals by the
various tribes all over the continent, and were of course held
centuries before a white man was ever seen on the continent; and no
white man in his wildest nightmare ever dreamt of such scenes as are
enacted at them. They are given preferably by moonlight, are apt to
last all night, and are often attended by the most obscene and
licentious practices. The corrobboree, says Curr (I., 92), was
undoubtedly "often an occasion of licentiousness and atrocity";
fights, even wars, ensue, "and almost invariably as the result of
outrages on women." The songs heard at these revels are sometimes
harmless and the dances not indecent, says the Rev. G. Taplin (37),
"but at other times the songs will consist of the vilest
obscenity. I have seen dances which were the most disgusting
displays of obscene gesture possible to be imagined, and
although I stood in the dark alone, and nobody knew I was
there, I felt ashamed to look upon such abominations.... The
dances of the women are very immodest and lewd."
John Mathew (in Curr, III., 168) testifies regarding the corrobborees
of the Mary Eiver tribes that
"the representations were rarely free from obscenity,
and on some occasions indecent gestures were the main
parts of the action. I have seen a structure formed of
huge forked sticks placed upright in the ground, the
forks upward, with saplings reaching from fork to fork,
and boughs laid over all. This building was part of the
machinery for a corrobboree, at a certain stage of
which the males, who were located on the roof, rushed
down among the females, who were underneath and handled
them licentiously."[156]
LOWER THAN BRUTES
The lowest depth of aboriginal degradation remains to be sounded. Like
most of the Africans, Australians are lower than animals inasmuch as
they often do not wait till girls have reached the age of puberty.
Meyer (190) says of the Narrinyeri: "They are given in marriage at a
very early age (ten or twelve years)." Lindsay Cranford[157] testifies
regarding five South Australian tribes that "at puberty no girl,
without exception, is a virgin." With the Paroo River tribes "the
girls became wives whilst mere children, and mothers at fourteen"
(Curr, II., 182). Of other tribes Curr's correspondents write (107):
"Girls become wives at from eight to fourteen years." "One
often sees a child of eight the wife of a man of fifty."
"Girls are promised to men in infancy, become wives at about
ten years of age, and mothers at fourteen or fifteen" (342).
The Birria tribe waits a few years longer, but atones for this by a
resort to another crime: "Males and females are married at from
fourteen to sixteen, but are not allowed to rear children until they
get to be about thirty years of age; hence infanticide is general."
The missionary O.W. Schürmann says of the Port Lincoln tribe (223):
"Notwithstanding the early marriage of females, I have not observed
that they have children at an earlier age than is common among
Europeans." Of York district tribes we are told (I., 343) that "girls
are betrothed shortly after birth, and brutalities are practised on
them while mere children." Of the Kojonub tribe (348): "Girls are
promised in marriage soon after birth, and given over to their
husbands at about nine years of age." Of the Natingero tribe (380):
"The girls go to live with their husbands at from seven to ten years,
and suffer dreadfully from intercourse." Of the Yircla Meening tribe
(402):
"Females become wives at ten and mothers at twelve
years of age." "Mr. J.M. Davis and others of repute
declare, as a result of long acquaintance with
Australian savages, that the girls were made use of for
promiscuous intercourse when they were only nine or ten
years old." (Sutherland, I., 113.)
It is needless to continue this painful catalogue.
INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY
Eyre's assertion regarding chastity, that "no such virtue is
recognized," has already been quoted, and is borne out by testimony of
many other writers. In the Dieyerie tribe "each married woman is
permitted a paramour." (Curr, II., 46.) Taplin says of the Narrinyeri
(16, 18) that boys are not allowed to marry until their beard has
grown a certain length; "but they are allowed the abominable privilege
of promiscuous intercourse with the younger portion of the other sex."
A.W. Howitt describes[158] a strange kind of group marriage prevalent
among the Dieri and kindred tribes, the various couples being allotted
to each other by the council of elder men without themselves being
consulted as to their preferences. During the ensuing festivities,
however, "there is for about four hours a general license in camp as
regards" the couples thus "married." Meyer (191) says of the Encounter
Bay tribes that if a man from another tribe arrives having anything
which a native desires to purchase, "he perhaps makes a bargain to pay
by letting him have one of his wives for a longer or shorter period."
Angas (I., 93) refers to the custom of lending wives. In Victoria the
natives have a special name for the custom of lending one of their
wives to young men who have none. Sometimes they are thus lent for a
month at a time.[159] As we shall presently see, one reason why
Australian men marry is to have the means of making friends by lending
their wives to others. The custom of allowing friends to share the
husband's privileges was also widely prevalent.
In New South Wales and about Riverina, says Brough Smyth (II., 316),
"in any instance where the abduction [of a woman] has taken
place by a party of men for the benefit of some one
individual, each of the members of the party claims, as a
right, a privilege which the intended husband has no power
to refuse."
Curr informs us (I., 128) that if a woman resist her husband's orders
to give herself up to another man she is "either speared or cruelly
beaten." Fison (303) believes that the lending of wives to visitors
was looked on not as a favor but a duty--a right which the visitor
could claim; and Howitt showed that in the native gesture language
there was a special sign for this custom--"a peculiar folding of the
hands," indicating "either a request or an offer, according as it is
used by the guest or the host."[160] Concerning Queensland tribes Roth
says (182):
"If an aboriginal requires a woman temporarily for
venery he either borrows a wife from her husband for a
night or two in exchange for boomerangs, a shield,
food, etc., or else violates the female when
unprotected, when away from the camp out in the bush.
In the former case the husband looks upon the matter as
a point of honor to oblige his friend, the greatest
compliment that can be paid him, provided that
permission is previously asked. On the other hand, were
he to refuse he has the fear hanging over him that the
petitioner might get a death-bone pointed at him--and
so, after all, his apparent courtesy may be only
Hobson's choice. In the latter case, if a married
woman, and she tells her husband, she gets a hammering,
and should she disclose the delinquent, there will
probably be a fight, and hence she usually keeps her
mouth shut; if a single woman, or of any paedomatronym
other than his own, no one troubles himself about the
matter. On the other hand, death by the spear or club
is the punishment invariably inflicted by the camp
council collectively for criminally assaulting any
blood relative, group-sister (_i.e._, a female member
of the same paedomatronym) or young woman that has not
yet been initiated into the first degree."
The last sentence would indicate that these tribes are not so
indifferent to chastity as the other natives; but the information
given by Roth (who for three years was surgeon-general to the Boulia,
Cloncurry and Normanton hospitals) dispels such an illusion most
radically.[161]
USELESS PRECAUTIONS
In Central Australia, says H. Kempe,[162] "there is no separation of
the sexes in social life; in the daily camp routine as well as at
festivals all the natives mingle as they choose." Curr asserts (I.,
109) that
"in most tribes a woman is not allowed to converse or
have any relations whatever with any adult male, save
her husband. Even with a grown-up brother she is almost
forbidden to exchange a word."
Grey (II., 255) found that at dances the females sat in groups apart
and the young men were never allowed to approach them and not
permitted to hold converse with any one except their mother or
sisters. "On no occasion," he adds,
"is a strange native allowed to approach the fire of the
married." "The young men and boys of ten years of age and
upward are obliged to sleep in their portion of the
encampment."
From such testimony one might infer that female chastity is
successfully guarded; but the writers quoted themselves take care to
dispel that illusion. Grey tells us that (in spite of these
arrangements) "the young females are much addicted to intrigue;" and
again (248):
"Should a female be possessed of considerable personal
attractions, the first years of her life must
necessarily be very unhappy. In her early infancy she
is betrothed to some man, even at this period advanced
in years, and by whom, as she approaches the age of
puberty, she is watched with a degree of vigilance and
care, which increases in proportion to the disparity of
years between them; it is probably from this
circumstance that so many of them are addicted to
intrigues, in which if they are detected by their
husbands, death or a spear through some portion of the
body is their certain fate."
And Curr shows in the following (109) how far the attempts at
seclusion are from succeeding in enforcing chastity:
"Notwithstanding the savage jealousy, _varied by
occasional degrading complaisance on the part of the
husband,_ there is more or less intrigue in every camp;
and the husband usually assumes that his wife has been
unfaithful to him whenever there has been an
opportunity for criminality.... In some tribes the
husband will frequently prostitute his wife to his
brother; otherwise more commonly to strangers visiting
his tribe than to his own people, and in this way our
exploring parties have been troubled with proposals of
the sort."
Apart from the other facts here given, the words I have italicized
above would alone show that what makes an Australian in some instances
guard his females is not a regard for chastity, or jealousy in our
sense of the word, but simply a desire to preserve his movable
property--a slave and concubine who, if young or fat, is very liable
to be stolen or, on account of the bad treatment she receives from her
old master, to run away with a younger man.[163]
If any further evidence were needed on this head it would be supplied
by the authoritative statement of J.D. Wood[164] that
"In fact, chastity as a virtue is absolutely unknown
amongst all the tribes of which there are records. The
buying, taking, or stealing of a wife is not at all
influenced by considerations of antecedent purity on
the part of the woman. A man wants a wife and he
obtains one somehow. She is his slave and there the
matter ends."
SURVIVALS OF PROMISCUITY
Since this chapter was written a new book on Australia has appeared
which bears out the views here taken so admirably that I must insert a
brief reference to its contents. It is Spencer and Gillen's _The
Native Tribes of Central Australia_ (1899), and relates to nine tribes
over whom Baldwin Spencer had been placed as special magistrate and
sub-protector for some years, during which he had excellent
opportunities to study their customs. The authors tell us (62, 63)
that
"In the Urabunna tribe every woman is the special
_Nupa_ of one particular man, but at the same time he
has no exclusive right to her, as she is the
_Piraungaru_ of certain other men who also have the
right of access to her.... There is no such thing as
one man having the exclusive right to one woman....
Individual marriage does not exist either in name or in
practice in the Urabunna tribe."
"Occasionally, but rarely, it happens that a man
attempts to prevent his wife's _Piraungaru_ from having
access to her, but this leads to a fight, and the
husband is looked upon as churlish. When visiting
distant groups where, in all likelihood, the husband
has no _Piraungaru_, it is customary for other men of
his own class to offer him the loan of one or more of
their _Nupa_ women, and a man, besides lending a woman
over whom he has the first right, will also lend his
_Piraungaru_."
In the Arunta tribe there is a restriction of a particular woman to a
particular man, "or rather, a man has an exclusive right to one
special woman, though he may of his own free will lend her to other
men," provided they stand in a certain artificial relation to her
(74). However (92):
"Whilst under ordinary circumstances in the Arunta and
other tribes one man is only allowed to have marital
relations with women of a particular class, there are
customs which allow at certain times of a man having
such relations with women to whom at other times he
would not on any account be allowed to have access. We
find, indeed, that this holds true in the case of all
the nine different tribes with the marriage customs of
which we are acquainted, and in which a woman becomes
the private property of one man."
In the southern Arunta, after a certain ceremony has been performed,
the bride is brought back to camp and given to her special _Unawa_.
"That night he lends her to one or two men who are _unawa_ to her, and
afterward she belongs to him exclusively." At this time when a woman
is being, so to speak, handed over to one particular individual,
special individuals with whom at ordinary times she may have no
intercourse, have the right of access to her. Such customs our authors
interpret plausibly as partial promiscuity pointing to a time when
still greater laxity prevailed--suggesting rudimentary organs in
animals (96).
Among some tribes at corrobboree time, every day two or three women
are told off and become the property of all the men on the corrobboree
grounds, excepting fathers, brothers, or sons. Thus there are three
stages of individual ownership in women: In the first, whilst the man
has exclusive right to a woman, he can and does lend her to certain
other men; in the second there is a wider relation in regard to
particular men at the time of marriage; and in the third a still wider
relation to all men except the nearest relatives, at corrobboree time.
Only in the first of these cases can we properly speak of wife
"lending"; in the other cases the individuals have no choice and
cannot withhold their consent, the matter being of a public or tribal
nature. As regards the corrobborees, it is supposed to be the duty of
every man at different times to send his wife to the ground, and the
most striking feature in regard to it is that the first man who has
access to her is the very one to whom, under normal conditions, she is
most strictly taboo, her _Mura_. [All women whose daughters are
eligible as wives are _mura_ to a man.]
Old and young men alike must give up their wives on these occasions.
"It is a custom of ancient date which is sanctioned by public opinion,
and to the performance of which neither men nor women concerned offer
any opposition" (98).
ABORIGINAL DEPRAVITY
These revelations of Spencer and Gillen, taken in connection with the
abundant evidence I have cited from the works of early explorers as to
the utter depravity of the aboriginal Australian when first seen by
white men, will make it impossible hereafter for anyone whose
reasoning powers exceed a native Australian's to maintain that it was
the whites who corrupted these savages. It takes an exceptionally
shrewd white man even to unravel the customs of voluntary or
obligatory wife sharing or lending which prevail in all parts of
Australia, and which must have required not only hundreds but
thousands of years to assume their present extraordinarily complex
aspect; customs which form part and parcel of the very life of
Australians and which represent the lowest depths of sexual depravity,
since they are utterly incompatible with chastity, fidelity,
legitimacy, or anything else we understand by sexual morality. In some
cases, no doubt, contact with the low whites and their liquor
aggravated these evils by fostering professional prostitution and
making men even more ready than before to treat their wives as
merchandise. Lumholtz, who lived several years among these savages,
makes this admission (345), but at the same time he is obliged to join
all the other witnesses in declaring that apart from this "there is
not much to be said of the morals of the blacks, for I am sorry to say
they have none." On a previous page (42) I cited Sutherland's summary
of a report of the House of Commons (1844, 350 pages), which shows
that the Australian native, as found by the first white visitors,
manifested "an absolute incapacity to form even a rudimentary notion
of chastity." The same writer, who was born and brought up in
Australia, says (I., 121):
"In almost every case the father or husband will
dispose of the girl's virtue for a small price. When
white men came they found these habits prevailing. The
overwhelming testimony proves it absurd to say that
they demoralized the unsophisticated savages."
And again (I., 186),
"It is untrue that in sexual license the savage has
ever anything to learn. In almost every tribe there are
pollutions deeper than any I have thought it necessary
to mention, and all that the lower fringe of civilized
men can do to harm the uncivilized is to stoop to the
level of the latter, instead of teaching them a better
way."[165]
THE QUESTION OF PROMISCUITY
As regards the promiscuity question, Spencer and Gillen's observations
go far to confirm some of the seemingly fantastic speculations
regarding "a thousand miles of wives," and so on, contained in the
volume of Fison and Howitt[166] and to make it probable that
unregulated intercourse was the state of primitive man at a stage of
evolution earlier than any known to us now. Since the appearance of
Westermarck's _History of Human Marriage_ it has become the fashion to
regard the theory of promiscuity as disproved. Alfred Russell Wallace,
in his preface to this book, expresses his opinion that "independent
thinkers" will agree with its author on most of the points wherein he
takes issue with his famous predecessors, including Spencer, Morgan,
Lubbock, and others. Ernst Grosse, in a volume which the president of
the German Anthropological Society pronounced "epoch-making"--_Die
Formen der Familie_--refers (43) to Westermarck's "very thorough
refutation" of this theory, which he stigmatizes as one of the
blunders of the unfledged science of sociology which it will be best
to forget as soon as possible; adding that "Westermarck's best weapons
were, however, forged by Starcke."
In a question like this, however, two independent observers are worth
more than two hundred "independent thinkers." Spencer and Gillen are
eye-witnesses, and they inform us repeatedly (100, 105, 108, 111) that
Westermarck's objections to the theory of promiscuity do not stand the
test of facts and that none of his hypotheses explains away the
customs which point to a former prevalence of promiscuity. They have
absolutely disproved his assertion (539) that "it is certainly not
among the lowest peoples that sexual relations most nearly approach
promiscuity." Cunow, who, as Grosse admits (50), has written the most
thorough and authentic monograph on the complicated family
relationship of Australia, devotes two pages (122-23) to exposing some
of Westermarck's arguments, which, as he shows, "border on the comic."
I myself have in this chapter, as well as in those on Africans,
American Indians, South Sea Islanders, etc., revealed the comicality
of the assertion that there is in a savage condition of life
"comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations," which forms
one of the main props of Westermarck's anti-promiscuity theory; and I
have also reduced _ad absurdum_ his systematic overrating of savages
in the matter of liberty of choice, esthetic taste and capacity for
affection which resulted from his pet theory and marred his whole
book.[167]
It is interesting to note that Darwin (_D.M._, Ch. XX.) concluded from
the facts known to him that "_almost_ promiscuous intercourse or very
loose intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world:" and
the only thing that seemed to deter him from believing in _absolutely_
promiscuous intercourse was the "strength of the feeling of jealousy."
Had he lived to understand the true nature of savage jealousy
explained in this volume and to read the revelations of Spencer and
Gillen, that difficulty would have vanished. On this point, too, their
remarks are of great importance, fully bearing out the view set forth
in my chapter on jealousy. They declare (99) that they did not find
sexual jealousy specially developed:
"For a man to have unlawful intercourse with any woman
arouses a feeling which is due not so much to jealousy
as to the fact that the delinquent has infringed a
tribal custom. If the intercourse has been with a woman
who belongs to the class from which his wife comes,
then he is called _atna nylkna_ (which, literally
translated, is vulva thief); if with one with whom it
is unlawful for him to have intercourse, then he is
called _iturka_, the most opprobrious term in the
Arunta language. In the one case he has merely stolen
property, in the other he has offended against tribal
law."
Jealousy, they sum up, "is indeed a factor which need not be taken
into serious account in regard to the question of sexual relations
amongst the Central Australian tribes."
The customs described by these authors show, moreover, that these
savages _do not allow jealousy to stand in the way of sexual
communism_, a man who refuses to share his wife being considered
churlish, in one class of cases, while in another no choice is allowed
him, the matter being arranged by the tribe. This point has not
heretofore been sufficiently emphasized. It knocks away one of the
strongest props of the anti-promiscuity theory, and it is supported by
the remarks of Howitt,[168] who, after explaining how, among the
Dieri, couples are chosen by headmen without consulting their
wishes,--new allotments being made at each circumcision ceremony--and
how the dance is followed by a general license, goes on to relate that
all these matters are carefully arranged _so as to prevent jealousy_.
Sometimes this passion breaks out nevertheless, leading to bloody
quarrels; but the main point is that systematic efforts are made to
suppress jealousy: "No jealous feeling is allowed to be shown during
this time under penalty of strangling." Whence we may fairly infer
that under more primitive conditions the individual was allowed still
less right to assert jealous claims of individual possession.
Australian jealousy presents some other interesting aspects, but we
shall be better able to appreciate them if we first consider why a
native ever puts himself into a position where jealous watchfulness of
private property is called for.
WHY DO AUSTRALIANS MARRY?
Since chastity among the young of both sexes is not held of any
account, and since the young girls, who are married to men four or
five times their age, are always ready for an intrigue with a young
bachelor, why does an Australian ever marry? He does not marry for
love, for, as this whole chapter proves, he is incapable of such a
sentiment. His appetites need not urge him to marry, since there are
so many ways of appeasing them outside of matrimony. He does not marry
to enjoy a monopoly of a woman's favors, since he is ready to share
them with others. Why then does he marry? One reason may be that, as
the men get older (they seldom marry before they are twenty-five or
even thirty), they have less relish for the dangers connected with
woman-stealing and intrigues. A second reason is indicated in Hewitt's
explanation (_Jour. Anthr. Inst_., XX., 58), that it is an advantage
to an Australian to have as many wives as possible, as they work and
hunt for him, and "he also obtains great influence in the tribe by
lending them his Piraurus occasionally, and receiving presents from
the young men."
The main reason, however, why an Australian marries is in order that
he may have a drudge. I have previously cited Eyre's statement that
the natives
"value a wife principally as a slave; in fact, when
asked why they are anxious to obtain wives, their usual
reply is, that they may get wood, water, and food for
them, and carry whatever property they possess."
H. Kempe (_loc. cit_., 55) says that
"if there are plenty of girls they are married as early
as possible (at the age of eight to ten), as far as
possible to one and the same man, for as it is the duty
of the women to provide food, a man who has several
wives can enjoy his leisure the more thoroughly."
And Lindsay Cranford testifies (_Jour. Anthrop. Inst_., XXIV., 181)
regarding the Victoria River natives that,
"after about thirty years of age a man is allowed to have as
many women as he likes, and the older he gets the younger
the girls are that he gets, probably to work and get food
for him, for in their wild state the man is too proud to do
anything except carry a woomera and spear."
Under these circumstances it is needless to say that there is not a
trace of romance connected with an Australian marriage. After a man
has secured his girl, she quietly submits and goes with him as his
wife and drudge, to build his camp, gather firewood, fetch water, make
nets, clear away grass, dig roots, fish for mussels, be his baggage
mule on journeys, etc. (Brough Smyth, 84); and Eyre (II., 319) thus
completes the picture. There is, he says, no marriage ceremony:
"In those cases where I have witnessed the giving away
of a wife, the woman was simply ordered by the nearest
male relative in whose disposal she was, to take up her
'rocko,' the bag in which a female carries the effects
of her husband, and go to the man's camp to whom she
had been given."
CURIOSITIES OF JEALOUSY
Thus the woman becomes the man's slave--his property in every sense of
the word. No matter how he obtained her--by capture, elopement, or
exchange for another woman--she is his own, as much as his spear or
his boomerang. "The husband is the absolute owner of the wife," says
Curr (I., 109). To cite Eyre once more (318):
"Wives are considered the absolute property of the
husband, and can be given away, or exchanged, or lent,
according to his caprice. A husband is denominated in
the Adelaide dialect, Yongarra, Martanya (the owner or
proprietor of a wife)."
A whole chapter in sociology is sometimes summed up in a word, as we
see in this case. Another instance is the word _gramma_, concerning
which we read in Lumholtz (126):
"The robbery of women, who also among these savages are
regarded as _a man's most valuable property_, is both
the grossest and the most common theft; for it is the
usual way of getting a wife. Hence woman is the chief
cause of disputes. _Inchastity_, which is called
_gramma, i.e._, to steal, also _falls under the head of
theft_."
Here we have a simple and concise explanation of Australian jealousy.
The native knows jealousy in its crudest form--that of mere animal
rage at being prevented by a rival from taking immediate possession of
the object of his desire. He knows also the jealousy of
property--_i.e._, revenge for infringement on it. Of this it is
needless to give examples. But he knows not true jealousy--_i.e._,
anxious concern for his wife's chastity and fidelity, since he is
always ready to barter these things for a trifle. Proofs of this have
already been adduced in abundance. Here is another authoritative
statement by the missionary Schurmann, who writes (223):
"The loose practices of the aborigines, with regard to
the sanctity of matrimony, form the worst trait in
their character; although the men are capable of fierce
jealousy if their wives transgress _unknown to them_,
yet they frequently send them out to other parties, or
exchange with a friend for a night; and, as for near
relatives, such as brothers, it may almost be said that
they have their wives in common."
An incident related by W.H. Leigh (152) shows in a startling way that
among the Australians jealousy means nothing more than a desire for
revenge because of infringement on property rights:
"A chief discovered that one of his wives had been
sinning, and called a council, at which it was decided
that the criminal should be sacrificed, or the
adulterous chief give a victim to appease the wrathful
husband. This was agreed to and he _gave one of his
wives_, who was immediately escorted to the side of the
river ... and there the ceremony was preluded by a
war-song, and the enraged chief rushed upon the
innocent and unfortunate victim--bent down her head
upon her chest, whilst another thrust the pointed bone
of a kangaroo under her left rib, and drove it upwards
into her heart. The shrieks of the poor wretch brought
down to the spot many colonists, who arrived in time
only to see the conclusion of the horrid spectacle.
After they had buried the bone in her body they took
their glass-pointed spears and tore her entrails out,
and finally fractured her skull with their waddies.
This barbarous method of wreaking vengeance is common
among them."[169]
The men being indifferent to female chastity, it would be vain to
expect true jealousy on the part of the women. The men are entirely
unrestrained in their appetites unless they interfere with other men's
property rights, and in a community where polygamy prevails the
jealousy which is based in a monopoly of affection has little chance
to flourish. Taplin says (101) that
"a wife amongst the heathen aborigines has no objection
to her husband taking another spouse, provided she is
younger than herself, but if he brings home one older
than herself there is apt to be trouble"
as the senior wife is "mistress of the camp," and in such a case the
first wife is apt to run away. Vanity and envy, or the desire to be
the favorite, thus appear to be the principal ingredients in an
Australian woman's jealousy. Meyer (191) says of the Encounter Bay
tribe:
"If a man has several girls at his disposal, he
speedily obtains several wives, who, however, very
seldom agree well with each other, but are continually
quarreling, each endeavoring to be the favorite."
This, it will be observed, is the jealousy two pet dogs will feel of
each other, and is utterly different from modern conjugal or lover's
jealousy, which is chiefly based on an ardent regard for chastity and
unswerving fidelity. In this phase jealousy is a noble and useful
passion, helping to maintain the purity of the family; whereas, in the
phase that prevails among savages it is utterly selfish and brutal.
Palmer says[170] that "a new woman would always be beaten by the other
wife, and a good deal would depend on the fighting powers of the
former whether she kept her position or not." "Among the Kalkadoon,"
writes Roth (141),
"where a man may have three, four, or even five gins, the
discarded ones will often, through jealousy, fight with her
whom they consider more favored. On such occasions they may
often resort to stone-throwing, or even use fire-sticks and
stone-knives with which to mutilate the genitals."
Lumholtz says (213) the black women "often have bitter quarrels about
men whom they love and are anxious to marry. If the husband is
unfaithful, the wife frequently becomes greatly enraged."
George Grey (II., 312-14) gives an amusing sketch of an aboriginal
scene of conjugal bliss. Weerang, an old man, has four wives, the last
of whom, just added to the harem, gets all his attention. This excites
the anger of one of the older ones, who reproaches the husband with
having stolen her, an unwilling bride, from another and better man.
"May the sorcerer," she adds, "bite and tear her whom you have now
taken to your bed. Here am I, rebuking young men who dare to look at
me, while she, your favorite, replete with arts and wiles, dishonors
you." This last insinuation is too much for the young favorite, who
retorts by calling her a liar and declaring that she has often seen
her exchanging nods and winks with her paramour. The rival's answer is
a blow with her stick. A general engagement follows, which the old man
finally ends by beating several of the wives severely about the head
with a hammer.[171]
PUGNACIOUS FEMALES
Jealousy is capable of converting even civilized women into fiends;
all the more these bush women, who have few opportunities for
cultivating the gentler feminine qualities. Indeed, so masculine are
these women that were it not for woman's natural inferiority in
strength their tyrants might find it hard to subdue them. Bulmer
says[172] that
"as a rule both husband and wife had fearful tempers;
there was no bearing and forbearing. When they
quarrelled it was a matter of the strongest conquering,
for neither would give in."
Describing a native fight over some trifling cause Taplin says (71):
"Women were dancing about naked, casting dust in the
air, hurling obscene language at their enemies, and
encouraging their friends. It was a perfect tempest of
rage."
Roth says of the Queensland natives that the women fight like men,
with thick, heavy fighting poles, four feet long.
"One of the combatants, with her hands between her
knees, supposing that only one stick is available,
ducks her head slightly--almost in the position of a
school-boy playing leap-frog, and waits for her
adversary's blow, which she receives on the top of her
head. The attitudes are now reversed, and the one just
attacked is now the attacking party. Blow for blow is
thus alternated until one of them gives in, which is
generally the case after three or four hits. Great
animal pluck is sometimes displayed.... Should a woman
ever put up her hand or a stick, etc., to ward a blow,
she would be regarded in the light of a coward" (141).
"At Genorminston, the women coming up to join a fray
give a sort of war-whoop; they will jump up in the air,
and as their feet, a little apart, touch the ground,
they knock up the dust and sand with the fighting-pole,
etc., held between their legs, very like one's early
reminiscences in the picture-books of a witch riding a
broom-stick."
"The ferocity of the women when excited exceeds that of the men," Grey
informs us (II., 314); "they deal dreadful blows at one another," etc.
For some unexplained reason--possibly a vague sense of fair play which
in time may lead to the beginnings of gallantry--there is one
occasion, an initiation ceremonial, at which women are allowed to have
their innings while the men are dancing. On this occasion, says Roth
(176),
"each woman can exercise her right of punishing any man
who may have ill-treated, abused, or hammered her, and
for whom she may have waited months or perhaps years to
chastise; for, as each pair appear around the corner at
the entrance exposed to her view, the woman and any of
her female friends may take a fighting-pole and belabor
the particular culprit to their heart's content, the
delinquent not being allowed to retaliate in any way
whatsoever--the only occasion in the whole of her life
when the woman can take the law into her own hands
without fear or favor."
WIFE STEALING
This last assertion is not strictly accurate. There are other
occasions when women take the law into their hands, especially when
men try to steal them, an every-day occurrence, at least in former
times. Thus W.H. Leigh writes of the South Australians (152):
"Their manner of courtship is one which would not be
popular among English ladies. If a chief, or any other
individual, be smitten by a female of a different
tribe, he endeavors to waylay her; and if she be
surprised in any quiet place, the ambushed lover rushes
upon her, beats her about the head with his waddy till
she becomes senseless, when she is dragged in triumph
to his hut. It sometimes happens, however, that she has
a thick skull, and resents his blows, when a battle
ensues, and not unfrequently ends in the discomfiture
of the Adonis."
Similarly G.B. Wilkinson describes how the young men go, usually in
groups of two or three, to capture brides of hostile tribes. They lurk
about in concealment till they see that the women are alone, when they
pounce upon them and, either by persuasion or blows, take away those
they want; whereupon they try to regain their own tribe before pursuit
can be attempted. "This stealing of wives is one cause of the frequent
wars that take place amongst the natives."
Barrington's _History of New South Wales_ is adorned with the picture
of a big naked man having beside him, on her back, a beautifully
formed naked girl whom he is dragging away by one arm. The monster, we
read in the text, has come upon her unawares, clubbed her on the head
and other parts of the body,
"then snatching up one of her arms, he drags her,
streaming with blood from her wounds, through the
woods, over stones, rocks, hills, and logs, with all
the violence and determination of a savage," etc.
Curr (I., 237) objects to this picture as a gross exaggeration. He
also declares (I., 108) that it is only on rare occasions that a wife
is captured from another tribe and carried off, and that at present
woman-stealing is not encouraged, as it is apt to involve a whole
tribe in war for one man's sake. From older writers, however, one gets
the impression that wife-stealing was a common custom. Howitt (351)
remarks concerning the "wild white man" William Buckley, who lived
many years among the natives, and whose adventures were written up by
John Morgan, that at first sight his statements "seem to record merely
a series of duels and battles about women who were stolen, speared,
and slaughtered;" and Brough Smyth (77) quotes John Bulmer, who says
that among the Gippsland natives
"sometimes a man who has no sister [to swap] will, in
desperation, steal a wife; but this is invariably a
cause of bloodshed. Should a woman object to go with
her husband, violence would be used. I have seen a man
drag away a woman by the hair of her head. Often a club
is used until the poor creature is frightened into
submission."
In South Australia there is a special expression for
bride-stealing--_Milla mangkondi,_ or force-marriage. (Bonwick, 65.)
Mitchell (I., 307) also observed that the possession of the women
"seems to be associated with all their ideas of fighting." The same
impression is conveyed by the writings of Salvado, Wilkes, and
others--Sturt, _e.g._, who wrote (II., 283) that the abduction of a
married or unmarried woman was a frequent cause of quarrel. Mitchell
(I., 330) relates that when some whites told a native that they had
killed a native of another tribe, his first thought and only remark
was, "Stupid white fellows! Why did you not bring away the gins
(women)?" It is unfortunate for a woman to possess the kind of
"beauty" Australians admire for, as Grey says (II., 231),
"The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for
beauty is generally one continued series of captivity
to different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wanderings
in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment
from other females amongst whom she is brought a
stranger by her captor; and rarely do you see a form of
unusual grace and elegance but it is marked and scarred
by the furrows of old wounds; and many a female thus
wanders several hundred miles from the home of her
infancy."
It is not only from other and hostile tribes that these men forcibly
appropriate girls or married women. Among the Hunter River tribes
(Curr, III., 353), "men renowned as warriors frequently attacked their
inferiors in strength and took their wives from them." The Queensland
natives, we are told by Narcisse Peltier, who lived among them
seventeen years, "not unfrequently fight with spears for the
possession of a woman" (Spencer, _P.S._, I., 601). Lumholtz says (184)
that "the majority of the young men wait a long time before they get
wives, partly for the reason that they have not the courage to fight
the requisite duel for one with an older man." On another page (212)
he relates:
"Near Herbert Vale I had the good fortune to be able to
witness a marriage among the blacks. A camp of natives
was just at the point of breaking up, when an old man
suddenly approached a woman, seized her by the wrist of
her left hand and shouted _Yongul ngipa_!--that is,
This one belongs to me (literally 'one I'). She
resisted with feet and hands, and cried, but he dragged
her off, though she made resistance during the whole
time and cried at the top of her voice. For a mile away
we could hear her shrieks.... But the women always make
resistance, for they do not like to leave their tribe,
and in many instances they have the best of reasons for
kicking their lovers. If a man thinks he is strong
enough, he will take hold of any woman's hand and utter
his _yongul ngipa_. If a woman is good-looking, all the
men want her, and the one who is most influential, or
who is the strongest, is accordingly generally the
victor."
SWAPPING GIRLS
It is obvious that when women are forcibly appropriated at home or
stolen from other tribes, their inclination or choice is not
consulted. A man wants a woman and she is seized, _nolens volens_,
whether married or single. If she gets a man she likes, it is a mere
accident, not likely to occur often. The same is true of another form
of Australian "courtship" which may be called swapping girls, and
which is far the most common way of getting a wife. Curr, after forty
years' experience with native affairs, wrote (I., 107) that "the
Australian male _almost invariably_ obtains his wife or wives, either
as the survivor of a married brother, or in exchange for his sisters
or daughters." The Rev. H.E.A. Meyer says (10) that the marriage
ceremony
"may with great propriety be considered an exchange, for no
man can obtain a wife unless he can promise to give his
sister or other relative in exchange.... Should the father
be living he may give his daughter away, but generally she
is the gift of the brother ... the girls have no choice in
the matter, and frequently the parties have never seen each
other before.... If a man has several girls at his disposal,
he speedily obtains several wives,"
Eyre (II., 318) declares that
"the females, especially the young ones, are kept
principally among the old men, who barter away their
daughters, sisters, or nieces, in exchange for wives for
themselves or their sons."
Grey (II., 230) says the same thing in different words:
"The old men manage to keep the females a good deal
amongst themselves, giving their daughters to one
another, and the more female children they have, the
greater chance have they of getting another wife, by
this sort of exchange."
Brough Smyth thus sums up (II., 84) the information on this subject he
obtained from divers sources. A yam-stick is given to a girl when she
reaches the age of marriage; with this she drives away any young man
she does not fancy, for a mere "no" would not keep him at bay. "The
women never initiate matches;" these are generally arranged between
two young men who have sisters to exchange. "The young woman's opinion
is not asked." When the young man is ready to "propose" to the girl he
has bartered his sister for, he walks up to her equipped as for
war--ready to parry her "love-taps" if she feels inclined that way.
"After a little fencing between the pair the woman, if she has no
serious objections to the man, quietly submits." If she _has_ "serious
objections," what happens? The same writer tells us graphically (76):
"By what mode soever a man procures a bride, it is very
seldom an occasion of rejoicing by the female. The
males engross the privilege of disposing of their
female relatives, and it often happens that an old man
of sixty or seventy will add to his domestic circle a
young girl of ten or twelve years of age.... A man
having a daughter of thirteen or fourteen years of age
arranges with some elderly person for the disposal of
her, and when all are agreed, she is brought out of the
_miam-miam,_ and told that her husband wants her.
Perhaps she has never seen him, or seen him but to
loathe him. The father carries a spear and waddy, or a
tomahawk, and anticipating resistance, is thus prepared
for it. The poor girl, sobbing and sighing, and
uttering words of complaint, claims pity from those who
will show none. If she resists the mandates of her
father, he strikes her with his spear; if she rebels
and screams, the blows are repeated; and if she
attempts to run away, a stroke on the head from the
waddy or tomahawk quiets her.... Seizing the bride by
the hair the stern father drags her to the home
prepared for her by her new owner.... If she attempts
to abscond, the bridegroom does not hesitate to strike
her savagely on the head with his waddy; and the bridal
screams and yells make the night hideous.... If she is
still determined to escape and makes the attempt, the
father will at last spear her in the leg or foot, to
prevent her from running."
No more than girls are widows allowed the liberty of choice. Sometimes
they are disposed of by being exchanged for young women of another
tribe and have to marry the men chosen for them (95).
"When wives are from thirty-five to forty years of age,
they are frequently cast off by their husbands, or are
given to the younger men in exchange for their sisters
or near relatives, if such are at their disposal"
(Eyre, II., 322).
In the Murray tribes "a widow could not marry any one she chose. She
was the property of her husband's family, hence she must marry her
husband's brother or near relative; and even if he had a wife she must
become No. 2 or 3."
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ELOPEMENTS
The evidence, in short, is unanimously to the effect that the
Australian girl has absolutely no liberty of choice. Yet the
astonishing Westermarck, ignoring, _more suo_, the overwhelming number
of facts against him, endeavors in two places (217, 223) to convey the
impression to his readers that she does largely enjoy the freedom of
choice, placing his sole reliance in two assertions by Howitt and
Mathew.[173] Howitt says that among the Kurnai, women are allowed free
choice, and Mathew "asserts that, with varying details, marriage by
mutual consent will be found among other tribes, also, though it is
not completed except by means of a runaway match." Now Hewitt's
assertion is contradicted by Curr, who, in addition to his own forty
years of experience among the natives had the systematized notes of a
large number of correspondents to base his conclusions on. He says
(I., 108) that "in no instance, unless Mr. Howitt's account of the
Kurnai be correct, which I doubt, has the female any voice in the
selection of a husband." He might have added that Hewitt's remark is
contradicted in his own book, where we are told that among the Kurnai
elopement is the rule. Strange to say, it seems to have occurred
neither to Howitt, nor to Westermarck, nor to Mathew that _elopement
proves the absence of choice_, for if there were liberty of choice the
couple would not be obliged to run away. Nor is this all. The facts
prove that marriage by actual elopement[174] is of rare occurrence;
that "marriage" based on such elopement is nearly always adulterous
(with another man's wife) and of brief duration--a mere intrigue, in
fact; that the guilty couple are severely punished, if not killed
outright; and that everything that is possible is done to prevent or
frustrate elopements based on individual preference or liking. On the
first of these points Curr gives us the most comprehensive and
reliable information (I., 108):
"Within the tribe, lovers occasionally abscond to some
corner of the tribal territory, but they are soon
overtaken, the female cruelly beaten, or wounded with a
spear, the man in most cases remaining unpunished. Very
seldom are men allowed to retain as wives their
partners in these escapades. Though I have been
acquainted with many tribes, and heard matters of the
sort talked over in several of them, I never knew _but
three instances of permanent runaway matches_; two in
which men obtained as wives women already married in
the tribe, and one case in which the woman was a
stranger."
William Jackman, who was held as a captive by the natives for
seventeen months, tells a similar story. Elopements, he says (174),
are usually with wives. The couple escape to a distant tribe and
remain a few months--_rarely more than seven or eight_, so far as he
observed; then the faithless wife is returned to her husband and the
elopers are punished more or less severely. "At times," we read in
Spencer and Gillen (556, 558)
"the eloping couple are at once followed up and then,
if caught, the woman is, if not killed on the spot, at
all events treated in such a way that any further
attempt at elopement on her part is not likely to take
place."
Sometimes the husband seems glad to have got rid of his wife, for when
the elopers return to camp he first has his revenge by cutting the
legs and body of both and then he cries "You keep altogether, I throw
away, I throw away."
It is instructive to note with what ingenuity the natives seek to
prevent matches based on mutual inclination. Taplin says (11) of the
Narrinyeri that "a young woman who goes away with a man and lives with
him as his wife without the consent of her relatives is regarded as
very little better than a prostitute." Among these same Narrinyeri,
says Gason, "it is considered disgraceful for a woman to take a
husband who has given no other woman for her." (Bonwick, 245.) The
deliberate animosity against free choice is emphasized by a statement
in Brough Smyth (79), that if the owner of an eloping female suspects
that she favored the man she eloped with, "he will not hesitate to
maim or kill her." She must have no choice or preference of her own,
under any circumstances. It must be remembered, too, that even an
actual elopement by no means proves that the woman is following a
special inclination. She may be merely anxious to get away from a
cruel or superannuated husband. In such cases the woman may take the
initiative. Dawson (65) once said to a native, "You should not have
carried Mary away from her husband"; to which the man replied, "Bael
(not) dat, massa; Mary come me. Dat husband wurry bad man: he waddy
(beat) Mary. Mary no like it, so it leabe it. Dat fellow no good,
massa."
Obviously, Australian elopement not only gives no indication of
romantic feelings, but even as an incident it is apt to be prosaic or
cruel rather than romantic, as our elopements are. In many cases it is
hard to distinguish from brutal capture, as we may infer from an
incident related by Curr (108-9). He was sleeping at a station on the
Lachlan.
"During the night I was awoke by the scream of a woman,
and a general yell from the men in the camp. Not
knowing what could be the matter, I seized a weapon,
jumped out of bed, and rushed outside. There I found a
young married woman standing by her fire, trembling all
over, with a barbed spear through her thigh. As for the
men, they were rushing about, here and there, in an
excited state, with their spears in their hands. The
woman's story was soon told. She had gone to the river,
not fifty yards off, for water; the Darling black had
stolen after her, and proposed to her to elope with
him, and, on her declining to do so, had speared her
and taken to his heels."
A pathetic instance of the cruel treatment to which the natives
subject girls who venture to have inclinations of their own was
communicated by W.E. Stanbridge to Brough Smyth (80). The scene is a
little dell among undulating grassy plains. In the lower part of the
dell a limpid spring bursts forth.
"On one side of this dell, and nearest to the spring at
the foot of it, lies a young woman, about seventeen
years of age, sobbing and partly supported by her
mother, in the midst of wailing, weeping, women; she
has been twice speared in the right breast with a
jagged hand-spear by her brother, and is supposed to be
dying."
CHARMING A WOMAN BY MAGIC
Besides the three ways already mentioned of securing a
wife--elopement, which is rare; capture, which is rarer still, and
_Tuelcha mura_, in which a girl is assigned to a man before she is
born, and while her prospective mother is still a girl herself--by far
the commonest arrangement--there is a fourth, charming by magic. Of
this, too, Spencer and Gillen have given the best description
(541-44). When a man, they tell us, wants to charm a woman belonging
to a distant tribe he takes a _churinga_, or sacred stick, and goes
with some friends into the bush, where
"all night long the men keep up a low singing of
Quabara songs, together with the chanting of amorous
phrases of invitation addressed to the woman. At
daylight the man stands up alone and swings the
_churinga_, causing it first to strike the ground as he
whirls it round and round and makes it hum. His friends
remain silent, and the sound of the humming is carried
to the ears of the far-distant woman, and has the power
of compelling affection and of causing her sooner or
later to comply with the summons. Not long ago, at
Alice Springs, a man called some of his friends
together and performed the ceremony, and in a very
short time the desired woman, who was on this occasion
a widow, came in from Glen Helen, about fifty miles to
the west of Alice Springs, and the two are now man and
wife."
The woman in this case need not be a widow, however. Another man's
wife will do just as well, and if her owner comes armed to stop
proceedings, the friends of the charmer stand by him.
Another method of obtaining a wife by magic is by means of a charmed
_chilara_, or head-band of opossum fur. The man charms it in secret by
singing over it. Then he places it on his head and wears it about the
camp so that the woman can see it. Her attention is drawn to it, and
she becomes violently attached to the man, or, as the natives say,
"her internal organs shake with eagerness." Here, again, it makes no
difference whether the woman be married or not.
Still another way of charming a woman is by means of a certain shell
ornament, which a man ties to his waist-belt at a corrobboree after
having charmed it.[175]
"While he is dancing the woman whom he wishes to
attract alone sees the lightning flashes on the
_Lonka-lonka_, and all at once her internal organs
shake with emotion. If possible she will creep into his
camp that night or take the earliest opportunity to run
away with him."
Here, at last, we have come across a method which
"allows of the breaking through of the hard and fast rule
which for the most part obtains, and according to which the
woman belongs to the man to whom she has been betrothed,
probably before her birth."
Yet these cases are rare exceptions, for, as the authors inform us,
"the woman naturally runs some risk, as, if caught in the act of
eloping, she would be severely punished, if not put to death;" and
again: these cases are not of frequent occurrence, for they depend on
the woman's consent, and she knows that if caught she will in all
probability be killed, or at least very roughly handled. Hence she is
"not very easily charmed away from her original possessor." Moreover,
even these adulterous elopements seldom lead to anything more than a
temporary liaison, as we have seen, and it would be comic to speak of
a "liberty of choice" in cases where such a choice can be exercised
only at the risk of being killed on the spot.
OTHER OBSTACLES TO LOVE
Looking back over the ground traversed in this chapter, we see that
Cupid is thwarted in Australia not only by the natural stupidity,
coarseness, and sensuality of the natives, but by a number of
artificial obstacles which seem to have been devised with almost
diabolical ingenuity for the express purpose of stifling the germs of
love. The selfish, systematic, and deliberate suppression of free
choice is only one of these obstacles. There are two others almost
equally fatal to love--the habit of marrying young girls to men old
enough to be their fathers or grandfathers, and the complicated
marriage taboos. We have already seen that as a rule the old men
appropriate the young girls, the younger men not being allowed to
marry till they are twenty-five or thirty, and even then being
compelled to take an old man's cast-off wife of thirty-five or forty
summers, "It is usual," says Curr (I., 110),
"to see old men with mere girls as wives, and men in the
prime of life married to widows.... Women have very
frequently two husbands during their life-time, the first
older and the second younger than themselves.... There are
always many bachelors in every tribe."[176]
Not to speak of love, this arrangement makes it difficult even for
animal passion to manifest itself except in an adulterous or
illegitimate manner.
"At present," we learn from Spencer and Gillen (104, 558),
"by far the most common method of getting a wife is by means
of an arrangement made between brothers or fathers of the
respective men and women whereby a particular woman is
assigned to a particular man."
This most usual method of getting a wife is also the most
extraordinary. Suppose one man has a son, another a daughter,
generally both of tender age. Now it would be bad enough to betroth
these two without their consent and before they are old enough to have
any real choice. But the Australian way is infinitely worse. It is
arranged that the girl in the case shall be, by and by, not the boy's
wife, but his mother-in-law; that is, the boy is to wed her daughter.
In other words, he must wait not only till she is old enough to marry
but till her daughter is old enough to marry! And this is "by far the
most common method"!
MARRIAGE TABOOS AND "INCEST."
The marriage taboos are no less artificial, absurd, and fatal to free
choice and love. An Australian is not only forbidden to marry a girl
who is closely related to him by blood--sometimes the prohibition
extends to first, second, and even third cousins--but he must not
think of such a thing as marrying a woman having his family name or
belonging to certain tribes or clans--his own, his mother's or
grandmother's, his neighbor's, or one speaking his dialect, etc. The
result is more disastrous than one unfamiliar with Australian
relationships would imagine; for these relationships are so
complicated that to unravel them takes, in the words of Howitt (59),
"a patience compared with which that of Job is furious irritability."
These prohibitions are not to be trifled with. They extend even to war
captives. If a couple disregard them and elope, they are followed by
the indignant relatives in hot pursuit and, if taken, severely
punished, perhaps even put to death. (Howitt, 300, 66.) Of the
Kamilaroi the same writer says:
"Should a man persist in keeping a woman who is denied to
him by their laws, the penalty is that he should be driven
out from the society of his friends and quite ignored. If
that does not cure his fondness for the woman, his male
relatives follow him and kill him, as a disgrace to their
tribe, and the female relatives of the woman kill her for
the same reason."
It is a mystery to anthropologists how these marriage taboos, these
notions of real or fancied incest, could have ever arisen. Curr
(I.,236) remarks pointedly that
"most persons who have any practical knowledge of our
savages will, I think, bear me out when I assert that,
whatever their objections to consanguineous marriages may
be, they have no more idea of the advantages of this or that
sort of breeding, or of any laws of Nature bearing on the
question, than they have of differential calculus."[177]
Whatever may have been the origin of these prohibitions, it is obvious
that, as I have said, they acted as obstacles to love; and what is
more, in many cases they seem to have impeded legitimate marriage
only, without interfering with licentious indulgence. Roth (67) cites
O'Donnell to the effect that with the Kunandaburi tribe the _jus
primae noctis_ is allowed all the men present at the camp without
regard to class or kin. He also cites Beveridge, who had lived
twenty-three years in contact with the Riverina tribes and who assured
him that, apart from marrying, there was no restriction on
intercourse. In his book on South Australia J.D. Wood says (403):
"The fact that marriage does not take place between
members of the same tribe, or is forbidden amongst
them, does not at all include the idea that chastity is
observed within the same limits."
Brough Smyth (II., 92) refers to the fact that secret violations of
the rule against fornication within the forbidden classes were not
punished. Bonwick (62) cites the Rev. C. Wilhelmi on the Port Lincoln
customs:
"There are no instances of two Karraris or two Matteris
having been married together; and yet connections of a
less virtuous character, which take place between
members of the same caste, do not appear to be
considered incestuous."
Similar testimony is adduced by Waitz-Gerland (VI., 776), and others.
AFFECTION FOR WOMEN AND DOGS
There is a strange class of men who always stand with a brush in hand
ready to whitewash any degraded creature, be he the devil himself. For
want of a better name they are called sentimentalists, and they are
among men what the morbid females who bring bouquets and sympathy to
fiendish murderers are among women. The Australian, unutterably
degraded, particularly in his sexual relations, as the foregoing pages
show him to be, has had his champions of the type of the "fearless"
Stephens. There is another class of writers who create confusion by
their reckless use of words. Thus the Rev. G. Taplin asserts (12) that
he has "known as well-matched and loving couples amongst the
aborigines" as he has amongst Europeans. What does he mean by loving
couples? What, in his opinion, are the symptoms of affection? With
amusing naïveté he reveals his ideas on the subject in a passage (11)
which he quotes approvingly from H.E.A. Meyer to the effect that if a
young bride pleases her husband, "he _shows his affection_ by
frequently rubbing her with grease to improve her personal appearance,
and with the idea that it will make her grow rapidly and become fat."
If such selfish love of obesity for sensual purposes merits the name
of affection, I cheerfully grant that Australians are capable of
affection to an unlimited degree. Taplin, furthermore, admits that
"as wives got old, they were often cast off by their husbands, or
given to young men in exchange for their sisters or other relations at
their disposal" (XXXI.); and again (121):
"From childhood to old age the gratification of
appetite and passion is the sole purpose of life to the
savage. He seeks to extract the utmost sweetness from
mere animal pleasures, and consequently his nature
becomes embruted."
Taplin does not mention a single act of conjugal devotion or
self-sacrifice, such as constitutes the sole criterion of affection.
Nor in the hundreds of books and articles on Australia that I have
read have I come across a single instance of this kind. On the subject
of the cruel treatment of women all the observers are eloquent; had
they seen any altruistic actions, would they have failed to make a
record of them?
The Australian's attachment to his wife is evidently a good deal like
his love of his dog. Gason (259) tells us that the dogs, of which
every camp has from six to twenty, are generally a mangy lot, but
"the natives are very fond of them.... If a white man wants
to offend a native let him beat his dog. I have seen women
crying over a dog, when bitten by snakes, as if over their
own children."
The dogs are very useful to them, helping them to find snakes, rats,
and other animals for food. Yet, when mealtime comes, "the dog,
notwithstanding its services and their _affection_ for it, _fares very
badly_, receiving nothing but the bones." "Hence the dog is always in
very low condition."
Another writer[178] with a better developed sense of humor, says that
"It may be doubted whether the man does not value his dog, when alive,
quite as much as he does his woman, and think of both quite as often
and lovingly after he has eaten them."
As for the women, they are little better than the men. What Mitchell
says of them (I., 307) is characteristic. After a fight, he says, the
women
"do not always follow their fugitive husbands from the
field, but frequently go over, as a matter of course,
to the victors, even with young children on their
backs; and thus it was, probably, that after we had
made the lower tribes sensible of our superiority, that
the three girls followed our party, beseeching us to
take them with us."
The following from Grey (II., 230) gives us an idea of wifely
affection and fidelity: "The women have generally some favorite
amongst the young men, always looking forward to be his wife at the
death of her husband." How utterly beyond the Australian horizon was
the idea of common decency, not to speak of such a holy thing as
affection, is revealed by a cruel custom described by Howitt (344):
"The Kurnai and the Brajerak were not intermarrying
tribes, unless by capture, and in this case each man
took the woman whose husband he had been the first to
spear."
It would of course be absurd to suppose the widows in such cases
capable of suffering as our women would under such circumstances. They
are quite as callous and cruel as the men. Evidence is given in the
Jackman book (149) that, like Indian women, they torture prisoners of
war, breaking toes, fingers, and arms, digging out the eyes and
filling the sockets with hot sand, etc.
"Husbands rarely show much affection for their wives," wrote Eyre
(II., 214).
"After a long absence I have seen natives, upon their
return, go to their camp, exhibiting the most stoical
indifference, never taking the least notice of their
wives."
Elsewhere (321) he says, with reference to the fact that marriage is
not regarded as any pledge of chastity, which is not recognized as a
virtue: "But little real affection consequently exists between
husbands and wives, and younger men value a wife principally for her
services as a slave." And in a Latin footnote, in which he describes
the licentious customs of promiscuous intercourse and the harsh
treatment of women, he adds (320), "It is easy to understand that
there can hardly be much love among husbands and wives." He also gives
this particular instance of conjugal indifference and cruelty. In 1842
the wife of a native in Adelaide, a girl of about eighteen, was
confined and recovered slowly. Before she was well the tribe removed
from the locality. The husband preferred accompanying them, and left
his wife to die unattended. William Jackman, the Englishman who lived
seventeen months as a captive among the natives, says (118) that
"wife-killing, among the aborigines of Australia, is frequent and
elicits neither surprise nor any sort of animadversion." By way of
illustrating this remark he relates how, one day, he returned with a
native from an unsuccessful hunt. The native's twelve-year-old wife
had caught an opossum, roasted it, and, impelled by hunger, had begun
to eat it instead of saving it for her master--an atrocious crime. For
fifteen minutes the husband sat in silent rage which his features
betrayed. Presently he jumped up with the air of a demon,
"scooped his two hands full of embers and burning sand,
and flung the whole into the face and bosom of the
naked object of his vengeance; for I must repeat that
none of the natives wear any clothing, and that she was
sitting there as nude as when she was born. The devil
of his nature thus fairly aroused, he sprang for his
spear. It transfixed his frantic but irresisting
victim. She fell dead.... Save by the women of the
tribe, the affair was scarcely noticed."
A HORRIBLE CUSTOM
Suppose this young wife had saved the opossum for her husband. He
would then have eaten it and, in accordance with their universal
custom, have thrown her the bones to share with the dog. After that he
might have rubbed her with grease and indulged in sensual caresses.
Would that have proved his capacity for affection? Would you call a
mother affectionate who fondled her child, but allowed it to starve
while she gratified her own appetite? The only sure test of affection
lies in disinterested actions of self-sacrifice; and even actions may
sometimes mislead us. Thus several authors have been led into absurdly
erroneous conclusions by a horrible custom prevalent among the
natives, and thus described by Curr (I., 89):
"In some cases a woman is obliged by custom to roll up
the remains of her deceased child in a variety of rags,
making them into a package, which she carries about
with her for several months, and at length buries. On
it she lays her head at night, and the odor is so
horrible that it pervades the whole camp, and not
unfrequently costs the mother her life."
Angas (I., 75) refers to this custom and exclaims, rapturously, "Oh!
how strong is a mother's love when even the offensive and putrid clay
can be thus worshipped for the spirit that once was its tenant"(!!).
Angas was an uneducated scribbler, but what shall we say on finding
his sentimental view accepted by the professional German
anthropologists, Gerland (VI., 780) and Jung (109)? Anyone familiar
with Australian life must suspect at once that this custom is simply
one of the horrible modes of punishment devised for women. Curr says
the woman is "_obliged by custom_" to carry her dead child, and he
adds: "I believe that this practice is insisted on when a young mother
loses her first born, as the death of the child is thought to have
come about by carelessness." To suppose that Australian mothers who
usually kill all but two of their six or more children could be
capable of such an act for sentimental reasons is to show a logical
faculty on a par with the Australian's own. This point has already
been discussed, but a further instance related by Dr. Moorehouse (J.D.
Wood, 390), will bring the matter home:
"A female just born was thus about to be destroyed for
the benefit of a boy about four years old, whom the
mother was nourishing, while the father was standing
by, ready to commit the deed. Through the kindness of a
lady to whom the circumstances became known, and our
joint interference, this one life was saved, and the
child was properly attended to by the mother, although
she at first urged the necessity of its death as
strenuously as the father." "In other parts of the
country," Wood adds, "the women do the horrible work
themselves. They are not content with destroying the
life of the infants, but they eat them."
ROMANTIC AFFLICTION
Here, as in several of the alleged cases of African sentimentality, we
see the great need of caution and detective sagacity in interpreting
facts. To take another instance: Westermarck (503), in his search for
cases of romantic attachment and absorbing passion among savages,
fancies he has come across one in Australia, for he tells us that
"even the rude Australian girl sings in a strain of romantic
affliction--
'I never shall see my darling again.'"
As a matter of fact this line has no more to do with the "true
monogamous instinct, the absorbing passion for one," than with Julius
Caesar. Eyre relates (310, 70) that when Miago, the first native who
ever quitted Perth, was taken away on the _Beagle_ in 1838, his
_mother_ sang during his absence:
Whither does that lone ship wander,
My young son I shall never see again.
Grosse, who often sides with Westermarck, here parts company with him,
being convinced that
"what is called love in Australia ... is no spiritual
affection, but a sensual passion, which is quickly
cooled in the enjoyment.... The only examples of
_sympathetic_ lyrics that have been found in Australia
are mourning songs, and even they relate only to
relatives by blood and tribal affinity" (_B.A.,_
244)[179].
A LOCK OF HAIR
A more subtle problem than those so far considered is presented by a
courtship custom described by Bulmer (Brough Smyth, 82-84). The
natives are very superstitious in regard to their hair. They carefully
destroy any that has been cut off and would be greatly frightened to
know it had fallen into another person's hands, as that would place
their health and life in jeopardy at the other's will. Yet a girl who
has a lover will not hesitate to give him a lock of her hair. It seems
impossible to deny that this is a touch of true sentiment, of romantic
love; and Bulmer accordingly calls this lock of hair a "token of
affection." But is it a token of affection? The sequel will show. In
due course of time the couple elope, in the black of the night they
take to the bush. Great excitement prevails in camp when they are
found missing. They are called "long-legged," "thin-legged,"
"squint-eyed," or "big-headed." Search is made, the pair are tracked
and caught, and both are cruelly beaten. They make a promise not to
repeat the offence, but do not keep it; another elopement follows,
with more beatings. At last the girl becomes afraid to elope again.
She alters her tactics, feigns a severe illness, and the parents are
alarmed. Then she remembers that her lover has a lock of her hair. He
is made to confess, and another fight follows. He is half killed, but
after that he is allowed to keep the girl.
Thus we see that the lock, instead of being a "token of affection," as
Bulmer would have us believe, and as it would be in our community, is
not even a sentimental sign of the girl's confidence in her lover, but
merely a detail of a foolish custom and stupid superstition.
TWO NATIVE STORIES
As a matter of course Australian folk-lore, too, shows no traces of
the existence of love. The nearest approach to such a thing I have
been able to find is a quaint story about a man who wanted two wives
and of how he got them. It is taken from Mrs. K. Langloh Parker's
_Australian Legendary Tales_ and the substance of it is as follows:
Wurrunnah, after a long day's hunting, came back to the
camp tired and hungry. His mother had nothing for him
to eat and no one else would give him anything. He flew
into a rage and said: "I will go into a far country and
live with strangers; my people would starve me." He
went away and after divers strange adventures with a
blind man and emus, who were really black fellows, he
came to a camp where there was no one but seven young
girls. They were friendly, gave him food, and allowed
him to camp there during the night. They told him their
name was Meamei and their tribe in a far country to
which they would soon return.
The next day Wurrunnah went away as if leaving for
good; but he determined to hide near and watch what
they did, and if he could get a chance he would steal a
wife from among them. He was tired of travelling alone.
He saw them all start out with their yam-sticks in
hand. Following them he saw them stop by the nests of
some flying ants and unearth the ants. Then they sat
down, threw their yam-sticks aside, and ate the ants,
which are esteemed a great delicacy. While they were
eating Wurrunnah sneaked up to their yam-sticks and
stole two of them. When the girls had eaten all they
wanted only five of them could find their sticks; so
those five started off, expecting that the other two
would soon find their sticks and follow them.
The two girls hunted all around the ants' nests, but
could find no sticks. At last, when their backs were
turned toward him, Wurrunnah crept out and stuck the
lost yam-sticks near together in the ground; then he
slipped back to his hiding-place. When the two girls
turned round, there in front of them they saw their
sticks. With a cry of joyful surprise they ran to them
and caught hold of them to pull them out of the ground,
in which they were firmly stuck. As they were doing so,
out from his hiding-place jumped Wurrunnah. He seized
both girls round their waists, holding them tightly.
They struggled and screamed, but to no purpose. There
was none near to hear them, and the more they struggled
the tighter Wurrunnah held them. Finding their screams
and struggles in vain they quietened at length, and
then Wurrunnah told them not to be afraid, he would
take care of them. He was lonely, he said, and wanted
two wives. They must come quietly with him and he would
be good to them. But they must do as he told them. If
they were not quiet he would swiftly quieten them with
his moorillah. But if they would come quietly with him
he would he good to them. Seeing that resistance was
useless the two young girls complied with his wish, and
travelled quietly on with him. They told him that some
day their tribe would come and steal them back again;
to avoid which he travelled quickly on and on still
farther hoping to elude pursuit. Some weeks passed and
he told his wives to go and get some bark from two
pine-trees near by. They declared if they did so he
would never see them again. But he answered "Talk not
so foolishly; if you ran away soon should I catch you
and, catching you, would beat you hard. So talk no
more." They went and began to cut the bark from the
trees. As they did so each felt that her tree was
rising higher out of the ground and bearing her upward
with it. Higher and higher grew the pine-trees and up
with them went the girl until at last the tops touched
the sky. Wurrunnah called after them, but they listened
not. Then they heard the voices of their five sisters,
who from the sky stretched forth their hands and drew
the two others in to live with them in the sky, and
there you may see the seven sisters together. We know
them as the Pleiades, but the black fellows call them
the Meamei.
A few rather improper tales regarding the sun and moon are recorded in
Woods's _Native Tribes_ by Meyer, who thus sums up two of them (200);
the other being too obscene for citation here:
The sun they consider to be a female, who, when she
sets, passes the dwelling-places of the dead. As she
approaches the men assemble and divide into two bodies,
leaving a road for her to pass between them; they
invite her to stay with them, which she can only do for
a short time, as she must be ready for her journey for
the next day. For favors granted to some one among them
she receives a present of red kangaroo skin; and
therefore in the morning, when she rises, appears in a
red dress.
The moon is also a woman, and not particularly chaste.
She stays a long time with the men, and from the
effects of her intercourse with them, she becomes very
thin and wastes away to a mere skeleton. When in this
state, Nurrunduri orders her to be driven away. She
flies, and is secreted for some time, but is employed
all the time in seeking roots which are so nourishing
that in a short time she appears again, and fills out
and becomes fat rapidly.
Here we see how even such sublime and poetic phenomena as sun and moon
are to the aboriginal mind only symbols of their coarse, sensual
lives: the heavenly bodies are concubines of the men, welcomed when
fat, driven away when thin. That puts the substance of Australian love
in a nutshell.
BARRINGTON'S LOVE-STORY
In the absence of aboriginal love-stories let us amuse ourselves by
examining critically a few more of the alleged cases of romantic love
discovered by Europeans. The erudite German anthropologist Gerland
expresses his belief (VI., 755) that notwithstanding the degradation
of the Australians "cases of true romantic love occur among them," and
he refers for an instance to Barrington (I., 37). On consulting
Barrington I find the following incident related as a sample of
"genuine love in all its purity." I condense the unessential parts:
A young man of twenty-three, belonging to a tribe near
Paramatta, was living in a cave with two sisters, one
of fourteen, the other of twenty. One day when he
returned from his kangaroo hunt he could not find the
girls. Thinking they had gone to fetch water or roots
for supper, he sat down till a rain-storm drove him
into the cave, where he stumbled over the prostrate
form of the younger sister. She was lying in a pool of
blood, but presently regained consciousness and told
him that a man had come to carry off her sister, after
beating her on the head. She had seized the sister's
arm to hold her back when the brute knocked her over
with his club and dragged off the sister.
It was too late to take revenge that day, but next
morning the two set out for the tribe to which the
girl-robber belonged. As they approached the camp,
Barrington continues, "he saw the sister of the very
savage who had stolen his sister; she was leaving her
tribe to pick some sticks for a fire (this was indeed a
fine opportunity for revenge); so making his sister
hide herself, he flew to the young woman and lifted up
his club to bring her to the ground, and thus satisfy
his revenge. The victim trembled, yet, knowing his
power, she stood with all the fortitude she could;
lifting up her eyes, they came in contact with his and
such was the enchanting beauty of her form (!) that he
stood an instant motionless to gaze on it (!). The poor
thing saw this and dropped on her knees (!) to implore
his pity, but before she could speak, his revenge
softened into love (!); he threw down his club, and
clasping her in his arms (!) vowed eternal constancy
(!!!); his pity gained her love (!), thus each procured
a mutual return. Then calling his sister, she would
have executed her revenge, but for her brother, who
told her she was now his wife. On my hero asking after
his sister, his new wife said she was very ill, but
would soon be better; and she excused her brother (!)
because the means he had taken were the customary one
of procuring a wife (!!); 'but you,' said she, 'have
more white heart' (meaning he was more like the
English), 'you no beat me; me love you; you love me; me
love your sisters; your sisters love me; my brother no
good man.' This artless address won both their hearts,
and now all three live in one hut which I enabled them
to make comfortable within half a mile of my own
house."
Barrington concludes with these words: "This little anecdote I have
given as the young man related it to me and perhaps I have _lost much
of its simplicity_." It is very much to be feared that he has. I have
marked with, exclamation points the most absurdly impossible parts of
the tale as idealized and embellished by Barrington. The Australian
never told him that he "gazed motionless" on the "enchanting beauty"
of the girl's form or that his "revenge softened into love;" he never
clasped her in his arms, nor "vowed eternal constancy." The girl never
dreamt of saying that his pity gained her love, or of excusing her
brother for doing what all Australian men do. These sentimental
touches are gratuitous additions of Barrington; native Australians do
not even clasp each other in their arms, and they are as incapable of
vowing eternal constancy as of comparing Herbert Spencer's philosophy
with Schopenhauer's. Yet on the strength of such dime novel rubbish an
anthropologist assures us that savages are capable of feeling pure
romantic love! The kernel of truth in the above tale reduces itself to
this, that the young man whose sister was stolen intended to take
revenge by killing the abductor, but that on seeing his sister he
concluded to marry her. These savages, as we have seen, always act
thus, killing the enemy's women only when unable to carry them off.
RISKING LIFE FOR A WOMAN
Lumholtz relates the following story to show that "these blacks also
may be greatly overcome by the sentiment of love" (213):
"A 'civilized' black man entered a station on Georgina
River and carried off a woman who belonged to a young
black man at the station. She loved her paramour and
was glad to get away from the station; but the whites
desired to keep her for their black servant, as he
could not be made to stay without her, and they brought
her back, threatening to shoot the stranger if he came
again. Heedless of the threat, he afterward made a
second attempt to elope with his beloved, but the white
men pursued the couple and shot the poor fellow."
If Lumholtz had reflected for a moment on the difference between love
as a sentiment and love as an appetite, he would have realized the
error of using the expression "the sentiment of love" in connection
with such a story of adulterous kidnapping, in which there is
absolutely nothing to indicate whether the kidnapper coveted the other
man's wife for any other than the most carnal reasons. It is not
unusual for an Australian to risk his life in stealing a woman. He
does that every time he captures one from another tribe. In men who
have so little imaginative faculty as these, the possibility of being
killed has no more deterrent effect than it has in two dogs or stags
fighting for a female. We must not judge such indifference to deadly
consequences from our point of view.
GERSTAECKER'S LOVE-STORY
Gerstaecker, a German traveller, who traversed a part of Australia,
has a tale of aboriginal love which also bears the earmarks of
fiction. On his whole trip, he says, in his 514-page volume devoted to
Australia, he heard of only one case of genuine love. A young man of
the Bamares tribe took a fancy to a girl of the Rengmutkos. She was
also pleased with him and he eloped with her at night, taking her to
his hunting-ground on the river. The tribe heard of his escapade and
ordered him to return the girl to her home. He obeyed, but two weeks
later eloped with her again. He was reprimanded and informed that if
it happened again he would be killed. For the present he escaped
punishment personally, but was ordered to cudgel the girl and then
send her back home. He obeyed again; the girl fell down before him and
he rained hard blows on her head and shoulders till the elders
themselves interceded and cried enough. The girl was chased away and
the lover remained alone. For two days he refused to join in the
hunting or diversions of his companions. On the third day he ascended
an eminence whence the Murray Valley can be seen. In the distance he
saw two columns of smoke; they had been maintained for him all this
time by his girl. He took his spear and opossum coat and hastened
toward the columns of smoke. He was about to commit his third offence,
which meant certain death, yet on he went and found the girl. Her
wounds were not yet healed, but she hastened to meet him and put her
head on his bosom.
This tale is open to the same criticism as Lumholtz's. The man risks
his life, not for another, but to secure what he covets. It is a
romantic love-story, but there is no indication anywhere of romantic
love, while some of the details are fictitiously embellished. An
Australian girl does not put her head on her lover's bosom, nor could
she camp alone and keep up two columns of smoke for several days
without being discovered and kidnapped. The story is evidently one of
an ordinary elopement, embellished by European fancy.[180]
LOCAL COLOR IN COURTSHIP
There is some quaint local color in Australian courtship, but usually
blows play too important a role to make their procedure acceptable to
anyone with a less waddy-proof skull than an Australian. Spencer and
Gillen relate (556) that in cases of charming, the initiative is
sometimes taken by the woman,
"who can, of course, imagine that she has been charmed,
and then find a willing aider and abettor in the man
whose vanity is flattered by this response to his magic
power, which he can soon persuade himself that he did
really exercise; besides which, an extra wife has its
advantages in the way of procuring food and saving him
trouble, while, if his other women object, the matter
is one which does not hurt him, for it can easily be
settled once and for all by a stand-up fight between
the women and the rout of the loser."
Quaintly Australian are the following details of Kurnai courtship
given by Howitt:
"Sometimes it might happen that the young men were
backward. Perhaps there might be several young girls
who ought to be married, and the women had then to take
the matter in hand when some eligible young men were at
camp. They consulted, and some went out in the forest
and with sticks killed some of the little birds, the
yeerung. These they brought back to the camp and
casually showed them to some of the men; then there was
an uproar. The men were very angry. The yeerungs, their
brothers, had been killed! The young men got sticks;
the girls took sticks also, and they attacked each
other. Heavy blows were struck, heads were broken, and
blood flowed, but no one stopped them.
"Perhaps this light might last a quarter of an hour,
then they separated. Some even might be left on the
ground insensible. Even the men and women who were
married joined in the free fight. The next day the
young men, the brewit, went, and in their turn killed
some of the women's 'sisters,' the birds djeetgun, and
the consequence was that on the following day there was
a worse fight than before. It was perhaps a week or two
before the wounds and bruises were healed. By and by,
some day one of the eligible young men met one of the
marriageable young women; he looked at her, and said
'Djeetgun!' She said 'Yeerung! What does the yeerung
eat?' The reply was, 'He eats so-and-so,' mentioning
kangaroo, opossum, or emu, or some other game. Then
they laughed, and she ran off with him without telling
anyone."
LOVE-LETTERS
Apart from magic and birds Australian lovers appear not to have been
without means of communicating with one another. Howitt says that if a
Kurnai girl took a fancy to a man she might send him a secret message
asking, "Will you find me some food?" And this was understood to be a
proposal--a rather unsentimental and utilitarian proposal, it must be
confessed. According to one of the correspondents of Curr (III., 176)
the natives along the Mary River even made use of a kind of
love-letters which, he says, "were peculiar."
"When the writer was once travelling with a black boy
the latter produced from the lining of his hat a bit of
twig about an inch long and having three notches cut on
it. The black boy explained that he was a _dhomka_
(messenger), that the central notch represented
himself, and the other notches, one the youth sending
the message, the other the girl for whom it was
intended. It meant, in the words of Dickens, 'Barkis is
willin'.' The _dhomka_ sewed up the love-symbol in the
lining of his hat, carried it for months without
divulging his secret to his sable friends, and finally
delivered it safely. This practice appeared to be
well-known, and was probably common."
Such a "love-letter," consisting of three notches cut in a twig,
symbolically sums up this whole chapter. The difference between this
bushman's twig and the love-letter of a civilized modern suitor is no
greater than the difference between aboriginal Australian "love" and
genuine romantic love.
ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC
Between the northern extremity of Australia and the southern extremity
of New Guinea, about ninety miles wide, lies Torres Strait, discovered
by a Spaniard in 1606, and not visited again by whites till Captain
Cook sailed through in 1770. This strait has been called a "labyrinth
of islands, rocks, and coral reefs," so complicated and dangerous that
Torres, the original discoverer, required two months to get through.
WHERE WOMEN PROPOSE
The larger islands in this strait are of special interest to students
of the phenomena of love and marriage, for on them it is not only
permissible but obligatory for women to propose to the men. Needless
to say that the inhabitants of these islands, though so near
Queensland, are not Australians. They are Melanesians, but their
customs are insular and unique. Curr (I., 279) says of them that they
are "with one exception, of the Papuan type, frizzle-haired people who
cultivate the soil, use the bow and arrow and not the spear, and,
un-Australian-like, treat their women with some consideration."
Luckily the customs of these islanders have been carefully and
intelligently studied by Professor A.C. Haddon, who published an
entertaining account of them in a periodical to which one usually
looks for instruction rather than amusement.[181] Professor Haddon
combines the two. On the island of Tud, he tells us, when boys undergo
the ordeal of initiation into manhood, one of the lessons taught them
is: "You no like girl first; if you do, girl laugh and call you
woman." When a girl likes a man, she tells his sister and gives her a
ring of string. On the first suitable opportunity the sister says to
her brother: "Brother, I have some good news for you. A woman loves
you." He asks who it is, and, if willing to go on with the affair,
tells his sister to ask the girl to keep an appointment with him in
some spot in the bush. On receipt of the message the enamoured girl
informs her parents that she is going into the bush to get some wood,
or food, or some such excuse. At the appointed time the man meets her;
and they sit down and yarn, without any fondling. The ensuing dialogue
is given by Haddon in the actual words which Maino, chief of Tud,
used:
"Opening the conversation, the man says, 'You like me
proper?'
"'Yes,' she replies, 'I like you proper with my heart
inside. Eye along my heart see you--you my man.'
"Unwilling to rashly give himself away, he asks,'How
you like me?'
"'I like your leg--you got fine body--your skin good--I
like you altogether,' replies the girl.
"After matters have proceeded satisfactorily the girl,
anxious to clench the matter, asks when they are to be
married. The man says, 'To-morrow, if you like.'
"Then they go home and inform their relatives. There is
a mock fight and everything is settled."
On the island of Mabniag, after a girl has sent an intermediary to
bring a string to the man she covets, she follows this up by sending
him food, again and again. But he "lies low" a month or two before he
ventures to eat any of this food, because he has been warned by his
mother that if he takes it he will "get an eruption all over his
face." Finally, he concludes she means business, so he consults the
big men of the village and marries her.
If a man danced well, he found favor in the sight of these island
damsels. His being married did not prevent a girl from proposing. Of
course she took good care not to make the advances through one of the
other wives--that might have caused trouble!--but in the usual way. On
this island the men never made the first advances toward matrimony.
Haddon tells a story of a native girl who wanted to marry a Loyalty
Islander, a cook, who was loafing on the mission premises. He did not
encourage her advances, but finally agreed to meet her in the bush,
where, according to his version of the story, he finally refused her.
She, however, accused him of trying to "steal" her. This led to a big
palaver before the chief, at which the verdict was that the cook was
innocent and that the girl had trumped up the charge in order to force
the marriage.
If a man and a girl began to keep company, he was branded on the back
with a charcoal, while her mark was cut into the skin (because "she
asked the man"). It was expected they would marry, but if they did not
nothing could be done. If it was the man who was unwilling, the girl's
father told the other men of the place, and they gave him a sound
thrashing. Refusing a girl was thus a serious matter on these islands!
The missionaries, Haddon was informed,
"discountenance the native custom of the women
proposing to the men, although there is not the least
objection to it from a moral or social point of view;
quite the reverse. So the white man's fashion is being
introduced. As an illustration of the present mixed
condition of affairs, I found that a girl who wants a
certain man writes him a letter, often on a slate, and
he replies in a similar manner."
On the island of Tud it often happened that the girl who was first
enamoured of a youth at his initiation, and who first asked him in
marriage, was one who "like too many men." The lad, being on his
guard, might get rid of her attentions by playing a trick on her,
making a bogus appointment with her in the bush, and then informing
the elder men, who would appear in his place at the trysting-place, to
the girl's mortification.
Various details given in the chapter on Australia indicated that if
the women on that big island did not propose, as a rule, it was not
from coyness but because the selfishness of the men and their
arrangements made it impossible in most cases. On these neighboring
islands the women could propose; yet the cause of love, of course, did
not gain anything from such an arrangement, which could serve only to
stimulate licentiousness. Haddon gathered the impression that
"chastity before marriage was unknown, free intercourse not being
considered wrong; it was merely 'fashion along we folk.'" Their excuse
was the same as Adam's: "Woman, he steal; man, how can he help
it?"[182]
Nocturnal courtship was in vogue:
"Decorum was observed. Thus I was told in Tud a girl, before
going to sleep, would tie a string round her foot and pass
it under the thatched wall of the house. In the middle of
the night her lover would come, pull the string, and so
awaken the girl, who would then join him. As the chief of
Mabuiag said, 'What can the father do; if she wants the man
how can he stop her?'"
On Muralug Island the custom is somewhat different. There,
after the girl has sent her grass-ring to the man she wants,
"if he is willing to proceed in the matter, he goes to
the rendezvous in the bush and, not unnaturally, takes
every advantage of the situation. Every night
afterwards he goes to the girl's house and steals away
before daybreak. At length someone informs the girl's
father that a man is sleeping with his daughter. The
father communicates with the girl, and she tells her
lover that her father wants to see him--'To see what
sort of man he is?' The father then says, 'You like my
daughter, she like you, you may have her.' The details
are then arranged."
Sometimes, if a girl was too free with her favors to the men, the
other women cut a mark down her back, to make her feel ashamed. Yet
she had no difficulty on this account in subsequently finding a
husband.
Besides the existence of "free love," there are other customs arguing
the absence of sentiment in these insular affairs of the heart.
Infanticide was frequently resorted to, the babes being buried alive
in the sand, for no other reason than to save the trouble of taking
care of them. After marriage, in spite of the fact that the girl did
the proposing, she becomes the man's property; so much so that if she
should offend him, he may kill her and no harm will come to him. If
her sister comes to remonstrate, he can kill her too, and if he has
two wives and they quarrel, he can kill both. In that love-scene
reported by Maino, the chief of Tud, the girl gives us her
"sentimental" reasons why she loves him: because he has a fine leg and
body, and a good skin. The "romance" of the situation is further
aggravated when we read that, as in Australia, swapping sisters is the
usual way of getting a wife, and that if a man has no sister to
exchange he must pay for his wife with a canoe, a knife, or a glass
bottle. Chief Maino himself told Haddon that he gave for his wife
seven pieces of calico, one dozen shirts, one dozen singlets, one
dozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen tomahawks, besides
tobacco, fish-lines and hooks and pearl shells. He finished his
enumeration by exclaiming "By golly, he too dear!"
How did these islanders ever come to indulge in the custom, so
inconsistent with their general attitude toward women, of allowing
them to propose? The only hint at an explanation I have been able to
find is contained in the following citation from Haddon:
"If an unmarried woman desired a man she accosted him,
but the man did not ask the woman (at least, so I was
informed), for if she refused him he would feel
ashamed, and maybe brain her with a stone club, and so
'he would kill her for nothing.'"
BORNEAN CAGED GIRLS
The islands of the Pacific Ocean and adjacent waters are almost
innumerable. To give an account of the love-affairs customary on all
of them would require a large volume by itself. In the present work it
is not possible to do more than select a few of the islands, as
samples, preference being given to those that show at least some
traces of feelings rising above mere sensualism. One of the largest
and best known of these islands is Borneo, and of its inhabitants the
Dyaks are of special interest from our point of view. Their customs
have been observed and described by St. John, Low, Bock, H. Ling Roth
and others.[183]
In some parts of Dutch Borneo the cruel custom prevails of locking up
a girl when she is eight to ten years old in a small, dark apartment
of the house, which she is not allowed to leave for about seven years.
She spends her time making mats and doing other handiwork, but is not
allowed to see anyone--not even of her own family--except a female
slave. When she is free from her prison she appears bleached a light
yellow, as though made out of wax, and totters along on small, thin
feet--which the natives consider especially attractive.
CHARMS OF DYAK WOMEN
Dyak girls are not subjected to any such restraints, and in some
respects they enjoy more liberty than is good for them. As usual among
the lower races, they have to do most of the hard work. "It is a sad
sight," says Low (75), "to see the Dyak girls, some but nine or ten
years of age, carrying water up the mount in bamboos, their bodies
bent nearly double, and groaning under the weight of their burden."
Lieutenant Marryat found that the mountain Dyak girls, if not
beautiful, had some beautiful points--good eyes, teeth, and hair,
besides good manners, and they "knew how to make use of their eyes."
Denison (cited by Roth, I., 46) remarks that
"Some of the girls showed signs of good looks, but hard
work, poor feeding, and intermarriage and early marriage
soon told their tale, and rapidly converted them into ugly,
dirty, diseased old hags, and this at an age when they are
barely more than young women."
They marry sometimes as early as the age of thirteen, and in general
they are inferior in looks to the men. Marryat thought he saw
"something wicked in their dark furtive glances," while Earl found the
faces of Dyak women generally extremely interesting, largely on
account of "the soft expression given by their long eyelashes, and by
the habit of keeping the eyes half closed." "Their general
conversation is not wanting in wit," says Brooke (I., 70),
"and considerable acuteness of perception is evinced, but
often accompanied by improper and indecent language, of
which they are unaware when giving utterance to it. Their
acts, however, fortunately evince more regard for modesty
than their words."
Grant, in describing his tour among the Land Dyaks, remarks (97):
"It has been mentioned once or twice that we found the
women bathing at the village well. Although, generally
speaking, no lack of proper modesty is shown, certainly
rather an Adam and Eve like idea of the same is
displayed on such occasions by these simple people."
DYAK MORALS
Concerning the sexual morality of the Dyaks, opinions of observers
differ somewhat. St. John (I., 52) observes that "the Sea Dyak women
are modest and yet unchaste, love warmly and yet divorce easily, but
are generally faithful to their husbands when married." It is agreed
that the morality of the Land Dyaks is superior to that of the Sea
Dyaks; yet with them,
"as among the Sea Dyaks, the young people have almost
unrestrained intercourse; but, if a girl prove with child a
marriage immediately takes place, the bridegroom making the
richest presents he can to her relatives" (I., 113). "There
is no strict law,"
says Mundy (II., 2),
"to bind the conduct of young married people of either
sex, and parents are more or less indifferent on those
points, according to their individual ideas of right
and wrong. It is supposed that every young Dyak woman
will eventually suit herself with a husband, and it is
considered no disgrace to be on terms of intimacy with
the youth of her fancy till she has the opportunity of
selecting a suitable helpmate; and as the unmarried
ladies attach much importance to bravery, they are
always desirous of securing the affections of a
renowned warrior. Lax, however, as this code may appear
before marriage, it would seem to be sufficiently
stringent after the matrimonial. One wife only is
allowed, and infidelity is punished by fine on both
sides--inconstancy on the part of the husband being
esteemed equally as bad as in the female. The breach of
the marriage vows, however, appears to be infrequent,
though they allow that, during the time of war, more
license is given."
NOCTURNAL COURTSHIP
Brooke Low relates that the Sea Dyak girls receive their male visitors
at night.
"They sleep apart from their parents, sometimes in the
same room, but more often in the loft. The young men
are not invited to sleep with them unless they are old
friends, but they may sit with them and chat, and if
they get to be fond of each other after a short
acquaintance, and wish to make a match of it, they are
united in marriage, if the parents on either side have
no objections to offer. It is in fact the only way open
to the man and woman to become acquainted with each
other, as privacy during the daytime is out of the
question in a Dyak village."
The same method of courtship prevails among the Land Dyaks. Some queer
details are given by St. John, Crossland and Leggatt (Roth, 110).
About nine or ten o'clock at night the lover goes on tiptoe to the
mosquito curtains of his beloved, gently awakens her and offers her
some prepared betel-nut. If she accepts it, he is happy, for it means
that his suit is prospering, but if she refuses it and says "Be good
enough to blow up the fire," it means that he is dismissed. Sometimes
their discourse is carried on through the medium of a sort of
Jew's-harp, one handing it to the other, asking questions and
returning answers. The lover remains until daybreak. After the consent
of the girl and her parents has been obtained, one more ordeal
remains; the bridal couple have to run the gauntlet of the mischievous
village boys, who stand ready with sooted hands to begrime their faces
and bodies; and generally they succeed so well that bride and groom
present the appearance of negroes.
Elopements also occur in cases where parental consent is withheld.
Brooke Low thus describes an old custom which permits a man to carry
off a girl:
"She will meet him by arrangement at the water-side and
step into his boat with a paddle in her hand, and both
will pull away as fast as they can. If pursued he will
stop every now and then to deposit some article of
value on the bank, such as a gun, a jar, or a favor for
the acceptance of her family, and when he has exhausted
his resources he will leave his own sword. When the
pursuers observe this they will cease to follow,
knowing he is cleared out. As soon as he reaches his
own village he tidies up the house and spreads the
mats, and when his pursuers arrive he gives them food
to eat and toddy to drink, and sends them home
satisfied. In the meanwhile he is left in possession of
his wife."
HEAD HUNTERS A-WOOING
In one of the introductory chapters of this volume a brief account was
given of the Dyak head-hunters. Reference was made to the fact that
the more heads a man has cut off, the more he is respected. He cannot
marry until he has killed a man, woman, or child, and brought home the
head as a trophy, and cases are known of men having to wait two years
before they could procure the skull necessary to soften the heart of
the gentle beloved. "From all accounts," says Roth (II., 163),
"there can be little doubt that one of the chief
incentives to getting heads is the desire to please the
women ... Mrs. McDougall relates an old Sakaran legend
which says that the daughter of their great ancestor,
who resides in heaven near the great Evening Star,
refused to marry until her betrothed brought her a
present worth her acceptance. The man went into the
jungle and killed a deer, which he presented to her;
but the fair lady turned away in disdain. He went again
and returned with a _mias_, the great monkey [_sic_]
who haunts the forest; but this present was not more to
her taste. Then, in a fit of despair, the lover went
abroad, and killed the first man that he met, and
throwing his victim's head at the maiden's feet, he
exclaimed at the cruelty she had made him guilty of;
but to his surprise, she smiled, and said that now he
had discovered the only gift worthy of herself."
Roth cites a correspondent who says:
"At this moment there are two Dyaks in the Kuching jail
who acknowledge that they took the heads of two
innocent Chinese with no other object in view when
doing so than to secure the pseudo affections of women,
who refused to marry them until they had thus proved
themselves to be men."
Here is what a sweet Dyak maiden said to a young man who asked for her
hand and heart:
"Why don't you go to the Saribus Fort and there take
the head of Bakir (the Dyak chief), or even that of
Tuan Hassan (Mr. Watson), and then I will deign to
think of your desires with some degree of interest."
Says Captain Mundy (II., 222):
"No aristocratic youth dare venture to pay his
addresses to a Dyak demoiselle unless he throws at the
blushing maiden's feet a netful of skulls! In some
districts it is customary for the young lady to desire
her lover to cut a thick bamboo from the neighboring
jungle, and when in possession of this instrument, she
carefully arranges the _cadeau d'amour_ on the floor,
and by repeated blows beats the heads into fragments,
which, when thus pounded, are scraped up and cast into
the river; at the same time she throws herself into the
arms of the enraptured youth, and so commences the
honeymoon."
Another account of Dyak courtship (Roth, II., 166) represents a young
warrior returning from a head-hunting expedition and, on meeting his
beloved, holding in each hand one of the captured heads by the hair.
She takes one of the heads, whereupon they dance round each other with
the most extravagant gestures, amidst the applause of the Rajah and
his people. The next step is a feast, at which the young couple eat
together. When this is over, they have to take off whatever clothes
they have on and sit naked on the ground while some of the old women
throw over them handfuls of paddy and repeat a prayer that they may
prove as fruitful as that grain.
"The warrior can take away any inferior man's wife at
pleasure, and is thanked for so doing. A chief who has
twenty heads in his possession will do the same with
another who may have only ten, and upwards to the
Rajah's family, who can take any woman at pleasure."
FICKLE AND SHALLOW PASSION
Though the Dyaks may be somewhat less coarse than those Australians
who make a captured woman marry the man who killed her husband, an
almost equal callousness of feeling is revealed by J. Dalton's
statement that the women taken on the head-hunting expedition "soon
became attached to the conquerors"--resembling, in this respect, the
Australian woman who, of her own accord, deserts to an enemy who has
vanquished her husband. Cases of frantic amorous infatuation occur, as
a matter of course. Brooke (II., 106) relates the story of a girl of
seventeen who, for the sake of an ugly, deformed, and degraded
workman, left her home, dressed as a man, and in a small broken canoe
made a trip of eighty miles to join her lover. In olden times death
would have been the penalty for such an act; but she, being a "New
Woman" in her tribe, exclaimed, "If I fell in love with a wild beast,
no one should prevent me marrying it." In this Eastern clime, Brooke
declares, "love is like the sun's rays in warmth." He might have added
that it is as fickle and transient as the sun's warmth; every passing
cloud chills it. The shallow nature of Dyak attachment is indicated by
their ephemeral unions and universal addiction to divorce. "Among the
Upper Sarawak Dyaks divorce is very frequent, owing to the great
extent of adultery," says Haughton (Roth, I., 126); and St. John
remarks:
"One can scarcely meet with a middle-aged Dayak who has
not had two, and often three or more wives. I have
heard of a girl of seventeen or eighteen years who had
already had three husbands. Repudiation, which is
generally done by the man or woman running away to the
house of a near relation, takes place for the slightest
cause--personal dislike or disappointments, a sudden
quarrel, bad dreams, discontent with their partners'
powers of labor or their industry, or, in fact, any
excuse which will help to give force to the expression,
'I do not want to live with him, or her, any longer.'"
"Many men and women have married seven or eight times
before they find the partner with whom they desire to
spend the rest of their lives."
"When a couple are newly-married, if a deer or a
gazelle, or a moose-deer utters a cry at night near the
house in which the pair are living, it is an omen of
ill--they must separate, or the death of one would
ensue. This might be a great trial to an European
lover; the Dayaks, however, take the matter very
philosophically."
"Mr. Chalmers mentions to me the case of a young
Penin-jau man who was divorced from his wife on the
third day after marriage. The previous night a deer had
uttered its warning cry, and separate they must. The
morning of the divorce he chanced to go into the 'Head
House' and there sat the bridegroom contentedly at
work."
"'Why are you here?' he was asked, as the 'Head House'
is frequented by bachelors and boys only; 'What news of
your new wife?'"
"'I have no wife, we were separated this morning
because the deer cried last night.'"
"'Are you sorry?'"
"'Very sorry.'"
"'What are you doing with that brass wire?'"
"'Making _perik_'--the brass chain work which the women
wear round their waists--'for a young woman whom I want
to get for my new wife,'" (I., 165-67; 55.)
Such is the love of Dyaks. Marriage among them, says the same keen
observer, "is a business of partnership for the purpose of having
children, dividing labor, and, by means of their offspring, providing
for their old age;" and Brooke Low remarks that "intercourse before
marriage is strictly to ascertain that the marriage will be fruitful,
as the Dyaks want children," In other words, apart from sensual
purposes, the women are not desired and cherished for their own sakes,
but only for utilitarian reasons, as a means to an end. Whence we
conclude that, high as the Dyaks stand above Australians and many
Africans, they are still far from the goal of genuine affection. Their
feelings are only skin deep.
DYAK LOVE-SONGS
Dyaks are not without their love-songs.
"I am the tender shoot of the drooping libau with its fragrant
scent." "I am the comb of the champion fighting-cock that never
runs away," "I am the hawk flying down the Kanyau Kiver, coming
after the fine feathered fowl." "I am the crocodile from the
mouth of the Lingga, coming repeatedly for the striped flower of
the rose-apple."
Roth (I., 119-21) cites forty-five of these verses, mostly expressive
of such selfish boasting and vanity. Not one of them expresses a
feeling of tenderness or admiration of a beloved person, not to speak
of altruistic feelings.
THE GIRL WITH THE CLEAN FACE
Is a Dyak capable of admiring personal beauty? Some of the girls have
fine figures and pretty faces; but there is no evidence that any but
the voluptuous (non-esthetic) qualities of the figure are appreciated,
and as for the faces, if the men really appreciated beauty as we do,
they would first of all things insist that the girls must keep their
faces clean. An amusing experiment made by St. John with some Ida'an
girls (I., 339) is suggestive from this point of view:
"We selected one who had the dirtiest face--and it was
difficult to select where all were dirty--and asked her
to glance at herself in a looking-glass. She did so,
and passed it round to the others; we then asked which
they thought looked best, cleanliness or dirt: this was
received with a universal giggle.
"We had brought with us several dozen cheap
looking-glasses, so we told Iseiom, the daughter of Li
Moung, our host, that if she would go and wash her face
we would give her one. She treated the offer with
scorn, tossed her head, and went into her father's
room. But about half an hour afterwards, we saw her
come into the house and try to mix quietly with the
crowd; but it was of no use, her companions soon
noticed she had a clean face, and pushed her to the
front to be inspected. She blushingly received her
looking-glass and ran away, amid the laughter of the
crowd."
The example had a great effect, however, and before evening nine of
the girls had received looking-glasses.[184]
FIJIAN REFINEMENTS
In the chapter on Personal Beauty I endeavored to show that if savages
who live near the sea or river are clean, it is not owing to their
love of cleanliness, but to an accident, bathing being resorted to by
them as an antidote to heat, or as a sport. This applies particularly
to the Melanesian and Polynesian inhabitants of the South Sea Islands,
whose chief pastimes are swimming and surf riding. Thomas Williams, in
his authoritative work on Fiji and the Fijians, makes some remarks
which entirely bear out my views:
"Too much has been said about the cleanliness of the
natives. The lower classes are often very dirty.... They ...
seldom hesitate to sink both cleanliness and dignity in what
they call comfort" (117).
We are therefore not surprised to read on another page (97) that
"of admiring emotion, produced by the contemplation of
beauty, these people seem incapable; while they remain
unmoved by the wondrous loveliness with which they are
everywhere surrounded.... The mind of the Fijian has
hitherto seemed utterly unconscious of any inspiration of
beauty, and his imagination has grovelled in the most vulgar
earthliness."
Sentimentalists have therefore erred in ascribing to the Fijian
cannibals cleanliness as a virtue. They have erred also in regard to
several other alleged refinements they discovered among these tribes.
One of these is the custom prohibiting a father from cohabiting with
his wife until the child is weaned. This has been supposed to indicate
a kind regard for the welfare and health of mother and child. But when
we examine the facts we find that far from being a proof of superior
morality, this custom reveals the immorality of the husband, and makes
an assassin of the wife. Read what Williams has to say (154):
"Nandi, one of whose wives was pregnant, left her to
dwell with a second. The forsaken one awaited his
return some months, and at last the child disappeared.
This practice seemed to be universal on Vanua
Levu--quite a matter of course--so that few women could
be found who had not in some way been murderers. The
extent of infanticide in some parts of this island
reaches nearer to two-thirds than half."
Williams further informs us (117) that "husbands are as frequently
away from their wives as they are with them, since it is thought not
well for a man to sleep regularly at home." He does not comment on
this, but Seeman (191) and Westermarck (151) interpret the custom as
indicating Fijian "ideas of delicacy in married life," which, after
what has just been said, is decidedly amusing. If Fijians really were
capable of considering it indelicate to spend the night under the same
roof with their wives, it would indicate their indelicacy, not their
delicacy. The utterly unprincipled men doubtless had their reasons for
preferring to stay away from home, and probably their great contempt
for women also had something to do with the custom.
HOW CANNIBALS TREAT WOMEN
In Fiji, says Crawley (225), women are kept away from participation in
worship. "Dogs are excluded from some temples, women from all." In
many parts of the group woman is treated, according to Williams,
"as a beast of burden, not exempt from any kind of labor,
and forbidden to enter any temple; certain kinds of food she
may eat only by sufferance, and that after her husband has
finished. In youth she is the victim of lust, and in old
age, of brutality."
