Primitive Love and Love-Stories by Henry Theophilus Finck (page 7)

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 Kitab almowascha, 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 Ghalija, 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–Theophile 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 naively (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 naively 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 Vambery 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 role 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 Abbe 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