Girls are betrothed and married as children without consulting their
choice. "I have seen an old man of sixty living with two wives both
under fifteen years of age." Such of the young women as are acquainted
with foreign ways envy the favored women who wed "the man to whom
their spirit flies." Women are regarded as the property of the men,
and as an incentive to bravery they are "promised to such as shall, by
their prowess, render themselves deserving." They are used for paying
war-debts and other accounts; for instance, "the people submitted to
their chiefs and capitulated, offering two women, a basket of earth,
whales' teeth, and mats, to buy the reconciliation of the Rewans."
"A chief of Nandy, in Viti Levu, was very desirous to
have a musket which an American captain had shown him.
The price of the coveted piece was two hogs. The chief
had only one; but he sent on board with it a young
woman as an equivalent."
At weddings the prayer is that the bride may "bring forth male
children"; and when the son is born, one of the first lessons taught
him is "to strike his mother, lest he should grow up to be a coward."
When a husband died, it was the national custom to murder his wife,
often his mother too, to be his companions. To kill a defenceless
woman was an honorable deed.
"I once asked a man why he was called Koroi. 'Because,' he
replied, 'I, with several other men, found some women and
children in a cave, drew them out and clubbed them and was
then consecrated.'"
So far have sympathy and gallantry progressed in Fiji.
"Many examples might be given of most dastardly cruelty,
where women and even unoffending children were abominably
slain." "I have labored to make the murderers of females
ashamed of themselves; and have heard their cowardly
cruelty defended by the assertion that such victims
were doubly good--because they ate well, and because of
the distress it caused their husbands and friends."
"Cannibalism does not confine itself to one sex." "The
heart, the thigh, and the arm above the elbow, are
considered the greatest dainties."
One of these monsters, whom Williams knew, sent his wife to
fetch wood and collect leaves to line the oven. When she had
cheerfully and unsuspectingly obeyed his orders, he killed her, put
her in the oven, and ate her. There had been no quarrel; he was simply
hungering for a dainty morsel. Even after death the women are
subjected to barbarous treatment.
"One of the corpses was that of an old man of seventy,
another of a fine young woman of eighteen.... All were
dragged about and subjected to abuse too horrible and
disgusting to be described."[185]
FIJIAN MODESTY AND CHASTITY
With these facts in mind the reader is able to appreciate the humor of
the suggestion that it is "ideas of delicacy" that prevent Fijian
husbands from spending their nights at home. Equally amusing is the
blunder of Wilkes, who tells us (III., 356) that
"though almost naked, these natives have a great idea of
modesty, and consider it extremely indelicate to expose the
whole person. If either a man or woman should be discovered
without the 'maro' or 'liku,' they would probably be
killed."
Williams, the great authority on Fijians, says that
"Commodore Wilkes's account of Fijian marriages seems to be compounded
of Oriental notions and Ovalan yarns" (147). Having been a mere
globe-trotter, it is natural that he should have erred in his
interpretation of Fijian customs, but it is unpardonable in
anthropologists to accept such conclusions without examination. As a
matter of fact, the scant Fijian attire has nothing to do with
modesty; quite the contrary. Williams says (147) "that young unmarried
women wear a _liku_ little more than a hand's breadth in depth, which
does not meet at the hips by several inches;" and Seeman writes (168)
that Fijian girls
"wore nothing but a girdle of hibiscus fibres, about six
inches wide, dyed black, red, yellow, white, or brown, and
put on in such a coquettish way that one thought it must
come off every moment."
Westermarck, with whom for once we can agree, justly observes
(190) that such a costume "is far from being in harmony with our ideas
of modesty," and that its real purpose is to attract attention. As
elsewhere among such peoples the matter is strictly regulated by
fashion. "Both sexes," says Williams (143), "go unclad until the tenth
year and some beyond that. Chiefs' children are kept longest without
dress." Any deviation from a local custom, however ludicrous that
custom may be, seems to barbarians punishable and preposterous. Thus,
a Fijian priest whose sole attire consisted in a loin-cloth (_masi_)
exclaimed on hearing of the gods of the naked New Hebrideans: "Not
possessed of masi and pretend to have gods!"
The alleged chastity of Fijians is as illusive as their modesty. Girls
who had been betrothed as infants were carefully guarded, and adultery
savagely punished by clubbing or strangling; but, as I made clear in
the chapter on jealousy, such vindictive punishment does not indicate
a regard for chastity, but is merely revenge for infringement on
property rights. The national custom permitting a man whose conjugal
property had been molested to retaliate by subjecting the culprit's
wife to the same treatment in itself indicates an utter absence of the
notion of chastity as a virtue. Like the Papuan, Melanesian, and
Polynesian inhabitants of the Pacific Islands in general, the Fijians
were utterly licentious. Young women, says Williams (145) are the
victims of man's lust;
"all the evils of the most licentious sensuality are
found among this people. In the case of the chiefs,
these are fully carried out, and the vulgar follow as
far as their means will allow. But here, even at the
risk of making the picture incomplete, there may not be
given a faithful representation" (115).
When a band of warriors returns victorious, they are met by the women;
but "the words of the women's song may not be translated; nor are the
obscene gestures of their dance, in which the young virgins are
compelled to take part, or the foul insults offered to the corpses of
the slain, fit to be described.... On these occasions the ordinary
social restrictions are destroyed, and the unbridled and
indiscriminate indulgence of every evil lust and passion completes the
scene of abomination" (43). Yet,
"voluntary breach of the marriage contract is rare in
comparison with that which is enforced, as, for
instance, when the chief gives up the women of a town
to a company of visitors or warriors. Compliance with
this mandate is compulsory, but should the woman
conceal it from her husband, she would be severely
punished" (147).
EMOTIONAL CURIOSITIES
When Williams adds to the last sentence that "fear prevents
unfaithfulness more than affection, though I believe that instances of
the latter are numerous," we must not allow ourselves to be deceived
by a word. Fijian "affection" is a thing quite different from the
altruistic feeling we mean by the word. It may in a wife assume the
form of a blind attachment, like that of a dog to a cruel master, but
is not likely to go beyond that, since even the most primitive love
between parents and children is confessedly shallow, transient, or
entirely absent. Williams (154, 142) "noticed cases beyond number
where natural affection was wanting on both sides;" two-thirds of the
offspring are killed, "such children as are allowed to live are
treated with a foolish fondness"--and fondness is, as we have seen,
not an altruistic but an egoistic feeling. In writing about Fijian
friendships our author says (117):
"The high attainments which constitute friendship are known
to very few.... Full-grown men, it is true, will walk about
together, hand in hand, with boyish kindliness, or meet with
hugs and embraces; but their love, though specious, is
hardly real."
Obviously the keen-eyed missionary here had in mind the distinction
between sentimentality and sentiment. Sentimentality of a most
extraordinary kind is also found in the attitude of sons toward
parents. A Fijian considered it a mark of affection to club an aged
parent (157), and Williams has seen the breast of a ferocious savage
heave and swell with strong emotion on bidding a temporary farewell to
his aged father, whom he afterward strangled (117). Such are the
emotions of barbarians--shallow, fickle, capricious--as different from
our affection as a brook which dries up after every shower is from the
deep and steady current of a river which dispenses its beneficent
waters even in a drought.
FIJIAN LOVE-POEMS
In his article on Fijian poetry, referred to in the chapter on
Coyness, Sir Arthur Gordon informs us that among the "sentimental"
class of poems "there are not a few which are licentious, and many
more which, though not open to that reproach, are coarse and indecent
in their plain-spokenness." Others of the love-songs, he declares,
have "a ring of true feeling very unlike what is usually found in
similar Polynesian compositions, and which may be searched for in vain
in Gill's _Songs of the Pacific_." These songs, he adds, "more nearly
resemble European love-songs than any with which I am acquainted among
other semi-savage races;" and he finds in them "a ring of true passion
as if of love arising not from mere animal instinct but intelligent
association." I for my part cannot find in them even a hint at
supersensual altruistic sentiment. To give the reader a chance to
judge for himself I cite the following:
I
_He_.--I seek my lady in the house when the breeze blows,
I say to her, "Arrange the house, unfold the mats, bring the pillows,
sit down and let us talk together."
I say "Why do you provoke me? Be sure men despise coquetry such as
yours, though they disguise from you the scorn they feel. Nay, be
not angry; grant me to hold thy fairly tattooed hand. I am
distracted with love. I would fain weep if I could move thee to
tears."
_She_.--You are cruel, my love, and perverse. To think thus much of an
idle jest.
The setting sun bids all repose. Night is nigh.
II
I lay till dawn of day, peacefully asleep,
But when the sun rose, I rose too and ran without.
I hastily gathered the sweetest flowers I could find, shaking them
from the branches.
I came near the dwelling of my love with my sweet scented burden.
As I came near she saw me, and called playfully,
"What birds are you flying here so early?"
"I am a handsome youth and not a bird," I replied,
"But like a bird I am mateless and forlorn."
She took a garland of flowers off her neck and gave it to me
I in return gave her my comb; I threw it to her and ah me! it strikes
her face!
"What rough bark of a tree are you made from?" she cries. And so
saying she turned and went away in anger.
III
In the mountain war of 1876 there was in the native force on the
government side a handsome lad of the name of Naloko, much admired by
the ladies. One day, all the camp and the village of Nasauthoko were
found singing this song, which someone had composed:
"The wind blows over the great mountain of Magondro,
It blows among the rocks of Magondro.
The same wind plays in and raises the yellow locks of
Naloko.
Thou lovest me, Naloko, and to thee I am devoted,
Shouldst thou forsake me, sleep would forever forsake me.
Shouldst thou enfold another in thine arms,
All food would be to me as the bitter root of the via.
The world to me would become utterly joyless
Without thee, my handsome, slender waisted,
Strong-shouldered, pillar-necked lad."
SERENADES AND PROPOSALS
At the time when Williams studied the Fijians, their poetry consisted
of dirges, serenades, wake-songs, war-songs, and hymns for the dance
(99). Of love-songs addressed to individuals he says nothing. The
serenades do not come under that head, since, as he says (140), they
are practised at night "by _companies_ of men and women"--which takes
all the romance out of them. One detail of the romance of courtship
had, however, been introduced even in his time, through European
influence. "Popping the question" is, he says, of recent date, "and
though for the most part done by the men, yet the women do not
hesitate to adopt the same course when so inclined." No violent
individual preference seems to be shown. The following is a specimen
of a man's proposal.
Simioni Wang Ravou, wishing to bring the woman he wanted to a
decision, remarked to her, in the hearing of several other persons:
"I do not wish to have you because you are a good-looking
woman; that you are not. But a woman is like a necklace of
flowers--pleasant to the eye and grateful to the smell: but
such a necklace does not long continue attractive; beautiful
as it is one day, the next it fades and loses its scent. Yet
a pretty necklace tempts one to ask for it, but, if refused
no one will often repeat his request. If you love me, I love
you; but if not, neither do I love you: let it be a settled
thing" (150).
SUICIDES AND BACHELORS
Hearts are not likely to be broken by a refusal under such
circumstances, which bears out Williams's remark (148) that no
distinctive preference is apparent among these men and women. Under
such circumstances it may appear strange that some widowers should
commit suicide upon the death of a wife, as Seernan assures us they do
(193). Does not this indicate deep feeling? Not in a savage. In all
countries suicide is usually a sign of a weak intellect rather than of
strong feelings, and especially is this the case among the lower
races, where both men and women are apt to commit suicide in a moment
of excitement, often for the most trivial cause, as we shall see in
the next chapter. Williams tells us (106) of a chief on Thithia who
was addressed disrespectfully by a younger brother and who, rather
than live to have the insult made the topic of common talk, loaded his
musket, placed the muzzle at his breast, and pushing the trigger with
his toe, shot himself through the heart. He knew a similar case on
Vanua Levu.
"Pride and anger combined often lead to self-destruction.
... The most common method of suicide in Fiji is by jumping
over a precipice. This is, among the women, the fashionable
way of destroying themselves; but they sometimes resort to
the rope. Of deadly poisons they are ignorant, and drowning
would be a difficult thing; for from infancy they learn to
be almost as much at home in the water as on dry land."
In his book on the Melanesians Codrington says (243) that
"a wife jealous of her husband, or in any way incensed at
him, would in former times throw herself from a cliff or
tree, swim out to sea, hang or strangle herself, stab
herself with an arrow, or thrust one down her throat; and a
man jealous or quarrelling with his wife would do the like;
but now it is easy to go off with another's wife or husband
in a labor vessel to Queensland or Fiji."
There is one class of men in Fiji who are not likely to commit
suicide. They are the bachelors, who, though they are scorned and
frowned on in this life, must look forward to a worse fate after
death. There is a special god, named Nangganangga--"the bitter hater
of bachelors"--who watches for their souls, and so untiring is his
watch, as Williams was informed (206), that no unwedded spirit has
ever reached the Elysium of Fiji. Sly bachelors sometimes try to dodge
him by stealing around the edge of a certain reef at low tide; but he
is up to their tricks, seizes them and dashes them to pieces on the
large black stone, just as one shatters rotten fire-wood.
SAMOAN TRAITS
Cruel and degraded as the Fijians are, they mark a considerable
advance over the Australian savages. A further advance is to be noted
as we come to the Samoans. Cannibalism was indulged in occasionally in
more remote times, but not, as in Fiji, owing to a relish for human
flesh, but merely as a climax of hatred and revenge. To speak of
roasting a Samoan chief is a deadly insult and a cause for war
(Turner, 108). Sympathy was a feeling known to Samoans; their
treatment of the sick was invariably humane (141). And whereas in
Australia, Borneo, and Fiji, it is just as honorable to slay a female
as a male, Samoans consider it cowardly to kill a woman (196). Nor do
they practise infanticide; but this abstinence is counterbalanced by
the fact that the custom of destroying infants before birth prevailed
to a melancholy extent (79).
Yet here as everywhere we discover that the sexual refinement on which
the capacity for supersensual love depends comes last of the virtues.
The Rev. George Turner, who had forty years of experience among the
Polynesians, writes (125) that at their dances "all kinds of obscenity
in looks, language, and gesture prevailed; and often they danced and
revelled till daylight." The universal custom of tattooing was
connected with immoral practices (90). During the wedding ceremonies
of chiefs the friends of the bride
"took up stones and beat themselves until their heads
were bruised and bleeding. The ceremony to prove her
virginity which preceded this burst of feeling will not
bear the light of description.... Night dances and the
attendant immoralities wound up the ceremonies."
The same obscene ceremonies, he adds, were gone through, and this
custom, he thinks, had some influence in cultivating chastity,
especially among young women of rank who feared the disgrace and
beating that was the lot of faithless brides. Presents were also given
to those who had preserved their virtue; but the result of these
efforts is thus summed up by Turner (91):
"Chastity was ostensibly cultivated by both sexes; but it
was more a name than a reality. From their childhood their
ears were familiar with the most obscene conversation; and
as a whole family, to some extent, herded together,
immorality was the natural and prevalent consequence. There
were exceptions, especially among the daughters of persons
of rank; but they were the exceptions, not the rule.
Adultery, too, was sadly prevalent, although often severely
punished by private revenge."
When a chief took a wife, the bride's uncle or other relative had to
give up a daughter at the same time to be his concubine; to refuse
this, would have been to displease the household god. A girl's consent
was a matter of secondary importance: "She had to agree if her parents
were in favor of the match." Many marriages were made chiefly for the
sake of the attendant festivities, the bride being compelled to go
whether or not she was willing. In this way a chief might in a short
time get together a harem of a dozen wives; but most of them remained
with him only a short time:
"If the marriages had been contracted merely for the sake of
the property and festivities of the occasion, the wife was
not likely to be more than a few days or weeks with her
husband."
COURTSHIP PANTOMIME
Elopements occur in Samoa in some cases where parental consent is
refused. A vivid description of the pantomimic courtship preceding an
elopement has been given by Kubary (_Globus_, 1885). A young warrior
is surrounded by a bevy of girls. Though unarmed, he makes various
gestures as if spearing or clubbing an enemy, for which the girls
cheer him.
He then selects one, who at first seems coyly unwilling, and begins a
dance with her. She endeavors to look indifferent and forbidding,
while he, with longing looks and words, tries to win her regard.
Presently, yielding to his solicitations, she smiles, and opens her
arms for him. But he, foolishly, stops to reproach her for holding him
off so long. He shakes his head, rolls his eyes, and lo! when he gets
ready to grasp her at last, she eludes him again, with a mocking
laugh.
It is now his turn to be perverse. Revenge is in his mind and mien.
All his looks and gestures indicate contempt and malice, and he keeps
turning his back to her. She cannot endure this long; his scorn
overcomes her pride, and when he changes his attitude and once more
begins to entreat, she at last allows him to seize her and they dance
wildly. When finally the company separates for the evening meal, one
may hear the word _tóro_ whispered. It means "cane," and indicates a
nocturnal rendezvous in the cane-field, where lovers are safe from
observation. They find each other by imitating the owl's sound, which
excites no suspicion.
When they have met, the girl says: "You know that my parents hate you;
nothing remains but _awenga_." Awenga means flight; three nights later
they elope in a canoe to some small island, where they remain for a
few weeks till the excitement over their disappearance has subsided in
the village and their parents are ready to pardon them.
TWO SAMOAH LOVE-STORIES
Turner devotes six pages (98-104) to two Samoan love-stories. One of
them illustrates the devotion of a wife and her husband's ingratitude
and faithlessness, as the following summary will show:
There was a youth called Siati, noted for his singing. A
serenading god came along, threw down a challenge, and
promised him his fair daughter if he was the better singer.
They sang and Siati beat the god. Then he rode on a shark to
the god's home and the shark told him to go to the
bathing-place, where he would find the god's daughters. The
girls had just left the place when Siati arrived, but one of
them had forgotten her comb and came back to get it.
"Siati," said she, "however have you come here?" "I've come
to seek the song-god and get his daughter to wife." "My
father," said she, "is more of a god than man--eat nothing
he hands you, never sit on a high seat lest death should
follow, and now let us unite."
The god did not like his son-in-law and tried various ways
to destroy him, but his wife Puapae always helped him out of
the scrape, one time even making him cut her into two and
throw her into the sea to be eaten by a fish and find a ring
the god had lost and asked him to get. She was afterward
cast ashore with the ring; but Siati had not even kept
awake, and she scolded him for it. To save his life, she
subsequently performed several other miracles, in one of
which her father and sister were drowned in the sea. Then
she said to Siati: "My father and sister are dead, and all
on account of my love to you; you may go now and visit your
family and friends while I remain here, but see that you do
not behave unseemly." He went, visited his friends, and
forgot Puapae. He tried to marry again, but Puapae came and
stood on the other side. The chief called out, "Which is
your wife, Siati?" "The one on the right side." Puapae then
broke silence with, "Ah, Siati, you have forgotten all I did
for you;" and off she went. Siati remembered it all, darted
after her crying, and then fell down dead.
Apart from the amusing "suddenness" of the proposal and the marriage,
this tale is of interest as indicating that among the lower races
woman has--as many observations indicate--a greater capacity for
conjugal attachment than man.
The courtship scene cited above indicates an instinctive knowledge of
the strategic value of coyness and feigned displeasure. The following
story, which I condense from the versified form in which Turner gives
it, would seem to be a sort of masculine warning to women against the
danger and folly of excessive coyness, so inconvenient to the men:
Once there were two sisters, Sinaleuuna and Sinaeteva, who
wished they had a brother. Their wish was gratified; a boy
was born to their parents, but they brought him up apart,
and the sisters never saw him till one day, when he had
grown up, he was sent to them with some food. The girls were
struck with his beauty.
Afterwards they sat down and filled into a bamboo bottle the
liquid shadow of their brother. A report had come to them of
Sina, a Fijian girl who was so beautiful that all the swells
were running after her. Hearing this, and being anxious to
get a wife for their brother, they dressed up and went to
Fiji, intending to tell Sina about their brother. But Sina
was haughty; she slighted the sisters and treated them
shamefully. She had heard of the beauty of the young man,
whose name was Maluafiti ("Shade of Fiji"), and longed for
his coming, but did not know that these were his sisters.
The slighted girls got angry and went to the water when Sina
was taking her bath. From the bottle they threw out on the
water the shadow of their brother. Sina looked at the shadow
and was struck with its beauty. "That is my husband," she
said, "wherever I can find him." She called out to the
villagers for all the handsome young men to come and find
out of whom the figure in the water was the image. But the
shadow was more beautiful than any of these young men and it
wheeled round and round in the water whenever Maluafiti, in
his own land, turned about. All this time the sisters were
weeping and exclaiming:
"Oh, Maluafiti! rise up, it is day;
Your shadow prolongs our ill-treatment.
Maluafiti, come and talk with her face to face,
Instead of that image in the water."
Sina had listened, and now she knew it was the shadow of
Maluafiti. "These are his sisters too," she thought, "and I
have been ill-using them; forgive me, I've done wrong," But
the ladies were angry still. Maluafiti came in his canoe to
court Lady Sina, and also to fetch his sisters. When they
told him of their treatment he flew into an implacable rage.
Sina longed to get him; he was her heart's desire and long
she had waited for him. But Maluafiti frowned and would
return to his island, and off he went with his sisters. Sina
cried and screamed, and determined to follow swimming. The
sisters pleaded to save and to bring her, but Maluafiti
relented not and Sina died in the ocean.
PERSONAL CHARMS OF SOUTH SEA ISLANDERS
"Falling in love" with a person of the other sex on the mere report of
his or her beauty is a very familiar motive in the literature of
Oriental and mediaeval nations in particular. It is, therefore,
interesting to find such a motive in the Samoan story just cited. In
my view, as previously explained, beauty, among the lower races, means
any kind of attractiveness, sensual more frequently than esthetic. The
South Sea Islanders have been credited with considerable personal
charms, although it is now conceded that the early voyagers (to whom,
after an absence from shore of several months, almost any female must
have seemed a Helen) greatly exaggerated their beauty.
Captain Cook kept a level head. He found Tongan women less
distinguished from the men by their features than by their forms,
while in the case of Hawaiians even the figures were remarkably
similar (II., 144, 246). In Tahitian women he saw "all those delicate
characteristics which distinguish them from the men in other
countries." The Hawaiians, though far from being ugly, are "neither
remarkable for a beautiful shape, nor for striking features" (246).
The indolent, open-air, amphibious life led by the South Sea Islanders
was favorable to the development of fine bodies. Cook saw among the
Tongans "some absolutely perfect models of the human figure." But fine
feathers do not make fine birds. The nobler phases of love are not
inspired by fine figures so much as by beautiful and refined faces.
Polynesian and Melanesian features are usually coarse and sensual.
Hugo Zoller says that "the most beautiful Samoan woman would stand
comparison at best with a pretty German peasant girl;" and from my own
observations at Honolulu, and a study of many photographs, I conclude
that what he says applies to the Pacific Islanders in general. Edward
Reeves, in his recent volume on _Brown Men and Women_ (17-22), speaks
of "that fraud--the beautiful brown woman." He found her a "dream of
beauty and refinement" only in the eyes of poets and romancers; in
reality they were malodorous and vulgar. "All South Sea Island women
are very much the same."
"To compare the prettiest Tongan, Samoan, Tahitian, or even
Rotuman, to the plainest and most simply educated Irish,
French, or Colonial girl that has been decently brought up
is an insult to one's intelligence."
Wilkes (II., 22) hesitated to speak of the Tahitian females because he
could not discover their much-vaunted beauty:
"I did not see among them a single woman whom I could call
handsome. They have, indeed, a soft sleepiness about the
eyes, which may be fascinating to some, but I should rather
ascribe the celebrity their charms have obtained among
navigators to their cheerfulness and gaiety. Their figures
are bad, and the greater part of them are parrot-toed."
TAHITIANS AND THEIR WHITE VISITORS
Tongan girls are referred to in Reeves's book as "bundles of blubber."
It is not necessary to refer once more to the fact that "blubber" is
the criterion and ideal of "beauty" among the Pacific Islanders, as
among barbarians in general. Consequently their love cannot have been
ennobled by any of the refined, esthetic, intellectual, and moral
qualities which are embodied in a refined face and a daintily modelled
figure.
Coarsest of all the Polynesians were the Tahitians; yet even here
efforts have been made[186] to convey the impression that they owed
their licentious practices to the influence of white visitors. The
grain of truth in this assertion lies in the undoubted fact that the
whites, with their rum and trinkets and diseases, aggravated the evil;
but their contribution was but a drop in the ocean of iniquity which
existed ages before these islands were discovered by whites. Tahitian
traditions trace their vilest practices back to the earliest times
known. (Ellis, I., 183.) The first European navigators found the same
vices which later visitors deplored. Bougainville, who tarried at
Tahiti in 1767, called the island Nouvelle Cythère, on account of the
general immorality of the natives. Cook, when he visited the island in
the following year, declined to make his journal "the place for
exhibiting a view of licentious manners which could only serve to
disgust" his readers (212). Hawkesworth relates (II., 206) that the
Tahitians offered sisters and daughters to strangers, while breaches
of conjugal fidelity are punished only by a few hard words or a slight
beating:
"Among other diversions there is a dance called Timorodee,
which is performed by young girls, whenever eight or ten of
them can be collected together, consisting of motions and
gestures beyond imagination wanton, in the practice of which
they are brought up from their earliest childhood,
accompanied by words which, if it were possible, would more
explicitly convey the same ideas." "But there is a scale in
dissolute sensuality, which these people have ascended,
wholly unknown to every other nation whose manners have been
recorded from the beginning of the world to the present
hour, and which no imagination could possibly conceive."
This is the testimony of the earliest explorers who saw the natives
before whites could have possibly corrupted them.[187] The later
missionaries found no change for the better. Captain Cook already
referred to the Areois who made a business of depravity (220). "So
agreeable," he wrote,
"is this licentious plan of life to their disposition, that
the most beautiful of both sexes thus commonly spend their
youthful days, habituated to the practice of enormities
which would disgrace the most savage tribes."
Ellis, who lived several years on this island, declares that they were
noted for their humor and their jests, but the jests
"were in general low and immoral to a disgusting degree....
Awfully dark, indeed, was their moral character, and
notwithstanding the apparent mildness of their disposition,
and the cheerful vivacity of their conversation, no portion
of the human race was ever, perhaps, sunk lower in brutal
licentiousness and moral degradation than this isolated
people" (87).
He also describes the Areois (I., 185-89) as "privileged libertines,"
who travelled from place to place giving improper dances and
exhibitions, "addicted to every kind of licentiousness," and
"spreading a moral contagion throughout society," Yet they were "held
in the greatest respect" by all classes of the population. They had
their own gods, who were "monsters in vice," and "patronized every
evil practice perpetrated during such seasons of public festivity."
Did the white sailors also give the Tahitians their idea of Tahitian
dances, and professional Areois, and corrupt gods? Did they teach them
customs which Hawkesworth, himself a sailor, and accustomed to scenes
of low life, said "no imagination could possibly conceive?" Did the
European whites teach these natives to regard men as _ra_ (sacred) and
women as _noa_ (common)? Did they teach them all those other customs
and atrocities which the following paragraphs reveal?
HEARTLESS TREATMENT OF WOMEN
It can be shown that quite apart from their sensuality, the Tahitians
were too coarse and selfish to be able to entertain any of those
refined sentiments of love which the sentimentalists would have us
believe prevailed before the advent of the white man.
Love is often compared to a flower; but love cannot, like a flower,
grow on a dunghill. It requires a pure, chaste soul, and it requires
the fostering sunshine of sympathy and adoration. To a Tahitian a
woman was merely a toy to amuse him. He liked her as he liked his food
and drink, or his cool plunge into the waves, for the reason that she
pleased his senses. He could not feel sentimental love for her, since,
far from adoring her, he did not even respect or well-treat her. Ellis
(I., 109) relates that
"The men were allowed to eat the flesh of the pig, and of
fowls, and a variety of fish, cocoanuts, and plantains, and
whatever was presented as an offering to the gods; these the
females, on pain of death, were forbidden to touch, as it
was supposed they would pollute them. The fires at which the
men's food was cooked were also sacred, and were forbidden
to be used by the females. The baskets in which their
provision was kept, and the house in which the men ate, were
also sacred, and prohibited to the females under the same
cruel penalty. Hence the inferior food, both for wives,
daughters, etc., was cooked at separate fires, deposited in
distinct baskets, and eaten in lonely solitude by the
females, in little huts erected for the purpose."
Not content with this, when one man wished to abuse another in a
particularly offensive way he would use some expression referring to
this degraded condition of the women, such as "mayst thou be baked as
food for thy mother." Young children were deliberately taught to
disregard their mother, the father encouraging them in their insults
and violence (205). Cook (220) found that Tahitian women were often
treated with a degree of harshness, or rather "brutality," which one
would scarcely suppose a man would bestow on an object for whom he had
the least affection. Nothing, however, is more common than "to see the
men beat them without mercy" (II., 220). They killed more female than
male infants, because, as they said, the females were useless for war,
the fisheries, or the service of the temple. For the sick they had no
sympathy; at times they murdered them or buried them alive. (Ellis,
I., 340; II., 281.) In battle they gave no quarter, even to women or
children. (Hawkesworth, II., 244.)
"Every horrid torture was practised. The females experienced
brutality and murder, and the tenderest infants were perhaps
transfixed to the mother's heart by a ruthless
weapon--caught up by ruffian hands, and dashed against the
rocks or the trees--or wantonly thrown up into the air, and
caught on the point of the warrior's spear, where it writhed
in agony, and died, ... some having two or three infants
hanging on the spear they bore across their shoulders" (I.,
235-36). The bodies of females slain in war were treated
with "a degree of brutality as inconceivable as it was
detestable."
TWO STORIES OF TAHITIAN INFATUATION
While ferocity, cruelty, habitual wantonness and general coarseness
are fatal obstacles to sentimental love, they may be accompanied, as
we have seen, by the violent sensual infatuation which is so often
mistaken for love. Unsuccessful Tahitian suitors have been known to
commit suicide under the influence of revenge and despair, as is
stated by Ellis (I., 209), who also notes two instances of violent
individual preference.
The chief of Eimeo, twenty years old, of a mild disposition, became
attached to a Huahine girl and tendered proposals of marriage. She was
a niece of the principal roatira in the island, but though her family
was willing, she declined all his proposals. He discontinued his
ordinary occupations, and repaired to the habitation of the individual
whose favor he was so anxious to obtain. Here he appeared subject to
the deepest melancholy, and from morning to night, day after day, he
attended his mistress, performing humiliating offices with apparent
satisfaction. His disappointment finally became the topic of general
conversation. At length the girl was induced to accept him. They were
publicly married and lived very comfortably together for a few months,
when the wife died.
In the other instance the girl was the lover and the man unwilling. A
belle of Huahine became exceedingly fond of the society of a young man
who was temporarily staying on the island and living in the same
house. It was soon intimated to him that she wished to become his
companion for life. The intimation, however, was disregarded by the
young man, who expressed his intention to prosecute his voyage. The
young woman became unhappy, and made no secret of the cause of her
distress. She was assiduous in redoubling her efforts to please the
individual whose affection she was desirous to retain. At this period
Ellis never saw him either in the house of his friend or walking
abroad without the young woman by his side. Finding the object of her
attachment, who was probably about eighteen years of age, unmoved by
her attentions, she not only became exceedingly unhappy, but declared
that if she continued to receive the same indifference and neglect,
she would either strangle or drown herself. Her friends now
interfered, using their endeavors with the young man. He relented,
returned the attentions he had received, and the two were married.
Their happiness, however, was of short duration. The attachment which
had been so ardent in the bosom of the young woman before marriage was
superseded by a dislike as powerful, and though he seemed not unkind
to her, she not only treated him with insult but finally left him.
"The marriage tie," says Ellis (I., 213),
"was probably one of the weakest and most brittle that
existed among them; neither party felt themselves bound to
abide by it any longer than it suited their convenience. The
slightest cause was often sufficient to occasion or justify
the separation."
CAPTAIN COOK ON TAHITIAN LOVE
It has been said of Captain Cook that his maps and topographical
observations are characterized by remarkable accuracy. The same may be
said in general of his observations regarding the natives of the
islands he visited more than a century ago. He, too, noted some cases
of strong personal preference among Tahitians, but this did not
mislead him into attributing to them a capacity for true love:
"I have seen several instances where the women have
preferred personal beauty to interest, though I must own
that, even in these cases, they seem scarcely susceptible of
those delicate sentiments that are the result of mutual
affection; and I believe that there is less Platonic love in
Otaheite than in any other country."
Not that Captain Cook was infallible. When he came across the Tonga
group he gave it the name of "Friendly Islands," because of the
apparently amicable disposition of the natives toward him; but, as a
matter of fact, their intention was to massacre him and his crew and
take the two ships--a plan which would have been put in execution if
the chiefs had not had a dispute as to the exact mode and time of
making the assault.[188] Cook was pleased with the appearance and the
ways of these islanders; they seemed kind, and he was struck at seeing
"hundreds of truly European faces" among them. He went so far as to
declare that it was utterly wrong to call them savages, "for a more
civilized people does not exist under the sun." He did not stay with
them long enough to discover that they were morally not far above the
other South Sea Islanders.
WERE THE TONGANS CIVILIZED?
Mariner, who lived among the Tongans four years, and whose adventures
and observations were afterward recorded by Martin, gives information
which indicates that Cook was wrong when he said that a more civilized
people does not exist under the sun. "Theft, revenge, rape and
murder," Mariner attests (II., 140), "under many circumstances are not
held to be crimes." It is considered the duty of married women to
remain true to their husbands and this, Mariner thinks, is generally
done. Unmarried women "may bestow their favors upon whomsoever they
please, without any opprobrium" (165). Divorced women, like the
unmarried, may admit temporary lovers without the least reproach or
secresy.
"When a woman is taken prisoner (in war) she generally has
to submit; but this is a thing of course, and considered
neither an outrage nor dishonor; the only dishonor being to
be a prisoner and consequently a sort of servant to the
conqueror. Rape, though always considered an outrage, is not
looked upon as a crime unless the woman be of such rank as
to claim respect from the perpetrator" (166).
Many of their expressions, when angry, are
"too indelicate to mention." "Conversation is often
intermingled with allusions, even when women are present,
which could not be allowed in any decent society in
England."
Two-thirds of the women
"are married and are soon divorced, and are married again
perhaps three, four, or five times in their lives." "No man
is understood to be bound to conjugal fidelity; it is no
reproach to him to intermix his amours." "Neither have they
any word expressive of chastity except _nofo mow_, remaining
fixed or faithful, and which in this sense is only applied
to a married woman to signify her fidelity to her husband."
Even the married women of the lower classes had to yield to the wishes
of the chiefs, who did not hesitate to shoot a resisting husband.
(Waitz-Gerland, VI., 184.)
While these details show that Captain Cook overrated the civilization
of the Tongans, there are other facts indicating that they were in
some respects superior to other Polynesians, at any rate. The women
are capable of blushing, and they are reproached if they change their
lovers too often. They seem to have a dawning sense of the value of
chastity and of woman's claims to consideration. In Mariner's
description (I., 130) of a chief's wedding occurs this sentence:
"The dancing being over, one of the old matabooles (nobles)
addressed the company, making a moral discourse on the
subject of chastity--advising the young men to respect, in
all cases, the wives of their neighbors, and never to take
liberties even with an unmarried woman against her free
consent."
The wives of chiefs must not go about without attendants. Mariner
says, somewhat naïvely, that when a man has an amour, he keeps it
secret from his wife,
"not out of any fear or apprehension, but because it is
unnecessary to excite her jealousy, and make her perhaps
unhappy; for it must be said, to the honor of the men, that
they consult in no small degree, and in no few respects, the
happiness and comfort of their wives."
If Mariner tells the truth, it must be said in this respect that the
Tongans are superior to all other peoples we have so far considered in
this book. Though the husband's authority at home is absolute, and
though one girl in every three is betrothed in her infancy, men do
not, he says, make slaves or drudges of their wives, or sell their
daughters, two out of every three girls being allowed to choose their
own husbands--"early and often." The men do most of the hard work,
even to the cooking. "In Tonga," says Seemann (237), "the women have
been treated from time immemorial with all the consideration demanded
by their weaker and more delicate constitution, not being allowed to
perform any hard work." Cook also found (II., 149) that the province
allotted to the men was "far more laborious and extensive than that of
the women," whose employments were chiefly such as may be executed in
the house.
LOVE OF SCENERY
If we may rely on Mariner there is still another point in which the
Tongans appear to be far above other Polynesians, and barbarians in
general. He would have us believe that while they seldom sing about
love or war, they evince a remarkable love of nature (I., 293). He
declares that they sometimes ascend a certain rock to "enjoy the
sublime beauty of the surrounding scenery," or to reflect on the deeds
of their ancestors. He cites a specimen of their songs, which, he
says, is often sung by them; it is without rhymes or regular measure,
and is given in a sort of recitative beginning with this highly poetic
passage:
"Whilst we were talking of _Vaváoo toóa Licoo_, the women
said to us, let us repair to the back of the island to
contemplate the setting sun: there let us listen to the
warbling of the birds and the cooing of the wood-pigeon. We
will gather flowers ... and partake of refreshments ... we
will then bathe in the sea and ... anoint our skins in the
sun with sweet-scented oil, and will plait in wreaths the
flowers gathered at _Matáwlo_. And now, as we stand
motionless on the eminence over _Ana Mánoo_, the whistling
of the wind among the branches of the lofty _toa_ shall fill
us with a pleasing melancholy; or our minds shall be seized
with astonishment as we behold the roaring surf below,
endeavoring but in vain to tear away the firm rocks. Oh! how
much happier shall we be thus employed, than when engaged in
the troublesome and insipid affairs of life."
Inasmuch as Mariner did not take notes on the spot, but relied on his
memory after an absence of several years, it is to be feared that the
above passage may not be unadulterated Tongan. The rest of the song
has a certain Biblical tone and style in a few of the sentences which
arouse the suspicion (remember Ossian!) that a missionary may have
edited, if not composed, this song. However that may be, the remainder
of it gives us several pretty glimpses of Tongan amorous customs and
may therefore be cited, omitting a few irrelevant sentences:
"Alas! how destructive is war!--Behold! how it has rendered
the land productive of weeds, and opened untimely graves for
departed heroes! Our chiefs can now no longer enjoy the
sweet pleasure of wandering alone by moonlight in search of
their mistresses: but let us banish sorrow from our hearts:
since we are at war, we must think and act like the natives
of Fiji, who first taught us this destructive art. Let us
therefore enjoy the present time, for to-morrow perhaps or
the next day we may die. We will dress ourselves with _chi
coola_, and put bands of white _tappa_ round our waists: we
will plait thick wreaths of _jiale_ for our heads, and
prepare strings of _hooni_ for our necks, that their
whiteness may show off the color of our skins. Mark how the
uncultivated spectators are profuse of their applause!--But
now the dance is over: let us remain here to-night, and
feast and be cheerful, and to-morrow we will depart for the
_Móoa_. How troublesome are the young men, begging for our
wreaths of flowers, while they say in their flattery, 'See
how charming these young girls look coining from
_Licoo_!--how beautiful are their skins, diffusing around a
fragrance like the flowery precipice of _Mataloco_:' Let us
also visit _Licoo_; we will depart to-morrow."
A CANNIBAL BARGAIN
This story intimates, what may be true, that the Fijians first taught
the Tongans the art of war, and if the Tongans were not originally a
warlike people, we would have in that significant fact alone an
explanation of much of their superiority to other Pacific islanders.
The Fijians also appear to have taught them cannibalism, to which,
however, they never became so addicted as their teachers. Mariner (I.,
110-111) tells a story of two girls who, in a time of scarcity, agreed
to play a certain game with two young men on these conditions: if the
girls won, they were to divide a yam belonging to them and give half
to the men; if the two men won they were still to have their share of
the yam, but they were to go and kill a man and give half his body to
the girls. The men won and promptly proceeded to carry out their part
of the contract. Concealing themselves near a fortress, they soon saw
a man who came to fill his cocoanut shells with water. They rushed on
him with their clubs, brought the body home at the risk of their
lives, divided it and gave the young women the promised half.
THE HANDSOME CHIEFS
To Captain Cook the muscular Tongan men conveyed the suggestion of
strength rather than of beauty. They have, however, a legend which
indicates that they had a high opinion of their personal appearance.
It is related by Mariner (II., 129-34).
The god Langai dwelt in heaven with his two daughters. One
day, as he was going to attend a meeting of the gods, he
warned the daughters not to go to Tonga to gratify their
curiosity to see the handsome chiefs there. But hardly had
he gone when they made up their minds to do that very thing.
"Let us go to Tonga," they said to each other; "there our
celestial beauty will be appreciated more than here where
all the women are beautiful." So they went to Tonga and, arm
in arm, appeared before the feasting nobles, who were
astounded at their beauty and all wanted the girls. Soon the
nobles came to blows, and the din of battle was so great
that it reached the ears of the gods. Langai was despatched
to bring back and punish the girls. When he arrived, one of
them had already fallen a victim to the contending chiefs.
The other he seized, tore off her head, and threw it into
the sea, where it was transformed into a turtle.
HONEYMOON IN A CAVE
On the west coast of the Tongan Island of Hoonga there is a peculiar
cave, the entrance to which is several feet beneath the surface of the
sea, even at low water. It was first discovered by a young chief,
while diving after a turtle. He told no one about it, and luckily, as
we shall see. He was secretly enamoured of a beautiful young girl, the
daughter of a certain chief, but as she was betrothed to another man,
he dared not tell her of his love. The governor of the islands was a
cruel tyrant, whose misdeeds at last incited this girl's father to
plot an insurrection. The plot unfortunately was discovered and the
chief with all his relatives, including the beautiful girl, condemned
to be taken out to sea in a canoe and drowned.
No time was to be lost. The lover hastened to the girl, informed her
of her danger, confessed his love, and begged her to come with him to
a place of safety. Soon her consenting hand was clasped in his; the
shades of evening favored their escape; while the woods afforded her
concealment until her lover had brought a canoe to a lonely part of
the beach. In this they speedily embarked, and as he paddled her
across the smooth water he related his discovery of the cavern
destined to be her asylum till an opportunity offered of conveying her
to the Fiji Islands.
When they arrived at the rock he jumped into the water, and she
followed close after; they rose into the cavern, safe from all
possibility of discovery, unless he should be watched. In the morning
he returned to Vavaoo to bring her mats to lie on, and _gnatoo_
(prepared bark of mulberry-tree) for a change of dress. He gave her as
much of his time as prudence allowed, and meanwhile pleaded his tale
of love, to which she was not deaf; and when she confessed that she,
too, had long regarded him with a favorable eye (but a sense of duty
had caused her to smother her growing fondness), his measure of
happiness was full.
This cave was a very nice place for a honeymoon, but hardly for a
permanent residence. So the young chief contrived a way of getting her
out of the cavernous prison. He told his inferior chiefs that he
wanted them to take their families and go with him to Fiji. A large
canoe was soon got ready, and as they embarked he was asked if he
would not take a Tongan wife with him. He replied, No! but that he
should probably find one by the way. They thought this a joke, but
when they came to the spot where the cave was, he asked them to wait
while he went into the sea to fetch his wife. As he dived, they began
to suspect he was insane, and as he did not soon reappear they feared
he had been devoured by a shark.
While they were deliberating what to do, all at once, to their great
surprise, he rose to the surface and brought into the canoe a
beautiful young woman who, they all supposed, had been drowned with
her family. The chief now told the story of the cave, and they
proceeded to Fiji, where they lived some years, until the cruel
governor of Tonga died, whereupon they returned to that island.
A HAWAIIAN CAVE-STORY
In an interesting book called _The Legends and Myths of Hawaii,_ by
King Kalakaua, there is a tale called "Kaala, the Flower of Lanai; A
Story of the Spouting Cave of Palikaholo," which also involves the use
of a submarine cave, but has a tragic ending. It takes the King
fifteen pages to tell it, but the following condensed version retains
all the details of the original that relate directly to love:
Beneath a bold rocky bluff on the coast of Lanai there is a
cave whose only entrance is through the vortex of a
whirlpool. Its floor gradually rises from the water, and is
the home of crabs, polypi, sting-rays, and other noisome
creatures of the deep, who find here temporary safety from
their larger foes. It was a dangerous experiment to dive
into this cave. One of the few who had done it was Oponui, a
minor chief of Lanai Island. He had a daughter named Kaala,
a girl of fifteen, who was so beautiful that her admirers
were counted by the hundreds.
It so happened that the great monarch Kamehameha I. paid a
visit to Lanai about this time (near the close of the
eighteenth century). He was received with enthusiasm, and
among those who brought offerings of flowers was the fair
Kaala. As she scattered the flowers she was seen by
Kaaialii, one of the King's favorite lieutenants. "He was of
chiefly blood and bearing" with sinewy limbs and a handsome
face, and when he stopped to look into the eyes of Kaala and
tell her that she was beautiful, she thought the words,
although they had been frequently spoken to her by others,
had never sounded so sweetly to her before. He asked her for
a simple flower and she twined a _lei_ for his neck. He
asked her for a smile, and she looked up into his face and
gave him her heart.
After they had seen each other a few times the lieutenant
went to his chief and said:
"I love the beautiful Kaala, daughter of Oponui. Give her to
me for a wife."
"The girl is not mine to give," replied the King. "We must
be just. I will send for her father. Come to-morrow."
Oponui was not pleased when he was brought before the King
and heard his request. He had once, in war, narrowly escaped
death at the hand of Kaaialii and now felt that he would
rather feed his daughter to the sharks than give her to the
man who had sought his life. Still, as it would have been
unwise to openly oppose the King's wishes, he pretended to
regard the proposal with favor, but regretted that his
daughter was already promised to another man. He was,
however, willing, he added, to let the girl go to the victor
in a contest with bare hands between the two suitors.
The rival suitor was Mailou, a huge, muscular savage known
as the "bone breaker." Kaala hated and feared him and had
taken every occasion to avoid him; but as her father was
anxious to secure so strong an ally, his desire finally had
prevailed against her aversion.
Kaaialii was less muscular than his rival, but he had
superior cunning, and thus it happened that in the fierce
contest which followed he tripped up the "bone-breaker,"
seized his hair as he fell, placed his knees against his
back, and broke his spine.
Breaking away from her disappointed father Kaala sprang
through the crowd and threw herself into the victor's arms.
The king placed their hands together and said: "You have won
her nobly. She is now your wife. Take her with you."
But Oponui's wrath was greater than before, and he plotted
revenge. On the morning after the marriage he visited Kaala
and told her that her mother was dangerously ill at Mahana
and wanted to see her before she died. The daughter followed
him, though her husband had some misgivings. Arriving at the
seashore, the father told her, with a wild glare in his
eyes, that he had made up his mind to hide her down among
the gods of the sea until the hated Kaaialii had left the
island, when he would bring her home again. She screamed and
tried to escape, but he gathered the struggling girl in his
arms and jumped with her into the circling waters above the
Spouting Cave. Sinking a fathom or so, they were sucked
upward into the cave, where he placed her just above the
reach of the water among the crabs and eels, with scarcely
light enough to see them. He offered to take her back if she
would promise to accept the love of the chief of Olowalu and
allow Kaaialii to see her in the embrace of another. But she
declared she would sooner perish in the cave. Having warned
her that if she attempted to escape she would surely be
dashed against the rocks and become the food of the sharks,
he returned to the shore.
Kaaialii awaited his wife's return with his heart aching for
her warm embrace. He recalled the sullen look of Oponui, and
panic seized him. He climbed a hill to watch for her return
and his heart beat with joy when he saw a girl returning
toward him. He thought it was Kaala, but it was Ua, the
friend of Kaala and almost her equal in beauty. Ua told him
that his wife had not been seen at her mother's, and as her
father had been seen taking her through the forest, it was
feared she would not be allowed to return.
With an exclamation of rage Kaaialii started down toward the
coast. Here he ran across Oponui and tried to seize him by
the throat; but Oponui escaped and ran into a temple, where
he was safe from an attack. In a paroxysm of rage and
disappointment Kaaialii threw himself upon the ground
cursing the _tabu_ that barred him from his enemy. His
friends took him to his hut, where Ua sought to soothe and
comfort him. But he talked and thought alone of Kaala, and
after partaking hastily of food, started out to find her. Of
every one he met he inquired for Kaala, and called her name
in the deep valleys and at the hilltops.
Near the sacred spring of Kealia he met a white-haired
priest who took pity on him and told him where Kaala had
been hidden. "The place is dark and her heart is full of
terror. Hasten to her, but tarry not, or she will be the
food of the creatures of the sea."
Thanking the priest, Kaaialii hastened to the bluff. With
the words "Kaala, I come!" he sprang into the whirlpool and
disappeared. The current sucked him up and suddenly he found
himself in a chilly cave, feeling his way on the slimy floor
by the dim light. Suddenly a low moan reached his ear. It
was the voice of Kaala. She was lying near him, her limbs
bruised with fruitless attempts to leave the cave, and
no longer strong enough to drive away the crabs that were
feeding upon her quivering flesh. He lifted her up and bore
her toward the light. She opened her eyes and whispered, "I
am dying, but I am happy, for you are here." He told her he
would save her, but she made no response,
and when he put his hand on her heart he found she was dead.
For hours he held her in his arms. At length he was aroused
by the splashing of water. He looked up and there was Ua,
the gentle and beautiful friend of Kaala, and behind her the
King Kamehameha. Kaaialii rose and pointed to the body
before him. "I see," said the King, softly, "the girl is
dead. She could have no better burial-place. Come, Kaaialii,
let us leave it." But Kaaialii did not move. For the first
time in his life he refused to obey his King. "What! would
you remain here?" said the monarch. "Would you throw your
life away for a girl? There are others as fair. Here is Ua;
she shall be your wife, and I will give you the valley of
Palawai. Come, let us leave at once lest some angry god
close the entrance against us!"
"Great chief," replied Kaaialii, "you have always been kind
and generous to me, and never more so than now. But hear me;
my life and strength are gone. Kaala was my life, and she is
dead. How can I live without her? You are my chief. You have
asked me to leave this place and live. It is the first
request of yours I have ever disobeyed. It shall be the
last!" Then seizing a stone, with a swift, strong blow he
crushed in brow and brain, and fell dead upon the body of
Kaala.
A wail of anguish went up from Ua. Kamehameha spoke not,
moved not. Long he gazed upon the bodies before him; and his
eye was moist and his strong lips quivered as, turning away
at last, he said: "He loved her indeed!"
Wrapped in _kapa_, the bodies were laid side by side and
left in the cavern; and there to-day may be seen the bones
of Kaala, the flower of Lanai, and of Kaaialii, her knightly
lover, by such as dare seek the passage to them through the
whirlpool of Palikaholo.
IS THIS ROMANTIC LOVE?
These two Polynesian cave-stories are of interest from several points
of view. In Waitz-Gerland (VI., 125), the Tongan tale is referred to
as "a very romantic love-story," and if the author had known the
Hawaiian story he would have had even more reason to call it romantic.
But is either of these tales a story of romantic love? Is there
evidence in them of anything but strong selfish passion or eagerness
to possess one of the other sex? Is there any trace of the _higher_
phases of love--of unselfish attachment, sympathy, adoration, as of a
superior being, purity, gallantry, self-sacrifice? Not one. The
Hawaiian Kaaialii does indeed smash his own skull when he finds his
bride is dead. But that is a very different thing from sacrificing
himself to save or please _her_. We have seen, too, on how slight a
provocation these islanders will commit suicide, an act which proves a
weak intellect rather than strong feeling. A man capable of feeling
true love would have brains enough to restrain himself from committing
such a silly and useless act in a fit of disappointment.
There is every reason to believe, moreover, that these stories have
been embroidered by the narrators. In the vast majority of cases the
men who have had an opportunity to note down primitive love-stories
unfortunately did not hesitate to disguise their native flavor with
European sauce in order to make them more palatable to the general
public. This makes them interesting stories, made realistic by the use
of local color, but utterly mars them for the scientific epicure who
often relishes most what is caviare to the general. Take that Hawaiian
story. It is supposed to be told by King Kalakaua himself. At least,
the book of _Legend and Myths_ has "By His Hawaiian Majesty" on the
title page. Beneath those words we read that the book was edited by
the Hon. E.M. Daggett; and in the preface acknowledgment is made to as
many as eight persons "for material in the compilation of many of the
legends embraced in this volume." Thus there are ten cooks, and the
question arises, "did they carefully and conscientiously tell these
stories exactly as related to them by aboriginal Hawaiians, free from
missionary influences, or did they flavor the broth with European
condiments?" To this question no answer is given in the book, but
there is plenty of evidence that either the King himself, in order to
make his people as much like ours as possible, or his foreign
assistants, embellished them with sentimental details. To take only
two significant points: it sounds very sentimental to be told that the
girl Ua, after Kaaialii had jumped into the vortex "wailed upon the
winds a requiem of love and grief," but a native Hawaiian has no more
notion of the word requiem than he has of a syllogism. Then again, the
story is full of expressions like this: "His _heart beat with joy_,
for he thought she was Kaala;" or "He asked her for a smile and she
_gave him her heart_." Such phrases mislead not only the general
reader but careless anthropologists into the belief that the lower
races feel and express their love just as we do. As a matter of fact,
Polynesians do not attribute feelings to the heart. Ellis (II., 311),
could not even make them understand what he was talking about when he
tried to explain to them our ideas regarding the heart as a seat of
moral feeling. The fact that our usage in this respect is a mere
convention, not based on physiological facts, makes it all the more
reprehensible to falsify psychology by adorning aboriginal tales with
the borrowed plumes and phrases of civilization.
VAGARIES OF HAWAIIAN FONDNESS
It is quite possible that the events related in the cave-story did
occur; but a Hawaiian, untouched by missionary influences, would have
told them very differently. It is very much more likely, however, that
if a Hawaiian had found himself in the predicament of Kaaialii, he
would have sympathized with the king's contemptuous speech: "What!
would you throw your life away for a girl? There are others as fair.
Here is Ua; she shall be your wife." This would have been much more in
accordance with what observers have told us of Hawaiian
"heart-affairs." "The marriage tie is loose," says Ellis (IV., 315),
"and the husband can dismiss his wife on any occasion." "The loves of
the Hawaiians are usually ephemeral," says "Häolé," the author of
_Sandwich Island Notes_ (267). The widow seldom or never plants a
solitary flower over the grave of her lord. She may once visit the
mound that marks the repose of his ashes, but never again, unless by
accident. It not unfrequently happens that a second husband is
selected while the remains of the first are being conveyed to his
"long home." Hawaiian women seem more attached to pigs and puppies
than to their husbands or even their children. The writer just quoted
says whole volumes might be written concerning the "silly affection"
of the women for animals. They carry them in their bosoms, and do not
hesitate to suckle them. It is one of their duties to drive pigs to
the market, and one day "Häolé" came across a group of native women
who had taken off their only garments and soaked them in water to cool
their dear five hundred-pounder, while others were fanning him! As
late as 1881 Isabella Bird wrote (213) that
"the crime of infanticide, which formerly prevailed to
a horrible extent, has long been extinct; but the love
of pleasure and the dislike of trouble which partially
actuated it are apparently still stronger among the
women than the maternal instinct, and they do not take
the trouble necessary to rear infants.... I have
nowhere seen such tenderness lavished upon infants as
upon the pet dogs that the women carry about with
them."
HAWAIIAN MORALS
Hawaiians did not treat women as brutally as Fijians do; yet how far
they were from respecting, not to speak of adoring, them, is obvious
from the contemptuous and selfish taboos which forbade women, on
penalty of death, to eat any of the best and commonest articles of
food, such as bananas, cocoanuts, pork, turtle; or refused them
permission to eat with their lords and masters, or to share in divine
worship, because their touch would pollute the offerings to the gods.
The grossness of the Hawaiian erotic taste is indicated by "Häolé's"
reference (123) to "the immense corpulency of some of the old Hawaiian
queens, a feature which, in those days, was deemed the _ne plus ultra_
of female beauty." Incest was permitted to the chiefs, and the people
vied with their rulers in the grossest sensuality.
"Nearly every night, with the gathering darkness,
crowds would retire to some favorite spot, where, amid
every species of sensual indulgence, they would revel
until the morning twilight" (412).
"In Hawaii, whether the woman was married or single,
she would have been thought very churlish and boorish
if she refused any favor asked by a male friend of the
family,"
says E. Tregear;[189] and in Dibble's _History of the Sandwich
Islands_ (126-27) we read:
"For husbands to interchange wives, or for wives to
interchange husbands, was a common act of friendship,
and persons who would not do this were not considered
on good terms of sociability. For a man or a woman to
refuse a solicitation for illicit intercourse was
considered an act of meanness, and so thoroughly was
this sentiment wrought into their minds that, even to
the present day, they seem not to rid themselves of the
feeling of meanness in making a refusal."
The Hawaiian word for marriage is _hoao_, meaning "trial." It was also
customary for a married woman to have an acknowledged lover known as
_punula_. The word _hula hula_ is familiar the world over as the name
of an improper dance, but it is nothing to what it used to be. The
famous cave Niholua was consecrated to it. In past generations
"warriors came here to revel with their paramours. The
Tartarean gloom was slightly relieved by torches
ingeniously formed of strings of the candle-nut.
Beneath this rugged roof, and amid this darkness--their
faces strangely reflecting the feeble torch-light--and
divested of every particle of apparel, they
promiscuously united in dancing the _hula hula_ (the
licentious dance).... Wives were exchanged, and so were
concubines; fathers despoiled their own daughters, and
brothers deemed it no crime to perpetrate incest."
Waitz-Gerland (VI., 459) cite Wise as attesting that "in 1848 the
missionaries gave up a girls' school, because it was impossible to
preserve the virtue of their pupils," and Steen Bill wrote that in
1846 seventy per cent of all the crimes punished were of a lewd
character, and that on the whole island there was not a chaste girl of
eleven years of age. Isabella Bird wrote (169) that "the Hawaiian
women have no notions of virtue as we understand it, and if there is
to be any future for this race it must come through a higher
morality."
THE HELEN OF HAWAII
As there was practically no difference between married and unmarried
women in Hawaii, it is not strange that cases of abduction of wives
should have occurred. The following story, related in Kalakana's book,
probably suffered no great change at the hands of the recorder. I give
a condensed version of it:
In the twelfth century, the close of the second era of
migration from Tahiti and Samoa, there lived a girl
named Hina, noted as the most beautiful maiden on the
islands. She married the chief Hakalanileo, and had two
children by him. Reports of her beauty had excited the
fancy of Kaupeepee, the chief of Haupu. He went to test
the reports with his own eyes, and saw that they were
not exaggerated. So he hovered around the coast of Hilo
watching for a chance to abduct her. It came at last.
One day, after sunset, when the moon was shining, Hina
repaired to the beach with her women to take a bath. A
signal was given--it is thought by the first wife of
Hina's husband--and, not long after, a light but
heavily manned canoe dashed through the surf and shot
in among the bathers. The women screamed and started
for the shore. Suddenly a man leaped from the canoe
into the water. There was a brief struggle, a stifled
scream, a sharp word of command, and a moment later
Kaupeepee was again in the canoe with the nude and
frantic Hina in his arms. The boatmen lost no time to
start; they rowed all night and in the morning reach
Haupu.
Hina had been wrapped in folds of soft _kapa_, and she
spent the night sobbing, not knowing what was to become
of her. When shore was reached she was borne to the
captor's fortress and given an apartment provided with
every luxury. She fell asleep from fatigue, and when
she awoke and realized where she was it was not without
a certain feeling of pride that she reflected that her
beauty had led the famous and mighty Kaupeepee to
abduct her.
After partaking of a hearty breakfast, she sent for him
and he came promptly. "What can I do for you ?" he
asked. "Liberate me!" was her answer. "Return me to my
children!" "Impossible!" was the firm reply. "Then kill
me," she exclaimed. The chief now told her how he had
left home specially to see her, and found her the most
beautiful woman in Hawaii. He had risked his life to
get her. "You are my prisoner," he said, "but not more
than I am yours. You shall leave Haupu only when its
walls shall have been battered down and I lie dead
among the ruins."
Hina saw that resistance was useless. He had soothed
her with flattery; he was a great noble; he was gentle
though brave. "How strangely pleasant are his words and
voice," she said to herself. "No one ever spoke so to
me before. I could have listened longer." After that
she hearkened for his footsteps and soon accepted him
as her lover and spouse.
For seventeen years she remained a willing prisoner. In
the meantime her two sons by her first husband had
grown up; they ascertained where their mother was,
demanded her release, and on refusal waged a terrible
war which at last ended in the death of Kaupeepee and
the destruction of his walls.
INTERCEPTED LOVE-LETTERS
The Rev. H.T. Cheever prints in his book on the Sandwich Islands
(226-28) a few amusing specimens of the love-letters exchanged between
the native lads of the Lahainaluna Seminary and certain lasses of
Lahaina. The following ones were intercepted by the missionaries. The
first was penned by a girl:
"Love to you, who speakest sweetly, whom I did kiss. My
warm affections go out to you with your love. My mind
is oppressed in consequence of not having seen you
these times. Much affection for thee dwelling there
where the sun causeth the head to ache. Pity for thee
in returning to your house, destitute as you supposed.
I and she went to the place where we had sat in the
meeting-house, and said she, Let us weep. So we two
wept for you, and we conversed about you.
"We went to bathe in the bread-fruit yard; the wind
blew softly from Lahainaluna, and your image came down
with it. We wept for you. Thou only art our food when
we are hungry. We are satisfied with your love.
"It is better to conceal this; and lest dogs should
prowl after it, and it should be found out, when you
have read this letter, tear it up."
The next letter is from one of the boys to a girl:
"Love to thee, thou daughter of the Pandanus of
Lanahuli. Thou _hina hina_, which declarest the
divisions of the winds.[190] Thou cloudless sun of the
noon. Thou most precious of the daughters of the earth.
Thou beauty of the clear nights of Lehua. Thou
refreshing fountain of Keipi. Love to thee, O Pomare,
thou royal woman of the Pacific here. Thou art glorious
with ribbons flying gracefully in the gentle breeze of
Puna. Where art thou, my beloved, who art anointed with
the fragrance of glory? Much love to thee, who dost
draw out my soul as thou dwellest in the shady
bread-fruits of Lahaina. O thou who art joined to my
affection, who art knit to me in the hot days of
Lahainaluna!
"Hark! When I returned great was my love. I was
overwhelmed with love like one drowning. When I lay
down to sleep I could not sleep; my mind floated after
thee. Like the strong south wind of Lahaina, such is
the strength of my love to thee, when it comes. Hear
me; at the time the bell rings for meeting, on
Wednesday, great was my love to you. I dropped my hoe
and ran away from my work. I secretly ran to the stream
of water, and there I wept for my love to thee.
Hearken, my love resembles the cold water far inland.
Forsake not thou this our love. Keep it quietly, as I
do keep it quietly here."
Here is another from one of the students in the missionary school:
"Love to thee, by reason of whom my heart sleeps not
night nor day, all the days of my dwelling here. O thou
beautiful one, for whom my love shall never cease. Here
also is this--at the time I heard you were going to
Waihekee, I was enveloped in great love. And when I had
heard you had really gone, great was my regret for you,
and exceeding great my love. My appearance was like a
sick person who cannot answer when spoken to. I would
not go down to the sea again, because I supposed you
had not returned. I feared lest I should see all the
places where you and I conversed together, and walked
together, and I should fall in the streets on account
of the greatness of my love to you. I however did go
down, and I was continually longing with love to you.
Your father said to me, Won't you eat with us? I
refused, saying I was full. But the truth was I had
eaten nothing. My great love to you, that was the thing
which could alone satisfy me. Presently, however, I
went to the place of K----, and there I heard you had
arrived. I was a little refreshed by hearing this. But
my eyes still hung down. I longed to see you, but could
not find you, though I waited till dark. Now, while I
am writing, my tears are dropping down for you; now my
tears are my friends, and my affection to you, O thou
who wilt forever be loved. Here, also is this: consent
thou to my desire, and write me, that I may know your
love. My love to you is great, thou splendid flower of
Lana-kahula."
Cheever seems to accept these letters as proof that love is universal,
and everywhere the same. He overlooks several important
considerations. Were these letters penned by natives or by
half-castes, with foreign blood in their veins and inherited
capacities of feeling? Unless we know that, no scientific deduction is
allowable. These natives are very imitative. They learn our music
easily and rapidly, and with the art of writing and reading they
readily acquire our amorous phrases. A certain Biblical tone,
suggesting the Canticles, is noticeable. The word "heart" is used in a
way foreign to Polynesian thought, and apart from these details, is
there anything in these letters that goes beyond selfish longing and
craving for enjoyment? Is there anything in them that may not be
summed up in the language of appetite: "Thou art very desirable--I
desire thee--I grieve, and weep, and refuse to eat, because I cannot
possess thee now?" Such longing, so intense and fiery[191] that it
seems as if all the waters of the ocean could not quench it,
constitutes a phase of all amorous passion, from the lowest up to the
highest. Philosophers have, indeed, disputed as to which is the more
violent and irrepressible, animal passion or sentimental love.
Schopenhauer believed the latter, Lichtenberg the former.[192]
MAORIS OF NEW ZEALAND
Hawaii has brought us quite near the coast of America, whose red men
will form the subject of our next chapter. But, before passing on to
the Indians, we must once more return to the neighborhood of
Australia, to the island of New Zealand, which offers some points of
great interest to a student of love and a collector of love-stories.
We have seen that the islands of Torres Straits, north of Australia,
have natives and customs utterly unlike those of Australia. We shall
now see that south of Australia, too, there is an island (or rather
two islands), whose inhabitants are utterly un-Australian in manners
and customs, as well as in origin. The Maoris (that is, natives) of
New Zealand have traditions that their ancestors came from Hawaii
(Hawaiki), disputes about land having induced them to emigrate. They
may have done so by way of other islands, on some of their large
canoes, aided by the trade winds.[193] The Maoris are certainly
Polynesians, and they resemble Hawaiians and Tongans in many respects.
Their ferocity and cannibalism put them on a level with Fijians,
making them a terror to navigators, while in some other respects they
appear to have been somewhat superior to most of their Polynesian
cousins, the Tongans excepted. The Maoris and Tongans best bear out
Waitz-Gerland's assertion that "the Polynesians rank intellectually
considerably higher than all other uncivilized peoples." The same
authorities are charmed by the romantic love-stories of the Maoris,
and they certainly are charming and romantic. Sir George Grey's
_Polynesian Mythology_ contains four of these stories, of which I will
give condensed versions, taking care, as usual, to preserve all
pertinent details and intimations of higher qualities.
THE MAIDEN OF ROTORUA
There was a girl of high rank named Hine-Moa. She was of
rare beauty, and was so prized by her family that they would
not betroth her to anyone. Such fame attended her beauty and
rank that many of the men wanted her; among them a chief
named Tutanekai and his elder brothers.
Tutanekai had built an elevated balcony where, with his
friend Tiki, he used to play the horn and the pipe at night.
On calm nights the music was wafted to the village and
reached the ears of the beautiful Hine-Moa, whose heart was
gladdened by it, and who said to herself, "Ah, that is the
music of Tutanekai which I hear."
She and Tutanekai had met each other on those occasions when
all the people of Eotorua come together. In those great
assemblies they had often glanced each at the other, to the
heart of each of them the other appeared pleasing, and
worthy of love, so that in the breast of each there grew up
a secret passion for the other. Nevertheless, Tutanekai
could not tell whether he might venture to approach Hine-Moa
to take her hand, to see would she press his in return,
because, said he, "Perhaps I may be by no means agreeable to
her;" on the other hand, Hine-Moa's heart said to her, "If
you send one of your female friends to tell him of your
love, perchance he will not be pleased with you."
However, after they had thus met for many, many days, and
had long fondly glanced at each other, Tutanekai sent a
messenger to Hine-Moa, to tell of his love; and when
Hine-Moa had seen the messenger, she said, "Eh-hu! have we
then each loved alike?"
Some time after this, a dispute arose among the brothers as
to which of them the girl loved. Each one claimed that he
had pressed the hand of Hine-Moa and that she had pressed
his in return. But the elder brothers sneered at Tutanekai's
claims (for he was an illegitimate son), saying, "Do you
think she would take any notice of such a lowborn fellow as
you?" But in reality Tutanekai had already arranged for an
elopement with the girl, and when she asked, "What shall be
the sign by which I shall know that I should then run to
you?" he said to her, "A trumpet will be heard sounding
every night, it will be I who sound it, beloved--paddle then
your canoe to that place."
Now always about the middle of the night Tutanekai and his
friend went up into their balcony and played. Hine-Moa heard
them and vastly desired to paddle over in her canoe; but her
friends suspecting something, had all the canoes on the
shore of the lake. At last, one evening, she again heard the
horn of Tutanekai, and the young and beautiful chieftainess
felt as if an earthquake shook her to make her go to the
beloved of her heart. At last she thought, perhaps I might
be able to swim across. So she took six large, dry, empty
gourds as floats, lest she should sink in the water, threw
oft her clothes, and plunged into the water. It was dark,
and her only guide was the sound of her lover's music.
Whenever her limbs became tired she rested, the gourds
keeping her afloat. At last she reached the island on which
her lover dwelt. Near the shore there was a hot spring, into
which she plunged, partly to warm her trembling body, and
partly also, perhaps, from modesty, at the thoughts of
meeting Tutanekai.
Whilst the maiden was thus warming herself in the hot
spring, Tutanekai happened to feel thirsty and sent his
servant to fetch him a calabash of water. The servant came
to dip it from the lake near where the girl was hiding. She
called out to him in a gruff voice, like that of a man,
asking him for some to drink, and he gave her the calabash,
which she purposely threw down and broke. The servant went
back for another calabash and again she broke it in the same
way. The servant returned and told his master that a man in
the hot spring had broken all his calabashes. "How did the
rascal dare to break my calabashes?" exclaimed the young
man. "Why, I shall die of rage."
He threw on some clothes, seized his club, and hurried to
the hot spring, calling out "Where's that fellow who broke
my calabashes?" And Hine-Moa knew the voice, and the sound
of it was that of the beloved of her heart; and she hid
herself under the overhanging rocks of the hot spring; but
her hiding was hardly a real hiding, but rather a bashful
concealing of herself from Tutanekai, that he might not find
her at once, but only after trouble and careful searching
for her; so he went feeling about along the banks of the hot
spring, searching everywhere, whilst she lay coyly hid under
the ledges of the rock, peeping out, wondering when she
would be found. At last he caught hold of a hand, and cried
out "Hollo, who's this?" And Hine-Moa answered, "It's I,
Tutanekai;" And he said, "But who are you?--who's I?" Then
she spoke louder and said., "It's I, 'tis Hine-Moa." And he
said "Ho! ho! ho! can such in very truth be the case? Let us
two then go to the house." And she answered, "Yes," and she
rose up in the water as beautiful as the wild white hawk,
and stepped upon the edge of the bath as the shy white
crane; and he threw garments over her and took her, and they
proceeded to his house, and reposed there; and thenceforth,
according to the ancient laws of the Maori, they were man
and wife.
THE MAN ON THE TREE
A young man named Maru-tuahu left home in quest of his father, who had
abandoned his mother before the son was born because he had been
unjustly accused of stealing sweet potatoes from another chief.
Maru-tuahu took along a slave, and they carried with them a spear for
killing birds for food on the journey through the forest. One morning,
after they had been on the way a month, he happened to be up in a
forest tree when two young girls, daughters of a chief, came along.
They saw the slave sitting at the root of the tree, and sportively
contested with each other whose slave he should be.
All this time Maru-tuahu was peeping down at the two girls from the
top of the tree; and they asked the slave, saying, "Where is your
master?" He answered, "I have no master but him," Then the girls
looked about, and there was a cloak lying on the ground, and a heap of
dead birds, and they kept on asking, "Where is he?" but it was not
long before a flock of Tuis settled on the tree where Maru-tuahu was
sitting; he speared at them and struck one of the birds, which made
the tree ring with its cries; the girls heard it, and looking up, the
youngest saw the young chief sitting in the top boughs of the tree;
and she at once called up to him, "Ah! you shall be my husband;" but
the eldest sister exclaimed, "You shall be mine," and they began
jesting and disputing between themselves which should have him for a
husband, for he was a very handsome young man.
Then the two girls called up to him to come down from the tree, and
down he came, and dropped upon the ground, and pressed his nose
against the nose of each of the young girls. They then asked him to
come to their village with them; to which he consented, but said, "You
two go on ahead, and leave me and my slave, and we will follow you
presently;" and the girls said, "Very well, do you come after us."
Maru-tuahu then told his slave to make a present to the girls of the
food they had collected, and he gave them two bark baskets of pigeons,
preserved in their own fat, and they went off to their village with
these.
As soon as the girls were gone, Maru-tuahu went to a stream, washed
his hair, and combed it carefully, tied it in a knot, and stuck fifty
red Kaka feathers and other plumes in his head, till he looked as
handsome as the large-crested cormorant. The young girls soon came
back from the village to meet their so-called husband, and when they
saw him in his new head-dress and attired in a chief's cloak they felt
deeply in love with him and they said, "Come along to our father's
village with us." On the way they found out from the slave that his
master was the far-famed Maru-tuahu, and they replied: "Dear, dear, we
had not the least idea that it was he," Then they ran off to tell his
father (for this was the place where his father had gone and married
again) that he was coming. The son was warmly welcomed. All the young
girls ran outside, waved the corners of their cloaks and cried out,
"Welcome, welcome, make haste."
Then there was a great feast, at which ten dogs were eaten. But all
this time the two girls were quarrelling with each other as to which
of them should have the young chief for a husband. The elder girl was
plain, but thought herself pretty, and could not see the least reason
why he should be frightened at her; but Maru-tuahu did not like her on
account of her plainness, and her pretty sister kept him as her
husband.
LOVE IN A FORTRESS
A chief named Rangirarunga had a daughter so celebrated for her beauty
that the fame of it had reached all parts of these islands. A young
hero named Takarangi also heard of her beauty, and it may be that his
heart sometimes dwelt long on the thoughts of such loveliness. They
belonged to different tribes, and war broke out between them, during
which the fortress of the girl's father was besieged. Soon the
inhabitants were near dying from want of food and water. At last the
old chief Rangirarunga, overcome by thirst, stood on the top of the
defences and cried out to the enemy: "I pray you to give me one drop
of water." Some were willing, and got calabashes of water, but others
were angry thereat and broke them in their hands. The old chief then
appealed to the leader of the enemy, who was Takarangi, and asked him
if he could calm the wrath of these fierce men. Takarangi replied:
"This arm of mine is one which no dog dares to bite." But what he was
really thinking was, "That dying old man is the father of Rau-mahora,
of that lovely maid. Ah, how should I grieve if one so young and
innocent should die tormented with the want of water." Then he filled
a calabash with fresh cool water, and the fierce warriors looked on in
wonder and silence while he carried it to the old man and his
daughter. They drank, both of them, and Taka-rangi gazed eagerly at
the young girl, and she too looked eagerly at Takarangi; long time
gazed they each one at the other; and as the warriors of the army of
Takarangi looked on, lo, he had climbed up and was sitting at the
young maiden's side; and they said, amongst themselves, "O comrades,
our lord Takarangi loves war, but one would think he likes Rau-mahora
almost as well."
At last a sudden thought struck the heart of the aged chief; so he
said to his daughter, "O my child, would it be pleasing to you to have
this young chief for a husband?" And the young girl said, "I like
him." Then the old man consented that his daughter should be given as
a bride to Takarangi, and he took her as his wife. Thence was that war
brought to an end, and the army of Takarangi dispersed.
STRATAGEM OF AN ELOPEMENT
Two tribes had long been at war, but as neither gained a permanent
victory peace was at last concluded. Then one day the chief Te Ponga,
with some of his followers, approached the fortress of their former
enemies. They were warmly welcomed, ovens were heated, food cooked,
served in baskets and distributed. But the visitors did not eat much,
in order that their waists might be slim when they stood up in the
ranks of the dancers, and that they might look as slight as if their
waists were almost severed in two.
As soon as it began to get dark the villagers danced, and whilst they
sprang nimbly about, Puhihuia, the young daughter of the village
chief, watched them till her time came to enter the ranks. She
performed her part beautifully; her fall-orbed eyes seemed clear and
brilliant as the full moon rising in the horizon, and while the
strangers looked at the young girl they all were quite overpowered
with her beauty; and Te Ponga, their young chief, felt his heart grow
wild with emotion when he saw so much loveliness before him.
Then up sprang the strangers to dance in their turn. Te Ponga waited
his opportunity, and when the time came, danced so beautifully that
the people of the village were surprised at his agility and grace, and
as for the young girl, Puhihuia, her heart conceived a warm passion
for Te Ponga.
When the dance was concluded, everyone, overcome with weariness, went
to sleep--all except Te Ponga, who lay tossing from side to side,
unable to sleep, from his great love for the maiden, and devising
scheme after scheme by which he might have an opportunity of
conversing with her alone. At last he decided to carry out a plan
suggested by his servant. The next night, when he had retired in the
chief's house, he called this servant to fetch him some water; but the
servant, following out the plot, had concealed himself and refused to
respond. Then the chief said to his daughter, "My child, run and fetch
some water for our guest." The maiden rose, and taking a calabash,
went off to fetch some water, and no sooner did Te Ponga see her start
off than he too arose and went out, feigning to be angry with his
slave and going to give him a beating; but as soon as he was out of
the house he went straight off after the girl. He did not well know
the path to the well, but was guided by the voice of the maiden, who
sang merrily as she went along.
When she arrived at the fountain she heard someone behind her, and
turning suddenly around she beheld the young chief. Astonished, she
asked, "What can have brought you here?" He answered, "I came here for
a draught of water." But the girl replied, "Ha, indeed! Did not I come
here to draw water for you? Could not you have remained at my father's
house until I brought the water for you?" Then Te Ponga answered, "You
are the water that I thirsted for." And as the maiden listened to his
words, she thought within herself, "He, then, has fallen in love with
me," and she sat down, and he placed himself by her side, and they
conversed together, and to each of them the words of the other seemed
most pleasant and engaging. Before they separated they arranged a time
when they might escape together, and then they returned to the
village.
When the time came for Te Ponga to leave his host he directed some
dozen men of his to go to the landing-place in the harbor, prepare one
large canoe in which he and his followers might escape, and then to
take the other canoes and cut the lashings which made the top sides
fast to the hulls. The next morning he announced that he must return
to his own country. The chief and his men accompanied him part of the
way to the harbor. Puhihuia and the other girls had stolen a little
way along the road, laughing and joking with the visitors. The chief,
seeing his daughter going on after he had turned back, called out,
"Children, children, come back here!" Then the other girls stopped and
ran back toward the village, but as to Puhihuia, her heart beat but to
the one thought of escaping with her beloved Te Ponga. So she began to
run. Te Ponga and his men joined in the swift flight, and as soon as
they had reached the water they jumped into their canoe, seized their
paddles and shot away, swift as a dart from a string. When the
pursuing villagers arrived at the beach they laid hold of another
canoe, but found that the lashings of all had been cut, so that
pursuit was impossible. Thus the party that had come to make peace
returned joyfully to their own country, with the enemy's young
chieftainess, while their foes stood like fools upon the shore,
stamping with rage and threatening them in vain.
These stories are undoubtedly romantic; but again I ask, are they
stories of romantic love? There is romance and quaint local color in
the feat of the girl who, reversing the story of Hero and Leander,
swam over to her lover; in the wooing of the two girls proposing to an
unseen man up a tree; in the action of the chief who saved the
beautiful girl and her father from dying of thirst, and acted so that
his men came to the conclusion he must love her "almost as well" as
war; in the slyly planned elopement of Te Ponga. But there is nothing
to indicate the quality of the love--to show an "illumination of the
senses by the soul," or a single altruistic trait. Even such touches
of egoistic sentimentality as the phrase "To the heart of each of them
the other appeared pleasing and worthy, so that in the breast of each
there grew up a secret passion for the other;" and again, "he felt his
heart grow wild with emotion, when he saw so much loveliness before
him," are quite certainly a product of Grey's fancy, for Polynesians,
as we have seen, do not speak of the "heart" in that sense, and such a
word as "emotions" is entirely beyond their powers of abstraction and
conception. Grey tells us that he collected different portions of his
legends from different natives, in very distant parts of the country,
at long intervals, and afterward rearranged and rewrote them. In this
way he succeeded in giving us some interesting legends, but a
phonographic record of the _fragments_ related to him, without any
embroidering of "heart-affairs," "wild emotions," and other adornments
of modern novels, would have rendered them infinitely more valuable to
students of the evolution of emotions. It is a great pity that so few
of the recorders of aboriginal tales followed this principle; and it
is strange that such neatly polished, arranged, and modernized tales
as these should have been accepted so long as illustrations of
primitive love.[194]
MAORI LOVE-POEMS
Besides their stories of love, the Maoris of New Zealand also have
poems, some accompanied with (often obscene) pantomimes, others
without accompaniment. Shortland (146-55), Taylor (310), and others
have collected and translated some of these poems, of which the
following are the best. Taylor cites this one:
The tears gush from my eyes,
My eyelashes are wet with tears;
But stay, my tears, within,
Lest you should be called mine.
Alas! I am betrothed (literally, my hands are bound);
It is for Te Maunee
That my love devours me.
But I may weep indeed,
Beloved one, for thee,
Like Tiniran's lament
For his favorite pet Tutunui
Which was slain by Ngae.
Alas!
Shortland gives these specimens of the songs that are frequently
accompanied by immodest gestures of the body. Some of them are "not
sufficiently decent to bear translating." The one marked (4) is
interesting as an attempt at hyperbole.
(1)
Your body is at Waitemata,
But your spirit came hither
And aroused me from my sleep.
(4)
Tawera is the bright star
Of the morning.
Not less beautiful is the
Jewel of my heart.
(5)
The sun is setting in his cave,
Touching as he descends (the
Land) where dwells my mate,
He who is whirled away
To southern seas.
More utilitarian are (6) and (7), in which a woman asks "Who will
marry a man too lazy to till the ground for food?" And a man wants to
know "Who will marry a woman too lazy to weave garments?" Very
unlover-like is the following:
I don't like the habits of woman.
When she goes out--
She _Kuikuis_
She _Koakoas_
She chatters
The very ground is terrified,
And the rats run away.
Just so.
More poetic are the _waiata_, which are sung without the aid of any
action. The following ode was composed by a young woman forsaken by
her lover:
Look where the mist
Hangs over Pukehina.
There is the path
By which went my love.
Turn back again hither,
That may be poured out
Tears from my eyes.
It was not I who first spoke of love.
You it was who made advances to me
When I was but a little thing.
Therefore was my heart made wild.
This is my farewell of love to thee.
A young woman, who had been carried away prisoner from Tuhua, gives
vent to her longing in these lines:
"My regret is not to be expressed. Tears like a spring
gush from my eyes. I wonder whatever is Te Kaiuku [her
lover] doing: he who deserted me. Now I climb upon the
ridge of Mount Parahaki; from whence is clear the view
of the island Tahua. I see with regret the lofty Taumo,
where dwells Tangiteruru. If I were there, the shark's
tooth would hang from my ear. How fine, how beautiful,
should I look. But see whose ship is that tacking? Is
it yours? O Hu! you husband of Pohiwa, sailing away on
the tide to Europe.
"O Tom! pray give me some of your fine things; for
beautiful are the clothes of the sea-god.
"Enough of this. I must return to my rags, and to my
nothing-at-all."
In this case the loss of her finery seems to trouble the girl a good
deal more than the loss of her lover. In another ode cited by
Shortland a deserted girl, after referring to her tearful eyes, winds
up with the light-hearted
Now that you are absent in your native land,
The day of regret will, perhaps, end.
There is a suggestion of Sappho in the last of these odes I shall
cite:
"Love does not torment forever. It came on me like the
fire which rages sometimes at Hukanai. If this
(beloved) one is near me, do not suppose, O Kiri, that
my sleep is sweet. I lie awake the live-long night, for
love to prey on me in secret.
"It shall never be confessed, lest it be heard of by
all. The only evidence shall be seen on my cheeks.
"The plain which extends to Tauwhare: that path I trod
that I might enter the house of Rawhirawhwi. Don't be
angry with me, O madam [addressed to Rawhirawhwi's
wife]; I am only a stranger. For you there is the body
(of your husband). For me there remains only the shadow
of desire."
"In the last two lines," writes Shortland, "the poetess coolly
requests the wife of the person for whom she acknowledges an unlawful
passion not to be angry with her, because 'she--the lawful wife--has
always possession of the person of her husband; while hers is only an
empty, Platonic sort of love.' This is rather a favorite sentiment,
and is not unfrequently introduced similarly into love-songs of this
description."
THE WOOING-HOUSE
It is noticeable that these love-poems are all by females, and most
frequently by deserted females. This does not speak well for the
gallantry or constancy of the men. Perhaps they lacked those qualities
to offset the feminine lack of coyness. In the first of our Maori
stories the maiden swims to the man, who calmly awaits her, playing
his horn. In the second, a man is simultaneously proposed to by two
girls, before he has time to come off his perch on the tree. This
arouses a suspicion which is confirmed by E. Tregear's revelations
regarding Maori courtship _(Journ. Anthrop. Inst_., 1889):
"The girl generally began the courting. I have often
seen the pretty little love-letter fall at the feet of
a lover--it was a little bit of flax made into a sort
of half-knot--'yes' was made by pulling the knot
tight--'no' by leaving the matrimonial noose alone.
Now, I am sorry to say, it is often thrown as an
invitation for love-making of an improper character.
Sometimes in the _Whare-Matoro_ (the wooing-house), a
building in which the young of both sexes assemble for
play, songs, dances, etc., there would be at stated
times a meeting; when the fires burned low a girl would
stand up in the dark and say, 'I love So-and-so, I want
him for my husband,' If he coughed (sign of assent), or
said 'yes' it was well; if only dead silence, she
covered her head with her robe and was ashamed. This
was not often, as she generally had managed to
ascertain (either by her own inquiry or by sending a
girl friend) if the proposal was acceptable. On the
other hand, sometimes a mother would attend and say 'I
want So-and-so for my son.' If not acceptable there was
general mocking, and she was told to let the young
people have their house (the wooing-house) to
themselves. Sometimes, if the unbetrothed pair had not
secured the consent of the parents, a late suitor would
appear on the scene, and the poor girl got almost
hauled to death between them all. One would get a leg,
another an arm, another the hair, etc. Girls have been
injured for life in these disputes, or even murdered by
the losing party."
LIBERTY OF CHOICE AND RESPECT FOR WOMEN
The assertion that "the girl generally began the courting" must not
mislead us into supposing that Maori women were free, as a rule, to
marry the husbands of their choice. As Tregear's own remarks indicate,
the advances were either of an improper character, or the girl had
made sure beforehand that there was no impediment in the way of her
proposal. The Maori proverb that as the fastidious Kahawai fish
selects the hook which pleases it best, so a woman chooses a man out
of many (on the strength of which alone Westermarck, 217, claims
liberty of choice for Maori women) must also refer to such liaisons
before marriage, for all the facts indicate that the original Maori
customs allowed women no choice whatever in regard to marriage. Here
the brother's consent had to be obtained, as Shortland remarks (118).
Many of the girls were betrothed in infancy, and many others married
at an age--twelve to thirteen--when the word choice could have had no
rational meaning. Tregear informs us that if a couple had not been
betrothed as children, everyone in the tribe claimed a right to
interfere, and the only way the couple could get their own way was by
eloping. Darwin was informed by Mantell "that until recently almost
every girl in New Zealand who was pretty or promised to be pretty was
tapu to some chief;" and we further read that
"when a chief desires to take to himself a wife, he fixes
his attention upon her, and takes her, if need be, by force,
without consulting her feelings and wishes or those of
anyone else."
This is confirmed by William Brown, in his book on the aborigines. But
the most graphic and harrowing description of Maori maltreatment of
women is given by the Rev. E. Taylor:
"The _ancient and most general way_ of obtaining a wife
was for the gentleman to summon his friends and make a
regular _taua_, or fight, to carry off the lady by
force, and oftentimes with great violence.... If the
girl had eloped with someone on whom she had placed her
affection, then her father and brother would refuse
their consent," and fight to get her back. "The
unfortunate female, thus placed between two contending
parties, would soon be divested of every rag of
clothing, and would then be seized by her head, hair,
or limbs," her "cries and shrieks would be unheeded by
her savage friends. In this way the poor creature was
often nearly torn to pieces. These savage contests
sometimes ended in the strongest party bearing off in
triumph the naked person of the bride. In some cases,
after a long season of suffering, she recovered, to be
given to a person for whom she had no affection, in
others to die within a few hours or days from the
injuries which she had received. But it was not
uncommon for the weaker party, when they found they
could not prevail, for one of them to put an end to the
contest by suddenly plunging his spear into the woman's
bosom to hinder her from becoming the property of
another."
After giving this account on page 163 of the Maori's "ancient and
_most general_ way" of obtaining a wife--which puts him below the most
ferocious brutes, since those at least spare their females--the same
writer informs us on page 338 that "there are few races who treat
their women with more deference than the Maori!" If that is so, it can
only be due to the influence of the whites, since all the testimony
indicates that the unadulterated Maori--with whom alone we are here
concerned--did not treat them "with great respect," nor pay any
deference to them whatever. The cruel method of capture described
above was so general that, as Taylor himself tells us, the native term
for courtship was _he aru aru_, literally, a following or pursuing
after; and there was also a special expression for this struggling of
two suitors for a girl--_he puna rua_. As for their "great respect"
for women, they do not allow them to eat with the men. A chief, says
Angas (II., 110), "will sometimes permit his favorite wife to eat with
him, though not out of the same dish." Ellis relates (III., 253) that
New Zealanders are "addicted to the greatest vices that stain the
human character--treachery, cannibalism, infanticide, and murder." The
women caught in battle, as well as the men, were, he says, enslaved or
eaten. "Sometimes they chopped off the legs and arms and otherwise
mangled the body before they put the victim to death." Concubines had
to do service as household drudges. A man on dying would bequeath his
wives to his brother. No land was bequeathed to female children. The
real Maori feeling toward women is brought out in the answer given to
a sister who went to her brothers to ask for a share of the lands of
the family: "Why, you're only a slave to blow up your husband's fire."
(Shortland, 119, 255-58.)
MAORI MORALS AND CAPACITY FOR LOVE
When Hawkesworth visited New Zealand with Captain Cook, he one day
came accidentally across some women who were fishing, and who had
thrown off their last garments. When they saw him they were as
confused and distressed as Diana and her nymphs; they hid among the
rocks and crouched down in the sea until they had made and put on
girdles of seaweeds (456). "There are instances," writes William Brown
(36-37), "of women committing suicide from its being said that they
had been seen naked. A chief's wife took her own life because she had
been hung up by the heels and beaten in the presence of the whole
tribe."
Shall we conclude from this that the Maoris were genuinely modest and
perhaps capable of that delicacy in regard to sexual matters which is
a prerequisite of sentimental love? What is modesty? The _Century
Dictionary_ says it is "decorous feeling or behavior; purity or
delicacy of thought or manner; reserve proceeding from pure or chaste
character;" and the _Encyclopaedic Dictionary_ defines it as
"chastity; purity of manners; decency; freedom from lewdness or
un-chastity." Now, Maori modesty, if such it maybe called, was only
skin deep. Living in a colder climate than other Polynesians, it
became customary among them to wear more clothing; and what custom
prescribes must be obeyed to the letter among all these peoples, be
the ordained dress merely a loin cloth or a necklace, or a cover for
the back only, or full dress. It does not argue true modesty on the
part of a Maori woman to cover those parts of her body which custom
orders her to cover, any more than it argues true modesty on the part
of an Oriental barbarian to cover her face only, on meeting a man,
leaving the rest of her body exposed. Nor does suicide prove anything,
since it is known that the lower races indulge in self-slaughter for
as trivial causes as they do in the slaughter of others. True modesty,
as defined above, is not a Maori characteristic. The evidence on this
point is too abundant to quote in full.
Shortland (126-27) describes in detail all of the ceremonies which
were in former days the pastimes of the New Zealanders, and which
accompanied the singing of their _haka_ or "love-songs," to which
reference has already been made. In the front were seated three
elderly ladies and behind them in rows, eight or ten in a row, and
five or six ranks deep, sat "_the best born young belles of the town_"
who supplied the poem and the music for the _haka_ pantomime:
"The _haka_ is not a modest exhibition, but the
reverse; and, on this occasion, two of the old ladies
who stood in front ... accompanied the music by
movements of the arms and body, their postures being
often disgustingly lascivious. However, they suited the
taste of the audience, who rewarded the performers at
such times with the applause they desired.... It was
altogether as ungodly a scene as can well be imagined."
The same author, who lived among the natives several years, says (120)
that
"before marriage the greatest license is permitted to young
females. The more admirers they can attract and the greater
their reputation for intrigue, the fairer is their chance of
making an advantageous match."
William Brown writes (35) that "among the Maoris chastity is not
deemed one of the virtues; and a lady before marriage may be as
liberal of her favors as she pleased without incurring censure." "As a
rule," writes E. Tregear in the _Journal of the Anthropological
Institute_ (1889),
"the girls had great license in the way of lovers. I
don't think the young woman knew when she was a virgin,
for she had love-affairs with the boys from the cradle.
This does not apply, of course, to _every_ individual
case--some girls are born proud, and either kept to one
sweetheart or had none, but this was rare."
After marriage a woman was expected to remain faithful to her husband,
but of course not from any regard for chastity, but because she was
his private property. Like so many other uncivilized races the Maori
saw no impropriety in lending his wife to a friend. (Tregear, 104.)
The faces of Maori women were always wet with red ochre and oil. Both
sexes anointed their hair (which was vermin-infested) with rancid
shark's oil, so that they were as disagreeable to the smell as
Hottentots. (Hawkesworth, 451-53.) They were cannibals, not from
necessity, but for the love of human flesh, though they did not, like
the Australians, eat their own relatives. Food, says Thompson (I.,
160), affected them "as it does wild beasts." They practised
infanticide, killed cripples, abandoned the sick--in a word, they
displayed a coarseness, a lack of delicacy, in sexual and other
matters, which makes it simply absurd to suppose they could have loved
as we love, with our altruistic feeling of sympathy and affection.
William Brown says (38) that mothers showed none of that doting
fondness for their children common elsewhere, and that they suckled
pigs and pups with "affection." "Should a husband quarrel with his
wife, she would not hesitate to kill her children, merely to annoy
him" (41). "They are totally devoid of natural affection." The men
"appear to care little for their wives," apparently from
"a want of that sympathy between the sexes which is the
source of the delicate attentions paid by the male to
the female in most civilized countries. In my own
experience I have seen only one instance where there
was any perceptible attachment between husband and
wife. To all appearance they behave to each other as if
they were not at all related; and it not infrequently
happens that they sleep in different places before the
termination of the first week of their marriage."
Thus even in the romantic isles of the Pacific we seek in vain for
true love. Let us now see whether the vast continent of North and
South America will bring us any nearer to our goal.
HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE
"On the subject of love no persons have been less understood than the
Indians," wrote Thomas Ashe in 1806 (271).
"It is said of them that they have no affection, and that
the intercourse of the sexes is sustained by a brutal
passion remote from tenderness and sensibility. This is one
of the many gross errors which have been propagated to
calumniate these innocent people."
Waitz remarks (III., 102):
"How much alike human nature is everywhere is evinced
by the remarkable circumstance that notwithstanding the
degradation of woman, cases of romantic love are not
even very rare"
among Indians. "Their languages," writes Professor Brinton (_R.P._,
54),
"supply us with evidence that the sentiment of love was
awake among them, and this is corroborated by the
incidents we learn of their domestic life.... Some of
the songs and stories of this race seem to reveal even
a capability for romantic love such as would do credit
to a modern novel. This is the more astonishing, as in
the African and Mongolian races this ethereal sentiment
is practically absent, the idealism of passion being
something foreign to those varieties of man."
The Indians, says Catlin (_N.A.I._, I., 121), "are not in the least
behind us in conjugal, in filial, and in paternal affection." In the
preface to Mrs. Eastman's _Life and Legend of the Sioux_, Mrs. Kirkman
exclaims that
"in spite of all that renders gross and mechanical their
ordinary mode of marrying and giving in marriage, instances
are not rare among them of love as true, as fiery, and as
fatal as that of the most exalted hero of romance."
Let us listen to a few of the tales of Indian love, as recorded by
Schoolcraft.[195]
THE RED LOVER
Many years ago there lived a Chippewa warrior on the banks of Lake
Superior. His name was Wawanosh and he was renowed for his ancestry
and personal bravery. He had an only daughter, eighteen years old,
celebrated for her gentle virtues, her _slender_ form, her full
beaming hazel eyes, and her dark and flowing hair. Her hand was sought
by a young man of humble parentage, but a tall commanding form, a
manly step, and an eye beaming with the tropical fires of love and
youth. These were sufficient to attract the favorable notice of the
daughter, but did not satisfy the father, who sternly informed the
young man that before he could hope to mingle his humble blood with
that of so renowned a warrior he would have to go and make a name for
himself by enduring fatigue in the campaigns against enemies, by
taking scalps, and proving himself a successful hunter.
The intimidated lover departed, resolved to do a deed that should
render him worthy of the daughter of Wawanosh, or die in the attempt.
In a few days he succeeded in getting together a band of young men all
eager, like himself, to distinguish themselves in battle. Armed with
bow and quiver, and ornamented with war-paint and feathers, they had
their war-dance, which was continued for two days and nights. Before
leaving with his companions the leader sought an interview with the
daughter of Wawanosh. He disclosed to her his firm intention never to
return unless he could establish his name as a warrior. He told her of
the pangs he had felt at her father's implied imputation of effeminacy
and cowardice. He averred that he never could be happy, either with or
without her, until he had proved to the whole tribe the strength of
his heart, which is the Indian term for courage. He repeated his
_protestations of inviolable attachment_, which she returned, and,
_pledging vows of mutual fidelity_, they parted.
She never saw him again. A warrior brought home the tidings that he
had received a fatal arrow in his breast after distinguishing himself
by the most heroic bravery. From that moment the young girl never
smiled again. She pined away by day and by night. Deaf to entreaty and
reproach, she would seek a sequestered spot, where she would sit under
a shady tree, and sing her mournful laments for hours together. A
small, beautiful bird, of a kind she had never seen, sat on her tree,
every day, singing until dark. Her fond imagination soon led her to
suppose it was the spirit of her lover, and her visits were repeated
with greater frequency. She passed her time in fasting and singing her
plaintive songs. Thus she pined away, until _the death she so
fervently desired_ came to her relief. After her death the bird was
never more seen, and it became a popular opinion that this mysterious
bird had flown away with her spirit. But bitter tears of regret fell
in the lodge of Wawanosh. Too late he _regretted his false pride_ and
his harsh treatment of the noble youth.
THE FOAM WOMAN
There once lived an Ottawa woman on the shores of Lake Michigan who
had a daughter as beautiful as she was modest and discreet. She was so
handsome that her mother feared she would be carried off, and, to
prevent it, she put her in a box on the lake, which was tied by a long
string to a stake on the shore. Every morning the mother pulled the
box ashore, and combed her daughter's long, shining hair, gave her
food, and then put her out again on the lake.
One day a handsome young man chanced to come to the spot at the moment
she was receiving her morning's attentions from her mother. He was
struck with her beauty and immediately went home and told his feelings
to his uncle, who was a great chief and a powerful magician. The uncle
told him to go to the mother's lodge, sit down in a modest manner,
and, without saying a word, _think_ what he wanted, and he would be
understood and answered. He did so; but the mother's answer was: "Give
you my daughter? No, indeed, my daughter shall never marry _you_."
This pride and haughtiness angered the uncle and the spirits of the
lake, who raised a great storm on the water. The tossing waves broke
the string, and the box with the girl floated off through the straits
to Lake Huron. It was there cast on shore and found by an old spirit
who took the beautiful girl to his lodge and married her.
The mother, when she found her daughter gone, raised loud cries, and
continued her lamentations for a long time. At last, after two or
three years, the spirits had pity on her and raised another storm,
greater even than the first. When the water rose and encroached on the
lodge where the daughter lived, she leaped into the box, and the waves
carried her back to her mother's lodge. The mother was overjoyed, but
when she opened the box she found that her daughter's beauty had
almost all departed. However, she still loved her because she was her
daughter, and she now thought of the young man who had made her the
offer of marriage. She sent a formal message to him, but he had
changed his mind, for he knew that she had been the wife of another.
"_I_ marry your daughter?" said he; "_your_ daughter! No, indeed! I
shall never marry her."
THE HUMPBACK MAGICIAN
Bokwewa and his brother lived in a secluded part of the country. They
were considered as Manitoes who had assumed mortal shapes. Bokwewa was
a humpback, but had the gifts of a magician, while the brother was
more like the present race of beings. One day the brother said to the
humpback that he was going away to visit the habitations of men, and
procure a wife. He travelled alone a long time. At length he came to a
deserted camp, where he saw a corpse on a scaffold. He took it down
and found it was the body of a beautiful young woman. "She shall be my
wife," he exclaimed.
He took her and carried her home on his back. "Brother," he exclaimed,
"cannot you restore her life? Oh! do me that favor."
The humpback said he would try, and, after performing various
ceremonies, succeeded in restoring her to life. They lived very
happily for some time. But one day when the humpback was home alone
with the woman, her husband having gone out to hunt, a powerful Manito
came and carried her off, though Bokwewa used all his strength to save
her.
When the brother returned and heard what had happened he would not
taste food for several days. Sometimes he would fall to weeping for a
long time, and appear almost beside himself. At last he said he would
go in search of her. His brother, finding that he could not dissuade
him, cautioned him against the dangers of the road; he must pass by
the large grape-vine and the frog's eggs that he would come across.
But the young husband heeded not his advice. He started out on his
journey and when he found the grapes and the frog's eggs he ate them.
At length he came to the tribe into which his wife had been stolen.
Throngs of men and women, gaily dressed, came out to meet him. As he
had eaten of the grapes and frog's eggs--snares laid for him--he was
soon overcome by their flatteries and pleasures, and he was not long
afterward seen beating corn with their women (the strongest proof of
effeminacy), although his wife, for whom he had mourned so much, was
in that Indian metropolis.
Meanwhile Bokwewa waited patiently for his brother, but when he did
not return he set out in search of him. He avoided the allurements
along the road and when he came among the luxurious people of the
South he wept on seeing his brother beating corn with the women. He
waited till the stolen wife came down to the river to draw water for
her new husband, the Manito. He changed himself into a hair-snake, was
scooped up in her bucket, and drunk by the Manito, who soon after was
dead. Then the humpback resumed his human shape and tried to reclaim
his brother; but the brother was so taken up with the pleasures and
dissipations into which he had fallen that he refused to give them up.
Finding he was past reclaiming, Bokwewa left him and disappeared
forever.
THE BUFFALO KING
Aggodagauda was an Indian who lived in the forest. Though he had
accidentally lost the use of one of his two legs he was a famous
hunter. But he had a great enemy in the king of buffaloes, who
frequently passed over the plain with the force of a tempest. The
chief object of the wily buffalo was to carry off Aggodagauda's
daughter, who was very beautiful. To prevent this Aggodagauda had
built a log cabin, and it was only on the roof of this that he
permitted his daughter to take the open air and disport herself. Now
her hair was so long that when she untied it the raven locks hung down
to the ground.
One day, when her father was off on a hunt, she went out on top of the
house and sat combing her long and beautiful hair, on the eaves of the
lodge, when the buffalo king, coming suddenly by, caught her glossy
hair, and winding it about his horns, tossed her onto his shoulders
and carried her to his village. Here he _paid every attention to gain
her affections_, but all to no purpose, for she sat pensively and
disconsolate in the lodge among the other females, and scarcely ever
spoke, and took no part in the domestic cares of her lover the king.
He, on the contrary, _did everything he could think of to please her
and win her affections_. He told the others in his lodge to give her
everything she wanted, and to be _careful not to displease her_. They
set before her the choicest food. They _gave her the seat of honor in
the lodge_. The king himself went out hunting to obtain the most
dainty bits of meat. And not content with these proofs of his
attachment _he fasted himself_, and would often take his flute and sit
near the lodge indulging his mind in repeating a few pensive notes:
My sweetheart,
My sweetheart,
Ah me!
When I think of you,
When I think of you,
Ah me!
How I love you,
How I love you,
Ah me!
Do not hate me,
Do not hate me,
Ah me!
In the meantime Aggodagauda had returned from his hunt, and finding
his daughter gone, determined to recover her. During her flight her
long hair had caught on the branches and broken them, and it was by
following these broken twigs that he tracked her. When he came to the
king's lodge it was evening. He cautiously peeped in and saw his
daughter sitting disconsolately. She caught his eye, and, in order to
meet him, said to the king, "Give me a dipper, I will go and get you a
drink of water." Delighted with this token of submission, the king
allowed her to go to the river. There she met her father and escaped
with him.
THE HAUNTED GROVE
Leelinau was the favorite daughter of an Odjibwa hunter, living on the
shore of Lake Superior. From her earliest youth she was observed to be
pensive and timid, and to spend much of her time _in solitude and
fasting_. Whenever she could leave her father's lodge she would fly to
the remote haunts and recesses of the woods, or _sit upon some high
promontory of rock overhanging the lake_. But her favorite place was a
forest of pines known as the Sacred Grove. It was supposed to be
inhabited by a class of _fairies who love romantic scenes_. This spot
Leelinau visited often, _gathering on the way strange flowers or
plants_ to bring home. It was there that she fasted, supplicated, and
strolled.
The effect of these visits was to make the girl melancholy and
dissatisfied with the realities of life. She did not care to play with
the other young people. Nor did she favor the plan of her parents to
marry her to a man much her senior in years, but a reputed chief. No
attention was paid to her disinclination, and the man was informed
that his offer had been favorably received. The day for the marriage
was fixed and the guests invited.
The girl had told her parents that she would never consent to the
match. On the evening preceding the day fixed for her marriage she
dressed herself in her best garments and put on all her ornaments.
Then she told her parents she was going to meet her little lover, the
chieftain of the green plume, who was waiting for her at the Spirit
Grove. Supposing she was going to act some harmless freak, they let
her go. When she did not return at sunset alarm was felt; with lighted
torches the gloomy pine forest was searched, but no trace of the girl
was ever found, and the parents mourned the loss of a daughter whose
inclinations they had, in the end, too violently thwarted.
THE GIRL AND THE SCALP
About the middle of the seventeenth century there lived on the shores
of Lake Ontario a Wyandot girl so beautiful that she had for suitors
nearly all the young men of her tribe; but while she rejected none,
neither did she favor any one in particular. To prevent her from
falling to someone not in their tribe the suitors held a meeting and
concluded that their claims should be withdrawn and the war chief
urged to woo her. He objected on account of the disparity of years,
but was finally persuaded to make his advances. His practice had been
confined rather to the use of stone-headed arrows than love-darts, and
his dexterity in the management of hearts displayed rather in making
bloody incisions than tender impressions. But after he had painted and
arrayed himself as for battle and otherwise adorned his person, he
paid court to her, and a few days later was accepted on condition that
he would pledge his word as a warrior to do what she should ask of
him. When his pledge had been given she told him to bring her the
scalp of a certain Seneca chief whom she hated. He begged her to
reflect that this chief was his bosom friend, whose confidence it
would be an infamy to betray. But she told him either to redeem his
pledge or be proclaimed for a lying dog, and then left him.
Goaded into fury, the Wyandot chief blackened his face and rushed off
to the Seneca village, where he tomahawked his friend and rushed out
of the lodge with his scalp. A moment later the mournful scalp-whoop
of the Senecas was resounding through the village. The Wyandot camp
was attacked, and after a deadly combat of three days the Senecas
triumphed, avenging the murder of their chief by the death of his
assailant as well as of the miserable girl who had caused the tragedy.
The war thus begun lasted more than thirty years.
A CHIPPEWA LOVE-SONG
In 1759 great exertions were made by the French Indian Department
under General Montcalm to bring a body of Indians into the valley of
the lower St. Lawrence, and invitations for this purpose reached the
utmost shores of Lake Superior. In one of the canoes from that
quarter, which was left on the way down at the mouth of the Utawas,
was a Chippewa girl named Paigwaineoshe, or the White Eagle. While the
party awaited there the result of events at Quebec she formed an
attachment for a young Algonquin belonging to a French mission. This
attachment was mutual, and gave rise to a song of which the following
is a prose translation:
I. Ah me! When I think of him--when I think of him--my
sweetheart, my Algonquin.
II. As I embarked to return, he put the white wampum around my
neck--a pledge of troth, my sweetheart, my Algonquin.
III. I shall go with you, he said, to your native country--I
shall go with you, my sweetheart--my Algonquin.
IV. Alas! I replied--my native country is far, far away--my
sweetheart, my Algonquin.
V. When I looked back again--where we parted, he was still
looking after me, my sweetheart, my Algonquin.
VI. He was still standing on a fallen tree--that had fallen
into the water, my sweetheart, my Algonquin.
VII. Alas! When I think of him--when I think of him--It is when
I think of him, my Algonquin.
HOW "INDIAN STORIES" ARE WRITTEN
Here we have seven love-stories as romantic as you please and full of
sentimental touches. Do they not disprove my theory that uncivilized
races are incapable of feeling sentimental love? Some think they do,
and Waitz is not the only anthropologist who has accepted such stories
as proof that human nature, as far as love is concerned, is the same
under all circumstances. The above tales are taken from the books of a
man who spent much of his life among Indians and issued a number of
works about them, one of which, in six volumes, was published under
the auspices of the United States Government. This expert--Henry R.
Schoolcraft--was member of so many learned societies that it takes
twelve lines of small type to print them all. Moreover, he expressly
assures us[196] that "the value of these traditionary stories appears
to depend very much upon their being left, as nearly as possible, in
their original forms of thought and expression," the obvious inference
being an assurance that he has so left them; and he adds that in the
collection and translation of these stories he enjoyed the great
advantages of seventeen years' life as executive officer for the
tribes, and a knowledge of their languages.
And now, having given the enemy's battle-ship every possible
advantage, the reader will allow me to bring on my little
torpedo-boat. In the first place Schoolcraft mentions (_A.R_., I., 56)
twelve persons, six of them women, who helped him collect and
interpret the material of the tales united in his volumes; but he does
not tell us whether all or any of these collectors acted on the
principle that these stories could claim absolutely no _scientific_
value unless they were verbatim reports of aboriginal tales, _without
any additions and sentimental embroideries by the compilers_. This
omission alone is fatal to the whole collection, reducing it to the
value of a mere fairy book for the entertainment of children, and
allowing us to make no inferences from it regarding the quality and
expression of an Indian's love.
Schoolcraft stands convicted by his own action. When I read his tales
for the first time I came across numerous sentences and sentiments
which I knew from my own experience among Indians were utterly foreign
to Indian modes of thought and feeling, and which they could no more
have uttered than they could have penned Longfellow's _Hiawatha_, or
the essays of Emerson. In the stories of "The Red Lover," "The Buffalo
King," and "The Haunted Grove,"[197] I have italicized a few of these
suspicious passages. To take the last-named tale first, it is absurd
to speak of Indian "fairies who love romantic scenes," or of a girl
romantically sitting on a rocky promontory,[198] or "gathering strange
flowers;" for Indians have no conception of the romantic side of
nature--of scenery for its own sake. To them a tree is simply a grouse
perch, or a source of fire-wood; a lake, a fish-pond, a mountain, the
dreaded abode of evil spirits. In the tale of the "Buffalo King" we
read of the chief doing a number of things to win the affection of the
refractory bride--telling the others not to displease her, giving her
"the seat of honor," and going so far as to fast himself, whereas in
real life, under such circumstances, he would have curtly clubbed the
stolen bride into submission. In the tale of the "Red Lover" the girl
is admired for her "slender form," whereas a real Indian values a
woman in proportion to her weight and rotundity. Indians do not make
"protestations of inviolable attachment," or "pledge vows of mutual
fidelity," like the lovers of our fashionable novels. As Charles A.
Leland remarks of the same race of Indians (85), "When an Indian seeks
a wife, he or his mutual friend makes no great ado about it, but
utters two words which tell the whole story." But there is no need of
citing other authors, for Schoolcraft, as I have just intimated,
stands convicted by his own action. In the second edition of his
_Algic Researches_, which appeared after an interval of seventeen
years and received the title of _The Myth of Hiawatha and other Oral
Legends of the North American Indians_, he seemed to remember what he
wrote in the preface of the first regarding these stories, "that in
the original there is no attempt at ornament," so he removed nearly
all of the romantic embroideries, like those I have italicized and
commented on, and also relegated the majority of his ludicrously
sentimental interspersed poems to the appendix. In the preface to
_Hiawatha_, he refers in connection with some of these verses to "the
poetic use of aboriginal ideas." Now, a man has a perfect right to
make such "poetic use" of "aboriginal ideas," but not when he has led
his readers to believe that he is telling these stories "as nearly as
possible in their original forms of thought and expression." It is
very much as if Edward MacDowell had published the several movements
of his Indian Suite as being, not only in their ideas, but in their
(modern European) harmonies and orchestration, a faithful transcript
of aboriginal Indian music. Schoolcraft's procedure, in other words,
amounts to a sort of Ossianic mystification; and unfortunately he has
had not a few imitators, to the confusion of comparative psychologists
and students of the evolution of love.
It is a great pity that Schoolcraft, with his valuable opportunities
for ethnological research, should not have added a critical attitude
and a habit of accuracy to his great industry. The historian Parkman,
a model observer and scholar, described Schoolcraft's volumes on the
Indian Tribes of the United States as
"a singularly crude and illiterate production, stuffed with
blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page
of a striking unfitness for historical or scientific
inquiry."[199]
REALITY VERSUS ROMANCE
A few of the tales I have cited are not marred by superadded
sentimental adornments, but all of them are open to suspicion from
still another point of view. They are invariably so proper and pure
that they might be read to Sunday-school classes. Since one-half of
Schoolcraft's assistants in the compilation of this material were
women, this might have been expected, and if the collection had been
issued as a Fairy Book it would have been a matter of course. But they
were issued as accurate "oral legends" of wild Indians, and from the
point of view of the student of the history of love the most important
question to ask was, "Are Indian stories in reality as pure and
refined in tone as these specimens would lead us to suspect?" I will
answer that question by citing the words of one of the warmest
champions of the Indians, the eminent American anthropologist,
Professor D.G. Brinton _(M.N.W., 160):
"Anyone who has listened to Indian tales, not as they
are recorded in books, but as they are told by the
camp-fire, will bear witness to the abounding obscenity
they deal in. That the same vulgarity shows itself in
their arts and life, no genuine observer need doubt."
And in a footnote he gives this extremely interesting information:
"The late George Gibbs will be acknowledged as an
authority here. He was at the time of his death
preparing a Latin translation of the tales he had
collected, as they were too erotic to print in English.
He wrote me, 'Schoolcraft's legends are emasculated to
a degree that they become no longer Indian.'"
No longer Indian, indeed! And these doctored stories, artfully
sentimentalized at one end and expurgated at the other, are advanced
as proofs that a savage Indian's love is just as refined as that of a
civilized Christian! What Indian stories really are, the reader, if he
can stomach such things, may find out for himself by consulting the
marvellously copious and almost phonographically accurate collection
of native tales which another of our most eminent anthropologists, Dr.
Franz Boas, has printed.[200] And it must be borne in mind that these
stories are not the secret gossip of vulgar men alone by themselves,
but are national tales with which children of both sexes become
familiar from their earliest years. As Colonel Dodge remarks (213): it
is customary for as many as a dozen persons of both sexes to live in
one room, hence there is an entire lack of privacy, either in word or
act. "It is a wonder," says Powers (271), "that children grow up with
any virtue whatever, for the conversation of their elders in their
presence is often of the filthiest description." "One thing seems to
me more than intolerable," wrote the French missionary Le Jeune in
1632 (_Jesuit Relations_, V., 169).
"It is their living together promiscuously, girls,
women, men, and boys, in a smoky hole. And the more
progress one makes in the knowledge of the language,
the more vile things one hears.... I did not think that
the mouth of the savage was so foul as I notice it is
every day."
Elsewhere (VI., 263) the same missionary says:
"Their lips are constantly foul with these obscenities;
and it is the same with the little children.... The
older women go almost naked, the girls and young women
are _very modestly clad_; but, among themselves, their
language has the foul odor of the sewers."
Of the Pennsylvania Indians Colonel James Smith (who had lived among
them as a captive) wrote (140): "The squaws are generally very
immodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young men
to the blush."
DECEPTIVE MODESTY
The late Dr. Brinton shot wide off the mark when he wrote (_R. and
P._, 59) that even among the lower races the sentiment of modesty "is
never absent." With some American Indians, as in the races of other
parts of the world, there is often not even the appearance of modesty.
Many of the Southern Indians in North America and others in Central
and South America wear no clothes at all, and their actions are as
unrestrained as those of animals.[201] The tribes that do wear clothes
sometimes present to shallow or biassed observers the appearance of
modesty. To the Mandan women Catlin (I.,
93, 96) attributes "excessive modesty of demeanor."
"It was customary for hundreds of girls and women to go
bathing and swimming in the Missouri every morning, while a
quarter of a mile back on a terrace stood several sentinels
with bows and arrows in hand to protect the bathing-place
from men or boys, who had their own swimming-place
elsewhere."
This, however, tells us more about the immorality of the men and their
anxiety to guard their property than about the character of the women.
On that point we are enlightened by Maximilian Prinz zu Wied, who
found that these women were anything but prudes, having often two or
three lovers at a time, while infidelity was seldom punished (I.,
531). According to Gatschet (183) Creek women also "were assigned a
bathing-place in the river currents at some distance below the men;"
but that this, too, was a mere curiosity of pseudo-modesty becomes
obvious when we read in Schoolcraft (V., 272) that among these Indians
"the sexes indulge their propensities with each other promiscuously,
unrestrained by law or custom, and without secrecy or shame." Powers,
too, relates (55) that among the Californian Yurok "the sexes bathe
apart, and the women do not go into the sea without some garment on."
But Powers was not a man to be misled by specious appearances. He
fully understood the philosophy of the matter, as the following shows
(412):
"Notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary
by false friends and weak maundering philanthropists,
the California Indians are a grossly licentious race.
None more so, perhaps. There is no word in all their
language that I have examined which has the meaning of
'mercenary prostitute,' because such a creature is
unknown to them; but among the unmarried of both sexes
there is very little or no restraint; and this freedom
is so much a matter of course that there is no reproach
attaching to it; so that _their young women are notable
for their modest and innocent demeanor_. This very
modesty of outward deportment has deceived the hasty
glance of many travellers. But what their conduct
really is is shown by the Argus-eyed surveillance to
which women are subjected. If a married woman is seen
even walking in the forest with another man than her
husband she is chastised by him. A repetition of the
offence is generally punished with speedy death.
Brothers and sisters scrupulously avoid living alone
together. A mother-in-law is never allowed to live with
her son-in-law. To the Indian's mind the opportunity of
evil implies the commission of it."
WERE INDIANS CORRUPTED BY WHITES?
Having disposed of the modesty fallacy, let us examine once more, and
for the last time, the doctrine that savages owe their degradation to
the whites.
In the admirable preface to his book on the Jesuit missionaries in
Canada, Parkman writes concerning the Hurons (XXXIV.):
"Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724, says that the
nation was corrupt in his time, but that this was a
degeneracy from their ancient manners. La Potherie and
Charlevoix make a similar statement. Megapolensis,
however, in 1644 says that they were then exceedingly
debauched; and Greenhalgh, in 1677, gives ample
evidence of a shameless license. One of their most
earnest advocates of the present day admits that the
passion of love among them had no other than an animal
existence (Morgan, _League of the Iroquois_, 322).
There is clear proof that the tribes of the South were
equally corrupt. (See Lawson's _Carolina_, 34, and
other early writers.)"
Another most earnest advocate of the Indians, Dr. Brinton, writes
(_M.N.W._, 159) that promiscuous licentiousness was frequently
connected with the religious ceremonies of the Indians:
"Miscellaneous congress very often terminated their
dances and festivals. Such orgies were of common
occurrence among the Algonkins and Iroquois at a very
early date, and are often mentioned in the _Jesuit
Relations_; Venagas describes them as frequent among
the tribes of Lower California, and Oviedo refers to
certain festivals of the Nicaraguans, during which the
women of all ranks extended to whosoever wished just
such privileges as the matrons of ancient Babylon, that
mother of harlots and all abominations, used to grant
even to slaves and strangers in the temple of Melitta
as one of the duties of religion."
In Part I. (140-42) of the _Final Report of Investigations among the
Indians of the Southwestern United States_,[202] A.F. Bandelier, the
leading authority on the Indians of the Southwest, writes regarding
the Pueblos (one of the most advanced, of all American tribes):
"Chastity was an act of penitence; to be chaste
signified to do penance. Still, after a woman had once
become linked to a man by the performance of certain
simple rites it was unsafe for her to be caught
trespassing, and her accomplice also suffered a
penalty. But there was the utmost liberty, even
license, as toward girls. Intercourse was almost
promiscuous with members of the tribe. Toward outsiders
the strictest abstinence was observed, and this fact,
which has long been overlooked or misunderstood,
explains the prevailing idea that before the coming of
the white man the Indians were both chaste and moral,
while the contrary is the truth."
Lewis and Clarke travelled a century ago among Indians that had never
been visited by whites. Their observations regarding immoral practices
and the means used to obviate the consequences bear out the above
testimony. M'Lean (II., 59, 120) also ridicules the idea that Indians
were corrupted by the whites. But the most conclusive proof of
aboriginal depravity is that supplied by the discoverers of America,
including Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. Columbus on his fourth voyage
touched the mainland going down near Brazil. In Cariay, he
writes,[203] the enchanters
"sent me immediately two girls very showily dressed.
The elder could not be more than eleven years of age
and the other seven, and both exhibited so much
immodesty that more could not be expected from public
women."
On another page (30) he writes: "The habits of these Caribbees are
brutal," adding that in their attacks on neighboring islands they
carry off as many women as they can, using them as concubines. "These
women also say that the Caribbees use them with such cruelty as would
scarcely be believed; and that they eat the children which they bear
to them."
Brazil was visited in 1501 by Amerigo Vespucci. The account he gives
of the dissolute practices of the natives, who certainly had never set
eye on a white man, is so plain spoken that it cannot be quoted here
in full. "They are not very jealous," he says, "and are immoderately
libidinous, and the women much more so than the men, so that for
decency I omit to tell you the ... They are so void of affection and
cruel that if they be angry with their husbands they ... and they slay
an infinite number of creatures by that means.... The greatest sign of
friendship which they can show you is that they give you their wives
and their daughters" and feel "highly honored" if they are accepted.
"They eat all their enemies whom they kill or capture, as well females
as males." "Their other barbarous customs are such that expression is
too weak for the reality."
The ineradicable perverseness of some minds is amusingly illustrated
by Southey, in his _History of Brazil_. After referring to Amerigo
Vespucci's statements regarding the lascivious practices of the
aboriginals, he exclaims, in a footnote: "This is false! Man has never
yet been discovered in such a state of depravity!" What the navigators
wrote regarding the cannibalism and cruelty of these savages he
accepts as a matter of course; but to doubt their immaculate purity is
high treason! The attitude of the sentimentalists in this matter is
not only silly and ridiculous, but positively pathological. As their
number is great, and seems to be growing (under the influence of such
writers as Catlin, Helen Hunt Jackson, Brinton, Westermarck, etc.), it
is necessary, in the interest of the truth, to paint the Indian as he
really was until contact with the whites (missionaries and others)
improved him somewhat.[204]
THE NOBLE RED MAN
Beginning with the Californians, their utter lack of moral sense has
already been described. They were no worse than the other Pacific
coast tribes in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska.
George Gibbs, the leading authority on the Indians of Western Oregon
and Washington, says regarding them (I., 197-200):
"Prostitution is almost universal. An Indian, perhaps,
will not let his favorite wife, but he looks upon his
others, his sisters, daughters, female relatives, and
slaves, as a legitimate source of profit....
Cohabitation of unmarried females among their own
people brings no disgrace if unaccompanied with
child-birth, which they take care to prevent. This
commences at a very early age, perhaps ten or twelve
years."
"Chastity is not considered a virtue by the Chinook women," says Ross
(92),
"and their amorous propensities know no bounds. All classes,
from the highest to the lowest, indulge in coarse sensuality
and shameless profligacy. Even the chief would boast of
obtaining a paltry toy or trifle in return for the
prostitution of his virgin daughter."
Lewis and Clarke (1814) found that among the Chinooks, "_as, indeed,
among all Indians_" they became acquainted with on their perilous
pioneer trips through the Western wilds, prostitution of females was
not considered criminal or improper (439).
Such revelations, illustrating not individual cases of depravity, but
a whole people's attitude, show how utterly hopeless it is to expect
refined and pure love of these Indians. Gibbs did not give himself up
to any illusions on this subject. "A strong _sensual_ attachment often
undoubtedly exists," he wrote (198),
"which leads to marriage, and instances are not rare of
young women destroying themselves on the death of a
lover; but where the idea of chastity is so entirely
wanting in both sexes, _this cannot deserve the name of
love_, or it is at best of a temporary duration." The
italics are mine.
In common with several other high authorities who lived many years
among the Indians (as we shall see at the end of this chapter) Gibbs
clearly realized the difference between red love and white
love--between sensual and sentimental attachments, and failed to find
the latter among the American savages.
British Columbian capacity for sexual delicacy and refined love is
sufficiently indicated by the reference on a preceding page (556) to
the stories collected by Dr. Boas. Turning northeastward we find
M'Lean, who spent twenty-five years among the Hudson's Bay natives,
declaring of the Beaver Indians (Chippewayans) that "the unmarried
youth, of both sexes, are generally under no restraint whatever," and
that "the lewdness of the Carrier [Taculli] Indians cannot possibly be
carried to a greater excess." M'Lean, too, after observing these
northern Indians for a quarter of a century, came to the conclusion
that "the tender passion seems unknown to the savage breast."
"The Hurons are lascivious," wrote Le Jeune (whom I have already
quoted), in 1632; and Parkman says (_J.N.A._, XXXIV.):
"A practice also prevailed of temporary or experimental
marriage, lasting a day, a week, or more.... An
attractive and enterprising damsel might, and often
did, make twenty such marriages before her final
establishing."
Regarding the Sioux, that shrewd observer, Burton, wrote (_C. of S._,
116): "If the mother takes any care of her daughter's virtue, it is
only out of regard to its market value." The Sioux, or Dakotas, are
indeed, sometimes lower than animals, for, as S.R. Riggs pointed out,
in a government publication (_U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Soc._, Vol. IX.),
"Girls are sometimes taken very young, before they are of marriageable
age, which generally happens with a man who has a wife already." "The
marriageable age," he adds, "is from fourteen years old and upward."
Even the Mandans, so highly lauded by Catlin, sometimes brutally
dispose of girls at the age of eleven, as do other tribes (Comanches,
etc.).
Of the Chippewas, Ottawas, and Winnebagoes we read in H. Trumbull's
_History of the Indian Wars_ (168):
"It appears to have been a very prevalent custom with
the Indians of this country, before they became
acquainted with the Europeans, to compliment strangers
with their wives;"
and "the Indian women in general are amorous, and before marriage not
less esteemed for gratifying their passions."
Of the New York Indians J. Buchanan wrote (II., 104):
"that it is no offence for their married women to
associate with another man, provided she acquaint her
husband or some near relation therewith, but if not, it
is sometimes punishable with death."
Of the Comanches it is said (Schoolcraft, V., 683) that while "the men
are grossly licentious, treating female captives in a most cruel and
barbarous manner," upon their women "they enforce rigid chastity;" but
this is, as usual, a mere question of masculine property, for on the
next page we read that they lend their wives; and Fossey (_Mexique_,
462) says: "Les Comanches obligent le prisonnier blanc, dont ils ont
admiré le valeur dans le combat, à s'unir à leurs femmes pour
perpétuer sa race." Concerning the Kickapoo, Kansas, and Osage Indians
we are informed by Hunter (203), who lived among them, that
"a female may become a parent out of wedlock without
loss of reputation, or diminishing her chances for a
subsequent matrimonial alliance, so that her paramour
is of respectable standing."
Maximilian Prinz zu Weid found that the Blackfeet, though they
horribly mutilated wives for secret intrigues [violation of property
right], offered these wives as well as their daughters for a bottle of
whiskey. "Some very young girls are offered" (I., 531). "The Navajo
women are very loose, and do not look upon fornication as a crime."
"The most unfortunate thing which can befall a captive
woman is to be claimed by two persons. In this case she
is either shot or delivered up for indiscriminate
violence" (Bancroft, I., 514).
Colonel R.I. Dodge writes of the Indians of the plains (204):
"For an unmarried Indian girl to be found away from her
lodge alone is to invite outrage, consequently she is
never sent out to cut and bring wood, nor to take care
of the stock."
He speaks of the "Indian men who, animal-like, approach a female only
to make love to her," and to whom the idea of continence is unknown
(210). Among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes
"no unmarried woman considers herself dressed to meet
her beau at night, to go to a dance or other gathering,
unless she has tied her lower limbs with a rope....
Custom has made this an almost perfect protection
against the brutality of the men. Without it she would
not be safe for an instant, and even with it, an
unmarried girl is not safe if found alone away from the
immediate protection of the lodge" (213).
A brother does not protect his sister from insult, nor avenge outrage
(220).
"Nature has no nobler specimen of man than the Indian," wrote Catlin,
the sentimentalist, who is often cited as an authority. To proceed:
"Prostitution is the rule among the (Yuma) women, not the exception."
The Colorado River Indians "barter and sell their women into
prostitution, with hardly an exception." (Bancroft, I., 514.) In his
_Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, C.C. Jones says of the Creeks,
Cherokees, Muscogulges, etc. (69):
"Comparatively little virtue existed among the
unmarried women. Their chances of marriage were not
diminished, but rather augmented, by the fact that they
had been great favorites, provided they had avoided
conception during their years of general pleasure."
The wife "was deterred, by fear of public punishment, from the
commission of indiscretions." "The unmarried women among the Natchez
were unusually unchaste," says McCulloh (165).
This damning list might be continued for the Central and South
American Indians. We should find that the Mosquito Indians often did
not wait for puberty (Bancroft, I., 729); that, according to Martius,
Oviedo, and Navarette,
"in Cuba, Nicaragua,[205] and among the Caribs and
Tupis, the bride yielded herself first to another, lest
her husband should come to some ill-luck by exercising
a priority of possession.... This _jus primae noctis_
was exercised by the priests" (Brinton, _M.N.W._, 155);
that the Waraus give girls to medicine men in return for professional
services (Brett, 320); that the Guaranis lend their wives and
daughters for a drink (Reich, 435); that among Brazilian tribes the
_jus primae noctis_ is often enjoyed by the chief (_Journ. Roy. G.S._,
II., 198); that in Guiana "chastity is not considered an indispensable
virtue among the unmarried women" (Dalton, I., 80); that the
Patagonians often pawned and sold their wives and daughters for brandy
(Falkner, 97); that their licentiousness is equal to their cruelty
(Bourne, 56-57), etc., etc.
APPARENT EXCEPTIONS
A critical student will not be able, I think, to find any exceptions
to this rule of Indian depravity among tribes untouched by missionary
influences. Westermarck, indeed, refers (65) with satisfaction to
Hearne's assertion (311) that the northern Indians he visited
carefully guarded the young people. Had he consulted page 129 of the
same writer he would have seen that this does not indicate a regard
for chastity as a virtue, but is merely a result of their habit of
regarding women as property, to which Franklin, speaking of these same
Indians, refers (287); for as Hearne remarks in the place alluded to,
"it is a very common custom among the men of this country to exchange
a night's lodging with each other's wives." An equal lack of insight
is shown by Westermarck, when he professes to find female chastity
among the Apaches. For this assertion he relies on Bancroft, who does
indeed say (I., 514) that "all authorities agree that the Apache
women, both before and after marriage, are remarkably pure." Yet he
himself adds that the Apaches will lend their wives to each
other.[206] If the women are otherwise chaste, it is not from a regard
for purity, but from fear of their cruel husbands and masters. United
States Boundary Commissioner, Bartlett, has enlightened us on this
point. "The atrocities inflicted upon an Apache woman taken in
adultery baffle all description," he writes, "and the females whom
they capture from their enemies are invariably doomed to the most
infamous treatment." Thus they are like other Indians--the Comanches,
for instance, concerning whom we read in Schoolcraft (V., 683) that
"the men are grossly licentious, treating female captives in a most
cruel and barbarous manner; but they enforce rigid chastity upon their
women."
Among the Modocs a wife who violated her husband's property rights in
her "chastity," was disembowelled in public, as Bancroft informs us
(I., 350). No wonder, that, as he adds, "adultery, being attended with
so much danger, is comparatively rare, but among the unmarried, who
have nothing to fear, a gross licentiousness prevails."
The Peruvian sun virgins are often supposed to indicate a regard for
purity; but in reality the temples in which these girls were reared
and guarded were nothing but nurseries for providing a choice
assortment of concubines for the licentious Incas and their friends.
(Torquemada, IX., 16.)[207]
"In the earlier times of Peru the union of the sexes was
voluntary, unregulated, and accompanied by barbarous usages:
many of which even at the present day exist among the
uncivilized nations of South America." (Tschudi's
_Antiquities_, 184; McCulloh, 379.)
Of the Mexicans, too, it has been erroneously said
that they valued purity; but Bandelier has collected facts from the
old Spanish writers, in summing which up he says: "This almost
establishes promiscuity among the ancient Mexicans, as a preliminary
to formal marriage." Oddly enough, the crime of adultery with a
married woman was considered one against a cluster of kindred, and not
against the husband; for if he caught the culprits _in flagrante
delictu_ and killed the wife, he lost his own life!
Another source of error regarding exceptional virtue in an Indian
tribe lies in the fact that in some few cases female captives were
spared. This was due, however, not to a chivalrous regard for female
virtue, but to superstition. James Adair relates of the Choktah (164)
that even a certain chief noted for his cruelty
"did not attempt the virtue of his female captives lest
(as he told one of them) 'it should offend the Indian's
god;' though at the same time his pleasures were
heightened in proportion to the shrieks and groans from
prisoners of both sexes while they were under his
torture. Although the Choktah are libidinous, yet I
have known them to take several female prisoners
without offering the least violence to their virtue,
till the time of purgation was expired; then some of
them forced their captives, notwithstanding their
pressing entreaties and tears."
Parkman, too, was convinced (_Jes. in Can._, XXXIV.) that the
remarkable forbearance observed by some tribes was the result of
superstition; and he adds: "To make the Indian a hero of romance is
mere nonsense."
INTIMIDATING CALIFORNIA SQUAWS
Besides the atrocious punishments inflicted on women who forgot their
role as private property, some of the Indians had other ways of
intimidating them, while reserving for themselves the right to do as
they pleased. Powers relates (156-61) that, among the California
Indians in general,
"there is scarcely such an attribute known as virtue or
chastity in either sex before marriage. Up to the time
when they enter matrimony most of the young women are a
kind of _femmes incomprises_, the common property of
the tribe; and after they have once taken on themselves
the marriage covenant, simple as it is, they are
guarded with a Turkish jealousy, for even the married
women are not such models as Mrs. Ford.... The one
great burden of the harangues delivered by the
venerable peace-chief on solemn occasions is the
necessity and excellence of _female_ virtue; all the
terrors of superstitious sanction and the direst
threats of the great prophet are levelled at
unchastity, and all the most dreadful calamities and
pains of a future state are hung suspended over the
heads of those who are persistently lascivious. All the
devices that savage cunning can invent, all the
mysterious masquerading horrors of devil-raising, all
the secret sorceries, the frightful apparitions and
bugbears, which can be supposed effectual in terrifying
women into virtue and preventing smock treason, are
resorted to by the Pomo leaders."
Among these Pomo Indians, and Californian tribes almost universally
(406), there existed secret societies whose simple purpose was to
conjure up infernal terrors and render each other assistance in
keeping their women in subjection. A special meeting-house was
constructed for this purpose, in which these secret women-tamers held
a grand devil-dance once in seven years, twenty or thirty men daubing
themselves with barbaric paint and putting vessels of pitch on their
heads. At night they rushed down from the mountains with these vessels
of pitch flaming on their heads, and making a terrible noise. The
squaws fled for dear life; hundreds of them clung screaming and
fainting to their valorous protectors. Then the chief took a
rattlesnake from which the fangs had been extracted, brandished it
into the faces of the shuddering women, and threatened them with dire
things if they did not live lives of chastity, industry, and
obedience, until some of the terrified squaws shrieked aloud and fell
swooning upon the ground.
GOING A-CALUMETING
We are now in a position to appreciate the unintentional humor of
Ashe's indignant outcry, cited at the beginning of this chapter,
against those who calumniate these innocent people "by denying that
there is anything but 'brutal passion' in their love-affairs." He
admits, indeed, that "no expressions of endearment or tenderness ever
escape the Indian sexes toward each other," as all observers have
remarked, but claims that this reserve is merely a compliance with a
political and religious law which "stigmatizes youth wasting their
time in female dalliance, except when covered with the veil of night
and beyond the prying eye of man." Were a man to speak to a squaw of
love in the daytime, he adds, she would run away from him or disdain
him. He then proceeds, with astounding naïveté, to describe the
nocturnal love-making of "these innocent people." The Indians leave
their doors open day and night, and the lovers take advantage of this
when they go a-courting, or "a-calumeting," as it is called.
"A young man lights his calumet, enters the cabin of
his mistress, and gently presents it to her. If she
extinguishes it she admits him to her arms; but if she
suffer it to burn unnoticed he softly retires with a
disappointed and throbbing heart, knowing that while
there was light she never could consent to his wishes.
This spirit of nocturnal amour and intrigue is attended
by one dreadful practice: the girls drink the juice of
a certain herb which prevents conception and often
renders them barren through life. They have recourse to
this to avoid the shame of having a child--a
circumstance _in which alone_ the disgrace of their
conduct consists, and which would be thought a thing so
heinous as to deprive them forever of respect and
religious marriage rites. _The crime is in the
discovery_." "I never saw gallantry conducted with more
_refinement_ than I did during my stay with the Shawnee
nation."
In brief, Ashe's idea of "refined" love consists in promiscuous
immorality carefully concealed! "On the subject of love," he sums up
with an injured air, "no persons have been less understood than the
Indians." Yet this writer is cited seriously as a witness by
Westermarck and others!
In view of the foregoing facts every candid reader must admit that to
an Indian an expression like "Love hath weaned my heart from low
desires," or Werther's "She is sacred to me; all desire is silent in
her presence," would be as incomprehensible as Hegel's metaphysics;
that, in other words, mental purity, one of the most essential and
characteristic ingredients of romantic love, is always absent in the
Indian's infatuation. The late Professor Brinton tried to come to the
rescue by declaring (_E.A._, 297) that
"delicacy of sentiment bears no sort of constant
relation to culture. Every man ... can name among his
acquaintances men of unusual culture who are coarse
voluptuaries and others of the humblest education who
have the delicacy of a refined woman. So it is with
families, and so it is with tribes."
Is it? That is the point to be proved. I myself have pointed out that
among nations, as among individuals, intellectual culture alone does
not insure a capacity for true love, because that also implies
emotional and esthetic culture. Now in our civilized communities there
are all sorts of individuals, many coarse, a few refined, while some
civilized races, too, are more refined than others. To prove his point
Dr. Brinton would have had to show that among the Indians, too, there
are tribes and individuals who are morally and esthetically refined;
and this he failed to do; wherefore his argument is futile. Diligent
and patient search has not revealed to me a single exception to the
rule of depravity above described, though I admit the possibility that
among the Indians who have been for generations under missionary
control such exceptions might be found. But we are here considering
the wild Indian and not the missionary's garden plant.
SQUAWS AND PERSONAL BEAUTY
An excellent test of the Indian's capacity for refined amorous feeling
may be found in his attitude toward personal beauty. Does he admire
real beauty, and does it decide his choice of a mate? That there are
good-looking girls among some Indian tribes cannot be denied, though
they are exceptional. Among the thousands of squaws I have seen on the
Pacific Slope, from Mexico to Alaska, I can recall only one whom I
could call really beautiful. She was a pupil at a Sitka Indian school,
spoke English well, and I suspect had some white blood in her. Joaquin
Miller, who married a Modoc girl and is given to romancing and
idealizing, relates (227) how "the brown-eyed girls danced, gay and
beautiful, half-nude, in their rich black hair and flowing robes."
Herbert Walsh,[208] speaking of the girls at a Navajo Indian school,
writes that
"among them was one little girl of striking beauty,
with fine, dark eyes, regularly and delicately modelled
features, and a most winning expression. Nothing could
be more attractive than the unconscious grace of this
child of nature."
I can find no indication, however, that the Indians ever admire such
exceptional beauty, and plenty of evidence that what they admire is
not beautiful. "These Indians are far from being connoisseurs in
beauty," wrote Mrs. Eastman (105) of the Dakotas. Dobrizhoffer says of
the Abipones (II., 139) what we read in Schoolcraft concerning the
Creeks: "Beauty is of no estimation in either sex;" and I have also
previously quoted Belden's testimony (302), that the men select the
squaws not for their personal beauty but "their strength and ability
to work;" to which he should have added, their weight; for bulk is the
savage's synonym for beauty. Burton (_C.S._, 128) admired the pretty
doll-like faces of the Sioux girls, but only up to the age of six.
"When full grown the figure becomes dumpy and _trapu_;" and that is
what attracts the Indian. The examples given in the chapter on
Personal Beauty of the Indians' indifference to geological layers of
dirt on their faces and bodies would alone prove beyond all
possibility of dispute that they can have no esthetic appreciation of
personal charms. The very highest type of Indian beauty is that
described by Powers in the case of a California girl
"just gliding out of the uncomfortable obesity of
youth, her complexion a soft, creamy hazel, her wide
eyes dreamy and idle ... a not unattractive type of
vacuous, facile, and voluptuous beauty"
--a beauty, I need not add, which may attract, but would not inspire
love of the sentimental kind, even if the Indian were capable of it.
ARE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS GALLANT?
Having failed to find mental purity and admiration of personal beauty
in the Indian's love-affairs, let us now see how he stands in regard
to the altruistic impulses which differentiate love from self-love. Do
Indians behave gallantly toward their women? Do they habitually
sacrifice their comfort and, in case of need, their lives for their
wives?
Dr. Brinton declares (_Am. R._, 48) that "the position of women in the
social scheme of the American tribes has often been portrayed in
darker colors than the truth admits." Another eminent American
anthropologist, Horatio Hale, wrote[209] that women among the Indians
and other savages are not treated with harshness or regarded as
inferiors except under special circumstances. "It is entirely a
question of physical comfort, and mainly of the abundance or lack of
food," he maintains. For instance, among the sub-arctic Tinneh, women
are "slaves," while among the Tinneh (Navajos) of sunny Arizona they
are "queens." Heckewelder declares (_T.A.P.S._, 142) that the labors
of the squaws "are no more than their fair share, under every
consideration and due allowance, of the hardships attendant on savage
life." This benevolent and oft-cited old writer shows indeed such an
eager desire to whitewash the Indian warrior that an ignorant reader
of his book might find some difficulty in restraining his indignation
at the horrid, lazy squaws for not also relieving the poor,
unprotected men of the only two duties which they have retained for
themselves--murdering men or animals. But the most "fearless" champion
of the noble red man is a woman--Rose Yawger--who writes (in _The
Indian and the Pioneer_, 42) that "the position of the Indian woman in
her nation was not greatly inferior to that enjoyed by the American
woman of to-day." ... "They were treated with great respect." Let us
confront these assertions with facts.
Beginning with the Pacific Coast, we are told by Powers (405) that, on
the whole, California Indians did not make such slaves of women as the
Indians of the Atlantic side of the continent. This, however, is
merely comparative, and does not mean that they treat them kindly,
for, as he himself says (23), "while on a journey the man lays far the
greatest burdens on his wife." On another page (406) he remarks that
while a California boy is not "taught to pierce his mother's flesh
with an arrow to show him his superiority over her, as among the
Apaches and Iroquois," he nevertheless afterward "slays his wife or
mother-in-law, if angry, with very little compunction." Colonel McKee,
in describing an expedition among California Indians (Schoolcraft,
III., 127), writes:
"One of the whites here, in breaking in his squaw to
her household duties, had occasion to beat her several
times. She complained of this to her tribe and they
informed him that he must not do so; if he was
dissatisfied, _let him kill her and take another_!"
"The men," he adds, "allow themselves the privilege of
shooting any woman they are tired of."
The Pomo Indians make it a special point to slaughter the women of
their enemies during or after battle. "They do this because, as they
argue with the greatest sincerity, one woman destroyed is tantamount
to five men killed" (Bancroft, I., 160), for without women the tribe
cannot multiply. A Modoc explained why he needed several wives--one to
take care of his house, a second to hunt for him, a third to dig roots
(259). Bancroft cites half a dozen authorities for the assertion that
among the Indians of Northern California "boys are disgraced by work"
and "women work while men gamble or sleep" (I., 351). John Muir, in
his recent work on _The Mountains of California_ (80), says it is
truly astonishing to see what immense loads the haggard old Pah Ute
squaws make out to carry bare-footed over the rugged passes. The men,
who are always with them, stride on erect and unburdened, but when
they come to a difficult place they "kindly" pile stepping-stones for
their patient pack-animal wives, "just as they would prepare the way
for their ponies."
Among some of the Klamath and other California tribes certain women
are allowed to attain the rank of priestesses. To be "supposed to have
communication with the devil" and be alone "potent over cases of
witchcraft and witch poisoning" (67) is, however, an honor which women
elsewhere would hardly covet. Among the Yurok, Powers relates (56),
when a young man cannot afford to pay the amount of shell-money
without which marriage is not considered legal, he is sometimes
allowed to pay half the sum and become what is termed "half-married."
"Instead of bringing her to his cabin and making her his slave, he
goes to live in her cabin and becomes her slave." This, however,
"occurs only in case of soft uxorious fellows." Sometimes, too, a
squaw will take the law in her own hands, as in a case mentioned by
the same writer (199). A Wappo Indian abandoned his wife and went down
the river to a ranch where he took another woman. But the lawful
spouse soon discovered his whereabouts, followed him up, confronted
him before his paramour, upbraided him fiercely, and then seized him
by the hair and led him away triumphantly to her bed and basket. It is
to check such unseemly "new-womanish" tendencies in their squaws that
the Californians resorted to the bugaboo performances already referred
to. The Central Californian women, says Bancroft (391), are more apt
than the others to rebel against the tyranny of their masters; but the
men usually manage to keep them in subjection. The Tatu and Pomo
tribes intimidate them in this way:
"A man is stripped naked, painted with red and black
stripes, and then at night takes a sprig of poison oak,
dips it in water, and sprinkles it on the squaws, who,
from its effects on their skins, are convinced of the
man's satanic power, so that his object is attained."
(Powers, 141.)
The pages of Bancroft contain many references besides those already
quoted, showing how far the Indians of California were from treating
their women with chivalrous, self-sacrificing devotion. "The principal
labor falls to the lot of the women" (I., 351). Among the
Gallinomeros,
"_as usual_, the women are treated with great contempt
by the men, and forced to do all the hard and menial
work; they are not even allowed to sit at the same fire
or eat at the same repast with their lords" (390).
Among the Shoshones "the weaker sex _of course_ do the hardest labor"
(437), etc. With the Hupâ a girl will bring in the market $15 to
$50--"about half the valuation of a man." (Powers, 85.)
Nor do matters mend if we proceed northward on the Pacific coast.
Thus, Gibbs says (198) of the Indians of Western Oregon and
Washington, "the condition of the woman is that of slavery under any
circumstances;" and similar testimony might be adduced regarding the
Indians of British Columbia and Alaska.
Among the eastern neighbors of the Californians there is one Indian
people--the Navajos of Arizona and New Mexico--that calls for special
attention, as its women, according to Horatio Hale, are not slaves but
"queens." The Navajos have lived for centuries in a rich and fertile
country; their name is said to mean "large cornfields" and the
Spaniards found, about the middle of the sixteenth century, that they
practised irrigation. A more recent writer, E.A. Graves,[210] says
that the Navajos "possess more wealth than all the wild tribes in New
Mexico combined. They are rich in horses, mules, asses, goats, and
sheep." Bancroft cites evidence (I., 513) that the women were the
owners of the sheep; that they were allowed to take their meals with
the men, and admitted to their councils; and that they were relieved
of the drudgery of menial work. Major E. Backus also noted
(Schoolcraft, IV., 214) that Navajo women "are treated more kindly
than the squaws of the northern tribes, and perform far less of
laborious work than the Sioux or Chippewa women." But when we examine
the facts more closely we find that this comparative "emancipation" of
the Navajo women was not a chivalrous concession on the part of the
men, but proceeded simply from the lack of occasion for the exercise
of their selfish propensities. No one would be so foolish as to say
that even the most savage Indian would put his squaw into the
treadmill merely for the fun of seeing her toil. He makes a drudge of
her in order to save himself the trouble of working. Now the Navajos
were rich enough to employ slaves; their labor, says Major Backus, was
"mostly performed by the poor dependants, both male and female." Hence
there was no reason for making slaves of their wives. Backus gives
another reason why these women were treated more kindly than other
squaws. After marriage they became free, for sufficient cause, to
leave their husbands, who were thus put on their good behavior. Before
marriage, however, they had no free choice, but were the property of
their fathers. "The consent of the father is absolute, and the one so
purchased assents or is taken away by force."[211]
A total disregard of these women's feelings was also shown in the
"very extensive prevalence of polygamy," and in the custom that the
wife last chosen was always mistress of her predecessors. (Bancroft,
I., 512.) But the utter incapacity of Navajo men for sympathetic,
gallant, chivalrous sentiment is most glaringly revealed by the
barbarous treatment of their female captives, who, as before stated,
were often shot or delivered up for indiscriminate violence. Where
such a custom prevails as a national institution it would be useless
to search for refined feeling toward any woman. Indeed, the Navajo
women themselves rendered the growth of refined sexual feeling
impossible by their conduct. They were notorious, even among Indians,
for their immodesty and lewd conduct, and were consequently incapable
of either feeling or inspiring any but the coarsest sensual passion.
They were not queens, as the astonishing Hale would have it, but they
certainly were queans.
Concerning other Indians of the Southwest--Yumas, Mojaves, Pueblos,
etc.--M.A. Dorchester writes:[212]
"The native Indian is naturally polite, but until
touched by civilization, it never occurred to him to be
polite to his wife." "If there is one drawback to
Indian civilization more difficult to overcome than any
other, it is to convince the Indian that he ought not
to put the hardest work upon the Indian women."
The ferocious Apaches make slaves of their women. (Bancroft, I., 512.)
Among the Comanches "the women do all the menial work." The husband
has the pleasant excitement of killing the game, while the women do
the hard work even here: "they butcher and transport the meat, dress
the skins, etc." "The females are abused and often beaten
unmercifully." (Schoolcraft, I., 236, V., 684.) The Moquis squaws were
exempt from field labor not from chivalrous feelings but because the
men feared amorous intrigues. (Waitz, IV., 209.) A Snake, Lewis and
Clarke found (308),
"would consider himself degraded by being compelled to
walk any distance; and were he so poor as to possess
only two horses, he would ride the best of them, and
leave the other for his wives and children and their
baggage; and if he has too many wives or too much
baggage for the horse, the wives have no alternative
but to follow him on foot."
Turning to the great Dakota or Sioux stock, we run against one of the
most naïve of the sentimentalists, Catlin, who perpetrated several
books on the Indians and made many "fearless" assertions about the red
men in general and the Mandans in particular. G.E. Ellis, in his book,
_The Red Man and the While Man_ (101), justly observes of Catlin that
"he writes more like a child than a well-balanced man," and Mitchell
(in Schoolcraft, III., 254) declares that much of what Catlin wrote
regarding the Mandans existed "entirely in the fertile imagination of
that gentleman," Yet this does not prevent eminent anthropologists
like Westermarck (359) from soberly quoting Catlin's declaration that
"it would be untrue and doing injustice to the Indians, to say that
they were in the least behind us in conjugal, in filial, and in
paternal affection" (_L.N.N.A.I._, I., 121). There is only one way of
gauging a man's affection, and that is by his actions. Now how,
according to Catlin himself, does an Indian act toward his wife? Even
among the Mandans, so superior to the other Indians he visited, he
found that the women, however attractive or hungry they might be,
"are not allowed to sit in the same group with the men
while at their meals. So far as I have yet travelled in
the Indian country I have never seen an Indian woman
eating with her husband. Men form the first group at
the banquet, and _women and children and dogs_ all come
together at the next."
Men first, women and dogs next--yet they are "not in the least behind
us in conjugal affection!" With his childish disregard of logic and
lack of a sense of humor Catlin goes on to tell us that Mandan women
lose their beauty soon because of their early marriages and "the
slavish life they lead." In many cases, he adds, the inclinations of
the girl are not considered in marriage, _the father selling her to
the highest bidder_.
Mandan conjugal affection, "just like ours," is further manifested by
the custom, previously referred to, which obliges mourning women to
crop off all their hair, while of a man's locks, which "are of much
greater importance," only one or two can be spared. (Catlin, _l.c._,
I., 95, 119, 121; II., 123.) An amusing illustration of the Mandan's
supercilious contempt for women, also by Catlin, will be given
later.[213]
The Sioux tribes in general have always been notorious for the brutal
treatment of their women. Mrs. Eastman, who wrote a book on their
customs, once received an offer of marriage from a chief who had a
habit of expending all his surplus bad temper upon his wives. He had
three of them, but was willing to give them all up if she would live
with him. She refused, as she "did not fancy having her head split
open every few days with a stick of wood." G.P. Belden, who also knew
the Sioux thoroughly, having lived among them twelve years, wrote
(270, 303-5) that "the days of her childhood are the only happy or
pleasant days the Indian girl ever knows." "From the day of her
marriage [in which she has no choice] until her death she leads a most
wretched life." The women are "the servants of servants." "On a winter
day the Sioux mother is often obliged to travel eight or ten miles and
carry her lodge, camp-kettle, ax, child, and several small dogs on her
back and head." She has to build the camp, cook, take care of the
children, and even of the pony on which her lazy and selfish husband
has ridden while she tramped along with all those burdens. "So severe
is their treatment of women, a happy female face is hardly ever seen
in the Sioux nation." Many become callous, and take a beating much as
a horse or ox does. "Suicide is very common among Indian women, and,
considering the treatment they receive, it is a wonder there is not
more of it."[214]
Burton attests (_C.S._, 125, 130, 60) that "the squaw is a mere slave,
living a life of utter drudgery." The husbands "care little for their
wives." "The drudgery of the tent and field renders the squaw cold and
unimpassioned." "The son is taught to make his mother toil for him."
"One can hardly expect a smiling countenance from the human biped
trudging ten or twenty miles under a load fit for a mule." "Dacotah
females," writes Neill (82, 85),
"deserve the sympathy of every tender heart. From early
childhood they lead worse than a dog's life.
Uncultivated and treated like brutes, they are prone to
suicide, and, when desperate, they act more like
infuriated beasts than creatures of reason."
Of the Crow branch of the Dakotas, Catlin wrote:[215] "They are,
_like all other Indian women, the slaves of their husbands_ ... and
not allowed to join in their religious rites and ceremonies, nor in
the dance or other amusements." All of which is delightfully
consistent with this writer's assertion that the Indians are "not in
the least behind us in conjugal affection."[216]
In his _Travels Through the Northwest Regions of the United States_
Schoolcraft thus sums up (231) his observations:
"Of the state of female society among the Northern Indians I
shall say little, because on a review of it I find very
little to admire, either in their collective morality, or
personal endowments.... Doomed to drudgery and hardships
from infancy ... without either mental resources or personal
beauty--what can be said in favor of the Indian women?"
A French author, Eugene A. Vail, writes an interesting summary
(207-14) of the realistic descriptions given by older writers of the
brutal treatment to which the women of the Northern Indians were
subjected. He refers, among other things, to the efforts made by
Governor Cass, of Michigan, to induce the Indians to treat their women
more humanely; but all persuasion was in vain, and the governor
finally had to resort to punishment. He also refers to the selfish
ingenuity with which the men succeeded in persuading the foolish
squaws that it would be a disgrace for their lords and masters to do
any work, and that polygamy was a desirable thing. The men took as
many wives as they pleased, and if one of them remonstrated against a
new rival, she received a sound thrashing.
In Franklin's _Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea_ we are informed
(160) that the women are obliged to drag the heavily laden sledges:
"Nothing can more shock the feelings of a person
accustomed to civilized life than to witness the state
of their degradation. When a party is on a march the
women have to drag the tent, the meat, and whatever the
hunter possesses, whilst he only carries his gun and
medicine case."
When the men have killed any large beast, says Hearne (90), the women
are always sent to carry it to the tent. They have to prepare and cook
it,
"and when it is done the wives and daughters of the
greatest captains in the country are never served till
all the males, even those who are in the capacity of
servants, have eaten what they think proper."
Of the Chippewas, Keating says (II., 153), that "frequently ... their
brutal conduct to their wives produces abortions."
A friend of the Blackfoot Indians, G.B. Grinnell, relates (184, 216)
that, while boys play and do as they please, a girl's duties begin at
an early age, and she soon does all a woman's "and so menial" work.
Their fathers select husbands for them and, if they disobey, have a
right to beat or even kill them. "As a consequence of this severity,
suicide was quite common among the Blackfoot girls."
A passage in William Wood's _New England Prospect_, published in
1634,[217] throws light on the aboriginal condition of Indian women in
that region. Wood refers to "the customarie churlishnesse and salvage
inhumanitie" of the men. The Indian women, he says, are
"more loving, pittiful and modest, milde, provident,
and laborious than their lazie husbands.... Since the
_English_ arrivall comparison hath made them miserable,
for seeing the kind usage of the _English_ to their
wives, they doe as much condemne their husbands for
unkindnesse and commend the _English_ for love, as
their husbands, commending themselves for their wit in
keeping their wives industrious, doe condemn the
_English_ for their folly in spoiling good working
creatures."
Concerning the intelligent, widely scattered, and numerous Iroquois,
Morgan, who knew them more intimately than anyone else, wrote (322),
that "the Indian regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and
the servant of man, and, from nature and habit, she actually
considered herself to be so." "Adultery was punished by whipping; but
the punishment was inflicted on the woman alone, who was supposed to
be the only offender" (331). "Female life among the Hurons had no
bright side," wrote Parkman (_J.C._, XXXIII.). After marriage,
"the Huron woman from a wanton became a drudge ... in
the words of Champlain, 'their women were their mules.'
The natural result followed. In every Huron town were
shrivelled hags, hideous and despised, who, in
vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the
men."
The _Jesuit Relations_ contain many references to the merciless
treatment of their women by the Canadian Indians. "These poor women
are real pack-mules, enduring all hardships." "In the winter, when
they break camp, the women drag the heaviest loads over the snow; in
short, the men seem to have as their share only hunting, war, and
trading" (IV., 205). "The women here are mistresses and servants"
(Hurons, XV.). In volume III. of the _Jesuit Relations_ (101), Biard
writes under date of 1616:
"These poor creatures endure all the misfortunes and
hardships of life; they prepare and erect the houses,
or cabins, furnishing them with fire, wood, and water;
prepare the food, preserve the meat and other
provisions, that is, dry them in the smoke to preserve
them; go to bring the game from the place where it has
been killed; sew and repair the canoes, mend and stitch
the skins, curry them and make clothes and shoes of
them for the whole family; they go fishing and do the
rowing; in short, undertake all the work except that
alone of the grand chase, besides having the care and
so weakening nourishment of the children....
"Now these women, although they have so much trouble,
as I have said, yet are not cherished any more for it.
The husbands beat them unmercifully, and often for a
very slight cause. One day a certain Frenchman
undertook to rebuke a savage for this; the savage
answered, angrily: 'How now, have you nothing to do but
to see into my house, every time I strike my dog?'"
Surely Dr. Brinton erred grievously when he wrote, in his otherwise
admirable book, _The American Race_ (49), that the fatigues of the
Indian women were scarce greater than those of their husbands, nor
their life more onerous than that of the peasant women of Europe
to-day. Peasants in Europe work quite as hard as their wives, whereas
the Indian--except during the delightful hunting period, or in
war-time, which, though frequent, was after all merely episodic--did
nothing at all, and considered labor a disgrace to a man, fit only for
women. The difference between the European peasant and the American
red man can be inferred by anyone from what observers reported of the
Creek Indians of our Southern States (Schoolcraft, V., 272-77):
"The summer season, with the men, is devoted to war, or
their domestic amusements of riding, horse-hunting,
ball-plays, and dancing, and by the women to their
customary hard labor."
"The women perform all the labor, both in the house and
field, and are, in fact, but slaves to the men, without
any will of their own, except in the management of the
children."
"A stranger going into the country must feel distressed
when he sees naked women bringing in huge burdens of
wood on their shoulders, or, bent under the scorching
sun, at hard labor in the field, while the indolent,
robust young men are riding about, or stretched at ease
on some scaffold, amusing themselves with a pipe or a
whistle."
The excesses to which bias and unintelligent philanthropy can lead a
man are lamentably illustrated in the writings of the Moravian
missionary, Heckewelder, regarding the Delaware Indians.[218] He
argues that
"as women are not obliged to live with their husbands
any longer than suits their pleasure or convenience, it
cannot be supposed that they would submit to be loaded
with unjust or unequal burdens" (!) "Were a man to take
upon himself a part of his wife's duty, in addition to
his own [hunting (!), for the Delawares were then a
peaceful tribe], he must necessarily sink under the
load, and of course his family must suffer with him."
The heartless sophistry of this reasoning--heartless because of its
pitiless disregard of the burdens and sufferings of the poor women--is
exposed in part by his own admissions regarding the selfish actions of
the men. He does not deny that after the women have harvested their
corn or maple sugar the men arrogate the right to dispose of it as
they please. He relates that in case of a domestic quarrel the husband
shoulders his gun and goes away a week or so. The neighbors naturally
say that his wife is quarrelsome. All the odium consequently falls on
her, and when he gets back she is only too willing to drudge for him
more than ever. Heckewelder naïvely gives the Indian's recipe for
getting a useful wife:
"Indian, when he see industrious squaw, which he like,
he go to _him_ [her], place his two forefingers close
aside each other, make two look like one--see _him_
[her] smile--which is all _he_ [she] say, _yes!_ so he
take _him_ [her] home. Squaw know too well what Indian
do if _he_ [she] cross! Throw _him_ [her] away and take
another! Squaw love to eat meat! no husband! no meat!
Squaw do everything to please husband! he do same to
please squaw [??]! live happy."
When that Indian said "he do the same to please the squaw," he must
have chuckled at his own sarcasm. Heckewelder does, indeed, mention a
few instances of kindness to a wife _(e.g._, going a great distance to
get some berries which she, in a pregnant state, eagerly desired;) but
these were obviously exceptional, as I have found nothing like them in
other records of Indian life. It must be remembered that, as Roosevelt
remarks (97) these Indians, under the influence of the Moravian
missionaries, had been
"transformed in one generation from a restless, idle,
blood-thirsty people of hunters arid fishers into an
orderly, thrifty, industrious folk; believing with all their
hearts the Christian religion."
It was impossible, however, to drive out the devil entirely, as the
facts cited show, and as we may infer from what, according to Loskiel,
was true a century ago of the Delawares as well as the Iroquois:
"Often it happens that an Indian deserts his wife because she has a
child to suckle, and marries another whom he presently abandons for
the same reason." In this respect, however, the women are not much
better than the men, for, as he adds, they often desert a husband who
has no more presents to give them, and go with another who has. Truly
Catlin was right when he said that the Indians (and these were the
best of them) were "not in the least behind us in conjugal affection!"
Thus do even the apparent exceptions to Indian maltreatment of
women--which exceptions are constantly cited as illustrations of the
rule--melt away like mists when sunlight is brought to bear upon them.
One more of these exceptions, of which sly sentimentalists have made
improper use, must be referred to here. It is maintained, on the
authority of Charlevoix, that the women of the Natchez Indians
asserted their rights and privileges even above those of the men, for
they were allowed to put unfaithful husbands to death while they
themselves could have as many paramours as they pleased. Moreover, the
husband had to stand in a respectful posture in the presence of his
wife, was not allowed to eat with her, and had to salute her in the
same way as the servants. This, truly, would be a remarkable
sociological fact--if it were a fact. But upon referring to the pages
of Charlevoix (264) we find that these statements, while perfectly
true, do not refer to the Natchez women in general, but only to the
princesses, or "female suns." These were allowed to marry none but
private men; but by way of compensation they had the right to discard
their husbands whenever they pleased and take another. The other women
had no more privileges than the squaws of other tribes; whenever a
chief saw a girl he liked he simply informed the relatives of the fact
and enrolled her among the number of his wives. Charlevoix adds that
he knew of no nation in America where the women were more unchaste.
The privileges conferred on the princesses thus appear like a coarse,
topsy-turvy joke, while affording one more instance of the lowest
degradation of woman.
Summing up the most ancient and trustworthy evidence regarding Mexico,
Bandelier writes (627):
"The position of women was so inferior, they were
regarded as so far beneath the male, that the most
degrading epithet that could be applied to any Mexican,
aside from calling him a dog, was that of woman."
If a woman presumed to don a man's dress her death alone could wipe
out the dishonor.
SOUTH AMERICAN GALLANTRY
So much for the Indians of North America. The tribes of the southern
half of the continent would furnish quite as long and harrowing a tale
of masculine selfishness and brutality, but considerations of space
compel us to content ourselves with a few striking samples.
In the northern regions of South America historians say that "when a
tribe was preparing poison in time of war, its efficacy was tried upon
the old women of the tribe."[219]
"When we saw the Chaymas return in the evening from their gardens,"
writes Humboldt (I., 309),
"the man carried nothing but the knife or hatchet
(machete) with which he clears his way among the
underwood; whilst the woman, bending under a great load
of plantains, carried one child in her arms, and,
sometimes, two other children placed upon the load."
Schomburgk (II., 428) found that Caribbean women generally bore marks
of the brutal treatment to which they were subjected by the men. Brett
noted (27, 31) that among the Guiana tribes women had to do all the
work in field and home as well as on the march, while the men made
baskets, or lay indolently in hammocks until necessity compelled them
to go hunting or fishing. The men had succeeded so thoroughly in
creating a sentiment among the women that it was their duty to do all
the work, that when Brett once induced an Indian to take a heavy bunch
of plantains off his wife's head and carry it himself, the wife (slave
to the backbone) seemed hurt at what she deemed a degradation of her
husband. One of the most advanced races of South America were the
Abipones of Paraguay. While addicted to infanticide they, contrary to
the rule, were more apt to spare the female children; but their reason
for this was purely commercial. A son, they said, would be obliged to
purchase a wife, whereas daughters may be sold to a bridegroom
(Dobrizhoffer, II., 97). The same missionary relates (214) that boys
are laughed at, praised and rewarded for throwing bones, horns, etc.,
at their mothers.
"If their wives displease them, it is sufficient; they
are ordered to decamp.... Should the husband cast his
eyes upon any handsome woman the old wife must move
merely on this account, her fading form and advancing
age being her only accusers, though she may be
universally commended for conjugal fidelity, regularity
of conduct, diligent obedience, and the children she
has borne."
In Chili, among the Mapuchés (Araucanians) the females, says Smith
(214), "do all the labor, from ploughing and cooking to the saddling
and unsaddling of a horse; for the 'lord and master' does nothing but
eat, sleep, and ride about." Of the Peruvian Indians the Jesuit Pater
W. Bayer (cited Reich, 444) wrote about the middle of the eighteenth
century that wives are treated as slaves and are so accustomed to
being regularly whipped that when the husband leaves them alone they
fear he is paying attention to another woman and beg him to resume his
beating. In Brazil, we are informed by Spix and Martins (I., 381),
"the women in general are slaves of the men, being
compelled when on the march to carry everything needed,
like beasts of burden; nay, they are even obliged to
bring home from the forest the game killed by the men."
Tschndi (_R.d.S.A._, 284, 274) saw the marks of violence on many of
the Botocudo women, and he says the men reserved for themselves the
beautiful plumes of birds, leaving to the women such ornaments as
pig's claws, berries, and monkey's teeth. A peculiar refinement of
selfishness is alluded to by Burton (_H.B._, II., 49):
"The Brazilian natives, to warm their naked bodies,
even in the wigwam, and to defend themselves against
wild beasts, used to make their women keep wood burning
all night."
Of the Patagonians Falkner says (125) that the women "are obliged
to submit to every species of drudgery." He gives a long list of their
duties (including even hunting) and adds:
"No excuse of sickness, or being big with child, will
relieve them from their appointed labor; and so rigidly
are they obliged to perform their duty, that their
husbands cannot help them on any occasion, or in the
greatest distress, without incurring the highest
ignominy."
Even the wives of the chiefs were obliged to drudge unless they had
slaves. At their marriages there is little ceremony, the bride being
simply handed over to the man as his property. The Fuegians, according
to Fitzroy, when reduced to a state of famine, became cannibals,
eating their old women first, before they kill their dogs. A boy being
asked why they did this, answered: "Doggie catch otters, old women
no." (Darwin, _V B._, 214.)
Thus, from the extreme north to the extreme south of the American
continent we find the "noble red man" consistent in at least one
thing--his maltreatment of women. How, in the face of these facts,
which might be multiplied indefinitely, a specialist like Horatio Hale
could write that there was among the Indians "complete equality of the
sexes in social estimation and influence," and that
"casual observers have been misled by the absence of
those artificial expressions of courtesy which have
descended to us from the time of chivalry, and which,
however gracious and pleasing to witness, are, after
all, merely signs of condescension and protection from
the strong to the weak"[220]
--surpasses all understanding. It is a shameful perversion of the
truth, as all the intelligent and unbiassed evidence of observers from
the earliest time proves.
HOW INDIANS ADORE SQUAWS
Not content with maltreating their squaws, the Indians literally add
insult to injury by the low estimation in which they hold them. A few
sample illustrations must suffice to show how far that adoration which
a modern lover feels for women and for his sweetheart in particular is
beyond their mental horizon.
"The Indians," says Hunter (250), "regarding themselves as the lords
of the earth, look down upon the squaws as an inferior order of
beings," created to rear families and do all the drudgery; "and the
squaws, accustomed to such usage, cheerfully acquiesce in it as a
duty." The squaw is not esteemed for her own sake, but "in proportion
to the number of children she raises, particularly if they are males,
and prove brave warriors." Franklin says (287) that the Copper Indians
"hold women in the same low estimation as the Chippewayans do, looking
upon them as a kind of property which the stronger may take from the
weaker." He also speaks (157) "of the office of nurse, so degrading in
the eyes of a Chippewayan, as partaking of the duties of a woman."
"The manner of the Indian boy toward his mother," writes Willoughby
(274), "is almost uniformly disrespectful;" while the adults consider
it a disgrace to do a woman's work--that is, practically any work at
all; for hunting is not regarded as work, but is indulged in for the
sport and excitement. In the preface to Mrs. Eastman's book on the
Dakotas we read:
"The peculiar sorrows of the Sioux woman commence at
her birth. Even as a child she is despised, in
comparison with her brother beside her, who is one day
to be a great warrior."
"Almost everything that a man owns is sacred," says Neill (86), "but
nothing that the woman possesses is so esteemed." The most insulting
epithets that can be bestowed on a Sioux are coward, dog, woman. Among
the Creeks, "old woman" is the greatest term of reproach which can be
used to those not distinguished by war names. You may call an Indian a
liar without arousing his anger, but to call him a woman is to bring
on a quarrel at once. (Schoolcraft, V., 280.) If the Natchez have a
prisoner who winces under torture he is turned over to the women as
being unworthy to die by the hands of men. (Charlevoix, 207.) In many
cases boys are deliberately taught to despise their mothers as their
inferiors. Blackfeet men mourn for the loss of a man by scarifying
their legs; but if the deceased is only a woman, this is never done.
(Grinnell, 194.) Among all the tribes the men look on manual work as a
degradation, fit only for women. The Abipones think it beneath a man
to take any part in female quarrels, and this too is a general trait.
(Dobrizhoffer, II., 155.)[221] Mrs. Eastman relates (XVII.) that
"among the Dakotas the men think it undignified for
them to steal, so they send their wives thus unlawfully
to procure what they want--and woe be to them if they
are found out."
Horse-stealing alone is considered worthy of superior man. But the
most eloquent testimony to the Indian's utter contempt for woman is
contributed in an unguarded moment by his most ardent champion. Catlin
relates (_N.A.I._, I., 226) how he at one time undertook to paint the
portraits of the chiefs and such of the warriors as the chiefs deemed
worthy of such an honor. All was well until, after doing the men, he
proposed also to paint the pictures of some of the squaws:
"I at once got myself into a serious perplexity, being
heartily laughed at by the whole tribe, both by men and
by women, for my exceeding and (to them) unaccountable
condescension in seriously proposing to paint a woman,
conferring on her the same honor that I had done the
chiefs and braves. Those whom I had honored were
laughed at by the hundreds of the jealous, who had been
decided unworthy the distinction, and were now amusing
themselves with the _very enviable honor_ which the
_great white medicine man_ had conferred _especially_
on them, and was now to confer equally upon the
_squaws!_"
CHOOSING A HUSBAND
It might be inferred _a priori_ that savages who despise and abuse
their women as the Indians do would not allow girls to choose their
own husbands except in cases where no selfish reason existed to force
them to marry the choice of their parents. This inference is borne out
by the facts. Westermarck, indeed, remarks (215) that "among the
Indians of North America, numberless instances are given of woman's
liberty to choose her husband." But of the dozen or so cases he cites,
several rest on unreliable evidence, some have nothing to do with the
question at issue,[222] and others prove exactly the contrary of what
he asserts; while, _more suo_, he placidly ignores the mass of facts
which disprove his assertion that "women are not, as a rule, married
without having any voice of their own in the matter." There are, no
doubt, some tribes who allow their women more or less freedom. Apache
courtship appears to be carried on in two ways, in each of which the
girl has the power to refuse. In both cases the proposal is made by
pantomime, without a word being spoken. According to Cremony (245).
the lover stakes his horse in front of the girl's "roost." Should she
favor his suit, she takes his horse, gives it food and water, and
secures it in front of his lodge. Four days comprise the term allowed
for an answer. Dr. J.W. Hoffman relates[223] that a Coyotero Apache,
having selected the girl he wants, watches to find out the trail she
is apt to frequent when she goes to pick berries or grass seed. Having
discovered it, he places a row of stones on both sides of it for a
distance of ten or fifteen paces:
"He then allows himself to be seen by the maiden before
she leaves camp, and running ahead, hides himself in
the immediate vicinity of the row of stones. If she
avoids them by passing to the outside, it is a refusal,
but should she continue on her trail, and pass between
the two rows, he immediately rushes out, catches her
and ... carries her triumphantly to camp."
Lewis and Clarke relate (441) that among the Chinooks the women "have
a rank and influence very rarely found among Indians." They are
allowed to speak freely before the men, their advice is asked, and the
men do not make drudges of them. The reason for this may be found in a
sentence from Ross's book on Oregon (90): "Slaves do all the laborious
work." Among such Indians one might expect that girls would have their
inclinations consulted when it came to choosing a husband. In the
twelfth chapter of his _Wa-Kee-Nah_, James C. Strong gives a graphic
description of a bridal chase which he once witnessed among the
Mountain Chinooks. A chief had an attractive daughter who was desired
by four braves. The parents, having no special choice in the matter,
decided that there should be a race on horseback, the girl being the
winner's prize. But if the parents had no preference, the girl had;
she indulged in various ingenious manoeuvres to make it possible for
the Indian on the bay horse to overtake her first. He succeeded, put
his arm round her waist, lifted her from her horse to his own, and
married her the next day.
Here the girl had her way, and yet it was only by accident, for while
she had a preference, she had no liberty of choice. It was the parents
who ordered the bridal race, and, had another won it, she would have
been his. It is indeed difficult to find real instances of liberty of
choice where the daughter's desire conflicted with the wishes of the
parents or other relatives. Westermarck claims that the Creeks
endeavored to gain the girl's consent, but no such fact can be
gathered from the passage he refers to (Schoolcraft, V., 269).
Moreover, among the Creeks, unrestrained license prevailed before
marriage, and marriage was considered only as a temporary convenience,
not binding on the party more than a year; and finally, Creeks who
wanted to marry had to gain the consent of the young woman's uncles,
aunts, and brothers. Westermarck also says that among the Thlinkets
the suitor had to consult the wishes of the "young lady;" yet on page
511 he tells us that among these Indians, "when a husband dies, his
sister's son _must_ marry the widow." It does not seem likely that
where even widows are treated so unceremoniously, any deference is
paid to the wishes of the "young ladies." From Keating Westermarck
gathers the information that although with the Chippewas the mothers
generally settle the preliminaries to marriage without consulting the
children, the parties are not considered husband and wife till they
have given their consent. A reference to the original passage gives,
however, a different impression, showing that the parents always have
their own way, unless the girl elopes. The suitor's mother arranges
the matter with the parents of the girl he wants, and when the terms
have been agreed upon her property is removed to his lodge. "The
disappearance of the property is the first intimation which she
receives of the contemplated change in her condition." If one or both
are unwilling, "the parents, who have a great influence, generally
succeed in bringing them to second their views."
COMPULSORY "FREE CHOICE"
A story related by C.G. Murr, a German missionary, warns us that
assertions as to the girls being consulted must always be accepted
with great caution. His remarks relate to several countries of Spanish
America. He was often urged to find husbands for girls only thirteen
years old, by their mothers, who were tired of watching them. "Much
against my will," he writes,
"I married such young girls to Indians fifty or sixty
years old. At first I was deceived, because the girls
said it was their free choice, whereas, in truth, they
had been persuaded by their parents with flatteries or
threats. Afterwards I always asked the girls, and they
confessed that their father and mother had threatened
to beat them if they disobeyed."
In tribes where some freedom seems to be allowed the girls at present
there are stories or traditions indicating that such a departure from
the natural state of affairs is resented by the men. Sometimes, writes
Dorsey (260) of the Omahas,
"when a youth sees a girl whom he loves, if she be
willing, he says to her, 'I will stand in that place.
Please go thither at night.' Then after her arrival he
enjoys her, and subsequently asks her of her father in
marriage. But it was different with a girl who had been
petulant, one who had refused to listen to the suitor
at first. He might be inclined to take his revenge.
After lying with her, he might say, 'As you struck me
and hurt me, I will not marry you. Though you think
much of yourself, I despise you.' Then would she be
sent away without winning him for her husband; and it
was customary for the man to make songs about her. In
these songs the woman's name was not mentioned unless
she had been a 'minckeda,' or dissolute woman."[224]
A BRITISH COLUMBIA STORY
An odd story about a man who was so ugly that no girl would have him
is related by Boas.[225] This man was so distasteful to the girls that
if he accidentally touched the blanket of one of them she cut out the
piece he had touched. Ten times this had happened, and each time he
had gathered the piece that had been cut out, giving it to his mother
to save. Besides being so ugly, he was also very poor, having gambled
away everything he possessed, and being reduced to the necessity of
swallowing pebbles to allay the pangs of hunger. A sorcerer, however,
put a fine new head on him and told him where he would find two lovely
girls who had refused every suitor, but who would accept him. He did
so and the girls were so pleased with his beauty that they became his
wives at once and went home with him. He resumed his gambling and lost
again, but his wives helped him to win back his losses. They also said
to him:
"All the girls who formerly would have nothing to do
with you will now be eager to be yours. Pay no
attention to them, however, but repel them if they
touch you."
The girls did come to his mother, and they said they would like to be
his wives. When the mother told him this, he replied: "I suppose they
want to get back the pieces they cut out of their blankets." He took
the pieces, gave them to the girls, with taunting words, and drove
them away.
THE DANGER OF COQUETRY
The moral of this sarcastic conclusion obviously was intended to be
that girls must not show independence and refuse a man, though he be a
reckless gambler, so poor that he has to eat pebbles, and so ugly that
he needs to have a new head put on him. Another story, the moral of
which was "to teach girls the danger of coquetry," is told by
Schoolcraft (_Oneota_, 381-84). There was a girl who refused all her
suitors scornfully. In one case she went so far as to put together her
thumb and three fingers, and, raising her hand gracefully toward the
young man, deliberately open them in his face. This gesticulatory mode
of rejection is an expression of the highest contempt, and it galled
the young warrior so much that he was taken ill and took to his bed
until he thought out a plan of revenge which cured him. He carried it
out with the aid of a powerful spirit, or personal Manito. They made a
man of rags and dirt, cemented it with snow and brought it to life.
The girl fell in love with this man and followed him to the marshes,
where the snow-cement melted away, leaving nothing but a pile of rags
and dirt. The girl, unable to find her way back, perished in the
wilderness.
THE GIRL MARKET
In the vast majority of instances the Indians did not simply try to
curb woman's efforts to secure freedom of choice by intimidating her
or inventing warning stories, but held the reins so tightly that a
woman's having a will of her own was out of the question. It may be
said that there are three principal stages in the evolution of the
custom of choosing a wife. In the first and lowest stage a man casts
his eyes on a woman and tries to get her, utterly regardless of her
own wishes. In the second, an attempt is made to win at least her
good-will, while in the third--which civilized nations are just
entering--a lover would refuse to marry a girl at the expense of her
happiness. A few Indian tribes have got as far as the second stage,
but most of them belong to the first. Provided a warrior coveted a
girl, and provided her parents were satisfied with the payment he
offered, matters were settled without regard to the girl's wishes. To
avoid needless friction it was sometimes deemed wise to first gain the
girl's good-will; but this was a matter of secondary importance. "It
is true," says Smith in his book on the Indians of Chili (214),
"that the Araucanian girl is not regularly put up for
sale and bartered for, like the Oriental houris; but
she is none the less an article of merchandise, to be
paid for by him who would aspire to her hand. She has
no more freedom in the choice of her husband than has
the Circassian slave."
"Marriage with the North Californians," says Bancroft (I., 349),
"is essentially a matter of business. The young brave must
not hope to win his bride by feats of arms or softer wooing,
but must buy her of her father like any other chattel, and
pay the price at once, or resign in favor of a richer man.
The inclinations of the girl are in nowise consulted; no
matter where her affections are placed, she goes to the
highest bidder. The purchase effected, the successful suitor
leads his blushing property to his hut and she becomes his
wife without further ceremony. Wherever this system of
wife-purchase obtains the rich old men almost absorb the
youth and beauty of the tribe, while the younger and poorer
men must content themselves with old and ugly wives. Hence
their eagerness for that wealth which will enable them to
throw away their old wives and buy new ones."[226]
A favorable soil for the growth of romantic and conjugal love! The
Omahas have a proverb that an old man cannot win a girl, he can only
win her parents; nevertheless if the old man has the ponies he gets
the girl. The Indians insist on their rights, too. Powers tells (318)
of a California (Nishinam) girl who loathed the man that had a claim
on her. She took refuge with a kind old widow, who deceived the
pursuers. When the deception was discovered, the noble warriors drew
their arrows and shot the widow to death in the middle of the village
amid general approval. I myself once saw a poor Arizona girl who had
taken refuge with a white family. When I saw the man to whom she had
been sold--a dirty old tramp whom a decent person would not want in
the same tribe, much less in the same wigwam--I did not wonder she
hated him; but he had paid for her and she was ultimately obliged to
live with him.
Of the Mandans, Catlin says (I., 119) that wives "are mostly treated
for with the father, as in all instances they are regularly bought and
sold." Belden relates (32) how he married a Sioux girl. One evening
his Indian friend Frombe came to his lodge and said he would take him
to see his sweetheart.
"I followed him and we went out of the village to where some girls
were watching the Indian boys play at ball. Pointing to a good-looking
Indian girl, Frombe said: 'That is Washtella,'
"'Is she a good squaw?' I inquired.
"'Very,' he replied.
"'But perhaps she will not want to marry me,' I said.
"'She has no choice,' he answered, laughing.
"'But her parents,' I interposed, 'will they like this kind of
proceeding?'
"'The presents you are expected to make them will be more acceptable
than the girl,' he answered."
And when full moon came the two were married.
Blackfeet girls, according to Grinnell (316),
"had very little choice in the selection of a husband.
If a girl was told she had to marry a certain man, she
had to obey. She might cry, but her father's will was
law, and she might be beaten or even killed by him if
she did not do as she was ordered."
Concerning the Missasaguas of Ontario, Chamberlain writes (145), that
in former times,
"when a chief desired to marry, he caused all the
marriageable girls in the village to come together and
dance before him. By a mark which he placed on the
clothes of the one he had chosen her parents knew she
had been the favored one."
Of the Nascopie girls, M'Lean says (127) that "their sentiments are
never consulted."'
The Pueblos, who treat their women exceptionally well, nevertheless
get their wives by purchase. With the Navajos "courtship is simple and
brief; the wooer pays for his bride and takes her home." (Bancroft, L,
511.) Among the Columbia River Indians, "to give a wife away without a
price is in the highest degree disgraceful to her family." (Bancroft,
I., 276.) "The Pawnees," says Catlin,[227] "marry and unmarry at
pleasure. Their daughters are held as legitimate merchandise.... The
women, as a rule, accept the situation with the apathy of the race."
Of the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and other Plains Indians, Dodge says
(216) that girls are regarded as valuable property to be sold to the
highest bidder, in later times by preference to a white man, though it
is known that he will probably soon abandon his wife. In Oregon and
Washington "wives, particularly the later ones, are often sold or
traded off.... A man sends his wife away, or sells her, at his will."
(Gibbs, 199.)
OTHER WAYS OF THWARTING FREE CHOICE
Besides this commercialism, which was so prevalent that, as Dr.
Brinton says (_A.R._, 48), "in America marriage was usually by
purchase," there were various other obstacles to free choice. "In a
number of tribes," as the same champion of the Indian remarks, "the
purchase of the eldest daughter gave a man a right to buy all the
younger daughters as they reached nubile age." Concerning the
Blackfeet--who were among the most advanced Indians--Grinnell says
(217) that
"all the younger sisters of a man's wife were regarded
as his potential wives. If he was not disposed to marry
them, they could not be disposed of to any other man
without his consent." "When a man dies his wives become
the potential wives of his brother." "In the old days,
it was a very poor man who did not have three wives.
Many had six, eight, and some more than a dozen."
Morgan refers (_A.S._, 432) to forty tribes where sisters were
disposed of in bunches; and in all such cases liberty of choice is of
course out of the question. Indeed the wide prevalence of so utterly
barbarous and selfish a custom shows us vividly how far from the
Indian's mind in general was the thought of seriously consulting the
choice of girls.
Furthermore, to continue Dr. Brinton's enumeration, "the selection of
a wife was often regarded as a concern of the gens rather than of the
individual. Among the Hurons, for instance, the old women of the gens
selected the wives for the young men, and united them with painful
uniformity to women several years their senior." "Thus," writes Morgan
(_L. of I._, 320),
"it often happened that the young warrior at
twenty-five was married to a woman of forty, and
oftentimes a widow; while the widower at sixty was
joined to a maiden of twenty."
Besides these obstacles to free choice there are several others not
referred to by Dr. Brinton, the most important being the custom of
wrestling for a wife, and of infant betrothal or very early marriage.
According to a passage in Hearne (104) cited on a previous occasion,
and corroborated by W.H. Hooper and J. Richardson, it has always been
the custom of northern Indians to wrestle for the women they want, the
strongest one carrying off the prize, and a weak man being "seldom
permitted to keep a wife that a stronger man thinks worth his notice."
It is needless to say that this custom, which "prevails throughout all
their tribes," puts the woman's freedom of choice out of question as
completely as if she were a slave sold in the market. Richardson says
(II., 24) that
"the bereaved husband meets his loss with the
resignation which custom prescribes in such a case, and
seeks his revenge by taking the wife of another man
weaker than himself."
Duels or fights for women also occurred in California, Mexico,
Paraguay, Brazil and other countries.[228]
Among the Comanches "the parents exercise full control in giving their
daughters in marriage," and they are frequently married before the age
of puberty. (Schoolcraft, II., 132.) Concerning the customs of early
betrothal and marriage enough has been said in preceding pages. It
prevailed widely among the Indians and, of course, utterly frustrated
all possibility of choice. In fact, apart from this custom, Indian
marriage, being in the vast majority of cases with girls under
fifteen,[229] made choice, in any rational sense of the word, entirely
out of the question.
CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICAN EXAMPLES
It has long been fashionable among historians to attribute to certain
Indians of Central and South America a very high degree of culture.
This tendency has received a check in these critical days.[230] We
have seen that morally the Mexicans, Central Americans, and Peruvians
were hardly above other Indians. In the matter of allowing females to
choose their mates we likewise find them on the same low level. In
Guatemala even the men wore obliged to accept wives selected for them
by their parents, and Nicaraguan parents usually arranged the matches.
In Peru the Incas fixed the conditions under which matrimony might
take place as follows:
"The bridegroom and bride must be of the same town or
tribe, and of the same class or position; the former
must be somewhat less than twenty-four years of age,
the latter eighteen. The consent of the parents and
chiefs of the tribes was indispensible." (Tschudi,
184.)
Unless the consent of the parents had been obtained the marriage was
considered invalid and the children illegitimate. (Garcilasso de la
Vega, I., 207.) As regards the Mexicans, Bandelier shows (612, 620)
that the position of woman was "little better than that of a costly
animal," and he cites evidence indicating that as late as 1555 it was
ordained at a _concile_ that since it is customary among the Indians
"not to marry without permission of their principals ... and the
marriage among free persons is not as free as it should be," etc.
As for the other Indians of the Southern Continent it is needless to
add that they too are habitually guided by the thought that daughters
exist for the purpose of enriching their parents. To the instances
previously cited I may add what Schomburgk says in his book on
Guiana--that if the girl to whom the parents betroth their son is too
young to marry, they give him meanwhile a widow or an older unmarried
woman to live with. This woman, after his marriage, becomes his
servant. Musters declares (186) that among the Tehuelches
(Patagonians) "marriages are always those of inclination." But
Falkner's story is quite different (124):
"As many of these marriages are compulsive on the side
of the woman, they are frequently frustrated. The
contumacy of the woman sometimes tires out the patience
of the man, who then turns her away, or sells her to
the person on whom she has fixed her affections."
Westermarck fancies he has a case on his side in Tierra del Fuego,
where, "according to Lieutenant Bove, the eagerness with which young
women seek for husbands is surprising, but even more surprising is the
fact that they nearly always attain their ends." More careful study of
the pages of the writer referred to[231] and a moment's unbiassed
reflection would have made it clear to Westermarck that there is no
question here either of choice or of marriage in our sense of the
words. The "husbands" the girls hunted for were boys of fourteen to
sixteen, and the girls themselves began at twelve to thirteen years of
age, or five years before they became mothers, and Fuegian marriage
"is not regarded as complete until the woman has become a mother," as
Westermarck knew (22, 138). In reality the conduct of these girls was
nothing but wantonness, in which the men, as a matter of course,
acquiesced. The missionaries were greatly scandalized at the state of
affairs, but their efforts to improve it were strongly resented by the
natives.[232]
WHY INDIANS ELOPE
With the Abipones of Paraguay "it frequently happens," according to
Dobrizhoffer (207),
"that the girl rescinds what has been _settled and
agreed upon between the parents and the bridegroom_,
obstinately rejecting the very mention of marriage.
Many girls, _through fear of being compelled to marry_,
have concealed themselves in the recesses of the woods
or lakes; seeming to dread the assaults of tigers less
than the untried nuptials."
The italics are mine; they make it obvious that the choice of the
girls is not taken into account and that they can escape parental
tyranny only by running away. Among the Indians in general it often
happens that merely to escape a hated suitor a girl elopes with
another man. Such cases are usually referred to as love-matches, but
all they indicate is a (comparative) preference, while proving that
there was no liberty of choice. A girl whose parents try to force her
on a much-married warrior four or five times her age must be only too
glad to run away with any young man who comes along, love or no
love.[233]
In the chapter on Australia I commented on Westermarck's topsy-turvy
disposition to look upon elopements as indications of the liberty of
choice. He repeats the same error in his references to Indians. "It is
indeed," he says,
"common in America for a girl to run away from a bridegroom
_forced upon her by the parents_, whilst, if they _refuse to
give their daughter_ to a suitor whom she loves, the couple
elope. Thus, among the Dakotas, as we are told by Mr.
Prescott, 'there are many matches made by elopement, _much
to the chagrin of the parents_.'"
The italics again indicate that denial of choice is the
custom, while the elopement indicates the same thing, for if there
were liberty of choice there would be no need of eloping. Moreover, an
Indian elopement does not at all indicate a romantic preference on the
part of an eloping couple. If we examine the matter carefully we find
that an Indian elopement is usually a very prosaic affair indeed. A
young man likes a girl and wishes to marry her; but she has no choice,
as her father insists on a number of ponies or blankets in payment for
her which the suitor may not have; therefore the two ran away. In
other words, an Indian elopement is a purely commercial transaction,
and one of a very shady character too, being nothing less than a
desire to avoid paying the usual price for a girl. It is in fact a
kind of theft, an injustice to the parents; for while paying for a
bride may be evidence of savagery, it is the custom among Indians, and
parents naturally resent its violation, though ultimately they may
forgive the elopers. Dodge relates (202) that among the Indians of the
great plains parents prefer a rich suitor, though he may have several
wives already. If the daughter prefers another man the only thing to
do is to elope. This is not easy, for a careful watch is kept on
suspicious cases. But the girl may manage to step out while the family
is asleep. The lover has two ponies in readiness, and off they speed.
If overtaken by the pursuers the man is liable to be killed. If not,
the elopers return after a few weeks and all is forgiven. Such
elopements, Dodge adds, are frequent in the reservations where young
men are poor and cannot afford ponies. Moreover, the concentration of
large numbers of Indians of different bands and tribes on the
reservations has increased the opportunities of acquaintance and
love-making among the young people.
In an article on Love-Songs among the Omaha Indians,[234] Miss Alice
Fletcher calls attention to the fact that the individual is little
considered in comparison with the tribal organization: "Marriage was
therefore an affair of the gentes, and not the free union of a man and
woman as we understand the relation." But side by side with the formal
marriage sanctioned by the tribe grew up the custom of secret
courtship and elopement; so the saying among the Omahas is: "An old
man buys his wife; a young man steals his." Dorsey says (260):
"Should a man get angry because his single daughter, sister,
or niece has eloped, the other Omahas would talk about him
saying, 'That man is angry on account of the elopement of
his daughter.' They would ridicule him for his behavior."
Other Indians take the matter much more seriously. When a Blackfoot
girl elopes her parents feel very bitter against the man.
"The girl has been stolen. The union is no marriage at
all. The old people are ashamed and disgraced for their
daughter. Until the father has been pacified by
satisfactory payments, there is no marriage."
(Grinnell, 215.)
The Nez Percés so bitterly resent elopements that they consider the
bride in such a case as a prostitute and her parents may seize upon
the man's property. (Bancroft, I., 276.)
Indian elopements, I repeat, are nothing but attempts to dodge payment
for a bride, and therefore do not afford the least evidence of exalted
sentiments, _i.e._, of romantic love, however romantic they may be as
incidents. Read, for instance, what Mrs. Eastman writes (103)
regarding the Sioux:
"When a young man is unable to purchase the girl he
loves best, or if her parents are unwilling she should
marry him, if he have gained the heart of the maiden he
is safe. They appoint a time and place to meet; take
whatever will be necessary for their journey....
Sometimes they merely go to the next village to return
the next day. But if they fancy a bridal tour, away
they go several hundred miles, with the grass for their
pillow, the canopy of heaven for their curtains, and
the bright stars to watch over them. When they return
home the bride goes at once to chopping wood, and the
groom to smoking."
What does such a romantic incident tell us regarding the nature of the
elopers' feelings--whether they are refined and sentimental or purely
sensual and frivolous? Nothing whatever. But the last sentence of Mrs.
Eastman's description--photographed from life--indicates the absence
of at least four of the most elementary and important ingredients of
romantic love. If he adored his bride, if he sympathized with her
feelings, if he felt the faintest impulse toward gallantry or
sacrifice of his selfish comforts, he would not allow her to chop wood
while he loafed and smoked. Moreover, if he had an appreciation of
personal beauty he would not permit his wife to sacrifice hers before
she is out of her teens by making her do all the hard work. But why
should he care? Since all his marriage customs are on a commercial
basis, why should he not discard a wife of thirty and take two new
ones of fifteen each?
SUICIDE AND LOVE
Having thus disposed of elopements, let us examine another phenomenon
which has always been a mainstay of those who would fain make out that
in matters of love there is no difference between us and savages.
Waitz (III., 102) accepts stories of suicide as evidence of genuine
romantic love, and Westermarck follows his example (358, 530), while
Catlin (II., 143) mentions a rock called Lover's Leap,
"from the summit of which, it is said, a beautiful
Indian girl, the daughter of a chief, threw herself
off, in presence of her tribe, some fifty years ago,
and dashed herself to pieces, to avoid being married to
a man whom her father had decided to be her husband,
and whom she would not marry."
Keating has a story which he tells with all the operatic
embellishments indulged in by his guide (I., 280). Reduced to its
simplest terms, the tale, as he gives it, is as follows:
In a village of the tribe of Wapasha there lived a girl
named Winona. She became attached to a young hunter who
wished to marry her, but her parents refused their
consent, having intended her for a prominent warrior.
Winona would not listen to the warrior's addresses and
told her parents she preferred the hunter, who would
always be with her, to the warrior, who would be
constantly away on martial exploits. The parents paid
no attention to her remonstrances and fixed the day for
her wedding to the man of their choice. While all were
busy with the preparations, she climbed the rock
overhanging the river. Having reached the summit, she
made a speech full of reproaches to her family, and
then sang her dirge. The wind wafted her words and song
to her family, who had rushed to the foot of the rock.
They implored her to come down, promising at last that
she should not be forced to marry. Some tried to climb
the rock, but before they could reach her she threw
herself down the precipice and fell a corpse at the
feet of her friends.
Mrs. Eastman also relates the story of Winona's leap (65-70). "The
incident is well known," she writes. "Almost everyone has read it a
dozen times, _and always differently told_." It is needless to say
that a story told in a dozen different ways and embellished by
half-breed guides and white collectors of legends has no value as
scientific evidence.[235] But even if we grant that the incidents
happened just as related, there is nothing to indicate the presence of
exalted sentiments. The girl preferred the hunter because he would be
more frequently with her than the warrior (one of the versions says
she wanted to wed "the successful hunter")[236]--which leaves us in
doubt as to the utilitarian or sentimental quality of her attachment.
Apparently she was not very eager to marry the hunter, for had she
been, why did she refuse to live when they told her she would not be
forced to marry the warrior? But the most important consideration is
that she did not commit suicide for _love_ at all, but from
_aversion_--to escape being married to a man she disliked. Aversion is
usually the motive which leads Indian women to what are called
"suicides for love." As Griggs remarks (_l.c._):
"Sometimes it happens that a young man wants a girl,
and her friends are also quite willing, while she alone
is unwilling. The purchase-bundle is desired by her
friends, and hence compulsion is resorted to. The girl
yields and goes to be his slave, or she holds out
stoutly, sometimes taking her own life as the
alternative. Several cases of the kind have come to the
personal knowledge of the writer."
Not long ago I read in the Paris _Figaro_ a learned article on suicide
in which the assertion was made that, as is well known, savages never
take their own lives. W.W. Westcott, in his otherwise excellent book
on suicide, which is based on over a hundred works relating to his
subject, makes the same astounding assertion. I have shown in
preceding pages that many Africans and Polynesians commit suicide, and
I may now add that Indians seem still more addicted to this idiotic
practice. Sometimes, indeed, they have cause for it. I have already
cited the words of Belden that suicide is very common among Indian
women, and that "considering the treatment they receive, it is a
wonder there is not more of it." Keating says (II., 172) that "among
the women suicide is far more frequent [than among men], and is the
result of jealousy, or of disappointments in love; sometimes extreme
grief at the loss of a child will lead to it." "Not a season passes
away," writes Mrs. Eastman (169),
"but we hear of some Dacotah girl who puts an end to
her life in consequence of jealousy, or from the fear
of being forced to marry some one she dislikes. A short
time ago a very young girl hung herself rather than
become the wife of a man who was already the husband of
one of her sisters."
It cannot be denied that in some of these cases (which might be
multiplied indefinitely) there is a strong provocation to self-murder.
But as a rule suicide among Indians, as among other savages and
barbarians, and among civilized races, is not proof of strong feeling,
but of a weak intellect. The Chippewas themselves hold it to be a
foolish thing (Keating, II., 168); and among the Indians in general it
was usually resorted to for the most trivial causes.
"The very frequent suicides committed [by Creeks] in
consequence of the most trifling disappointment or
quarrel between men and women are not the result of
grief, but of savage and unbounded revenge."
(Schoolcraft, V., 272.) Krauss (222) found that suicide was frequent
among the Alaskan Thlinket Indians. Men sometimes resorted to it when
they saw no other way of securing revenge, for a person who causes a
suicide is fined and punished as if he were a murderer. One woman cut
her throat because a shahman accused her of having by sorcery caused
another one's illness. A favorite mode of committing suicide is to go
out into the sea, cast away oar and rudder, and deliver themselves to
wind and waves. Sometimes they change their mind. A man, whose face
had been all scratched up by his angry wife, left home to end his
life; but after spending the night with a trader he concluded to go
home and make up the quarrel. Mrs. Eastman (48) tells of an old squaw
who wanted to hang herself because she was angry with her son; but
when, "after having doubled the strap four times to prevent its
breaking, she found herself choking, her courage gave way--she yelled
frightfully." They cut her down and in an hour or two she was quite
well again. Another squaw, aged ninety, attempted to hang herself
because the men would not allow her to go with a war-party. Her object
in wanting to go was to have the pleasure of mutilating the corpses of
enemies! Keating says that Sank men sometimes kill themselves because
they are envious of the power of others. Neill (85) records the cases
of a Dakota wife who hanged herself because her husband had flogged
her for hiding his whiskey; of a woman who hanged herself because her
son-in-law refused to give her whiskey; of an old woman who flew into
a passion and committed suicide because her pet granddaughter had been
whipped by her father.
If a storm in a tea-kettle is accepted as a true storm, then we may
infer from these suicides the existence of deep feeling and profound
despair. As a matter of fact, a savage's feelings are no deeper than a
tea-kettle, and for that very reason they boil up and overflow more
readily than if they were deeper. Loskiel tells us (74-75), that
Delaware Indians, both men and women, have committed suicide on
discovering that their spouse was unfaithful; these are the same
Indians among whom husbands used to abandon their wives when they had
babes, and wives their husbands when there were no more presents to
receive. Yet even if we admitted such feelings to have been deep,
suicide would not prove the existence of genuine affection.
Heckewelder reports instances of Indians who took their own lives
because the girls they loved and were engaged to jilted them and
married other men. Was the love which led to these suicides mere
sensual passion or was it refined sentiment, devoted affection? There
is nothing to tell us, and the inference from everything we know about
Indians is that it was purely sensual. Gibbs, who understood Indian
nature thoroughly, took this view when he wrote (198) that among the
Indians of Oregon and Washington "a strong sensual attachment" not
rarely leads young women to destroy themselves on the death of a
lover. And the writer who refers in Schoolcraft (V., 272) to the
frequent suicides among the Creeks declares that genuine love is
unknown to any of them. Had the young men referred to by Heckewelder
lost their lives in trying to save the lives of the girls in question,
it might be permissible to infer the existence of affection, but no
Indian has ever been known to commit such an act. If a savage commits
suicide he does it like everything else, for selfish reasons--as an
_antidote to distress_--and selfishness is the very negation of love.
The distinguished psychologist, Dr. Maudsley, has well said that
"any poor creature from the gutter can put an end to
himself; there is no nobility in the act and no great
amount of courage required for it. It is a deed rather
of cowardice shirking duty, generated in _a monstrous
feeling of self_, and accomplished in the most sinful,
because wicked, ignorance."
In itself, no doubt, a suicide is apt to be extremely "romantic,"
A complete dime-novel is condensed in a few remarks which Squier
makes[237] anent a quaint Nicaraguan custom.
Poor girls, he says, would often get their marriage portion by having
amours with several young men. Having collected enough for a "dowry,"
the girl would assemble all her lovers and ask them to build a house
for her and the one she intended to choose for a husband. She then
selected the one she liked best, and the others had their pains and
their past for their love. Sometimes it happened that one of the
discarded lovers committed suicide from grief. In that case the
special honor was in store for him of being eaten up by his former
rivals and colleagues. The bride also, I presume, partook of the
feast--at least after the men had had all they wanted.
LOVE-CHARMS
Indians indulge not only in elopements and suicide, but in the use of
love-charms--powders, potions, and incantations. Inasmuch as the
distinguished anthropologist Waitz mentions (III., 102) the use of
such charms among the things which show that "genuine romantic love is
not rare among Indians," it behooves us to investigate the matter.
The ancient Peruvians had, according to Tschudi,[238] a special class
of medicine men whose business it was
"to bring lovers together. For this purpose they
prepared talismans made from roots or feathers, which
were introduced, secretly if possible, into the clothes
or bed of those whose inclination was to be won.
Sometimes hairs of the persons whose love was to be won
were used, or else highly colored birds from the
forest, or their feathers only. They also sold to the
lovers a so-called _Kuyanarumi_ (a stone to cause love)
of which they said it could be found only in places
that had been struck by lightning. They were mostly
black agates with white veins and were called _Sonko
apatsinakux_ (mutual heart-carriers). These
_Runatsinkix_ (human-being-uniters) also prepared
infallible and irresistible love-potions."
Among North American Indians the Ojibways or Chippawas appear to have
been especially addicted to the use of love-powders. Keating writes
(II., 163):
"There are but few young men or women among the
Chippewas who have not compositions of this kind, to
promote love in those in whom they feel an interest.
These are generally powders of different colors;
sometimes they insert them into punctures made in the
heart of the little images which they procure for this
purpose. They address the images by the names of those
whom they suppose them to represent, bidding them to
requite their affection. Married women are likewise
provided with powders, which they rub over the heart of
their husbands while asleep, in order to secure
themselves against any infidelity."
Hoffman says[239] of these same powders that they are held in great
honor, and that their composition is a deep secret which is revealed
to others only in return for high compensation. Nootka maidens
sometimes sprinkle love-powders into the food intended for their
lovers, and await their coming. The Menomini[240] have a charm called
_takosáwos_, "the powder that causes people to love one another." It
is composed of vermilion and mica laminae, ground very fine and put
into a thimble which is carried suspended from the neck or from some
part of the wearing apparel. It is also necessary to secure from the
one whose inclination is to be won a hair, a nail-paring, or a small
scrap of clothing, which must also be put into the thimble.
The Rev. Peter Jones says (155) that the Ojibway Indians have a charm
made of red ochre and other ingredients, with which they paint their
faces, believing it to possess a power so irresistible as to cause the
object of their desire to love them. But the moment this medicine is
taken away, and the charm withdrawn, the person who before was almost
frantic with love hates with a perfect hatred. The Sioux also have
great faith in spells.
"A lover will take gum," says Mrs. Eastman, "and, after putting some
medicine in it, will induce the girl of his choice to chew it, or put
it in her way so that she will take it up of her own accord." Burton
thought (160) that an Indian woman "will administer 'squaw medicine,'
a love philter, to her husband, but rather for the purpose of
retaining his protection than his love."
Quite romantic are all these things, no doubt; but I fail to see that
they throw any light whatever on the problem whether Indians can love
sentimentally. Waitz refers particularly to the Chippewa custom of
putting powders into the images of coveted persons as a symptom of
"romantic love," forgetting that a superstitious fool may resort to
such a procedure to evoke any kind of love, sensual or sentimental,
and that unless there are other and more specific symptoms there is
nothing to indicate the quality of the lover's feelings or the ethical
character of his desires.
CURIOSITIES OF COURTSHIP
Some of the Indian courtship customs are quite romantic; perhaps we
may find evidence of romantic love in this direction. Those of the
Apaches have been already referred to. Pawnee courtship is thus
described by Grinnell.[241]
"The young man took his stand at some convenient point
where he was likely to see the young woman and waited
for her appearance. Favorite places for waiting were
near the trail which led down to the river or to the
spot usually resorted to for gathering wood. The lover,
wrapped in his robe or blanket, which covered his whole
person except his eyes, waited here for the girl, and
as she made her appearance stepped up to her and threw
his blanket about her, holding her in his arms. If she
was favorably inclined to him she made no resistance,
and they might stand there concealed by the blanket,
which entirely covered them, talking to one another for
hours. If she did not favor him she would at once free
herself from his embrace and go away."
This blanket-courtship, as it might be called, also prevailed among
the Indians of the great plains described by Colonel Dodge (193-223).
The lover, wrapped in a blanket, approaches the girl's lodge and sits
before it. Though in plain view of everybody, it is etiquette not to
see a lover under such circumstances. After more or less delay the
girl may give signs and come out, but not until she has taken certain
precautions against the Indian's "romantic" love which have been
already referred to. He seizes her and carries her off a little
distance. At first they sit under two blankets, but later on one
suffices. Thus they remain as long as they please, and no one disturbs
them. If there is more than one suitor the girl cries out if seized by
the wrong one, who at once lets go. In these cases it may seem as if
the girl had her own choice. But it does not at all follow that
because she favors a certain suitor she will be allowed to marry him.
If her father prefers another she will have to take him, unless her
lover is ready to risk an elopement.
The Piutes of the Pacific slope, like some eastern Indians, appear to
have indulged in a form of nocturnal courtship strikingly resembling
that of the Dyaks of Borneo. The Indian woman (Sarah W. Hopkins) who
wrote _Life Among the Piutes_ declares that the lover never speaks to
his chosen one,
"but endeavors to attract her attention by showing his
horsemanship, etc. As he knows that she sleeps next to
her grandmother in the lodge, he enters in full dress
after the family has retired for the night, and seats
himself at her feet. If she is not awake, her
grandmother wakes her. He does not even speak to the
young woman or grandmother, but when the young woman
wishes him to go away, she rises and goes and lies down
by the side of her mother. He then leaves as silently
as he came in. This goes on sometimes for a year or
longer if the young woman has not made up her mind. She
is never forced by her parents to marry against her
wishes."
Courtship among the Nishinam Indians of California is thus described
by Powers (317):
"The Nishinam may be said to set up and dissolve the
conjugal estate almost as easily as do the brute
beasts. No stipulated payment is made for the wife. A
man seeking to become a son-in-law is bound to cater
(_yé-lin_) or make presents to the family, which is to
say, he will come along some day with a deer on his
shoulder, perhaps fling it off on the ground before the
wigwam, and go his way without a single word being
spoken. Some days later he may bring along a brace of
hare or a ham of grizzly-bear meat, or some fish, or a
string of _hâ-wok_ [shell money]. He continues to make
these presents for awhile, and if he is not acceptable
to the girl and her parents they return him an
equivalent for each present (to return his gift would
be grossly insulting); but if he finds favor in her
eyes they are quietly appropriated, and in due course
of time he comes and leads her away, or comes to live
at her house."
Belden remarks (301) that a Sioux seldom gets the girl he wants to
marry to love him. He simply buys her of her parents, and as for the
girl, after being informed that she has been sold
"she immediately packs up her little keepsakes and
trinkets, and without exhibiting any emotion, such as
is common to white girls, leaves her home, and goes to
the lodge of her master,"
where she is henceforth his wife and "willing slave." Among the
Blackfoot Indians, too, there was apparently no form of courtship, and
young men seldom spoke to girls unless they were relatives. (Grinnell,
216.) It was a common thing among these Indians for a youth and a girl
not to know about each other until they were informed of their
impending marriage.
The Araucanian maidens of Chili are disposed of with even less
ceremony. In the choice of husbands, as we have seen, they have no
more freedom than a Circassian slave. Our informant (E.R. Smith, 214)
adds, however, that attachments do sometimes spring up, and, though
the lovers have little opportunity to communicate freely, they resort
occasionally to amatory songs, tender glances, and other tricks which
lovers understand. "Matrimony may follow, but such a preliminary
courtship is by no means considered necessary." When a man wants a
girl he calls on her father with his friends. While the friends talk
with the parent, he seizes the bride
"by the hair or by the heel, as may be most convenient,
and drags her along the ground to the open door. Once
fairly outside, he springs to the saddle, still firmly
grasping his screaming captive, whom he pulls up over
the horse's back, and yelling forth a whoop of triumph,
he starts off at full gallop.... Gaining the woods, the
lover dashes into the tangled thickets, while the
friends considerately pause upon the outskirts until
the screams of the bride have died away."
A day or two later the couple emerge from the forest and without
further ceremony live as man and wife. This is the usual way; but
sometimes
"a man meets a girl in the fields alone, and far away
from home; a sudden desire to better his solitary
condition seizes him, and without further ado he rides
up, lays violent hands upon the damsel and carries her
off. Again, at their feasts and merrymakings (in which
the women are kept somewhat aloof from the men), a
young man may be smitten with a sudden passion, or be
emboldened by wine to express a long slumbering
preference for a dusky maid; his sighs and amorous
glances will perhaps be returned, and rushing among the
unsuspecting females, he will bear away the object of
his choice while yet she is in the melting mood. When
such an attempt is foreseen the unmarried girls form a
ring around their companion, and endeavor to shield
her; but the lover and his friends, by well-directed
attacks, at length succeed in breaking through the
magic circle, and drag away the damsel in triumph;
perhaps, in the excitement of the game, some of her
defenders too may share her fate."
A Patagonian courtship is amusingly described by Bourne (91). The
chief of the tribe that held him a captive several months would not
allow anyone to marry without his consent. In his opinion
"no Indian who was not an accomplished
rogue--particularly in the horse-stealing line--an
expert hunter, able to provide plenty of meat and
grease, was fit to have a wife on any conditions."
One day a suitor appeared for the hand of the chief's own daughter, a
quasi-widow, but the chief repulsed him because he had no horses. As a
last resort the suitor appealed to the young woman herself, promising,
if she favored him, that he would give her plenty of grease. This
grease argument she was unable to resist, so she entreated her father
to give his consent. At this he broke out in a towering passion, threw
cradle and other chattels out of the door and ordered her to follow at
once. The girl's mother now interceded, whereupon "seizing her by the
hair, he hurled her violently to the ground and beat her with his
clenched fists till I thought he would break every bone in her body."
The next morning, however, he went to the lodge of the newly married
couple, made up, and they returned, bag and baggage, to his tent.
Grease appears to play a rôle in the courtship of northern Indians
too. Leland relates (40) that the Algonquins make sausages from the
entrails of bears by simply turning them inside out, the fat which
clings to the outside of the entrails filling them when they are thus
turned. These sausages, dried and smoked, are considered a great
delicacy. The girls show their love by casting a string of them round
the neck of the favored youth.
PANTOMIMIC LOVE-MAKING
It is noticeable in the foregoing accounts that courtship and even
proposal are apt to be by pantomime, without any spoken words. The
young Piute who visits his girl while she is in bed with her
grandmother "does not speak to her." The Nishinam hunter leaves his
presents and they are accepted "without a word being spoken;" and the
Apaches, as we saw, "pop the question" with stones or ponies. Why this
silent courtship? Obviously because the Indian is not used to playing
so humble a rôle as that of suitor to so inferior a being as a woman.
He feels awkward, and has nothing to say. As Burton has remarked
_(C.S._, 144), "in savage and semi-barbarous societies the separation
of the sexes is the general rule, because, as they have no ideas in
common, each prefers the society of its own." "Between the sexes,"
wrote Morgan (322)
"there was but little sociality, as this term is
understood in polished society. Such a thing as formal
visiting was entirely unknown. When the unmarried of
opposite sexes were casually brought together there was
little or no conversation between them. No attempts by
the unmarried to please or gratify each other by acts
of personal attention were ever made. At the season of
councils and religious festivals there was more of
actual intercourse and sociality than at any other
time; but this was confined to the dance and was in
itself limited."
HONEYMOON
It is needless to say that where there is no mental intercourse there
can be no choice and union of souls, but only of bodies; that is,
there can be no sentimental love. The honeymoon, where there is
one,[242] is in this respect no better than the period of courtship.
Parkman gives this realistic sketch from life among the Ogallalla
Indians (_O.T._, ch. XI.):
"The happy pair had just entered upon the honeymoon.
They would stretch a buffalo robe upon poles, so as to
protect them from the fierce rays of the sun, and,
spreading beneath this rough canopy a luxuriant couch
of furs, would sit affectionately side by side for half
a day, though I could not discover that much
conversation passed between them. Probably they had
nothing to say; for an Indian's supply of topics is far
from being copious."
MUSIC IN INDIAN COURTSHIP
Inasmuch as music is said to begin where words end, we might expect it
to play a role in the taciturn courtship of Indians. One of the
maidens described by Mrs. Eastman (85) "had many lovers, who wore
themselves out playing the flute, to as little purpose as they braided
their hair and painted their faces," Gila Indians court and pop the
question with their flutes, according to the description by Bancroft
(I., 549):
"When a young man sees a girl whom he desires for a
wife he first endeavors to gain the good-will of the
parents; this accomplished, he proceeds to serenade his
lady-love, and will often sit for hours, day after day,
near her house playing on his flute. Should the girl
not appear, it is a sign that she rejects him; but if,
on the other hand, she comes out to meet him, he knows
that his suit is accepted, and he takes her to his
house. No marriage ceremony is performed."
In Chili, among the Araucanians, every lover carries with him an
amatory Jew's-harp, which is played almost entirely by inhaling.
According to Smith
"they have ways of expressing various emotions by
different modes of playing, all of which the Araucanian
damsels seem fully to appreciate, although I must
confess that I could not.
"The lover usually seats himself at a distance from the
object of his passion, and gives vent to his feeling in
doleful sounds, indicating the maiden of his choice by
slyly gesturing, winking, and rolling his eyes toward
her. This style of courtship is certainly sentimental
and might be recommended to some more civilized lovers
who always lose the use of their tongues at the very
time it is most needed."
"Sentimental" in one sense of the word, but not in the sense in which
it is used in this book. There is nothing in winking, rolling the
eyes, and playing the Jew's-harp, either by inhalation or exhalation,
to indicate whether the youth's feelings toward the girl are refined,
sympathetic, and devoted, or whether he merely longs for an amorous
intrigue. That these Indian lovers _may_ convey definite _ideas_ to
the minds of the girls is quite possible. Even birds have their
love-calls, and savages in all parts of the world use "leading
motives" _à la_ Wagner, i.e., musical phrases with a definite
meaning.[243]
Chippewayan medicine men make use of music-boards adorned with
drawings which recall special magic formulae to their minds. On one of
these (Schoolcraft, V., 648) there is the figure of a young man in the
frenzy of love. His head is adorned with feathers, and he has a drum
in hand which he beats while crying to his absent love: "Hear my drum!
Though you be at the uttermost parts of the earth, hear my drum!"
"The flageolet is the musical instrument of young men and is
principally used in love-affairs to attract the attention of the
maiden and reveal the presence of the lover," says Miss Alice
Fletcher, who has written some entertaining and valuable treatises on
Indian music and love-songs.[244] Mirrors, too, are used to attract
the attention of girls, as appears from a charming idyl sketched by
Miss Fletcher, which I will reproduce here, somewhat condensed.
One day, while dwelling with the Omahas, Miss Fletcher
was wandering in quest of spring flowers near a creek
when she was arrested by a sudden flash of light among
the branches. "Some young man is near," she thought,
"signalling with his mirror to a friend or sweetheart."
She had hardly seen a young fellow who did not carry a
looking-glass dangling at his side. The flashing signal
was soon followed by the wild cadences of a flute. In a
few moments the girls came in sight, with merry faces,
chatting gayly. Each one carried a bucket. Down the
hill, on the other side of the brook, advanced two
young men, their gay blankets hanging from one
shoulder. The girls dipped their pails in the stream
and turned to leave when one of the young men jumped
across the creek and confronted one of the girls, her
companion walking away some distance. The lovers stood
three feet apart, she with downcast face, he evidently
pleading his cause to not unwilling ears. By and by she
drew from her belt a package containing a necklace,
which she gave to the young man, who took it shyly from
her hands. A moment later the girl had joined her
friend, and the man recrossed the brook, where he and
his friend flung themselves on the grass and examined
the necklace. Then they rose to go. Again the flute was
heard gradually dying away in the distance.
INDIAN LOVE-POEMS
As it is not customary for an Indian to call at the lodge where a girl
lives, about the only chance an Omaha has to woo is at the creek where
the girl fetches water, as in the above idyl. Hence courting is always
done in secret, the girls never telling the elders, though they may
compare notes with each other.
"Generally an honorable courtship ends in a more or less
speedy elopement and marriage, but there are men and women
who prefer dalliance, and it is this class that furnishes
the heroes and heroines of the Wa-oo-wa-an."
These Wa-oo-wa-an, or woman songs, are a sort of ballad relating the
experiences of young men and women. "They are sung by young men when
in each other's company, and are seldom overheard by women, almost
never by women of high character;" they "belong to that season in a
man's career when 'wild oats' are said to be sown." Some of them are
vulgar, others humorous.
"They are in no sense love-songs, they have nothing to
do with courtship, and are reserved for the exclusive
audience of men." "The true love-song, called by the
Omahas Bethae wa-an ... is sung generally in the early
morning, when the lover is keeping his tryst and
watching for the maiden to emerge from the tent and go
to the spring. They belong to the secret courtship, and
are sometimes called Me-the-g'thun wa-an--courting
songs." "The few words in these songs convey the one
poetic sentiment: 'With the day I come to you;' or
'Behold me as the day dawns.' Few unprejudiced
listeners," the writer adds, "will fail to recognize in
the Bethae wa-an, or love-songs, the emotion and the
sentiment that prompts a man to woo the woman of his
choice."
Miss Fletcher is easily satisfied. For my part I cannot see in a tune,
however rapturously sung or fluted, or in the words "with the day I
come to you" and the like any sign of real sentiment or the faintest
symptom differentiating the two kinds of love. Moreover, as Miss
Fletcher herself remarks:
"The Omahas as a tribe have ceased to exist. The young
men and women are being educated in English speech, and
imbued with English thought; their directive emotion
will hereafter take the lines of our artistic forms."
Even if traces of sexual sentiment were to be found among Indians like
the Ornahas, who have been subjected for some generations to
civilizing influences, they would allow no inference as to the
love-affairs of the real, wild Indian.
Miss Fletcher makes the same error as Professor Fillmore, who assisted
her in writing _A Study of Omaha Indian Music_. He took the wild
Indian tunes and harnessed them to modern German harmonies--a
procedure as unscientific as it would be unhistoric to make Cicero
record his speeches in a phonograph. Miss Fletcher takes simple Indian
songs and reads into them the feelings of a New York or Boston woman.
The following is an instance. A girl sings to a warrior (I give only
Miss Fletcher's translation, omitting the Indian words): "War; when
you returned; die; you caused me; go when you did; God; I appealed;
standing," This literal version our author explains and translates
freely, as follows:
"No. 82 is the confession of a woman to the man she
loves, that he had conquered her heart before he had
achieved a valorous reputation. The song opens upon the
scene. The warrior had returned victorious and passed
through the rites of the Tent of War, so he is entitled
to wear his honors publicly; the woman tells him how,
when he started on the war-path, she went up on the
hill and standing there cried to Wa-kan-da to grant him
success. He who had now won that success had even then
vanquished her heart, 'had caused her to die' to all
else but the thought of him"(!)
Another instance of this emotional embroidery may be found on pages
15-17 of the same treatise. What makes this procedure the more
inexplicable is that both these songs are classed by Miss Fletcher
among the Wa-oo-wa-an or "woman songs," concerning which she has told
us that "they are in no sense love-songs," and that usually they are
not even the effusions of a woman's own feelings, but the compositions
of frivolous and vain young men put into the mouth of wanton women.
The honorable secret courtships were never talked of or sung about.
Regarding the musical and poetic features of Dakota courtship,
S.R. Riggs has this to say (209):
"A boy begins to feel the drawing of the other sex and,
like the ancient Roman boys, he exercises his ingenuity
in making a 'cotanke,' or rude pipe, from the bone of a
swan's wing, or from some species of wood, and with
that he begins to call to his lady-love, on the night
air. Having gained attention by his flute, he may sing
this:
Stealthily, secretly, see me,
Stealthily, secretly, see me,
Stealthily, secretly, see me,
Lo! thee I tenderly regard;
Stealthily, secretly, see me."
Or he may commend his good qualities as a hunter by singing this song:
Cling fast to me, and you'll ever have plenty,
Cling fast to me, and you'll ever have plenty,
Cling fast to me...."
"A Dacota girl soon learns to adorn her fingers with rings, her ears
with tin dangles, her neck with beads. Perhaps an admirer gives her a
ring, singing:
Wear this, I say;
Wear this, I say;
Wear this, I say;
This little finger ring,
Wear this, I say."
For traces of real amorous sentiment one would naturally look to the
poems of the semi-civilized Mexicans and Peruvians of the South rather
than to the savage and barbarous Indians of the North. Dr. Brinton
(_E. of A_., 297) has found the Mexican songs the most delicate. He
quotes two Aztec love-poems, the first being from the lips of an
Indian girl:
I know not whether thou hast been absent:
I lie down with thee, I rise up with thee,
In my dreams thou art with me.
If my ear-drop trembles in my ears,
I know it is thou moving within my heart.
The second, from the same language, is thus rendered:
On a certain mountain side,
Where they pluck flowers,
I saw a pretty maiden,
Who plucked from me my heart,
Whither thou goest,
There go I.
Dr. Brinton also quotes the following poem of the Northern Kioways as
"a song of true love in the ordinary sense:"
I sat and wept on the hillside,
I wept till the darkness fell;
I wept for a maiden afar off,
A maiden who loves me well.
The moons are passing, and some moon,
I shall see my home long-lost,
And of all the greetings that meet me,
My maiden's will gladden me most.
"The poetry of the Indians is the poetry of naked thought. They have
neither rhyme nor metre to adorn it," says Schoolcraft (_Oneota,_ 14).
The preceding poem has both; what guarantee is there that the
translator has not embellished the substance of it as he did its form?
Yet, granting he did not embroider the substance, we know that weeping
and longing for an absent one are symptoms of sensual as well as of
sentimental love, and cannot, therefore, be accepted as a criterion.
As for the Mexican and other poems cited, they give evidence of a
desire to be near the beloved, and of the all-absorbing power of
passion (monopoly) which likewise are characteristic of both kinds of
love. Of the true criteria of love, the altruistic sentiments of
gallantry, self-sacrifice, sympathy, adoration, there is no sign in
any of these poems. Dr. Brinton admits, too, that such poems as the
above are rare among the North American Indians anywhere.
"Most of their chants in relation to the other sex are
erotic, not emotional; and this holds equally true of
those which in some tribes on certain occasions are
addressed by the women to the men."
Powers says (235) that the Wintun of California have a special dance
and celebration when a girl reaches the age of puberty. The songs sung
on this occasion "sometimes are grossly licentious." Evidences of this
sort might be supplied by the page.[245]
An interesting collection of erotic songs sung by the Klamath Indians
of Southern Oregon has been made by A.S. Gatschet.[246] "With the
Indians," he says,
"all these and many other erotic songs pass under the name
of puberty songs. They include lines on courting,
love-sentiments, disappointments in love, marriage fees paid
to the parents, on marrying and on conjugal life."
From this collection I will cite those that are pertinent to our
inquiry. Observe that usually it is the girl that sings or does the
courting.
1. I have passed into womanhood.
3. Who comes there riding toward me?
4. My little pigeon, fly right into the dovecot!
5. This way follow me before it is full daylight.
9. I want to wed you for you are a chief's son.
7. Very much I covet you as a husband, for in times to come you
will live in affluence.
8. She: And when will you pay for me a wedding gift?
He: A canoe I'll give for you half filled with water.
9. He spends much money on women, thinking to obtain them
easily.
11. It is not that black fellow that I am striving to secure.
14. That is a pretty female that follows me up.
16. That's because you love me that rattle around the lodge.
27. Why have you become so estranged to me?
37. I hold you to be an innocent girl, though I have not lived
with you yet.
38. Over and over they tell me,
That this scoundrel has insulted me.
52. Young chaps tramp around;
They are on the lookout for women.
54. Girls: Young man, I will not love you, for you run around
with no blanket on; I do not desire such a husband.
Boys: And I do not like a frog-shaped woman with swollen
eyes.[247]
Most of these poems, as I have said, were composed and sung by women.
The same is true of a collection of Chinook songs (Northern Oregon and
adjacent country) made by Dr. Boas.[248] The majority of his poems, he
says, "are songs of love and jealousy, such as are made by Indian
women living in the cities, or by rejected lovers." These songs are
rather pointless, and do not tell us much about the subject of our
inquiry. Here are a few samples:
1. Yaya,
When you take a wife,
Yaya,
Don't become angry with me.
I do not care.
2. Where is Charlie going now?
Where is Charlie going now?
He comes back to see me,
I think.
3. Good-by, oh, my dear Charlie!
When you take a wife
Don't forget me.
4. I don't know how I feel
Toward Johnny.
That young man makes a foe of me.
5. My dear Annie,
If you cast off Jimmy Star,
Do not forget
How much he likes
You.
Of much greater interest are the "Songs of the Kwakiutl Indians," of
Vancouver Island, collected by Dr. Boas.[249] One of them is too
obscene to quote. The following lines evidence a pretty poetic fancy,
suggesting New Zealand poetry:
1. Y[=i]! Yawa, wish I could----and make my true love happy,
haigia, hay[=i]a.
Y[=i]! Yawa, wish I could arise from under the ground right
next to my true love, haigia hay[=i]a.
Y[=i]! Yawa, wish I could alight from the heights, from the
heights of the air right next to my true love, haigia,
hay[=i]a.
Y[=i]! Yawa, wish I could sit among the clouds and fly with
them to my true love.
Y[=i]! Yawa, I am downcast on account of my true love.
Y[=i]! Yawa, I cry for pain on account of my true love, my
dear.
Dr. Boas confesses that this song is somewhat freely translated. The
more's the pity. An expression like "my true love," surely is utterly
un-Indian.
2. An[=a]ma! Indeed my strong-hearted, my dear.
An[=a]ma! Indeed, my strong hearted, my dear.
An[=a]ma! Indeed my truth toward my dear.
Not pretend I I know having master my dear.
Not pretend I I know for whom I am gathering property, my
dear.
Not pretend I I know for whom I am gathering blankets, my
dear.
3. Like pain of fire runs down my body my love to you, my dear!
Like pain runs down my body my love to you, my dear.
Just as sickness is my love to you, my dear.
Just as a boil pains me my love to you, my dear.
Just as a fire burns me my love to you, my dear.
I am thinking of what you said to me
I am thinking of the love you bear me.
I am afraid of your love, my dear.
O pain! O pain!
Oh, where is my true love going, my dear?
Oh, they say she will be taken away far from here. She will
leave me, my true love, my dear.
My body feels numb on account of what I have said, my true
love, my dear.
Good-by, my true love, my dear.[250]
MORE LOVE-STORIES
Apart from "free translations" and embellishments, the great
difficulty with poems like these, taken down at the present day, is
that one never knows, though they may be told by a pure Indian, how
far they may have been influenced by the half-breeds or the
missionaries who have been with these Indians, in some cases for many
generations. The same is true of not a few of the stories attributed
to Indians.
Powers had heard among other "Indian" tales one of a lover's leap, and
another of a Mono maiden who loved an Awani brave and was imprisoned
by her cruel father in a cave until she perished. "But," says Powers
(368), "neither Choko nor any other Indian could give me any
information touching them, and Choko dismissed them all with the
contemptuous remark, '_White man too much lie_.'" I have shown in this
chapter how large is the number of white men who "too much lie" in
attributing to Indians stories, thoughts, and feelings, which no
Indian ever dreamt of.[251]
The genuine traditional literature of the Indians consists, as Powers
remarks (408), almost entirely of petty fables about animals, and
there is an almost total lack of human legends. Some there are, and a
few of them are quite pretty. Powers relates one (299) which may well
be Indian, the only suspicious feature being the reference to a
"beautiful" cloud (for Indians know only the utility, not the charm,
of nature).
"One day, as the sun was setting, Kiunaddissi's daughter
went out and saw a beautiful red cloud, the most lovely
cloud ever seen, resting like a bar along the horizon,
stretching southward. She cried out to her father, 'O
father, come and see this beautiful [bright?] cloud!' He did
so.... Next day the daughter took a basket and went out into
the plain to gather clover to eat. While picking the clover
she found a very pretty arrow, trimmed with yellow-hammer's
feathers. After gazing at it awhile in wonder she turned to
look at her basket, and there beside it stood a man who was
called Yang-wi'-a-kan-üh (Red Cloud) who was none other than
the cloud she had seen the day before. He was so bright and
resplendent to look upon that she was abashed; she modestly
hung down her head and uttered not a word. But he said to
her, 'I am not a stranger. You saw me last night; you see me
every night when the sun is setting. I love you; you love
me; look at me; be not afraid.' Then she said, 'If you love
me, take and eat this basket of grass-seed pinole.' He
touched the basket and in an instant all the pinole vanished
in the air, going no man knows whither. Thereupon the girl
fell away in a swoon, and lay a considerable time there upon
the ground. But when the man returned to her behold she had
given birth to a son. And the girl was abashed, and would
not look in his face, but she was full of joy because of her
new-born son."
The Indian's anthropomorphic way of looking at nature (instead of the
esthetic or scientific, both of which are as much beyond his mental
capacity as the faculty for sentimental love) is also illustrated by
the following Dakota tale, showing how two girls got married.[252]
"There were two women lying out of doors and looking up to
the shining stars. One of them said to the other, 'I wish
that very large and bright shining star was my husband,' The
other said, 'I wish that star that shines so brightly were
my husband.' Thereupon they both were immediately taken up.
They found themselves in a beautiful country, which was full
of twin flowers. They found that the star which shone most
brightly was a large man, while the other was only a young
man. So they each had a husband, and one became with child."
Fear and superstition are, as we know, among the obstacles which
prevent an Indian from appreciating the beauties of nature. The story
of the Yurok siren, as related by Powers (59), illustrates this point:
"There is a certain tract of country on the north side of
the Klamath River which nothing can induce an Indian to
enter. They say that there is a beautiful squaw living there
whose fascinations are fatal. When an Indian sees her he
straightway falls desperately in love. She decoys him
farther and farther into the forest, until at last she
climbs a tree and the man follows. She now changes into a
panther and kills him; then, resuming her proper form, she
cuts off his head and places it in a basket. She is now,
they say, a thousand years old, and has an Indian's head for
every year of her life."
Such tales as these may well have originated in an Indian's
imagination. Their local color is correct and charming, and they do
not attribute to a savage notions and emotions foreign to his mind and
customs.
"WHITE MAN TOO MUCH LIE"
It is otherwise with a class of Indian tales of which Schoolcraft's
are samples, and a few more of which may here be referred to. With the
unquestioning trust of a child the learned Waitz accepts as a specimen
of genuine romantic love a story[253] of an Indian maiden who, when an
arrow was aimed at her lover's heart, sprang before him and received
the barbed shaft in her own heart; and another of a Creek Indian who
jumped into a cataract with the girl he loved, meeting death with her
when he found he could not escape the tomahawk of the pursuers. The
solid facts of the first story will be hinted at presently in speaking
of Pocahontas; and as for the second story it is, reduced to Indian
realism, simply an incident of an elopement and pursuit such as may
have easily happened, though the motive of the elopement was nothing
more than the usual desire to avoid paying for the girl. Such
sentences as "she loved him with an intensity of passion that only the
noblest souls know," and "they vowed eternal love; they vowed to live
and die with each other," ought to have opened Waitz's eyes to the
fact that he was not reading an actual Indian story, but a story
sentimentalized and embellished in the cheapest modern dime-novel
style. The only thing such stories tell us is that "white man too much
lie."
White woman, too, is not always above suspicion. Mrs. Eastman assures
us that she got her Sioux legends from the Indians themselves. One of
these stories is entitled "The Track Maker" (122-23). During an
interval of peace between the Chippewas and Dakotas, she relates, a
party of Chippewas visited a camp of the Dakotas. A young Dakota
warrior fell in love with a girl included in the Chippewa party.
"_Though he would have died to save her from sorrow_, yet he knew that
she could never be his wife," for the tribes were ever at war. Here
Mrs. Eastman, with the recklessness of a newspaper reporter, puts into
an Indian's head a sentiment which no Indian ever dreamt of. All the
facts cited in this chapter prove this, and, moreover, the sequel of
her own story proves it. After exchanging vows of love (!) with the
Dakotan brave, the girl departed with her Chippewa friends. Shortly
afterward two Dakotas were murdered. The Chippewas were suspected, and
a party of warriors at once broke up in pursuit of the innocent and
unsuspecting party. The girl, whose name was Flying Shadow, saw her
lover among the pursuers, who had already commenced to slaughter and
scalp the other women, though the maidens clasped their hands in a
"vain appeal to the merciless wretches, who see neither beauty nor
grace when rage and revenge are in their hearts." Throwing herself in
his arms she cried, "Save me! save me! Do not let them slay me before
your eyes; make me your prisoner! You said that you loved me, spare my
life!" He did spare her life; he simply touched her with his spear,
then passed on, and a moment later the girl was slain and scalped by
his companions. And why did the gallant and self-sacrificing lover
touch her with his spear before he left her to be murdered? Because
touching an enemy--male or female--with his spear entitles the noble
red man to wear a feather of honor as if he had taken a scalp! Yet he
"would have died to save her from sorrow"!
An Indian's capacity for self-sacrifice is also revealed in a favorite
Blackfoot tale recorded by Grinnell (39-42). A squaw was picking
berries in a place rendered dangerous by the proximity of the enemy.
Suddenly her husband, who was on guard, saw a war party approaching.
Signalling to the squaw, they mounted their horses and took to flight.
The wife's horse, not being a good one, soon tired out and the husband
had to take her on his. But this was too much of a load even for his
powerful animal. The enemy gained on them constantly. Presently he
said to his wife: "Get off. The enemy will not kill you. You are too
young and pretty. Some one of them will take you, and I will get a big
party of our people and rescue you." But the woman cried "No, no, I
will die here with you." "Crazy person," cried the man, and with a
quick jerk he threw the woman off and escaped. Having reached the
lodge safely, he painted himself black and "walked all through the
camp crying." Poor fellow! How he loved his wife! The Indian, as
Catlin truly remarked, "is not in the least behind us in conjugal
affection." The only difference--a trifling one to be sure--is that a
white man, under such circumstances, would have spilt his last drop of
blood in defence of his wife's life and her honor.
THE STORY OF POCAHONTAS
The rescue of John Smith by Pocahontas is commonly held to prove that
the young Indian girl, smitten with sudden love for the white man,
risked her life for him. This fanciful notion has however, been
irreparably damaged by John Fiske (_O.V._, I., 102-111). It is true
that "the Indians debated together, and presently two big stones were
placed before the chiefs, and Smith was dragged thither and his head
laid upon them;" and that
"even while warriors were standing with clubs in hand, to
beat his brains out, the chief's young daughter Pocahontas
rushed up and embraced him, whereupon her father spared his
life."
It is true also that Smith himself thought and wrote that "Pocahontas
hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save" his. But she did
no such thing. Smith simply was ignorant of Indian customs:
"From the Indian point of view there was nothing romantic or
extraordinary in such a rescue: it was simply a not uncommon
matter of business. The romance with which readers have
always invested it is the outcome of a misconception no less
complete than that which led the fair dames of London to
make obeisance to the tawny Pocahontas as to a princess of
imperial lineage. Time and again it used to happen that when
a prisoner was about to be slaughtered some one of the dusky
assemblage, moved by pity or admiration or some unexplained
freak, would interpose in behalf of the victim; and as a
rule such interposition was heeded. Many a poor wretch,
already tied to the fatal tree and benumbed with unspeakable
terror, while the firebrands were heating for his torment,
has been rescued from the jaws of death and adopted as
brother or lover by some laughing young squaw, or as a son
by some grave wrinkled warrior. In such cases the new-comer
was allowed entire freedom and treated like one of the
tribe.... Pocahontas, therefore, did not hazard the beating
out of her own brains, though the rescued stranger, looking
with civilized eyes, would naturally see it in that light.
Her brains were perfectly safe. This thirteen-year-old squaw
liked the handsome prisoner, claimed him, and got him,
according to custom."
VERDICT: NO ROMANTIC LOVE
In the hundreds of genuine Indian tales collected by Boas I have not
discovered a trace of sentiment, or even of sentimentality. The notion
that there is any refinement of passion or morality in the sexual
relations of the American aborigines has been fostered chiefly by the
stories and poems of the whites--generally such as had only a
superficial acquaintance with the red men. "The less we see and know
of real Indians," wrote G.E. Ellis (111), "the easier will it be to
make and read poems about them." General Custer comments on Cooper's
false estimate of Indian character, which has misled so many.
"Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been
so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the
inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we
are compelled to meet with him in his native village, on the
warpath, and when raiding upon our frontier settlements and
lines of travel, the Indian forfeits his claim to the
appellation of the 'noble red man'" (12).
The great explorer Stanley did not see as much of the American savage
as of the African, yet he had no difficulty in taking the American's
correct measure. In his _Early Travels and Adventures_ (41-43), he
pokes fun at the romantic ideas that poets and novelists have given
about Indian maidens and their loves, and then tells in unadorned
terms what he saw with his own eyes--Indian girls with "coarse black
hair, low foreheads, blazing coal-black eyes, faces of a dirty, greasy
color"--and the Indian young man whose romance of wooing is comprised
in the question, "How much is she worth?'"
One of the keenest and most careful observers of Indian life, the
naturalist Bates, after living several years among the natives of
Brazil, wrote concerning them (293):
"Their phlegmatic, apathetic temperament; coldness of desire
and deadness of feeling; want of curiosity and slowness of
intellect, make the Amazonian Indians very uninteresting
companions anywhere. Their imagination is of a dull-gloomy
quality, and they seemed never to be stirred by the
emotions--love, pity, admiration, fear, wonder, joy,
enthusiasm. These are characteristics of the whole race,"
In Schoolcraft (V., 272) we read regarding the Creeks that "the
refined passion of love is unknown to any of them, although they apply
the word _love_ to rum or anything else they wish to be possessed of."
A capital definition of Indian love! I have already quoted the opinion
of the eminent expert George Gibbs that the attachment existing among
the Indians of Oregon and Washington, though it is sometimes so strong
as to lead to suicide, is too sensual to deserve the name of love.
Another eminent traveller, Keating, says (II., 158) concerning the
Chippewas:
"We are not disposed to believe that there is frequently
among the Chippewas an inclination entirely destitute of
sensual considerations and partaking of the nature of a
sentiment; such may exist in a few instances, but in their
state of society it appears almost impossible that it should
be a common occurrence."
M'Lean, after living for twenty-five years among Indians, says, in
writing of the Nascopies (II., 127):
"Considering the manner in which their women are treated it
can scarcely be supposed that their courtships are much
influenced by sentiments of love; in fact, the tender
passion seems unknown to the savage breast."
From his observations of Canadian Indians Heriot came to the
conclusion (324) that "The passion of love is of too delicate a nature
to admit of divided affections, and its real influence can scarcely be
felt in a society where polygamy is tolerated." And again (331): "The
passion of love, feeble unless aided by imagination, is of a nature
too refined to acquire a great degree of influence over the mind of
savages." He thinks that their mode of life deadens even the physical
ardor for the sex, but adds that the females appear to be "much more
sensible of tender impressions." Even Schoolcraft admits implicitly
that Indian love cannot have been sentimental and esthetic, but only
sensual, when he says (_Travels_, etc., 231) that Indian women are
"without either mental resources or personal beauty."
But the most valuable and weighty evidence on this point is supplied
by Lewis A. Morgan in his classical book, _The League of the Iroquois_
(320-35). He was an adopted member of the Senecas, among whom he spent
nearly forty years of his life, thus having unequalled opportunities
for observation and study. He was moreover a man of scientific
training and a thinker, whose contributions to some branches of
anthropology are of exceptional value. His bias, moreover, is rather
in favor of the Indians than against them, which doubles the weight of
his testimony. This testimony has already been cited in part, but in
summing up the subject I will repeat it with more detail. He tells us
that marriage among these Indians "was not founded on the affections
... but was regulated exclusively as a matter of physical necessity."
The match was made by the mothers, and
"not the least singular feature of the transaction was the
entire ignorance in which the parties remained of the
pending negotiations; the first intimation they received
being the announcement of their marriage without, perhaps,
ever having known or seen each other. Remonstrance or
objections on their part was never attempted; they received
each other as the gift of their parents."
There was no visiting or courting, little or no conversation between
the unmarried, no attempts were made to please each other, and the man
regarded the woman as his inferior and servant. The result of such a
state of affairs is summed up by Morgan in this memorable passage:
"From the nature of the marriage institution among the
Iroquois it follows that the passion of love was entirely
unknown among them. Affections after marriage would
naturally spring up between the parties from association,
from habit, and from mutual dependence; but of that
marvellous passion which originates in a higher development
of the passions of the human heart and is founded upon the
cultivation of the affections between the sexes they were
entirely ignorant. In their temperaments they were below
this passion in its simplest forms. Attachments between
individuals, or the cultivation of each other's affections
before marriage, was entirely unknown; so also were promises
of marriage."
Morgan regrets that his remarks "may perhaps divest the mind of some
pleasing impressions" created by novelists and poets concerning the
attachments which spring up in the bosom of Indian society; but these,
he adds, are "entirely inconsistent with the marriage institution as
it existed among them, and with the facts of their social history." I
may add that another careful observer who had lived among the Indians,
Parkman, cites Morgan's remarks as to their incapacity for love with
approval.
There is one more important conclusion to be drawn from Morgan's
evidence. The Iroquois were among the most advanced of all Indians.
"In intelligence," says Brinton (_A.R._, 82), "their position must be
placed among the highest." As early as the middle of the fifteenth
century the great chief Hiawatha completed the famous political league
of the Iroquois. The women, though regarded as inferiors, had more
power and authority than among most other Indians. Morgan speaks of
the "unparallelled generosity" of the Iroquois, of their love of
truth, their strict adherence to the faith of treaties, their
ignorance of theft, their severe punishment for the infrequent crimes
and offences that occurred among them. The account he gives of their
various festivals, their eloquence, their devout religious feeling and
gratitude to the Great Spirit for favors received, the thanks
addressed to the earth, the rivers, the useful herbs, the moving wind
which banishes disease, the sun, moon, and stars for the light they
give, shows them to be far superior to most of the red men. And yet
they were "below the passion of love in its simplest forms." Thus we
see once more that refinement of sexual feeling, far from being, as
the sentimentalists would have us believe, shared with us by the
lowest savages, is in reality one of the latest products of
civilization--if not the very latest.
THE UNLOVING ESKIMO
Throughout this chapter no reference has been made to the Eskimos, who
are popularly considered a race apart from the Indians. The best
authorities now believe that they are a strictly American race, whose
primal home was to the south of the Hudson Bay, whence they spread
northward to Labrador, Greenland, and Alaska.[254] I have reserved
them for separate consideration because they admirably illustrate the
grand truth just formulated, that a race may have made considerable
progress in some directions and yet be quite below the sentiment of
love. Westermarck's opinion (516) that the Eskimos are "a rather
advanced race" is borne out by the testimony of those who have known
them well. They are described as singularly cheerful and good-natured
among themselves. Hall says "their memory is remarkably good, and
their intellectual powers, in all that relates to their native land,
its inhabitants, its coasts, and interior parts, is of a surprisingly
high order" (I., 128). But what is of particular interest is the great
aptitude Eskimos seem to show for art, and their fondness for poetry
and music. King[255] says that "the art of carving is universally
practised" by them, and he speaks of their models of men, animals, and
utensils as "executed in a masterly style." Brinton indeed says they
have a more artistic eye for picture-writing than any Indian race
north of Mexico. They enliven their long winter nights with
imaginative tales, music, and song. Their poets are held in high
honor, and it is said they get their notion of the music of verse by
sleeping by the sound of running water, that they may catch its
mysterious notes.
Yet when we look at the Eskimos from another point of view we find
them horribly and bestially unaesthetic. Cranz speaks of "their filthy
clothes swarming with vermin." They make their oil by chewing seal
blubber and spurting the liquid into a vessel. "A kettle is seldom
washed except the dogs chance to lick it clean." Mothers wash
children's faces by licking them all over.[256]
Such utter lack of delicacy prepares us for the statement that the
Eskimos are equally coarse in other respects, notably in their
treatment of women and their sexual feelings. It would be a stigma
upon an Eskimo's character, says Cranz (I., 154), "if he so much as
drew a seal out of the water." Having performed the pleasantly
exciting part of killing it, he leaves all the drudgery and hard work
of hauling, butchering, cooking, tanning, shoe-making, etc., to the
women. They build the houses, too, while the men look on with the
greatest insensibility, not stirring a finger to assist them in
carrying the heavy stones. Girls are often "engaged" as soon as born,
nor are those who grow up free allowed to marry according to their own
preference. "When friendly exhortations are unavailing she is
compelled by force, and even blows, to receive her husband." (Cranz,
I., 146.) They consider children troublesome, and the race is dying
out. Women are not allowed to eat of the first seal of the season. The
sick are left to take care of themselves. (Hall, II., 322, I., 103.)
In years of scarcity widows "are rejected from the community, and
hover about the encampments like starving wolves ... until hunger and
cold terminate their wretched existence." (M'Lean, II., 143.) Men and
women alike are without any sense of modesty; in their warm hovels
both sexes divest themselves of nearly all their clothing. Nor,
although they fight and punish jealousy, have they any regard for
chastity _per se_. Lending a wife or daughter to a guest is a
recognized duty of hospitality. Young couples live together on trial.
When the husband is away hunting or fishing the wife has her
intrigues, and often adultery is committed _sans gêne_ on either side.
Unnatural vices are indulged in without secrecy, and altogether the
picture is one of utter depravity and coarseness.[257]
Under such circumstances we hardly needed the specific assurance of
Rink, who collected and published a volume of _Tales and Traditions of
the Eskimo_, and who says that "never is much room given in this
poetry to the almost universal feeling of love." He refers, of course,
to any kind of love, and he puts it very mildly. Not only is there no
trace of altruistic affection in any of these tales and traditions,
but the few erotic stories recorded (_e.g._, pp. 236-37) are too
coarse to be cited or summarized here. Hall, too, concluded that
"love--if it come at all--comes after marriage." He also informs us
(II., 313) that there "generally exists between husband and wife a
steady but not very demonstrative affection;" but here he evidently
wrongs the Eskimos; for, as he himself remarks (126), they
"always summarily punish their wives for any real or
imaginary offence. They seize the first thing at hand--a
stone, knife, hatchet, or spear--and throw it at the
offending woman, just as they would at their dogs."
What could be more "demonstrative" than such "steady affection?"
INDIA--WILD TRIBES AND TEMPLE GIRLS
India, it has been aptly said, "forms a great museum of races in which
we can study man from his lowest to his highest stages of culture." It
is this multiplicity of races and their lack of patriotic co-operation
that explains the conquest of the hundreds of millions of India by the
tens of millions of England. Obviously it would be impossible to make
any general assertion regarding love that would apply equally to the
10,000,000 educated Brahmans, who consider themselves little inferior
to gods, the 9,000,000 outcasts who are esteemed and treated
infinitely worse than animals, and the 17,000,000 of the aboriginal
tribes who are comparable in position and culture to our American
Indians. Nevertheless, we can get an approximately correct composite
portrait of love in India by making two groups and studying first, the
aboriginal tribes, and then the more or less civilized Hindoos (using
this word in the most comprehensive sense), with their peculiar
customs, laws, poetic literature, and bayadères, or temple girls.
In Bengal and Assam alone, which form but a small corner of this vast
country, the aborigines are divided into nearly sixty distinct races,
differing from each other in various ways, as American tribes do. They
have not been described by as many and as careful observers as our
American Indians have, but the writings of Lewin, Galton, Rowney, Man,
Shortt, Watson and Kaye, and others supply sufficient data to enable
us to understand the nature of their amorous feelings.
"WHOLE TRACTS OF FEELING UNKNOWN TO THEM"
Lewin gives us the interesting information (345-47) that with the
Chittagong hill-tribes
"women enjoy perfect freedom of action; they go unveiled,
they would seem to have equal rights of heritage with men,
while their power of selecting their own husband is to the
full as free as that of our own English maidens."
Moreover, "in these hills the crime of infidelity among wives is
almost unknown; so also harlots and courtesans are held in abhorrence
amongst them."
On reading these lines our hopes are raised that at last we may have
come upon a soil favorable to the growth of true love. But Lewin's
further remarks dispel that illusion:
"In marriage, with us, a perfect world springs up at
the word, of tenderness, of fellowship, trust, and
self-devotion. With them it is a mere animal and
convenient connection for procreating their species and
getting their dinner cooked. They have no idea of
tenderness, nor of the chivalrous devotion that
prompted the old Galilean fisherman when he said 'Give
ye honor unto the woman as to the weaker vessel,' ...
The best of them will refuse to carry a burden if there
be a wife, mother, or sister near at hand to perform
the task." "_There are whole tracts of mind, and
thought, and feeling, which are unknown to them_."
PRACTICAL PROMISCUITY
One of the most important details of my theory is that while there can
be no romantic love without opportunity for genuine courtship and free
choice, nevertheless the existence of such opportunity and choice does
not guarantee the presence of love unless the other conditions for its
growth--general refinement and altruistic impulses--coexist with them.
Among the Chittagong hill-tribes these conditions--constituting "whole
tracts of mind, and thought, and feeling"--do not coexist with the
liberty of choice, hence it is useless to look for love in our sense
of the word. Moreover, when we further read in Lewin that the reason
why there are no harlots is that they "are rendered unnecessary by the
freedom of intercourse indulged in and allowed to both sexes before
marriage," we see that what at first seemed a virtue is really a mark
of lower degradation. Some of the oldest legislators, like Zoroaster
and Solon, already recognized the truth that it was far better to
sacrifice a few women to the demon of immorality than to expose them
all to contamination. The wild tribes of India in general have not yet
arrived at that point of view. In their indifference to chastity they
rank with the lowest savages, and usually there is a great deal of
promiscuous indulgence before a mate is chosen for a union of
endurance. Among the Oráons, as Dalton tells us (248), "liaisons
between boys and girls of the same village seldom end in marriage;"
and he gives strange details regarding the conduct of the young people
which may not be cited here, and in which the natives see "no
impropriety." Regarding the Butias Rowney says (142):
"The marriage tie is so loose that chastity is quite
unknown amongst them. The husbands are indifferent to
the honor of their wives, and the wives do not care to
preserve that which has no value attached to it. ...
The intercourse of the sexes is, in fact, promiscuous."
Of the Lepchas Rowney says (139) that "chastity in adult girls
previous to marriage is neither to be met with nor cared for." Of the
Mishmees he says (163): "Wives are not expected to be chaste, and are
not thought worse off when otherwise," and of the Kookies (186): "All
the women of a village, married or unmarried, are available to the
chief at his will, and no stigma attaches to those who are favored by
him." In some tribes wives are freely exchanged. Dalton says of the
Butan (98) that "the intercourse between the sexes is practically
promiscuous." Rhyongtha girls indulge in promiscuous intercourse with
several lovers before marriage. (Lewin, 121.) With the Kurmuba, "no
such ceremony as marriage exists." They "live together like the brute
creation." (W.R. King, 44.)
My theory that in practice, at any rate, if not in form, promiscuity
was the original state of affairs among savages, in India as
elsewhere, is supported by the foregoing facts, and also by what
various writers have told us regarding the licentious festivals
indulged in by these wild tribes of India. "It would appear," says
Dalton (300),
"that most of the hill-tribes found it necessary to
promote marriage by stimulating intercourse between the
sexes at particular seasons of the year.... At one of
the Kandh festivals held in November all the lads and
lasses assemble for a spree, and a bachelor has then
the privilege of making off with any unmarried girl
whom he can induce to go with him, subject to a
subsequent arrangement with the parents of the maiden."
Dalton gives a vivid description of these festivals as practised by
the Hos in January, when the granaries are full of wheat and the
natives "full of deviltry:"
"They have a strange notion that at this period men and
women are so overcharged with vicious propensities,
that it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the
person to let off steam by allowing, for a time, full
vent to the passions. The festival therefore becomes a
saturnale, during which servants forget their duties to
their masters, children their reverence for parents,
even their respect for women, and women all notions of
modesty, delicacy, and gentleness; they become raging
bacchantes....
"The Ho population of the village forming the environs
of Chaibasa are at other seasons quiet and reserved in
manner, and in their demeanor toward women gentle and
decorous; even in the flirtations I have spoken of they
never transcend the bounds of decency. The girls,
though full of spirits and somewhat saucy, have innate
notions of propriety that make them modest in demeanor,
though devoid of all prudery.... Since their adoption
of clothing they are careful to drape themselves
decently as well as gracefully, but they throw all this
aside during the Mágh feast. Their natures appear to
undergo a temporary change. Sons and daughters revile
their parents in gross language, and parents their
children; men and women become almost like animals in
the indulgence of their amorous propensities. They
enact all that was ever portrayed by prurient artists
in a bacchanalian festival or pandean orgy; and as the
light of the sun they adore and the presence of
numerous spectators seem to be no restraint on their
indulgence, it cannot be expected that chastity is
preserved when the shades of night fall on such a scene
of licentiousness and debauchery."
"MARVELLOUSLY PRETTY AND ROMANTIC"
Nor are these festivals of rare occurrence. They last three or four
days and are held at the different villages at different dates, so the
inhabitants of each may take part in "a long succession of these
orgies." When Dalton declares (206) regarding these coarse and
dissolute Hos, who thus spend a part of each year in "a long
succession of orgies," in which their own wives and daughters
participate, that they are nevertheless capable of the higher
emotions--though he admits they have no words for them--he merely
proves that long intercourse with such savages blunted his own
sensibilities, or what is more probable--that he himself never
understood the real nature of the higher emotions--those "tracts of
feeling" which Lewin found missing among the hill-tribes. We are
confirmed in this suspicion by noticing Dalton's ecstatic delight over
the immoral courtship customs of the Bhúiyas, which he found
"marvellously pretty and romantic" and describes as follows:
"In each village there is, as with the Oráons, an open
space for a dancing ground, called by the Bhúiyas the
Darbár; and near it the bachelors' hall.... here the
young men must all sleep at night, and here the drums
are kept. Some villages have a 'Dhangarin bássa,' or
house for maidens, which, strange to say, they are
allowed to occupy without anyone to look after them.
They appear to have very great liberty, and slips of
morality, as long as they are confined to the tribe,
are not much heeded. Whenever the young men of the
village go to the Darbár and beat the drums the young
girls join them there, and they spend their evenings
dancing and enjoying themselves without any
interference on the part of the elders.
"The more exciting and exhilarating occasions are when
the young men of one village proceed to visit the
maidens of another village, or when the maidens return
the call. The young men provide themselves with
presents for the girls, generally consisting of combs
for the hair and sweets, and going straight to the
Darbár of the village they visit, they proclaim their
arrival loudly by beating their drums and tambourines.
The girls of that village immediately join them. Their
male relations and neighbors must keep entirely out of
view, leaving the field clear for the guests. The
offerings of the visitors are now gallantly presented
and graciously accepted and the girls at once set to
work to prepare a dinner for their beaux, and after the
meal they dance and sing and flirt all night together,
and the morning dawns on more than one pair of pledged
lovers. Then the girls, if the young men have conducted
themselves to their satisfaction, make ready the
morning meal for themselves and their guests; after
which the latter rise to depart, and still dancing and
playing on the drums, move out of the village followed
by the girls, who escort them to the boundary. This is
generally a rock-broken stream with wooded banks; here
they halt, the girls on one side, the lads on the
other, and to the accompaniment of the babbling brook
sing to each other in true bucolic style. The song on
these occasions is to a certain extent improvised, and
is a pleasant mixture of raillery and love-making....
"The song ended, the girls go down on their knees, and
bowing to the ground respectfully salute the young men,
who gravely and formally return the compliment, and
they part.
"The visit is soon returned by the girls. They are
received by the young men in their Darbár and
entertained, and the girls of the receiving village
must not be seen....
"They have certainly more wit, more romance, and more
poetry in their composition than is usually found among
the country folk in India."
LIBERTY OF CHOICE
All this may indeed be "marvellously pretty and romantic," but I fail
to see the least indication of the "higher emotions." Nor can I find
them in some further interesting remarks regarding the Hos made by the
same author (192-93). Thirty years ago, he says, a girl of the better
class cost forty or fifty head of cattle. Result--a decrease in the
number of marriages and an increase of immoral intimacies. Sometimes a
girl runs away with her lover, but the objection to this is that
elopements are not considered respectable.
"It is certainly not from any yearning for celibacy
that the marriage of Singbhum maidens is so long
postponed. The girls will tell you frankly that they do
all they can to please the young men, and I have often
heard them pathetically bewailing their want of
success. They make themselves as attractive as they
can, flirt in the most demonstrative manner, and are
not too coy to receive in public attentions from those
they admire. They may be often seen in well-assorted
pairs returning from market with arms interlaced, and
looking at each other as lovingly as if they were so
many groups of Cupids and Psyches, but with all this
the 'men will not propose.' Tell a maiden you think her
nice-looking, she is sure to reply 'Oh, yes! I am, but
what is the use of it, the young men of my acquaintance
don't see it.'"
Here we note a frankly commercial view of marriage, without any
reference to "higher emotions." In this tribe, too, the girls are not
allowed the liberty of choice. Indeed, when we examine this point we
find that Westermarck is wrong, as usual, in assigning such a
privilege to the girls of most of these tribes. He himself is obliged
to admit (224) that
"in many of the uncivilized tribes of India parents are in
the habit of betrothing their sons.... The paternal
authority approaches the _patria potestas_ of the ancient
Aryan nations."
The Kisans, Mundas, Santals, Máriás, Mishmis, Bhils, and Yoonthalin
Karens are tribes among whom fathers thus reserve the right of
selecting wives for their sons; and it is obvious that in all such
cases daughters have still less choice than sons. Colonel Macpherson
throws light on this point when he says of the Kandhs:
"The parents obtain the wives of their sons during
their boyhood, as very valuable _domestic servants,_
and _their selections are avowedly made with a view to
utility in this character."_[258]
Rowney reports (103) that the Khond boys are married at the age of ten
and twelve to girls of fifteen to sixteen; and among the Reddies it is
even customary to marry boys of five or six years to women of sixteen
to twenty. The "wife," however, lives with an uncle or relation, who
begets children for the boy-husband. When the boy grows up his "wife"
is perhaps too old for him, so he in turn takes possession of some
other boy's "wife".[259] The young folks are obviously in the habit of
obeying implicitly, for as Dalton says (132) of the Kisans, "There is
no instance on record of a youth or maiden objecting to the
arrangement made for them." With the Savaras, Boad Kandhs, Hos, and
Kaupuis, the prevalence of elopements shows that the girls are not
allowed their own choice. Lepcha marriages are often made on credit,
and are breakable if the payment bargained for is not made to the
parent within the specified time. (Rowney, 139.)[260]
SCALPS AND FIELD-MICE
While among the Nagas, as already stated, the women must do all the
hard work, they have one privilege: tribal custom allows them to
refuse a suitor until he has put in their hands a human skull or
scalp; and the gentle maidens make rigorous use of this privilege--so
much so that in consequence of the difficulty of securing these "gory
tokens of love" marriages are contracted late in life. The head need
not be that of an enemy: "A skull may be acquired by the blackest
treachery, but so long as the victim was not a member of the clan,"
says Dalton (39), "it is accepted as a chivalrous offering of a true
knight to his lady," Dalton gives another and less grewsome instance
of "chivalry" occurring among the Oráons (253).
"A young man shows his inclination for a girl thus: He
sticks flowers in the mass of her back-hair, and if she
subsequently return the compliment, it is concluded
that she desires a continuance of his attention. The
next step may be an offering to his lady-love of some
nicely grilled field-mice, which the Oráons declare to
be the most delicate of food. Tender looks and squeezes
whilst both are engaged in the dance are not much
thought of. They are regarded merely as the result of
emotions naturally arising from pleasant contiguity and
exciting strains; but when it comes to flowers and
field-mice, matters look serious."
A TOPSY-TURVY CUSTOM
Coyness as well as primitive gallantry has its amusing phases among
these wild tribes. The following description seems so much like an
extravaganza that the reader may suspect it to be an abstract of a
story by Frank Stockton or a libretto by Gilbert; but it is a serious
page from Dalton's _Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal_ (63-64). It
relates to the Garos, who are thus described:
"The women are on the whole the most unlovely of the
sex, but I was struck with the pretty, plump, nude
figures, the merry musical voices and good-humored
countenances of the Garos girls. Their sole garment is
a piece of cloth less than a foot in breadth that just
meets round the loins, and in order that it may not
restrain the limbs it is only fastened where it meets
under the hip at the upper corners."
But if they have not much to boast of in the way of dress, these girls
enjoy a privilege rare in India or elsewhere of making the first
advances.
"As there is no restriction on innocent intercourse,
the boys and girls freely mixing together in the labors
of the field and other pursuits, an amorous young lady
has ample opportunity of declaring her partiality, and
it is her privileged duty to speak first.... The maiden
coyly tells the youth to whom she is about to surrender
herself that she has prepared a spot in some quiet and
secluded valley to which she invites him.... In two or
three days they return to the village and their union
is then publicly proclaimed and solemnized. Any
infringement of the rule which declares that the
initiative shall in such cases rest with the girl is
summarily and severely punished."
For a man to make the advances would be an insult not only to the girl
but to the whole tribe, resulting in fines. But let us hear the rest
of the topsy-turvy story.
"The marriage ceremony chiefly consists of dancing,
singing, and feasting. The bride is taken down to the
nearest stream and bathed, and the party next proceeds
to the house of the bridegroom, who pretends to be
unwilling and runs away, but is caught and subjected to
a similar ablution, and then taken, in spite of the
resistance and the counterfeited grief and lamentation
of his parents, to the bride's house."
It is true that this inversion of the usual process of proposing and
acting a comedy of sham coyness occurs only in the case of the poor
girls, the wealthy ones being betrothed by their parents in infancy;
but it would be interesting to learn the origin of this quaint custom
from someone who has had a chance to study this tribe. Probably the
girl's poverty furnishes the key. The whole thing seems like a
practical joke raised to the dignity of an institution. The perversion
of all ordinary rules is consistently carried out in this, too, that
"if the old people refuse they can be beaten into compliance!" That
the loss of female coyness is not a gain to the cause of love or of
virtue is self-evident.
PAHÁRIA LADS AND LASSES
Thus, once more, we are baffled in our attempts to find genuine
romantic love. Of its fourteen ingredients the altruistic ones are
missing entirely. What Dalton writes (248) regarding the Oráons,
"Dhúmkúria lads are no doubt great flirts, but each has
a special favorite among the young girls of his
acquaintance, and the girls well know to whose touch
and pressure in the dance each maiden's heart is
especially responsive," will not mislead any reader of
this book, who will know that it indicates merely
individual preference, which goes with all sorts of
love, and is moreover, characteristically shallow here;
for, as Dalton has told us, these village flirtations
"seldom end in marriage."
The other ingredients that primitive love shares with romantic
love--monopoly, jealousy, coyness, etc., are also, as we saw, weak
among the wild tribes of India. Westermarck (503) indeed fancied he
had discovered the occurrence among them of "the absorbing passion for
one." "Colonel Dalton," he says, "represents the Pahária lads and
lasses as forming very romantic attachments; 'if separated only for an
hour,' he says, 'they are miserable.'" In reality Dalton does not
"represent them" thus; he says "they are represented;" that is, he
gives his information at second-hand, without naming his authority,
who, to judge by some of his remarks, was apparently a facetious
globe-trotter. It is of course possible that these young folks are
much attached to each other. Even sheep are "miserable if separated
only for an hour;" they bleat pathetically and are disconsolate,
though there is no question of an "absorbing passion for one." What
kind of love unites these Pahária lads and lasses may be inferred from
the further information given in Dalton's book that "they work
together, go to market together, eat together, and sleep together;"
while indiscretions are atoned for by shedding the blood of an animal,
whereupon all is forgiven! In other words, where Westermarck found
"the absorbing passion for one," a critical student can see nothing
but a vulgar case of reprehensible free lust.
And yet, though we have found no indications of true love, I can see
reasons for Dalton's exclamation,
"It is singular that in matters of the affections the
feelings of these semi-savages should be more in unison
with the sentiments and customs of the highly organized
western nations than with the methodical and unromantic
heart-schooling of their Aryan fellow-countrymen."
Whether these wild tribes are really more like ourselves in their
amorous customs than the more or less civilized Hindoos to whom we now
turn our attention, the reader will be able to decide for himself
after finishing this chapter.
CHILD MURDER AND CHILD MARRIAGE
Twenty years ago there were in India five million more men than women,
and there has been no change in that respect. The chief cause of this
disparity is the habitual slaughter of girl babies. The unwelcome
babes are killed with opium pills or exposed to wild beasts. The
Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati, in her agonizing book, _The High Caste
Hindu Woman_, writes with bitter sarcasm, that
"even the wild animals are so intelligent and of such
refined taste that they mock at British law and almost
always steal _girls_ to satisfy their hunger." "The
census of 1870 revealed the curious fact that three
hundred children were stolen in one year by wolves from
within the city of Umritzar, _all the children being
girls_."
Hindoo females who escape the opium pills and the wolves seldom have
occasion to congratulate themselves therefor. Usually a fate worse
than death awaits them. Long before they are old enough, physically or
mentally, to marry, they are either delivered bodily or betrothed to
men old enough to be their grandfathers. A great many girls are
married literally in the cradle, says the authoress just quoted (31).
"From five to eleven years is the usual period for this marriage among
the Brahmans all over India." Manu made twenty-four the minimum age
for men to marry, but "popular custom defies the law. Boys of ten and
twelve are now doomed to be married to girls of seven to eight years
of age." This early marriage system is "at least five hundred years
older than the Christian era." As superstitious custom compels poor
parents to marry off their daughters by a given age "it very
frequently happens that girls of eight or nine are given to men of
sixty or seventy, or to men utterly unworthy of the maidens."[261]
MONSTROUS PARENTAL SELFISHNESS
In an article on "Child Marriages in Bengal,"[262] D.N. Singha
explains the superstition to which so many millions of poor girls are
thus ruthlessly sacrificed. "It is," he says,
"a well-nigh universal conviction among Hindoos that
every man's soul goes to a hell called Poot, no matter
how good he may have been. Nothing but a son's fidelity
can release or deliver him from it, hence all Hindoos
are driven to seek marriage as early as possible to
make sure of a son." "A son, the fruit of marriage,
saves him from perdition, so that the one purpose of
marriage is to leave a son behind him."[263] A
daughter's son may take his son's place: hence the
eagerness to marry off the girls young. In other words,
in order to save themselves from a hell hereafter the
brutal fathers drive their poor little daughters to a
hell on earth. And what is worse, public opinion
compels them to act in this cruel manner; for, as the
same writer informs us, the man who suffers his
daughter to remain unmarried till she is thirteen or
fourteen years old is "subjected to endless annoyances,
beset with stinging remarks, unpleasant whisperings and
slanderous gossip. No orthodox Hindoo will allow his
son to accept the hand of such a grown-up girl."
How preventive of all possibility of free choice or love such a custom
is may be inferred from another brief extract from the same article:
"The superstitious notion of a Hindoo parent that it is
a sin not to give his daughter in marriage before she
ceases to to be a child impels him urgently to get her
a husband before she has passed her ninth or tenth
year. He sends out to match-makers and spares no pains
to discover a bridegroom in some family of rank equal
or superior to his own. Having found a boy ... he
endeavors to secure him by entreaty or by large offers
of money or jewels."
The Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati (22) gives some further grewsome details
which would seem like the inventions of a burlesque writer were they
not attested by such unbiassed authority. "Religions enjoin that every
girl must be given in marriage; the neglect of this duty means for the
father unpardonable sin, public ridicule, and caste excommunication."
But in the higher castes the cost of a marriage is at least $200,
wherefore if a man has several daughters his ruin is almost certain.
Female infanticide is often the result, but even if the girls are
allowed to grow up there is a way for the father to escape. There is a
special high class of Brahmans who make it their business to marry
these girls. They go up and down the land marrying ten, twenty,
sometimes as many as one hundred and fifty of them, receiving presents
from the bride's parents and immediately thereafter bidding good-by to
her, going home never to see their "wife" again. The parents have now
done their duty; they have escaped religious and social ostracism at
the expense, it is true, of their daughters, who remain at home to
make themselves useful. These poor girls can never marry again, and
whether or not they become moral outcasts, their life is ruined; but
that, to a Hindoo, is a trifling matter; girls, in his opinion, were
not created for their own sake, but for the pleasure, comfort, and
salvation of man.
HOW HINDOO GIRLS ARE DISPOSED OF
In some parts of India the infant girls are merely subjected to an
"irrevocable betrothal" for the time being, while in others they fall
at once into the clutches of their degraded husbands.[264] In either
case they have absolutely no choice in the selection of a
life-partner. As Dubois remarks (I., 198):
"In negotiating marriage the inclinations of the future
spouses are never attended to. Indeed, it would be
ridiculous to consult girls of that age; and,
accordingly, the choice devolves entirely upon the
parents," "The ceremony of the 'bhánwar,' or circuit of
the pole or branch, is," says Dalton (148), "observed
in most Hindu marriages.... Its origin is curious.. As
a Hindu bridegroom of the upper classes has no
opportunity of trotting out his intended previous to
marriage, and she is equally in the dark regarding the
paces of her lord, the two are made to walk around the
post a certain number of times to prove that they are
sound in limb."
Even the _accidental_ coincidence of the choice of a husband with the
girl's own preference--should any such exist--is rendered impossible
by a superstitious custom which demands that a horoscope must in all
cases be taken to see if the signs are propitious, as Ramabai
Sarasvati informs us (35), adding that if the signs are not propitious
another girl is chosen. Sometimes a dozen are thus rejected, and the
number may rise to three hundred before superstition is satisfied and
a suitable match is found! The same writer gives the following
pathetic instance of the frivolous way in which the girls are disposed
of. A father is bathing in the river; a stranger comes in, the father
asks him to what caste he belongs, and finding that all right, offers
him his nine-year-old daughter. The stranger accepts, marries the
child the next day, and carries her to his home nine hundred miles
away. These poor child brides, she says, are often delighted to get
married, because they are promised a ride on an elephant!
But the most extraordinary revelation made by this doctor is contained
in the following paragraph which, I again beg the reader to remember,
was not written by a humorous globetrotter or by the librettist of
_Pinafore_, but by a native Hindoo woman who is bitterly in earnest, a
woman who left her country to study the condition of women in England
and America, and who then returned to devote her life to the attempt
to better the dreadful fate of her country-women:
"As it is absurd to assume that girls should be allowed
to choose their future husbands, in their infancy, this
is done for them by their parents or guardians. In the
northern part of this country the _family barber_ is
generally employed to select the boys and girls to be
married, it being considered _too humiliating and mean
an act_ on the part of the parents and guardians to go
out and seek their future daughters and sons-in-law."
HINDOOS FAR BELOW BRUTES
A more complete disregard of the real object of marriage and of the
existence of love could hardly be found among clams and oysters. In
their sexual relations the civilized Hindoos are, indeed, far beneath
the lowest of animals. Young animals are never prevented by their
parents from mating according to their choice; they never unite till
they have reached maturity; they use their procreative instinct only
for the purpose for which it was designed, whereas the Hindoos--like
their wild neighbors--indulge in a perpetual carnival of lust; they
never kill their offspring, and they never maltreat their females as
the Hindoos do.[265] On this last point some more details must be
given:
"The Hindu is supposed to be, of all creatures on
earth, the most generous, the most kind-hearted, the
most gentle, the most sympathetic, and the most
unselfish. After living for nearly seven years in
India, I must tell you that the reverse of this is
true.... It has been said that among the many languages
spoken by the people of Hindustan there is no such word
as home, in the sense in which we understand it; that
among the languages spoken there is no such word as
love, in the sense in which we know it. I cannot vouch
for the truth of this, as I am not acquainted with the
languages of India, but I do know that among all the
heathen people of that country there is no such place
as home, as we understand it; there is no such
sentiment as love, as we feel it."
The writer of the above is Dr. Salem Armstrong-Hopkins, who, during
her long connection with the Woman's Hospital of Hyderabad, Sindh, had
the best of opportunities for observing the natives of all classes,
both at the hospital and in their homes, to which she was often
summoned. In her book _Within the Purdah_ she throws light on the
popular delusion that Hindoos must be kind to each other since they
are kind to animals. In Bombay there is even a hospital for diseased
and aged animals: but that is a result of religious superstition, not
of real sympathy, for the same Brahman who is afraid to bring a curse
upon his soul by killing an animal "will beat his domestic animals
most cruelly, and starve and torture them in many ways, thus
exhibiting his lack of kindness." And the women fare infinitely worse
than the animals. The wealthiest are perpetually confined in rooms
without table or chairs, without a carpet on the mud floor or picture
on the mud walls--and this in a country where fabulous sums are spent
on fine architecture. All girl babies are neglected, or dosed with
opium if they cry; the mother's milk--which an animal would give to
them--being reserved for their brothers, though these brothers be
already several years old. Unless a girl is married before her twelfth
year she is considered a disgrace to the family, is stripped of all
her finery and compelled to do the drudgery of her fathers household,
receiving
"kicks and abuses from any and all its members, and
often upon the slightest provocation. Should she fall
ill, no physician is consulted and no effort is made to
restore her health or to prolong life." "The expression
of utter hopelessness, despair, and misery" on such a
girl's face "beggars description."
Nor are matters any better for those who get married. Not only are
they bestowed in infancy on any male--from an infant boy to an old man
with many wives--whom the father can secure[266]--but the
daughter-in-law becomes "a drudge and slave in her husband's home."
One of her tasks is to grind wheat between two great stones. "This is
very arduous labor, and the slight little women sometimes faint away
while engaged in the task", yet by a satanic refinement of cruelty
they are compelled to sing a grinding song while the work lasts and
never stop, on penalty of being beaten. And though they prepare all
the food for the family and serve the others, they get only what is
left--which often is nothing at all, and many literally starve to
death. No wonder these poor creatures--be they little girls or
women--all wear "the same look of hopeless despair and wretchedness,"
making an impression on the mind more pitiable than any disease. The
writer had among her patients some who tried by the most agonizing of
deaths--voluntary starvation--to escape their misery.
CONTEMPT IN PLACE OF LOVE
No one can read these revelations without agreeing with the writer
that "the Hindu is of all people the most cowardly and the most
cruel," and that he cannot know what real love of any kind is. The
Abbé Dubois, who lived many years among the Hindoos, wearing their
clothes and adopting their customs so far as they did not conflict
with his Christian conscience, wrote (I., 51) that
"the affection and attachment between brothers and
sisters, never very ardent, almost entirely disappears
as soon as they are married. After that event, they
scarcely ever meet, unless it be to quarrel."
Ramabai Sarasvati thinks that loving couples can be found in India,
but Dubois, applying the European standard, declared (I., 21,
302-303):
"During the long period of my observation of them and
their habits, I am not sure that I have ever seen two
Hindu marriages that closely united the hearts by a
true and inviolable attachment."
The husband thinks his wife "entitled to no attentions, and never pays
her any, even in familiar intercourse." He looks on her "merely as his
servant, and never as his companion." "We have said enough of women in
a country where they are considered as scarcely forming a part of the
human species." And Ramabai herself confesses (44) that at home "men
and women have almost nothing in common." "The women's court is
situated at the back of the houses, where darkness reigns
perpetually." Even after the second ceremony the young couple seldom
meet and talk.
"Being cut off from the chief means of forming attachment, the young
couple are almost strangers, and in many cases ... a feeling kindred
to hatred takes root between them." There is "no such thing as the
family having pleasant times together."
Dr. Ryder thinks that for "one kind husband there are one hundred
thousand cruel ones," and she gives the following illustration among
others:
"A rich husband (merchant caste) brought his wife to me
for treatment. He said she was sixteen, and they had
been married eight years. 'She was good wife, do
everything he want, wait on him and eight brothers,
carry water up three flights of stairs on her head;
now, what will you cure her for? She suffer much. I not
pay too much money. When it cost too much I let her
die. I don't care. I got plenty wives. When you cure
her for ten shilling I get her done, but I not pay
more.' I explained to him that her medicines would cost
more than that amount, and he left, saying, 'I don't
care. Let her die. I can have plenty wives. I like
better a new wife.'"[267]
Though the lawgiver Manu wrote "where women are honored there the gods
are pleased," he was one of the hundreds of Sanscrit writers, who, as
Ramabai Sarasvati relates, "have done their best to make woman a
hateful being in the world's eye." Manu speaks of their "natural
heartlessness," their "impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, and
bad conduct." Though mothers are more honored than other women, yet
even they are declared to be "as impure as falsehood itself."
"I have never read any sacred book in Sanscrit literature
without meeting this kind of hateful sentiment about
women.... Profane literature is by no means less severe or
more respectful toward women."
The wife is the husband's property and classed by Manu with "cows,
mares, female camels, slave girls, buffalo cows, she goats, and ewes."
A man may abandon his wife if he finds her blemished or diseased,
while she must not even show disrespect to a husband who is diseased,
addicted to evil passions, or a drunkard. If she does she shall be
deserted for three months and deprived of her ornaments and
furniture.[268] Even British rule has not been able to improve the
condition of woman, for the British Government is bound by treaties
not to interfere with social and religious customs; hence many
pathetic cases are witnessed in the courts of unwilling girls handed
over, in accordance with national custom, to the loathed husbands
selected for them. "The gods and justice always favor the men." "Many
women put an end to their earthly sufferings by committing suicide."
WIDOWS AND THEIR TORMENTORS
If anything can cast a ray of comfort into the wretched life of a
Hindoo maiden or wife it is the thought that, after all, she is much
better off than if she were a widow--though, to be sure, she runs
every risk of becoming one ere she is old enough to be considered
marriageable in any country where women are regarded as human beings.
In considering the treatment of Hindoo widows we reach the climax of
inhuman cruelty--a cruelty far exceeding that practised by American
Indians toward female prisoners, because more prolonged and involving
mental as well as physical agonies.
In 1881 there were in British India alone 20,930,000 widows, 669,000
of whom were under nineteen, and 78,976 _under nine_ years of
age.[269] Now a widow's life is naturally apt to be one of hardship
because she has lost her protector and bread-winner; but in India the
tragedy of her fate is deepened a thousandfold by the diabolical
ill-treatment of which she is made the innocent victim. A widow who
has borne sons or who is aged is somewhat less despised than the child
widow; on her falls the worst abuse and hatred of the community,
though she be as innocent of any crime as an angel. In the eyes of a
Hindoo the mere fact of being a widow is a crime--the crime of
surviving her husband, though he may have been seventy and the wife
seven.
All women love their soft glossy hair; and a Hindoo woman, says
Ramabai Sarasvati (82), "thinks it worse than death to lose her hair";
yet "among the Brahmans of Deccan the heads of all widows must be
shaved regularly every fortnight." "Shaved head" is a term of derision
everywhere applied to the widows. All their ornaments are taken from
them and they are excluded from every ceremony of joy. The name "rand"
given to a widow "is the same that is borne by a Nautch girl or a
harlot." One poor woman wrote to a missionary:
"O great Lord, our name is written with drunkards, with
lunatics, with imbeciles, with the very animals; as
they are not responsible, we are not. Criminals
confined in jails for life are happier than we."
Another of these widows wrote:[270] "While our husbands live we are
their slaves, when they die we are still worse off." The husband's
funeral, she says, may last all day in a broiling sun, and while the
others are refreshed, she alone is denied food and water. After
returning she is reviled by her own relatives. Her mother says:
"Unhappy creature! I can't bear the thought of anyone so vile. I wish
she had never been born." Her mother-in-law says: "The horned viper!
She has bitten my son and killed him, and now he is dead, and she,
useless creature, is left behind." It is impossible for her to escape
this fate by marrying again. The bare mention of remarriage by a
widow, though she be only eight or nine years old, would be regarded,
says Dubois (I., 191), "as the greatest of insults." Should she marry
again "she would be hunted out of society, and no decent person would
venture at any time to have the slightest intercourse with her."
Attempts have been made in recent times by liberal-minded men to marry
widows; but they were subjected to so much odium and persecution
therefor that they were driven to suicide.
When a widow dies her corpse is disposed of with hardly any ceremony.
Should a widow try to escape her fate the only alternatives are
suicide or a life of shame. To a Hindoo widow, says Ramabai Sarasvati,
death is "a thousand times more welcome than her miserable existence."
It is for this reason that the suttee or "voluntary" burning of widows
on the husband's funeral pyre--the climax of inhuman atrocity--lost
some of its horrors to the victims until the moment of agony arrived.
I have already (p. 317) refuted the absurd whim that this voluntary
death of Hindoo widows was a proof of their conjugal devotion. It was
proof, on the contrary, of the unutterably cruel selfishness of the
male Hindoos, who actually forged a text to make the suttee seem a
religious duty--a forgery which during two thousand years caused the
death of countless innocent women. Best was told that the real cause
of widow-burning was a desire on the part of the men to put an end to
the frequent murders of husbands by their cruelly treated wives
(Reich, _212_). However that may be, the suttee in all probability was
due to the shrewd calculation that the fear of being burned alive, or
being more despised and abused than the lowest outcasts, would make
women more eager to follow obediently the code which makes of them
abject slaves of their husbands, living only for them and never having
a thought or a care for themselves.
HINDOO DEPRAVITY
Since, as Ward attests (116), the young widows "without exception,
become abandoned women," it is obvious that one reason why the priests
were so anxious to prevent them from marrying again was to insure an
abundant supply of victims for their immoral purposes. The
hypocritical Brahmans were not only themselves notorious libertines,
but they shrewdly calculated that the simplest way to win the favor
and secure control of the Indian populace was by pandering to their
sensual appetites and supplying abundant opportunities and excuses for
their gratification--making these opportunities, in fact, part and
parcel of their religious ceremonies. Their temples and their sacred
carts which traversed the streets were decorated with obscene pictures
of a peculiarly disgusting kind,[271] which were freely exposed to the
gaze of old and young of both sexes; their temples were little more
than nurseries for the rearing of bayadères, a special class of
"sacred prostitutes;" while scenes of promiscuous debauchery sometimes
formed part of the religious ceremony, usually under some hypocritical
pretext.
It would be unjust, however, to make the Brahman priests entirely
responsible for Hindoo depravity. It has indeed been maintained that
there was a time when the Hindoos were free from all the vices which
now afflict them; but that is one of the silly myths of ignorant
dreamers, on a level with the notion that savages were corrupted by
whites. One of the oldest Hindoo documents, the _Mahabharata_, gives
us the native traditions concerning these "good old times" in two
sentences:
"Though in their youthful innocence the women abandoned
their husbands, they were guilty of no offence; for
such was the rule in early times." "Just as cattle are
situated, so are human beings, too, within their
respective castes"
which suggests a state of promiscuity as decided as that which
prevailed in Australia. Civilization did not teach the Hindoos
love--for that comes last--but merely the refinements of lust, such as
even the Greeks and Romans hardly knew. Ovid's _Ars Amandi_ is a model
of purity compared with the Hindoo "Art of Love," the
_K[=a]mas[=u]tram_ (or _Kama Soutra_) of V[=a]tsy[=a]yana, which is
nothing less than a handbook for libertines, of which it would be
impossible even to print the table of contents. Whereas the translator
of Ovid into a modern language need not omit more than a page of the
text, the German translator of the _K[=a]mas[=u]tram_, Dr. Richard
Schmidt, who did his work in behalf of the Kgl. Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Berlin, felt it incumbent on him to turn more than
fifty pages out of four hundred and seventy into Latin. Yet the author
of this book, who lived about two thousand years ago, recommends that
every one, including young girls, should study it. In India, as his
French translator, Lamairesse, writes, "everything is done to awaken
carnal desires even in young children of both sexes." The natural
result is that, as the same writer remarks (186):
"Les catégories des femmes faciles sont si nombreuses
qu'elles doivent comprendre presque toutes les personnes du
sexe. Aussi un ministre protestant écrivait-il au milieu de
notre siècle qu'il n'existait presque point de femmes
vertueuses dans l'Inde."
The Rev. William Ward wrote (162) in 1824:
"It is a fact which greatly perplexes many of the
well-informed Hindus, that notwithstanding the wives of
Europeans are seen in so many mixed companies, they
remain chaste; while their wives, though continually
secluded, watched, and veiled, are so notoriously
corrupt. I recollect the observation of a gentleman who
had lived nearly twenty years in Bengal, whose opinions
on such a subject demanded the highest regard, that the
infidelity of the Hindu women was so great that he
scarcely thought there was a single instance of a wife
who had been always faithful to her husband."[272]
TEMPLE GIRLS
The Brahman priests, who certainly knew their people well, had so
little faith in their virtue that they would not accept a girl to be
brought up for temple service if she was over five years old. She had
to be not only pure but physically flawless and sound in health. Yet
her purity was not valued as a virtue, but as an article of commerce.
The Brahmans utilized the charms of these girls for the purpose of
supporting the temples with their sinful lives, their gains being
taken from them as "offerings to the gods." As soon as a girl was old
enough she was put up at auction and sold to the highest bidder. If
she was specially attractive the bids would sometimes reach fabulous
sums, it being a point of honor and eager rivalry among Rajahs and
other wealthy men, young and old, to become the possessors of bayadère
débutantes. Temporarily only, of course, for these girls were never
allowed to marry. While they were connected with the temple they could
give themselves to anyone they chose, the only condition being that
they must never refuse a Brahman (Jacolliot, 169-76). The bayadères,
says Dubois, call themselves Deva-dasi, servants or slaves of the
gods, "but they are known to the public by the coarser name of
strumpets." They are, next to the sacrificers, the most important
persons about the temples. While the poor widows who had been
respectably married are deprived of all ornaments and joys of life,
these wantons are decked with fine clothes, flowers, and jewelry; and
gold is showered upon them. The bayadères Vasantasena is described by
the poet Cûdraka as always wearing a hundred gold ornaments, living in
her own palace, which has eight luxurious courts, and on one occasion
refusing an unwelcome suitor though he sent 100,000 gold pieces.
Bayadères are supposed to be originally descendants of the apsaras, or
dancing girls of the god Indra, the Hindoo Jupiter. In reality they
are recruited from various castes, some parents making it a point to
offer their third daughter to the Brahmans. Bands of the bayadères are
engaged by the best families to provide dancing and music, especially
at weddings. To have dealings with bayadères is not only in good form,
but is a meritorious thing, since it helps to support the temples. And
yet, when one of these girls dies she is not cremated in the same
place as other women, and her ashes are scattered to the winds. In
some provinces of Bengal, Jacolliot says, she is only half burnt, and
the body then thrown to the jackals and vultures.
The temple of Sunnat had as many as five hundred of these priestesses
of Venus, and a Rajah has been known to entertain as many as two
thousand of them. Bayadères, or Nautch girls, as they are often called
in a general way, are of many grades. The lowest go about the country
in bands, while the highest may rise to the rank and dignity of an
Aspasia. To the former class belong those referred to by Lowrie
(148)--a band of twenty girls, all unveiled and dressed in their
richest finery, who wanted to dance for his party and were greatly
disappointed when refused. "Most of them were very young--about ten or
eleven years old." Their course is brief; they soon lose their charms,
are discarded, and end their lives as beggars.
AN INDIAN ASPASIA
A famous representative of the superior class of bayadères is the
heroine of King Çûdraka's drama just referred to--Vasantasena. She has
amassed immense wealth--the description of her palace takes up several
pages--and is one of the best known personages in town, yet that does
not prevent her from being spoken of repeatedly as "a noble woman, the
jewel of the city."[273] She is, indeed, represented as differing in
her love from other bayadères, and, as she herself remarks, "a
bayadères is not reprehensible in the eyes of the world if she gives
her heart to a poor man." She sees the Brahman Tscharudatta in the
temple garden of Kama, the god of love, and forthwith falls in love
with him, as he does with her, though he is married. One afternoon she
is accosted in the street by a relative of the king, who annoys her
with his unwelcome attentions. She takes refuge in her lover's house
and, on the pretext that she has been pursued on account of her
ornaments, leaves her jewelry in his charge. The jewels are stolen
during the night, and this mishap leads to a series of others which
finally culminate in Tscharudatta being led out to execution for the
alleged murder of Vasantasena. At the last moment Vasantasena, who had
been strangled by the king's relative, but has been revived, appears
on the scene, and her lover's life is saved, as well as his honor.
The royal author of this drama, who has been called the Shakspere of
India, probably lived in one of the first centuries of the Christian
era. His play may in a certain sense be regarded as a predecessor of
_Manon Lescaut_ and _Camille_, inasmuch as an attempt is made in it to
ascribe to the heroine a delicacy of feeling to which women of her
class are naturally strangers. She hesitates to make advances to
Tscharudatta, and at first wonders whether it would be proper to
remain in his house. See informs her pursuer that "love is won by
noble character, not by importunate advances." Tscharudatta says of
her: "There is a proverb that 'money makes love--the treasurer has the
treasure,' But no! she certainly cannot be won with treasures." She is
in fact represented throughout as being different from the typical
bayadères, who are thus described by one of the characters:
"For money they laugh or weep; they win a man's
confidence but do not give him theirs. Therefore a
respectable man ought to keep bayadères like flowers of
a cemetery, three steps away from him. It is also said:
changeable like waves of the sea, like clouds in a
sunset, glowing only a moment--so are women. As soon as
they have plundered a man they throw him away like a
dye-rag that has been squeezed dry. This saying, too,
is pertinent: just as no lotos grows on a mountain top,
no mule draws a horse's loud, no scattered barley grows
up as rice; so no wanton ever becomes a respectable
woman."
Vasantasena, however, does become a respectable woman. In the last
scene the king confers on her a veil, whereby the stain on her birth
and life is wiped away and she becomes Tscharudatta's legitimate
second wife.
But how about the first wife? Her actions show how widely in India
conjugal love may differ from what we know as such, by the absence of
monopoly and jealousy. When she first hears of the theft of
Vasantasena's jewels in her husband's house she is greatly distressed
at the impending loss of his good name, but is not in the least
disturbed by the discovery that she has a rival. On the contrary, she
takes a string of pearls that remains from her dowry, and sends it to
her husband to be given to Vasantasena as an equivalent for her lost
jewels. Vasantasena, on her part, is equally free from jealousy.
Without knowing whence they came, she afterward sends the pearls to
her lover's wife with these words addressed to her servants:
"Take these pearls and give them to my sister,
Tscharudatta's wife, the honorable woman, and say to
her: 'Conquered by Tscharudatta's excellence, I have
become also your slave. Therefore use this string of
pearls as a necklace.'"
The wife returned the pearls with the message:
"My master and husband has made you a present of these
pearls. It would therefore be improper for me to accept
them: my master and husband is my special jewel. This I
beg you to consider."
And, in the final scenes, the wife shows her great love for her
husband by hastening to get ready for the funeral pyre to be burnt
alive with his corpse. And when, after expressing her joy at his
rescue and kissing him, she turns and sees Vasantasena, she exclaims:
"O this happiness! How do you do, my sister?" Vasantasena replies:
"Now I am happy," and the two embrace!
The translator of Çûdraka's play notes in the preface that there is a
curious lack of ardor in the expression of Tscharudatta's love for
Vasantasena, and he naïvely--though quite in the Hindoo
spirit--explains this as showing that this superior person (who is a
model of altruistic self-sacrifice in every respect), "remains
untouched by coarse outbursts of sensual passion." The only time he
warms up is when he hears that the bayadères prefers him to her
wealthy persecutor; he then exclaims, "Oh, how this girl deserves to
be worshipped like a goddess." Vasantasena is much the more ardent of
the two. It is she who goes forth to seek him, repeatedly, dressed in
purple and pearls, as custom prescribes to a girl who goes to meet her
lover. It is she who exclaims: "The clouds may rain, thunder, or send
forth lightning: women who go to meet their lovers heed neither heat
nor cold." And again: "may the clouds tower on high, may night come
on, may the rain fall in torrents, I heed them not. Alas, my heart
looks only toward the lover." It is she who is so absent-minded,
thinking of him, that her maid suspects her passion; she who, when a
royal suitor is suggested to her, exclaims, "'Tis love I crave to
bestow, not homage."
SYMPTOMS OF FEMININE LOVE
This portrayal of the girl as the chief lover is quite the custom in
Hindoo literature, and doubtless mirrors life as it was and is. Like a
dog that fawns on an indifferent or cruel master, these women of India
were sometimes attached to their selfish lovers and husbands. They had
been trained from their childhood to be sympathetic, altruistic,
devoted, self-sacrificing, and were thus much better prepared than the
men for the germs of amorous sentiment, which can grow only in such a
soil of self-denial. Hence it is that Hindoo love-poems are usually of
the feminine gender. This is notably the case with the _Saptacatakam_
of Hâla, an anthology of seven hundred Prakrit verses made from a
countless number of love-poems that are intended to be sung--"songs,"
says Albrecht Weber, "such as the girls of India, especially perhaps
the bayadères or temple girls may have been in the habit of
singing."[274] Some of these indicate a strong individual preference
and monopoly of attachment:
No. 40: "Her heart is dear to her as being your abode,
her eyes because she saw you with them, her body
because it has become thin owing to your absence."
No. 43: "The burning (grief) of separation is (said to
be) made more endurable by hope. But, mother, if my
beloved is away from me even in the same village, it is
worse than death to me."
No. 57: "Heedless of the other youths, she roams about,
transgressing the rules of propriety, casting her
glances in (all) directions of the world for your sake,
O child."
No. 92: "That momentary glimpse of him whom, oh, my
aunt, I constantly long to see, has (touched) quenched
my thirst (as little) as a drink taken in a dream."
No. 185: "She has not sent me. You have no relations
with her. What concern of ours is it therefore? Well,
she dies in her separation from you."
No. 202: "No matter how often I repeat to my mistress
the message you confided to me, she replies 'I did not
hear' (what you said), and thus makes me repeat it a
hundred times."
No. 203: "As she looked at you, filled with the might
of her self-betraying love, so she then, in order to
conceal it, looked also at the other persons."
No. 234: "Although all (my) possessions were consumed
in the village fire, yet is (my) heart rejoiced, (when
it was put out) he took the bucket as it passed from
hand to hand (from my hand)."
No. 299: "She stares, without having an object, gives
vent to long sighs, laughs into vacant space, mutters
unintelligible words--surely she must bear something in
her heart."
No. 302: "'Do give her to the one she carries in her
heart. Do you not see, aunt, that she is pining away?'
'No one rests in my heart' [literally; whence could
come in my heart resting?]--thus speaking, the girl
fell into a swoon."
No. 345: "If it is not your beloved, my friend, how is it
that at the mention of his name your face glows like a lotos
bud opened by the sun's rays?"
No. 368: "Like illness without a doctor--like living
with relatives if one is poor, like the sight of an
enemy's prosperity--so difficult is it to endure
separation from you."
No. 378: "Whatever you do, whatever you say, and
wherever you turn your eyes, the day is not long enough
for her efforts to imitate you."
No. 440: "...She, whose every limb was bathed in
perspiration, at the mere mention of his name."
No. 453: "My friend! tell me honestly, I ask you: do
the bracelets of all women become larger when the lover
is far away?"
No. 531: "In whichever direction I look I see you
before me, as if painted there. The whole firmament
brings before me as it were a series of pictures of
you."
No. 650: "From him proceed all discourses, all are
about him, end with him. Is there then, my aunt, but
one young man in all this village?"
While these poems may have been sung mostly by bayadères, there are
others which obviously give expression to the legitimate feelings of
married women. This is especially true of the large number which voice
the sorrows of women at the absence of their husbands after the rains
have set in. The rainy season is in India looked on as the season of
love, and separation from the lover at this time is particularly
bewailed, all the more as the rains soon make the roads impassable.
No. 29: "To-day, when, alone, I recalled the joys we
had formerly shared, the thunder of the new clouds
sounded to me like the death-drum (that accompanies
culprits to the place of execution)."
No. 47: "The young wife of the man who has got ready
for his journey roams, after his departure, from house
to house, trying to get the secret for preserving life
from wives who have learned how to endure separation
from their beloved."
No. 227: "In putting down the lamp the wife of the
wanderer turns her face aside, fearing that the stream
of tears that falls at the thought of the beloved might
drop on it."
No. 501: "When the voyager, on taking leave, saw his
wife turn pale, he was overcome by grief and unable to
go."
No. 623: "The wanderer's wife does indeed protect her
little son by interposing her head to catch the rain
water dripping from the eaves, but fails to notice (in
her grief over her absent one) that he is wetted by her
tears."
These twenty-one poems are the best samples of everything contained in
Hâla's anthology illustrating the serious side of love among the
bayadères and married women of India. Careful perusal of them must
convince the reader that there is nothing in them revealing the
altruistic phases of love. There is much ardent longing for the
selfish gratification which the presence of a lover would give; deep
grief at his absence; indications that a certain man could afford her
much more pleasure by his presence than others--and that is all. When
a girl wails that she is dying because her lover is absent she is
really thinking of her own pleasure rather than his. None of these
poems expresses the sentiment, "Oh, that I could do something to make
_him_ happy!" These women are indeed taught and _forced_ to sacrifice
themselves for their husbands, but when it comes to _spontaneous_
utterances, like these songs, we look in vain for evidence of pure,
devoted, high-minded, romantic love. The more frivolous side of
Oriental love is, on the other hand, abundantly illustrated in Hâla's
poems, as the following samples show:
No. 40: "O you pitiless man! You who are afraid of your
wife and difficult to catch sight of! You who resemble
(in bitterness) a nimba worm--and yet who are the
delight of the village women! For does not the (whole)
village grow thin (longing) for you?"
No. 44: "The sweetheart will not fail to come back into
his heart even though he caress another girl, whether
he see in her the same charms or not."
No. 83: "This young farmer, O beautiful girl, though he
already has a beautiful wife, has nevertheless become
so reduced that his own jealous wife has consented to
deliver this message to you."
The last two poems hint at the ease with which feminine jealousy is
suppressed in India, of which we have had some instances before and
shall have others presently. Coyness seems to be not much more
developed, at least among those who need it most:
No. 465: "By being kind to him again at first sight you
deprived yourself, you foolish girl, of many
pleasures--his prostration at your feet and his eager
robbing of a kiss."
No. 45: "Since youth (rolls on) like the rapids of a
river, the days speed away and the nights cannot be
checked--my daughter! what means this accursed, proud
reserve?"
No. 139: "On the pretext that the descent to the Goda
(river) is difficult, she threw herself in his arms.
And he clasped her tightly without thereby incurring
any reproach." (See also No. 108.)
No. 121: "Though disconsolate at the death of her
relatives, the captive girl looked lovingly upon the
young kidnapper, because he appeared to her to be a
perfect (hero). Who can remain sulky in the face of
virtues?"
Such love as these women felt is fickle and transient:
No. 240: "Through being out of sight, my child, in
course of time the love dwindles away even of those who
were firmly joined in tender union, as water runs from
the hollow of the hand."
No. 106: "O heart that, like a long piece of wood which
is being carried down the rapids of a small stream is
caught at every place, your fate is nevertheless to be
burnt by some one!"
No. 80: "By being out of sight love goes away; by
seeing too often it goes away; also by the gossip of
malicious persons it goes away; yes, it also goes away
by itself."
"If the bee, eager to sip, always seeks the juices of new growths,
this is the fault of the sapless flowers, not of the bee."
Where love is merely sensual and shallow lovers' quarrels do not fan
the flame, but put it out:
"Love which, once dissolved, is united again, after
unpleasant things have been revealed, tastes flat, like
water that has been boiled."
The commercial element is conspicuous in this kind of love; it cannot
persist without a succession of presents:
No. 67: "When the festival is over nothing gives
pleasure. So also with the full moon late in the
morning--and of love, which at last becomes
insipid--and with gratification, that does not manifest
itself in the form of presents."
The illicit, impure aspect of Oriental love is hinted at in many of
the poems collected by Hâla. There are frequent allusions to
rendezvous in temples, which are so quiet that the pigeons are scared
by the footsteps of the lovers; or in the high grain of the harvest
fields; or on the river banks, so deserted that the monkeys there fill
their paunches with mustard leaves undisturbed.
No. 19: "When he comes what shall I do? What shall I
say and what will come of this? Her heart beats as,
with these thoughts, the girl goes out on her first
rendezvous." (_Cf._ also Nos. 223 and 491.)
No. 628: "O summer time! you who give good
opportunities for rendezvous by drying the small
ditches and covering the trees with a dense abundance
of leaves! you test-plate of the gold of
love-happiness, you must not fade away yet for a long
time."
No. 553: "Aunt, why don't you remove the parrot from
this bed-chamber? He betrays all the caressing words to
others."
Hindoo poets have the faculty, which they share with the Japanese, of
bringing a whole scene or episode vividly before the eyes with a
sentence or two, as all the foregoing selections show. Sometimes a
whole story is thus condensed, as in the following:
"'Master! He came to implore our protection. Save him!'
thus speaking, she very slyly hastened to turn over her
paramour to her suddenly entering husband." (See also
No. 305 and _Hitopadesa_, p. 88.)
SYMPTOMS OF MASCULINE LOVE
Since Hindoo women, in spite of their altruistic training, are
prevented by their lack of culture or virtue (the domestic virtuous
women have no culture and the cultured bayadères have no virtue) from
rising to the heights of sentimental love, it would be hopeless to
expect the amazingly selfish, unsympathetic and cruel men to do so,
despite their intellectual culture. Among all the seven hundred poems
culled by Hâla there are only two or three which even hint at the
higher phases of love in masculine bosoms. Inasmuch as No. 383 tells
us that even "the male elephant, though tormented by great hunger,
thinking of his beloved wife, allows the juicy lotos-stalk to wither
in his trunk," one could hardly expect of man less than the sentiment
expressed in No. 576: "He who has a faithful love considers himself
contented even in misfortune, whereas without his love he is unhappy
though he possess the earth." Another poem indicating that Hindoo men
may share with women a strong feeling of amorous monopolism is No.
498:
"He regards only her countenance, and she, too, is
quite intoxicated at sight of him. Both of them,
satisfied with one another, act as if in the whole
world there were no other women or men."
But as a rule the men are depicted as being fickle, even more so than
the women. A frequent complaint of the girls is that the men forget
whom they happen to be caressing and call them by another girl's name.
More frequent still are the complaints of neglect or desertion. One of
these, No. 46, suggests the praises of night sung in the mediaeval
legend of Tristan and Isolde:
"To-morrow morning, my beloved, the hard-hearted goes
away--so people say. O sacred night! do lengthen so
that there will be no morning for him."
At first sight the most surprising and important of Hâla's seven
hundred poems seems to be No. 567:
"Only over me, the iron-hearted, thunder, O cloud, and
with all your might; be sure that you do not kill my
poor one with the hanging locks."
Here, for once, we have the idea of self-sacrifice--only the idea, it
is true, and not the act; but it indicates a very exceptional and
exalted state for a Hindoo even to think of such a thing. The
self-reproach of "iron-hearted" tells us, however, that the man has
been behaving selfishly and cruelly toward his sweetheart or wife, and
is feeling sorry for a moment. In such moments a Hindoo not
infrequently becomes human, especially if he expects new favors of the
maltreated woman, which she is only too willing to grant:
No. 85: "While with the breath of his mouth he cooled
one of my hands, swollen from the effect of his blow, I
put the other one laughingly around his neck."
No. 191: "By untangling the hair of her prostrate lover
from the notches of her spangles in which it had been
caught, she shows him that her heart has ceased to be
sulky."
References to such prostrations to secure forgiveness for inconstancy
or cruelty are frequent in Hindoo poems and dramas, and it is needless
to say that they are a very different thing from the disinterested
prostrations and homage of modern gallantry. True gallantry being one
of the altruistic ingredients of love, it would be useless to seek for
it among the Hindoos. Not so with hyperbole, which being simply a
magnifying of one's own sensations and an expression of extravagant
feeling of any kind, forms, as we know, a phase of sensual as well as
of sentimental love. The eager desire for a girl's favor makes her
breath and all her attributes seem delicious not only to man but to
inanimate things. The following, with the finishing touches applied by
the German translator, approaches modern poetic sentiment more closely
than any other of Hâla's songs:
No. 13: "O you who are skilled in cooking! Do not be
angry (that the fire fails to burn). The fire does not
burn, smokes only, in order to drink in (long) the
breath of (your) mouth, perfumed like red pâtela
blossoms."
In the use of hyperbole it is very difficult to avoid the step from
the sublime to the ridiculous. The author of No. 153 had a happy
thought when he sang that his beloved was so perfect a beauty that no
one had ever been able to see her whole body because the eye refused
to leave whatever part it first alighted on. This pretty notion is
turned into unconscious burlesque by the author of No. 274, who
complains,
"How can I describe her from whose limbs the eyes that
see them cannot tear themselves away, like a weak cow
from the mud she is sticking in."
Hardly less grotesque to our Western taste is the favorite boast (No.
211 _et passim_) that the moon is making vain efforts to shine as
brightly as the beloved's face. It is easier for us to sympathize with
the Hindoo poets when they express their raptures over the eyes or
locks of their beloved:
No. 470: "Other beauties too have in their faces
beautiful wide black eyes, with long lashes, but they
cannot cast such glances as you do."
No. 77: "I think of her countenance with her locks
floating loosely about it as she shook her head when I
seized her lip--like unto a lotos flower surrounded by
a swarm of (black) bees attracted by its fragrance."
Yet even these two references to personal beauty are not purely
esthetic, and in all the others the sensual aspect is more emphasized:
No. 556: "The brown girl's hair, which had succeeded in
touching her hips, weeps drops of water, as it were,
now that she comes out of the bath, as if from fear of
now being tied up again."
No. 128: "As by a miracle, as by a treasure, as in
heaven, as a kingdom, as a drink of ambrosia, was I
affected when I (first) saw her without any clothing."
No. 473: "For the sake of the dark-eyed girls whose
hips and thighs are visible through their wet dresses
when they bathe in the afternoon, does Kama [the god of
love] wield his bow."
Again and again the poets express their raptures over exaggerated
busts and hips, often in disgustingly coarse comparisons--lines which
cannot be quoted here.[275]
LYRICS AND DRAMAS
In his _History of Indian Literature_ (209), Weber says that
"the erotic lyric commences for us with certain of the poems
attributed to Kalidasa." "The later Kavyas are to be ranked
with the erotic poems rather than with the epic. In general
this love-poetry is of the most unbridled and extravagantly
sensual description; yet examples of deep and truly romantic
tenderness are not wanting."
Inasmuch as he attributes the same qualities to some of the Hâla poems
in which we have been unable to find them, it is obvious that his
conception of "deep and truly romantic tenderness" is different from
ours, and it is useless to quarrel about words. Hâla's collection,
being an anthology of the best love-songs of many poets, is much more
representative and valuable than if the verses were all by the same
poet. If Hindoo bards and bayadères had a capacity for true altruistic
love-sentiment, these seven hundred songs could hardly have failed to
reveal it. But to make doubly sure that we are not misrepresenting a
phase of the history of civilization, let us examine the Hindoo dramas
most noted as love-stories, especially those of Kalidasa, whose
_Sakuntala_ in particular was triumphantly held up by some of my
critics as a refutation of my theory that none of the ancient
civilized nations knew romantic love. I shall first briefly summarize
the love-stories told in these dramas, and then point out what they
reveal in regard to the Hindoo conception of love as based,
presumably, on their experiences.
I. THE STORY OF SAKUNTALA
Once upon a time there lived on the banks of the Gautami River a
hermit named Kauçika. He was of royal blood and had made so much
progress with his saintly exercises of penitence that he was on the
point of being able to defy the laws of Nature, and the gods
themselves began to fear his power. To deprive him of it they sent
down a beautiful _apsara_ (celestial bayadères) to tempt him. He could
not resist her charms, and broke his vows. A daughter was born who
received the name of Sakuntala, and was given in charge of another
saint, named Kanva, who brought her up lovingly as if she had been his
own daughter. She has grown up to be a maiden of more than human
beauty, when one day she is seen by the king, who, while hunting, has
strayed within the sacred precincts while the saint is away on a holy
errand. He is at once fascinated by her beauty--a beauty, as he says
to himself, such as is seldom found in royal chambers--a wild vine
more lovely than any garden-plant--and she, too, confesses to her
companions that since she has seen him she is overcome by a feeling
which seems out of place in this abode of penitence.
The king cannot bear the idea of returning to his palace, but encamps
near the grove of the penitents. He fears that he may not be able to
win the girl's love, and she is tortured by the same doubt regarding
him. "Did Brahma first paint her and then infuse life into her, or did
he in his spirit fashion her out of a number of spirits?" he exclaims.
He wonders what excuse he can have for lingering in the grove. His
companion suggests gathering the tithe, but the king retorts: "What I
get for protecting her is to be esteemed higher than piles of jewels."
He now feels an aversion to hunting. "I would not be able to shoot
this arrow at the gazelles who have lived with her, and who taught the
beloved to gaze so innocently." He grows thin from loss of sleep.
Unable to keep his feelings locked up in his bosom, he reveals them to
his companion, the jester, but afterward, fearing he might tell his
wives about this love-affair, he says to him:
"Of course there is no truth in the notion that I
coveted this girl Sakuntala. Just think! how could we
suit one another, a girl who knows nothing of love and
has grown up perfectly wild with the young gazelles?
No, my friend, you must not take a joke seriously."
But all the time he grows thinner from longing--so thin that his
bracelet, whose jewels have lost all their lustre from his tears,
falls constantly from his arm and has to be replaced.
In the meantime Sakuntala, without lacking the reserve and timidity
proper to the girls of penitents, has done several things that
encouraged the king to hope. While she avoided looking straight at him
(as etiquette prescribed), there was a loving expression on her face,
and once, when about to go away with her companions, she pretended
that her foot had been cut by a blade of kusagrass--but it was merely
an excuse for turning her face. Thus, while her love is not frankly
discovered, it is not covered either. She doubts whether the king
loves her, and her agony throws her into a feverish state which her
companions try in vain to allay by fanning her with lotos leaves. The
king is convinced that the sun's heat alone could not have affected
her thus. He sees that she has grown emaciated and seems ill. "Her
cheeks," he says,
"have grown thin, her bosom has lost its firm tension,
her body has grown attenuated, her shoulders stoop, and
pale is her face. Tortured by love, the girl presents
an aspect as pitiable as it is lovable; she resembles
the vine Mâdhavi when it is blighted by the hot breath
of a leaf-desiccating wind."
He is watching her, unseen himself, as she reclines in an arbor with
her friends, who are fanning her. He hears her say: "Since the hour
when he came before my eyes ... the royal sage, ah, since that hour I
have become as you see me--from longing for him;" and he wonders, "how
could she fear to have any difficulty in winning her lover?" "The
little hairs on her cheek reveal her passion by becoming erect," he
adds as he sees her writing something with her nails on a lotos leaf.
She reads to her companions what she has written: "_Your_ heart I know
not; me love burns day and night, you cruel one, because I think of
you alone."[276] Encouraged by this confession, the king steps from
his place of concealment and exclaims: "Slender girl, the glowing heat
of love only burns you, but me it consumes, and incessant is the great
torture." Sakuntala tries to rise, but is too weak, and the king bids
her dispense with ceremony. While he expresses his happiness at having
found his love reciprocated, one of the companions mutters something
about "Kings having many loves," and Sakuntala herself exclaims: "Why
do you detain the royal sage? He is quite unhappy because he is
separated from his wives at court." But the king protests that though
he has many women at court, his heart belongs to no other but her.
Left alone with Sakuntala, he exclaims:
"Be not alarmed! For am not I, who brings you adoring
homage, at your side? Shall I fan you with the cooling
petals of these water-lilies? Or shall I place your
lotos feet on my lap and fondle them to my heart's
content, you round-hipped maiden?"
"God forbid that I should be so indiscreet with a man that commands
respect," replies Sakuntala. She tries to escape, and when the king
holds her, she says: "Son of Puru! Observe the laws of propriety and
custom! I am, indeed, inflamed by love, but I cannot dispose of
myself." The king urges her not to fear her foster father. Many girls,
he says, have freely given themselves to kings without incurring
parental disapproval; and he tries to kiss her. A voice warns them
that night approaches, and, hearing her friends returning, Sakuntala
urges the king to conceal himself in the bushes.
Sakuntala now belongs to the king; they are united according to one of
the eight forms of Hindoo marriage known as that of free choice. After
remaining with her a short time the king returns to his other wives at
court. Before leaving he puts a seal ring on her finger and tells her
how she can count the days till a messenger shall arrive to bring her
to his palace. But month after month passes and no messenger arrives.
"The king has acted abominably toward Sakuntala," says one of her
friends; "he has deceived an inexperienced girl who put faith in him.
He has not even written her a letter, and she will soon be a mother."
She feels convinced, however, that the king's neglect is due to the
action of a saint who had cursed Sakuntala because she had not waited
on him promptly. "Like a drunkard, her lover shall forget what has
happened," was his curse. Relenting somewhat, he added afterward that
the force of the curse could be broken by bringing to the king some
ornament that he might have left as a souvenir. Sakuntala has her
ring, and relying on that she departs with a retinue for the royal
abode. On the way, in crossing a river, she loses the ring, and when
she confronts the king he fails to remember her and dismisses her
ignominiously. A fisherman afterward finds the ring in the stomach of
a fish, and it gets into the hands of the king, who, at sight of it,
remembers Sakuntala and is heartbroken at his cruel conduct toward
her. But he cannot at once make amends, as he has chased her away, and
it is not till some years later, and with supernatural aid, that they
are reunited.
II. THE STORY OF URVASI
The saint Narayana had spent so many years in solitude, addicted to
prayers and ascetic practices, that the gods dreaded his growing
power, which was making him like unto them, and to break it they sent
down to him some of the seductive apsaras. But the saint held a
flower-stalk to his loins, and Urvasi was born, a girl more beautiful
than the celestial bayadères who had been sent to tempt him. He gave
this girl to the apsaras to take as a present to the god Indra, whose
entertainers they were. She soon became the special ornament of heaven
and Indra used her to bring the saints to fall.
One day King Pururavas, while out driving, hears female voices calling
for help. Five apsaras appear and implore him, if he can drive through
the air, to come to the assistance of their companion Urvasi, who has
been seized and carried away, northward, by a demon. The king
forthwith orders his charioteer to steer in that direction, and
erelong he returns victorious, with the captured maiden on his
chariot. She is still overcome with terror, her eyes are closed, and
as the king gazes at her he doubts that she can be the daughter of a
cold and learned hermit; the moon must have created her, or the god of
love himself. As the chariot descends, Urvasi, frightened, leans
against the king's shoulder, and the little hairs on his body stand up
straight, so much is he pleased thereat. He brings her back to the
other apsaras, who are on a mountain-top awaiting their return.
Urvasi, too much overcome to thank him for her rescue, begs one of her
friends to do it for her, whereupon the apsaras, bidding him good-by,
rise into the air. Urvasi lingers a moment on the pretence that her
pearl necklace has got entangled in a vine, but in reality to get
another peep at the king, who addresses fervent words of thanks to the
bush for having thus given him another chance to look on her face.
"Rising into the air," he exclaims, "this girl tears my heart from my
body and carries it away with her."
The queen soon notices that his heart has gone away with another. She
complains of this estrangement to her maid, to whom she sets the task
of discovering the secret of it. The maid goes at it slyly. Addressing
the king's viduschaka (confidential adviser), she informs him that the
queen is very unhappy because the king addressed her by the name of
the girl he longs for. "What?" retorts the viduschaka--"the king
himself has revealed the secret? He called her Urvasi?" "And who, your
honor, is Urvasi?" says the maid. "She is one of the apsaras," he
says. "The sight of her has infatuated the king's senses so that he
tortures not only the queen but me, the Brahman, too, for he no longer
thinks of eating." But he expresses his conviction that the folly will
not last long, and the maid departs.
Urvasi, tortured, like the king, by love and doubt, suppresses her
bashfulness and asks one of her friends to go with her to get her
pearl necklace which she had left entangled in the vine. "Then you are
hurrying down, surely, to see Pururavas, the king?" says the friend;
"and whom have you sent in advance?" "My heart," replied Urvasi. So
they fly down to the earth, invisible to mortals, and when they see
the king, Urvasi declares that he seems to her even more beautiful
than at their first meeting. They listen to the conversation between
him and the viduschaka. The latter advises his master to seek
consolation by dreaming of a union with his love, or by painting her
picture, but the king answers that dreams cannot come to a man who is
unable to sleep, nor would a picture be able to stop his flood of
tears. "The god of love has pierced my heart and now he tortures me by
denying my wish." Encouraged by these words, but unwilling to make
herself visible, Urvasi takes a piece of birch-bark, writes on it a
message, and throws it down. The king sees it fall, picks it up and
reads:
"I love you, O master; you did not know, nor I, that
you burn with love for me. No longer do I find rest on
my coral couch, and the air of the celestial grove
burns me like fire."
"What will he say to that?" wonders Urvasi, and her friend replies,
"Is there not an answer in his limbs, which have become like withered
lotos stalks?" The king declares to his friend that the message on the
leaf has made him as happy as if he had seen his beloved's face.
Fearing that the perspiration on his hand (the sign of violent love)
might wash away the message, he gives the birch-bark to the
viduschaka. Urvasi's friend now makes herself visible to the king, who
welcomes her, but adds that the sight of her delights him not as it
did when Urvasi was with her. "Urvasi bows before you," the apsara
answers, "and sends this message: 'You were my protector, O master,
when a demon offered me violence. Since I saw you, god Kama has
tortured me violently; therefore you must sometime take pity on me,
great king!'" And the king retorts: "The ardor of love is here equally
great on either side. It is proper that hot iron be welded with hot
iron." After this Urvasi makes herself visible, too, but the king has
hardly had time to greet her, when a celestial messenger arrives to
summon her hastily back to heaven, to her own great distress and the
king's.
Left alone, the king wants to seek consolation in the message written
on the birch-bark. But to their consternation, they cannot find it. It
had dropped from the viduschaka's hand and the wind had carried it
off. "O wind of Malaya," laments the king,
"you are welcome to all the fragrance breathing from
the flowers, but of what use to you is the love-letter
you have stolen from me? Know you not that a hundred
such consolers may save the life of a love-sick man who
cannot hope soon to attain the goal of his desires?"
In the meantime the queen and her maid have appeared in the
background. They come across the birch-bark, see the message on it,
and the maid reads it aloud. "With this gift of the celestial girl let
us now meet her lover," says the queen, and stepping forward, she
confronts the king with the words: "Here is the bark, my husband. You
need not search for it longer." Denial is useless; the king prostrates
himself at her feet, confessing his guilt and begging her not to be
angry at her slave. But she turns her back and leaves him. "I cannot
blame her," says the king; "homage to a woman leaves her cold unless
it is inspired by love, as an artificial jewel leaves an expert who
knows the fire of genuine stones." "Though Urvasi has my heart," he
adds, "yet I highly esteem the queen. Of course, I shall meet her with
firmness, since she has disdained my prostration at her feet."
The reason why Urvasi had been summoned back to heaven so suddenly was
that Indra wanted to hear a play which the celestial manager had
rehearsed with the apsaras. Urvasi takes her part, but her thoughts
are so incessantly with the king that she blunders repeatedly. She
puts passion into lines which do not call for it, and once, when she
is called on to answer the question, "To whom does her heart incline?"
she utters the name of her own lover instead of the one of similar
sound called for in the play. For these mistakes her teacher curses
her and forbids her remaining in heaven any longer. Then Indra says to
the abashed maiden: "I must do a favor to the king whom you love and
who aids me in battle. Go and remain with him at your will, until you
have borne him a son."
Ignorant of the happiness in store for him, the king meanwhile
continues to give utterance to his longings and laments. "The day has
not passed so very sadly; there was something to do, no time for
longing. But how shall I spend the long night, for which there is no
pastime?" The viduschaka counsels hope, and the king grants that even
the tortures of love have their advantage; for, as the force of the
torrent is increased a hundredfold if a rock is interposed, so is the
power of love if obstacles retard the blissful union. The twitching of
his right arm (a favorable sign) augments his hope. At the moment when
he remarks: "The anguish of love increases at night," Urvasi and her
friend came down from the air and hover about him. "Nothing can cool
the flame of my love," he continues,
"neither a bed of fresh flowers, nor moonlight, nor
strings of pearls, nor sandal ointment applied to the
whole body. The only part of my body that has attained
its goal is this shoulder, which touched her in the
chariot."
At these words Urvasi boldly steps before the king, but he pays no
attention to her. "The great king," she complains to her friend,
"remains cold though I stand before him." "Impetuous girl," is the
answer, "you are still wearing your magic veil; he cannot see you."
At this moment voices are heard and the queen appears with her
retinue. She had already sent a message to the king to inform him that
she was no longer angry and had made a vow to fast and wear no finery
until the moon had entered the constellation of Rohini, in order to
express her penitence and conciliate her husband. The king, greeting
her, expresses sorrow that she should weaken her body, delicate as
lotos root, by thus fasting. "What?" he adds, "you yourself conciliate
the slave who ardently longs to be with you and who is anxious to win
your indulgence!" "What great esteem he shows her!" exclaims Urvasi,
with a confused smile; but her companion retorts: "You foolish girl, a
man of the world is most polite when he loves another woman." "The
power of my vow," says the queen, "is revealed in his solicitude for
me." Then she folds her hands, and, bowing reverently, says:
"I call to witness these two gods, the Moon and his
Rohini, that I beg my husband's pardon. Henceforth may
he, unhindered, associate with the woman whom he loves
and who is glad to be his companion."
"Is he indifferent to you?" asks the viduschaka. "Fool!" she replies;
"I desire only my husband's happiness, and give up my own for that.
Judge for yourself whether I love him."
When the queen has left, the king once more abandons himself to his
yearning for his beloved. "Would that she came from behind and put her
lotos hands over my eyes." Urvasi hears the words and fulfils his
wish. He knows who it is, for every little hair on his body stands up
straight. "Do not consider me forward if now I embrace his body," says
Urvasi to her friend; "for the queen has given him to me." "You take
my body as the queen's present," says the king; "but who, you thief,
allowed you before that to steal my heart?" "It shall always be yours
and I your slave alone," he continues. "When I took possession of the
throne I did not feel so near my goal as now when I begin my service
at your feet." "The moon's rays which formerly tortured me now refresh
my body, and welcome are Kama's arrows which used to wound me." "Did
my delaying do you harm?" asks Urvasi, and he replies: "Oh, no! Joy is
sweeter when it follows distress. He who has been exposed to the sun
is cooled by the tree's shade more than others;" and he ends the same
with the words: "A night seemed to consist of a hundred nights ere my
wish was fulfilled; may it be the same now that I am with you, O
beauty! how glad I should be!"
Absorbed by his happy love, the king hands over the reins of
government to his ministers and retires with Urvasi to a forest. One
day he looks for a moment thoughtfully at another girl, whereat Urvasi
gets so jealous that she refuses to accept his apology, and in her
anger forgets that no woman must walk into the forest of the war-god.
Hardly has she entered when she is changed into a vine. The king goes
out of his mind from grief; he roams all over the forest, alternately
fainting and raving, calling upon peacock and cuckoo, bee, swan, and
elephant, antelope, mountain, and river to give him tidings of his
beloved, her with the antelope eyes and the big breasts, and the hips
so broad that she can only walk slowly. At last he sees in a cleft a
large red jewel and picks it up. It is the stone of union which
enables lovers to find one another. An impulse leads him to embrace
the vine before him and it changes to Urvasi. A son is afterward born
to her, but she sends him away before the king knows about it, and has
him brought up secretly lest she be compelled to return at once to
heaven. But Indra sends a messenger to bring her permission to remain
with the king as long as he lives.
III. MALAVIKA AND AGNIMITRA
Queen Dharini, the head wife of King Agnimitra, has received from her
brother a young girl named Malavika, whom he has rescued from robbers.
The queen is just having a large painting made of herself and her
retinue, and Malavika finds a place on it at her side. The king sees
the picture and eagerly inquires: "Who is that beautiful maiden?" The
suspicious queen does not answer his question, but takes measures to
have the girl carefully concealed from him and kept busy with dancing
lessons. But the king accidentally hears Malavika's name and makes up
his mind that he must have her. "Arrange some stratagem," he says to
his viduschaka, "so I may see her bodily whose picture I beheld
accidentally." The viduschaka promptly stirs up a dispute between the
two dancing-masters, which is to be settled by an exhibition of their
pupils before the king. The queen sees through the trick too late to
prevent its execution and the king's desire is gratified. He sees
Malavika, and finds her more beautiful even than her picture--her face
like the harvest moon, her bosom firm and swelling, her waist small
enough to span with the hand, her hips big, her toes beautifully
curved. She has never seen the king, yet loves him passionately. Her
left eye twitches--a favorable sign--and she sings: "I must obey the
will of others, but my heart desires you; I cannot conceal it." "She
uses her song as a means of offering herself to you," says the
viduschaka to the king, who replies: "In the presence of the queen her
love saw no other way." "The Creator made her the poisoned arrow of
the god of love," he continues to his friend after the performance is
over and they are alone. "Apply your mind and think out other plans
for meeting her." "You remind me," says the viduschaka, "of a vulture
that hovers over a butcher's shop, filled with greed for meat but also
with fear. I believe the eagerness to have your will has made you
ill." "How were it possible to remain well?" the king retorts. "My
heart no longer desires intimacies with any woman in all my harem. To
her with the beautiful eyes, alone shall my love be devoted
henceforth."
In the royal gardens stands an asoka tree whose bloom is retarded. To
hasten it, the tree must be touched by the decorated foot of a
beautiful woman. The queen was to have done this, but an accident has
injured her foot and she has asked Malavika to take her place. While
the king and his adviser are walking in the garden they see Malavika
all alone. Her love has made her wither like a jasmine wreath blighted
by frost. "How long," she laments, "will the god of love make me
endure this anguish, from which there is no relief?" One of the
queen's maids presently arrives with the paints and rings for
decorating Malavika's feet. The king watches the proceeding, and after
the maiden has touched the tree with her left foot he steps forward,
to the confusion of the two women. He tells Malavika that he, like the
tree, has long had no occasion to bloom, and begs her to make him
also, who loves only her, happy with the nectar of her touch.
Unluckily this whole scene has also been secretly witnessed by
Iravati, the second of the king's wives, who steps forward at this
moment and sarcastically tells Malavika to do his bidding. The
viduschaka tries to help out his confused master by pretending that
the meeting was accidental, and the king humbly calls himself her
loving husband, her slave, asks her pardon, and prostrates himself;
but she exclaims: "These are not the feet of Malavika whose touch you
desire to still your longing," and departs. The king feels quite hurt
by her action. "How unjust," he exclaims,
"is love! My heart belongs to the dear girl, therefore
Iravati did me a service by not accepting my
prostration. And yet it was love that led her to do
that! Therefore I must not overlook her anger, but try
to conciliate her."
Iravati goes straight to the first queen to report on their common
husband's new escapade. When the king hears of this he is astonished
at "such persistent anger," and dismayed on learning further that
Malavika is now confined in a dungeon, under lock and key, which
cannot be opened unless a messenger arrives with the queen's own seal
ring. But once more the viduschaka devises a ruse which puts him in
possession of the seal ring. The maiden is liberated and brought to
the water-house, whither the king hastens to meet her with the
viduschaka, who soon finds an excuse for going outside with the girl's
companion, leaving the lovers alone. "Why do you still hesitate, O
beauty, to unite yourself with one who has so long longed for your
love?" exclaims the king; and Malavika answers: "What I should like to
do I dare not; I fear the queen." "You need not fear her." "Did I not
see the master himself seized with fear when he saw the queen?" "Oh,
that," replies the king, "was only a matter of good breeding, as
becomes princes. But you, with the long eyes, I love so much that my
life depends on the hope that you love me too. Take me, take me, who
long have loved you." With these words he embraces her, while she
tries to resist. "How charming is the coyness of young girls!" he
exclaims.
"Trembling, she tries to restrain my hand, which is
busy with her girdle; while I embrace her ardently she
puts up her own hands to protect her bosom; her
countenance with the beautiful eyelashes she turns
aside when I try to raise it for a kiss; by thus
struggling she affords me the same delight as if I had
attained what I desire."
Again the second queen and her maid appear unexpectedly and disturb
the king's bliss. Her object is to go to the king's picture in the
water-house and beg its pardon for having been disrespectful, this
being better, in her opinion, than appearing before the king himself,
since he has given his heart to another, while in that picture he has
eyes for her alone (as Malavika, too, had noticed when she entered the
water-house). The viduschaka has proved an unreliable sentinel; he has
fallen asleep at the door of the house. The queen's maid perceives
this and, to tease him, touches him with a crooked staff. He awakes
crying that a snake has bitten him. The king runs out and is
confronted again by Iravati. "Well, well!" she exclaims, "this couple
meet in broad daylight and without hindrance to gratify their wishes!"
"An unheard-of greeting is this, my dear," said the king. "You are
mistaken; I see no cause for anger. I merely liberated the two girls
because this is a holiday, on which servants must not be confined, and
they came here to thank me." But he is glad to escape when a messenger
arrives opportunely to announce that a yellow ape has frightened the
princess.
"My heart trembles when I think of the queen," says Malavika, left
alone with her companion. "What will become of me now?" But the queen
knows her duty, according to Hindoo custom. She makes her maids array
Malavika in marriage dress, and then sends a message to the king
saying that she awaits him with Malavika and her attendants. The girl
does not know why she has been so richly attired, and when the king
beholds her he says to himself: "We are so near and yet apart. I seem
to myself like the bird Tschakravaka;[277] and the name of the night
which does not allow me to be united with my love is Dharini." At that
moment two captive girls are brought before the assemblage, and to
everyone's surprise they greet Malavika as "Princess." A princess she
proves to be, on inquiry, and the queen now carries out the plan she
had had in her mind, with the consent also of the second queen, who
sends her apologies at the same time. "Take her," says Dharini to the
king, and at a hint of the viduschaka she takes a veil and by putting
it on the new bride makes her a queen and spouse of equal rank with
herself. And the king answers:
"I am not surprised at your magnanimity. If women are
faithful and kind to their husbands, they even bring,
by way of serving him, new wives to him, like unto the
rivers which provide that the water of other streams
also is carried to the ocean. I have now but one more
wish; be hereafter always, irascible queen, prepared to
do me homage. I wish this for the sake of the other
women."
IV. THE STORY OF SAVITRI
King Asvapati, though an honest, virtuous, pious man, was not blessed
with offspring, and this made him unhappy.[278] He curbed all his
appetites and for eighteen years lived a life of devotion to his
religious duties. At the expiration of these years Savitri, the
daughter of the sun-god, appeared to him and offered to reward him by
granting a favor. "Sons I crave, many sons, O goddess, sons to
preserve my family," he answered. But Savitri promised him a daughter;
and she was born to him by his oldest wife and was named after the
goddess Savitri. She grew up to be so beautiful, so broad-hipped, like
a golden statue, that she seemed of divine origin, and, abashed, none
of the men came to choose her as his wife. This saddened her father
and he said:
"Daughter, it is time for you to marry, but no one comes to
ask me for you. Go and seek your own husband, a man your
equal in worth. And when you have chosen, you must let me
know. Then I will consider him, and betroth you. For,
according to the laws, a father who does not give his
daughter in marriage is blameworthy."
And Savitri went on a golden chariot with a royal retinue, and she
visited all the groves of the saints and at last found a man after her
heart, whose name was Satyavant. Then she returned to her father--who
was just conversing with the divine sage Nârada--and told him of her
choice. But Nârada exclaimed: "Woe and alas, you have chosen one who
is, indeed, endowed with all the virtues, but who is doomed to die a
year from this day." Thereupon the king begged Savitri to choose
another for her husband, but she replied: "May his life be long or
short, may he have merits or no merits, I have selected him as my
husband, and a second I shall not choose." Then the king and Nârada
agreed not to oppose her, and she went with her father to the grove
where she had seen Satyavant, the man of her choice. The king spoke to
this man's father and said: "Here, O royal saint, is my lovely
daughter, Savitri; take her as your daughter-in-law in accordance with
your duty as friend." And the saint replied: "Long have I desired such
a bond of relationship; but I have lost my royal dignity, and how
could your daughter endure the hardships of life in the forest?" But
the king replied that they heeded not such things and their mind was
made up. So all the Brahmans were called together and the king gave
his daughter to Satyavant, who was pleased to win a wife endowed with
so many virtues.
When her father had departed, Savitri put away all her ornaments and
assumed the plain garb of the saints. She was modest, self-contained,
and strove to make herself useful and to fulfil the wishes of all. But
she counted the days, and the time came when she had to say to
herself, "In three days he must die." And she made a vow and stood in
one place three days and nights; on the following day he was to die.
In the afternoon her husband took his axe on his shoulder and went
into the primeval forest to get some wood and fruits. For the first
time she asked to go with him. "The way is too difficult for you,"
said he, but she persisted; and her heart was consumed by the flames
of sadness. He called her attention, as they walked on, to the limpid
rivers and noble trees decked with flowers of many colors, but she had
eyes only for him, following his every movement; for she looked on him
as a dead man from that hour. He was filling his basket with fruits
when suddenly he was seized with violent headache and longing for
sleep. She took his head on her lap and awaited his last moment.
All at once she saw a man, in red attire, of fearful aspect, with a
rope in his hand. And she said: "Who are you?" "You," he replied, "are
a woman faithful to your husband and of good deeds, therefore will I
answer you. I am Yama, and I have come to take away your husband,
whose life has reached its goal." And with a mighty jerk he drew from
the husband's body his spirit, the size of a thumb, and forthwith the
breath of life departed from the body. Having carefully tied the soul,
Yama departed toward the south. Savitri, tortured by anguish, followed
him. "Turn back, Savitri," he said; "you owe your husband nothing
further, and you have gone as far as you can go." "Wherever my husband
goes or is taken, there I must go; that is an eternal duty." Thereupon
Yama offered to grant any favor she might ask--except the life of her
husband. "Restore the sight of the blind king, my father-in-law," she
said; and he answered: "It is done already." He offered a second favor
and she said: "Restore his kingdom to my father-in-law;" and it was
granted, as was also the third wish: "Grant one hundred sons to my
father, who has none." Her fourth wish, too, he agreed to: that she
herself might have a hundred sons; and as he made the fifth and last
wish unconditional, she said:
"Let Satyavant return to life; for, bereft of him, I
desire not happiness; bereft of him I desire not
heaven; I desire not to live bereft of him. A hundred
sons you have promised me, yet you take away my
husband? I desire this as a favor; let Satyavant live!"
"So be it!" answered the god of death as he untied the string.
"Your husband is released to you, blessed one, pride of
your race. Sound and well you shall take him home, live
with him four hundred years, beget one hundred sons,
and all of them shall be mighty kings."
With these words he went his way. Life returned to the body of
Satyavant, and his first feeling was distress lest his parents grieve
over his absence. Thinking him too weak to walk, Savitri wanted to
sleep in the forest, surrounded by a fire to keep off wild beasts, but
he replied:
"My father and mother are distressed even in the
daytime when I am away. Without them I could not live.
As long as they live I live only for them. Rather than
let anything happen to them, I give up my own life, you
woman with the beautiful hips; truly I shall kill
myself sooner."
So she helped him to rise, and they returned that very night, to the
great joy of their parents and friends; and all the promises of Yama
were fulfilled.
V. NALA AND DAMAYANTI
Once upon a time there was a king by the name of Nala, a man handsome
as the god of love, endowed with all the virtues, a favorite of men
and women. There was also another king, named Bhima, the Terrible. He
was renowned as a warrior and endowed with many virtues; yet he was
discontented, for he had no offspring. But it happened that he was
visited by a saint, whom he entertained so hospitably that the Brahman
granted him in return a favor: a daughter and three sons were born to
him. The daughter, who received the name of Damayanti, soon became
famed for her beauty, her dignity, and her gracious manners. She
seemed, amid her companions, like lightning born in a rain-cloud. Her
beauty was so much vaunted in the hearing of King Nala, and his merits
were so much extolled in her presence, that the two conceived an
ardent passion for one another, though they had never met. Nala could
hardly endure his yearnings of love; near the apartments of the women
there was a forest; into that he retired, living in solitude. One day
he came across some gold-decked geese. He caught one of them and she
said to him: "Spare my life and I promise to praise you in Damayanti's
presence in such a way that she shall never think of any other man."
He did so, and the goose flew to Damayanti and said: "There is a man
named Nala; he is like the celestial knights; no human being equals
him. Yes, if you could become _his_ wife, it would be worth while that
you were born and became so beautiful. You are the pearl among women,
but Nala, too, is the best of men." Damayanti begged the goose to go
and speak to Nala similarly about her, and the goose said "Yes" and
flew away.
From that moment Damayanti was always in spirit with Kala. Sunk in
reverie, sad, with pale face, she visibly wasted away, and sighing was
her only, her favorite, occupation. If anyone saw her gazing upward,
absorbed in her thoughts, he might have almost fancied her
intoxicated. Often of a sudden her whole face turned pale; in short,
it was plain that love-longing held her senses captive. Lying in bed,
sitting, eating, everything is distasteful to her; neither at night
nor by day does sleep come to her. Ah and alas! thus her wails
resound, and over and over again she begins to weep.
Her companions noted these symptoms and they said to the king:
"Damayanti is not at all well." The king reflected, "Why is my
daughter no longer well?" and it occurred to him that she had reached
the marriageable age, and it became clear to him that he must without
delay give her a chance to choose a husband. So he invited all the
kings to assemble at his court for that purpose on a certain day. Soon
the roads were filled with kings, princes, elephants, horses, wagons,
and warriors, for she, the pearl of the world, was desired of men
above all other women. King Nala also had received the message and set
out on his journey hopefully. Like the god of love incarnate he
looked. Even the ruling gods heard of the great event and went to join
the worldly rulers. As they approached the earth's surface they beheld
King Nala. Pleased with his looks, they accosted him and said: "We are
immortals journeying on account of Darnayanti. As for you, go you and
bring Damayanti this message: 'The four gods, Indra, Agni, Yama,
Varuna, desire to have you for a wife. Choose one of these four gods
as your wedded husband.'"
Folding his hands humbly, Nala replied:
"The very same affair has induced me to make this
journey: therefore you must not send me on this errand.
For how could a man who himself feels the longing of
love woo the same woman for another?"
But the gods ordered him to go at once, because he had promised to
serve them before he knew what they wanted. They endowed him with
power to enter the carefully guarded apartments of the princess, and
presently he found himself in her presence. Her lovely face, her
charmingly moulded limbs, her slender body, her beautiful eyes,
diffused a splendor that mocked the light of the moon and increased
his pangs of love; but he resolved to keep his promise. When the young
maidens beheld him they could not utter a word; they were dazed by the
splendor of his appearance, and abashed, the beautiful virgins. At
last the astonished Damayanti began to speak and said with a sweet
smile:
"Who are you, you with the faultless form, who increase
the yearnings of my love? Like an immortal you came
here, O hero! I would like to know you better, noble,
good man. Closely guarded is my house, however, and
most strict in his orders is the king."
"My name, gracious maiden, is Nala," he replied.
"As messenger of the gods have I come. Four of
them--Indra, Agni, Varuna, Yama--would like you as
bride, therefore choose one of them as husband, O
beauty! That I entered unseen is the result, too, of
their power. Now you have heard all; act as seems
proper to you."
As he spoke the names of the gods Damayanti bowed humbly; then she
laughed merrily and said:
"Follow you the inclination of your heart and be kind
to me. What can I do to please you? Myself and all that
is mine belongs to you. Lay aside all diffidence, my
master and husband! Alas, the entire speech of the
gold-swans, my prince, was to me a real firebrand. It
was for your sake, O hero, that all these kings were in
reality called together so hastily. Should you ever, O
my pride, be able to scorn me, who is so devoted to
you, I shall resort on your account to poison, fire,
water, rope."
"How can you," retorted Nala,
"when gods are present in person, direct your desires
toward a mortal? Not so! Let your inclination dwell
with them, the creators of the world. Remember, too,
that a mortal who does something to displease the gods
is doomed to death. Therefore, you with the faultless
limbs, save me by choosing the most worthy of the gods.
Hesitate no longer. Your husband must be one of the
gods."
Then said Damayanti, while her eyes were diffused with anguish-born
tears: "My reverence to the gods! As husband I choose you, mighty
ruler on earth. What I say to you is immutable truth." "I am here now
as messenger of the gods, and cannot, therefore, plead my own cause.
Later I shall have a chance to speak for myself," said Nala; and
Damayanti said, smiling, while tears choked her voice:
"I shall arrange that you as well as the gods are
present on the day of my husband-choice. Then I shall
choose you in the presence of the immortals. In that
way no blame can fall on anyone."
Returning to the gods, Nala told them just what happened, not omitting
her promise that she would choose him in presence of the gods. The day
now was approaching when the kings, who, urged by love-longings, had
assembled, were to appear before the maiden. With their beautiful
hair, noses, eyes, and brows, these royal personages shone like the
stars in heaven. They fixed their gaze on the maiden's limbs, and
wherever the eyes first rested there they remained fixed immovably.
But the four gods had all assumed the exact form and appearance of
Nala, and when Damayanti was about to choose him she saw five men all
alike. How could she tell which of them was the king, her beloved?
After a moment's thought she uttered an invocation to the gods calling
upon them to assume the characteristics by which they differ from
mortals. The gods, moved by her anguish, her faith in the power of
truth, her intelligence and passionate devotion, heard her prayer and
forthwith they appeared to her free from perspiration, with fixed
gaze, ever fresh wreath, free from dust; and none of them, while
standing, touched the floor; whereas King Nala betrayed himself by
throwing a shadow, by having dust and perspiration on his body, a
withered wreath, and eyelids that winked.
Thereupon the big-eyed maiden timidly seized him by the hem of his
garment and put a beautiful wreath on his shoulders. Thus did she
choose him to be her husband; and the gods granted them special
favors.[279]
According to Schroeder, the Hindoos are "the romantic nation" among
the ancients, as the Germans are among the moderns; and Albrecht Weber
says that when, a little more than a century ago, Europe first became
acquainted with Sanscrit literature, it was noticed that in the
amorous poetry of India in particular the sentimental qualities of
modern verse were traced in a much higher degree than they had been
found in Greek and Roman literature. All this is doubtless true. The
Hindoos appear to have been the only ancient people that took delight
in forests, rivers, and mountains as we do; in reading their
descriptions of Nature we are sometimes affected by a mysterious
feeling of awe, like a reminiscence of the time when our ancestors
lived in India. Their amorous hyperbole, too, despite its frequent
grotesqueness, affects us perhaps more sympathetically than that of
the Greeks. And yet the essentials of what we call romantic love are
so entirely absent from ancient Hindoo literature that such amorous
symptoms as are noted therein can all be readily brought under the
three heads of artificiality, sensuality, and selfishness.
ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS
Commenting on the directions for caressing given in the _Kama Soutra_,
Lamairesse remarks (56):
"All these practices and caresses are conventional rather
than natural, like everything the Hindoos do. A bayadères
straying to Paris and making use of them would be a
curiosity so extraordinary that she would certainly enjoy a
succès de vogue pour rire."
Nail-marks on various parts of the body, blows, bites, meaningless
exclamations are prescribed or described in the diverse love-scenes.
In Hindoo dramas several of the artificial symptoms--pure figments of
the poetic fancy--are incessantly referred to. One of the most
ludicrous of them is the drops of perspiration on the cheeks or other
parts of the body, which are regarded as an infallible and inevitable
sign of love. Urvasi's royal lover is afraid to take her birch-bark
message in his hand lest his perspiration wipe away the letters. In
Bhavabhuti's drama, _Malati and Madhava_, the heroine's feet perspire
so profusely from excess of longing, that the lacquer of her couch is
melted; and one of the stage directions in the same drama is:
"Perspiration appears on Madayantika, with other things indicating
love."
Another of these grotesque symptoms is the notion that the touch or
mere thought of the beloved makes the small hairs all over the body
stand erect. No love-scene seems to be complete without this detail.
The drama just referred to, in different scenes, makes the hairs on
the cheeks, on the arms, all over the body, rise "splendidly," the
author says in one line.[280] A Hindoo lover always has twitching of
the right or left arm or eye to indicate what kind of luck he is going
to have; and she is equally favored. Usually the love is mutual and at
first sight--nay, preferably _before_ first sight. The mere hearsay
that a certain man or maiden is very beautiful suffices, as we saw in
the story of Nala and Damayanti, to banish sleep and appetite, and to
make the lover pale and wan and most wretched. Sakuntala's royal lover
wastes away so rapidly that in a few days his bracelet falls from his
attenuated arm, and Sakuntala herself becomes so weak that she cannot
rise, and is supposed to have sunstroke! Malati dwindles until her
form resembles the moon in its last quarter; her face is as pale as
the moon at morning dawn. Always both the lovers, though he be a
king--as he generally is--and she a goddess, are diffident at first,
fearing failure, even after the most unmistakable signs of fondness,
in the betrayal of which the girls are anything but coy. All these
symptoms the poets prescribe as regularly as a physician makes out a
prescription for an apothecary.
A peculiar stare--which must be sidelong, not direct at the
beloved--is another conventional characteristic of Hindoo amorous
fiction. The gait becomes languid, the breathing difficult, the heart
stops beating or is paralyzed with joy; the limbs or the whole body
wither like flower-stalks after a frost; the mind is lamed, the memory
weakened; cold shivers run down the limbs and fever shakes the body;
the arms hang limp at the side, the breast heaves, words stick in the
throat; pastimes no longer entertain; the perfumed Malayan wind crazes
the mind; the eyelids are motionless, sighs give vent to anguish,
which may end in a swoon, and if things take an unfavorable turn the
thought of suicide is not distant. Attempts to cure this ardent love
are futile; Madhava tries snow, and moonlight, and camphor, and lotos
roots, and pearls, and sandal oil rubbed on his skin, but all in vain.
THE HINDOO GOD OF LOVE
Quite as artificial and unsentimental as the notions of the Hindoos
concerning the symptoms of love is their conception of their god of
love, Kama, the husband of Lust. His bow is made of sugar-cane, its
string a row of bees, and his arrow-tips are red flower-buds. Spring
is his bosom friend, and he rides on a parrot or the sea-monster
Makara. He is also called Ananga--the bodiless--because Siwa once
burned him up with the fire that flashed from his third eye for
disturbing him in his devotions by awakening in him love for Parwati.
Sakuntala's lover wails that Kama's arrows are "not flowers, but hard
as diamond." Agnimitra declares that the Creator made his beloved "the
poison-steeped arrow of the God of Love;" and again, he says: "The
softest and the sharpest things are united in you, O Kama." Urvasi's
royal lover complains that his "heart is pierced by Kama's arrow," and
in _Malati and Madhava_ we are told that "a cruel god no doubt is
Kama;" while No. 329 of Ilâla's love-poems declares:
"The arrows of Kama are most diverse in their
effects--though made of flowers, very hard; though not
coming into direct contact, insufferably hot; and
though piercing, yet causing delight."
Our familiarity with Greek and Roman literature has made us so
accustomed to the idea of a Cupid awakening love by shooting arrows
that we fail to realize how entirely fanciful, not to say whimsical,
this conceit is. It would be odd, indeed, if the Hindoo poets had
happened on the same fancy as the Greeks of their own accord; but
there is no reason to suppose that they did. Kama is one of the later
gods of the Indian Pantheon, and there is every reason to believe that
the Hindoos borrowed him from the Greeks, as the Romans did. In
_Sakuntala_ (27) there is a reference to the Greek women who form the
king's body-guard; in _Urvasi_ (70) to a slave of Greek descent; and
there are many things in the Hindoo drama that betray Greek influence.
Besides being artificial and borrowed, Kama is entirely sensual. Kama
means "gratification of the senses,"[281] and of all the epithets
bestowed on their god of love by the Hindoos none rises distinctly
above sensual ideas. Dowson (147) has collated these epithets; they
are: "the beautiful," "the inflamer," "lustful," "desirous," "the
happy," "the gay, or wanton," "deluder," "the lamp of honey, or of
spring," "the bewilderer," "the crackling fire," "the stalk of
passion," "the weapon of beauty," "the voluptuary," "remembrance,"
"fire," "the handsome."[282]
The same disregard of sentimental, devotional, and altruistic elements
is shown in the Ten Stages of Love-Sickness as conceived by the
Hindoos: (1) desire; (2) thinking of her (his) beauty; (3) reminiscent
revery; (4) boasting of her (his) excellence; (5) excitement; (6)
lamentations; (7) distraction; (8) illness; (9) insensibility; (10)
death.[283]
DYING FOR LOVE
The notion that the fever of love may become so severe as to lead to
death plays an important role in Hindoo amorous sophistry. "Hindoo
casuists," says Lamairesse (151, 179), "always have a peremptory
reason, in their own eyes, for dispensing with all scruples in
love-affairs: the necessity of not dying for love." "It is
permissible," says the author of _Kama Soutra_, "to seduce another
man's wife if one is in danger of dying from love for her;" upon which
Lamairesse comments:
"This principle, liberally interpreted by those
interested, excuses all intrigues; in theory it is
capable of accommodating itself to all cases, and in
the practice of the Hindoos it does thus accommodate
itself. It is based on the belief that the souls of men
who die of ungratified desires flit about a long time
as manes before transmigrating."
Thus did the wily priests invoke the aid even of superstition to
foster that national licentiousness by which they themselves profited
most. Small wonder that the _Hitopadesa_ declared (92) that "there is
perhaps in all the world not a man who covets not his neighbor's
wife;" or that the same collection of wise stories and maxims should
take an equally low view of feminine morals (39, 40, 41, 54, 88);
_e.g._ (in substance): "Then only is a wife faithful to her husband,
when no other man covets her." "Seek chastity in those women only who
have no opportunity to meet a lover." "A woman's lust can no more be
satisfied than a fire's greed for wood, the ocean's thirst for rivers,
death's desire for victims." Another verse in the _Hitopadesa_ (13)
declares frankly that of the six good things in the world two of them
are a caressing wife and a devoted sweetheart beside her--upon which
the editor, Johannes Hertel, comments: "To a Hindoo there is nothing
objectionable in such a sentiment."
WHAT HINDOO POETS ADMIRE IN WOMEN
The Hindoo's inability to rise above sensuality also manifests itself
in his admiration of personal beauty, which is purely carnal. No. 217
of Hâla's anthology declares:
"Her face resembles the moon, the juice of her mouth
nectar; but wherewith shall I compare (my delight) when
I seize her, amid violent struggles, by the head and
kiss her?"
Apart from such grotesque comparisons of the face to the moon, or of
the teeth to the lotos, there is nothing in the amorous hyperbole of
Hindoo poets that rises above the voluptuous into the neighborhood of
esthetic admiration. Hindoo statues embodying the poets' ideal of
women's waists so narrow that they can be spanned by the hand, show
how infinitely inferior the Hindoos were to the Greeks in their
appreciation of human beauty. The Hindoo poet's ideal of feminine
beauty is a wasp-waist and grossly exaggerated bust and hips.
Bhavabhuti allows his heroine Malati to be thus addressed (by a
girl!):
"The wind, sandal-cool, refreshes your moon-face, in
which nectar-like drops of perspiration appear from
your walking, during which you lifted your feet but
slowly, as they wavered under the weight of your
thighs, which are strong as those of an elephant."
Usually, of course, these grotesquely coarse compliments are paid by
the enamored men. Kalidasa makes King Pururavas, crazed by the loss of
Urvasi, exclaim:
"Have you seen the divine beauty, who is compelled by
the weight of her hips to walk slowly, and who never
sees the flight of youth, whose bosom is high and
swelling, whose gait is as the swan's?"
In another place he refers to her footsteps "pressed in deeper behind
by the weight of the beloved's hips," Satyavant has no other epithet
for Savitri than "beautiful-hipped." It is the same with Sakuntala's
lover (who has been held up as an ancient embodiment of modern
ethereal sentiment). What does he admire in Sakuntala? "Here," he
says, "in the yellow sand are a number of fresh footsteps; they are
higher in front, but depressed behind by the weight of her hips." "How
slow was her gait--and naturally so, considering the weight of her
hips." Compare also the poet's remarks on her bodily charms when the
king first sees her.[284] Among all of the king's hyperbolic
compliments and remarks there is not one that shows him to be
fascinated by anything but the purely bodily charms of the young girl,
charms of a coarse, voluptuous kind, calculated to increase _his_
pleasure should he succeed in winning her, while there is not a trace
of a desire on his part to make _her_ happy. Nor is there anything in
Sakuntala's symptoms rising above selfish distress at her uncertainty,
or selfish longing to possess her lover. In a word, there is no
romantic love, in our sense of the word, in the dramas of the most
romantic poet of the most romantic nation of antiquity.[285]
THE OLD STORY OF SELFISHNESS
It might be maintained that the symptoms of true affection--altruistic
devotion to the verge of self-sacrifice--are revealed, at any rate, in
the _conjugal_ love of Savitri and of Damayanti. Savitri follows the
god of death as he carries away her husband's spirit, and by her
devotion and entreaties persuades Yama to restore him to life; while
Damayanti (whose story we did not finish) follows her husband, after
he has gambled away all his kingdom, into the forest to suffer with
him. One night, while she sleeps, he steals half of her only garment
and deserts her. Left alone in the terrible forest with tigers and
snakes, she sobs aloud and repeatedly faints away from fear. "Yet I do
not weep for myself," she exclaims; "my only thought is, how will you
fare, my royal master, being left thus all alone?" She is seized by a
huge snake, which coils its body around her; yet "even in this
situation she thinks not so much of herself as she bewails the fate of
the king." A hunter saves her and proceeds to make improper advances,
but she, faithful to her lord, curses the hunter and he falls dead
before her. Then she resumes her solitary roaming in the gloomy
forest, "_distressed by grief for her husband's fate_," unmindful of
his cruelty, or of her own sad plight.
It is needless to continue the tale; the reader cannot be so obtuse as
not to notice the _moral_ of it. The stories of Savitri and of
Damayanti, far from exemplifying Hindoo conjugal devotion, simply
afford fresh proof of the hoggish selfishness of the male Hindoo. They
are intended to be _object-lessons_ to wives, teaching them--like the
laws of Manu and the custom of widow burning--that they do not exist
for their own sakes, but for their husbands. Reading the stories in
the light of this remark, we cannot fail to note everywhere the subtle
craft of the sly men who invented them. If further evidence were
needed to sustain my view it would be found in the fact related by F.
Reuleaux, that to this day the priests arrange an annual
"prayer-festival" of Hindoo women at which the wife must in every way
show her subjection to her husband and master. She must wash his feet,
dry them, put a wreath around his neck, and bring offerings to the
gods, praying that _he_ may prosper and live long. Then follows a meal
for which she has prepared all _his_ favorite dishes. And as a climax,
_the story of Savitri is read_, a story in which the wife lives only
for the husband, while he, as he rudely tells her--after all her
devotion--_lives only for his parents_!
If these stories were anything else than slyly planned object-lessons
calculated to impress and subjugate the women, why is it that the
_husband_ is never chosen to act the self-sacrificing part? He does,
indeed, sometimes indulge in frantic outbursts of grief and maudlin
sentimentality, but that is because he has lost the young woman who
pleased his senses. There is no sign of soul-love here; the husband
never dreams of devoting his life to her, of sacrificing it for her
sake, as she is constantly exhorted to do for his sake. In a word,
masculine selfishness is the keynote of Hindoo life. "When in danger,
never hesitate to sacrifice your goods and your wife to save your
life," we read in the _Hitopadesa_ (25); and No. 4112 of Boehtlingk's
_Hindu Maxims_ declares bluntly that a wife exists for the purpose of
bearing sons, and a son for the purpose of offering sacrifices after
his father's death. There we have masculine selfishness in a nutshell.
Another maxim declares that a wife can atone for her lack or loss of
beauty by faithful subjection to her husband. And in return for all
the devotion expected of her she is utterly despised--considered
unworthy of an education, unfit even to profess virginity--in a word,
looked on "as scarcely forming a part of the human species." In the
most important event in her life--marriage--her choice is never
consulted. The matter is, as we have seen, left to the family barber,
or to the parents, to whom questions of caste and wealth are of
infinitely more importance than personal preferences. When those
matters are arranged the man satisfies himself concerning the
inclinations of the chosen girl's _kindred_, and when assured that he
will not "suffer the affront of a refusal" from _them_ he proceeds
with the offer and the bargaining. "To marry or to buy a girl are
synonymous terms in this country," says Dubois (I., 198); and he
proceeds, to give an account of the bargaining and the disgraceful
quarrels this leads to.
BAYADÈRES AND PRINCESSES AS HEROINES
Under such circumstances the Hindoo playwrights must have found
themselves in a curious dilemma. They were sufficiently versed in the
poetic art to build up a plot; but what chance for an amorous plot was
there in a country where there was no courtship, where women were
sold, ignored, maltreated, and despised? Perforce the poets had to
neglect realism, give up all idea of mirroring respectable domestic
life, and take refuge in the realms of tradition, fancy, or liaisons.
It is interesting to note how they got around the difficulty. They
either made their heroines bayadères, or princesses, or girls willing
to be married in a way allowing them their own choice, but not reputed
respectable. Bayadères, though not permitted to marry, were at liberty
to choose their temporary companions. Cûdraka indulges in the poetic
license of making Vasantasena superior to other bayadères and
rewarding her in the end by a regular marriage as the hero's wife
number two. By way of securing variety, apsaras, or celestial
bayadères, were brought on the scene, as in Kalidasa's _Urvasi_,
permitting the poet to indulge in still bolder flights of fancy.
Princesses, again, were favorite heroines, for various reasons, one of
which was the tradition concerning the custom called Svayamvara or
"Maiden's Choice"--a princess being "permitted," after a tournament,
to "choose" the victor. The story of _Nala and Damayanti_ has made us
familiar with a similar meeting of kings, at which the princess
chooses the lover she has determined on beforehand, though she has
never seen him. Apart from the fantasticality of this episode, it is
obvious that even if the Svayamvara was once a custom in royal circles
it did not really insure to the princesses free choice of a rational
kind. Brought up in strict seclusion, a king's daughter could never
have seen any of the men competing for her. The victor might be the
least sympathetic to her of all, and even if she had a large number of
suitors to choose from, her selection could not be based on anything
but the momentary and superficial judgment; of the eye. But for
dramatic purposes the Svayamvara was useful.
VOLUNTARY UNIONS NOT RESPECTABLE
In _Sakuntala_, Kalidasa resorts to the third of the expedients I have
mentioned. The king weds the girl whom he finds in the grove of the
saints in accordance with a form which was not regarded as
respectable--marriage based on mutual inclination, without the
knowledge of the parents. The laws of Mann (III., 20-134) recognized
eight kinds of marriage:
(1) gift of a daughter to a man learned in the Vedas,
(2) gift of a daughter to a priest; (3) gift of a
daughter in return for presents of cows, etc.; (4) gift
of a daughter, with a dress. In these four the father
gives away his daughter as he chooses. In (5) the groom
buys the girl with presents to her kinsmen or herself;
(6) is voluntary union; (7) forcible abduction (in
war); (8) rape of a girl asleep, or drunk, or imbecile.
In other words, of the eight kinds of marriage recognized by Hindoo
law and custom only one is based on free choice, and of that Mann
says: "The voluntary connection of a maiden and a man is to be known
as a Gandharva union, which arises from lust." It is classed among the
blamable marriages. Even this appears not to have been a legal form
before Mann. It is blamable because contracted without the consent or
knowledge of the parents, and because, unless the sacred fire has been
obtained from a Brahman to sanctify it, such a marriage is merely a
temporary union. Gandharvas, after whom it is named, are singers and
other musicians in Indra's heaven, who, like the apsaras, enter into
unions that are not intended to be enduring, but are dissoluble at
will. Such marriages (liaisons we call them) are frequently mentioned
in Hindoo literature (_e.g., Hitopadesa_, p. 85). Malati (30) chides
her friend for advising her to make a secret marriage, and later on
exclaims (75): "I am lost! What a girl must not do, my friend counsels
me." The orthodox view is unfolded by the Buddhist nun Kamándaki(33):
"We hear of Duschyanta loving Sakuntala, of Pururavas loving Urvasi
... but these cases look like arbitrary action and cannot be commended
as models." In _Sakuntala_, too, the king feels it incumbent on him to
apologize to the girl he covets, when she bids him not to transgress
the laws of propriety, by exclaiming that many other girls have thus
been taken by kings without incurring parental disapproval. The
directions for this form of courtship given in the _Kama Soutra_
indicate that Sakuntala had every reason to appeal to the rules of
propriety, social and moral. Kalidasa spares us the details.
The king's desertion of Sakuntala after he had obtained his
self-indulgent object was quite in accordance with the spirit of a
Gandharva marriage. Kalidasa, for dramatic purposes, makes it a result
of a saint's curse, which enables him to continue his story
interestingly. A poet has a right to such license, even though it
takes him out of the realm of realism. Hindoo poets, like others, know
how to rise above sordid reality into a more ideal sphere, and for
this reason, even if we had found in the dramas of India a portrayal
of true love, it would not prove that it existed outside of a poet's
glowing and prophetic fancy. There is a Hindoo saying, "Do not strike
a woman, even with a flower;" but we have seen that these Hindoos
often do physically abuse their wives most cruelly, besides subjecting
them to indescribable mental anguish, and mental anguish is much more
painful and more prolonged than bodily torture. Fine words do not make
fine feelings. From this point of view Dalton was perhaps right when
he asserted that the wild tribes of India come closer to us in their
love-affairs than the more cultured Hindoos, with their "unromantic
heart-schooling." We have seen that Albrecht Weber's high estimate of
the Hindoo's romantic sentiment does not bear the test of a close
psychological analysis.
The Hindoo may have fewer uncultivated traits of emotion than the wild
tribesmen, but they are in the same field. Hindoo civilization rose to
splendid heights, in some respects, and even the great moral principle
of altruism was cultivated; but it was not applied to the relations
between the sexes, and thus we see once more that the refinement of
the affections--especially the sexual affections--comes last in the
evolution of civilization. Masculine selfishness and sensuality have
prevented the Hindoo from entering the Elysian fields of romantic
love. He has always allowed, and still allows, the minds of women to
lie fallow, being contented with their bodily charms, and unaware that
the most delightful of all sexual differences are those of mind and
character. To quote once more the Abbé Dubois (I., 271), the most
minute and philosophic observer of Indian manners and morals:
"The Hindoos are nurtured in the belief that there can
be nothing disinterested or innocent in the intercourse
between a man and a woman; and however Platonic the
attachment might be between two persons of different
sex, it would be infallibly set down to sensual love."
DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE ROMANTIC LOVE?
My assertion that there are no cases of romantic love recorded in the
Bible naturally aroused opposition, and not a few critics lifted up
their voices in loud protest against such ignorant audacity. The case
for the defence was well summed up in the Rochester _Post-Express:_
"The ordinary reader will find many love-stories in the
Scriptures, What are we to think, for instance, of this
passage from the twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis: 'And
Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder was
Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah was
tender-eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well-favored.
And Jacob loved Rachel; and said, I will serve thee
seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter. And Laban
said, It is better that I give her to thee, than that I
should give her to another man: abide with me. And
Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed
unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her,'
It may be said that after marriage Jacob's love was not
of the modern conjugal type; but certainly his
pre-matrimonial passion was self-sacrificing, enduring,
and hopeful enough for a mediaeval romance. The
courtship of Ruth and Boaz is a bold and pretty
love-story, which details the scheme of an old widow
and a young widow for the capture of a wealthy kinsman.
The Song of Solomon is, on the surface, a wonderful
love-poem. But it is needless to multiply illustrations
from this source."
A Chicago critic declared that it would be easy to show that from the
moment when Adam said,
"This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of
man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his
mother, and cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one
flesh"
--from that moment unto this day "that which it pleases our author to
call romantic love has been substantially one and the same thing....
Has this writer never heard of Isaac and Rebekah; of Jacob and
Rachel?" A Philadelphia reviewer doubted whether I believed in my own
theory because I ignored in my chapter on love among the Hebrews "the
story of Jacob and Rachel and other similar instances of what deserves
to be called romantic love among the Hebrews." Professor H.O. Trumbull
emphatically repudiates my theory in his _Studies in Oriental Social
Life_ (62-63); proceeding:
"Yet in the very first book of the Old Testament
narrative there appears the story of young Jacob's
romantic love for Rachel, a love which was inspired by
their first meeting [Gen. 29: 10-18] and which was
afresh and tender memory in the patriarch Jacob's mind
when long years after he had buried her in Canaan [Gen.
35: 16-20] he was on his deathbed in Egypt [Gen. 48:
1-7]. In all the literature of romantic love in all the
ages there can be found no more touching exhibit of the
true-hearted fidelity of a romantic lover than that
which is given of Jacob in the words: 'And Jacob served
seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto him but a
few days for the love he had to her.' And the entire
story confirms the abiding force of that sentiment.
There are, certainly, gleams of romantic love from out
of the clouds of degraded human passion in the ancient
East, in the Bible stories of Shechem and Dinah [Gen.
34: 1-31], of Samson and the damsel of Timnath [Judg.
14: 1-3], of David and Abigail [I. Sam. 25: 1-42], of
Adonijah and Abishag [I. Kings 2: 13-17], and other men
and women of whom the Scriptures tell us."
Cénac Moncaut, who begins his _Histoire de l'Amour dans l'Antiquité_
with Adam and Eve, declares (28-31) that the episode of Jacob and
Rachel marks the birth of perfect love in the world, the beginning of
its triumph, followed, however, by relapses in days of darkness and
degradation. If all these writers are correct then my theory falls to
the ground and romantic love must be conceded to be at least four
thousand years old, instead of less than one thousand. But let us look
at the facts in detail and see whether there is really no difference
between ancient Hebrew and modern Christian love.
The Rev. Stopford Brooke has remarked:
"Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph may have existed as real
men, and played their part in the founding of the Jewish
race, but their stories, as we have them, are as entirely
legendary as those of Arthur or Siegfried, of Agamemnon or
Charlemagne."
This consideration would bring the date of the story
from the time when Jacob is supposed to have lived down to the much
later time when the legend was elaborated. I have no desire, however,
to seek refuge behind such chronological uncertainties, nor to
reassert that my theory is a question of evolution rather than of
dates, and that, therefore, if Jacob and Rachel, during their
prolonged courtship, had the qualities of mind and character to feel
the exalted sentiment of romantic love, we might concede in their case
an exception which, by its striking isolation, would only prove the
rule. I need no such refuge, for I can see no reason whatever for
accepting the story of Jacob and Rachel as an exceptional instance of
romantic love.
THE STORY OF JACOB AND RACHEL
Nothing could be more charmingly poetic than this story as told by the
old Hebrew chronicler. The language is so simple yet so pictorial that
we fancy we can actually see Jacob as he accosts the shepherds at the
well to ask after his uncle Laban, and they reply "Behold, Rachel his
daughter cometh with the sheep." We see him as he rolls the stone from
the well's mouth and waters his uncle's flocks; we see him as he
kisses Rachel and lifts up his voice and weeps. He kisses her of
course by right of being a relative, and not as a lover; for we cannot
suppose that even an Oriental shepherd girl could have been so devoid
of maidenly prudence and coyness as to give a love-kiss to a stranger
at their first meeting. Though apparently her cousin (Gen. 28: 2;
29:10), Jacob tells her he is her uncle; "and Jacob told Rachel that
he was her father's brother."[286] There was the less impropriety in
his kissing her, as she was probably a girl of fifteen or sixteen and
he old enough to be her grandfather, or even great-grandfather, his
age at the time of meeting her being seventy-seven.[287] But as men
are reported to have aged slowly in those days, this did not prevent
him from desiring to marry Rachel, for whose sake he was willing to
serve her father. Strange to say, the words "And Jacob served seven
years for Rachel" have been accepted as proof of self-sacrifice by
several writers, including Dr. Abel, who cites those words as
indicating that the ancient Hebrews knew "the devotion of love, which
gladly _serves the beloved_ and shuns no toil in her behalf." In
reality Jacob's seven years of service have nothing whatever to do
with self-sacrifice. He did not "serve his beloved" but her father;
did not toil "in her behalf" but on his own behalf. He was simply
doing that very unromantic thing, paying for his wife by working a
stipulated time for her father, in accordance with a custom prevalent
among primitive peoples the world over. Our text is very explicit on
the subject; after Jacob had been with his relative a month Laban had
said unto him: "Because thou art my brother shouldst thou therefore
serve me for naught? tell me what shall thy wages be?" And Jacob had
chosen Rachel for his wages. Rachel and Leah themselves quite
understood the commercial nature of the matrimonial arrangement; for
when, years afterward, they are prepared to leave their father they
say: "Is there yet any portion or inheritance for us in our father's
house? Are we not counted of him strangers? for he hath sold us, and
hath also quite devoured the price paid for us."
Instead of the sentimental self-sacrifice of a devoted lover for his
mistress we have here, therefore, simply an example of a prosaic,
mercenary marriage custom familiar to all students of anthropology.
But how about the second half of that sentence, which declares that
Jacob's seven years of service "seemed to him but a few days for the
love he had for her?" Is not this the language of an expert in love?
Many of my critics, to my surprise, seemed to think so, but I am
convinced that none of them can have ever been in love or they would
have known that a lover is so impatient and eager to call his beloved
irrevocably his own, so afraid that someone else might steal away her
affection from him, that Jacob's seven years, instead of shrinking to
a few days, would have seemed to him like seven times seven years.
A minute examination of the story of Jacob and Rachel thus reveals
world-wide differences between the ancient Hebrew and the modern
Christian conceptions of love, corresponding, we have no reason to
doubt, to differences in actual feeling. And as we proceed, these
differences become more and more striking:
"And Jacob said unto Laban, Give me my wife, for my
days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her. And
Laban gathered together all the men of the place, and
made a feast. And it came to pass in the evening, that
he took Leah his daughter, and brought her to him; and
he went in unto her.... And it came to pass, in the
morning that, behold, it was Leah: and he said to
Laban, What is this thou has done unto me? Did not I
serve with thee for Rachel? Wherefore then hast thou
beguiled me? And Laban said, It is not so done in our
place, to give the younger before the first-born.
Fulfil the week of this one, and we will give thee the
other also for the service which thou shalt serve with
me yet seven other years. And Jacob did so, and
fulfilled her week; and he gave him Rachel his daughter
to wife."
Surely it would be difficult to condense into so few lines more facts
and conditions abhorrent to the Christian conception of the sanctity
of love than is done in this passage. Can anyone deny that in a modern
Christian country Laban's breach of contract with Jacob, his
fraudulent substitution of the wrong daughter, and Jacob's meek
acceptance of two wives in eight days would not only arouse a storm of
moral indignation, but would land both these men in a police court and
in jail? I say this not in a flippant spirit, but merely to bring out
as vividly as possible the difference between the ancient Hebrew and
modern Christian ideals of love. Furthermore, what an utter ignorance
or disregard of the rights of personal preference, sympathy, and all
the higher ingredients of love, is revealed in Laban's remark that it
was not customary to give the younger daughter in marriage before the
older had been disposed of! And how utterly opposed to the modern
conception of love is the sequel of the story, in which we are told
that "because" Leah was _hated_ by her husband "therefore" she was
made fruitful, and she bore him four sons, while the beloved Rachel
remained barren! Was personal preference thus not only to be repressed
by marrying off girls according to their age, but even punished? No
doubt it was, according to the Hebrew notion; in their patriarchal
mode of life the father was the absolute tyrant in the household, who
reserved the right to select spouses for both his sons and daughters,
and felt aggrieved if his plans were interfered with. The object of
marriage was not to make a happy, sympathetic couple, but to raise
sons; wherefore the hated Leah naturally exclaims, after she has borne
Reuben, her first son, "Now my husband will love me." That is not the
kind of love we look for in our marriages. We expect a man to love his
wife for her own sake.
This notion, that the birth of sons is the one object of marriage, and
the source of conjugal love, is so preponderant in the minds of these
women that it crowds out all traces of monopoly or jealousy. Leah and
Rachel not only submit to Laban's fraudulent substitution on the
wedding-night, but each one meekly accepts her half of Jacob's
attentions. The utter absence of jealousy is strikingly revealed in
this passage:
"And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children,
Rachel envied her sister; and she said unto Jacob, Give
me children, or else I die. And Jacob's anger was
kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I in God's
stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the
womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto
her; that she may bear upon my knees, and I also may
obtain children by her. And she gave him Bilhah her
handmaid to wife: and Jacob went in unto her. And
Bilhah conceived and bare Jacob a son.... And Bilhah,
Rachel's handmaid, conceived again, and bare Jacob a
second son.... When Leah saw she had left bearing, she
took Zilpah her handmaid, and gave her to Jacob to
wife. And Zilpah Leah's handmaid bare Jacob a son....
And God hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and
bare Jacob a fifth son. And Leah said, God hath given
me my hire, because I gave my handmaid to my husband."
Thus polygamy and concubinage are treated not only as a matter of
course, but as a cause for divine reward! It might be said that there
does exist a sort of jealousy between Leah and Rachel: a rivalry as to
which of the two shall bear their husband the more sons, either by
herself or by proxy. But how utterly different this rivalry is from
the jealousy of a modern Christian wife, the very essence of which
lies in the imperative insistence on the exclusive affection and
chaste fidelity of her husband! And as modern Christian jealousy
differs from ancient Hebrew jealousy, so does modern romantic love in
general differ from Hebrew love. There is not a line in the story of
Jacob and Rachel indicating the existence of monopoly, jealousy,
coyness, hyperbole, mixed moods, pride, sympathy, gallantry,
self-sacrifice, adoration, purity. Of the thirteen essential
ingredients of romantic love only two are implied--individual
preference and admiration of personal beauty. Jacob preferred Rachel
to Leah, and this preference was based on her bodily charms: she was
"beautiful and well-favored." Of the higher mental phases of personal
beauty not a word is said.
In the case of the women, not even their individual preference is
hinted at, and this is eminently characteristic of the ancient Hebrew
notions and practices in regard to marriage. Did Rachel and Leah marry
Jacob because they preferred him to all other men they knew? To Laban
and his contemporaries such a question would have seemed absurd. They
knew nothing of marriage as a union of souls. The woman was not
considered at all. The object of marriage, as in India, was to raise
sons, in order that there might be someone to represent the departed
father. Being chiefly for the father's benefit, the marriage was
naturally arranged by him. As a matter of fact, even Jacob did not
select his own wife!
"And Isaac called Jacob, and blessed him, and charged
him and said unto him, Thou shalt not take a wife of
the daughters of Canaan, Arise, go to Padan-aram, to
the house of Bethuel, thy mothers father; and take thee
a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban thy
mother's brother."
And Jacob did as ordered. His choice was limited to the two sisters.
THE COURTING OF REBEKAH
Isaac himself had even less liberty of choice than Jacob. He courted
Rebekah by proxy--or rather his father courted her through her father,
for him, by proxy! When Abraham was stricken with age he said to his
servant, the elder of his house, that ruled over all that he had, and
enjoined on him, under oath,
"thou shalt not take a wife for my son of the daughters
of the Canaanites, among whom I shall dwell; but thou
shalt go into my country, and to my kindred, and take a
wife for my son Isaac."
And the servant did as he had been ordered. He journeyed to the city
of Mesopotamia where Abraham's brother Nahor and his descendants
dwelt. As he lingered at the well, Rebekah came out with her pitcher
upon her shoulder. "And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a
virgin, neither had any man known her." And she filled her pitcher and
gave him drink and then drew water and filled the trough for all his
camels. And he gave her a ring and two bracelets of gold. And she ran
and told her mother's house what had happened. And her brother Laban
ran out to meet the servant of Abraham and brought him to the house.
Then the servant delivered his message to him and to Rebekah's father,
Bethuel; and they answered: "Behold, Rebekah is before thee, take her,
and go, and let her be thy master's son's wife." And he wanted to take
her next day, but they wished her to abide with them at the least ten
days longer. "And they said, We will call the damsel, and inquire at
her mouth. And they called Rebekah, and said unto her, wilt thou go
with this man? And she said, I will go. And they sent away Rebekah
their sister, and her nurse, and Abraham's servant, and his men." And
Isaac was in the field meditating when he saw their camels coming
toward him. Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac she
lighted off her camel, and asked the servant who was the man coming to
meet them; and when he said it was his master, she took her veil and
covered herself. And Isaac brought her into her mother's tent and she
became his wife, and he loved her.
Such is the story of the courting of Rebekah. It resembles a story of
modern courtship and love about as much as the Hebrew language
resembles the English, and calls for no further comment. But there is
another story to consider; my critics accused me of ignoring the three
R's of Hebrew love--Rachel, Rebekah, and Ruth. "The courtship of Ruth
and Boaz is a bold and pretty love-story." Bold and pretty, no doubt;
but let us see if it is a love-story. The following omits no essential
point.
HOW RUTH COURTED BOAZ
It came to pass during a famine that a certain man went to sojourn in
the country of Moab with his wife, whose name was Naomi, and two sons.
The husband died there and the two sons also, having married, died
after ten years, leaving Naomi a widow with two widowed
daughters-in-law, whose names were Orpah and Ruth. She decided to
return to the country whence she had come, but advised the younger
widows to remain and go back to the families of their mothers. I am
too old, she said, to bear again husbands for you, and even if I could
do so, would you therefore tarry till they were grown? Orpah thereupon
kissed her mother-in-law and went back to her people; but Ruth clave
unto her and said "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou
lodgest, I will lodge.... Where thou diest, will I die." So the two
went until they came to Bethlehem, in which place Naomi had a kinsman
of her husband, a mighty man of wealth, whose name was Boaz. They
arrived in the beginning of the barley harvest, and Ruth went and
gleaned in the field after the reapers. Her hap was to light on the
portion of the field belonging to Boaz. When he saw her he asked the
reapers "Whose damsel is this?" And they told him. Then Boaz spoke to
Ruth and told her to glean in his field and abide with his maidens,
and when athirst drink of that which the young men had drawn; and he
told the young men not to touch her. At meal-time he gave her bread to
eat and vinegar to dip it in, and he told his young men to let her
glean even among the sheaves and also to pull out some for her from
the bundles, and leave it, and let her glean and rebuke her not. And
he did all this because, as he said to her,
"It hath been shewed me, all that them hast done to thy
mother-in-law since the death of thine husband: and how thou
hast left thy father and mother, and the land of thy
nativity, and art come unto a people which thou knewest not
heretofore."
So Ruth gleaned in the field until even; then she beat out what she
had gleaned and took it to Naomi and told her all that had happened.
And Naomi said unto her,
"My daughter, shall I not seek rest for thee, that it
may be well with thee? And now is there not Boaz our
kinsman, with whose maidens thou wast? Behold, he
winnoweth barley to-night in the threshing-floor. Wash
thyself therefore, and anoint thee and put thy raiment
upon thee, and get thee down to the threshing-floor;
but make not thyself known unto the man, until he shall
have done eating and drinking. And it shall be, when he
lieth down, that thou shalt mark the place where he
shall lie, and thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet,
and lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou wilt
do."
And Ruth did as her mother-in-law bade her. And when Boaz had eaten
and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of
the heap of corn; and she came softly and uncovered his feet, and laid
her down. And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid
[startled], and turned himself; and, behold, a woman lay at his feet.
And he said, "who art thou?" And she answered, "I am Ruth thine
handmaid; spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art
a near kinsman." And he said,
"Blessed be thou of the Lord, my daughter; thou hast
shewed more kindness in the latter end, than at the
beginning, inasmuch as thou followedst not young men,
whether poor or rich. And now, my daughter, fear not; I
will do to thee all that thou sayest; for all the city
of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman.
And now it is true that I am a near kinsman: howbeit
there is a kinsman nearer than I. Tarry this night, and
it shall be in the morning, that if he will perform
unto thee the part of a kinsman, well; let him do the
kinsman's part; but if he will not do the part of a
kinsman to thee, then will I do the part of a kinsman
to thee, as the LORD liveth: lie down until the
morning."
And she lay at his feet until the morning: and she rose up before one
could discern another. For he said, "Let it not be known that the
woman came to the threshing-floor." Then he gave her six measures of
barley and went into the city. He sat at the gate until the other
kinsman he had spoken of came by, and Boaz said to him,
"Naomi selleth the parcel of land which was our brother
Elimelech's. If thou wilt redeem it, redeem it; but if
thou wilt not redeem it, then tell me that I may know;
for there is none to redeem it beside thee; and I am
after thee. What day thou buyest the field of the hand
of Naomi, thou must buy it also of Ruth, the wife of
the dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his
inheritance."
And the near kinsman said, "I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I
mar mine own inheritance; take then my right of redemption on thee;
for I cannot redeem it. Buy it for thyself." And he drew off his shoe.
And Boaz called the elders to witness, saying,
"Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I
purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the
dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be
not cut off from among his brethren, and from the gate
of his place."
So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife.
How anyone can read this charmingly told, frank, and realistic tale of
ancient Hebrew life and call it a love-story, passeth all
understanding. There is not the slightest suggestion of love, either
sensual or sentimental, on the part of either Ruth or Boaz. Ruth, at
the suggestion of her mother-in-law, spends a night in a way which
would convict a Christian widow, to say the least, of an utter lack of
that modesty and coy reserve which are a woman's great charm, and
which, even among the pastoral Hebrews, cannot have been approved,
inasmuch as Boaz did not want it to be known that she had come to the
threshing-floor. He praises Ruth for following "not young men, whether
rich or poor." She followed him, a wealthy old man. Would love have
acted thus? What she wanted was not a lover but a protector ("rest for
thee that it may be well for thee," as Naomi said frankly), and above
all a son in order that her husband's name might not perish. Boaz
understands this as a matter of course; but so far is he, on his part,
from being in love with Ruth, that he offers her first to the other
relative, and on his refusal, buys her for himself, without the least
show of emotion indicating that he was doing anything but his duty. He
was simply fulfilling the law of the Levirate, as written in
Deuteronomy (25:5), ordaining that if a husband die without leaving a
son his brother shall take the widow to him to wife and perform the
duty of an husband's brother unto her; that is, to beget a son (the
first-born) who shall succeed in the name of his dead brother, "that
his name be not blotted out of Israel." How very seriously the Hebrews
took this law is shown by the further injunction that if a brother
refuses thus to perform his duty,
"then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak
unto him: and if he stand and say, I like not to take
her; then shall his brother's wife come into him in the
presence of the elders, and loose his shoe off his
foot, and spit in his face; and she shall answer and
say, so shall it be done unto the man that doth not
build up his brother's house. And his name shall be
called in Israel, the house of him that hath his shoe
loosed."
Onan was even slain for thus refusing to do his duty (Gen. 38:8-10).
NO SYMPATHY OR SENTIMENT
The three R's of Hebrew love thus show how these people arranged their
marriages with reference to social and religious customs or
utilitarian considerations, buying their wives by service or
otherwise, without any thought of sentimental preferences and
sympathies, such as underlie modern Christian marriages of the higher
order. It might be argued that the ingredients of romantic love
existed, but simply are not dwelt on in the old Hebrew stories. But it
is impossible to believe that the Bible, that truly inspired and
wonderfully realistic transcript of life, which records the minutest
details, should have neglected in its thirty-nine books, making over
seven hundred pages of fine print, to describe at least one case of
sentimental infatuation, romantic adoration, and self-sacrificing
devotion in pre-matrimonial love, had such love existed. Why should it
have neglected to describe the manifestations of sentimental love,
since it dwells so often on the symptoms and results of sensual
passion? Stories of lust abound in the Hebrew Scriptures; Genesis
alone has five. The Lord repented that he had made man on earth and
destroyed even his chosen people, all but Noah, because every
imagination in the thoughts of man's heart "was only evil
continually." But the flood did not cure the evil, nor did the
destruction of Sodom, as a warning example. It is after those events
that the stories are related of Lot's incestuous daughters, the
seduction of Dinah, the crime of Judah and Tamar, the lust of
Potiphar's wife, of David and Bath-sheba, of Amnon and Tamar, of
Absalom on the roof, with many other references to such crimes.[288]
A MASCULINE IDEAL OF WOMANHOOD
There is every reason to conclude that these ancient Jews, unlike many
of their modern descendants, knew only the coarser phases of the
instinct which draws man to woman. They knew not romantic love for the
simple reason that they had not discovered the charm of refined
femininity, or even recognized woman's right to exist for her own
sake, and not merely as man's domestic servant and the mother of his
sons. "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over
thee," Eve was told in Eden, and her male descendants administered
that punishment zealously and persistently; whereas the same lack of
gallantry which led Adam to put all the blame on Eve impelled his
descendants to make the women share his part of the curse too--"In the
sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread"; for they were obliged to do
not only all the work in the house, but most of that in the fields,
seething under a tropical sun. From this point of view the last
chapter of the Proverbs (31:10-31) is instructive. It is often
referred to as a portrait of a perfect woman, but in reality it is
little more than a picture of Hebrew masculine selfishness. Of the
forty-five lines making up this chapter, nine are devoted to praise of
the feminine virtues of fidelity to a husband, kindness to the needy,
strength, dignity, wisdom, and fear of the Lord; while the rest of the
chapter goes to show that the Hebrew woman indeed "eateth not the
bread of idleness," and that the husband "shall have no lack of
gain"--or spoil, as the alternative reading is:
"She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with
her hands. She is like the merchant ships: she bringeth
her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet
night, and giveth meat to her household, and their task
to the maidens. She considereth a field and buyeth it;
with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard....
She perceiveth that her merchandise is profitable. Her
lamp goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to
the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle.... She
maketh for herself carpets of tapestry.... She maketh
linen garments and selleth them; and delivereth girdles
unto the merchant."
As for the husband, he "is known in the gates, When he sitteth among
the elders of the land," which is an easy and pleasant thing to do;
hardly in accordance with the curse the Lord pronounced on Adam and
his male descendants. The wife being thus the maid of all work, as
among Indians and other primitive races, it is natural that the
ancient Hebrew ideal of femininity should he masculine: "She girdeth
her loins with strength, and maketh strong her arms;" while the
feminine charms are sneered at: "Favor is deceitful, and beauty is
vain."
NOT THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LOVE
Not only feminine charms, but the highest feminine virtues are
sometimes strangely, nay, shockingly disregarded, as in the story of
Lot (Gen. 19:1-12), who, when besieged by the mob clamoring for the
two men who had taken refuge in his house, went out and said:
"I pray you, my brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold
now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let
me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to
them as is good in your eyes; only unto these men do
nothing, forasmuch as they are come under the shadow of
my roof."
And this man was saved, though his action was surely more villainous
than the wickedness of the Sodomites who were destroyed with brimstone
and fire. In Judges (19: 22-30) we read of a man offering his maiden
daughter and his concubine to a mob to prevent an unnatural crime
being committed against his guest: "Seeing that this man is come into
my house, do not this folly." This case is of extreme sociological
importance as showing that notwithstanding the strict laws of Moses
(Levit. 20: 10; Deut. 22: 13-30) on sexual crimes, the law of
hospitality seems to have been held more sacred than a father's regard
for his daughter's honor. The story of Abraham shows, too, that he did
not hold his wife's honor in the same esteem as a modern Christian
does:
"And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter
into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, 'Behold
now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon;
and it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see
thee, that they shall say, This is his wife; and they
will kill me, but they will save thee alive. Say, I
pray thee, Thou art my sister; that it may be well with
me for thy sake, and that my soul may live because of
thee."
And it happened as he had arranged. She was taken into Pharaoh's house
and he was treated well for her sake; and he had sheep, and oxen, and
other presents. When he went to sojourn in Gerar (Gen. 20:1-15)
Abraham tried to repeat the same stratagem, taking refuge, when found
out, in the double excuse that he was afraid he would be slain for his
wife's sake, and that she really was his sister, the daughter of his
father, but not the daughter of his mother. Isaac followed his
father's example in Gerar:
"The man of the place asked him of his wife; and he
said, She is my sister: for he feared to say, My wife;
lest (said he) the men of the place should kill me for
Rebekah; because she was fair to look upon."
Yet we were told that Isaac loved Rebekah. Such is not Christian love.
The actions of Abraham and Isaac remind one of the Blackfoot Indian
tale told on page 631 of this volume. An American army officer would
not only lay down his own life, but shoot his wife with his own pistol
before he would allow her to fall into the enemy's hands, because to
him her honor is, of all things human, the most sacred.
UNCHIVALROUS SLAUGHTER OF WOMEN
Emotions are the product of actions or of ideas about actions.
Inasmuch as Hebrew actions toward women and ideas about them were so
radically different from ours it logically follows that they cannot
have known the emotions of love as we know them. The only symptom of
love referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures is Amnon's getting lean from
day to day and feigning sickness (II. Sam. 13: 1-22); and the story
shows what kind of love that was. It would be contrary to all reason
and psychological consistency to suppose that modern tenderness of
romantic feeling toward women could have existed among a people whose
greatest and wisest man could, for any reason whatever, chide a
returning victorious army, as Moses did (Numbers 31: 9-19), for saving
all the women alive, and could issue this command:
"Now, therefore, kill every male among the living ones,
and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with
him. But all the women children that have not known man
by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."
The Arabs were the first Asiatics who spared women in war; the Hebrews
had not risen to that chivalrous stage of civilization. Joshua (8:26)
destroyed Ai and slew 12,000, "both of men and women:" and in Judges
(21:10-12) we read how the congregation sent an army of 12,000 men and
commanded them, saying,
"Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the
edge of the sword, with the women and the little ones.
And this is the thing ye shall do; ye shall utterly
destroy every male and every woman that hath lain by
man."
And they did so, sparing only the four hundred virgins. These were
given to the tribe of Benjamin, "that a tribe be not blotted out from
Israel;" and when it was found that more were needed they lay in wait
in the vineyards, and when the daughters of Shiloh came out to dance,
they caught them and carried them off as their wives; whence we see
that these Hebrews had not advanced beyond the low stage of evolution,
when wives are secured by capture or killed after battle. Among such
seek not for romantic love.
FOUR MORE BIBLE STORIES
Dr. Trumbull's opinion has already been cited that there are certainly
"gleams of romantic love from out of the clouds of degraded human
passions in the ancient East," in the stories of Shechem and Dinah,
Samson and the damsel of Timnah, David and Abigail, Adonijah and
Abishag. But I fail to find even "gleams" of romantic love in these
stories. Shechem said he loved Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah,
but he humbled her and dealt with her "as with an harlot," as her
brothers said after they had slain him for his conduct toward her.
Concerning Samson and the Timnah girl we are simply told that he saw
her and told his father, "Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well"
(literally, "she is right in my eyes"). And this is evidence of
romantic love! As for Abigail, after her husband has refused to feed
David's shepherds, and David has made up his mind therefore to slay
him and his offspring, she takes provisions and meets David and
induces him not to commit that crime; she does this not from love for
her husband, for when David has received her presents he says to her,
"See, I have hearkened to thy voice, and have accepted thy person."
Ten days later, Abigail's husband died, and when David heard of it he
"sent and spake concerning Abigail, to take her to him to
wife.... And she rose and bowed herself with her face to the
earth, and said, Behold, thine handmaid is a servant to wash
the feet of the servants of my lord. And Abigail, hasted,
and arose, and rode upon an ass, with five damsels of hers
that followed her; and she went after the messengers of
David, and became his wife."
And as if to emphasize how utterly unsentimental and un-Christian a
transaction this was, the next sentence tells us that "David also took
Ahinoam of Jezreel; and they became both of them his wives."
ABISHAG THE SHUNAMMITE
The last of the stories referred to by Dr. Trumbull, though as far
from proving his point as the others, is of peculiar interest because
it introduces us to the maiden who is believed by some commentators to
be the same as the Shulamite, the heroine of the _Song of Songs_.
After Solomon had become king his elder brother, Adonijah, went to the
mother of Solomon, Bath-sheba, and said:
"Thou knowest thy kingdom was mine, and that all Israel
set their faces on me, that I should reign: howbeit the
kingdom is turned about, and is become my brother's:
for it was his from the Lord. And now I ask one
petition of thee, deny me not.... Speak, I pray thee,
unto Solomon the king (for he will not say thee nay)
that he give me Abishag the Shunammite to wife."
But when Solomon heard this request he declared that Adonijah had
spoken that word against his own life; and he sent a man who fell on
him and killed him.
Who was this Abishag, the Shunammite? The opening lines of the First
Book of Kings tell us how she came to the court:
"Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they
covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore
his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my
lord the king, a young virgin, and let her stand before
the king and cherish him; and let her lie in thy bosom,
that my lord the king may get heat. So they sought for
a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and
found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the
king. And the damsel was very fair; and she cherished
the king, and ministered to him; but the king knew her
not."
THE SONG OF SONGS
Now it is plausibly conjectured that this Abishag of Shunam or Shulam
(a town north of Jerusalem) was the same as the Shulamite of the _Song
of Songs_, and that in the lines 6:11-12 she tells how she was
kidnapped and brought to court.
I went down into the garden of nuts,
To see the green plants of the valley,
To see whether the vine budded,
And the pomegranates were in flower,
Or ever I was aware, my soul [desire] set me
Among the chariots of my princely people.
She also explains why her face is tanned like the dark tents of Kedar:
"My mother's sons were incensed against me, They made me keeper of the
vineyards." The added words "mine own vineyard have I not kept" are
interpreted by some as an apology for her neglected personal
appearance, but Renan (10) more plausibly refers them to her
consciousness of some indiscretion, which led to her capture. We may
suppose that, attracted by the glitter and the splendor of the royal
cavalcade, she for a moment longed to enjoy it, and her desire was
gratified. Brought to court to comfort the old king, she remained
after his death at the palace, and Solomon, who wished to add her to
his harem, killed his own brother when he found him coveting her. The
maiden soon regrets her indiscretion in having exposed herself to
capture. She is "a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley," and she
feels like a wildflower transplanted to a palace hall. While Solomon
in all his glory urges his suit, she, tormented by homesickness,
thinks only of her vineyard, her orchards, and the young shepherd
whose love she enjoyed in them. Absent-minded, as one in a revery, or
dreaming aloud, she answers the addresses of the king and his women in
words that ever refer to her shepherd lover:[289]
"Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou
feedest thy flock." "My beloved is unto me as a cluster
of henna flowers in the vineyards of En-gedi." "Behold,
thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant: Also our couch
is green." "As the apple-tree among the trees of the
wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under
his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet
to my taste." "The voice of my beloved! behold, he
cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the
hills." "My beloved is mine, and I am his: He feedeth
his flock among the lilies," "Come, my beloved, let us
go forth into the field, let us lodge in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards.... There will I
give thee my love."
The home-sick country girl, in a word, has found out that the
splendors of the palace are not to her taste, and the thought of being
a young shepherd's darling is pleasanter to her than that of being an
old king's concubine. The polygamous rapture with which Solomon
addresses her: "There are three-score queens and four-score
concubines, and maidens without number," does not appeal to her rural
taste. She has no desire to be the hundred and forty-first piece of
mosaic inlaid in Solomon's palanquin (III., 9-10), and she stubbornly
resists his advances until, impressed by her firmness, and unwilling
to force her, the king allows her to return to her vineyard and her
lover.
The view that the gist of the _Song of Songs_ is the Shulamite's love
of a shepherd and her persistent resistance to the advances of
Solomon, was first advanced in 1771 by J.F. Jacobi, and is now
universally accepted by the commentators, the overwhelming majority of
whom have also given up the artificial and really blasphemous
allegorical interpretation of this poem once in vogue, but ignored in
the Revised Version, as well as the notion that Solomon wrote the
poem. Apart from all other arguments, which are abundant, it is absurd
to suppose that Solomon would have written a drama to proclaim his own
failure to win the love of a simple country girl. In truth, it is very
probable that, as Renan has eloquently set forth (91-100), the _Song
of Songs_ was written practically for the purpose of holding up
Solomon to ridicule. In the northern part of his kingdom there was a
strong feeling against him on account of his wicked ways and vicious
innovations, especially his harem, and other expensive habits that
impoverished the country. "Taken all in all," says the Rev. W.E.
Griffis, of Solomon (44),
"he was probably one of the worst sinners described in
the Old Testament. With its usual truth and
fearlessness, the Scriptures expose his real character,
and by the later prophets and by Jesus he is ignored or
referred to only in rebuke."
The contempt and hatred inspired by his actions were especially vivid
shortly after his death, when the _Song of Songs_ is believed to have
been written (Renan, 97); and, as this author remarks (100),
"the poet seems to have been animated by a real spite
against the king; the establishment of a harem, in
particular, appears to incense him greatly, and he
takes evident pleasure in showing us a simple shepherd
girl triumphing over the presumptuous sultan who thinks
he can buy love, like everything else, with his gold."
That this is intended to be the moral of this Biblical drama is
further shown by the famous lines near the close:
"For love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the
grave [literally: passion is as inexorable (or hard) as
sheol]: The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very
flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench it, nor
can the floods drown it: If a man should give all the
substance of his house for love, he [it] would utterly
be contemned."
These lines constitute the last of the passages cited by my critics to
prove that the ancient Hebrews knew romantic love and its power. They
doubtless did know the power of love; all the ancient civilized
nations knew it as a violent sensual impulse which blindly sacrifices
life to attain its object. The ancient Hindoos embodied their idea of
irresistible power in the force and fury of an amorous elephant. Among
animals in general, love is even stronger than death. Male animals of
most species engage in deadly combat for the females. "For most
insects," says Letourneau, "to love and to die are almost synonymous
terms, and yet they do not even try to resist the amorous frenzy that
urges them on." Yet no one would dream of calling this romantic love;
from that it differs as widely as the insect mind in general differs
from the human mind. Waters cannot quench any kind of love or
affection nor floods drown it. What we are seeking for are _actions or
words describing the specific symptoms of sentimental love_, and these
are not to be found in this passage any more than elsewhere in the
Bible. An old man may buy a girl's body, but he cannot, with all his
wealth and splendor, awaken her love, either sentimental or sensual;
love, whatever its nature, will always prefer the apple-tree and the
shepherd lover to the vain desires and a thousand times divided
attentions of a decrepit king, though he be a Solomon.
It would be strange if this purely profane poem, which was added to
the Scriptural collection only by an unusual stretch of
liberality,[290] and in which there is not one mention of God or of
religion, should give a higher conception of sexual love than the
books which are accepted as inspired, and which paint manners,
emotions, and morals as the writers found them. As a matter of fact
the _Song of Songs_ was long held to be so objectionable that the
Talmudists did not allow young people to read it before their
thirtieth year. Whiston denounced it as foolish, lascivious, and
idolatrous. "The excessively amative character of some passages is
designated as almost blasphemous when supposed to be addressed by
Christ to his Church,"[291] as it was by the allegorists. On the other
hand there is a class of commentators to whom this poem is the ideal
of all that is pure and lovely. Herder went into ecstasies over it.
Israel Abrahams refers to it (163) as "the noblest of love-poems;" as
"this idealization of love." The Rev. W.E. Griffis declares
rapturously (166, 63, 21, 16, 250) that "the purest-minded virgin may
safely read the _Song of Songs_, in which is no trace of immoral
thought." In it "sensuality is scorned and pure love glorified;" it
"sets forth the eternal romance of true love," and is "chastely pure
in word and delicate in idea throughout." "The poet of the Canticle
shows us how to love." "An angel might envy such artless love dwelling
in a human heart."
The truth, as usual in such cases, lies about half-way between these
extreme views. There is only one passage which is objectionably coarse
in the English version and in the Hebrew original obscene;[292] yet,
on the other hand, I maintain that the whole poem is purely Oriental
in its exclusively sensuous and often sensual character, and that
there is not a trace of romantic sentiment such as would color a
similar love-story if told by a modern poet. The _Song of Songs_ is so
confused in its arrangement, its plan so obscure, its repetitions and
repeated dénouements so puzzling,[293] that commentators are not
always agreed as to what character in the drama is to be held
responsible for certain lines; but for our purpose this difficulty
makes no difference. Taking the lines just as they stand, I find that
the following:--1: 2-4, 13 (in one version), 17; 2: 6; 4: 16; 5: 1; 8:
2, 3--are indelicate in language or suggestion, as every student of
Oriental amorous poetry knows, and no amount of specious argumentation
can alter this. The descriptions of the beauty and charms of the
beloved or the lover, are, moreover, invariably sensuous and often
sensual. Again and again are their bodily charms dwelt on rapturously,
as is customary in the poems of all Orientals with all sorts of quaint
hyperbolic comparisons, some of which are poetic, others grotesque. No
fewer than five times are the external charms thus enumerated, but not
once in the whole poem is any allusion made to the spiritual
attractions, the mental and moral charms of femininity which are the
food of romantic love. Mr. Griffis, who cannot help commenting (223)
on this frequent description of the human body, makes a desperate
effort to come to the rescue. Referring to 4: 12-14, he says (212)
that the lover now "adds a more delicate compliment to her modesty,
her instinctive refinement, her chaste life, her purity amid court
temptations. He praises her inward ornaments, her soul's charms." What
are these ornaments? The possible reference to her chastity in the
lines: "A garden shut up is my sister, my bride. A spring shut up, a
fountain sealed"--a reference which, if so intended, would be regarded
by a Christian maiden not as a compliment, but an insult; while every
student of Eastern manners knows that an Oriental makes of his wife "a
garden shut up," and "a fountain sealed" not by way of complimenting
her chastity, but because he has no faith in it whatever, knowing that
so far as it exists it is founded on fear, not on affection. Mr.
Griffis knows this himself when he does not happen to be idealizing an
impossible shepherd girl, for he says (161):
"To one familiar with the literature, customs, speech, and
ideas of the women who live where idolatry prevails, and the
rulers and chief men of the country keep harems, the amazing
purity and modesty of maidens reared in Christian homes is
like a revelation from heaven."[294]
Supersensual charms are not alluded to in the _Song of Songs_, for the
simple reason that Orientals never did, and do not now, care for such
charms in women or cultivate them. They know love only as an appetite,
and in accordance with Oriental taste and custom the _Song of Songs_
compares it always to things that are good to eat or drink or smell.
Hence such ecstatic expressions as "How much better is thy love than
wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all manner of spices!"
Hence her declaration that her beloved is
"as the apple-tree among the trees of the wood.... I sat
down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was
sweet to my taste.... Stay ye me with raisins, comfort me
with apples: For I am sick of love. His left hand is under
my head, and his right hand doth embrace me."
Hence the shepherd's description of his love: "I am come into the
garden, my sister, my bride: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice: I
have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my
milk."
Modern love does not express itself in such terms; it is more mental
and sentimental, more esthetic and sympathetic, more decorous and
delicate, more refined and supersensual. While it is possible that, as
Renan suggests (143), the author of the Canticles conceived his
heroine as a saint of her time, rising above sordid reality, it is
clear from all we have said that the author himself was not able to
rise above Orientalism. The manners of the East, both ancient and
modern, are incompatible with romantic love, because they suppress the
evolution of feminine refinement and sexual mentality. The documents
of the Hebrews, like those of the Hindoos and Persians, Greeks, and
Romans, prove that tender, refined, and unselfish affection between
the sexes, far from being one of the first shoots of civilization, is
its last and most beautiful flower.
GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS
The most obstinate disbeliever in the doctrine that romantic love,
instead of being one of the earliest products of civilization, is one
of the latest, will have to capitulate if it can be shown that even
the Greeks, the most cultivated and refined nation of antiquity, knew
it only in its sensual and selfish side, which is not true love, but
self-love. In reality I have already shown this to be the case
incidentally in the sections in which I have traced the evolution of
the fourteen ingredients of love. In the present chapter, therefore,
we may confine ourselves chiefly to a consideration of the stories and
poems which have fostered the belief I am combating. But first we must
hear what the champions of the Greeks have to say in their behalf.
CHAMPIONS OF GREEK LOVE
Professor Rohde declares emphatically (70) that "no one would be so
foolish as to doubt the existence of pure and strong love" among the
ancient Greeks. Another eminent German scholar, Professor Ebers,
sneers at the idea that the Greeks were not familiar with the love we
know and celebrate. Having been criticised for making the lovers in
his ancient historic romances act and talk and express their feelings
precisely as modern lovers in Berlin or Leipsic do, he wrote for the
second edition of his _Egyptian Princess_ a preface in which he tries
to defend his position. He admits that he did, perhaps, after all, put
too warm colors on his canvas, and frankly confesses that when he
examined in the sunshine what he had written by lamplight, he made up
his mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend. He
admits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between the
sexes; yet he thinks it "quite conceivable that a Greek heart should
have felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart," and he
refers to a number of romantic stories invented by the Greeks as proof
that they knew love in our sense of the word--such stories as
Apuleius's _Cupid and Psyche_, Homer's portrait of Penelope,
Xenophon's tale of Panthea and Abradates.
"Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have been
unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice,
was transferred as a constellation to the skies; or can
devotion to love be doubted in the case of peoples who, for
the sake of a beautiful woman, wage terrible wars with
bitter pertinacity?"
Hegel's episodic suggestion referred to in our first chapter regarding
the absence of romantic love in ancient Greek literature having thus
failed to convince even his own countrymen, it was natural that my
revival of that suggestion, as a detail of my general theory of the
evolution of love, should have aroused a chorus of critical dissent.
Commenting on my assertion that there are no stories of romantic love
in Greek literature, an editorial writer in the London _Daily News_
exclaimed: "Why, it would be less wild to remark that the Greeks had
nothing but love-stories." After referring to the stories of Orpheus
and Eurydice, Meleager and Atalanta, Alcyone and Ceyx, Cephalus and
Procris, the writer adds,
"It is no exaggeration to say that any school-girl
could tell Mr. Finck a dozen others." "The Greeks were
human beings, and had the sentiments of human beings,
which really vary but little...."
The New York _Mail and Express_ also devoted an editorial article to
my book, in which it remarked that if romantic love is, as I claim, an
exclusively modern sentiment,
"we must get rid of some old-fashioned fancies. How
shall we hereafter classify our old friends Hero and
Leander? Leander was a fine fellow, just like the
handsomest boy you know. He fell in love with the
lighthouse-keeper's daughter[!] and used to swim over
the river[!] every night and make love to her. It was
all told by an old Greek named Musaeus. How did he get
such modern notions into his noddle? How, moreover,
shall we classify Daphnis and Chloe? This fine old
romance of Longus is as sweet and beautiful a
love-story as ever skipped in prose."
"Daphnis and Chloe," wrote a New Haven critic, "is one of the most
idyllic love-stories ever written." "The love story of Hero and
Leander upsets this author's theory completely," said a Rochester
reviewer, while a St. Louis critic declared boldly that "in the pages
of Achilles Tatius and Theodorus, inventors of the modern novel, the
young men and maidens loved as romantically as in Miss Evans's
latest." A Boston censor pronounced my theory "simply absurd," adding:
"Mr. Finck's reading, wide as it is, is not wide
enough; for had he read the Alexandrian poets,
Theoeritus especially, or Behr A'Adin among the Arabs,
to speak of no others, he could not possibly have had
courage left to maintain his theory; and with him,
really, it seems more a matter of courage than of
facts, notwithstanding his evident training in a
scientific atmosphere."
GLADSTONE ON THE WOMEN OF HOMER
The divers specifications of my ignorance and stupidity contained in
the foregoing criticisms will be attended to in their proper place in
the chronological order of the present chapter, which naturally begins
with Homer's epics, as nothing definite is known of Greek literature
before them. Homer is now recognized as the first poet of antiquity,
not only in the order of time; but it took Europe many centuries to
discover that fact. During the Middle Ages the second-rate Virgil was
held to be a much greater genius than Homer, and it was in England, as
Professor Christ notes (69), that the truer estimate originated.
Pope's translation of the Homeric poems, with all its faults, helped
to dispel the mists of ignorance, and in 1775 appeared Robert Wood's
book, _On the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_, which combated
the foolish prejudice against the poet, due to the coarseness of the
manners he depicts. Wood admits (161) that "most of Homer's heroes
would, in the present age, be capitally convicted, in any country in
Europe, on the poet's evidence;" but this, he explains, does not
detract from the greatness of Homer, who, upon an impartial view,
"will appear to excel his own state of society, in point of decency
and delicacy, as much as he has surpassed more polished ages in point
of genius."
In this judicious discrimination between the genius of Homer and the
realistic coarseness of his heroes, Wood forms an agreeable contrast
to many modern Homeric scholars, notably the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone,
who, having made this poet his hobby, tried to persuade himself and
his readers that nearly everything relating not only to Homer, but to
the characters he depicts, was next door to perfection. Confining
ourselves to the topic that concerns us here, we read, in his _Studies
on Homer_ (II., 502), that "we find throughout the poems those signs
of the overpowering force of conjugal attachments which ... we might
expect." And in his shorter treatise on Homer he thus sums up his
views as to the position and estimate of woman in the heroic age, as
revealed in Homer's female characters:
"The most notable of them compare advantageously with
those commended to us in the Old Testament; while
Achaiian Jezebels are nowhere found. There is a certain
authority of the man over the woman; but it does not
destroy freedom, or imply the absence either of
respect, or of a close mental and moral fellowship. Not
only the relation of Odysseus to Penelope and of Hector
to Andromache, but those of Achilles to Briseis, and of
Menelaus to the returned Helen, are full of dignity and
attachment. Briseis was but a captive, yet Achilles
viewed her as in expectation a wife, called her so,
avowed his love for her, and laid it down that not he
only, but every man must love his wife if he had sense
and virtue. Among the Achaiian Greeks monogamy is
invariable; divorce unknown; incest abhorred.... The
sad institution which, in Saint Augustine's time, was
viewed by him as saving the world from yet worse evil
is unknown or unrecorded. Concubinage prevails in the
camp before Troy, but only simple concubinage. Some of
the women, attendants in the Ithacan palace, were
corrupted by the evil-minded Suitors; but some were
not. It should, perhaps, be noted as a token of the
respect paid to the position of the woman, that these
very bad men are not represented as ever having
included in their plans the idea of offering violence
to Penelope. The noblest note, however, of the Homeric
woman remains this, that she shared the thought and
heart of her husband: as in the fine utterance of
Penelope she prays that rather she may be borne away by
the Harpies than remain to 'glad the heart of a meaner
man' (_Od_. XX., 82) than her husband, still away from
her."
Only a careful student of Homer can quite realize the diplomatic
astuteness which inspired this sketch of Homeric morals. Its amazing
sophistry can, however, be made apparent even to one who has never
read the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.
ACHILLES AS A LOVER
The Trojan War lasted ten years. Its object was to punish Paris, son
of the King of Troy, for eloping with Helen, the wife of Menelaus,
King of Sparta, and taking away a shipload of treasures to boot. The
subject of Homer's _Iliad_ is popularly supposed to be this Trojan
War; in reality, however, it covers less than two months (fifty-two
days) of those ten years, and its theme, as the first lines indicate,
is the wrath of Achilles--the ruinous wrath, which in the tenth year,
brought on the other Greek warriors woes innumerable. Achilles had
spent much of the intervening time in ravaging twelve cities of Asia
Minor, carrying away treasures and captive women, after the piratical
Greek custom. One of these captives was Briseis, a high priest's
daughter, whose husband and three brothers he had slain with his own
hand, and who became his favorite concubine. King Agamemnon, the chief
commander of the Greek forces, also had for his favorite concubine a
high priest's daughter, named Chryseis. Her father came to ransom the
captive girl, but Agamemnon refused to give her up because, as he
confessed with brutal frankness, he preferred her to his wife.[295]
For this refusal Apollo brings a pestilence on the Greek army, which
can be abated only by restoring Chryseis to her father. Agamemnon at
last consents, on condition that some other prize of honor be given to
him--though, as Thersites taunts him (II, 226-228), his tents are
already full of captive women, among whom he always has had first
choice. Achilles, too, informs him that he shall have all the women he
wants when Troy is taken; but what really hurts Agamemnon's feelings
is not so much the loss of his favorite as the thought that the hated
Achilles should enjoy Briseis, while his prize, Chryseis, must be
returned to her father. So he threatens to retaliate on Achilles by
taking Briseis from his tent and keeping her for himself. "I would
deserve the name of coward," retorts Achilles
"were I to yield to you in everything.... But this let me
say--Never shall I lift my arm to strive for the girl either
with you or any other man; you gave her, you can take her.
But of all else, by the dark ship, that belongs to me,
thereof you shall not take anything against my will. Do that
and all shall see your black blood trickle down my spear."
Having made this "uncowardly," chivalrous, and romantic distinction
between his two kinds of property--yielding Briseis, but threatening
murder if aught else belonging to him be touched--Achilles goes and
orders his friend Patroclus to take the young woman from the tent and
give her to the king. She leaves her paramour--her husband's and
brothers' murderer--unwillingly, and he sits down and weeps--why?
because, as he tells his mother, he has been insulted by Agamemnon,
who has taken away his prize of honor. From that moment Achilles
refuses to join the assemblies, or take a part in the battles, thus
bringing "woes innumerable" on his countrymen. He refuses to yield
even after Agamemnon, alarmed by his reverses, seeks to conciliate him
by offering him gold and horses and women in abundance; telling him he
shall have back his Briseis, whom the king swears he has never
touched, and, besides her, seven Lesbian women of more than human
beauty; also, the choice of twenty Trojan women as soon as the city
capitulates; and, in addition to these, one of the three princesses,
his own daughters--twenty-nine women in all!
Must not a hero who so stubbornly and wrathfully resented the seizure
of his concubine have been deeply in love with her? He himself remarks
to Odysseus, who comes to attempt a reconciliation (IX., 340-44):
"Do the sons of Atreus alone of mortal men love their
bedfellows? Every man who is good and sensible loves his
concubine and cares for her as I too love mine with all my
heart, though but the captive of my spear."
Gladstone here translates the word [Greek: alochos] "wife," though, as
far as Achilles is concerned, it means concubine. Of course it would
have been awkward for England's Prime Minister to make Achilles say
that "every man must love his concubine, if he has sense and virtue;"
so he arbitrarily changes the meaning of the word and then begs us to
notice the moral beauty of this sentiment and the "dignity" of the
relation between Achilles and Briseis! Yet no one seems to have
denounced him for this transgression against ethics, philology, and
common sense. On the contrary, a host of translators and commentators
have done the same thing, to the obscuration of the truth.
Nor is this all. When we examine what the Achilles of Homer means by
the fine phrase "every man loves his bedfellow as I love mine," we
come across a grotesque parody even of sensual infatuation, not to
speak of romantic love. If Achilles had been animated by the strong
individual preference which sometimes results even from animal
passion, he would not have told Agamemnon, "take Briseis, but don't
you dare to touch any of my other property or I will smash your
skull." If he had been what _we_ understand by a lover, he would not
have been represented by the poet, after Briseis was taken away from
him, as having "his heart consumed by grief" because "he yearned for
_the battle_." He would, instead, have yearned for the girl. And when
Agamemnon offered to give her back untouched, Achilles, had he been a
real lover, would have thrown pride and wrath to the winds and
accepted the offer with eagerness and alacrity.
But the most amazing part of the story is reached when we ask what
Achilles means when he says that every good and sensible man [Greek:
phileei kai kaedetai]--loves and cherishes--his concubine, as he
professes to love his own. _How_ does he love Briseis? Patroclus had
promised her (XIX., 297-99), probably for reasons of his own (she is
represented as being extremely fond of him), to see to it that
Achilles would ultimately make her his legitimate wife, but Achilles
himself never dreams of such a thing, as we see in lines 393-400, book
IX. After refusing the offer of one of Agamemnon's daughters, he goes
on to remark:
"If the gods preserve me and I return to my home, Peleus
himself will seek a wife for me. There are many Achaian
maidens in Hellas and Phthia, daughters of city-protecting
princes. Among these I shall select the one I desire to be
my dear wife. Very often is my manly heart moved with
longing to be there to take a wedded wife [Greek: mnaestaen
alochon], and enjoy the possessions Peleus has gathered."
And if any further detail were needed to prove how utterly shallow,
selfish, and sensual was his "love" of Briseis, we should find it a
few lines later (663) where the poet naïvely tells us, as a matter of
course, that
"Achilles slept in the innermost part of the tent and
by his side lay a beautiful-cheeked woman, whom he had
brought from Lesbos. On the other side lay Patroclus
with the fair Isis by his side, the gift of Achilles."
Obviously even individual preference was not a strong ingredient in
the "love" of these "heroes," and we may well share the significant
surprise of Ajax (638) that Achilles should persist in his wrath when
seven girls were offered him for one. Evidently the tent of Achilles,
like that of Agamemnon, was full of women (in line 366 he especially
refers to his assortment of "fair-girdled women" whom he expects to
take home when the war is over); yet Gladstone had the audacity to
write that though concubinage prevailed in the camp before Troy, it
was "only single concubinage." In his larger treatise he goes so far
as to apologize for these ruffians--who captured and traded off women
as they would horses or cows--on the ground that they were away from
their wives and were indulging in the "mildest and least licentious"
of all forms of adultery! Yet Gladstone was personally one of the
purest and noblest of men. Strange what somersaults a hobby ridden too
hard may induce a man to make in his ethical attitude!
ODYSSEUS, LIBERTINE AND RUFFIAN
If we now turn from the hero of the _Iliad_ to the hero of the
_Odyssey_, we find the same Gladstone declaring (II., 502) that "while
admitting the superior beauty of Calypso as an immortal, Ulysses
frankly owns to her that his heart is pining every day for Penelope;"
and in the shorter treatise he goes so far as to say (131), that
"the subject of the Odyssey gives Homer the opportunity
of setting forth the domestic character of Odysseus, in
his profound attachment to wife, child, and home, in
such a way as to adorn not only the hero, but his age
and race."
The "profound attachment" of Odysseus to his wife may be gauged in the
first place by the fact that he voluntarily remained away from her ten
years, fighting to recover, for another king, a worthless, adulterous
wench. Before leaving on this expedition, from which he feared he
might never return, he spoke to his wife, as she herself relates
(XVIII., 269), begging her to be mindful of his father and mother,
"and when you see our son a bearded man, then marry whom you will, and
leave the house now yours"--namely for the benefit of the son, for
whose welfare he was thus more concerned than for a monopoly of his
wife's love.
After the Trojan war was ended he embarked for home, but suffered a
series of shipwrecks and misfortunes. On the island of Aeaea he spent
a whole year sharing the hospitality and bed of the beautiful
sorceress Circe, with no pangs of conscience for such conduct, nor
thought of home, till his comrades, in spite of the "abundant meat and
pleasant wine," longed to depart and admonished him in these words:
"Unhappy man, it is time to think of your native land, if you are
destined ever to be saved and to reach your home in the land of your
fathers." Thus they spoke and "persuaded his manly heart." In view of
the ease with which he thus abandoned himself for a whole year to a
life of indulgence, till his comrades prodded his conscience, we may
infer that he was not so very unwilling a prisoner afterward, of the
beautiful nymph Calypso, who held him eight years by force on her
island. We read, indeed, that, at the expiration of these years,
Odysseus was always weeping, and his sweet life ebbed away in longing
for his home. But all the sentiment is taken out of this by the words
which follow: [Greek: epei ouketi aendane numphae] "_because the nymph
pleased him no more_!" Even so Tannhäuser tired of the pleasures in
the grotto of Venus, and begged to be allowed to leave.
While thus permitting himself the unrestrained indulgence of his
passions, without a thought of his wife, Odysseus has the barbarian's
stern notions regarding the duties of women who belong to him. There
are fifty young women in his palace at home who ply their hard tasks
and bear the servant's lot. Twelve of these, having no one to marry,
yield to the temptations of the rich princes who sue for the hand of
Penelope in the absence of her husband.
Ulysses, on his return, hears of this, and forthwith takes measures to
ascertain who the guilty ones are. Then he tells his son Telemachus
and the swineherd and neatherd to
"go and lead forth these serving-maids out of the
stately hall to a spot between the roundhouse and the
neat courtyard wall, and smite them with your long
swords till you take life from all, so that they may
forget their secret amours with the suitors."
The "discreet" Telemachus carried out these orders, leading the maids
to a place whence there was no escape and exclaiming:
"'By no honorable death would I take away the lives of
those who poured reproaches on my head and on my
mother, and lay beside the suitors.'"
"He spoke and tied the cable of a dark-bowed ship to a
great pillar, then lashed it to the roundhouse,
stretching it high across, too high for one to touch
the feet upon the ground. And as the wide-winged
thrushes or the doves strike on a net set in the
bushes; and when they think to go to roost a cruel bed
receives them; even so the women held their heads in
line, and around every neck a noose was laid that they
might die most vilely. They twitched their feet a
little, but not long."
A more dastardly, cowardly, unmanly deed is not on record in all human
literature, yet the instigator of it, Odysseus, is always the "wise,"
"royal," "princely," "good," and "godlike," and there is not the
slightest hint that the great poet views his assassination of the poor
maidens as the act of a ruffian, an act the more monstrous and
unpardonable because Homer (XXII., 37) makes Odysseus himself say to
the suitors that they outraged his maids by force ([Greek: biaios]).
What world-wide difference in this respect between the greatest poet
of antiquity and Jesus of Nazareth who, when the Scribes and Pharisees
brought before him a woman who had erred like the maids of Odysseus,
and asked if she should be stoned as the law of Moses commanded, said
unto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her;" whereupon, being convicted by their own consciences,
they went out one by one. And Jesus said, "Where are those thine
accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?" She said, "No man, Lord." And
Jesus said unto her, "Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more."
He is lenient to the sinner because of his sense of justice and mercy;
yet at the same time his ethical ideal is infinitely higher than
Homer's. He preaches that "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after
her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart;" whereas
Homer's ideas of sexual morality are, in the last analysis, hardly
above those of a savage. The dalliance of Odysseus with the nymphs,
and the licentious treatment of women captives by all the "heroes," do
not, any more than the cowardly murder of the twelve maids, evoke a
word of censure, disgust, or disapproval from his lips.
His gods are on the same low level as his heroes, if not lower. When
the spouse of Zeus, king of the gods, wishes to beguile him, she knows
no other way than borrowing the girdle of Aphrodite. But this scene
(_Iliad_, XIV., 153 _seq_.) is innocuous compared with the shameless
description of the adulterous amours of Ares and Aphrodite in the
Odyssey (VIII., 266-365), in presence of the gods, who treat the
matter as a great joke. For a parallel to this passage we would have
to descend to the Botocudos or the most degraded Australians. All of
which proves that the severity of the punishment inflicted on the
twelve maids of Odysseus does not indicate a high regard for chastity,
but is simply another illustration of typical barbarous fury against
women for presuming to do anything without the consent of the man
whose private property they are.
WAS PENELOPE A MODEL WIFE?
If the real Odysseus, unprincipled, unchivalrous, and cruel, is
anything but a hero who "adorns his age and race," must it not be
conceded, at any rate, that "the unwearied fidelity of Penelope,
awaiting through the long revolving years the return of her
storm-tossed husband," presents, as Lecky declares (II., 279), and as
is commonly supposed, a picture of perennial beauty "which Rome and
Christendom, chivalry and modern civilization, have neither eclipsed
nor transcended?"
We have seen that the fine words of Achilles regarding his "love" of
Briseis are, when confronted with his actions, reduced to empty
verbiage. The same result is reached in the case of Penelope, if we
subject her actions and motives to a searching critical analysis.
Ostensibly, indeed, she is set up as a model of that feminine
constancy which men at all times have insisted on while they
themselves preferred to be models of inconstancy. As usual in such
cases, the feminine model is painted with touches of almost grotesque
exaggeration. After the return of Odysseus Penelope informed her nurse
(XXIII., 18) that she has not slept soundly all this time--twenty
years! Such phrases, too, are used as "longing for Odysseus, I waste
my heart away," or "May I go to my dread grave seeing Odysseus still,
and never gladden heart of meaner husband." But they are mere phrases.
The truth about her attitude and her-feelings is told frankly in
several places by three different persons--the goddess of wisdom,
Telemachus, and Penelope herself. Athene urges Telemachus to make
haste that he may find his blameless mother still at home instead of
the bride of one of the suitors.
"But let her not against your will take treasure from your
home. You know a woman's way; she strives to enrich his
house who marries her, while of her former children and the
husband of her youth, when he is dead she thinks not, and
she talks of him no more" (XV., 15-23).
In the next book (73-77) Telemachus says to the swineherd:
"Moreover my mother's feeling wavers, whether to bide beside
me here and keep the house, and thus revere her husband's
bed and _heed the public voice_, or finally to follow some
chief of the Achaians who woos her in the hall with largest
gifts."
And a little later (126) he exclaims, "She neither declines the hated
suit nor has she power to end it, while they with feasting impoverish
my home."
These words of Telcinachus are endorsed in full by Penelope herself,
whose remarks (XIX., 524-35) to the disguised Odysseus give us the key
to the whole situation and explain why she lies abed so much weeping
and not knowing what to do.
" ... so does my doubtful heart toss to and fro whether
to bide beside my son and keep all here in safety--my
goods, my maids, and my great high-roofed house--and
thus revere my husband and _heed the public voice_, or
finally to follow some chief of the Achaiians who woos
me in my hall with countless gifts. My son, while but a
child and slack of understanding, _did not permit my
marrying_ and departing from my husband's home; but now
that he is grown and come to man's estate, he prays me
to go home again and leave the hall, so troubled is he
for that substance which the Achaiians waste."
If these words mean anything, they mean that what kept Penelope from
marrying again was not affection for her husband but the desire to
live up to the demands of "the public voice" and the fact that her
son--who, according to Greek usage, was her master--would not permit
her to do so. This, then, was the cause of that proverbial constancy!
But a darker shadow still is cast on her much-vaunted affection by her
cold and suspicious reception of her husband on his return. While the
dog recognized him at once and the swineherd was overjoyed, she, the
wife, held him aloof, fearing that he might be some man who had come
to cheat her! At first Odysseus thought she scorned him because he
"was foul and dressed in sorry clothes;" but even after he had bathed
and put on his princely attire she refused to embrace him, because she
wished to "prove her husband!" No wonder that her son declared that
her "heart is always harder than a stone," and that Odysseus himself
thus accosts her:
"Lady, a heart impenetrable beyond the sex of women the
dwellers on Olympus gave you. There is no other woman
of such stubborn spirit to stand off from the husband
who, after many grievous toils, came in the twentieth
year home to his native land. Come then, good nurse,
and make my bed, that I may lie alone. For certainly of
iron is the heart within her breast."
HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE
A much closer approximation to the modern ideal of conjugal love than
the attachment between Odysseus and Penelope with the "heart of iron,"
may be found in the scene describing Hector's leave-taking of
Andromache before he goes out to fight the Greeks, fearing he may
never return. The serving-women inform him that his wife, hearing that
the Trojans were hard pressed, had gone in haste to the wall, like
unto one frenzied. He goes to find her and when he arrives at the
Skaian gates, she comes running to meet him, together with the nurse,
who holds his infant boy on her bosom. Andromache weeps, recalls to
his mind that she had lost her father, mother, and seven brothers,
wherefore he is to her a father, mother, brothers, as well as a
husband. "Have pity and abide here upon the tower, lest thou make thy
child an orphan and thy wife a widow." Though Hector cannot think of
shrinking from battle like a coward, he declared that her fate, should
the city fall and he be slain, troubles him more than that of his
father, mother, and brothers--the fate of being led into captivity and
slavery by a Greek, doomed to carry water and to be pointed at as the
former wife of the brave Hector. He expresses the wish that his
boy--who at first is frightened by the horse-hair crest on his
helmet--may become greater than his father, bringing with him
blood-stained spoils from the enemy he has slain, and gladdening his
mother's heart; then caressing his wife with his hand, he begs her not
to sorrow overmuch, but to go to her house and see to her own tasks,
the loom and the distaff. Thus he spake, and she departed for her
home, oft looking back and letting fall big tears.
This scene, which takes up four pages of the _Iliad_ (VI., 370-502),
is the most touching, the most inspired, the most sentimental and
modern passage not only in the Homeric poems, but in all Greek
literature. Benecke has aptly remarked (10) that the relation between
Hector and Andromache is unparalleled in that literature; and he adds:
"At the same time, how little really sympathetic to the
Greek of the period was this wonderful and unique passage is
sufficiently shown by this very fact, that no attempt was
ever made to imitate or develop it. It may sound strange to
say so, but in all probability we to-day understand
Andromache better than did the Greeks, for whom she was
created; better, too, perhaps than did her creator himself."
Benecke should have written Hector in place of Andromache. There was
no difficulty, even for a Greek, in understanding Andromache. She had
every reason, even from a purely selfish point of view, to dread
Hector's battling with the savage Greeks; for while he lived she was a
princess, with all the comforts of life, whereas his fall and the fall
of Troy meant her enslavement and a life of misery. What makes the
scene in question so modern is the attitude of Hector--his dividing
his caresses equally between his wife and his son, and assuring her
that he is more troubled about her fate and anguish than about what
may befall his father, mother, and brothers. That is an utterly
un-Greek sentiment, and that is the reason why the passage was not
imitated. It was not a realistic scene from life, but a mere product
of Homer's imagination and glowing genius--like the pathetic scene in
which Odysseus wipes away a tear on noting that his faithful dog Argos
recognized him and wagged his tail. It is extremely improbable that a
man who could behave so cruelly toward women as Odysseus did could
have thus sympathized with a dog.
Certainly no one else did, not even his "faithful" Penelope. As long
as Argos was useful in the chase, the poet tells us, he was well taken
care of; but now that he was old, he "lay neglected upon a pile of
dung," doomed to starve, for he had not strength to move. Homer alone,
with the prophetic insight of a genius, could have conceived such a
touch of modern sentiment toward animals, so utterly foreign to
ancient ideas; and he alone could have put such a sentiment of
wife-love into the mouth of the Trojan Hector--a barbarian whose ideal
of manliness and greatness consisted in "bringing home blood-stained
spoils of the enemy."
BARBAROUS TREATMENT OF GREEK WOMEN
It seems like a touch of sarcasm that Homer incarnates his isolated
and un-Greek ideal of devotion to a wife in a _Trojan_, as if to
indicate that it must not be accepted as a touch of _Greek_ life. From
our point of view it is a stroke of genius. On the other hand it is
obvious that attributing such a sentiment to a Trojan likewise cannot
be anything but a poetic license; for these Trojans were quite as
piratical, coarse, licentious, and polygamous as the Greeks, Hector's
own father having had fifty children, nineteen of whom were borne by
his wife, thirty-one by various concubines. Many pages of the _Iliad_
bear witness to the savage ferocity of Greeks and Trojans alike--a
ferocity utterly incompatible with such tender emotions as Homer
himself was able to conceive in his imagination. The ferocity of
Achilles is typical of the feelings of these heroes. Not content with
slaughtering an enemy who meets him in honorable battle, defending his
wife and home, he thrust thongs of ox-hide through the prostrate
Hector's feet, bound him to his chariot, lashed his horses to speed,
and dragged him about in sight of the wailing wife and parents of his
victim. This he repeated several times, aggravating the atrocity a
hundredfold by his intention--in spite of the piteous entreaties of
the dying Hector--to throw his corpse to be eaten by the dogs, thus
depriving even his spirit of rest, and his family of religious
consolation. Nay, Achilles expresses the savage wish that his rage
might lead him so far as to carve and eat raw Hector's flesh. The
Homeric "hero," in short, is almost on a level in cruelty with the red
Indian.
But it is in their treatment of women--which Gladstone commends so
highly--that the barbarous nature of the Greek "heroes" is revealed in
all its hideous nakedness. The king of their gods set them the example
when he punished his wife and queen by hanging her up amid the clouds
with two anvils suspended from her feet; clutching and throwing to the
earth any gods that came to her rescue. (_Iliad,_ XV., 15-24.) Rank
does not exempt the women of the heroic age from slavish toil.
Nausicäa, though a princess, does the work of a washerwoman and drives
her own chariot to the laundry on the banks of the river, her only
advantage over her maids being that they have to walk.[296] Her
mother, too, queen of the Phoeaceans, spends her time sitting among
the waiting maids spinning yarn, while her husband sits idle and "sips
his wine like an immortal." The women have to do all the work to make
the men comfortable, even washing their feet, giving them their bath,
anointing them, and putting their clothes on them again (_Odyssey,_
XIX., 317; VIII., 454; XVII., 88, etc.),[297] even a princess like
Polycaste, daughter of the divine Nestor, being called upon to perform
such menial service (III., 464-67). As for the serving-maids, they
grind corn, fetch water, and do other work, just like red squaws; and
in the house of Odysseus we read of a poor girl, who, while the others
were sleeping, was still toiling at her corn because her weakness had
prevented her from finishing her task (XX., 110).
Penelope was a queen, but was very far from being treated like one.
Gladstone found "the strongest evidence of the respect in which women
were held" in the fact that the suitors stopped short of violence to
her person! They did everything but that, making themselves at home in
her house, unbidden and hated guests, debauching her maidservants, and
consuming her provisions by wholesale. But her own son's attitude is
hardly less disrespectful and insulting than that of the ungallant,
impertinent suitors. He repeatedly tells his mother to mind her own
business--the loom and the distaff--leaving words for men; and each
time the poet recommends this rude, unfilial speech as a "wise saying"
which the queen humbly "lays to heart." His love of property far
exceeds his love of his mother, for as soon as he is grown up he begs
her to go home and get married again, "so troubled is he for the
substance which the suitors waste." He urges her at last to "marry
whom she will," offering as an extra inducement "countless gifts" if
she will only go.
To us it seems topsy-turvy that a mother should have to ask her son's
consent to marry again, but to the Greeks that was a matter of course.
There are many references to this custom in the Homeric poems. Girls,
too, though they be princesses, are disposed of without the least
regard to their wishes, as when Agamemnon offers Achilles the choice
of one of his three daughters (IX., 145). Big sums are sometimes paid
for a girl--by Iphidamas, for instance, who fell in battle, "far from
his bride, of whom he had known no joy, and much had he given for her;
first a hundred kine he gave, and thereafter promised a thousand,
goats and sheep together." The idea, too, occurs over and over again
that among the suitors the one who has the richest gifts to offer
should take the bride. How much this mercenary, unceremonious, and
often cruel treatment of women was a matter of course among these
Greeks is indicated by Homer's naïve epithet for brides, [Greek:
parthenoi alphesiboiai], "virgins who bring in oxen." And this is the
state of affairs which Gladstone sums up by saying "there is a certain
authority of the man over the woman; but it does not destroy freedom"!
The early Greeks were always fighting, and the object of their wars,
as among the Australian savages, was usually woman, as Achilles
frankly informs us when he speaks of having laid waste twelve cities
and passed through many bloody days of battle, "_warring with folk for
their women's sake_." (_Iliad,_ IX., 327.) Nestor admonishes the
Greeks to "let no man hasten to depart home till each have lain by
some Trojan's wife" (354-55). The leader of the Greek forces issues
this command regarding the Trojans:
"Of them let not one escape sheer estruction at our hands,
not even the man-child that the mother beareth in her womb;
let not even him escape, but all perish together out of
Ilios, uncared for and unknown" (VI., 57);
while Homer, with consummate art, paints for us the terrors of a
captured city, showing how the women--of all classes--were maltreated:
"As a woman wails and clings to her dear husband, who
falls for town and people, seeking to shield his home
and children from the ruthless day; seeing him dying,
gasping, she flings herself on him with a piercing cry;
while men behind, smiting her with the spears on back
and shoulder, force her along to bondage to suffer toil
and trouble; with pain most pitiful her cheeks are
thin...." (_Odyssey,_ VIII., 523-30.)[298]
LOVE IN SAPPHO'S POEMS
Having failed to find any traces of romantic love, and only one of
conjugal affection, in the greatest poet of the Greeks, let us now
subject their greatest poetess to a critical examination.
Sappho undoubtedly had the divine spark. She may have possibly
deserved the epithet of the "tenth Muse," bestowed on her by ancient
writers, or of "the Poetess," as Homer was "the Poet." Among the one
hundred and seventy fragments preserved some are of great beauty--the
following, for example, which is as delightful as a Japanese poem and
in much the same style--suggesting a picture in a few words, with the
distinctness of a painting:
"As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough,
the very end of the bough, which the gatherers
overlooked, nay overlooked not, but could not
reach."[299] It is otherwise in her love-poems, or
rather fragments of such, comprising the following:
"Now love masters my limbs, and shakes me, fatal
creature, bitter-sweet."
"Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain
falling on the oaks."
"Sleep thou in the bosom of thy tender girl-friend."
"Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am
by longing for a maiden, at soft Aphrodite's will."
"For thee there was no other girl, bridegroom, like
her."
"Bitter-sweet," "giver of pain," "the weaver of fictions," are some
expressions of Sappho's preserved by Maximus Tyrius; and Libanius, the
rhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying "that night
might be doubled for her." But the most important of her love-poems,
and the one on which her adulators chiefly base their praises, is the
following fragment addressed [Greek: Pros Gunaíka Eromenaen] ("to a
beloved woman"):
"That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy
presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and
lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart flutter in
my bosom. For when I see thee but a little I have no
utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and
straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with
my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat bathes me,
and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than
grass, and seem in my madness little better than one
dead. But I must dare all, since one so poor ..."
The Platonist Longinus (third century) said that this ode was "not one
passion, but a congress of passions," and declared it the most perfect
expression in all ancient literature of the effects of love. A Greek
physician is said to have copied it into his book of diagnoses "as a
compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotion." F.B. Jevons, in
his history of Greek literature (139), speaks of the "marvellous
fidelity in her representation of the passion of love." Long before
him Addison had written in the _Spectator_ (No. 223) that Sappho "felt
the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms."
Theodore Watts wrote: "Never before these songs were sung, and never
since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry
like hers." That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne,
speaks of the
"dignity of divinity, which informs the most passionate
and piteous notes of the unapproachable poetess with
such grandeur as would seem impossible to such
passion."
And J.A. Symonds assures us that "Nowhere, except, perhaps, in some
Persian or Provençal love-songs, can be found more ardent expressions
of overmastering passion."
I have read this poem a score of times, in Greek, in the Latin version
of Catullus, and in English, German, and French translations. The more
I read it and compare with it the eulogies just quoted, the more I
marvel at the power of cant and conventionality in criticism and
opinion, and at the amazing current ignorance in regard to the
psychology of love and of the emotions in general. I have made a long
and minute study of the symptoms of love, in myself and in others; I
have found that the torments of doubt and the loss of sleep may make a
lover "paler than grass"; that his heart is apt to "flutter in his
bosom," and his tongue to be embarrassed in presence of the beloved;
but when Sappho speaks of a lover bathed in sweat, of becoming blind,
deaf, and dumb, trembling all over, and little better than one dead,
she indulges in exaggeration which is neither true to life nor poetic.
An amusing experiment may be made with reference to this famous poem.
Suppose you say to a friend:
"A woman was walking in the woods when she saw
something that made her turn pale as a sheet; her heart
fluttered, her ears rang, her tongue was paralyzed, a
cold sweat covered her, she trembled all over and
looked as if she would faint and die: what did she
see?"
The chances are ten to one that your friend will answer "a bear!" In
truth, Sappho's famous "symptoms of love" are laughably like the
symptoms of fear which we find described in the books of Bain, Darwin,
Mosso, and others--"a cold sweat," "deadly pallor," "voice becoming
husky or failing altogether," "heart beating violently," "dizziness
which will blind him," "trembling of all the muscles of the body," "a
fainting fit." Nor is fear the only emotion that can produce these
symptoms. Almost any strong passion, anger, extreme agony or joy, may
cause them; so that what Sappho described was not love in particular,
but the physiologic effects of violent emotions in general. I am glad
that the Greek physician who copied her poem into his book of
diagnoses is not my family doctor.
Sappho's love-poems are not psychologic but purely physiologic. Of the
imaginative, sentimental, esthetic, moral, altruistic, sympathetic,
affectional symptoms of what we know as romantic love they do not give
us the faintest hint. Hegel remarked truly that "in the odes of Sappho
the language of love rises indeed to the point of lyrical inspiration,
yet what she reveals is rather the slow consuming flame of the blood
than the inwardness of the subjective heart and soul." Nor was Byron
deceived: "I don't think Sappho's ode a good example." The historian
Bender had an inkling of the truth when he wrote (183):
"To us who are accustomed to spiritualized love-lyrics after
the style of Geibel's this erotic song of Sappho may seem
too glowing, too violent; but we must not forget that love
was conceived by the Greeks altogether in a less spiritual
manner than we demand that it should be."
That is it precisely. These Greek love-poems do not depict romantic
love but sensual passion. Nor is this the worst of it. Sappho's
absurdly overrated love-poems are not even good descriptions of normal
sensual passion. I have just said that they are purely physiologic;
but that is too much praise for them. The word physiologic implies
something healthy and normal, but Sappho's poems are not healthy and
normal; they are abnormal, they are pathologic. Had they been written
by a man, this would not be the case; but Sappho was a woman, and her
famous ode is addressed to a woman. A woman, too, is referred to in
her famous hymn to Venus in these lines, as translated by Wharton:
"What beauty now wouldst thou draw to love thee? Who
wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if she flies, she shall
soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give,
and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth."
In the five fragments above quoted there are also two at least which
refer to girls. Now I have not the slightest desire to discuss the
moral character of Sappho or the vices of her Lesbian countrywomen.
She had a bad reputation among the Romans as well as the Greeks, and
it is a fact that in the year 1073 her poems were burnt at Rome and
Constantinople, "as being," in the words of Professor Gilbert Murray,
"too much for the shaky morals of the time." Another recent writer,
Professor Peck of Columbia University, says that
"it is difficult to read the fragments which remain of her
verse without being forced to come to the conclusion that a
woman who could write such poetry could not be the pure
woman that her modern apologists would have her."
The following lament alone would prove this:
[Greek:
Deduke men a Selana
kai Plaeiades, mesai de
nuktes, para d' erxet ora
ego de mona katheudo.]
MASCULINE MINDS IN FEMALE BODIES
Several books and many articles have been written on this topic,[300]
but the writers seem to have overlooked the fact that in the light of
the researches of Krafft-Ebing and Moll it is possible to vindicate
the character of Sappho without ignoring the fact that her passionate
erotic poems are addressed to women. These alienists have shown that
the abnormal state of a masculine mind inhabiting a female body, or
_vice versa_, is surprisingly common in all parts of the world. They
look on it, with the best of reasons, as a diseased condition, which
does not necessarily, in persons of high principles, lead to vicious
and unnatural practices. In every country there are thousands of girls
who, from childhood, would rather climb trees and fences and play
soldiers with the boys than fondle dolls or play with the other girls.
When they get older they prefer tobacco to candy; they love to
masquerade in men's clothes, and when they hear of a girl's
love-affair they cannot understand what pleasure there can be in
dancing with a man or kissing him, while they themselves may long to
kiss a girl, nay, in numerous cases, to marry her.[301] Many such
marriages are made between women whose brains and bodies are of
different sexes, and their love-affairs are often characterized by
violent jealousy and other symptoms of intersexual passion. Not a few
prominent persons have been innocent victims of this distressing
disease; it is well-known what strange masculine proclivities several
eminent female novelists and artists have shown; and whenever a woman
shows great creative power or polemic aggressiveness the chances are
that her brain is of the masculine type. It is therefore quite
possible that Sappho may have been personally a pure woman, her mental
masculinity ("mascula Sappho" Horace calls her) being her misfortune,
not her fault. But even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and
take for granted that she had enough character to resist the abnormal
impulses and passions which she describes in her poems, and which the
Greeks easily pardoned and even praised, we cannot and must not
overlook the fact that these poems are the result of a diseased
brain-centre, and that what they describe is not love, but a phase of
erotic pathology. Normal sexual appetite is as natural a passion as
the hunger for food; it is simply a hunger to perpetuate the species,
and without it the world would soon come to an end; but Sapphic
passion is a disease which luckily cannot become epidemic because it
cannot perpetuate itself, but must always remain a freak.[302]
ANACREON AND OTHERS
There is considerable uncertainty regarding the dates of the earliest
Greek poets. By dint of ingenious conjectures and combinations
philologists have reached the conclusion that the Homeric poems, with
their interpolations, originated between the dates 850 and 720
B.C.--say 2700 years ago. Hesiod probably flourished near the end of
the seventh century, to which Archilochus and Alcman belong, while in
the sixth and fifth centuries a number of names appear--little more
than names, it is true, since of most of them fragments only have come
down to us--Alcaeus, Mimnermus, Theognis, Sappho, Stesichorus,
Anacreon, Ibycus, Bacchylides, Pindar, and others. Best known of all
these, as a poet of love, is Anacreon, though in his case no one has
been so foolish as to claim that the love described in his poems (or
those of his imitators) is ever supersensual. Professor Anthon has
aptly characterized him as "an amusing voluptuary and an elegant
profligate," and Hegel pointed out the superficiality of Anacreontic
love, in which there is no conception of the tremendous importance to
a lover of having this or that particular girl and no other, or what I
have called individual preference. Benecke puts this graphically when
he remarks (25) regarding Mimnermus: "'What is life without love?' he
says; he does not say, 'What is life without your love?'" Even in
Sappho, I may add here, in spite of the seeming violence of her
passion, this quality of individual preference is really lacking or
weak, for she is constantly transferring her attention from one girl
to another. And as Sappho's poems are addressed to girls, so are
Anacreon's and those of the other poets named, to boys, in most cases.
The following, preserved by Athenaeus (XIII., 564D), is a good
specimen:
[Greek:
"O pai parthenion blepon,
dixemai se, su d' ou koeis,
ouk eidos hoti taes emaes
psuchaes haeniocheueis."]
Such a poem, even if addressed properly, would indicate nothing more
than simple admiration and a longing which is specified in the
following:
[Greek:
Alla propine
radinous, o phile, maerous.]
It would hardly be worth while, even if the limitations of space
permitted, to subject the fragments of the other poets of this period
to analysis. The reader has the key in his hands now--the altruistic
and supersensual ingredients of love pointed out in this volume; and
if he can find those ingredients in any of these poems, he will be
luckier than I have been. We may therefore pass on to the great tragic
poets of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.
WOMAN AND LOVE IN AESCHYLUS
In the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes, Aeschylus is made to declare that he
had never introduced a woman in love into any of his plays--[Greek:
ouk oid' oudeis haentin erosan popt' epoiaesa gunaika]. He certainly
has not done so in any one of the seven plays which have survived of
the ninety that he wrote, according to Suidas; and Aristophanes would
not have put that expression in his mouth had it not been true of the
others, too. To us it seems extraordinary that an author should boast
of having kept out of his writings the element which constitutes the
greatest fascination of modern literature; but after reading his seven
surviving tragedies we do not wonder that Aeschylus should not have
introduced a woman in love, or a man either, in plays wherewith he
competed for the state prize on the solemn occasions of the great
festivals at Athens; for love of an exalted kind, worthy of such an
occasion, could not have existed in a community where such ideas
prevailed about women as Aeschylus unfolds in the few places where he
condescends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of sexual
love of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in the
remarks of Prometheus and Io regarding the designs of Zeus on the
latter.
An apparent exception seems at first sight to exist in the cordial
reception Clytaemnestra accords to her husband, King Agamemnon, when
he returns from the Trojan war. She calls the day of his return the
most joyous of her life, asserts her complete fidelity to him during
his long absence, declares she is not ashamed to tell her fond
feelings for her spouse in public, and adds that she has wept for him
till the gushing fountains of her eyes have been exhausted. Indeed,
she goes so far in her homage that Agamemnon protests and exclaims,
"Pamper me not after the fashion of women, nor as though I were a
barbaric monarch.... I bid thee reverence me as a man, not a god." But
ere long we discover (as in the case of Achilles), that all this fine
talk of Clytaemnestra is mere verbiage, and worse--deadly hypocrisy.
In reality she has been living with a paramour, and the genuineness
and intensity of her "fond feelings" for her husband may be inferred
from the fact that hardly has he returned when she makes a murderous
assault on him by throwing an artfully woven circular garment over
him, while he is taking a bath, and smiting him till he falls dead.
"And I glory in the deed" she afterwards declares, adding that it "has
long since been meditated."
Agamemnon, for his part, not only brought back with him from Troy a
new concubine, Cassandra, and installed her in his home with the usual
Greek indifference to the feelings of his legitimate wife, but he
really was no better than his murderous wife, since he had been
willing to kill her daughter and his own, Iphigenia, to please his
brother, curb a storm, and expedite the Trojan war. In the words of
the Chorus,
"Thus he dared to become the sacrificer of his daughter
to promote a war undertaken for the avenging of a
woman, and as a first offering for the fleet: and the
chieftains, eager for the fight, set at naught her
supplications and her cries to her father, and her
maiden age. But after prayer her father bade the
ministering priests with all zeal, to lift, like a kid,
high above the altar, her who lay prostrate wrapped in
her robes, and to put a check upon her beauteous mouth,
a voice of curses upon the house, by force of muzzles
and strength which allowed no vent to her cry."
The barbarous sacrifice of an innocent maiden is of course a myth, but
it is a myth which doubtless had many counterparts in Greek life.
Aeschylus did not live so very long after Homer, and in his age it was
still a favorite pastime of the Greeks to ravage cities, a process of
which Aeschylus gives us a vivid picture in a few lines, in his _Seven
against Thebes_:
"And for its women to be dragged away captives, alas!
alas! both the young and the aged, like horses by their
hair, while their vestments are rent about their
persons. And the emptied city cries aloud, while its
booty is wasted amid confused clamors.... And the cries
of children at the breast all bloody resound, and there
is rapine, sister of pell-mell confusion ... And young
female slaves have new sorrows ... so that they hope
for life's gloomy close to come, a guardian against
these all-mournful sorrows."
For women of rank alone is there any consideration--so long as they
are not among the captives; yet even queens are not honored as women,
but only as queens, that is, as the mothers or wives of kings. In _The
Persians_ the Chorus salutes Atossa in terms every one of which
emphasizes this point: "O queen, supreme of Persia's deep-waisted
matrons, aged mother of Xerxes, hail to thee! spouse to Darius,
consort of the Persians, god and mother of a god thou art," while
Clytaemnestra is saluted by the chorus in _Agamemnon_ in these words:
"I have came revering thy majesty, Clytaemnestra; for it is right to
honor the consort of a chieftain hero, when the monarch's throne has
been left empty."
We read in these plays of such unsympathetic things as a
"man-detesting host of Amazons;" of fifty virgins fleeing from
incestuous wedlock and all but one of them cutting their husbands'
throats at night with a sword; of the folly of marrying out of one's
own rank. In all Aeschylus there is on the other hand only one
noticeable reference to a genuine womanly quality--the injunction of
Danaus to his daughters to honor modesty more than life while they are
travelling among covetous men; an admonition much needed, since, as
Danaus adds--characterizing the coarseness and lack of chivalry of the
men--violence is sure to threaten them everywhere, "and on the
fair-formed beauty of virgins everyone that passes by sends forth a
melting dart from his eyes, overcome by desire." Masculine coarseness
and lack of chivalry are also revealed in such abuse of woman as
Aeschylus--in the favorite Greek manner, puts in the mouth of
Eteocles:
"O ye abominations of the wise. Neither in woes nor in
welcome prosperity may I be associated with woman-kind;
for when woman prevails, her audacity is more than one
can live with; and when affrighted she is still a
greater mischief to her home and city."
WOMAN AND LOVE IN SOPHOCLES
Unlike his predecessor, Sophocles did not hesitate, it seems, to bring
"a woman in love" on the stage. Not, it is true, in any one of the
seven plays which alone remain of the one hundred and twenty-three he
is said to have written. But there are in existence some fragments of
his _Phaedra_, which Rohde (31) and others are inclined to look on as
the "first tragedy of love." It has, however, nothing to do with what
we know as either romantic or conjugal love, but is simply the story
of the adulterous and incestuous infatuation of Phaedra for her
stepson Hippolytus. It is at the same time one of the many stories
illustrating the whimsical, hypocritical, and unchivalrous attitude of
the early Greeks of always making woman the sinful aggressor and
representing man as being coyly reserved (see Rohde, 34-35). The
infatuation of Phaedra is correctly described (_fr_., 611, 607 Dind.)
as a [Greek: Theaelatos nosos]--a maddening disease inflicted by an
angry goddess.
Among the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles there are three which
throw some light on the contemporary attitude toward women and the
different kinds of domestic attachment--the _Ajax_, the _Trachiniae_
and _Antigone_. When Ajax, having disgraced himself by slaughtering a
flock of sheep and cattle in the mad delusion that they were his
enemies, wishes he might die, Tecmessa, his concubine, declares, "Then
pray for my death, too, for why should I live if you are dead?" She
has, however, plenty of egotistic reasons for dreading his death, for
she knows that her fate will be slavery. Moreover, instead of being
edified by her expression of attachment, we are repelled when we bear
in mind that Ajax slew her father when he made her his concubine. The
Greeks were too indelicate in their ideas about concubines to be
disturbed by such a reflection. Nor were they affected disagreeably by
the utter indifference toward his concubine which Ajax displays. He
tells her to attend to her own affairs and remember that silence is a
woman's greatest charm, and before committing suicide he utters a
monologue in which he says farewell to his parents and to his country,
but has no last message for Tecmessa. She was only a woman, forsooth.
Only a woman, too, was Deianira, the heroine of the _Trachiniae_, and
though of exalted rank she fully realized this fact. When Hercules
first took her to Tiryns, he was still sufficiently interested in her
to shoot a hydra-poisoned arrow into the centaur Nessus, who attempted
to assault her while carrying her across the river Evenus. But after
she had borne him several children he neglected her, going off on
adventures to capture other women. She weeps because of his absence,
complaining that for fifteen months she has had no message from him.
At last information is brought to her that Hercules, inflamed with
violent love for the Princess Iole, had demanded her for a secret
union, and when the king refused, had ravaged his city and carried off
Iole, to be unto him more than a slave, as the messenger gives her to
understand distinctly. On receiving this message; Deianira is at first
greatly agitated, but soon remembers what the duty of a Greek wife is.
"I am well aware," she says in substance, "that we cannot expect a man
to be always content with one woman. To antagonize the god of love, or
to blame my husband for succumbing to him, would be foolish. After
all, what does it amount to? Has not Hercules done this sort of thing
many times before? Have I ever been angry with him for so often
succumbing to this malady? His concubines, too, have never received an
unkind word from me, nor shall Iole; for I freely confess, resentment
does not become a woman. Yet I am distressed, for I am old and Iole is
young, and she will hereafter be his actual wife in place of me." At
this thought jealousy sharpens her wit and she remembers that the
dying centaur had advised her to save some of his blood and, if ever
occasion should come for her to wish to bring back her husband's love,
to anoint his garment with it. She does so, and sends it to him,
without knowing that its effect will be to slowly burn the flesh off
his body. Hearing of the deadly effect of her gift, she commits
suicide, while Hercules spends the few remaining hours of his life
cursing her who murdered him, "the best of all men," and wishing she
were suffering in his place or that he might mutilate her body. Nor
was his latest and "violent love" for Iole more than a passing
appetite quickly appeased; for at the end he asks his son to marry
her!
This drama admirably illustrates the selfish view of the marital
relation entertained by Greek men. Its moral may be summed up in this
advice to a wife:
"If your husband falls in love with a younger woman and
brings her home, let him, for he is a victim of Cupid
and cannot help it. Display no jealousy, and do not
even try to win back his love, for that might annoy him
or cause mischief."
In other words, _The Trachiniae_ is an object-lesson to Greek wives,
telling us what the men thought they ought to be. Probably some of the
wives tried to live up to that ideal; but that could hardly be
accepted as genuine, spontaneous devotion deserving the name of
affection. Most famous among all the tragedies of the Greeks, and
deservedly so, is the _Antigone_. Its plot can be told in such a way
as to make it seem a romantic love-story, if not a story of romantic
love. Creon, King of Thebes, has ordered, under penalty of death, that
no one shall bestow the rites of burial on Prince Polynices, who has
fallen after bearing arms against his own country. Antigone, sister of
Polynices, resolves to disobey this cruel order, and having failed to
persuade her sister, Ismene, to aid her, carries out her plan alone.
Boldly visiting the place where the body is exposed to the dogs and
vultures, she sprinkles dust on it and pours out libations, repeating
the process the next day on finding that the guards had meanwhile
undone her work. This time she is apprehended in the act and brought
before the king, who condemns her to be immured alive in a tomb,
though she is betrothed to his son Haemon. "Would you murder the bride
of your own son?" asks Ismene; but the king replies that there are
many other women in the world. Haemon now appears and tries to move
his father to mercy, but in vain, though he threatens to slay himself
if his bride is killed. Antigone is immured, but at last, moved by the
advice of the Chorus and the dire predictions of the seer Tiresias,
Creon changes his mind and hastens with men and tools to liberate the
virgin. When he arrives at the tomb he sees his son in it, clinging to
the corpse of Antigone, who had hanged herself. Horrified, the king
begs his son to come out of the tomb, but Haemon seizes his sword and
rushes forward to slay his father. The king escapes the danger by
flight, whereupon Haemon thrusts the sword into his own body, and
expires, clasping the corpse of his bride.
If we thus make Haemon practically the central figure of the tragedy,
it resembles a romantic love-story; but in reality Haemon is little
more than an episode. He has a quarrel with his father (who goes so
far as to threaten to kill his bride in his presence), rushes off in a
rage, and the tomb scene is not enacted, but merely related by a
messenger, in forty lines out of a total of thirteen hundred and
fifty. Much less still have we here a story of romantic love. Not one
of the fourteen ingredients of love can be found in it except
self-sacrifice, and that not of the right kind. I need not explain
once more that suicide from grief over a lost bride does not benefit
that bride; that it is not altruistic, but selfish, unmanly, and
cowardly, and is therefore no test whatever of love. Moreover, if we
examine the dialogue in detail we see that the motive of Haemon's
suicide is not even grief over his lost bride, but rage at his father.
When on first confronting Creon, he is thus accosted: "Have you heard
the sentence pronounced on your bride?" He answers meekly: "I have, my
father, and I yield to your superior wisdom, which no marriage can
equal in excellence;" and it is only gradually that his ire is aroused
by his father's abusive attitude; while at the end his first intention
was to slay his father, not himself. Had Sophocles understood love as
we understand it, he would have represented Haemon as drawing his
sword at once and moving heaven and earth to prevent his bride from
being buried alive.
But it is in examining the attitude of Antigone that we realize most
vividly how short this drama falls of being a love-story. She never
even mentions Haemon, has no thought of him, but is entirely absorbed
in the idea of benefiting the spirit of her dead brother by performing
the forbidden funeral rites. As if to remove all doubt on that point,
she furthermore tells us explicitly (lines 904-912) that she would
have never done such a deed, in defiance of the law, to save a husband
or a child, but only for a brother; and why? because she might easily
find another husband, and have new children by him, but another
brother she could never have, as her parents were dead.[303]
WOMAN AND LOVE IN EURIPIDES
Of Euripides it cannot be said, as of his two great predecessors, that
woman plays an insignificant rôle in his dramas. Most of the nineteen
plays which have come down to us of the ninety-two he wrote are named
after women; and Bulwer-Lytton was quite right when he declared that
"he is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us
_intellectually_ in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes."
But I cannot agree with him when he says that with Euripides commences
"the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment."
There is true sentiment in Euripides, as there is in Sophocles, in the
relations between parents and children, friends, brothers and sisters;
but in the attitude of lovers, or of husband and wife, there is only
sensuality or at most sentimentality; and this sentimentality, or sham
sentiment, does not begin with Euripides, for we have found instances
of it in the fond words of Clytaemnestra regarding the husband she
intended to murder, and did murder, and even in the Homeric Achilles,
whose fine words regarding conjugal love contrast so ludicrously with
his unloving actions. These, however, are mere episodes, while
Euripides has written a whole play which from beginning to end is an
exposition of sentimentality.
The Fates had granted that when the Thessalian King Admetus approached
the ordained end of his life it should be prolonged if another person
voluntarily consented to die in his place. His aged parents had no
heart to "plunge into the darkness of the tomb" for his sake. "It is
not the custom in Greece for fathers to die for children," his father
informs him; while Adinetus indulges in coarse abuse: "By heaven, thou
art the very pattern of cowards, who at thy age, on the borderland of
life, would'st not, nay, could'st not find the heart to die for thy
own son; but ye, my parents, left to this stranger, whom henceforth I
shall justly hold e'en as mother and as father too, and none but her."
This "stranger" is his wife Alcestis, who has volunteered to die for
him, exclaiming:
"Thee I set before myself, and instead of living have
ensured thy life, and so I die, though I need not have died
for thee, but might have taken for my husband whom I would
of the Thessalians, and have had a home blest with royal
power; reft of thee, with my children orphans, I cared not
to live."
The world has naïvely accepted this speech and the sacrifice of
Alcestis as belonging to the region of sentiment; but in reality it is
nothing more than one of those stories shrewdly invented by selfish
men to teach women that the object of their existence is to sacrifice
themselves for their husbands. The king's father tells us this in so
many words: "By the generous deed she dared, hath she made her life _a
noble example for all her sex_;" adding that "such marriages I declare
are gain to man, else to wed is not worth while." If these stories,
like those manufactured by the Hindoos, were an indication of existing
conjugal sentiment, would it be possible that the self-sacrifice was
invariably on the woman's side? Adinetus would have never dreamt of
sacrificing _his_ life for his wife. He is not even ashamed to have
her die for him. It is true that he has one moment when he fancies his
foe deriding him thus:
"Behold him living in his shame, a wretch who quailed at
death himself, but of his coward heart gave up his wedded
wife instead, and escaped from Hades; doth he deem himself a
man after that?"
It is true also that his father taunts him contemptuously,
"Dost thou then speak of cowardice in me, thou craven
heart!... A clever scheme hast thou devised to stave off
death forever, if thou canst persuade each new wife to die
instead of thee."
Yet Admetus is constantly assuring everyone of his undying attachment
to his wife. He holds her in his arms, imploring her not to leave him.
"If thou die," he exclaims,
"I can no longer live; my life, my death, are in thy hands; thy
love is what I worship.... Not a year only, but all my life will
I mourn for thee.... In my bed thy figure shall be laid full
length, by cunning artists fashioned; thereon will I throw myself
and, folding my arms about thee, call upon thy name, and think I
hold my dear wife in my embrace.... Take me, O take me, I
beseech, with thee 'neath the earth;"
and so on, _ad nauseam_--a sickening display of sentimentality,
_i.e._, fond words belied by cowardly, selfish actions.
The father-in-law of Alcestis, in his indignation at his son's
impertinence and lack of filial pity, exclaims that what made Alcestis
sacrifice herself was "want of sense;" which is quite true. But in
painting such a character, Euripides's chief motive appears to have
been to please his audience by enforcing a maxim which the Greeks
shared with the Hindoos and barbarians that "a woman, though bestowed
upon a worthless husband, must be content with him." These words are
actually put by him into the mouth of Andromache in the play of that
name. Andromache, once the wife of the Trojan Hector, now the
concubine of Achilles's son, is made to declare to the Chorus that "it
is not beauty but virtuous acts that win a husband's heart;" whereupon
she proceeds to spoil this fine maxim by explaining what the Greeks
understood by "virtuous acts" in a wife--namely, subordinating herself
even to a "worthless husband." "Suppose," she continues, "thou hadst
wedded a prince of Thrace... where one lord shares his affections with
a host of wives, would'st thou have slain them? If so, thou would'st
have set a stigma of insatiate lust on all our sex." And she proceeds
to relate how she herself paid no heed in Troy to Hector's amours with
other women: "Oft in days gone by I held thy bastard babes to my own
breast, to spare thee any cause for grief. By this course I bound my
husband to me by virtue's chains." To spare _him_ annoyance, no matter
how much his conduct might grieve _her_--that was the Greek idea of
conjugal devotion--all on one side. And how like the Hindoos, and
Orientals, and barbarians in general, is the Greek seen to be in the
remarks made by Hermione, the legitimate wife, to Andromache, the
concubine--accusing the latter of having by means of witchcraft made
her barren and thus caused her husband to hate her.
With the subtle ingenuity of masculine selfishness the Greek dramatist
doubles the force of all his fine talk about the "virtuous acts" of
wives by representing the women themselves as uttering these maxims
and admitting that their function is self-denial--that woman is
altogether an inferior and contemptible being. "How strange it is,"
exclaims Andromache,
"that, though some god has devised cures for mortals against
the venom of reptiles, no man ever yet hath discovered aught
to cure a woman's venom, which is far worse than viper's
sting or scorching flame; so terrible a curse are we to
mankind."
Hermione declares:
"Oh! never, never--this truth will I repeat--should men
of sense, who have wives, allow women-folks to visit
them in their homes, for they teach them mischief; one,
to gain some private end, helps to corrupt their honor;
another having made a slip herself, wants a companion
in misfortune, while many are wantons; and hence it is
men's houses are tainted. Wherefore keep strict guard
upon the portals of your houses with bolts and bars."
Bolts and bars were what the gallant Greek men kept their wives under,
hence this custom too is here slyly justified out of a woman's mouth.
And thus it goes on throughout the pages of Euripides. Iphigenia, in
one of the two plays devoted to her, declares: "Not that I shrink from
death, if die I must,--when I have saved thee; no, indeed! for a man's
loss from his family is felt, while a woman's is of little moment." In
the other she declares that one man is worth a myriad of
Women--[Greek: heis g' anaer kreisson gunaikon murion]--wherefore, as
soon as she realizes the situation at Aulis, she expresses her
willingness to be immolated on the altar in order that the war against
Troy may no longer be delayed by adverse minds. She had, however, come
for a very different purpose, having been, with her queen mother,
inveigled from home under the pretext that Achilles was to make her
his wife. Achilles, however, knew as little of the plot as she did,
and he is much surprised when the queen refers to his impending
marriage. A modern poet would have seen here a splendid, seemingly
inevitable, opportunity for a story of romantic love. He would have
made Achilles fall in love at sight of Iphigenia and resolve to save
her life, if need be at the cost of his own. What use does Euripides
make of this opportunity? In his play Achilles does not see the girl
till toward the close of the tragedy. He promises her unhappy mother
that "never shall thy daughter, after being once called my bride, die
by her father's hand;" But his reason for this is not love for a girl
or a chivalrous attitude toward women in distress, but offended
vanity. "It is not to secure a bride that I have spoken thus," he
exclaims; "there be maids unnumbered, eager to have my love--no! but
King Agamemnon has put an insult on me; he should have asked my leave
to use my name as a means to catch the child." In that case he "would
never have refused" to further his fellow-soldiers' common interest by
allowing the maiden to be sacrificed.
It is true that after Iphigenia has made her brave speech declaring
that a woman's life was of no account anyway, and that she had
resolved to die voluntarily for the army's sake, Achilles assumes a
different attitude, declaring,
"Some god was bent on blessing me, could I but have won
thee for my wife.... But now that I have looked into
thy noble nature, I feel still more a fond desire to
win thee for my bride,"
and promising to protect her against the whole army. But what was it
in Iphigenia that thus aroused his admiration? A feminine trait, such
as would impress a modern romantic lover? Not in the least. He admired
her because, like a man, she offered to lay down her life in behalf of
the manly virtue of patriotism. Greek men admired women only in so far
as they resembled men; a truth to which I shall recur on another page.
It would be foolish to chide Euripides for not making of this tragedy
a story of romantic love; he was a Greek and could not lift himself
above his times by a miracle. To him, as to all his contemporaries,
love was not a sentiment, "an illumination of the senses by the soul,"
an impulse to noble actions, but a common appetite, apt to become a
species of madness, a disease. His _Hippolytus_ is a study of this
disease, unpleasant but striking; it has for its subject the lawless
pathologic love of Phædra for her step-son. She is "seized with wild
desire;" she "pines away in silence, moaning beneath love's cruel
scourge;" she "wastes away on a bed of sickness;" denies herself all
food, eager to reach death's cheerless bourn; a canker wastes her
fading charms; she is "stricken by some demon's curse;" from her eyes
the tear-drops stream, and for very shame she turns them away; on her
soul "there rests a stain;" she knows that to yield to her "sickly
passion" would be "infamous;" yet she cannot suppress her wanton
thoughts. Following the topsy-turvy, unchivalrous custom of the Greek
poets, Euripides makes a woman--"a thing the world detests"--the
victim of this mad passion, opposing to it the coy resistance of a
man, a devotee of the chaste Diana. And at the end he makes Phaedra,
before committing suicide, write an infamous letter which, to save her
reputation, dooms to a cruel death the innocent victim of her
infatuation.
To us, this last touch alone would demonstrate the worldwide
difference between lust and love. But Euripides knows no such
difference. To him there is only one kind of love, and it varies only
in being moderate in some cases, excessive in others. Love is "at once
the sweetest and the bitterest thing," according as it is one or the
other of the two. Phaedra's nurse deplores her passion, chiefly
because of its violence. The chorus in _Medea_ (627 _seqq_.) sings:
"When in excess and past all limits Love doth come, he
brings not glory or repute to man; but if the Cyprian
queen in moderate might approach, no goddess is so full
of charm as she."
And in _Iphigenia at Aulis_ the chorus declares:
"Happy they who find the goddess come in moderate might,
sharing with self-restraint in Aphrodite's gift of marriage
and enjoying calm and rest from frenzied passions.... Be
mine delight in moderate and hallowed [Greek: hosioi]
desires, and may I have a share in love, but shun excess
therein."
To Euripides, as to all the Greeks, there is no difference in the
loves of gods and goddesses or kings and queens on the one hand, and
the lowest animals on the other. As the chorus sings in _Hippolytus_:
"O'er the land and booming deep, on golden pinion
borne, flits the god of love, maddening the heart and
beguiling the senses of all whom he attacks, savage
whelps on mountains bred, ocean's monsters, creatures
of this sun-warmed earth, and man; thine, O Cypris,
thine alone, the sovereign power to rule them
all."[304]
ROMANTIC LOVE, GREEK STYLE
The Greeks, instead of confuting my theory that romantic love is the
last product of civilization, afford the most striking confirmation of
it. While considering the love-affairs of Africans, Australians, and
other uncivilized peoples, we were dealing with races whose lack of
intelligence and delicacy in general made it natural to expect that
their love, too, must be wanting in psychic qualities and refinement.
But the Greeks were of a different calibre. Not only their men of
affairs--generals and statesmen--but their men of thought and
feeling--philosophers and poets--were among the greatest the world has
ever seen; yet these philosophers and poets--who, as everywhere, _must
have been far above the emotional level of their countrymen in
general_--knew nothing of romantic love. What makes this the more
remarkable is that, so far as their minds were concerned, they were
quite capable of experiencing such a feeling. Indeed, they were
actually familiar with the psychic and altruistic ingredients of love;
sympathy, devotion, self-sacrifice, affection, are sometimes
manifested in their dramas and stories when dealing with the love
between parents and children, brothers and sisters, or pairs of
friends like Orestes and Pylades. And strangest of all, they actually
had a kind of romantic love, which, except for one circumstance, is
much like modern romantic love.
Euripides knew this kind of romantic love. Among the fragments that
remain to us of his lost tragedies is one from _Dictys_, in which
occurs this sentiment:
"He was my friend, and never did love lead me to folly
or to Cypris. Yes, there is another kind of love, love
for the soul, honorable, continent, and good. Surely
men should have passed a law that only the chaste and
self-contained should love, and Cypris [Venus] should
have been banished."
Now it is very interesting to note that Euripides was a friend of
Socrates, who often declared that his philosophy was the science of
love, and whose two pupils, Xenophon and Plato, elucidated this
science in several of their works. In Xenophon's _Symposium_
Critobulus declares that he would rather be blind to everything else
in the world than not to see his beloved; that he would rather _give_
all he had to the beloved than _receive_ twice the amount from
another; rather be the beloved's slave than free alone; rather work
and dare for the beloved than live alone in ease and security. For, he
continues, the enthusiasm which beauty inspires in lovers
"makes them more generous, more eager to exert
themselves, and more ambitious to overcome dangers,
nay, it makes them purer and more continent, causing
them to avoid even that to which the strongest appetite
urges them."
Several of Plato's dialogues, especially the _Symposium_ and
_Phaedrus_, also bear witness to the fact that the Socratic conception
of love resembled modern romantic love in its ideal of purity and its
altruistic impulses. Especially notable in this respect are the
speeches of Phaedrus and Pausanius in the _Symposium_ (175-78), in
which love is declared to be the source of the greatest benefits to
us. There can be no greater blessing to a young person, we read, than
a virtuous lover. Such a lover would rather die a thousand deaths than
do a cowardly or dishonorable deed; and love would make an inspired
hero out of the veriest coward. "Love will make men dare to die for
the beloved--love alone." "The actions of a lover have a grace which
ennobles them." "From this point of view a man fairly argues that in
Athens to love and be loved is a very honorable thing." "There is a
dishonor in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth, or of
political power." "For when the lover and beloved come together ...
the lover thinks that he is right in doing any service which he can to
his gracious loving one." And in the _Republic_ (VI., 485): "He whose
nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs or
is akin to the object of his affections."[305]
All this, as I have said, suggests romantic love, except for one
circumstance--a fatal one, however. Modern romantic love is an
ecstatic adoration of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman, whereas
the romantic love described by Xenophon and Plato--so-called "Platonic
love"--has nothing whatever to do with women. It is a passionate,
romantic friendship between men and boys, which (whether it really
existed or not) the pupils of Socrates dilate upon as the only noble,
exalted form of the passion that is presided over by Eros. On this
point they are absolutely explicit. Of course it would not do for a
Greek philosopher to deny that a woman may perform the noble act of
sacrificing her life for her husband--_that_ is her ideal function, as
we have seen--so Alcestis is praised and rewarded for giving up her
life; yet Plato tells us distinctly (_Symp_., 180) that this phase of
feminine love is, after all, inferior to that which led Achilles to
give his life for the purpose of avenging the death of his friend
Patroclus.[306] What chiefly distinguishes the higher love from the
lower is, in the opinion of the pupils of Socrates, purity; and this
kind of love does not exist, in their opinion, between men and women.
In discussing this higher kind of love both Plato and Xenophon
consistently and persistently ignore women, and not only do they
ignore them, but they deliberately distinguish between two goddesses
of love, one of whom, the celestial, presides--not over refined love
between men and women, as we would say--but over the friendships
between men only, while the feelings toward women are always inspired
by the common goddess of sensual love. In Plato's _Symposium_ (181)
this point is made clear by Pausanias:
"The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite
is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being
such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be
of women as well as of youths, and is of the body
rather than of the soul.... But the offspring of the
heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose
birth the female has no part,--she is from the male
only; this is that love which is of youths, and the
goddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in
her."
PLATONIC LOVE OF WOMEN
In thus excluding women from the sphere of pure, super-sensual
romantic love, Plato shows himself a Greek to the marrow. In the Greek
view, to be a woman was to be inferior to man from every point of
view--even personal beauty. Plato's writings abound in passages which
reveal his lofty contempt for women. In the _Laws_ (VI., 781) he
declares that "women are accustomed to creep into dark places, and
when dragged out into the light they will exert their utmost powers of
resistance, and be far too much for the legislator." While unfolding,
in _Timaeus_ (91), his theory of the creation of man, he says
gallantly that "of the men who came into the world, those who were
cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have
changed into the nature of women in the second generation;" and on
another page (42) he puts the same idea even more insultingly by
writing that the man
"who lived well during his appointed time was to return
and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a
blessed existence. But if he failed in attaining this,
at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if,
when in that state of being, he did not desist from
evil, he would continually be changed into some brute
who resembled him in the evil nature which he had
acquired."
In other words, in Plato's mind a woman ranks half-way between a man
and a brute. "Woman's nature," he says, "is inferior to that of men in
capacity for virtue" (_Laws_, VI., 781); and his idea of ennobling a
woman consists in making her resemble a man, giving her the same
education, the same training in athletics and warlike exercises, in
wrestling naked with each other, even though the old and ugly would be
laughed at (_Republic_, Bk. V.). Fathers, sons, mothers, daughters,
will, in his ideal republic, go to war together.
"Let a man go out to war from twenty to sixty years,
and for a woman if there appear any need of making use
of her in military service, let the time of service be
after she shall have brought forth children up to fifty
years of age" (_Laws_, VI., 785).
Having thus abolished woman, except as a breeder of sons, Plato
proceeds to eliminate marriage and morality. "The brave man is to have
more wives than others, and he is to have first choice in such matters
more than others" (_Republic_, V., 468). All wives, however, must be
in common, no man having a monopoly of a woman. Nor must there be any
choice or preference for individuals. The mothers are to be arranged
by officials, who will see that the good pair with the good, the bad
with the bad, the offspring of the latter being destroyed, just as is
done in the breeding of animals. Maternal and filial love also must be
abolished, infants being taken from their mothers and educated in
common. Nor must husband and wife remain together longer than is
necessary for the perpetuation of the species. This is the only object
of marriage in Plato's opinion; for he recommends (_Laws_, VI., 784)
that if a couple have no children after being married ten years, they
should be "divorced for their mutual benefit."
In all history there is not a more extraordinary spectacle than that
presented by the greatest philosopher of Greece, proposing in his
ideal republic to eliminate every variety of family affection, thus
degrading the relations of the sexes to a level inferior in some
respects even to that of Australian savages, who at least allow
mothers to rear their own children. And this philosopher, the most
radical enemy love has ever known--practically a champion of
promiscuity--has, by a strange irony of fate, lent his name to the
purest and most exalted form of love![307]
SPARTAN OPPORTUNITIES FOR LOVE
Had Plato lived a few centuries earlier he might have visited at least
one Greek state where his barbarous ideal of the sexual relations was
to a considerable extent realized. The Spartan law-maker Lycurgus
shared his views regarding marriage, and had the advantage of being
able to enforce them. He, too, believed that human beings should be
bred like cattle. He laughed, so Plutarch tells us in his biographic
sketch, at those who, while exercising care in raising dogs and
horses, allowed unworthy husbands to have offspring. This, in itself,
was a praiseworthy thought; but the method adopted by Lycurgus to
overcome that objection was subversive of all morality and affection.
He considered it advisable that among worthy men there should be a
community of wives and children, for which purpose he tried to
suppress jealousy, ridiculing those who insisted on a conjugal
monopoly and who even engaged in fights on account of it. Elderly men
were urged to share their wives with younger men and adopt the
children as their own; and if a man considered another's wife
particularly prolific or virtuous he was not to hesitate to ask for
her. Bridegrooms followed the custom of capturing their brides. An
attendant, after cutting off the bride's hair and putting a man's
garment on her, left her alone in the dark, whereupon her bridegroom
visited her, returning soon, however, to his comrades. For
months--sometimes until after children had been born--the husband
would thus be unable to see his wife.
Reading Greek literature in the light of modern science, it is
interesting to note that we have in the foregoing account unmistakable
allusions to several primitive customs which have prevailed among
savages and barbarians in all parts of the world.[308] The Greek
writers, ignorant of the revelations of anthropology regarding the
evolution of human habits, assumed such customs to have been
originated by particular lawgivers. This was natural enough and
pardonable under the circumstances; but how any modern writer can
consider such customs (whether aboriginal or instituted by lawgivers)
especially favorable to love, passes my comprehension. Yet one of the
best informed of my critics assured me that "in Sparta love was made a
part of state policy, and opportunities were contrived for the young
men and women to see each other at public games and become enamored."
As usual in such cases, the writer ignores the details regarding these
Spartan opportunities for seeing one another and falling in love,
which would have spoiled his argument by indicating what kind of
"love" was in question here.
Plutarch relates that Lycurgus made the girls strip naked and attend
certain festivals and dance in that state before the youths, who were
also naked. Bachelors who refused to marry were not allowed to attend
these dances, which, as Plutarch adds with characteristic Greek
naïveté, were "a strong incentive to marriage." The erudite C.O.
Müller, in his history of the Doric race (II., 298), while confessing
that in all his reading of Greek books he had not come across a single
instance of an Athenian in love with a free-born woman and marrying
her because of a strong attachment, declares that Sparta was somewhat
different, personal attachments having been possible there because the
young men and women were brought together at festivals and dances; but
he has the acumen to see that this love was "not of a romantic
nature."[309]
AMAZONIAN IDEAL OF GREEK WOMANHOOD
Romantic love, as distinguished from friendship, is dependent on
sexual differentiation, and the highest phases of romantic love are
possible only, as we have seen, where the secondary and tertiary
sexual qualities, physical and mental, are highly developed. Now the
Spartans, besides maintaining all the love-suppressing customs just
alluded to, made special and systematic efforts to convert their women
into Amazons devoid of all feminine qualities except such as were
absolutely necessary for the perpetuation of the species. One of the
avowed objects of making girls dance naked in the presence of men was
to destroy what they considered as effeminate modesty. The law which
forbade husbands to associate with their wives in the daytime
prevented the growth of any sentimental, sympathetic attachment
between husband and wife. Even maternal feeling was suppressed, as far
as possible, Spartan mothers being taught to feel proud and happy if
their sons fell in battle, disgraced and unhappy if they survived in
case of defeat. The sole object, in brief, of Spartan institutions
relating to women was to rear a breed of healthy animals for the
purpose of supplying the state with warriors. Not love, but
patriotism, was the underlying motive of these institutions. To
patriotism, the most masculine of all virtues, the lives of these
women were immolated, and what made it worse was that, while they were
reared as men, these women could not share the honors of men. Brought
up as warriors, they were still despised by the warriors, who, when
they wanted companionship, always sought it in association with
comrades of their own sex. In a word, instead of honoring the female
sex, the Spartans suppressed and dishonored it. But they brought on
their own punishment; for the women, being left in charge of affairs
at home during the frequent absence of their warlike husbands and
sons, learned to command slaves, and, after the manner of the African
Amazons we have read about, soon tried to lord it over their husbands
too.
And this utter suppression of femininity, this glorification of the
Amazon--a being as repulsive to every refined mind as an effeminate
man--has been lauded by a host of writers as emancipation and
progress!
"If your reputation for prowess and the battles you have fought were
taken away from you Spartans, in all else, be very sure, you have not
your inferiors," exclaims Peleus in the _Andromache_ of Euripides,
thus summing up Athenian opinion on Sparta. There was, however, one
other respect in which the enemies of Sparta admired her. C.O. Müller
alludes to it in the following (II., 304):
"Little as the Athenians esteemed their own women, they
involuntarily revered the heroines of Sparta, such as
Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas; Lampito, the daughter of
Leotychidas, the wife of Archidamus and mother of
Agis."
This is not surprising, for in Athens, as among the Spartans and all
other Greeks, patriotism was the supreme virtue, and women could be
compared with men only in so far as they had the opportunity and
courage to participate in this masculine virtue. Aristotle appears to
have been the only Greek philosopher who recognized the fact that
"each sex has its own peculiar virtues in which the other rejoices;"
yet there is no indication that even he meant by this anything more
than the qualities in a woman of being a good nurse and a chaste
housemaid.[310] Plato, as we have seen, considered woman inferior to
man because she lacked the masculine qualities which he would have
liked to educate into her; and this remained the Greek attitude to the
end, as we realize vividly on reading the special treatise of
Plutarch--who flourished nearly half a thousand years after Plato--_On
the Virtues of Women_, in which, by way of proving "that the virtues
of a man and a woman do not differ," a number of stories are told of
heroic deeds, military, patriotic, and otherwise, performed by women.
Greek ideas on womanhood are admirably symbolized in their theology.
Of their four principal goddesses--using the more familiar Latin
names--Juno is a shrew, Venus a wanton, while Minerva and Diana are
Amazons or hermaphrodites--masculine minds in female bodies. In Juno,
as Gladstone has aptly said, the feminine character is strongly
marked; but, as he himself is obliged to admit, "by no means on its
higher side." Regarding Minerva, he remarks with equal aptness that
"she is a goddess, not a god; but she has nothing of sex except the
gender, nothing of the woman except the form." She is the goddess,
among other things, of war. Diana spends all her time hunting and
slaughtering animals, and she is not only a perpetual virgin but
ascetically averse to love and feminine tenderness--as unsympathetic a
being as was ever conceived by human imagination--as unnatural and
ludicrous as her devotee, the Hippolytus of Euripides. She is the
Amazon of Amazons, and was represented dressed as an Amazon. Of course
she is pictured as the tallest of women, and it is in regard to the
question of stature that the Greeks once more betray their
ultra-masculine inability to appreciate true femininity; as, for
example, in the stupid remark of Aristotle _(Eth. Nicom_., IV., 7),
[Greek: to kallos en megalo somati, hoi mikroi d' asteioi kai
summetroi, kaloi d' ou.]--"beauty consists in a large body; the petite
are pretty and symmetrical, but not beautiful."[311]
ATHENIAN ORIENTALISM
Both Diana and Venus were brought to Greece from Asia. Indeed, when we
examine Greek life in the light of comparative _Culturgeschichte_, we
find a surprising prevalence of Oriental customs and ideas, especially
in Athens, and particularly in the treatment of women. In this respect
Athens is the antipode of Sparta. While at Sparta the women wrestled
naked with the men, in Athens the women were not even permitted to
witness their games. The Athenians moreover had very decided opinions
about the effect of Spartan customs. The beautiful Helen who caused
the Trojan war by her adulterous elopement was a Spartan, and the
Athenian Euripides makes Peleus taunt her husband Menelaus in these
words:
"Thou who didst let a Phrygian rob thee of thy wife,
leaving thy home without bolt or guard, as if forsooth
the cursed woman thou hadst was a model of virtue. No!
a Spartan maid could not be chaste, e'en if she would,
who leaves her home and bares her limbs and lets her
robe float free, to share with youth their races and
their sports--customs I cannot away with. Is it any
wonder that ye fail to educate your women in virtue?"
The Athenian, to be sure, did not any more than the Spartan educate
his women in virtue. What he did was to compel them to be virtuous by
locking them up in the Oriental style. Unlike the Spartan, the
Athenian had a regard for paternity and genealogy, and the only way he
knew to insure it was the Asiatic. He failed to make the discovery
that the best safeguard of woman's virtue is education--as witness
America; and to this failure is due to a large extent the collapse of
Greek civilization. Athenian women were more chaste than Spartans
because they had to be, and they were superior also in being less
masculine; but the topsy-turvy Athenian men looked down on them
because they were _not_ more masculine and because they lacked the
education which they themselves perversely refused to give them! Few
Athenian women could read or write, nor had they much use for such
accomplishments, being practically condemned to life-long
imprisonment. The men indorsed the Oriental idea that educating a
woman is an unwise and reprehensible thing.[312]
Widely as the Athenian way of treating women differed from the
Spartan, the result was the same--the frustration of pure love. The
girls were married off in their early teens, before what little mind
they had was developed, to men whom they had never seen before, and in
the selection of whom they were not consulted; the result being, in
the words of a famous orator, that the men married respectable women
for the sake of rearing legitimate offspring, keeping concubines for
the daily wants and care of the body, and associating with hetairai
for pleasant companionship. Hence, as Becker justly remarks (III.,
337), though we come across stories of passionate love in the pages of
Terence (_i.e._ Menander) and other Greek writers, "sensuality was
always the soil from which such passion sprang, and none other than a
sensual love between a man and a woman was even acknowledged."
LITERATURE AND LIFE
Although dogs are the most intelligent of all animals and at the same
time proverbial for their faithful attachment to their masters, they
are nevertheless, as I have before pointed out, in their sexual
relations utterly incapable of that approximation to conjugal love
which we find instinctive in some birds. Most readers of this book,
too, are probably acquainted with men and women, who while highly
educated and refined, as well as devoted to the members of their
family, are strangers to romantic love; and I have pointed out (302)
that men of genius may in this respect be in the same boat as ordinary
mortals. In view of these considerations, and of the rarity of true
love even in modern Europe and America, it surely is not unnatural or
reckless to assume that there may have been whole nations in this
predicament, though they were as advanced in many other respects as
were the Greeks and as capable of other forms of domestic attachment.
Yet, as I remarked on page 6, several writers, including so eminent a
thinker as Professor William James, have held that the Greeks could
have differed from us only in their _ideas_ about love, and not in
their feelings themselves. "It is incredible," he remarks in the
review referred to,
"that individual women should not at all times have had the
power to fill individual manly breasts with enchanted
respect.... So powerful and instinctive, an emotion can
never have been recently evolved. But our ideas _about_ our
emotions, and the esteem in which we hold them, differ very
much from one generation to another."
In the next paragraph he admits, however, that "no doubt the
way in which we think about our emotions reacts on the emotions
themselves, dampening or inflaming them, as the case may be;" and in
this admission he really concedes the whole matter. The main object of
my chapter "How Sentiments Change and Grow" is to show how men's
_ideas_ regarding nature, religion, murder, polygamy, modesty,
chastity, incest, affect and modify their _feelings_ in relation to
them, thus furnishing indirectly a complete answer to the objection
made to my theory.[313]
Now the ideas which the Greeks had about their women could not but
dampen any elevated feelings of love that might otherwise have sprung
up in them. Their literature attests that they considered love a
degrading, sensual passion, not an ennobling, supersensual sentiment,
as we do. With such an _idea_ how could they have possibly _felt_
toward women as we do? With the _idea_ firmly implanted in their minds
that women are in every respect the inferiors of men, how could they
have experienced that _emotional_ state of ecstatic adoration and
worship of the beloved which is the very essence of romantic love? Of
necessity, purity and adoration were thus entirely eliminated from
such love as they were capable of feeling toward women. Nor can they,
though noted for their enthusiasm for beautiful human forms, have
risen above sensualism in the admiration of the personal beauty of
women; for since their girls were left to grow up in utter ignorance,
neither their faces nor their minds can have been of the kind which
inspires supersensual love. With boys it was different. They were
educated mentally as well as physically, and hence as
Winckelmann--himself a Greek in this respect--has remarked, "the
supreme beauty of Greek art is male rather than female." If the
healthy Greek mind could be so utterly different from the healthy
modern mind in regard to the love of boys, why not in regard to the
love of women? The perverseness of the Greeks in this respect was so
great that, as we have seen, they not only adored boys while despising
women, but preferred masculine women to feminine women.
But the most serious oversight of the champions of Greek love is that
they regard love as merely an emotion, or group of emotions, whereas,
as I have shown, its most essential ingredients and only safe criteria
are the altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacrifice, allied
with sympathy and affection. That there was no gallantry and
self-sacrifice in Greek love of women I have already indicated (188,
197, 203, 163); and that there was no sympathy in it is obvious from
the heartless way in which the men treated the women--in life I mean,
not merely in literature--refusing to allow them the least liberty of
movement, or choice in marriage, or to give them an education which
would have enabled them to enjoy the higher pleasures of life on their
own account. As for affection, it is needless to add that it cannot
exist where there is no sympathy, no gallant kindness and courtesy,
and no willingness to sacrifice one's selfish comfort or pleasures for
another.
Of course we know all these things only on the testimony of Greek
literature; but it would surely be the most extraordinary thing in the
world if these altruistic impulses had existed in Greek life, and
Greek literature had persistently and absolutely ignored them, while
on the other hand it is constantly harping on the other ingredients of
love which also accompany lust. If literature has any historic value
at all, if we can ever regard it as a mirror of life, we are entitled
to the inference that romantic love was unknown to the Greeks of
Europe, whereas the caresses and refinements and ardent longings of
sensual love--including hyperbole and the mixed moods of hope and
despair---were familiar to them and are often expressed by them in
poetic language (see 137, 140-44, 295, 299). I say the Greeks of
Europe, to distinguish them from those of Greater Greece, whose
capacities for love we still have to consider.
GREEK LOVE IN AFRICA
It is amusing to note the difference of opinion prevailing among the
champions of Greek love as to the time when it began to be sentimental
and "modern." Some boldly go back to Homer, at the threshold of
literature. Many begin with Sappho, some with Sophocles, and a host
with Euripides. Menander is the starting-point to others, while
Benecke has written a book to prove that the credit of inventing
modern love belongs to Antimachus of Colophon. The majority hesitate
to go back farther than the Alexandrian school of the fourth century
before Christ, while some modestly content themselves with the
romancers of the fourth or fifth centuries after Christ--thus allowing
a latitude of twelve or thirteen hundred years to choose from.
We for our part, having applied our improved chemical test to such
love as is recorded in the prose and verse of Classical Greece, and
having found the elements of romantic sentiment missing, must now
examine briefly what traces of it may occur in the much-vaunted erotic
poems and stories of Greater Greece, notably the capital of Egypt in
the third century before Christ.
It is true that of the principal poets of the Alexandrian
school--Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius--only the last named
was probably a native of Alexandria; but the others made it their home
and sphere of influence, being attracted by the great library, which
contained all the treasures of Greek literature, and other inducements
which the Ptolemies held out to men of letters. Thus it is permissible
to speak of an African or Alexandrian period of Greek literature, all
the more as the cosmopolitan influences at work at Alexandria gave
this literature a peculiar character of its own, erotically as well as
otherwise, which tinged Greek writings from that time on.
In reading Homer we are struck by the utter absence not only of
stories of romantic love but of romantic love-stories. Even the
relations of Achilles and Briseis, which offered such fine romantic
opportunities, are treated in an amazingly prosaic manner. An emphatic
change in this respect is hardly to be noted till we come to
Euripides, who, though ignorant of romantic love, gave women and their
feelings more attention than they had previously received in
literature. Aristophanes, in several of his plays, gave vent to his
indignation at this new departure, but the tendency continued in the
New Comedy (Menander and others), which gave up the everlasting
Homeric heroes and introduced everyday contemporary scenes and people.
Thus the soil was prepared for the Alexandrians, but it was with them
that the new plant reached its full growth. Not content with following
the example of the New Comedy, they took up the Homeric personages
again, gods as well as heroes, but in a very different fashion from
that of their predecessors, proceeding to sentimentalize them to their
hearts' content, the gods being represented as sharing all the amorous
weaknesses of mortals, differing from them only, as Rohde remarks
(107), in being even more fickle than they, eternally changing their
loves.
The infusion of this romantic spirit into the dry old myths
undoubtedly brings the poems and stories of the Alexandrians and their
imitators a step nearer to modern conditions. The poets of the
Alexandrian period must also be credited with being the first who made
love (sensual love, I mean)--which had played so subordinate a rôle in
the old epics and tragedies--the central feature of interest, thus
setting a fashion which has continued without interruption to the
present day. As Couat puts it, with the pardonable exaggeration of a
specialist (155): "Les Alexandrins n'ont pas inventé l'amour dans la
littérature ... mais ils ont créé la littérature de l'amour." Their
way of treating love was followed in detail by the Roman poets,
especially Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and by the Greek
novelists, Xenophon Ephesius, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Chariton,
Longus, etc., up to the fourth or fifth centuries (dates are
uncertain) of our era.
There is a "suprising similarity" in the descriptions of love-affairs
by all these writers, as is noted by Rohde, who devotes twenty pages
(145-165, chiefly foot-notes, after the fashion of German professors)
to detailed proof of his assertion. The substance of these pages, may,
however be summed up very briefly, under seventeen heads. In all these
writings, if the girl is represented as being respectable, (1) the
lovers meet or see each other for the first time at religious
festivals, as those were practically the only occasions where such
women could appear in public. (2) The love is sudden, at first sight,
no other being possible under circumstances that permit of no
prolonged courtship. (3) The youth is represented as having previously
felt a coy, proud aversion to the goddess of love, who now avenges
herself by smiting him with a violent, maddening passion. (4) The love
is mutual, and it finds its way to the heart through the eyes. (5)
Cupid with his arrows, urged on by Venus, is gradually relegated to
the background as a shadowy abstraction. (6) Both the youth and the
maiden are extraordinarily beautiful. No attempt is made, however, to
describe the points of beauty in detail, after the dry fashion of the
Oriental and the later Byzantine authors. Hyperbole is used in
comparing the complexion to snow, the cheeks to roses, etc; but the
favorite way of picturing a youth or maiden is to compare the same to
some one of the gods or goddesses who were types familiar to all
through pictures and statues--a characteristically Greek device, going
back as far as Hesiod and Homer. (7) The passion of the lovers is a
genuine disease, which (8) monopolizes their souls, and (9) makes them
neglect the care of the body, (10) makes pallor alternate with
blushes, (11) deprives them of sleep, or fills their dreams with the
beloved; (12) it urges them to seek solitude, and (13) to tell their
woes to the trees and rocks, which (14) are supposed to sympathize
with them. (15) The passion is incurable, even wine, the remedy for
other cares, serving only to aggravate it. (16) Like Orientals, the
lovers may swoon away or fall into dangerous illness. (17) The lover
cuts the beloved's name into trees, follows her footsteps, consults
the flower oracle, wishes he were a bee so he could fly to her, and at
the banquet puts his lips to the spot where she drank from the cup.
Having finished his list of erotic traits, Rohde confesses frankly
that it "embraces, to be sure, only a limited number of the simplest
symptoms of love." But instead of drawing therefrom the obvious
inference that love which has no other symptoms than those is very far
from being like modern love, he adds perversely and illogically that
"in its _essential_ traits, this passion _is presumably_ the same at
all times and with all nations."[314]
ALEXANDRIAN CHIVALRY.
It is in the Alexandrian period of Greek literature and art that,
according to Helbig (194), "we first meet traits that suggest the
adoration of women (_Frauencultus_) and gallantry." This opinion is
widely prevalent, a special instance being that ecstatic exclamation
of Professor Ebers: "Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have
been unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, was
transferred as a constellation to the skies?" In reality this act was
inspired by selfish adulation and had not the remotest connection with
love.
The story in brief is as follows: Shortly after his marriage to
Berenice, Ptolemy went on an expedition into Syria. To insure his safe
return to Egypt Berenice vowed to consecrate her beautiful hair to
Venus. On his return she fulfilled her vow in the temple; but on the
following day her hair could not be found. To console the king and the
queen, and to _conciliate the royal favor_, the astronomer Conon
declared that the locks of Berenice had been removed by divine
interposition and transferred to the skies in the form of a
constellation.[315]
A still more amusing instance of Alexandrian "gallantry" is to be
found in the case of the queen Stratonice, whose court-poets were
called upon to compete with each other in singing of the beauty of her
locks. The fact that she was bald, did not, as a matter of course,
make the slightest difference in this kind of homage.
Unlike his colleagues, Rohde was not misled into accepting such
_adulation of queens_ as evidence of _adoration of women in general_.
In several pages of admirable erudition (63-69), which I commend to
all students of the subject, he exposes the hollowness and
artificiality of this so-called Alexandrian chivalry. Fashion ordained
that poems should be addressed to women of exalted rank:
"As the queens were, like the kings, enrolled among the
gods, the court-poets, of course, were not allowed to
neglect the praise of the queens, and they were called upon
to celebrate the royal weddings;[316] nay, in the
extravagance of their gallant homage they rose to a level of
bad taste the pinnacle of which was reached by Callimachus
in his elegy--so well-known through the imitation of
Catullus--on the hair of queen Berenice placed among the
constellations by the courtesy of the astronomer Conon."
He then proceeds to explain that we must be careful
not to infer from such a courtly custom that other women enjoyed the
freedom and influence of the queen or shared their compliments.
"In actual life a certain chivalrous attitude toward women
existed at most toward hetairai, in which case, as a matter
of course, it was adulterated with a very unpleasant
ingredient of frivolous sentimentality.... Of an essential
change in the position of respectable girls and women there
is no indication."
Though there were a number of learned viragoes, there is "absolutely
no evidence" that women in general received the compliment and benefit
of an education. The poems of Philetas and Callimachus, like those of
Propertius and Ovid, so far as they referred to women, appealed only
to the wanton hetairai. As late as our first century Plutarch felt
called upon to write a treatise, oti kai gunaikas paideuteon--"that
women too should be educated." Cornelius Nepos still speaks of the
gynaikonitis as the place where women spend their time.
"In particular, the emancipation of virgins from the
seclusion of their jealous confinement would have implied a
revolution in all social arrangements of the Greeks of which
we have no intimation anywhere,"
including Alexandria (69). In another chapter, Rohde comments
(354-356) with documentary proof, on the "extraordinary tenacity,"
with which the Greeks down to the latest periods of their literature,
clung to their custom of regarding and treating women as inferiors and
servants--a custom which precluded the possibility of true chivalry
and adoration. That sympathy also--and consequently true, altruistic
affection--continued to be wanting in their emotional life is
indicated by the fact, also pointed out by Rohde, that "the most
palpable mark of a higher respect," an education, was withheld from
the women to the end of the Hellenic period.[317]
THE NEW COMEDY
Another current error regarding the Alexandrian period both in Egypt
and in Greece (Menander and the New Comedy) is that a regard for
purity enters as a new element into its literature. It does, in some
instances, less, however, as a virtue than as a _bonne bouche_ for
epicures,[318] as is made most patent in that offshoot of the
Alexandrian manner, the abominably _raffiné_ story of Daphnis and
Chloe. There may also be traces of that "longing for an ennobling of
the passion of love" of which Rohde speaks (though I have not found
any in my own reading, and the professor, contrary to his favorite
usage, gives no references); but apart from that, the later Greek
literature differs from the older not in being purer, but by its
coarse and shameless eroticism, both unnatural and natural. The old
epics and tragedies are models of purity in comparison, though
Euripides set a bad example in his _Hippolytus_, and still more his
_Aeolus_, the coarse incestuous passion of which was particularly
admired and imitated by the later writers.[319] Aristophanes is
proverbial for his unspeakable license and obscenity. Concerning the
plays of Menander (more than a hundred, of which only fragments have
come down to us and Latin versions of several by Terence and Plautus),
Plutarch tells us, indeed, that they were all tied together by one
bond--love; but it was love in the only sense known to the Greeks, and
always involving a hetaira or at most a [Greek: pseudokorae] or
_demie-vierge_, since respectable girls could not be involved in
realistic Greek love-affairs.
Professor Gercke has well remarked (141) that the charm of elegance
with which Menander covers up his moral rottenness, and which made him
the favorite of the _jeunesse dorée_ of his time, exerted a bad
influence on the stage through many centuries. There are a few
quasi-altruistic expressions in the plays of Terence and Plautus, but
they are not supported by actions and do not reach beyond the sphere
of sentimentality into that of sentiment. Here again I may adduce
Rohde as an unbiassed witness. While declaring that there is "a
longing for the ennobling of the passion in actual life" he admits
that
"really _sentimental effusions_ of love are strikingly rare
in Plautus and Terence.[320] One might think the authors of
the Latin versions had omitted the sentimental passages,
were it not that in the remnants of the Newer Comedy of the
Attic writers themselves there are, apart from general
references to Eros, no traces whatever of sentimental
allusions."[321]
THEOCRITUS AND CALLIMACHUS
Let us now return from Athens and Rome to Alexandria, to see whether
we can find a purer and more genuinely romantic atmosphere in the
works of her leading poets. Of these the first in time and fame is
Theocritus. He, like Sappho, has been lauded as a poet of love; and he
does resemble Sappho in two respects. Like her, he often glorifies
unnatural passion in a way which, as in the twelfth and twenty-third
Idyls, for example, tempts every normal person who can read the
original to throw the whole book away in disgust. Like Sappho and the
Hindoos (and some modern Critics) he also seems to imagine that the
chief symptoms of love are emaciation, perspiration, and paralysis, as
we see in the absurdly overrated second Idyl, of which I have already
spoken (116). Lines 87-88 of Idyl I., lines 139-142 of Idyl II., and
the whole of Idyl XXVII., practically sum up the conception of love
prevailing in the bucolic school of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus,
except that Theocritus has an idea of the value of coyness and
jealousy as stimulants of passion, as Idyl VI. shows. Crude coyness
and rude jealousy no doubt were known also to the rustic folk he sings
about; but when he makes that ugly, clumsy, one-eyed monster, the
Cyclops Polyphemus, fall in love with the sea-nymph Galatea (Idyl XI.)
and lament that he was not born with fins that he might dive and kiss
her hand if his lips she refused, he applies Alexandrian
pseudo-gallantry to pastoral conditions where they are ludicrously out
of place. The kind of "gallantry" really to be expected under these
conditions is realistically indicated in Idyl XIV., where Aeschines,
after declaring that he shall go mad some day because the beautiful
Cyniska flouted him, tells his friend how, in a fit of jealousy, he
had struck the girl on the cheek twice with clenched fist, while she
was sitting at his own table. Thereupon she left him, and now he
laments: "If I could only find a cure for my love!"
Another quaintly realistic touch occurs in the line (Idyl II.) in
which Battis declares that Amaryllis, when she died, was as dear to
him as his goats. In this line, no doubt, we have the supreme ideal of
Sicilian pastoral love; nor is there a line which indicates that
Theocritus himself knew any higher phases of love than those which he
embodies in his shepherds. In a writer who has so many poetic
charms[322] this may seem strange, but it simply bears out my theory
that romantic love is one of the latest products of civilization--as
late as the love of romantic scenery, which we do not find in
Theocritus, though he writes charmingly of other kinds of scenery--of
cool fountains, shady groves, pastures with cattle, apple trees, and
other things that please the senses of man--as women do while they are
young and pretty.
Callimachus, the younger contemporary of Theocritus, is another
Alexandrian whose importance in the history of love has been
exaggerated. His fame rests chiefly on the story of Acontius and
Cydippe which occurred in the collection of legends and tales he had
brought together in his [Greek: Aitia]. His own version is now lost,
like most of his other works; and such fragments of the story as
remain would not suffice for the purpose of reconstruction were we not
aided by the two epistles which the lovers exchange with each other in
the _Heroides_ of Ovid, and more still by the prose version of
Aristaenetus, which appears to be quite literal, judging by the
correspondence of the text with some of the extant fragments of the
original.[323] The story can be related in a few lines. Acontius and
Cydippe are both very beautiful and have both been coy to others of
the opposite sex. As a punishment they are made to fall in love with
each other at first sight in the Temple of Diana. It is a law of this
temple that any vow made in it must be kept. To secure the girl,
Acontius therefore takes an apple, writes on it a vow that she will be
his bride and throws it at her feet. She picks it up, reads the vow
aloud and thus pledges herself. Her parents, some time after, want to
marry her to another man; three times the wedding arrangements are
made, but each time she falls ill. Finally the oracle at Delphi is
consulted, which declares that the girl's illness is due to her not
keeping her vow; whereupon explanations follow and the lovers are
united.
In the literary history of love this story may be allowed a
conspicuous place for the reason that, as Mahaffy remarks (_G.L. &
T._, 230), it is the first literary original of that sort of tale
which makes falling in love and happy marriage the beginning and the
end, while the obstacles to this union form the details of the plot.
Moreover, as Couat points out (145), the later Greek romances are mere
imitations of this Alexandrian elegy--Hero and Leander, Leucippe and
Clitophon, and other stories all recall it. But from my point of
view--the evolutionary and psychological--I cannot see that the story
told by Callimachus marks any advance. The lovers see each other only
a moment in the temple; they do not meet afterward, there is no real
courtship, they have no chance to get acquainted with each other's
mind and character, and there is no indication whatever of
supersensual, altruistic affection. Nor was Callimachus the man from
whom one would have expected a new gospel of love. He was a dry old
librarian, without originality, a compiler of catalogues and legends,
etc.--eight hundred works all told--in which even the stories were
marred by details of pedantic erudition. Moreover, there is ample
evidence in the extant epigrams that he did not differ from his
contemporaries and predecessors in the theory and practice of love.
Instead of having the modern feeling of abhorrence toward any
suggestion of [Greek: paiderastia], he glorified it in the usual Greek
style. The fame he enjoyed as an erotic poet among the coarse and
unprincipled Roman bards does not redound to his credit, and he
himself tells us unmistakably what he means by love when he calls it a
[Greek: philopaida noson] and declares that fasting is a sure remedy
for it (_Epigr._, 47).
MEDEA AND JASON
Another writer of this period who has been unduly extolled for his
insight into the mysteries of love, is Apollonius Rhodius, concerning
whom Professor Murray goes so far as to say (382), that "for romantic
love on the higher side he is without a peer even in the age of
Theocritus."(!) He owes this fame to the story of Medea and Jason,
introduced in the third book of his version of the Argonautic
expedition (275 _seq_.). It begins in the old-fashioned way with Cupid
shooting his arrow at Medea's heart, in which forthwith the
destructive passion glows. Blushes and pallor alternate in her face,
and her breast heaves fast and deep as she incessantly stares at Jason
with flaming eyes. She remembers afterwards every detail about his
looks and dress, and how he sat and walked. Unlike all other men he
seemed to her. Tears run down her cheeks at the thought that he might
succumb in his combat with the two terrible bulls he will have to tame
before he can recover the Golden Fleece. Even in her dreams she
suffers tortures, if she is able to sleep at all. She is distracted by
conflicting desires. Should she give him the magic salve which would
protect his body from harm, or let him die, and die with him? Should
she give up her home, her family, her honor, for his sake and become
the topic of scandalous gossip? or should she end it all by committing
suicide? She is on the point of doing so when the thought of all the
joys of life makes her hesitate and change her mind. She resolves to
see Jason alone and give him the ointment. A secret meeting is
arranged in the temple of Hecate. She gets there first, and while
waiting every sound of footsteps makes her bosom heave. At last he
comes and at sight of him her cheek flames red, her eyes grow dim,
consciousness seems to leave her, and she is fixed to the ground
unable to move forward or backward. After Jason has spoken to her,
assuring her that the gods themselves would reward her for saving the
lives of so many brave men, she takes the salve from her bosom, and
she would have plucked her heart from it to give him had he asked for
it. The eyes of both are modestly turned to the ground, but when they
meet longing speaks from them. Then, after explaining to him the use
of the salve, she seizes his hand and begs him after he shall have
reached his home again, to remember her, as she will bear him in mind,
even against her parents' wishes. Should he forget her, she hopes
messengers will bring news of him, or that she herself may be able to
cross the seas and appear an unexpected guest to remind him how she
had saved him.
Such was the love of Medea, which historians have proclaimed such a
new thing in literature--"romantic love on the higher side." For my
part I cannot see in this description--in which no essential trait is
omitted--anything different from what we have found in Homer, in
Sappho, and in Euripides. The unwomanly lack of coyness which Medea
displays when she practically proposes to Jason, expecting him to
marry her out of gratitude, is copied after the Nausicäa of the
_Odyssey_. The flaming cheeks, dim eyes, loss of consciousness, and
paralysis are copied from Sappho; while the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides
furnished the model for the dwelling on the subjective symptoms of the
"pernicious passion of love." The stale trick too, of making this love
originate in a wound inflicted by Cupid's arrows is everlastingly
Greek; and so is the device of representing the woman alone as being
consumed by the flames of love. For Jason is about as unlike a modern
lover as a caricaturist could make him. His one idea is to save his
life and get the Fleece. "Necessity compels me to clasp your knees and
ask your aid," he exclaims when he meets her; and when she gives him
that broad hint "do not forget me; I shall never forget you," his
reply is a long story about his home. Not till after she has
threatened to visit him does he declare "But _should you_ come to my
home, you would be honored by all ... _in that case_ I hope you may
grace my bridal couch." And again in the fourth book he relates that
he is taking Medea home to be his wife "in accordance with her
wishes!" Without persiflage, his attitude may be summed up in these
words: "I come to you because I am in danger of my precious life. Help
me to get back the Golden Fleece and I promise you that, on condition
that I get home safe and sound, I will condescend to marry you." Is
this, perhaps, the "romantic love on the higher side" which Professor
Murray found in this story? But there is more to come.
Of the symptoms of love in Medea's heart described in the foregoing
paragraph not one rises above that egotistic gloating over the pangs
and joys of sensual infatuation which constitute one phase of
sentimentality; while the further progress of the story shows that
Medea had no idea whatever of sacrificing herself for Jason, but that
the one motive of her actions was the eager desire to possess him.
When the fugitives are being pursued closely, and the chivalrous
Argonauts, afraid to battle with a superior number, propose to retain
the Golden Fleece, but to give up Medea and let some other king decide
whether she is to be returned to her parents, it never occurs to her
that she might save her beloved by going back home. She wants to have
him at any cost, or to perish with him; so she reproaches him bitterly
for his ingratitude, and meditates the plan of setting fire to the
ships and burning him up with all the crew, as well as herself. He
tries to pacify her by protesting that he had not quite liked the plan
proposed himself, but had indorsed it only to gain time; whereupon she
suggests a way out of the dilemma pleasanter to herself, by advising
the Argonauts to inveigle her brother, who leads the pursuers, into
their power and assassinate him; which they promptly proceed to do,
while she stands by with averted eyes. It is with unconscious sarcasm
that Apollonius exclaims on the same page where all these details of
"romantic love on the higher side" are being unfolded: "Accursed Eros,
the world's most direful plague."
POETS AND HETAIRAI.
The one commendable feature which the stories of Acontius and Cydippe
and of Medea and Jason have in common is that the heroine in each case
is a respectable and pure maiden (see _Argon._, IV., 1018-1025). But,
although the later romance writers followed this example, it would be
a great mistake to suppose, with Mahaffy (272), that this touch of
virgin purity was felt by the Alexandrians to be "the necessary
starting-point of the love-romance in a refined society." Alexandrian
society was anything but refined in matters of love, and the trait
referred to stands out by reason of its novelty and isolation in a
literature devoted chiefly to the hetairai. We see this especially
also in the epigrams of the period. It is astonishing, writes Couat
(173), how many of these are erotic; and "almost all," he adds, "are
addressed to courtesans or young boys." "Dans toutes l'auteur ne
chante que la beauté plastique et les plaisirs faciles; leur Cypris
est la Cypris [Greek: pandaemos], celle qui se vend à tout le monde."
In these verses of Callimachus, Asclepiades, Poseidippus and others,
he finds sentimentality but no sentiment; and on page 62 he sums up
Alexandria with French patness as a place "ou l'on faisait assidûment
des vers sur l'amour sans être amoureux"--"where they were ever
writing love-poems without ever being in love." But what repels modern
taste still more than this artificiality and lack of inspiration is
the effeminate degradation of the masculine type most admired. Helbig,
who, in his book on _Campanische Wandmalerei_, enforces the testimony
of literature with the inferences that can be drawn from mural
paintings and vases, remarks (258) that the favorite poetic ideals of
the time are tender youths with milk-white complexion, rosy cheeks and
long, soft tresses. Thus is Apollo represented by Callimachus, thus
even Achilles by the bucolic poets. In later representations
indicating Alexandrian influences we actually see Polyphemus no longer
as a rude giant, but as a handsome man, or even as a beardless
youth.[324]
That the Alexandrian period, far from marking the advent of purity and
refinement in literature and life, really represents the climax of
degradation, is made most obvious when we regard the role which the
hetairai played in social life. In Alexandria and at Athens they were
the centre of attraction at all the entertainments of the young men,
and to some of them great honors were paid. In the time of Polybius
the most beautiful houses in Alexandria were named after flute girls;
portrait statues of such were placed in temples and other public
places, by the side of those of generals and statesmen, and there were
few prominent men whose names were not associated with these
creatures.
The opinion has been promulgated countless times that these [Greek:
hetairai] were a mentally superior class of women, and on the strength
of this information I assumed, in _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_
(79), that, notwithstanding their frailty, they may have been able, in
some cases, to inspire a more refined, spiritual sort of love than the
uneducated domestic women. A study of the original sources has now
convinced me that this was a mistake. Aspasia no doubt was a
remarkable woman, but she stands entirely by herself, Theodota is
visited once by Socrates, but he excuses himself from calling again,
and as for Diotima, she is a seeress rather than a hetaira. Athenaeus
informs us that some of these women
"had a great opinion of themselves, paying attention to
education and spending a part of their time on literature;
so that they were very ready with their rejoinders and
replies;"
but the specimens he gives of these rejoinders and replies consist
chiefly of obscene jokes, cheap puns on names or pointless witticisms.
Here are two specimens of the better kind, relating to Gnathaena, who
was famed for her repartee:
"Once, when a man came to see her and saw some eggs on a
dish, and said, 'Are these raw, Gnathaena, or boiled?' she
replied, 'They are made of brass, my boy.'" "On one
occasion, when some poor lovers of the daughter of Gnathaena
came to feast at her house, and threatened to throw it down,
saying that they had brought spades and mattocks on purpose;
'But,' said Gnathaena, 'if you had these implements, you
should have pawned them and brought some money with you.'"
The pictures of the utter degradation of the most famous
of the hetairai--Leontium, Lais, Phryne, and others, drawn by
Athenaeus, need not be transferred to these pages. Combined with the
revelations made in Lucian's [Greek: Etairikoi dialogoi], they
demonstrate absolutely that these degraded, mercenary, mawkish
creatures could not have inspired romantic sentiment in the hearts of
the men, even if the latter had been capable of it.
It is to such vulgar persons that the poets of classical Greece and
Alexandria addressed their verses. And herein they were followed by
those of the Latins who may be regarded as imitators of the
Alexandrians--Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, the principal
erotic poets of Rome. They wrote all their love-poems to, for, or
about, a class of women corresponding to the Greek hetairai. Of Ovid I
have already spoken (189), and what I said of him practically applies
to the others. Propertius not only writes with the hetairai in his
mind, but, like his Alexandrian models, he appears as one who is
forever writing love-poems without ever being really in love. With
Catullus the sensual passion at least is sincere. Yet even Professor
Sellar, who declares that he is, "with the exception perhaps of
Sappho, the greatest and truest of all the ancient poets of love," is
obliged to admit that he "has not the romance and purity of modern
sentiment" (349, 22). Like the Greeks, he had a vague idea that there
is something higher than sensual passion, but, like a Greek, in
expressing it, he ignores women as a matter of course. "There was a
time," he writes to his profligate Lesbia, "when I loved you not as a
man loves his mistress, but _as a father loves his son or his
son-in-law_"!
Dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum,
Lesbia, nee prae me velle tenere Iovem.
Dilexi tum te non ut volgus amicam,
Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.
In Tibullus there is a note of tenderness which, however, is a mark of
effeminacy rather than of an improved manliness. His passion is
fickle, his adoration little more than adulation, and the expressions
of unselfish devotion here and there do not mean more than the
altiloquent words of Achilles about Briseis or of Admetus about
Alcestis, for they are not backed up by altruistic actions. In a word,
his poems belong to the region of sentimentality, not sentiment.
Morally he is as rotten as any of his colleagues. He began his poetic
career with a glorification of [Greek: paiderastia], and continued it
as an admirer of the most abandoned women. A French author who wrote a
history of prostitution in three volumes quite properly devoted a
chapter to Tibullus and his love-affairs.[325]
SHORT STORIES
A big volume might be filled with the short love-stories in prose or
verse scattered through a thousand years of Greek literature. But,
although some of them are quite romantic, I must emphatically
reiterate what I said in my first book (76)--that romantic love does
not appear in the writings of any Greek author and that the passion of
the desperately enamoured young people so often portrayed sprang
entirely from sensuality. One of the critics referred to at the
beginning of this chapter held me up to the ridicule of the British
public because I ignored such romantic love-stories as Orpheus and
Eurydice, Alcyone and Ceyx, Atalanta and Meleager, Cephalus and
Procris, and "a dozen others" which "any school girl" could tell me.
To begin with the one last named, the critic asks: "What can be said
against Cephalus and Procris?" A great deal, I am afraid. As told by
Antoninus Liberalis in No. 41 of his _Metamorphoses_ ([Greek:
metamorphoseon synagogae]) it is one of the most abominable and
obscene stories ever penned even by a Greek. Some of the disgusting
details are omitted in the versions of Ovid and Hyginus, but in the
least offensive version that can be made the story runs thus:
Cephalus, having had experience of woman's unbridled
passion, doubts his wife's fidelity and, to test her,
disguises himself and offers her a bag of gold. At
first she refuses, but when he doubles the sum, she
submits, whereupon he throws away his disguise and
confronts her with her guilt. Covered with shame, she
flies. Afterward she cuts her hair like a man's,
changes her clothes so as to be unrecognizable, and
joins him in the chase. Being more successful than he,
she promises to teach him on a certain condition; and
on his assenting, she reveals her identity and accuses
him of being just as bad as she was. Another version
reads that after their reconciliation she suspected his
fidelity on hearing that he used to ascend a hill and
cry out "Come, Nephela, come" ([Greek: Nephelae] means
cloud). So she went and concealed herself on the hill
in a thicket, where her husband accidentally killed her
with his javelin.
Is this the kind of Greek "love-stories" that English school girls
learn by the dozen? Coarse as it is, the majority of these stories are
no better, being absolutely unfit for literal translation, which is
doubtless the reason why no publisher has ever brought out a
collection of Greek "love-stories." Of those referred to above none is
so objectionable as the tale of Cephalus and Procris, nor, on the
other hand, is any one of them in any way related to what we call
romantic love. Atalanta was a sweet masculine maiden who could run
faster than any athlete. Her father was anxious to have her marry, and
she finally agreed to wed any man who could reach a certain goal
before her, the condition being, however, that she should be allowed
to transfix with her spear every suitor who failed. She had already
ornamented the place of contest with the heads of many courageous
young men, this tender-hearted, romantic maiden had, when her fun was
rudely spoiled by Meleager, who threw before her three golden apples
which she stopped to pick up, thus losing the race to that hero, who,
no doubt, was extremely happy with such a wife ever after. Even to
this story an improper sequel was added.
Alcyone and Ceyx is the story of a wife who committed suicide on
discovering the body of her husband on the sea-beach; and the story of
Orpheus, who grieved so over the death of his wife Eurydice that he
went to the lower world to bring her up again, but lost her again
because, contrary to his agreement with Pluto and Proserpina, he
looked back to see if she was following, is known to everybody. The
conjugal attachment and grief at the loss of a spouse which these two
legends tell of, are things the existence of which in Greece no one
has ever denied. They are simple phenomena quite apart from the
complex state of mind we call romantic love, and are shared by man
with many of the lower animals. In such attachment and grief there is
no evidence of altruistic affection. Orpheus tried to bring back
Eurydice to please himself, not her, and Alcyone's suicide was of no
possible use to Ceyx.[326]
The story of Panthea and Abradates, to which Professor Ebers refers so
triumphantly, is equally inconclusive as to the existence of
altruistic affection. Abradates, having been urged by his wife Panthea
to show himself worthy of the friendship of Cyrus by doing valorous
deeds, falls in a battle, whereat Panthea is so grieved at the result
of her advice that she commits suicide. From the modern Christian
point of view this was not a rational proof of affection, but a
foolish and criminal act. But it harmonized finely with the Greek
ideal--the notion that patriotism is even a woman's first duty, and
her life not worth living except in subservience to her husband. There
is good reason to believe[327] that this story was a pure invention of
Xenophon and deliberately intended to be an object lesson to women
regarding the ideal they ought to live up to. The whole of the book in
which it appears--[Greek: Kyrou paideia]--is what the Germans call a
_Tendenzroman_--a historic romance with a moral, illustrating the
importance of a correct education and glorifying a certain form of
government.
To a student of Greek love one of the most instructive documents is
the [Greek: erotika pathaemata] of Parthenius, who was a contemporary
of the most famous Roman poets (first century before Christ), and the
teacher of Virgil. It is a collection of thirty-six short love-stories
in prose, made for him by his friend Cornelius Gallus, who was in
quest of subjects which he might turn into elegies. It has been
remarked that these poems are peculiarly sad, but a better word for
them is coarse. Unbridled lust, incest, [Greek: _paiderastia_], and
adultery are the favorite motives in them, and few rise above the
mephitic atmosphere which breathes from Cephalus and Procris or other
stories of crime, like that of Philomela and Procne, which were so
popular among Greek and Roman poets, and presumably suited their
readers. With amusing naïveté Eckstein pleads for these "specimens of
antique romance" on the ground that there is more lubricity in
Bandello and Boccaccio!--which is like declaring that a man who
assassinates another by simply hitting him on the head is virtuous
because there are others who make murder a fine art. I commend the
stories of Parthenius to the special attention of any one who may have
any lingering doubts as to the difference between Greek ideas of love
and modern ideals.[328]
GREEK ROMANCES
Parthenius is regarded as a connecting link of the Alexandrian school
with the Roman poets on one side, and on the other with the romances
which constitute the last phase of Greek erotic literature.[329] In
these romances too, a number of my critics professed to discover
romantic love. The reviewer of my book in _Nature_ (London) asked me
to see whether Heliodorus's account of the loves of Theagenes and
Chariclea does not come up to my standard. I am sorry to say it does
not. Jowett perhaps dismisses this story somewhat too curtly as "silly
and obscene"; but it certainly is far from being a love-story in the
modern sense of the word, though its moral tone is doubtless superior
to that of the other Greek romances. The notion that it indicates an
advance in erotic literature may no doubt be traced to the legend that
Heliodorus was a bishop, and that he introduced Christian ideas into
his romance--a theory which Professor Rohde has scuttled and sent to
the bottom of the sea.[330] The preservation of the heroine's
virginity amid incredible perils and temptations is one of the tricks
of the Greek novelists, the real object of which is made most apparent
in _Daphnis and Chloe_. The extraordinary emphasis placed on it on
every possible occasion is not only very indelicate, but it shows how
novel and remarkable such an idea was considered at the time. It was
one of the tricks of the Sophists (with whom Heliodorus must be
classed), who were in the habit of treating a moral question like a
mathematical problem. "Given a maiden's innocence, how can it be
preserved to the end of the story?" is the artificial, silly, and
vulgar leading motive of this Greek romance, as of others. Huet,
Villemain, and many other critics have been duped by this
sophistico-mathematical aspect of the story into descanting on the
peculiar purity and delicacy of its moral tone; but one need only read
a few of the heroine's speeches to see how absurd this judgment is.
When she says to her lover,
"I resigned myself to you, not as to a paramour, but as to a
legitimate husband, and I have preserved my chastity with
you, resisting your urgent solicitations because I always
had in mind the lawful marriage to which we pledged
ourselves,"
she uses the language of a shrewd hetaira, not of an innocent girl;
nor could the author have made her say the following had his subject
been romantic love: [Greek: _Hormaen gar, hos oistha, kratousaes
epithumias machae men antitupos epipeinei, logos d' eikon kai pros to
boulaema syntrechon taen protaen kai zeousan phoran esteile kai to
katoxu taes orezeos to haedei taes epaggelias kateunase.]
The story of Heliodorus is full of such coarse remarks, and his idea
of love is plainly enough revealed when he moralizes that "a lover
inclines to drink and one who is drunk is inclined to love."
It is not only on account of this coarseness that the story of
Theagenes and Chariclea fails to come up to the standard of romantic
love. When Arsace (VIII., 9) imprisons the lovers together, with the
idea that the sight of their chains will increase the sufferings of
each, we have an intimation of crude sympathy; but apart from that the
symptoms of love referred to in the course of the romance are the same
that I have previously enumerated, as peculiar to Alexandrian
literature. The maxims, "dread the revenge that follows neglected
love;" "love soon finds its end in satiety;" and "the greatest
happiness is to be free from love," take us back to the oldest Greek
times. Peculiarly Greek, too, is the scene in which the women, unable
to restrain their feelings, fling fruits and flowers at a young man
because he is so beautiful; although on the same page we are surprised
by the admission that woman's beauty is even more alluring than man's,
which is not a Greek sentiment.
In this last respect, as in some others, the romance of Heliodorus
differs favorably from that of Achilles Tatius, which relates the
adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon; but I need not dwell on this
amazingly obscene and licentious narrative, as its author's whole
philosophy of love, like that of Heliodorus, is summed up in this
passage:
"As the wine produced its effect I cast lawless glances at
Leucippe: for Love and Bacchus are violent gods, they invade
the soul and so inflame it that they forget modesty, and
while one kindles the flame the other supplies the fuel; for
wine is the food of love."
Nor need I dwell on the stories of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, or
the epic _Dionysiaca_ of Nonnus, as they yield us no new points of
view. The romance of Longus, however, calls for some remarks, as it is
the best known of the Greek novels and has often been pronounced a
story of refined love worthy of a modern writer.
DAPHNIS AND CHLOE
Goethe found in _Daphnis and Chloe_ "a delicacy of feeling which
cannot be excelled." Professor Murray backs up the morals of Longus:
"It needs an unintelligent reader or a morbid translator," he writes
(403), "to find harm in the _History of Daphnis and Chloe_;" and an
editorial writer in the New York _Mail and Express_ accused me, as
before intimated, of unexampled ignorance for not knowing that
_Daphnis and Chloe_ is "as sweet and beautiful a love-story as ever
skipped in prose." This, indeed, is the prevalent opinion. How it ever
arose is a mystery to me. Fiction has always been the sphere of the
most unrestrained license, yet Dunlop wrote in his _History of
Fiction_ that there are in this story "particular passages so
extremely reprehensible that I know nothing like them in almost any
work whatever." In collecting the material for the present volume I
have been obliged to examine thousands of books referring to the
relations of men and women, but I declare that of all the books I have
seen only the Hindoo _K[=a]masutr[=a]m_, the literal version of the
_Arabian Nights_, and the American Indian stories collected by Dr.
Boas, can compare with this "sweet and beautiful" romance of Longus in
downright obscenity or deliberate laciviousness. I have been able,
without going beyond the latitude permissible to anthropologists, to
give a fairly accurate idea of the love-affairs of savages and
barbarians; but I find it impossible, after several trials, to sum up
the story of Daphnis and Chloe without going beyond the limits of
propriety. Among all the deliberate pictures of _moral depravity_
painted by Greek and Roman authors not one is so objectionable as this
"idyllic" picture of the _innocent_ shepherd boy and girl. Pastoral
love is coarse enough, in all truth: but this story is infinitely more
immoral than, for instance, the frank and natural sensualism of the
twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus. Professor Anthon (755) described
the story of _Daphnis and Chloe_ as
"the romance, _par excellence_, of physical love. It is a
history of the senses rather than of the mind, a picture of
the development of the instincts rather than of the
sentiments.... _Paul and Virginia_ is nothing more than
_Daphnis and Chloe_ delineated by a refined and cultivated
mind, and spiritualized and purified by the influence of
Christianity."
This is true; but Anthon erred decidedly in saying that in the Greek
story "vice is advocated by no sophistry." On the contrary, what makes
this romance so peculiarly objectionable is that it is a master work
of that kind of fiction which makes vice alluring under the
sophistical veil of innocence. Longus knew very well that nothing is
so tempting to libertines as purity and ignorant innocence; hence he
made purity and ignorant innocence the pivot of his prurient story.
Professor Rohde (516) has rudely torn the veil from his sly sophistry:
"The way in which Longus excites the sensual desires of
the lovers by means of licentious experiments going
always only to the verge of gratification, betrays an
abominably hypocritical _raffinement_[331] which
reveals in the most disagreeable manner that the
naïveté of this idyllist is a premeditated artifice and
he himself nothing but a sophist. It is difficult to
understand how anyone could have ever been deceived so
far as to overlook the sophistical character of this
pastoral romance of Longus, or could have discovered
genuine naïveté in this most artificial of all
rhetorical productions. No attentive reader who has
some acquaintance with the ways of the Sophistic
writers will have any difficulty in apprehending the
true inwardness of the story... As this sophist, in
those offensively licentious love-scenes, suddenly
shows the cloven foot under the cloak of innocence, so,
on the other hand, his eager desire to appear as simple
and childlike as possible often enough makes him cold,
finical, trifling, or utterly silly in his
affectation."[332]
HERO AND LEANDER
Our survey of Greek erotic literature may be brought to a close with
two famous stories which are closely allied to the Greek romances,
although one of them--_Hero and Leander_--was written in verse, and
the other--_Cupid and Psyche_--in Latin prose. While Apuleius was an
African and wrote his story in Latin, he evidently derived it from a
Greek source.[333] He lived in the second century of our era, and
Musaeus, the author of _Hero and Leander_, in the fifth. It is more
than probable that Musaeus did not invent the story, but found it as a
local legend and simply adorned it with his pen.
On the shores of the Hellespont, near the narrowest part of the
strait, lay the cities of Sestos and Abydos. It was at Sestos that
Xerxes undertook to cross with his vast armies, while Abydos claimed
to be the true burial place of Osiris; yet these circumstance were
considered insignificant in comparison with the fact that it was from
Abydos to Sestos and back that Leander was fabled to have swum on his
nightly visits to his beloved Hero; for the coins of both the cities
were adorned with the solitary tower in which Hero was supposed to
live at the time. Why she lived there is not stated by any of the
poets who elaborated the legend, but it may be surmised that she did
so in order to give them a chance to invent a romantic story. To the
present day the Turks point out what they claim to be her tower, and
it is well-known that in 1810, Lord Byron and Lieutenant Ekenhead, in
order to test the possibility of Leander's feat, swam from Europe to
Asia at this place; it took them an hour and five and an hour and ten
minutes respectively, and on account of the strong current the
distance actually traversed was estimated at more than four miles,
while in a straight line it was only a mile from shore to shore.
I have already pointed out (202, 204) that the action of Leander in
swimming across this strait for the sake of enjoying the favor of
Hero, and her suicide when she finds him dead on the rocks, have
nothing so do with the altruistic self-sacrifice that indicates
_soul_-love. Here I merely wish to remark that apart from that there
is not a line or word in the whole poem to prove that this story
"completely upsets" my theory, as one critic wrote. The story is not
merely frivolous and cold, as W. von Humboldt called it; it is as
unmitigatedly sensual as _Daphnis and Chloe_, though less offensively
so because it does not add the vice of hypocrisy to its immodesty.
From beginning to end there is but one thought in Leanders mind, as
there is in Hero's, whose words and actions are even more indelicate
than those of Leander; they are the words and actions of a priestess
of Venus true to her function--a girl to whom the higher feminine
virtues, which alone can inspire romantic love, are unknown. On the
impulse of the moment, in response to coarse flattery, she makes an
assignation in a lonely tower with a perfect stranger, regardless of
her parents, her honor, her future. Details need not be cited, as the
poem is accessible to everybody. It is a romantic story, in Ovid's
version even more so than in that of Musaeus; but of romantic
love--soul-love--there is no trace in either version. There are
touches of sentimentality in Ovid, but not of sentiment; a distinction
on which I should have dwelt in my first book (91).
CUPID AND PSYCHE
To a student of comparative literature the story of Cupid and
Psyche[334] is one of those tales which are current in many countries
(and of which _Lohengrin_ is a familiar instance), that were
originally intended as object lessons to enforce the moral that women
must not be too inquisitive regarding their lovers or husbands, who
may seem monsters, but in reality are gods and should be accepted as
such. If most persons, nevertheless, fancy that _Cupid and Psyche_ is
a story of "modern" romantic love, that is presumably due to the fact
that most persons have never read it. It is not too much to say that
had Apuleius really known such a thing as modern romantic love--or
conjugal affection either--it would have required great ingenuity on
his part to invent a plot from which those qualities are so rigorously
excluded. Romantic love means pre-matrimonial infatuation, based not
only on physical charms but on soul-beauty. The time when alone it
flourishes with its mental purity, its minute sympathies, its gallant
attentions and sacrifices, its hyperbolic adorations, and mixed moods
of agonies and ecstasies, is during the period of courtship. Now from
the story of Cupid and Psyche this period is absolutely eliminated.
Venus is jealous because divine honors are paid to the Princess Psyche
on account of her beauty; so she sends her son Cupid to punish Psyche
by making her fall in love violently (_amore flagrantissimo_) with the
lowest, poorest, and most abject man on earth. Just at that time
Psyche has been exposed by the king on a mountain top in obedience to
an obscure oracle. Cupid sees her there, and, disobeying his mother's
orders, has her brought while asleep, by his servant Zephir, to a
beautiful palace, where all the luxuries of life are provided for her
by unseen hands; and at night, after she has retired, an unknown lover
visits her, disappearing again before dawn (_jamque aderat ignobilis
maritus et torem inscenderat et uxorem sibi Psychen fecerat et ante
lucis exortum propere discesserat_).
Now follow some months in which Psyche is neither maiden nor wife.
Even if they had been properly married there would have been no
opportunity for the development or manifestation of supersensual
conjugal attachment, for all this time Psyche is never allowed even to
see her lover; and when an opportunity arises for her to show her
devotion to him she fails utterly to rise to the occasion. One night
he informs her that her two sisters, who are unhappily married, are
trying to find her, and he warns her seriously not to heed them in any
way, should they succeed in their efforts. She promises, but spends
the whole of the next day weeping and wailing because she is locked up
in a beautiful prison, unable to see her sisters--very unlike a loving
modern girl on her honeymoon, whose one desire is to be alone with her
beloved, giving him a monopoly of her affection and enjoying a
monopoly of his, with no distractions or jealousies to mar their
happiness. Cupid chides her for being sad and dissatisfied even amid
his caresses and he again warns her against her scheming sisters;
whereat she goes so far as to threaten to kill herself unless he
allows her to receive her sisters. He consents at last, after making
her promise not to let them persuade her to try to find out anything
about his personal appearance, lest such forbidden curiosity make her
lose him forever. Nevertheless, when, on their second visit, the
sisters, filled with envy, try to persuade her that her unseen lover
is a monster who intends to eat her after she has grown fat, and that
to save herself she must cut off his head while he is asleep, she
resolves to follow their advice. But when she enters the room at
night, with a knife in one hand and a lamp in the other, and sees the
beautiful god Cupid in her bed, she is so agitated that a drop of hot
oil falls from her lamp on his face and wakes him; whereupon, after
reproaching her, he rises on his wings and forsakes her.
Overcome with grief, Psyche tries to end her life by jumping into a
river, but Zephir saves her. Then she takes revenge on her sisters by
calling on them separately and telling each one that Cupid had
deserted her because he had seen her with lamp and knife, and that he
was now going to marry one of them. The sisters hasten one after the
other to the rock, but Zephir fails to catch them, and they are dashed
to pieces. Venus meanwhile had discovered the escapade of her boy and
locked him up till his wound from the hot oil was healed. Her anger
now vents itself on Psyche. She sets her several impossible tasks, but
Psyche, with supernatural aid, accomplishes all of them safely. At
last Cupid manages to escape through a window. He finds Psyche lying
on the road like a corpse, wakes her and Mercury brings her to heaven,
where at last she is properly married to Cupid--_sic rite Psyche
convenit in manum Cupidinis et nascitur illis maturo partu filia, quam
Voluptatem nominamus_.
Such is the much-vaunted "love-story" of Cupid and Psyche!
Commentators have found all sorts of fanciful and absurd allegories in
this legend. Its real significance I have already pointed out. But it
may be looked at from still another point of view. Psyche means soul,
and in the story of Apuleius Cupid does not fall in love with a soul,
but with a beautiful body. This sums up Hellenic love in general. _The
Greek Cupid_ NEVER _fell in love with a Psyche_.
UTILITY AND FUTURE OF LOVE
The Greek view that love is a disease and a calamity still prevails
extensively among persons who, like the Greeks, have never experienced
real love and do not know what it is. In a book dated 1868 and
entitled _Modern Women_ I find the following passage (325):
"Already the great philosopher of the age has
pronounced that the passion of love plays far too
important a part in human existence, and that it is a
terrible obstacle to human progress. The general temper
of the times echoes the sentence of Mill."
It is significant that this opinion should have emanated from a man
whose idea of femininity was as masculine as that of the Greeks--an
ideal which, by eliminating or suppressing the secondary and tertiary
(mental) sexual qualities, necessarily makes love synonymous with
lust.
There is another large class of persons who likewise consider love a
disease, but a harmless one, like the measles, or mumps, which it is
well to have as early as possible, so as to be done with it, and which
seldom does any harm. Others, still, regard it as a sort of juvenile
holiday, like a trip to Italy or California, which is delightful while
it lasts and leaves pleasant memories thoughout life, but is otherwise
of no particular use.
It shows a most extraordinary ignorance of the ways of nature to
suppose that it should have developed so powerful an instinct and
sentiment for no useful purpose, or even as a detriment to the race.
That is not the way nature operates. In reality love is the most
useful thing in the world. The two most important objects of the human
race are its own preservation and improvement, and in both of these
directions love is the mightiest of all agencies. It makes the world
go round. Take it away, and in a few years animal life will be as
extinct on this planet as it is on the moon. And by preferring youth
to age, health to disease, beauty to deformity, it improves the human
type, slowly but steadily.
The first thinker who clearly recognized and emphatically asserted the
superlative importance of love was Schopenhauer. Whereas Hegel (II.,
184) parroted the popular opinion that love is peculiarly and
exclusively the affair of the two individuals whom it directly
involves, having no concern with the eternal interests of family and
race, no universality (Allgemeinheit). Schopenhauer's keen mind on the
contrary saw that love, though the most individualized of all
passions, concerns the race even more than the individual. "Die
Zusammensetzung der nächsten Generation, e qua iterum pendent
innumerae generationes"--the very composition and essence of the next
generation and of countless generations following it, depends, as he
says, on the particular choice of a mate. If an ugly, vicious,
diseased mate be chosen, his or her bad qualities are transmitted to
the following generations, for "the gods visit the sins of the fathers
upon the children," as even the old sages knew, long before science
had revealed the laws of heredity. Not only the husband's and the
wife's personal qualities are thus transmitted to the children and
children's children, but those also of four grandparents, eight
great-grandparents, and so on; and when we bear in mind the tremendous
differences in the inheritable ancestral traits of families--virtues
or infirmities--we see of what incalculable importance to the future
of families is that individual preference which is so vital an
ingredient of romantic love.
It is true that love is not infallible. It is still, as Browning puts
it, "blind, oft-failing, half-enlightened." It may be said that
marriage itself is not necessary for the maintenance of the species;
but it is useful both for its maintenance and its improvement; hence
natural selection has favored it--especially the monogamous form--_in
the interest of coming generations._ Love is simply an extension of
this process---making it efficacious before marriage and thus
quintupling its importance. It makes many mistakes, for it is a young
instinct, and it has to do with a very complex problem, so that its
development is slow; but it has a great future, especially now that
intelligence is beginning to encourage and help it. But while
admitting that love is fallible we must be careful not to decry it for
mistakes with which it has no concern. It is absurd to suppose that
every self-made match is a love-match: yet, whenever such a marriage
is a failure, love is held responsible. We must remember, too, that
there are two kinds of love and that the lower kind does not choose as
wisely as the higher. Where animal passion alone is involved, parents
cannot be blamed for trying to curb it. As a rule, love of all kinds
can be checked or even cured, and an effort to do this should be made
in all cases where it is found to be bestowed on a person likely to
taint the offspring with vicious propensities or serious disease. But,
with all its liability to error, romantic love is usually the safest
guide to marriage, and even sensual love of the more refined, esthetic
type is ordinarily preferable to what are called marriages of reason,
because love (as distinguished from abnormal, unbridled lust) always
is guided by youth and health, thus insuring a healthy, vigorous
offspring.
If it be asked, "Are not the parents who arrange the marriages of
reason also guided as a rule by considerations of health, moral and
physical?" the answer is a most emphatic "No." Parental fondness,
sufficing for the preservation and rearing of children, is a very old
thing, but parental affection, which is altruistically concerned for
the weal of children in after-life, is a comparatively modern
invention. The foregoing chapters have taught us that an Australian
father's object in giving his daughter in marriage was to get in
exchange a new girl-wife for himself; what became of the daughter, or
what sort of a man got her, did not concern him in the least. Among
Africans and American Indians the object of bringing up daughters and
giving them in marriage was to secure cows or ponies in return for
them. In India the object of marriage was the rearing of sons or
daughters' sons for the purpose of saving the souls of their parents
from perdition; so they flung them into the arms of anyone who would
take them. The Greeks and the Hebrews married to perpetuate their
family name or to supply the state with soldiers. In Japan and China
ancestral and family considerations have always been of infinitely
more importance than the individual inclinations or happiness of the
bridal couple. Wherever we look we find this topsy-turvy state of
affairs--marriages made to suit the parents instead of the bride and
groom; while the welfare of the grandchildren is of course never
dreamt of.
This outrageous parental selfishness and tyranny, so detrimental to
the interests of the human race, was gradually mitigated as
civilization progressed in Europe. Marriages were no longer made for
the benefit of the parents alone, but with a view to the comfort and
worldly advantages of the couple to be wedded. But rank, money, dowry,
continued--and continue in Europe to this day--to be the chief
matchmakers, few parents rising to the consideration of the welfare of
the grandchildren. The grandest task of the morality of the future
will be to _make parental altruism extend to these grandchildren_;
that is, to make parents and everyone else abhor and discountenance
all marriages that do not insure the health and happiness of future
generations. Love will show the way. Far from being useless or
detrimental to the human race, it is an instinct evolved by nature as
a defence of the race against parental selfishness and criminal myopia
regarding future generations.
Plato observed in his _Statesman_ (310) that
"most persons form marriage connections without due
regard to what is best for procreation of children."
"They seek after wealth and power, which in matrimony
are objects not worthy even of serious censure."
But his remedy for this evil was, as we have seen (775), quite as bad
as the evil itself, since it involved promiscuity and the elimination
of chastity and family life. Love accomplishes the results that Plato
and Lycurgus aimed at, so far as healthy offspring is concerned,
without making the same sacrifices and reducing human marriage to the
level of the cattle-breeder. It accomplishes, moreover, the same
result that natural selection secures, and without its cruelty, by
simply excluding from marriage the criminal, vicious, crippled,
imbecile, incurably diseased and all who do not come up to its
standard of health, vigor, and beauty.
While claiming that love is an instinct developed by nature as a
defence against the short-sighted selfishness of parents who would
sacrifice the future of the race to their own advantage or that of
their children, I do not forget that in the past it has often secured
its results in an illegitimate way. That, however, was no fault of its
own, being due to the artificial and foolish obstacles placed in its
way. Laws of nature cannot be altered by man, and if the safety valve
is tied down the boiler is bound to explode. In countries where
marriages are habitually arranged by the parents with reference to
rank or money alone, in defiance of love, the only "love-children" are
necessarily illegitimate. This has given rise to the notion that
illegitimate children are apt to be more beautiful, healthy, and
vigorous than the issue of regular marriages: and, under the
circumstances, it was true. But for this topsy-turvyness, this folly,
this immorality, we must not blame love, but those who persistently
thwarted love--or tried to thwart it. As soon as love was allowed a
voice in the arrangement of marriages illegitimacy decreased rapidly.
Had the rights of love been recognized sooner, it would have proved a
useful ally of morality instead its craftiest enemy.[335]
The utility of love from a moral point of view can be shown in other
ways. Many tendencies--such as club life, the greater ease of securing
divorces, the growing independence of women and their disinclination
to domesticity--are undermining that family life which civilization
has so slowly and laboriously built up, and fostering celibacy. Now
celibacy is not only unnatural and detrimental to health and
longevity, but it is the main root of immorality. Its antidote is
love, the most persuasive champion and promoter of marriage. No reader
of the present volume can fail to see that man has generally managed
to have a good time at the expense of woman and it is she who benefits
particularly by the modern phases of love and marriage. Yet in recent
years the notion that family life is not good enough for women, and
that they should be brought up in a spirit of manly independence, has
come over society like a noxious epidemic. It is quite proper that
there should be avenues of employment for women who have no one to
support them; but it is a grievous error to extend this to women in
general, to give them the education, tastes, habits, sports, and
politics of the men. It antagonizes that sexual differentiation of the
more refined sort on which romantic love depends and tempts men to
seek amusement in ephemeral, shallow amours. In plain English, while
there are many charming exceptions, the growing masculinity of girls
is the main reason why so many of them remain unmarried; thus
fulfilling the prediction: "Could we make her as the man, sweet love
were slain." Let girls return to their domestic sphere, make
themselves as delightfully feminine as possible, not trying to be
gnarled oaks but lovely vines clinging around them, and the sturdy
oaks will joyously extend their love and protection to them amid all
the storms of life. In love lies the remedy for many of the economic
problems of the day.
There is not one of the fourteen ingredients of romantic love which
cannot be shown to be useful in some way. Of individual preference and
its importance in securing a happy blend of qualities for the next
generation I have just spoken, and I have devoted nearly a page (131)
to the utility of coyness. Jealousy has helped to develop chastity,
woman's cardinal virtue and the condition of all refinement in love
and society. Monopolism has been the most powerful enemy of those two
colossal evils of savagery and barbarism--promiscuity and polygamy;
and it will in future prove as fatal an enemy to all attempts to bring
back promiscuity under the absurd name of "free love," which would
reduce all women to the level of prostitutes and make men desert them
after their charms have faded. Two other ingredients of love--purity
and the admiration of personal beauty--are of great value to the cause
of morality as conquerors of lust, which they antagonize and suppress
by favoring the higher (mental) sexual qualities; while the sense of
beauty also co-operates with the instinct which makes for the health
of future generations; beauty being simply the flower of health, and
inheritable.
At first sight it may seem difficult to assign any use to the pride,
the hyperbole, and the mixed moods which are component elements of
love; but they are of value inasmuch as they exalt the mind, and give
to the beloved such prominence and importance that the way is paved
for the altruistic ingredients of romantic love, the utility of which
is so obvious that it hardly needs to be hinted at. If love were
nothing more than a lesson in altruism--with many the first and only
lesson in their lives--it would be second in importance to no other
factor of civilization. Sympathy lifts the lover out of the deep
groove of selfishness, teaching him the miracle of feeling another's
pains and pleasures more keenly than his own. Man's adoration of woman
as a superior being--which she really is, as the distinctively
feminine virtues are more truly Christian and have a higher ethical
value than the masculine virtues--creates an ideal which has improved
women by making them ambitious to live up to it. No one, again, who
has read the preceding pages relating to the treatment of women before
romantic love existed, and compares it with their treatment at
present, can fail to recognize the wonderful transformation brought
about by gallantry and self-sacrifice--altruistic habits which have
changed men from ruffians to gentlemen. I do not say that love alone
is responsible for this improvement, but it has been one of the most
potent factors. Finally, there is affection, which, in conjunction
with the other altruistic ingredients of love, has changed it from an
appetite like that of a fly for sugar to a self-oblivious devotion
like a mother's for her child, thus raising it to the highest ethical
rank as an agency of culture.
We are still very far from the final stage in the evolution of love.
There is no reason to doubt that it will continue to develop, as in
the past, in the direction of the esthetic, supersensual, and
altruistic. As a physician's eye becomes trained for the subtle
diagnosis of disease, a clergyman's for the diagnosis of moral evil,
so will the love-instinct become more and more expert, critical, and
refined, rejecting those who are vicious or diseased. Compare the
lustrous eyes of a consumptive girl with the sparkling eyes of a
healthy maiden in buoyant spirits. Both are beautiful, but to a
doctor, or to anyone else who knows the deadliness and horrors of
tuberculosis, the beauty of the consumptive girl's eyes will seem
uncanny, like the charm of a snake, and it will inspire pity, which in
this case is not akin to love, but fatal to it. Thus may superior
knowledge influence our sense of beauty and liability to fall in love.
I know a man who was in love with a girl and had made up his mind to
propose. He went to call on her, and as he approached the door he
heard her abusing her mother in the most heartless manner. He did not
ring the bell, and never called again. His love was of the highest
type, but he suppressed his feelings.
More important than the further improvement of romantic love is the
task of increasing the proportion of men and women who will be capable
of experiencing it as now known to us. The vast majority are still
strangers to anything beyond primitive love. The analysis made in the
present volume will enable all persons who fancy themselves in love to
see whether their passion is merely self-love in a roundabout way or
true romantic affection for another. They can see whether it is mere
selfish liking, attachment, or fondness, or else unselfish affection.
If adoration, purity, sympathy, and the altruistic impulses of
gallantry and self-sacrifice are lacking, they can be cultivated by
deliberate exercise:
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this.
The affections can be trained as well as the muscles; and thus the
lesson taught in this book may help to bring about a new era of
unselfish devotion and true love. No man, surely, can read the
foregoing disclosures regarding man's primitive coarseness and
heartlessness without feeling ashamed for his sex and resolving to be
an unselfish lover and husband to the end of his life.
A great mistake was made by the Greeks when they distinguished
celestial from earthly love. The distinction itself was all right, but
their application of it was all wrong. Had they known romantic love as
we know it, they could not have made the grievous blunder of calling
the love between men and women worldly, reserving the word celestial
for the friendship between men. Equally mistaken were those mediaeval
sages who taught that the celestial sexual virtues are celibacy and
virginity--a doctrine which, if adopted, would involve the suicide of
the human race, and thus stands self-condemned. No, _celestial love is
not asceticism; it is altruism_. Romantic love is celestial, for it is
altruistic, yet it does not preach contempt of the body, and its goal
is marriage, the chief pillar of civilization. The admiration of a
beautiful, well-rounded, healthy body is as legitimate and laudable an
ingredient of romantic love as the admiration of that mental beauty
which distinguishes it from sensual love. It is not only that the
lovers themselves are entitled to partners with healthy, attractive
bodies; it is a duty they owe to the next generation not to marry
anyone who is likely to transmit bodily or mental infirmities to the
next generation. It is quite as reprehensible to marry for spiritual
reasons alone as to be guided only by physical charms.
Love is nature's radical remedy for disease, whereas marriage, as
practised in the past, and too often in the present, is little more
than a legalized crime. "One of the last things that occur to a
marrying couple is whether they are fit to be represented in
posterity," writes Dr. Harry Campbell (_Lancet_, 1898).
"Theft and murder are considered the blackest of crimes, but
neither the law nor the church has raised its voice against
the marriage of the unfit, for neither has realized that
worse than theft and well-nigh as bad as murder is the
bringing into the world, through disregard of parental
fitness, of individuals full of disease-tendencies."
On this point the public conscience needs a thorough rousing. If a
mother deliberately gave her daughter a draught which made her a
cripple, or an invalid, or an imbecile, or tuberculous, everybody
would cry out with horror, and she would become a social outcast. But
if she inflicts these injuries on her granddaughter, by marrying her
daughter to a drunkard, in the hope of reforming him, or to a wealthy
degenerate, or an imbecile baron, no one says a word, provided the
marriage law has been complied with.
It is owing to these persistent crimes against grandchildren that the
human race as a whole is still such a miserable rabble, and that
recruiting offices and insurances companies tell such startling tales
of degeneracy. Love would cure this, if there were more of the right
kind. Until there is, much good may be done by accepting it as a
guide, and building up a sentiment in favor of its instinctive object
and ideal. I have described in one chapter the obstacles which
retarded the growth of love, and in another I have shown how
sentiments change and grow. Most of those obstacles are being
gradually removed, and public opinion is slowly but surely changing in
favor of love. Building up a new sentiment is a slow process. At first
it may be a mere hut for a hermit thinker, but gradually it becomes
larger and larger as thousands add their mite to the building fund,
until at last it stands as a sublime cathedral admonishing all to do
their duty. When the Cathedral of Love is finished the horror of
disease and vice will have become as absolute a bar to marriage as the
horror of incest is now; and it will be acknowledged that the only
true marriage of reason is a marriage of love.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Albrecht Weber and other German scholars, while practically
agreeing with Hegel regarding the Greeks and Romans, claim, that the
amorous poetry of the ancient Hindoo has the sentimental qualities of
modern European verse.
[2] In the New York _Nation_ of September 22, and the _Evening Post_
of September 24, 1887. My reasons for not agreeing with these two
distinguished professors will be dwelt on repeatedly in the following
pages. If they are right, then literature is not, as it is universally
held to be, a mirror of life.
[3] No important truth is ever born full fledged. The Darwinian theory
was conceived simultaneously by Wallace and Darwin, and both were
anticipated by other writers. Nay, a German professor has written a
treatise on the "Greek Predecessors of Darwin."
[4] _Studien über die Libido Sexualis_, I., Pt. I., 28.
[5] In the last chapter of _Lotos-Time in Japan_.
[6] An amusing instance of this trait may be found in Johnston's
account of his ascent of the Kilima-Njaro (271-276).
[7] Roth's sumptuous volume, _British North Borneo_, gives a life-like
picture of the Dyaks from every point of view, with numerous
illustrations.
[8] See the chapter on Nudity and Bathing in my _Lotos-Time in Japan_.
[9] Bancroft, II., 75; Wallace, 357; Westermarck, 195; Humboldt, III.,
230.
[10] See especially the ninth chapter of Westermarck's _History of
Human Marriage_, 186-201.
[11] Westermarck (74) devotes half a page in fine type to an
enumeration of the peoples among whom many such customs prevailed, and
his list is far from being complete.
[12] See Westermarck, Chap. XX., for a list of monogamous peoples.
[13] The vexed question of promiscuity hinges on this distinction. As
a matter of _form_ promiscuity may not have been the earliest phase of
human marriage, but as a matter of _fact_ it was. Westermarck's
ingeniously and elaborately built up argument against the theory of
promiscuity is a leaning tower which crashes to the ground when
weighted by this one consideration. See the chapter on Australia.
[14] For a partial list of peoples who practised trial marriage and
frequent divorce see Westermarck, 518-521, and C. Fischer, Über die
Probennächte der deutschen Bauernmädchen_. Leipzig, 1780.
[15] For the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality see the
chapter on Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment.
[16] Johnston states (in Schoolcraft, IV., 224) that the wild Indians
of California had their rutting season as regularly as have the deer
and other animals. See also Powers (206) and Westermarck (28). In the
Andaman Islands a man and woman remained together only till their
child was weaned, when they separated to seek new mates (_Trans.
Ethnol. Soc_., V., 45).
[17] The other cases of "jealousy" cited by Westermarck (117-122) are
all negatived by the same property argument; to which he indeed
alludes, but the full significance of which he failed to grasp. It is
a pity that language should be so crude as to use the same word
jealousy to denote three such entirely different things as rage at a
rival, revenge for stolen property, and anguish at the knowledge or
suspicion of violated chastity and outraged conjugal affection.
Anthropologists have studied only the lower phases of jealousy, just
as they have failed to distinguish clearly between lust and love.
[18] All these facts, it is hardly necessary to add, serve as further
illustrations to the chapter How Sentiments Change and Grow.
[19] For "love" read covet. We shall see in the chapter on Australia
that love is a feeling altogether beyond the mental horizon of the
natives.
[20] Rohde, 35, 28, 147. See his list of corroborative cases in the
long footnote, pp. 147-148.
[21] Compare this with what Rohde says (42) about the Homeric heroes
and their complete absorption in warlike doings.
[22] _Grundlage der Moral_, § 14.
[23] _Wagner and his Works_, II., 163.
[24] In Burton the translator has changed the sex of the beloved. This
proceeding, a very common one, has done much to confuse the public
regarding the modernity of Greek love. It is not Greek love of women,
but romantic friendship for boys, that resembles modern love for
women.
[25] A multitude of others may be found in an interesting article on
"Sexual Taboo" by Crawley in the _Journal of the Anthropological
Institute_, xxvi.
[26] New York _Evening Post_, January 21, 1899.
[27] Fitzroy, II., 183; _Trans. Ethn. Soc_., New Series, III., 248-88.
[28] That moral infirmities, too, were capable of winning the respect
of savages, may be seen in Carver's _Travels in North America_ (245).
[29] Garcia _Origin de los Indios de el Nuevo Mondo_; McLennan; Ingham
(Westermarck, 113) concerning the Bakongo; Giraud-Teulon, 208, 209,
concerning Nubians and other Ethiopians.
[30] See Letourneau, 332-400; Westermarck, 39-41, 96-113; Grosse,
11-12,50-63, 75-78, 101-163, 107, 180.
[31] Charlevoix, V. 397-424; Letourneau, 351. See also Mackenzie, _V.
fr. M._, 84, 87; Smith, _Arauc._, 238; _Bur. Ethnol._, 1887, 468-70.
[32] How capable of honoring women the Babylonians were may be
inferred from the testimony of Herodotus (I., ch. 199) that every
woman had to sacrifice her chastity to strangers in the temple of
Mylitta.
[33] It gives me great pleasure to correct my error in this place. Not
a few critics of my first book censured me for underrating Roman
advances in the refinements of love. As a matter of fact I overrated
them.
[34] _Life Among the Modocs_ (228). It must be borne in mind that
Joaquin Miller here describes his own ideas of chivalry. He did not,
as a matter of course, find anything resembling them among the Modocs.
If he had, he would have said so, for he was their friend, and married
the girl referred to. But while the Indians themselves never entertain
any chivalrous regard for women, they are acute enough to see that the
whites do, and to profit thereby. One morning when I was writing some
pages of this book under a tree at Lake Tahoe, California, an Indian
came to me and told me a pitiful tale about his "sick squaw" in one of
the neighboring camps. I gave him fifty cents "for the squaw," but
ascertained later that after leaving me he had gone straight to the
bar-room at the end of the pier and filled himself up with whiskey,
though he had specially and repeatedly assured me he was "damned good
Indian," and never drank.
[35] _Magazin von Reisebeschreibungen_, I., 283.
[36] The Rev. Isaac Malek Yonan tells us, in his book on _Persian
Women_ (138), that most Armenian women "are very low in the moral
scale." It is obvious that only one of the wanton class could be in
question in Trumbull's story, for the respectable women are, as Yonan
says, not even permitted to talk loudly or freely in the presence of
men. This clergyman is a native Persian, and the account he gives of
his countrywomen, unbiassed and sorrowful, shows that the chances for
romantic love are no better in modern Persia than they were in the
olden times. The women get no education, hence they grow up "really
stupid and childlike." He refers to "the low estimation in which women
are held," and says that the likes and dislikes of girls about to be
married are not consulted. Girls are seldom betrothed later than the
seventh to the tenth year, often, indeed, immediately after birth or
even before. The wife cannot sit at the same table with her husband,
but must wait on him "like an accomplished slave." After he has eaten
she washes his hands, lights his pipe, then retires to a respectful
distance, her face turned toward the mud wall, and finishes what is
left. If she is ill or in trouble, she does not mention it to him,
"for she could only be sure of harsh, rough words instead of loving
sympathy." Their degraded Oriental customs have led the Persians to
the conclusion that "love has nothing to do with the matrimonial
connection," the main purpose of marriage being "the convenience and
pleasure of a degenerate people" (34-114). So far this Persian
clergyman. His conclusions are borne out by the observations of the
keen-eyed Isabella Bird Bishop, who relates in her book on Persia how
she was constantly besieged by the women for potions to bring back the
"love" of their husbands, or to "make the favorite hateful to him."
She was asked if European husbands "divorce their wives when they are
forty?" A Persian who spoke French assured her that marriage in his
country was like buying "a pig in a poke," and that "a woman's life in
Persia is a very sad thing."
[37] _Magazin für d. Lit. des In-und Auslandes_, June 30, 1888.
[38] The philosophy of widow-burning will be explained under the head
of Conjugal Love.
[39] Willoughby, in his article on Washington Indians, recognizes the
predominance of the "animal instinct" in the parental fondness of
savages, and so does Hutchinson (I., 119); but both erroneously use
the word "affection," though Hutchinson reveals his own misuse of it
when he writes that "the savage knows little of the higher affection
subsequently developed, which has a worthier purpose than merely to
disport itself in the mirth of childhood and at all hazards to avoid
the annoyance of seeing its tears." He comprehends that the savage
"gratifies _himself_" by humoring the whims "of his children." Dr.
Abel, on the other hand, who has written an interesting pamphlet on
the words used in Latin, Hebrew, English, and Russian to designate the
different kinds and degrees of what is vaguely called love, while
otherwise making clear the differences between liking, attachment,
fondness, and affection, does not sufficiently emphasize the most
important distinction between them--the selfishness of the first three
and the unselfish nature of affection.
[40] Stanford-Wallace, _Australasia_, 89.
[41] See also the reference to the "peculiar delicacy" of his
relations to Lili, in Eckermann, III., March 5, 1830.
[42] Renan, in one of his short stories, describes a girl, Emma
Kosilis, whose love, at sixteen, is as innocent as it is unconscious,
and who is unable to distinguish it from piety. Regarding the
unconscious purity of woman's love see Moll, 3, and Paget, _Clinical
Lectures_, which discuss the loss in women of instinctive sexual
knowledge. _Cf_. Ribot, 251, and Moreau, _Psychologie Morbide_,
264-278. Ribot is sceptical, because the ultimate goal is the
possession of the beloved. But that has nothing to do with the
question, for what he refers to is unconscious and instinctive. Here
we are considering love as a conscious feeling and ideal, and as such
it is as spotless and sinless as the most confirmed ascetic could wish
it.
[43] The case is described in the _Medical Times_, April 18, 1885.
[44] _Trans. Asiatic Soc. of Japan_, 1885, p. 181.
[45] In the _Journal des Goncourts_ (V., 214-215) a young Japanese,
with characteristic topsy-turviness, comments on the "coarseness" of
European ideas of love, which he could understand only in his own
coarse way. "Vous dites à une femme, je vous aime! Eh bien! Chez nous,
c'est comme si on disait Madame, je vais coucher avec vous. Tont ce
que nous osons dire à la dame que nous aimons, c'est que nous envions
près d'elle la place des canards mandarins. C'est messieurs, notre
oiseau d'amour."
[46] In his _Tropical Nature, Contributions to the Theory of Natural
Selection_, and _Darwinism_. In _R.L.P.B._, 42-50, where I gave a
summary of this question, I suggested that the "typical colors" (the
numerous cases where both sexes are brilliantly colored) for which
Wallace could "assign no function or use," owe their existence to the
need of a means of recognition by the sexes; thus indicating how the
love-affairs of animals may modify their appearance in a way quite
different from that suggested by Darwin, and dispensing with his
postulates of unproved female choice and problematic variations in
esthetic taste.
[47] Angas, II., 65.
[48] Tylor, _Anthr._, 237.
[49] Musters, 171; cf. Thomson, _Through Masai Land_, 89, where we
read that woman's coating of lampblack and castor-oil--her only
dress--serves to prevent excessive perspiration in the day-time and
ward off chills at night.
[50] C. Bock, 273.
[51] O. Baumann, _Mitth. Anthr. Ges._, Wien, 1887, 161.
[52] Nicaragua, II., 345.
[53] Sturt, II., 103.
[54] Tylor, 237.
[55] _Jesuit Relations_, I., 279.
[56] Prince Wied, 149.
[57] Belden, 145.
[58] Mallery, 1888-89, 631-33.
[59] Mallery, 1882-83, 183.
[60] Bourke, 497.
[61] Dobrizhoffer, II., 390.
[62] Mariner, Chapter X.
[63] Ellis, P.R., I., 243.
[64] J. Campbell, _Wild Tribes of Khondistan_.
[65] Mackenzie, _Day Dawn_, 67.
[66] Bastian, _Af.R_., 76.
[67] Burton, _Abcok_. I., 106.
[68] Spencer, _D. Soc._, 27.
[69] J. Franklin, _P.S._, 132.
[70] Dobrizhoffer, II., 17.
[71] Murdoch, 140.
[72] Crantz, I., 216.
[73] Mallery, 1888-89, 621.
[74] Lynd, II., 68.
[75] Bonwick, 27.
[76] Wilkes, III., 355.
[77] Westermarck opines (170) that "such tales are not of much
importance, as any usage practised from time immemorial may easily he
ascribed to the command of a god." On the contrary, such legends are
of very great importance, since they show how utterly foreign to the
thought of these races was the purpose of "decorating" themselves in
these various ways "in order to make themselves attractive to the
opposite sex."
[78] Dorsey, 486.
[79] Fison and Howitt, 253; Frazer, 28.
[80] Mallery, 1888-89, 395, 412, 417.
[81] Wilhelmi, in Woods.
[82] Angas, I., 86.
[83] Mitchell, I., 171.
[84] Spencer, _D.S._, 21, 22; 18, 19.
[85] Schweinfurth, _H.A_., I., 154.
[86] Ellis, _Haw_., 146.
[87] Man, in _Jour. Anthr. Inst_., XII.
[88] Powers, 166.
[89] Dall, 95.
[90] Boas, cited by Mallery, 534.
[91] Mallery, 1888-89, 197, 623-629.
[92] See also the remarks in Prazer's _Totemism_, 26.
[93] _Explor. and Surv. Mississippi River to Pacific Ocean_. Senate
Reports, Washington, 1856, III., 33.
[94] See the pages (386-91) on the "Fashion Fetish" in my _Romantic
Love and Personal Beauty_.
[95] _Jour. Roy. As. Soc_., 1860, 13.
[96] Feathers also serve various other useful purposes to Australians.
An apron of emu feathers distinguishes females who are not yet
matrons. (Smyth, I., xl.) Howitt says that in Central Australia
messengers sent to avenge a death are painted yellow and wear feathers
on their head and in the girdle at the spine. (Mallery, 1888-89, 483.)
[97] Related by Dieffenbach. Heriot even declares of the northern
Indians (352) that "they assert that they find no odor agreeable but
that of food."
[98] For other references to ancient nations, see Joest in _Zeitschr.
für Ethnologie._ 1888, 415.
[99] See, for instance, Spix and Martius, 384.
[100] See _e.g_. Eyre, II. 333-335; Brough Smith, L, XLI, 68, 295,
II., 313; Ridley, _Kamilaroi_, 140; _Journ. Roy. Soc. N.S.W_., 1882,
201; and the old authorities cited by Waitz-Gerland, VI., 740; cf
Frazer, 29. If Westermarck had been more anxious to ascertain the
truth than to prove a theory, would he have found it necessary to
ignore all this evidence, neglecting to refer even to Chatfield in
speaking of Curr?
[101] H. Ward, 136.
[102] Roth, II, 83.
[103] Martius, I., 321.
[104] Boas, _Bur. Ethnol._, 1884-88, 561.
[105] Mann, _Journ. Anthr. Soc._, XII, 333.
[106] Galton, 148.
[107] Dalton, 251.
[108] Waitz-Gerland, VI., 30.
[109] Mallery, 1888-89, 414.
[110] To take three cases in place of many Carl Bock relates (67) that
among some Borneans tattooing is one of the privileges of matrimony
and is _not allowed to unmarried girls_. D'Urville describes the
tattooing of the wife of chief Tuao, who seemed to glory in the "_new
honor_ his wife was securing by these decorations." (Robley, 41.)
Among the Papuans of New Guinea tattooing the chest of females denotes
that they _are married_. (Mallery, 411.)
[111] It is significant that Westermarck (179) though he refers to
page 90 of Turner, ignores the passage I have just cited, though it
occurs on the same page.
[112] Australia is by no means the only country where the women are
less decorated than the men. Various explanations have been offered,
but none of them covers all the facts. The real reason becomes obvious
if my view is accepted that the alleged ornaments of savages are not
esthetic, but practical or utilitarian. The women are usually allowed
to share such things as badges of mourning, amulets, and various
devices that attract attention to wealth or rank; but the religious
rites, and the manifold decorations associated with military life--the
chief occupation of these peoples--they are not allowed to share, and
these, with the tribal marks, furnish, as we have seen, the occasion
for the most diverse and persistent "decorative" practices.
[113] The advocates of the sexual selection theory might have avoided
many grotesque blunders had they possessed a sense of humor to
counterbalance and control their erudition. The violent opposition of
Madagascar women to King Radama's order that the men should have their
hair cut, to which Westermarck refers (174-75), surely finds in the
proverbial stupid conservatism of barbarous customs a simpler and more
rational explanation than in his assumption that this riot illustrated
"the important part played by the hair of the head as a stimulant of
sexual passion" (to these coarse, masculine women, who had to be
speared before they could be quieted). An argument which attributes to
unwashed, vermin-covered savages a fanatic zeal for what they consider
as beautiful, such as no civilized devotee of beauty would ever dream
of, involves its own _reductio ad absurdum_ by proving too much.
Westermarck also cites (177) from a book on Brazil the story that if a
young maiden of the Tapoyers "be marriageable, and yet not courted by
any, the mother paints her with some red color about the eyes," and in
accordance with his theory we are soberly expected to accept this red
paint about the eyes as an effective "stimulant of sexual passion," in
case of a girl whose appearance otherwise did not tempt men to court
her! The obvious object of the paint was to indicate that the girl was
in the market. In other words, it was part of that language of signs
which had such a remarkable development among some of the uncivilized
races (see Mallery's admirable treatises on Indian Pictographs, taking
up hundreds of pages in two volumes of the Bureau of Ethnology at
Washington). Belden relates (145) of the Plains Indians that a warrior
who is courting a squaw usually paints his eyes yellow or blue, and
the squaw paints hers red. He even knew squaws, go through the painful
operation of reddening the eyeballs, which he interprets as resulting
from a desire to fascinate the men; but it is much more likely that it
had some special significance in the language of courtship, probably
as a mark of courage in enduring pain, than that the inflamed eye
itself was considered beautiful. Belden himself further points out
that "a red stripe drawn horizontally from one eye to the other, means
that the young warrior has seen a squaw he could love if she would
reciprocate his attachment," and on p. 144 he explains that "when a
warrior smears his face with lampblack and then draws zigzags with his
nails, it is a sign that he desires to be left alone, or is trapping,
or melancholy, or in love." I had intended to give a special paragraph
to Decorations as Parts of the Language of Signs, but desisted on
reflecting that most of the foregoing facts relating to war, mourning,
tribal, etc., decorations, really came under that head.
[114] _Trans. Eth. Soc.,_ London, N.S., VII., 238; _Journ. Asiatic
Soc. Bengal,_ XXXV., Pt. II., 25. Spencer, _D.S._
[115] In Fiji fatness is also "a mark of high rank, for these people
can only imagine one reason for any person being thin and spare,
namely, not having enough to eat." (W.J. Smythe, 166.)
[116] Yet Westermarck has the audacity to remark (259), that natural
deformity and the unsymmetrical shape of the body are "regarded by
every race as unfavorable to personal appearance"!
[117] It is not strange that the human race should have had to wait so
long for a complete analysis of love. It is not so very long ago since
Newton showed that what was supposed to be a simple white light was
really compounded of all the colors of the rainbow; or that Helmholtz
analyzed sounds into their partial tones of different pitch, which are
combined in what seems to be a simple tone of this or that pitch.
Similarly, I have shown that the pleasures of the table, which
everybody supposes to be simple, gustatory sensations (matters of
taste), are in reality compound odors. See my article on "The
Gastronomic Value of Odors," in the _Contemporary Review_, 1881.
[118] II., 271-74. See also _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1887, 31;
Hellwald, 144.
[119] Which even in tropical countries seldom comes before the
eleventh or twelfth year. See the statistics in Ploss-Bartels, I.,
269-70.
[120] _Alone among the Hairy Ainu_, 140-41.
[121] _Culturgeschichte des Orients_, II, 109.
[122] _Journal des Goncourt_, Tome V. 328-29.
[123] _Trans. Ethn. Soc. N.S._, II, 292.
[124] Ross Cox, cited by Yarrow in his valuable article on Mortuary
Customs of North American Indians, I, _Report Bur. Ethnol.,_ 1879-80.
See also Ploss-Bartels, II., 507-13; Westermarck, 126-28; Letourneau,
Chap. XV., where many other cases are cited.
[125] _Trans. Ninth Internal. Congr. of Orientalists_, London, 1893,
p. 781.
[126] Details and authorities in Ploss-Bartels, II., 514-17;
Westermarck, 125-26; Letourneau, Chap. XV.
[127] For many other cases see references in footnotes 3 and 4,
Westermarck, 378.
[128] The poets and a certain class of novelists also like to dwell on
the love-matches among peasants as compared with commercial city
marriages. As a matter of fact, in no class do sordid pecuniary
matters play so great a rôle as among peasants. (_Cf._ Grosse.
_F.d.F._, 16.)
[129] _Princ. of Soc._, American Edition, pp. 756, 772, 784, 787.
[130] The proofs of man's universal contempt for woman are to be found
in the chapter on "Adoration," and everywhere in this book. Many
additional illustrations are contained in several articles by Crawley
in the _Jour. Anthrop. Inst_., Vol. XXIV.
[131] _Cf_. Ploss-Bartels, I., 471-87, where this topic of infant
marriage is treated with truly German thoroughness and erudition.
[132] To demonstrate the recklessness (to use a mild word) of Darwin
and Westermarck in this matter I will quote the exact words of
Burchell in the passage referred to (II., 58-59): "These men generally
take a second wife as soon as the first becomes somewhat advanced in
years." "Most commonly" the girls are betrothed when about seven years
old, and in two or three years the girl is given to the man. "These
bargains are made with her parents only, and _without ever consulting
the wishes (even if she had any) of the daughter_. When it happens,
which is not often the case, that a girl has grown up to womanhood
without having been betrothed, her lover must gain her approbation _as
well as that of her parents_."
[133] Darwin was evidently puzzled by the queer nature of Reade's
evidence in other matters (_D.M._, Chap. XIX.); yet he naïvely relies
on him as an authority. Reade told him that the ideas of negroes on
beauty are "on the whole, the same as ours." Yet in several other
pages of Darwin we see it noted that according to Reade, the negroes
have a horror of a white skin and admire a skin in proportion to its
blackness; that "they look on blue eyes with aversion, and they think
our noses too long and our lips too thin." "He does not think it
probable," Darwin adds, "that negroes would ever prefer the most
beautiful European woman, on the mere ground of physical admiration,
to a good-looking negress." How extraordinarily like our taste! If a
man had talked to Darwin about corals or angleworms as foolishly and
inconsistently as Reade did about negroes, he would have ignored him.
But in matters relating to beauty or love all rubbish is accepted, and
every globe-trotter and amateur explorer who wields a pen is treated
as an authority.
[134] See McLennan's _Studies in Ancient History_, first and second
series; Spencer's _Principles of Sociology_, I., Part 3, Chap. 4;
Westermarck, Chap. XIV., etc.
[135] Westermarck, 364-66, where many other striking cases of racial
prejudice are given.
[136] For instance omal-win-yuk-un-der, illpoogee, loityo, kernoo,
ipamoo, badjeerie, mungaroo, yowerda, yowada, yoorda, yooada, yongar,
yunkera, wore, yowardoo, marloo, yowdar, koolbirra, madooroo, oggra,
arinva, oogara, augara, uggerra, bulka, yshuckuru, koongaroo,
chookeroo, thaldara, kulla, etc.
[137] See also Merensky's _Süd Afrika_, 68.
[138] As Fritsch says (306) "Kolben found them most excellent
specimens of mankind and invested them with the most manifold virtues"
(see also 312 and 328). A person thus biased is under suspicion when
he praises, but not when he exposes shady sides. My page references
are to the French edition of Kolben. The italics are mine.
[139] Gathered from Hahn's _Tsuni_ and Krönlein's _Wortschatz der
Namaqua Hottentotten._
[140] The details given by the Rev. J. MacDonald (_Journal Anthrop.
Soc._, XX., 1890, 116-18) cannot possibly be cited here. Our argument
is quite strong enough without them. Westermarck devotes ten pages to
an attempt to prove that immorality is not characteristic of
uncivilized races in general. He leads off with that preposterous
statement of Barrow that "a Kaffir woman is chaste and extremely
modest;" and most of his other instances are based on equally flimsy
evidence. I shall recur to the subject repeatedly. It is hardly
necessary to call the reader's attention to the unconscious humor of
the assertion of Westermarck's friend Cousins that "between their
various feasts the Kaffirs have to live in strict continence"--which
is a good deal like saying of a toper that "between drinks he is
strictly sober."
[141] It may seem inconsistent to condemn Barrow on one page as
unreliable and then quote him approvingly on another. But in the first
case his assertion was utterly opposed to the unanimous testimony of
those who knew the Kaffirs best, while in this instance his remarks
are in perfect accordance with what we would expect under the
circumstances and with the testimony of the standard authorities.
[142] Vid. Mantegazza, _Geschlechtsverhältnisse des Menschen_, 213.
[143] From an article in the _Humanitarian_, March, 1897, it appears
that this "leap-year" custom still prevails among Zulus; but the dawn
of civilization has introduced a modification to the effect that when
the girl is refused, a present is usually given her "to ease her
feelings." At least that is the way Miss Colenso puts it. Wood (80)
relates a story of a Kaffir girl who persistently wooed a young chief
who did not want her; she had to be removed by force and even beaten,
but kept returning until, to save further bother, the chief bought
her.
[144] Ignorant sentimentalists who have often argued that the absence
of illegitimate offspring argues moral purity will do well to ponder
what Thomson says on page 580, and compare with it the remarks of the
Rev. J. Macdonald, who lived twelve years among the tribes between
Cape Colony and Natal, regarding their use of herbs. (_Journal
Anthrop. Soc._, XIX., 264.) See also Johnston (413).
[145] To what almost incredible lengths sentimental defenders of
savages will go, may be seen in an editorial article with which the
London _Daily News_ of August 4, 1887, honored my first book. I was
informed therein that "savages are not strangers to love in the most
delicate and noble form of the passion.... The wrong conclusion must
not be drawn from Monteiro's remark, 'I have never seen a negro put
his arm around a negro's waist.' It is the uneducated classes who may
be seen to exhibit in the parks those harmless endearments which
negroes have too much good taste to practise before the public." To
one who knows the African savage as he is, such an assertion is worth
a whole volume of _Punch_.
[146] Westermarck (358), as usual, accepts Johnston's statement about
poetic love on the Congo as gospel truth, without examining it
critically.
[147] Bleek credits these tales to Schön's _Grammar of the Hausa
Language_, Schlenker's _Collection of Temne Traditions_, and Kölle's
_African Native Literature_, where the original Bornu text may be
found.
[148] _Folk Lore Journal_, London, 1888, 119-22.
[149] Compare this with what I said on page 340 about the behavior of
girls in the New Britain Group.
[150] _Revue d'Anthropologie,_ 1883.
[151] See an elaborate discussion of this question by the Rev. John
Mathew in the _Journal of the Royal Society of N.S. Wales,_ Vol.
XXIII., 335-449.
[152] See, _e.g._, the hideous pictures of Australian women enclosed
in G.W. Earl's _The Papuans_. Spencer and Gillen's admirable volume
also contains pictures of "young women" who look twice their age.
After the age of twenty, the authors write, the face becomes wrinkled,
the breasts pendulous, the whole body shrivelled. At fifty they reach
"a stage of ugliness which baffled description" (40,40).
[153] _Royal Geogr. Soc of Australasia_, 1887, Vol. V., 29.
[154] _Trans. Ethn. Soc., New Ser_., III., 248, 288; cited by Spencer,
_D.S._, 26.
[155] He adds in a foot-note (320) "Foeminae sese per totam paene
vitam prostituunt. Apud plurimas tribus juventutem utriusque sexus
sine discrimine concumbere in usu est. Si juvenis forte indigenorum
coetum quendam in castris manentem adveniat ubi quaevis sit puella
innupta, mos est nocte veniente et cubantibus omnibus, illam ex loco
exsurgere et juvenem accedentem cum illo per noctem manere unde in
sedem propriam ante diem redit. Cui femina est, eam amicis libenter
praebet."
[156] F. Müller (212-13) gives the details of West Australian
corrobborees which are too obscene to be cited here. See also the
testimony in Hellwald (134-35) based on the observations of Oldfield,
Koler, M'Combie, etc., and a number of other authorities cited by
Waitz-Gerland, VI., 754-55. Curr says (I., 128) that at the
corrobborees men of different tribes lend their wives to each other.
[157] _Journal Anthrop. Inst_., XXIV., 169. See also Waitz, VI., 774;
Macgillivray, II., 8; Hasskarl, 82. They have a peculiar rattle with
mystic sculpturing, and Eyre says that its sound libertatem coeundi
juventuti esse tum concessam omnibus indicat. Maclennan (287) cites
G.S. Lang, who cites the fact that the old men get most of the young
women. Connubium profecto valde est liberum. Conjuges, puellae,
_puellulae_ cum adolescentibus venantur. Pretium corporis poene
nullius est. Vendunt se vel columbae vel canis vel piscis pretio.
Inter Anglos et aborigines nihil distat.
[158] _Journal Anthrop. Inst._, XX., 53.
[159] _Revue d'Anthropologie_. 1882, p. 376.
[160] A.W. Howitt, _Jour. Anthr. Hist._ XX., 60-61. Fison and Howitt,
289; _Smithsonian Reports_, 1883, p. 67. Details are given which
cannot be reproduced here. Boys participate in these orgies.
[161] The details given by Roth are too disgusting for reproduction
here. They vie with the loathsome practices of the Kaffirs and the
most debauched Roman emperors, while some of them are so vile that it
seems as if they could have been suggested only by the diseased brain
of an erotomaniac. The most degraded white criminal that ever took up
his abode among savages would turn away from them with horror and
nausea, yet we are asked to believe that the savages learned all their
vices from the whites!
[162] _Mittheil des Ver. für Erdkunde zu Halle_, 1883, 54.
[163] Westermarck overlooks these vital facts when he calmly assumes
(64, 65) that the guarding of girls, or punishment of intruders,
argues a regard for chastity. His entire ignoring of the superabundant
and unimpeachable testimony proving the contrary is extraordinary, to
put it mildly. Dawson's assertion (33) that "illegitimacy is rare" and
the mother severely punished, which Westermarck cites (65), is as
foolish as most of the gossip printed by that utterly untrustworthy
writer. As the details given in these pages regarding licentiousness
before marriage and wife-lending after it show, there is no possible
way of proving illegitimacy unless the child has a white father. In
that case it is killed; but that is nothing remarkable, as the
Australians kill most of their children anyway. That a regard for
chastity or fidelity has nothing to do with these actions is proved by
the fact cited from Curr (I., 110) by Westermarck himself (on another
page--131--of course!) that "husbands display much less jealousy of
white men than of those of their own color," and that they will more
commonly prostitute their wives to strangers visiting the tribe than
to their own people. I have no doubt that the simple reason of this is
that the whites are better able to pay, in rum and trinkets.
[164] _South Australia_, Adelaide, 1804, p. 403. The part author, part
editor of this valuable book is not to be confounded with J.S. Wood,
the compiler of the _Natural History of Man_.
[165] See also the account he gives (I., 180) of the report as to
aboriginal morals made in the early days of Victoria by a commission
of fourteen settlers, missionaries, and protectors of the aborigines.
The explorer Sturt (I., 316) even found that the natives became
indignant if the whites rejected their addresses.
[166] See also a very important paper on this subject by Howitt in the
_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, Vol. XX., 1890,
demonstrating that "in Australia at the present day group marriage
does exist in a well-marked form, which is evidently only the modified
survival of a still more complete social communism" (104). Regarding
the manner in which group marriage gradually passed into individual
proprietorship, a suggestive hint may be found in this sentence from
Brough Smyth (II., 316): When women are carried off from another
tribe, "they are common property till they are gradually annexed by
the best warriors of the tribe."
[167] In my mind the strongest argument against Westermarck's views as
regards promiscuity is that all his tributary theories, so to speak,
which I have had occasion to examine in this volume have proved so
utterly inconsistent with facts. The question of promiscuity itself I
cannot examine in detail here, as it hardly comes within the scope of
this book. In view of the confusion Westermarck has already created in
recent scientific literature by his specious pleading, I need not
apologize for the frequency of my polemics against him. His imposing
erudition and his cleverness in juggling with facts by ignoring those
that do not please him (as _e.g._, in case of the morality of the
Kaffirs and Australians, and the "liberty of choice" of their women)
make him a serious obstacle to the investigation of the truth
regarding man's sexual history, wherefore it is necessary to expose
his errors promptly and thoroughly.
[168] _Journ. Anthrop. Inst_., 1890, 53.
[169] Would our friend Stephens be fearless enough to claim that this
custom also was taught the natives by the degraded whites? Apart from
the diabolical cruelty to a woman of which no white man except a
maniac would ever be individually guilty--whereas this is a tribal
custom--note the unutterable masculine selfishness of this "jealousy,"
which, while indifferent to chastity and fidelity, _per se_, punishes
by proxy, leaving the real culprit untouched and happy at having not
only had his intrigue but a chance to get rid of an undesired wife!
[170] _Jour. Anthr. Inst._, XII., 282.
[171] Grey might have made a valuable contribution to the comparative
psychology of passion by noting down the chant of the rivals in their
own words. Instead of that, for literary effect, he cast them into
European metre and rhyme, with various expressions, like "bless" and
"caress," which of course are utterly beyond an Australian's mental
horizon. This absurd procedure, which has made so many documents of
travellers valueless for scientific purposes, is like filling an
ethnological museum with pictures of Australians, Africans, etc., all
clothed in swallow-tail coats and silk hats. _Cf_. Grosse (_B.A_.,
236), and Semon (224). Real Australian "poems" are like the following:
"The peas the white man eats--
I wish I had some,
I wish I had some."
Or this:
"The kangaroo ran very fast
But I ran faster;
The kangaroo was fat;
I ate him."
[172] _Roy. Geogr. Soc. of Australasia_, Vol. V., 29.
[173] The reason why Westermarck is so eager to prove liberty of
choice on the part of Australian women is because he has set himself
the hopeless task of proving that the lower we go the more liberty
woman has, and that "under more primitive conditions she was even more
free in that respect than she is now amongst most of the lower races."
"As man in the earliest times," he asserts (222), "had no reason ...
to retain his full-grown daughter, she might go away and marry at her
pleasure." Quite the contrary; an Australian, than whom we know no
more "primitive" man, had every reason for not allowing her to go away
and marry whom she pleased. He looked on his daughter, as we have
seen, chiefly as a desirable piece of property to exchange for some
other man's daughter or sister.
[174] As distinguished from the more common sham elopement, at which
the parents are consulted as usual. In the Kunandaburi tribe, for
instance, as Howitt himself tells us (_Jour. Anthr. Inst_., XX.,
60-61) the suitor asks permission of the girl's parents to take her
away. "She resists all she can, biting and screaming, while the other
women look on laughing." The whole thing is obviously a custom ordered
by the parents, and tells us nothing regarding the presence or absence
of choice. See the remarks on sham capture in my chapter on Coyness
(125).
[175] The reader will note that here are some additional objects
usually supposed to be "ornamental," but which, as in all the cases
examined in the chapter on Personal Beauty, are seen on close
examination to serve other than esthetic purposes. These _are_
intended to _charm_ the women, not, however, as things of beauty, but
by their magic qualities and by attracting their attention.
[176] With his usual conscientious regard for facts Westermarck
declares (70) that in a savage condition of life "every full-grown man
marries as soon as possible."
[177] We are occasionally warned not to underrate the intelligence of
the aboriginal Australian. As a matter of fact, there is more danger
of its being overrated. Thus it was long believed that what was known
as the "terrible rite" (_finditur usque ad urethram membrum
virile_)--see Curr I., 52, 72--was practised as a check to population;
but surgeon-general Roth (179) has exploded this idea, and made it
seem probable that this rite is merely a senseless counterpart of
certain useless mutilations inflicted on females.
[178] _Trans. Eth. Soc_., New Ser., III, 248.
[179] Gerland (VI., 756) makes the same mistake here as Westermarck.
He also refers to Petermann's _Mittheilungen_ for another case of
"romantic love." On consulting that periodical (1856, 451) I find that
the proof of such love lay in the circumstance that in the quarrels so
common in Australian camps, wives would not hesitate to join in and
help their husbands!
[180] Surgeon-General Roth of Queensland does not indulge in any
illusions regarding love in Australia. He uses quotation marks when he
speaks of a man being in "love" (180), and in another place he speaks
of the native woman "whose love, such as it is." etc. He evidently
realizes that Australian lovers are only "lewd fellows of the baser
sort."
[181] _Journal of the Anthrop. Inst_., 1889.
[182] Macgillivray says (II., 8) that the females of the Torres
Islands are in most cases betrothed in infancy. "When the man thinks
proper he takes his wife to live with him without any further
ceremony, but before this she has probably had promiscuous intercourse
with the young men, such, if conducted with a moderate degree of
secrecy, not being considered as an offence.... Occasionally there are
instances of strong mutual attachment and courtship, when, if the
damsel is not betrothed, a small present made to the father is
sufficient to procure his consent; at the Prince of Wales Islands a
knife or a glass is considered as a sufficient price for the hand of a
'fair lady,' and are the articles mostly used for that purpose." I
cite this passage chiefly because it is another one of those to which
Gerland refers as evidence of genuine romantic love!
[183] I am indebted for many of the following facts to H. Ling Roth's
splendid compilation and monograph entitled _The Natives of Sarawak
and British North Borneo_. London, 1896.
[184] The Ida'an are the aboriginal population; in dress, habitations,
manners, and customs they are essentially the same as the Dyaks in
general.
[185] The above details are culled from Williams, pp. 145, 144, 38,
345, 148, 152, 43, 114, 179, 180, 344. The editor declares, in a
foot-note (182), that he has repressed or softened some of the more
horrible details in Williams's account.
[186] See Westermarck, 67, and footnotes on that page.
[187] If sentimentalists were gifted with a sense of humor it would
have occurred to them how ludicrous and illogical it is to suppose
that savages and barbarians, the world over, should in each instance
have been converted by a few whites from angels to monsters of
depravity with such amazing suddenness. We know, on the contrary, that
in no respect are these races so stubbornly tenacious of old customs
as in their sexual relations.
[188] See Mariner (Martin) Introduction and Chap. XVI.
[189] _Jour. Anthr. Inst_., 1889, p. 104.
[190] Supposed to mean a beautiful flower that grows on the tops of
the mountains, where sea and land breezes meet.
[191] According to Erskine (50) when a Samoan felt a violent passion
for another he would brand his arm, to symbolize his ardor.
(Waitz-Gerland, VI., 125.)
[192] See _Schopenhauer's Gespräche_ (Grisebach), 1898, p. 40, and the
essay on love, in Lichtenberg's _Ausgewählte Schriften_ (Reclam).
Lichtenberg seems, indeed, to have doubted whether anything else than
sensual love actually exists.
[193] It is said that, under favorable circumstances, a distance of
3,000 miles might thus be covered in a month.
[194] There is much reason to suspect, too, that Grey expurgated and
whitewashed these tales. See, on this subject, the remarks to be made
in the next chapter regarding the Indian love-stories of Schoolcraft,
bearing in mind that Polynesians are, if possible, even more
licentious and foul-mouthed than Indians.
[195] Considerations of space compel me here, as in other cases, to
condense the stories; but I conscientiously and purposely retain all
the sentimental passages and expressions.
[196] _Algic Researches_, 1839, I., 43. From this work the first five
of the above stories are taken, the others being from the same
author's _Oneota_ (54-57; 15-16). The stories in _Algic Researches_
were reprinted in 1856 under the title _The Myth of Hiawatha and Other
Oral Legends_.
[197] I have taken the liberty of giving to most of the stories cited
more attractive titles than Schoolcraft gave them. He himself changed
some of the titles in his later edition.
[198] In another of these tales (_A.R._, II., 165-80) Schoolcraft
refers to a girl who went astray in the woods "while admiring the
scenery."
[199] Schoolcraft's volumes include, however, a number of reliable and
valuable articles on various Indian tribes by other writers. These are
often referred to in anthropological treatises, including the present
volume.
[200] In the _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1891, especially pages 546,
554, 555, 556, 557, 558, 559, 567-69, 640, 643; in the vol. for 1892,
pages 36, 42, 44, 324, 330, 340, 386, 392, 434, 447; and in the vol.
for 1894, 283, 303, 304. It is impossible even to hint here at the
details of these stories. Some are licentious, others merely filthy.
Powers, in his great work on the California Indians (348), refers to
"the unspeakable obscenity of their legends."
[201] Ehrenreich says (_Zeitschr. für Ethnol._, 1887, 31) that among
the Botocudos cohabitatio coram familia et vicinibus exagitur; and of
the Machacares Indians Feldner tells us (II., 143, 148) that even the
children behave lewdly in presence of everybody. Parentes rident,
appellunt eos canes, et usque ad silvam agunt. Some extremely
important and instructive revelations are made in von den Steinen's
classic work on Brazil (195-99), but they cannot be cited here. The
author concludes that "a feeling of modesty is decidedly absent among
the unclothed Indians."
[202] Published in the _Papers of the American Archaeological
Institute_, III.
[203] _Works_, in Hakluyt Soc. Publ., London, 1847, II., 192.
[204] What Parkman says regarding the cruelty of the Indians perhaps
applies also to their sexual morality, though to a less extent. In
speaking of the early missionary intercourse with the Indians he
remarks (_Jes in Can._, 319):
"In the wars of the next century we do not often find these
examples of diabolic atrocity with which the earlier annals
were crowded. The savage burned his enemies alive still, it
is true, but he rarely ate them; neither did he torment them
with the same deliberation and persistency. He was a savage
still, but not so often a devil. The improvement was not
great, but it was distinct; and it seems to have taken place
wherever Indian tribes were in close relations with any
respectable community of white men."
[205] Herrera relates (III., 340) that Nicaraguan fathers used to send
out their daughters to roam the country and earn a marriage portion in
a shameful way.
[206] See also the remarks of Dr. W.J. Hoffmann regarding the dances
of the Coyotero Apaches. _U.S. Geol. and Geogr. Survey_, Colorado,
1876, 464.
[207] Pizarro says (_Relacion_, 266) that "the virgins of the sun
feigned to preserve virginity and to be chaste. In this they lied, as
they cohabited with the servants and guards of the Sun, who were
numerous." Regarding Peruvians in general Pizarro (1570) and Cieza
(_Travels_, 1532-40) agree that parents did not care about the conduct
of their daughters, and Cieza speaks of the promiscuity at festivals.
Brinton (_M.N.W._, 149) is obliged to admit that "there is a decided
indecency in the remains of ancient American art, especially in Peru,
and great lubricity in many ceremonies."
[208] _Indian Rights Assoc._, Philadelphia, 1885.
[209] _Journ. Anthrop. Inst._, 1892, 427.
[210] _Indian Com. Rep_., 1854, p. 179.
[211] Bristol in _Ind. Aff. Rep. Spec. Com_., 1867, p. 357.
[212] _Rep. Com. Ind. Aff_., 1892, p. 607.
[213] Even the wives of chiefs were treated no better than slaves.
Catlin himself tells us of the six wives of a Mandan chief who were
"not allowed to speak, though they were in readiness to obey his
orders." (_Smithson. Rep._. 1885, Pt. II., 458.)
[214] Such cruel treatment of women argues a total lack of sympathy in
Indians, and without sympathy there can be no love. The systematic
manner in which sympathy is crushed among Indians I have described in
a previous chapter. Here let me add a few remarks by Theodore
Roosevelt (I., 86) which coincide with what John Hance, the famous
Arizona guide, told me:
"Anyone who has ever been in an encampment of wild Indians
and has had the misfortune to witness the delight the
children take in torturing little animals will admit that
the Indian's love of cruelty for cruelty's sake cannot
possibly be exaggerated. The young are so trained that when
old they shall find their keenest pleasure in inflicting
pain in its most appalling form. Among the most brutal white
borderers a man would be instantly lynched if he practiced
on any creature the fiendish torture which in the Indian
camp either attracts no notice at all, or else excites
merely laughter."
(See also Roosevelt's remarks--87, 831, 335 on Helen Hunt Jackson's
_Century of Dishonor_.) The Indian was much wronged by unprincipled
agents and others, but the border ruffians served him only as he
served others of his race, the weaker being always driven out. Nor was
there any real sympathy within the tribes themselves. "These people,"
wrote the old Jesuit missionary Le Jeune (VI., 245), "are very little
moved by compassion. They give a sick person food and drink, but show
otherwise no concern for him; to coax him with love and tenderness is
a language which they do not understand. When he refuses food they
kill him, partly to relieve him from suffering, partly to relieve
themselves of the trouble of taking him with them when they go to some
other place."
[215] _Smithsonian Rep._, 1885, Pt. II., 108.
[216] The humor of Catlin's assertions becomes more obvious still when
we read how readily Indians dissolve their marriages, through love of
change, caprice, etc. See cases in Westermarck, 518.
[217] Cited by Schoolcraft, _Oneota_, 57.
[218] _Transactions of the American Philosophical Society._
Philadelphia, 1819.
[219] _Journ. Anthrop. Inst._, 1884, p. 251.
[220] Brinton's _Library of Aborig. Amer. Lit._, II, 65.
[221] The only way the women could secure any consideration was by
overawing the men. Thus Southey says (III., 411) regarding the
Abipones that the old women "were obdurate in retaining superstitions
that rendered them objects of fear, and therefore of respect." Smith
in his book on the Araucanians of Chili, notes (238), that besides the
usual medicine men there was an occasional woman "who had acquired the
most unbounded influence by shrewdness, joined to a hideous personal
appearance and a certain mystery with which she was invested."
[222] As when he says, "The Atkha Aleuts occasionally betrothed their
children to each other, but the marriage was held to be binding only
after the birth of a child." What evidence of choice is there here?
[223] _U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Survey of Colorado,_ etc., 1876, p. 465.
[224] Miss Alice Fletcher gives in the _Journal of the American Folk
Lore Society_ (1889, 219-26) an amusing instance of how far a
present-day Omaha girl may go in resenting a man's unwelcome advances.
A faint-hearted lover had sent a friend as go-between to ask for the
girl's favor. As he finished his speech the girl looked at him with
flashing eyes and said: "I'll have nothing to do with your friend or
you either." The young man hesitated a moment, as if about to repeat
his request, when a dangerous wave of her water-bucket made him leap
to one side to escape a deluge.
[225] _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie,_ 1891, p. 545.
[226] How California marriages were made in the good old times we may
see from the account in Hakluyt's _Collection of Early Voyages_, 1810,
III., 513:
"If any man had a daughter to marry he went where the people
kept, and said, I have a daughter to marry, is there any man
here that would have her? And if there were any that would
have her, he answered that he would have her, and so the
marriage was made."
[227] _Smithsonian Rep._, 1885, Pt. II., p. 71.
[228] Schoolcraft, IV., 224; Powers, 221; Waitz, IV., 132; Azara
(_Voyages_), II., 94; von Martius, I.,412, 509.
[229] A table relating to sixty-five North American Indian girls given
in Ploss, I., 476, shows that all but eight of them had their first
child before the end of the fifteenth year; the largest number
(eighteen), having it in the fourteenth.
[230] See John Fiske's _Discovery of America_, I., 21, and E.J.
Payne's _History of the New World_.
[231] Giacomo Bove, _Patagonia. Cf._ Ploss, I., 476; _Globus_, 1883,
158. Hyades's _Mission Scientifique du Cap Horn_, VII., 377.
[232] Equally inconclusive is Westermarck's reference (216) to what
Azara says regarding the Guanas. Azara expressly informs us that, as
summed up by Darwin (_D.M._, Chap. XIX.) among the Guanas "the men
rarely marry till twenty years old or more, as before that age they
cannot conquer their rivals." Where girls are literally wrestled for,
they have, of course, no choice.
[233] Keating says (II., 153) that among the Chippewas "where the
antipathy is great, one or the other elopes from the lodge."
[234] _Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropologists_,
1894, 153-57.
[235] Laurence Oliphant realized the absurdity of attributing such
tales to Indians, assigning to them feelings and motives like our own.
He kindly supplies some further details, insisting that the girl was
told to "return and all would be forgiven;" that the "fast young Sioux
hunter" whom Winona wanted to marry ("her heart could never be
another's"), had "no means of his own." He is believed to have been
"utterly disconsolate at the time," and "subsequently to have married
an heiress." See the amusing satire in his _Minnesota_, 287-89.
[236] S.R. Riggs in _U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Soc._, IX., 206.
[237] _Trans. Amer. Ethnol. Soc._, Vol. III, Pt. I.
[238] _Denkschriften der Kaiserl. Akad. d. Wissensch. in Wien_, Bd.
XXXIX., S. 214.
[239] _Report of Bureau of Ethnol., Wash._, 1892.
[240] Ibid., 1896, Pt. 1, p. 154.
[241] _American Anthropologist_, IV., 276.
[242] The Chippewas have bridal canoes which they fill with stores to
last a betrothed pair for a month's excursion, this being the only
marriage ceremony. (Kane, 20.)
[243] Army bugle calls, telling the soldiers what to do, are "leading
motives." See my article on "The Utility of Music," _Forum_, May,
1898; or Wallaschek's _Primitive Music_.
[244] _A Study of Omaha Indian Music_ (14, 15, 44, 52). Cambridge,
1893; _Journal Amer. Folklore_, 1889 (219-26); _Memoirs Intern. Congr.
Anthrop.,_ 1894 (153-57).
[245] Dr. Brinton published in 1886 an interesting pamphlet entitled
_The Conception of Love in Some American Languages_, which was
afterward reprinted in his _Essays of an Americanist_. It forms the
philological basis for his assertion, already quoted, that the
languages of the Algonquins of North America, the Nahuas of Mexico,
the Mayas of Yucatan, the Quichas of Peru, and the Tupis and Guaranis
of Brazil "supply us with evidence that the sentiment of love was
awake among them." I have read this learned paper half a dozen times,
and have come to the conclusion that it proves exactly the contrary.
I. In the Algonkin, as I gather from the professor's explanations,
there is one form of the word "love" from which are derived the
expressions "to tie," "to fasten," "and also some of the coarsest
words to express the sexual relation." For the feebler "sentiment" of
merely liking a person there is a word meaning "he or it _seems good
to me_." Expressions relating to the highest form of love, "that which
embraces all men and all beings" are derived from a root indicative of
"_what gives joy_." The italics are mine. I can find here no
indication of altruistic sentiment, but quite the reverse.
II. It was among the Mexicans that Dr. Brinton found the "delicate"
poems. Yet he informs us that they had "only one word...to express
every variety of love, human and divine, carnal and chaste, between
men and between the sexes." This being the case, how are we ever to
know which kind of love a Mexican poem refers to? Dr. Brinton himself
feels that one must not credit the Aztecs "with finer feelings than
they deserve;" and with reference to a certain mythic conception he
adds, "I gravely doubt that they felt the shafts of the tender
passion, with any such susceptibility as to employ this metaphor."
Moreover, as he informs us, the Mexican root of the word is not
derived from the primary meaning of the root, but from a secondary and
later signification. "This hints ominously," he says,
"at the probability that the ancient tongue had for a long
time no word at all to express this, the highest and noblest
emotion of the human heart, and that consequently this
emotion itself had not risen to consciousness in the
national mind."
In its later development the capacity of the language for emotional
expression was greatly enlarged. Was this before the European
missionaries appeared on the scene? Missionaries, it is important to
remember, had a good deal to do with the development of the language,
as well as the birth of the nobler conceptions and emotions among the
lower races. Many fatal blunders in comparative psychology and
sociology can be traced to the ignoring of this fact.
III. Dr. Otto Stoll, in his work _Zur Ethnographie der Rep.
Guatemala,_ declares that the Cakchiquel Indians of that country "are
strangers to the mere conception of that kind of love which is
expressed by the Latin verb _amare_." _Logoh_, the Guatemalan word for
love, also means "to buy," and according to Stoll the only other word
in the pure original tongue for the passion of love is _ah_, to want,
to desire. Dr. Brinton finds it used also in the sense of "to like,"
"to love" [in what way?]. But the best he can do is to "think that 'to
buy' and 'to love' may be construed as developments of the same idea
of _prizing highly_" which tells us nothing regarding altruism. All
that we know about the customs of Guatemalans points to the conclusion
that Dr. Stoll was right in declaring that they had no notion of true
love.
IV. Of the Peruvian expressions relating to love in the comprehensive
sense of the word, Dr. Brinton specifies five. Of one of them,
_munay_, there were, according to Dr. Anchorena, nearly six hundred
combinations. It meant originally "merely a sense of want, an
appetite, and the accompanying desire to satisfy it." In songs
composed in the nineteenth century _cenyay_, which originally meant
pity, is preferred to _munay_ as the most appropriate term for the
love between the sexes. The blind, unreasoning, absorbing passion is
expressed by _huaylluni_, which is nearly always confined to sexual
love, and "conveys the idea of the sentiment showing itself in action
by those sweet signs and marks of devotion which are so highly prized
by the loving heart." The verb _lluyllny_ (literally to be soft or
tender, as fruit) means to
"love with tenderness, to have as a darling, to caress
lovingly. It has less of sexuality in it than the word last
mentioned, and is applied by girls to each other and as a
term of family fondness."
There was also a term, _mayhuay_, referring to words of tenderness or
acts of endearment which may be merely simulated signs of emotion. I
cannot find in any of these definitions evidence of altruistic
affection, unless it be in the "marks of devotion," which expression,
however, I suspect, is Philadelphian rather than Peruvian.
V. The Tupi-Guarani have one word only to express all the varieties of
love known to them--_aihu_. Dr. Brinton thinks he "cannot be far
wrong" in deriving this from _ai_, self, or the same, and _hu_ to find
or be present; and from this he infers that "to love," in Guarani,
means "to find oneself in another," or "to discover in another a
likeness to oneself." I submit that this is altogether too airy a
fabric of fanciful conjecture to allow the inference that the
sentiment of love was known to these Brazilian Indians, whose morals
and customs were, moreover, as we have seen, fatal obstacles to the
growth of refined sexual feeling. Both the Tupis and Guaranis were
cannibals, and they had no regard for chastity. One of their
"sentimental" customs was for a captor to make his prisoner, before he
was eaten, cohabit with his (the captor's) sister or daughter, the
offspring of this union being allowed to grow up and then was devoured
too, the first mouthful being given to the mother. (Southey, I., 218.)
I mention this because Dr. Brinton says that the evidence that the
sentiment of love was awake among these tribes "is corroborated by the
incidents we learn of their domestic life."
[246] _U.S. Geogr. and Geol Survey Rocky Mt. Region_, Pt. I., 181-89.
[247] It is of the Modocs of this region that Joaquin Miller wrote
that "Indians have their loves, and as they have but little else,
these fill up most of their lives." The above poems indicate the
quality of this Indian love. In Joaquin Miller's narrative of his
experience with the Modocs, the account of his own marriage is of
special interest. At a Modoc marriage a feast is given by the girl's
father, "to which all are invited, but the bride and bridegroom do not
partake of food. ... Late in the fall, the old chief made the marriage
feast, and at that feast neither I nor his daughter took meat, or any
part." It is a pity that the rest of this writer's story is, by his
own confession, part romance, part reality. A lifelike description of
his Modoc experience would have done more to ensure immortality for
his book than any amount of romancing.
[248] _Journal of Amer. Folklore_, 1888, 220-26.
[249] _Internat. Archiv. fur Ethnogr., Supplement zu Bd._ IX. 1896,
pp. 1-6.
[250] These lines by their fervid eroticism quite suggest the
existence of a masculine Indian Sappho. See the comments on Sappho in
the chapter on Greek love.
[251] Such a procedure does well enough if the object is to amuse idle
readers; and when a writer confesses, as Cornelius Mathews did in the
_Indian Fairy Book_, that he bestowed on the stories "such changes as
similar legends most in vogue in other countries have received to
adapt them to the comprehension and sympathy of general readers," no
harm is done. But for scientific purposes it is necessary to sift down
all alleged Indian stories and poems to the solid bed-rock of facts.
It is significant that in the stories collected by men of science and
recorded literally in anthropological journals all romantic and
sentimental features are conspicuously absent, being often replaced by
the Indian's abounding obscenity. Rand's _Legends of the Micmacs_ and
Grinnell's _Blackfoot Lodge Tales_ are on the whole free from the
errors of Schoolcraft and his followers. It ought to be obvious to
every collector of aboriginal folk-lore that Indian tales, like the
Indians themselves, are infinitely more interesting in war paint and
buffalo robes than in "boiled shirts" and "store-clothes."
[252] _U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Survey of Rocky Mt. Region_, IX., 90.
[253] Related in G. White's _Historical Collection of Georgia_, 571.
[254] See Brinton's _The American Race_, 59-67, for an excellent
summary of our present knowledge of the Eskimos (on the favorable
side).
[255] _Journal Ethnol. Soc_., I., 299.
[256] Cranz, I., 155, 134; Hall, II., 87, I., 187; Hearne, 161.
[257] Hall, _Narrat. of Second Arctic Exp._, 102; Cranz, I, 207-12
(German ed.); Letourneau, _E.d.M._, 72.
[258] Among the Nagas, we read in Dalton (43), "maidens are prized for
their physical strength more than for their beauty and family;" and
the reason is not far to seek. "The women have to work incessantly,
while the men bask in the sun."
[259] Shortt in _Trans. Ethnol. Soc_., _N.S._, VII., 464.
[260] For our purposes it is needless to continue this list; but I may
add that of the very few tribes Westermarck ventured to claim
specifically for his side, three at any rate--the Miris, Todas, and
Kols (Mundas) do not belong there. The state of mind prevalent among
the Miris is indicated by Dalton's observation (33) that "two brothers
will unite and from the proceeds of their joint labor buy a wife
between them." In regard to the Todas, Westermarck apparently forgot
what he himself had written about them on a previous page (53), after
Shortt:
"When a man marries a girl, she becomes the wife of his
brothers as they successively reach manhood, and they
become the husbands of all her sisters, when they are
old enough to marry."
To speak of "liberty of choice" in such cases, or of the marriage
being only "ostensibly" arranged by the parents, is nonsense. As for
the Kols, what Dalton says about the Mundas (194) not only indicates
that parental interference is more than "ostensible," but makes clear
that what these girls enjoy is not free choice but what is
euphemistically called "free love," before marriage:
"Among Mundas having any pretensions to respectability
the young people are not allowed to arrange these
affairs [matrimonial] for themselves. Their parents
settle it all for them, French fashion, and after the
liberty they have enjoyed, and the liaisons they are
sure to have made, this interference on the part of the
old folk must be very aggravating to the young ones."
If the dissolute or imbecile advocates of "free love" had their way,
we should sink to the level of these wild tribes of India; but there
is no danger of our losing again the large "tracts of mind, and
thought, and feeling" we have acquired since our ancestors, who came
from India, were in such a degraded state as these neighbors of
theirs.
[261] Statistics have shown that twenty-eight per cent of the females
were married before their fourth year. The ancient _Sutras_ ordained
the age of six to seven the best for girls to marry, and declared that
a father who waits till his daughter is twelve years old must go to
hell. The evils are aggravated by the fact noted by Dr. Ryder (who
gives many pathetic details) that a Hindoo girl of ten often appears
like an European child of six, owing to the weak physique inherited
from these girl mothers. Yet Mrs. Mansell relates:
"Many pitiable child-wives have said to me, 'Oh, Doctor
mem Sahib, I implore you, do give me medicine that I
may become a mother.' I have looked at their innocent
faces and tender bodies, and asked, 'Why?' The reply
has invariably been, 'My husband will discard me if I
do not bear a child.'"
[262] _Journal of Nat. Indian Assoc._, 1881, 543-49.
[263] The roots of this superstition, which has created such
unspeakable misery in India, go back to the oldest times of which
there are records. The Vedas say, "Endless are the worlds for those
men who have sons; but there is no place for those who have no male
offspring."
[264] Dr. S. Armstrong-Hopkins writes in her recent volume _Within the
Purdah_ (51-52): "A few years ago the English Government passed a law
to the effect that no bride should go to the house of her
mother-in-law before she arrived at the age of twelve years. I am
witness, however, as is every practising physician in India, that this
law is utterly ignored.... Often and often have I treated little women
patients of five, six, seven, eight, nine years, who were at that time
living with their husbands."
[265] If Darwin had dwelt on such facts in his _Descent of Man_, and
contrasted man's vileness with the devotion, sympathy, and
self-sacrifice shown by birds and other animals, he would have aroused
less indignation among his ignorant contemporaries. In these respects
it was the animals who had cause to resent his theory.
[266] Dr. Ryder says in her pathetic book, _Little Wives of India_: "A
man may be a vile and loathsome creature; he may be blind, a lunatic,
an idiot, a leper, or diseased in any form; he may be fifty, sixty, or
seventy years old, and may be married to a child of five or ten, who
positively loathes his presence; but if he claims her she must go.
There is no other form of slavery equal to it on the face of the
earth."
[267] The London _Times_ of November 11, 1889, had the following in
its column about India:
"Two shocking cases of wife killing lately came before
the courts, in both cases the result of child marriage.
In one a child aged ten was strangled by her husband.
In the second case a child of tender years was ripped
open with a wooden peg. Brutal sexual exasperation was
the sole apparent reason in both instances. Compared
with the terrible evils of child marriage, widow
cremation is of infinitely inferior magnitude."
[268] Manu's remark that "where women are honored there the gods are
pleased" is one of those expressions of unconscious humor which
naturally escaped him, but should not have escaped European
sociologists. What he understands by "honoring women" may be gathered
from many maxims in his volume like the following (the references
being to the pages of Burnell and Hopkins's version):
"This is the nature of women, to seduce men here" (40);
"One should not be seated in a secluded place with a
mother, sister, or daughter; the powerful host of the
senses compels even a wise man" (41).
"No act is to be done according to (her) own will by a
young girl, a young woman, or even by an old woman,
though in (their own) houses."
"In her childhood (a girl) should be under the will of
her father; in (her) youth, of (her) husband; her
husband being dead, of her sons; a woman should never
enjoy her own will" (130).
"Though of bad conduct or debauched, or even devoid of
good qualities, a husband must always be worshipped
like a god by a good wife."
"For women there is no separate sacrifice, nor vow, nor
even fast; if a woman obeys her husband, by that she is
exalted in heaven" (131).
"Day and night should women be kept by the male members
of the family in a state of dependence" (245)....
"Women being weak creatures, and having no share in the
_mantras_, are falsehood itself" (247).
Quite in the spirit of these ordinances of the great Manu are the
directions for wives given in the _Padma Purana_, one of the books of
highest authority, whose rules are, as Dubois informs us (316), kept
up in full vigor to this day. A wife, we read therein, must regard her
husband as a god, though he be a very devil. She must laugh if he
laughs, eat after him, abstain from food which _he_ dislikes, burn
herself after his death. If he has another wife she must not
interfere, must always keep her eyes on her master, ready to receive
his commands; she must never be gloomy or discontented in his
presence; and though he abuse or even beat her she must return only
meek and soothing words.
[269] In Calcutta nearly one-half the females--42,824 out of
98,627--were widows. In India in general one-fifth of the women (or,
excluding the Mohammedans, one-third) are widows.
[270] _Journal of the National Indian Assoc._, 1881, 624-30.
[271] Ploss-Bartels, I., 385-87; Lamairesse, 18, 95, XX., etc.
[272] Here again we must guard against the naïve error of benevolent
observers of confounding chastity with an assumption of modest
behavior. In describing the streets of Delhi Ida Pfeiffer says
(_L.V.R.W._, 148):
"The prettiest girlish faces peep modestly out of these
curtained bailis, and did one not know that in India an
unveiled face is never an innocent one, the fact
certainly could not be divined from their looks or
behavior." It happens to be the fashion even for
bayadères to preserve an appearance of great propriety
in public.
[273] Pp. 143 and 160 of Kellner's edition of this drama (Reclam). The
extent to which indifference to chastity is sometimes carried in India
may be inferred from the facts that in the famous city of Vasali
"marriage was forbidden, and high rank attached to the lady who held
office as the chief of courtesans;" and that the same condition
prevails in British India to this day in a town in North Canara
(Balfour, _Cyclop. of India_, II., 873).
[274] Hâla's date is somewhat uncertain, but he flourished between the
third and fourth centuries A.D. Professor Weber's translation of his
seven hundred poems, with the professor's comments, takes up no fewer
than 1,023 pages of the _Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes_,
Vols. V. and VII. I have selected all those which throw light on the
Hindoo conception of love, and translated them carefully from Weber's
version. Hâla's anthology served as prototype, about the twelfth
century, to a similar collection of âryâ verses, the erotic Saptacati
of Govardhana, also seven hundred in number, but written in Sanskrit.
Of these I have not been able to find a version in a language that I
can read, but the other collection is copious and varied enough to
cover all the phases of Hindoo love. The verses were intended, as
already indicated, to be sung, for the Hindoos, too, knew the power of
music as a pastime and a feeder of the emotions. "If music be the food
of love, play on," says the English Shakespere, and the "Hindoo
Shakespere" wrote more than a thousand years before him:
"Oh, how beautifully our master Rebhila has sung! Yes,
indeed, the zither is a pearl, only it does not come
from the depths of the sea. How its tones accord with
the heart that longs for love, how it helps to while
away time at a rendezvous, how it assuages the grief of
separation, and augments the delights of the lovers!"
(_Vasantasena_, Act III., 2.)
[275] The disadvantage of arguing against the believers in primitive,
Oriental, and ancient amorous sentiment is that some of the strongest
evidence against them cannot be cited in a book intended for general
reading. Professor Weber declares in his introduction to Hâla's
anthology that these poems take us through all phases of sentimental
love (_innigen Liebeslebens_) to the most licentious situations. He is
mistaken, as I have shown, in regard to the sentiment, but there can
be no doubt about the licentiousness. Numbers 5, 23, 62, 63, 65, 71,
72, 107, 115, 139, 161, 200, 223, 237, 241, 242, 300, 305, 336, 338,
356, 364, 369, 455, 483, 491, 628, 637, depict or suggest improper
scenes, while 61, 213, 215, 242, 278, 327, 476, 690 are frankly
obscene. Lower and higher things are mixed in these poems with a
naïveté that shows the absence of any idea of refinement.
[276] I have here followed Kellner, though Boehtlingk's version is
more literal and Oriental: "Mir aber brennt Liebe, O Grausamer, Tag
und Nacht gewaltig die Glieder, deren Wünsche auf dich gerichtet
sind."
[277] _Anas Casarea_, a species of duck which, in Hindoo poetry, is
allowed to be with his mate only in the daytime and must leave her at
night, in consequence of a curse; thereupon begin mutual lamentations.
[278] For a Hindoo, unless he has a son to make offerings after his
death, is doomed to live over again his earthly life with all its
sorrows. A daughter will do, provided she has a son to attend to the
rites.
[279] The sequel of the story, relating to the misfortunes of Nala and
Damayanti after marriage, will be referred to presently. The famous
tale herewith briefly summarized occurs in the _Mahâbhârata_, the
great epic or mythological cyclopaedia of India, which embraces
220,000 metric lines, and antedates in the main the Christian era. The
story of Savitri also occurs in the _Mahâbhârata_; and these two
episodes have been pronounced by specialists the gems not only of that
great epic, but of all Hindoo literature. I have translated from the
edition of H.C. Kellner, which is based on the latest and most careful
revisions of the Sanscrit text. I have also followed Kellner's edition
of Kalidasa's _Sakuntala_ and Otto Fritze's equally critical versions
of the same poet's _Urvasi_ and _Malavika and Agnimitra_. Some of the
earlier translators, notably Rückert, permitted themselves unwarranted
poetic licenses, modernizing and sentimentalizing the text, somewhat
as Professor Ebers did the thoughts and feelings of the ancient
Egyptians. I will add that while I have been obliged to greatly
condense the stories of the above dramas, I have taken great care to
retain all the speeches and details that throw light on the Hindoo
conception of love, reserving a few, however, for comment in the
following paragraphs.
[280] Our poets speak of fright making the hair stand on end--but only
on the head. Can the alleged Hindoo phenomenon be identical with what
we call goose flesh--French frisson? That would make it none the less
artificial as a symptom of love. Hertel says, in his edition of the
_Hitopadesa_ (26):
"With the Hindoos it is a consequence of great
excitement, joy as well as fear, that the little hairs
on the body stand erect. The expression has become
conventional."
[281] _Hitopadesa_ (25). This gratification the Hindoos regard as one
of the four great objects of life, the other three being liberty
(emancipation of the soul), wealth, and the performance of religious
duties.
[282] Robert Brown has remarked that "moral and intellectual qualities
seem to be entirely omitted from the seven points which, according to
Manu, make a good wife." And Ward says (10) that no attention is paid
to a bride's mind or temper, the only points being the bride's person,
her family, and the prospect of male offspring.
[283] This is the list, as given by the eminent Sanscrit scholar,
Professor Albrecht Weber in the _Abhandlungen für die Kunde des
Abendlandes_, Vol. V., 135. Burton, in his original edition of the
_Arabian Nights_ (III., 36), gives the stages thus: love of the eyes;
attraction of the manos or mind; birth of desire; loss of sleep; loss
of flesh; indifference to objects of sense; loss of shame; distraction
of thought; loss of consciousness; death. _Cf_. Lamairesse, p. 179.
[284] Preferably in Boehtlingk's literal version, which I have
followed whenever Kellner idealizes. In this case Kellner speaks of
covering "den Umfang des Brüstepaars," while Boethlingk has "das
starke Brüstepaar," which especially arouse the king's "love."
[285] It would hardly be surprising if Kalidasa had had some
conception of true love sentiment, for not only did he possess a
delicate poetic fancy, but he lived at a time when tidings of the
chivalrous treatment and adoration of women might have come to him
from Arabia or from Europe. The tradition that he flourished as early
as the first century of our era was demolished by Professor Weber
(_Ind. Lit. Ges._, 217). Professor Max Müller (91) found no reason to
place him earlier than our sixth century; and more recent evidence
indicates that he lived as late as the eleventh. Yet he had no
conception of supersensual love; marriage was to him, as to all
Hindoos, a union of bodies, not of souls. He had not learned from the
Arabs (like the Persian poet Saadi, of the thirteenth century, whom I
referred to on p. 199) that the only test of true love is
self-sacrifice. It is true that Bhavabhuti, the Hindoo poet, who is
believed to have lived at the end of our seventh century, makes one of
the lovers in _Malati and Madhava_ slay a tiger and save his beloved's
life; but that is also a case of self-defence. The other lover--the
"hero" of the drama--faints when he sees his friend in danger!
Generally speaking, there is a peculiar effeminacy, a lack of true
manliness, about Hindoo lovers They are always moping, whining,
fainting; the kings--the typical lovers--habitually neglect the
affairs of state to lead a life of voluptuous indulgence. Hindoo
sculpture emphasizes the same trait: "Even in the conception of male
figures," says Lübke (109), "there is a touch of this womanly
softness;" there is "a lack of an energetic life, of a firm contexture
of bone and muscle." It is not of such enervated stuff that true
lovers are made.
[286] An explanation of this discrepancy may be found in A.K. Fiske's
suggestion (191) that there is a double source for this story. The
reader will please bear in mind that all my quotations are from the
revised version of the Bible. I do not believe in retaining inaccurate
translations simply because they were made long ago.
[287] McClintock and Strong's _Encyclop. of Biblical Literature_ says:
"It must be borne in mind that Jacob himself had now reached the
mature age of seventy-seven years, as appears from a comparison of
Joseph's age... with Jacob's." That Rachel was not much over fifteen
may be assumed because among Oriental nomadic races shepherd girls are
very seldom unmarried after that age, or even an earlier age, for
obvious reasons.
[288] Gen. 19: 1-9; 19: 30-38; 34: 1-31; 38: 8-25; 39: 6-20; Judges
19: 22-30; II. Sam. 3: 6-9; 11: 2-27; 13: 1-22; 16: 22; etc.
[289] For whom the Hebrew poet has a special word _(dodi)_ different
from that used when Solomon is referred to.
[290] See Renan, Preface, p. iv. It is of all Biblical books, the one
"pour lequel les scribes qui ont décidé du sort des écrits hébreux ont
le plus élargi leurs règles d'admission."
[291] McClintock and Strong.
[292] In the seventh chapter there are lines where, as Renan points
out (50), the speaker, in describing the girl, "vante ses charmes les
plus intimes," and where the translator was "obligé à des
attenuations."
[293] Renan says justly that it is the most obscure of all Hebrew
poems. According to the old Hebrew exegesis, every passage in the
Bible has seventy different meanings, all of them equally true; but of
this Song a great many more than seventy interpretations have been
given: the titles of treatises on the Canticles fill four columns of
fine print in McClintock and Strong's Cyclopaedia. Griffis declares
that it is, "probably, the most perfect poem in any language," but in
my opinion it is far inferior to other books in the Bible. The
adjective perfect is not applicable to a poem so obscure that more
than half its meaning has to be read between the lines, while its
plan, if plan it has, is so mixed up and hindmost foremost that I
sometimes feel tempted to accept the view of Herder and others that
the _Song of Songs_ is not one drama, but a collection of unconnected
poems.
[294] Mr. Griffis' lucid, ingenious, and admirably written monograph
entitled, _The Lily among Thorns_, is unfortunately marred in many
parts by the author's attitude, which is not that of a critic or a
judge, but of a lawyer who has a case to prove, that black and gray
are really snow white. His sense of humor ought to have prevented him
from picturing an Eastern shepherd complimenting a girl of his class
on her "instinctive refinement". He carries this idealizing process so
far that he arbitrarily divides the line "I am black but comely,"
attributing the first three words to the Shulamite, the other two to a
chorus of her rivals in Solomon's harem! The latter supposition is
inconceivable; and why should not the Shulamite call herself comely? I
once looked admiringly at a Gypsy girl in Spain, who promptly opened
her lips, and said, with an arch smile, "soy muy bonita"--"I am very
pretty!"--which seemed the natural, naïve attitude of an Oriental
girl. To argue away such a trifling spot on maiden modesty as the
Shulamite's calling herself comely, while seeing no breach of delicacy
in her inviting her lover to come into the garden and eat his precious
fruits, though admitting (214) that "the maiden yields thus her heart
and her all to her lover," is surely straining at a gnat and
swallowing a camel.
[295] Which, however, evidently was not saying much, as he immediately
added that he was ready to give her up provided they gave him another
girl, lest he be the only one of the Greeks without a "prize of
honor." Strong individual preference, as we shall see also in the case
of Achilles, was not a trait of "heroic" Greek love.
[296] I have already commented (115) on Nausicäa's lack of feminine
delicacy and coyness; yet Gladstone says (132) "it may almost be
questioned whether anywhere in literature there is to be found a
conception of the maiden so perfect as Nausicäa in grace, tenderness,
and delicacy"!
[297] How Gladstone reconciled his conscience with these lines when he
wrote (112) that "on one important and characteristic subject, the
exposure of the person to view, the men of that time had a peculiar
and fastidious delicacy," I cannot conceive.
[298] It will always remain one of the strangest riddles of the
nineteenth century why the statesman who so often expressed his
righteous indignation over the "Bulgarian atrocities" of his time
should not only have pardoned, but with insidious and glaring
sophistry apologized for the similar atrocities of the heroes whom
Homer fancies he is complimenting when he calls them professional
"spoilers of towns." I wish every reader of this volume who has any
doubts regarding the correctness of my views would first read
Gladstone's shorter work on Homer (a charmingly written book, with all
its faults), and then the epics themselves, which are now accessible
to all in the admirable prose versions of the _Iliad_ by Andrew Lang,
Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers, and of the _Odyssey_ by Professor George
H. Palmer of Harvard--versions which are far more poetic than any
translations in verse ever made and which make of these epics two of
the most entertaining novels ever written. It is from these versions
that I have cited, except in a few cases where I preferred a more
literal rendering of certain words.
[299] In all the extracts here made I follow the close literal prose
version made by H.T. Wharton, in his admirable book on Sappho, by far
the best in the English language.
[300] P.B. Jevons refers to some of these as "mephitic exhalations
from the bogs of perverted imaginings!" Welcker's defence of Sappho is
a masterpiece of naïveté written in ignorance of mental pathology.
[301] The most elaborate discussion of this subject is to be found in
Moll's _Untersuchungen_, 314-440, where also copious bibliographic
references are given. The most striking impression left by the reading
of this book is that the differentiation of the sexes is by no means
as complete yet as it ought to be. All the more need is there of
romantic love, whose function it is to assist and accelerate this
differentiation.
[302] As long ago as 1836-38 a Swiss author, Heinrich Hössli, wrote a
remarkable book with the title _The Unreliability of External Signs as
Indications of Sex in Body and Mind_. I may add here that if it were
known how many of the "shrieking sisterhood" who are clamoring for
masculine "rights" for women, are among the unfortunates who were born
with male brains in female bodies, the movement would collapse as if
struck by a ton of dynamite. These amazons often wonder why the great
mass of women are so hard to stir up in this matter. The reason is
that the great mass of women--heaven be thanked!--have feminine minds
as well as feminine bodies.
[303] Probably no passage in any drama has ever been more widely
discussed than the nine lines I have just summarized. As long ago as
the sixteenth century the astronomer Petrus Codicillus pronounced them
spurious. Goethe once remarked to Eckermann; (III., March 28, 1827)
that he considered them a blemish in the tragedy and would give a good
deal if some philologist would prove that Sophocles had not written
them. A number of eminent philologists--Jacob, Lehrs, Hauck, Dindorf,
Wecklein, Jebb, Christ, and others--have actually bracketed them as
not genuine; but if they are interpolations, they must have been added
within a century after the play was written, for Aristotle refers to
them (_Rhet. III_., 16,9) in these words: "And should any circumstance
be incredible, you must subjoin the reason; as Sophocles does. He
furnishes an example in the _Antigone_, that she mourned more for her
brother than for a husband and children; for these, if lost, might
again be hers.
"'But father now and mother both being lost,
A brother's name can ne'er be hailed again.'"
It is noticeable that Aristotle should pronounce Antigone's preference
strange or incredible from a Greek point of view; that point of view
being, as we have seen, that a woman's first duties are toward her
husband, for whom she should ever sacrifice herself. It has been
plausibly suggested that Sophocles borrowed the idea of those nine
lines from his friend Herodotus, who (III., 118) relates the story of
Darius permitting the wife of Intophernes to save one of her relatives
from death and who chooses her brother, for reasons like those
advanced by Antigone. It has been shown (_Zeitschrift f. d.
Oesterreich Gymn_., 1898; see also _Frankfurter Zeitung_, July 22, 24,
27, 1899; _Hermes_, XXVIII.) that this idea occurs in old tales and
poems of India, Persia, China, as well as among the Slavs,
Scandinavians, etc. If Sophocles did introduce this notion into his
tragedy (and there is no reason for doubting it except the unwarranted
assumption that he was too great a genius to make such a blunder), he
did it in a bungling way, for inasmuch as Antigone's brother is dead
she cannot benefit her family by favoring him at the expense of her
betrothed; and moreover, her act of sacrificing herself in order to
secure the rest of a dear one's soul--which alone might have partly
excused her heartless and unromantic ignoring and desertion of her
lover--is bereft of all its nobility by her equally heartless
declaration that she would not have thus given her life for a husband
or a child. These Greek poets knew so little of true femininity that
they could not draw a female character without spoiling it.
[304] The unduly extolled [Greek: Epos] chorus in the _Antigone_
expresses nothing more than the universal power of love in the Greek
conception of the term.
[305] In Müller's book on the Doric race we read (310) that the love
of the Corinthian Philolaus and Diocles "lasted until death," and even
their graves were turned toward one another, in token of their
affection. Lovers in Athens carved the beloved's names on walls, and
innumerable poems were addressed by the leading bards to their
favorites.
[306] Compare Ramdohr, III., 191 and 124.
[307] I have before me a dictonary which defines Platonic love as it
is now universally, and incorrectly, understood, as "a pure spiritual
affection subsisting between the sexes, unmixed with carnal desires, a
species of love for which Plato was a warm advocate." In reality
Platonic (i.e. Socratic) love has nothing whatever to do with women,
but is a fantastic and probably hypocritical idealization of a species
of infatuation which in our day is treated neither in poems nor in
dialogues, nor discussed in text-books of psychology or physiology,
but relegated to treatises on mental diseases and abnormalities. In
fact, the whole philosophy of Greek love may be summed up in the
assertion that "Platonic love," as understood by us, was by Plato and
the Greeks in general considered an impossibility.
[308] In the _Deipnosophists_ of Athenaeus (III., Bk. XII.) we find
some other information of anthropological significance: "Hermippus
stated in his book about lawgivers that at Lacedaemon all the damsels
used to be shut up in a dark room, while a number of unmarried young
men were shut up with them; and whichever girl each of the young men
caught hold of he led away as his wife, without a dowry." "But
Clearches the Solensian, in his treatise on Proverbs, says: 'In
Lacedaemon the women, on a certain festival, drag the unmarried men to
an altar and then buffet them; in order that, for the purpose of
avoiding the insults of such treatment, they may become more
affectionate and in due season may turn their thoughts to marriage.
But at Athens Cecrops was the first person who married a man to one
woman only, when before his time connections had taken place at random
and men had their wives in common.'"
[309] My critics might have convicted me of a genuine blunder inasmuch
as in my first book (78) I assumed that Plato "foresaw the importance
of pre-matrimonial acquaintance as the basis of a rational and happy
marriage choice." This was an unwarranted concession, because all that
Plato recommended was that "the youths and maidens shall dance
together, seeing and being seen naked," after the Spartan manner. This
might lead to a rational choice of sound bodies, but romantic love
implies an acquaintance of minds, and is altogether a more complicated
process than the dog and cattle breeder's procedure commended by Plato
and Lycurgus. I may add that in view of Lycurgus's systematic
encouragement of promiscuity, the boast of the Spartan Geradas
(recorded by Plutarch) that there were no cases of adultery in Sparta,
must be accepted either as broad sarcasm, or in the manner of
Limburg-Brouwer, who declares (IV., 165) that the boast is "like
saying that in a band of brigands there is not a single thief." Even
from the cattle-breeding point of view Lycurgus proved a failure, for
according to Aristotle (_Pol._ II., 9) the Spartans grew too lazy to
bring up children, and rewards had to be offered for large families.
[310] See the evidence cited in Becker (III., 315) regarding
Aristotle's views as to the inferiority of women. After comparing it
with the remarks of other writers Becker sums up the matter by saying
that "the virtue of which a woman was in those days considered capable
did not differ very much from that of a faithful slave."
[311] In the _Odyssey_ (XV., 418) Homer speaks of "a Phoenician woman,
handsome and tall." He makes Odysseus compare Nausicäa to Diana "in
beauty, height, and bearing," and in another place he declares that,
like Diana among her nymphs, she o'ertops her companions by head and
brow (VI., 152, 102). However, this manner of measuring beauty with a
yard-stick; indicates _some_ progress over the savage and Oriental
custom of making rotundity the criterion of beauty.
[312] Compare Menander, _Frag. Incert._, 154: [Greek: gunaich ho
didaskon gpammat ou kalos poiei].
[313] A homely but striking illustration may here be added. In Africa
the negroes are proud of their complexion and look with aversion on a
white skin. In the United States, knowing that a black skin is looked
down on as a symbol of slavery or inferiority, they are ashamed of it.
The wife of an eminent Southern judge informed me that Georgia negroes
believe that in heaven they will be white; and I have heard of one
negro woman who declared that if she could become white by being
flayed she would gladly submit to the torture. Thus have _ideas_
regarding the complexion changed the _emotion_ of pride to the emotion
of shame.
[314] Professor Rohde appears to follow the old metaphysical maxim "If
facts do not agree with my theory, so much the worse for the facts."
He piles up pages of evidence which show conclusively that these
Greeks knew nothing of the higher traits and symptoms of love, and
then he adds: "but they _must_ have known them all the same." To give
one instance of his contradictory procedure. On page 70 he admits
that, as women were situated, the tender and passionate courtship of
the youths as described in poems and romances of the period "could
hardly have been copied from life," because the Greek custom of
allowing the fathers to dispose of their daughters without consulting
their wishes was incompatible with the poetry of such courting. "It is
very significant," he adds, "that among the numerous references to the
ways of obtaining brides made by poets and moral philosophers,
including those of the Hellenistic [Alexandrian] period, and collected
by Stobaeus in chapters 70, 71, and 72 of his _Florilegium_, love is
never mentioned among the motives of marriage choice." In the next
sentence he declares nevertheless that "no one would be so foolish as
to deny the existence of pure, strong love in the Greek life of this
period;" and ten lines farther on he backs down again, admitting that
though there may be indications of supersensual, sentimental love in
the literature of this period these traits _had not yet taken hold of
the life of these men_, though there were _longings_ for them. And at
the end of the paragraph he emphasizes his back-down by declaring that
"the very essence of sentimental poetry is the _longing for what does
not exist_." (_Ist doch das rechte Element gerade der sentimentalen
Poesie die Sehnsucht nach dem nicht Vorhandenen_.) What makes this
admission the more significant is that Professor Rohde, in speaking of
"sentimental" elements, does not even use that word as the adjective
of sentiment but of sentimentality. He defines this _Sentimentalität_
to which he refers as a "_ Sehnen, Sinnen und Hoffen_," a
"_Selbstgenuss der Leidenschaft_"--a "longing, dreaming, and hoping,"
a "revelling in (literally, self-enjoying of) passion." In other
words, an enjoyment of emotion for emotion's sake, a gloating over
one's selfish joys and sorrows. Now in this respect I actually go
beyond Rohde as a champion of Greek love! Such _Sentimentalität_
existed, I am convinced, in Alexandrian life as well as in Alexandrian
literature; but of the existence of true supersensual altruistic
_sentiment_ I can find no evidence. The trouble with Rohde, as with so
many who have written on this subject, is that he has no clear idea of
the distinction between sensual love, which is selfish
(_Selbstgenuss_) and romantic love, which is altruistic; hence he
flounders in hopeless contradictions.
[315] See Anthon, 258, and the authors there referred to.
[316] See Theocritus, Idyll XVII. Regarding the silly and degrading
adulation which the Alexandrian court-poets were called upon to bestow
on the kings and queens, and its demoralizing effect on literature,
see also Christ's _Griechische Litteraturgeschichte_, 493-494 and 507.
[317] I have given Professor Rohde's testimony on this point not only
because he is a famous specialist in the literature of this period,
but because his peculiar bias makes his negative attitude in regard to
the question of Alexandrian gallantry the more convincing. A reader of
his book would naturally expect him to take the opposite view, since
he himself fancied he had discovered traces of gallantry in an author
who preceded the Alexandrians. The _Andromeda_ of Euripides, he
declares (23), "became in his hands one of the most brilliant examples
of chivalrous love." This, however, is a pure assumption on his part,
not warranted by the few fragments of this play that have been
preserved. Benecke has devoted a special "Excursus" to this play
(203-205), in which he justly remarks that readers of Greek literature
"need hardly be reminded of how utterly foreign to the Greek of
Euripides's day is the conception of the '_galante Ritter_' setting
out in search of ladies that want rescuing." He might have brought out
the humor of the matter by quoting the characteristically Greek
version of the Perseus story given by Apollodorus, who relates dryly
(II., chap. 4) that Cepheus, in obedience to an oracle, bound his
daughter to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster. "Perseus saw her,
fell in love with her, and promised Cepheus to slaughter the monster
_if he would promise to give him the rescued daughter to marry_. The
contract was made and Perseus undertook the adventure, killed the
monster and rescued Andromeda." Nothing could more strikingly reveal
the difference between Hellenic and modern ideas regarding lovers than
the fact that to the Greek mind there was nothing disgraceful in this
selfish, ungallant bargain made by Perseus as a condition of his
rescuing the poor girl from a horrible death. A mediaeval knight, or a
modern gentleman, not to speak of a modern lover, would have saved her
at the risk of his own life, reward or no reward. The difference is
further emphasized by the attitude of the girl, who exclaims to her
deliverer, "Take me, O stranger, for thine handmaiden, or wife, or
slave." Professor Murray, who cites this line in his _History of Greek
Literature_, remarks with comic naïveté: "The love-note in this pure
and happy sense Euripides had never struck before." But what is there
so remarkably "pure and happy" in a girl's offering herself as a slave
to a man who has saved her life? Were not Greek women always expected
to assume that attitude of inferiority, submission, and
self-sacrifice? Was not _Alcestis_ written to enforce that principle
of conduct? And does not that very exclamation of Andromeda show how
utterly antipodal the situation and the whole drama of Euripides were
to modern ideas of chivalrous love?
Having just mentioned Benecke, I may as well add here that his own
theory regarding the first appearance of the romantic elements in
Greek love-poetry rests on an equally flimsy basis. He held that
Antimachus, who flourished before Euripides and Plato had passed away,
was the first poet who applied to women the idea of a pure, chivalrous
love, which up to his time had been attributed only to the romantic
friendships with boys. The "romantic idea," according to Benecke, is
"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." But that Antimachus knew anything of such love is a pure
figment of Benecke's imagination. The works of Antimachus are lost,
and all that we know about them or him is that he lamented the loss of
his wife--a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon--and
consoled himself by writing an elegy named [Greek: Ludae], in which he
brought together from mythical and traditional sources a number of sad
tales. Conjugal grief does not take us very far toward so complicated
an altruistic state of mind as I have shown romantic love to be.
[318] Theocritus makes this point clear in line 5 of Idyl 12:
[Greek: hosson parthenikae propherei trigamoio gunaikos].
[319] See Helbig, 246, and Rohde, 36, for details. Helbig remarks that
the Alexandrians, following the procedure of Euripides, chose by
preference incestuous passions, "and it appears that such passions
were not rare in actual life too in those times."
[320] He refers as instances to Plaut., _Asin._, III., 3, particularly
v. 608 ff. and 615; adding that "a very sentimental character is
Charinus in the _Mercator_;" and he also points to Ter., _Eun._, 193
ff.
[321] What makes this evidence the more conclusive is that Rohde's use
of the word "sentimental" refers, according to his own definition, to
egoistic sentimentality, not to altruistic sentiment. Of
sentimentality--altiloquent, fabricated feeling and cajolery--there is
enough in Greek and Latin literature, doubtless as a reflection of
life. But when, in the third act of the _Asinaria_, the lover says to
his girl, "If I were to hear that you were in want of life, at once
would I present you my own life and from my own would add to yours,"
we promptly ask, "_Would he have done it_?" And the answer, from all
we know of these men and their attitude toward women, would have been
the same as that of the maiden to the enamoured Daphnis, in the
twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus: "_Now_ you promise me everything,
but afterward you will not give me a pinch of salt." As for the purity
of the characters in the play, its quality may be inferred from the
fact that the girl is not only a hetaira, but the daughter of a
procuress. From the point of view of purity the _Captivi_ is
particularly instructive. Riley calls it "the most pure and innocent
of all the plays of Plautus;" and when we examine why this is so we
find that it is because there is no woman in it! In the epilogue
Plautus himself--who made his living by translating Athenian comedies
into Latin--makes the significant confession that there were but few
Greek plays from which he might have copied so chaste a plot, in which
"there is no wenching, no intriguing, no exposure of a child" to be
found by a procuress and brought up as a hetaira--which are the staple
features of these later Greek plays.
[322] Those who cannot read Greek will derive much pleasure from the
admirable prose version of Andrew Lang, which in charm of style
sometimes excels the original, while it veils those features that too
much offend modern taste.
[323] Couat, 142. There are reasons to believe that the epistles
referred to are not by Ovid. Aristaenetus lived about the fifth
century. It is odd that the poem of Callimachus should have been lost
after surviving eight centuries.
[324] See also Helbig's Chap. XXII. on the increasing lubricity of
Greek art.
[325] Space permitting, it would be interesting to examine these poets
in detail, as well as the other Romans--Virgil, Horace, Lucretius,
etc., who came less under Greek influence. But in truth such
examination would be superfluous. Any one may pursue the investigation
by himself, and if he will bear in mind and apply as tests, the last
seven of my ingredients of love--the altruistic-supersensual group--he
cannot fail to become convinced that there are no instances of what I
have described as romantic love in Latin literature any more than in
Greek. And since it is the province of poets to idealize, we may feel
doubly sure that the emotions which they did not even imagine cannot
have existed in the actual life of their more prosaic contemporaries.
It would, indeed, be strange if a people so much more coarse-fibred
and practical, and so much less emotional and esthetic, than the
Greeks, should have excelled them in the capacity for what is one of
the most esthetic and the most imaginative of all sentiments.
Before leaving the poets, I may add that the Greek _Anthology_, the
basis of which was laid by Meleager, a contemporary of the Roman poets
just referred to, contains a collection of short poems by many Greek
writers, in which, of course, some of my critics have discovered
romantic love. One of them wrote that "the poems of Meleager alone in
the Greek _Anthology_ would suffice to refute the notion that Greece
ignored romantic passion." If this critic will take the trouble to
read these poems of Meleager in the original he will find that a
disgustingly large number relate to [Greek: paiderastia], which in
No. III. is expressly declared to be superior to the love for women;
that most of the others relate to hetairai; and that not one of
them--or one in the whole _Anthology_--comes up to my standard of
romantic love.
[326] The best-known ancient story of "love-suicide" is that of
Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus, having reason to think that Thisbe, with
whom he had arranged a secret interview at the tomb of Ninus, has been
devoured by a lion, stabs himself in despair, and Thisbe, on finding
his body, plunges on to the same sword, still warm with his blood.
This tale, which is probably of Babylonian origin, is related by Ovid
(_Metamorph._, IV., 55-166), and was much admired and imitated in the
Middle Ages. Comment on it would be superfluous after what I have
written on pages 605-610.
[327] See Rohde, 130; Christ, 349.
[328] No more like stories of romantic love than these are the five
"love-stories" written in the second century after Christ by Plutarch.
This is the more remarkable as Plutarch was one of the few ancient
writers to whom at any rate the _idea_ occurred that women _might be_
able to feel and inspire a love rising above the senses. This
suggestion is what distinguishes his _Dialogue on Love_ most favorably
from Plato's _Symposium_, which it otherwise, however, resembles
strikingly in the peculiar notions regarding the relation of the
sexes; showing how tenacious the unnatural Greek ideas were in Greek
life. Plutarch's various writings show that though he had advanced
notions compared with other Greeks, he was nearly as far from
appreciating true femininity, chivalry, and romantic love as Lucian,
who also wrote a dialogue on love in the old-fashioned manner.
[329] Hirschig's _Scriptores Erotici_ begins with Parthenius and
includes Achilles Tatius, Longus, Xenophon, Heliodorus, Chariton, etc.
The right-hand column gives a literal translation into Latin.
[330] _Der Griechische Roman_, 432-67. An excrescence of this theory
is the foolish story that "Bishop" Heliodorus, being called upon by a
provincial synod either to destroy his erotic books or to abdicate his
position, preferred the latter alternative. The date of the real
Heliodorus is perhaps the end of the third or the first half of the
fourth century after Christ.
[331] He refers in a footnote to such scenes as are painted in I., 32,
4; II., 9, 11; III., 14, 24, 3; IV., 6, 3--scones and hypocritically
naïve experiments which he justly considers much more offensive than
the notorious scene between Daphnis and Lykainion (III., 18).
[332] Rohde (516) tries to excuse Goethe for his ridiculous praise of
this romance (Eckermann, II., 305, 318-321, 322) because he knew the
story only in the French version of Amyot-Courier. But I find that
this version retains most of the coarseness of the original, and I see
no reason for seeking any other explanation of Goethe's attitude than
his own indelicacy and obtuseness which, as I noted on page 208, made
him go into ecstacies of admiration over a servant whom lust prompted
to attempt rape and commit murder. As for Professor Murray, his
remarks are explicable only on the assumption that he has never read
this story in the original. This is not a violent assumption. Some
years ago a prominent professor of literature, ancient and modern, in
a leading American university, hearing me say one day that _Daphnis
and Chloe_ was one of the most immoral stories ever written, asked in
a tone of surprise: "Have you read it in the original?" Evidently _he_
never had! It is needless to add that translations never exceed the
originals in impropriety and usually improve on them. The Rev. Rowland
Smith, who prepared the English version for Bohn's Library, found
himself obliged repeatedly to resort to Latin.
Apart from his coarseness, there is nothing in Longus's conception of
love that goes beyond the ideas of the Alexandrians. Of the symptoms
of true love--mental or sentimental, esthetic and sympathetic,
altruistic and supersensual, he knows no more than Sappho did a
thousand years before him. Indeed, in making lovers become indolent,
cry out as if they had been beaten, and jump into rivers as if they
were afire, he is even cruder and more absurd than Sappho was in her
painting of sensual passion. His whole idea of love is summed up in
what the old shepherd Philetas says to Daphnis and Chloe (II., 7):
[Greek: _Egvov d' ego kai tauron erasthenta kai hos oistro plaegeis
emukato, kai tragon philaesanta aiga kai aekolouthei pantachou. Autos
men gar aemaen neos kai aerasthen Amarullidos_].
[333] See Rehde, 345; on Musaeus, 472, 133.
[334] Lucii Apulei _Metamorphoseon_, Libri XI., Ed. van der Vliet
(_Teubner_), IV., 89-135.
[335] See the remarks on _Tristan and Isolde_ in my _Wagner and his
Works_, II., 138.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX OF AUTHORS
Abel, C. Ueber den Begriff der Liebe in einigen alten und neuen
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Symonds, J.A.: Studies in the Greek Poets.
Taplin, G.: In Woods' Native Tribes.
Tawney, C.H.: The Kathákoça, or Treasury of Stories.
Taylor, R.: Te Ika a Maui; or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants.
Tennyson.
Terence.
Theal, G.M.: Kaffir Folk-Lore, 1886.
Theocritus.
Thomson, A.S.: New Zealand.
Thomson, J.: Through Masai Land.
Thunberg, C.P.: An Account of the Cape of Good Hope, in Pinkerton's
Coll. of Voyages, Vol. XVI.
Thwaites, R.G.: Jesuit Relations, editor.
Tibullus.
Torquemada, J. de: Monarquia Indiana.
Tregear, E.: The Maoris in Journ. Anthr. Inst. 1889.
Trumbull, H.: History of Indian Wars.
Trumbull, H.C.: Studies in Oriental Social Life.
Tschudi, J.J. von:
Reisen durch Süd Amerika.
Travels in Peru.
See also Rivero.
Tuckey, J.K.: Expedition to Explore the River Zaire.
Turgeuieff.
Turner, G.:
Nineteen Years in Polynesia.
Samoa.
Tyler, J.: Forty Years Among the Zulus.
Tylor, E.B.:
Primitive Culture.
Anthropology.
Tyrrell: Across the Sub Arctics of Canada.
Ulrici, H.: Shakspere's Dramatic Art.
United States Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky
Mountain Region. Same of Colorado.
D'Urville, Dumont: Voyage de l'Astrolabe.
Vail, E.A.: Les Indiens de l'Amérique du Nord.
Vambéry, A.: The Turkish People.
Varigny, De: Quartorze Ans aux Isles Sandwich.
"Vason," Four Years' Residence at Tongataboo.
Verplanck, G.C.: The Illustrated Shakespeare.
Vespucci, Amerigo: Four Voyages. Quaritch Transl., London, 1885.
Virgil.
Wagner, R.
Waitz-Gerland: Anthropologie der Naturvölker.
Wallace, A.R.:
Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.
Tropical Nature.
Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection.
Darwinism.
The Malay Archipelago.
Australasia.
Wallaschek, R.: Primitive Music.
Ward, Herbert: Five Years with the Congo Cannibals.
Ward, Wm.: History, Literature and Religion of the Hindus.
Watson and Kaye: The People of India.
Weber, A.: History of Indian Literature.
Weber, Ernst von: Vier Jahre in Afrika.
Weismann: Essays upon Heredity.
Westcott, W.W.: Suicide.
Westermarck, E.: History of Human Marriage. Second Ed., 1894.
Wharton, H.T.: Sappho.
White, G.: Historical Collection of Georgia.
Wied, Maximilian Prinz zu: Reise in das Innere Nord Amerikas.
Wilhelmi, C., in Woods' Native Tribes of South Australia.
Wilkes, C.: Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition,
1838-1842.
Wilkinson, G.B.: South Australia.
Williams, Monier: Modern India and the Indians.
Williams and Calvert: Fiji and the Fijians.
Willoughby, C.: Smithsonian Report, 1886, Pt. I..
Winstanley, W.: A Visit to Abyssinia.
Wood, J.G.: Natural History of Man.
Wood, Robert: The Original Genius, and Writings of Homer, London,
1775.
Woods, J.D.:
The Native Tribes of South Australia.
South Australia.
Xenophon.
Xenophon Ephesius.
Yawger, Rose: The Indian and the Pioneer.
Yonan, Isaac Malek: Persian Women. Nashville, 1898.
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie.
Zöller, H.:
Pampas und Anden.
Rund um die Erde.
Forschungsreisen in die deutsche Colonie Kamerun.
INDEX OF SUBJECTS
Abipones:
Baldness;
Tattooing courage;
Cruel to women;
Parental tyranny.
Abyssinians:
Concubinage;
Women not coy;
Amulets;
Choice;
Where woman rules;
No chance for love;
Pastoral love;
A flirtation.
Achilles and Briseis.
Acontius and Cydippe.
Adoration, contempt, and adulation:
(See also Women: maltreatment of, and contempt for).
Affection.
Africans:
Mutilations;
Vanity and emulation;
Scarification;
Beauty not appreciated;
Corpulence versus beauty;
Concupiscence versus beauty;
Kissing;
Why wives are valued;
Desertion of the aged;
"Liberty of choice,";
Chapter on (See Table of Contents and names of peoples: Bushmen,
Hottentots, Kaffirs, etc.).
Ainos:
A flirtation.
Algerians:
Kabyles.
Algonkins:
Tattooing;
Words for love.
Altruism:
(See Selfishness).
Amazons:
(See Women, masculine).
American Indians:
Fear of nature;
Honorable polygamy;
Ashamed to wear clothes;
Indifference to chastity;
Incest;
Advertising for a wife;
Repression of preference;
Utility versus beauty;
Masculine women;
A girl's ideal;
Polygamous sentiment;
"Jealousy,";
Absence of real jealousy;
Unjealous Californians and Patagonians;
Feminine jealousy;
Absence of;
Easily overcome;
Causes of;
Proposals by girls;
Capture of women;
Pride;
Cruelty;
Contempt for women;
Kinship through females;
Woman's domestic and political rule;
Ungallant;
Caressing no evidence of affection;
War decorations;
Tattooing;
Hair dresses;
Valor versus beauty;
Tattooing as a mark of courage;
Language of signs;
Utility versus beauty;
Uncleanly;
Child-wives;
Conjugal "tenderness,";
Mourning to order;
Conjugal grief;
Lack of brains;
"Liberty of choice,";
Sexual taboos;
Tribal hatred;
Chapter on (See Table of Contents);
Defenders;
Stories;
Not true to life;
Morals;
Not gallant;
Lower than brutes;
Enforced chastity, but no purity;
Why some female captives were spared;
Squaws intimidated;
Beauty not valued;
Lack of sympathy;
Contempt for squaws;
Girl market;
Marriage arrangements;
Elopements;
Suicide;
Love-dreams;
Curiosities of courtship;
Silent proposals;
Music in courtship;
Honeymoon;
Love-poems;
Philology and love;
More stories.
Animals:
Superior to savages;
Gallant roosters;
A noble officer;
Maternal instinct;
Sexual selection;
Superior to Hindoos.
Annamanese:
Incest.
Antigone and Haemon.
Apaches:
Hair;
Filthy;
"Purity" and cruelty;
Cruelty to mothers;
Enslave women;
Courtship.
Appetite and longing.
Arabs:
Nudity;
Unjealous;
Unjealous women;
Bedouin women not coy;
Resistance of brides;
Love among;
Shaping skulls;
Corpulence versus beauty;
Love and lust;
One wife not enough;
Desertion of parents;
Influence on others.
Arapahoes:
Protection against men;
Girls as merchandise.
Araucanians:
Brides sold;
Bride-capture;
Musical lovers.
Ashangos:
Amazons.
Ashantees:
No free choice.
Attachment.
Australians:
Inclined to murder;
Infanticide;
Indifference to chastity;
Jealous women;
Female opposition to marriage;
Capture not encouraged;
Protection not gallantry;
Risking life for a woman;
War-paint;
Mutilations;
Signs of mourning;
Colors to attract attention;
Feathers to look savage;
Scarification;
Women and ornaments;
Taking notice of a man's face;
Must submit to mutilations;
Women indifferent to decorations;
Filthy;
"Appreciation of beauty";
Child-wives;
Mourning to order;
"Love";
Lewd dances;
Price of a wife;
Chapter on (See Table of Contents).
Azteks:
(See Mexicans).
Babylonian women.
Bakongo:
Headdresses.
Bathing:
Reasons for.
Bayadères.
Beauty:
Personal;
Hottentot ideal;
Australian;
South Sea Islanders;
Not valued in squaws;
Hindoo ideal;
Greek masculine ideal.
Bechuanas:
Polygamy.
Bhuiyas:
Romantic courtship.
Bible:
(See Hebrews).
Blackfeet:
Punishing infidelity;
Maltreatment of squaws;
"Only a woman";
Disposal of girls;
Marrying sisters;
Elopements;
Courtship.
Borneans:
Marriage by stratagem;
Tattooing;
Suicidal grief;
Caged girls (See also Dyaks).
Brazilians:
Tribal marks;
Tattooing;
Lack of brains;
Multiplicity of languages;
Licentiousness;
_Jus primae noctis_;
Women as slaves;
Words to express love.
Brides:
Capture or purchase of (See Marriage).
Bushmen:
Imperfect sexual differentiation;
Charms;
Child-wives;
Various details;
No liberty of choice.
Butias:
Promiscuity.
California Indians:
Adultery;
Tattooing;
Uncleanly;
Voluptuous beauties;
Deceptive modesty;
Intimidating the squaws;
Treatment of squaws;
Marriage;
Courtship;
Puberty songs;
Stories.
Cannibalism:
Australian.
Capture of brides:
(See Marriage).
Caribs:
Columbus on;
_Jus primae noctis_;
Women as drudges.
Caroline Islanders:
Tattooing.
Chansons de Geste:
Courting by women.
Charms.
Chastity and unchastity.
Cherokees:
Immoral.
Cheyennes:
Protection against men;
Girls as merchandise.
Chinese:
Hiding women's feet;
Feminine coercion to marriage;
Pitiable condition of women;
Love considered immoral;
Why deform women's feet;
Marriage restrictions.
Chinooks:
Painting;
Unchaste;
Position of women;
Love-songs.
Chippewas:
Husband and wife;
Lending wives;
Cruelty to women;
"Choice";
Love-powders;
No love.
Chippewyans:
Unchaste;
Love and drums.
Chittagong Hill Tribes:
Capacity for love.
Choice:
Prevention of;
New Zealand;
Indians;
Wild tribes of India;
Hindoos.
Christianity:
Vs. natural selection;
Prayer;
Encourages feminine virtues;
Ideal of love.
Cleanliness:
Indifference to.
Coarseness:
An obstacle to love.
Comanches:
Utilitarian marriages;
Cruel jealousy;
Filthy;
Lower than brutes;
Enforce chastity on wives.
Congo:
Ornaments as fetiches;
Mourning;
Wives esteemed as mothers only;
"Poetic love" on.
Coreans:
Contempt for women.
Corpulence versus beauty.
Corrobborees.
Courage:
Mutilation a test of.
Courtship:
Greenland;
Creeks;
Zulu;
Australian;
Torres Islands;
Dyaks;
New Zealand;
Apaches;
Omahas;
Curiosities of Indian;
Bhuiyas;
Hindoo;
Greek.
Coyness:
(See Table of Contents).
Creeks:
Masculine women;
Deceptive modesty;
Immoral;
Women as slaves;
Contempt for women;
Choice and marriage;
Suicides.
Crees:
Unchastity.
Cruelty:
In women;
An obstacle to love;
Of Indians:
Of Hindoos;
Of Greeks;
(See Women, maltreatment of).
Dahomans:
Signs of grief;
Compulsory mourning;
Amazons.
Dakotas:
Honorable polygamy;
Similarity of sexes;
Gallantry;
War-decorations;
Paint;
Uncleanly;
Lower than brutes;
Market value of chastity;
Maltreatment of squaws;
Sorrows of women;
Disposal of girls;
Honeymoon;
Suicide;
Love-charms;
Courtship;
Love-poems;
A love-story.
Damaras:
Lack of sympathy;
Uncleanly;
Temporary marriages.
Decorations, personal.
Delawares:
Treatment of squaws;
Suicide.
Dyaks:
Head-hunters;
Gallantry;
Scars and courage;
Charms of women;
Morals;
Courtship;
Fickle and shallow passion;
Love-songs.
Dying for love.
Egyptians:
Obscenity in tombs;
Love;
Child-wives.
Elopements:
Philosophy of Australian;
Why Indians elope.
Eskimos:
No morality or chastity;
Not modest or coy;
Ungallant;
Risking life for a woman;
Assaults;
Mutilations;
Tattooing;
Tattoo marks and husbands;
Filthy;
"Love-unions;"
Capacity for love.
Esthetic sense:
(See Beauty).
Esthonians:
Mock coyness.
Fashion and mutilation.
Females:
Kinship thorough.
Feminine ideals:
Superior to masculine;
Encouraged by Christianity;
Greek ignorance of.
Fetiches.
Fijians:
Murder a virtue;
Infanticide;
Preference;
Similarity of sexes;
Jealousy;
Proposal by a girl;
Feathers to attract attention;
Eat useless wives;
Choice;
Cleanliness;
Treatment of women;
Modesty and chastity;
Sentimentality;
Love-poems;
Serenades and proposals;
Suicides and bachelors.
Fondness.
Fuegians:
Marriage.
Gallantry:
A lesson in;
American Indians;
Wild tribes of India;
Greeks;
Hebrews.
Gallas:
Coarseness of.
Garos:
Proposing by girls.
Gipsies:
Incest.
Greeks:
Hegel on love;
Love in Homer;
Wood, Shelley;
Macaulay, Bulwer, Gautier;
Sentimentality;
No love of romantic scenery;
Incest;
Jealousy;
Homeric women not coy;
Women the embodiment of lust;
Masculine coyness;
Shy women;
War and love;
Mercenary coyness;
Mixed moods in love;
Amorous hyperbole;
Artificial symptoms;
Sympathy denounced by Plato;
Estimate of women;
Unchivalrous;
Risking life for a woman;
Suicide and love;
Love turns to hate;
Woman-love considered sensual;
Attitude toward female beauty;
Sensual love;
Barrenness a cause of divorce;
Chapter on Greek love;
Champions of;
Gladstone on the women of Homer;
Achilles as a lover;
Words versus actions;
Odysseus, libertine and ruffian;
Penelope as a model wife;
Conjugal tenderness of Hector;
Barbarous treatment of women;
Love in Sappho's poems;
Anacreon and others;
Woman and love in AEschylus;
In Sophocles;
In Euripides;
Romantic love for boys;
Platonic love excludes women;
Made impossible in Sparta;
Preference for masculine women and beauty;
Oriental costumes;
Love in life and in literature;
In Greater Greece;
Seventeen symptoms;
Alexandrian chivalry;
The New Comedy;
Theocritus and Callimachus;
Medea and Jason;
Poets and hetairai;
No stories of romantic love;
Romances;
Marriage among.
Greenlanders:
Indifferent to chastity;
Courtship.
Guatemalans:
Brides selected for men;
Erotic philology.
Guiana:
War-paint;
Tattooing;
Women as drudges;
Marriage arrangements.
Harari:
Amorous hyperbole;
Love-poems.
Hawaiians:
Infanticide;
Nudity;
Indifference to chastity;
Incest;
Similarity of sexes;
Ungallant;
Mutilations;
Mourning;
Personal appearance;
Love-stories;
Quality of love;
Morals.
Head-hunters.
Heads:
Moulded.
Hebrews:
Women not coy;
Champions for;
Stories;
No sympathy or sentiment;
A masculine ideal of womanhood;
Not the Christian ideal of love;
Unchivalrous slaughter of women;
Song of Songs.
Hector and Andromache.
Hero and Leander.
Hetairai.
Hindoos:
(See India).
Honeymoon:
Among Indians.
Hope and Despair.
Hottentots:
Courtship;
Uncleanly;
Ugliness;
Child-wives;
Various details.
Hurons:
Preference and aversion;
Immorality;
Woman man's mule;
Old wives for young men.
Hyperbole.
Importance of Love:
(See Utility).
Incest:
(See Licentious Festivals);
Horror of.
India: Hindoos:
Immorality in religion;
Idea of politeness;
Of modesty;
Incest;
Mixed moods in love;
Arousing pride;
Sham altruism;
Contempt for women;
Ungallant;
Impurity;
Idea of beauty;
Widow-burning;
Conjugal "devotion,";
Barren wives discarded;
Cruelty to infant wives;
"Maiden's choice,";
Chapter on;
Child murder and marriage;
Parental selfishness;
Below brutes;
Contempt for women;
Widows and their tormentors;
Depravity;
Symptoms of love: feminine;
Masculine;
Artificial symptoms;
God of love;
Dying for love;
What Hindoo poets admire in women;
Shrewd selfishness;
Bayadères and princesses as heroines;
Marriages of choice not respectable.
India: Wild Tribes:
Religious sacrifices;
Filthy;
Practical promiscuity;
Romantic customs;
Choice;
Courtship;
Proposing by girls;
Attachments.
Indians:
(See American Indians).
Individual preference.
Infanticide.
Intelligence:
Importance of, to beauty.
Iroquois:
Feathers and rank;
No love;
Licentious festivals;
Cruelty to mothers;
Woman man's servant;
Love the last product of civilization.
Jacob and Rachel.
Japanese:
Concubines;
Lover's pride;
Contempt for women;
No love-marriages;
Tattooing.
Javanese:
Marriage before puberty;
No liberty of choice.
Jealousy:
Rousseau on;
Chapter on (See Table of Contents).
Jus primae noctis.
Kaffirs:
Cattle versus women;
Pride vs. love;
Pride to aid love;
Uncleanly;
Child-wives;
No free choice;
Various details.
Kaffirs of Hindu-Kush:
Unjealous.
Kamerun:
Nudity;
No individual preference;
No love in.
Kandhs:
Licentious festivals.
Klamath Indians:
Erotic songs.
Korumbas, promiscuity.
Kukis:
Unchastity.
Kwakiutl Indians:
Love-songs.
Languages:
Multiplicity of.
Latuka:
Polygamy.
Lepchas:
Promiscuity.
Levirate.
Licentious festivals;
Kaffir;
Australian (See Corrobborees);
Hawaiians;
American Indians;
India.
Liking.
Longing.
Love, conjugal:
Nature of;
Mistakes regarding;
African;
Australian;
Dyak;
Fijian;
Hawaiian;
New Zealand;
Indian;
Hindoo;
Greek.
Love-letters:
African;
Australian;
Hawaiian.
Love: pathologic.
Love-poems:
Turkish;
Fijian;
Somali;
Esthonian;
Hottentot;
Harari;
New Zealand;
Indian;
Hindoo;
Song of Songs;
Greek.
Love:
Primitive.
Love:
Romantic;
A compound;
The word;
Last product of civilization;
Importance of;
What it is;
Ingredients;
Jealousy in;
Power of;
Hyperbole;
Comic side of;
Symptoms;
Sympathy;
Adoration;
Actions versus words;
Affection;
Mental purity;
Definition of;
Why called romantic;
Sentiment;
Vanity of;
Changed to conjugal love;
Obstacles to;
Baker on African;
Zöller on African;
Absent in Abyssinia;
Among Bushmen;
Hottentots;
Kaffirs;
Negroes;
Gallas;
Somals;
Kabyles;
Touaregs;
Germs;
Australian "affection,";
Sentimental touches;
Dyak love;
Fijian love;
Tahitian love;
Polynesian stories;
Hawaiian love;
Its violence compared with sensual passion;
To be found in New Zealand?;
Unchastity incompatible with;
Indian "refined love,";
Does suicide prove love?;
Philologic evidence;
Indian specimens;
Whole tracts of feeling unknown to savages;
Unknown to Hindoos;
To Hebrews;
To Greeks;
Utility of.
Madagascar:
Unchastity.
Mahâbhârata.
Makololo:
Mutilations.
Malavika and Agnimitra.
Mandans:
Women not jealous;
Not coy;
Obliged to mourn;
Apparent modesty;
Lower than brutes;
"Conjugal love,";
Brides sold.
Maoris (See New Zealanders).
Marriage:
Polygamy more honorable than monogamy;
Monopolism and monogamy;
Chastity not valued in;
Utilitarian;
Wives as property;
On trial;
A farce;
And corpulence;
Why savages value wives;
Of women, without choice (See Choice);
In China;
Love in Bushman;
Why Australians marry;
By exchange of girls;
By elopement (See Elopements);
Taboos;
Of souls;
By stratagem;
Christian ideal vs. ancient Hebrew;
In Greece;
Plato's ideal;
In Tonga;
In Hawaii;
Indians;
In India;
By capture and mock capture;
By purchase;
Before puberty;
(See also Promiscuity).
Masculine selfishness:
(See Selfishness).
Medea and Jason.
Mediaeval gallantry.
Melanesians:
Morals.
Mexicans:
Barrenness a cause of divorce;
Practical promiscuity;
Woman's inferior position;
Marriage conditions;
Aztek love-poems;
Erotic philology.
Micronesians:
Tattooing.
Militarism and feminine lack of coyness.
Mishmees:
Unchastity.
Mixed Moods:
(See Hope and Despair).
Modesty:
Curiosities of;
Deception;
Absence of, etc. (See Chastity).
Modocs:
Dangers of adultery;
Why they marry;
Marriage ceremony.
Mohammedans:
Polygamy;
Contempt for women.
Mojaves:
Jewels and rank;
Morals.
Monopolism.
Moors:
Ideas of beauty;
Ugly features.
Mordvins:
Mock coyness.
Mosquitos:
Lower than animals.
Mourning:
Decorations;
To order;
For entertainment.
Murder:
As a virtue.
Mutilations.
Nagas:
Ungallant.
Nala and Damayanti.
Natchez:
Lending wives;
Unchaste;
Treatment of squaws.
Natural selection:
Replaced by love.
Navajos:
Unchastity;
Treatment of women;
Courtship.
Negroes, African:
Feminine aspect of men;
Delight in torture;
Scarification;
Idea of beauty;
No love among.
New Britain Group:
Paying for a wife.
New Hebrides:
Infanticide.
New Zealanders:
Masculine women;
Wooing-house;
Decorations;
Anesthetic;
Object of tattooing;
Filthy;
Origin of the Maoris;
Love-poems;
Courtship;
Morals.
Niam-Niam:
Conjugal love.
Nicaraguans:
Tattooing;
Licentious festivals;
Eating a rival.
Nudity:
(See Modesty).
Obscenity:
An obstacle to love.
Odysseus as a husband.
Old maids.
Omahas:
Tribal marks;
Tattooing;
Courtship;
Buying wives;
And elopements;
An idyl;
Love-poems.
Oráons:
Promiscuity;
Courtship.
Oriental ideal of beauty;
Sentimentality.
Osages:
Tattooing;
Unchaste.
Pacific Islands:
Love on.
Paharias:
Attachment.
Paiderastia [Greek].
Papuans:
Nudity.
Pastoral love.
Patagonians:
Adultery;
Decorations;
No esthetic sense;
Licentiousness;
Women as drudges;
Marriages;
A courtship.
Paul and Virginia.
Pawnees:
Apathy of brides;
Daughters as merchandise;
Courtship.
Penelope as a model wife.
Perseus and Andromeda.
Persians:
Cruel jealousy;
Unjealous women;
Amorous hyperbole;
Love among;
Impurity.
Peruvians:
Mutilations;
Sun virgins;
Cruel to women;
Marriage;
Love-charms;
Words to express love.
Philippine Islanders:
Bisayos;
Indifferent to chastity;
Women not jealous.
Piutes:
Nocturnal courtship.
Pocahontas, story of.
Polynesians:
Gods;
Infanticide;
Proposals by women;
Tattooing;
Reasons for bathing;
Beauty means fat.
Pride, amorous.
Priestesses.
Promiscuity, practical.
Proposing:
By women;
In Fiji;
Silent;
By Indians.
Puberty:
Decorations and mutilations at;
Marriage before (See Marriage).
Pueblos:
Girls propose;
Unchastity.
Purchase of brides:
(See Marriage).
Purity, mental.
Race aversion.
Rebekah, the courting of.
Religion:
No love in early;
Fear;
Blasphemy;
Sacrifices;
Immorality;
Associated with.
Religious prejudices.
Romans:
Refined sensual love;
Mercenary coyness;
Amorous hyperbole;
Sham gallantry;
Suicide and love;
Terence and Plautus;
Catullus;
Tibullus;
Propertius and Ovid.
Romantic, meaning of.
Ruth and Boaz.
Sakuntala.
Samoans:
Idea of modesty;
Obscene conversation;
Various traits;
Chastity;
Courtship pantomime;
Love-stories;
Personal appearance.
Samoyedes: selfish men.
Savitri.
Scarification.
Scenery, romantic.
Selfishness:
(See Women, maltreatment of);
Adoration;
Sympathy;
Gallantry;
Affection.
Self-sacrifice.
Sensuality:
Antipode of love;
Fastidious;
Is not love;
Goethe's error;
Appetite and longing;
And sentimentality (See Chastity).
Sentiment, versus sentimentality.
Sentimentality.
Sentiments:
How they change and grow.
Separation of the sexes.
Sexual characters, primary and secondary.
Sexual selection.
Sexuality, mental.
Singhalese: utilitarian marriage.
Sioux:
(See Dakotas).
Social barriers to love.
Somali:
Unjealous wives;
Feathers;
Fat versus beauty;
A love-song;
Child-wives;
Barren women chased away;
Absence of gallantry;
Love-affairs.
Song of Songs.
Sorceresses.
Stories, incidents, and dramas:
African;
American Indian;
Australian;
Eskimo;
Greek;
Hawaiian;
Hebrew;
Indian (Hindoo and wild tribes);
New Zealand;
Oriental;
Polynesian;
Samoan;
Tahitian;
Tongan.
Suicide and love.
Sumatrans:
Marriages;
Selfish men;
No choice.
Swedes: mock-capture.
Sympathy.
Syria: idea of modesty.
Taboos, sexual.
Tahitians:
Tattooing;
Indifference to chastity;
Contempt for women;
Compressed heads;
Flowers and licentiousness;
Mourning;
Personal appearance;
Depraved by white visitors?
Tasmanians:
Charms;
Mourning.
Taste, disputing about.
Tattooing.
Temple girls, Hindoo.
Thibet:
Unchastity;
Woman's wretched lot.
Thlinkeets:
Exchanging wives;
War-paint;
Mutilations;
Suicide.
Todas:
Unjealous.
Tongans:
Tattooing;
Beads and vanity;
Personal appearance;
Were they civilized?
Love of scenery.
Torres Strait Islanders.
Tribal marks.
Tupis: no jealousy.
Turks:
Modesty;
Love-song;
Amorous hyperbole;
Arousing pride;
Coarseness;
Lust versus love;
Mourning to order.
Uganda:
Nudity;
Disposal of women.
Unchastity:
(See Chastity).
Urvasi.
Utility of love.
Vasantasena.
Veddahs:
Incest.
Virginity:
Penetrative;
Indifference to;
(See Chastity).
Votyaks:
Indifference to chastity;
Mock capture;
War:
An obstacle to love.
Whites:
Did they corrupt savages?
Widows:
Tormented in India;
Burning of.
Winona's leap.
Wives:
(See Marriage).
Women:
Homage to priestesses;
Domestic rule;
Political rule;
Is gallantry an "insult?"
Pugnacious;
Crueler than men;
Woman's sphere;
Maltreatment of and contempt for;
Masculine women;
No liberty of choice (See Choice).
Wooing:
By women;
(see Proposing).
Yucatan:
War decorations;
Tattooing.
Yumas:
Immorality.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Primitive Love and Love-Stories
by Henry Theophilus Finck
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