Primitive Love and Love-Stories

by Henry Theophilus Finck

  HISTORY OF AN IDEA

  "Love is always the same. As Sappho loved, fifty years ago, so didpeople love ages before her; so will they love thousands of yearshence."

  These words, placed by Professor Ebers in the mouth of one of thecharacters in his historic novel, _An Egyptian Princess_, express theprevalent opinion on this subject, an opinion which I, too, sharedfifteen years ago. Though an ardent champion of the theory ofevolution, I believed that there was one thing in the world to whichmodern scientific ideas of gradual development did not apply--thatlove was too much part and parcel of human nature to have ever beendifferent from what it is to-day.

  ORIGIN OF A BOOK

  It so happened that I began to collect notes for a paper on "How toCure Love." It was at first intended merely as a personal experimentin emotional psychology. Afterward it occurred to me that such asketch might be shaped into a readable magazine article. This, again,suggested a complementary article on "How to Win Love"--a sort ofmodern Ovid in prose; and then suddenly came the thought,

  "Why not write a book on love? There is none in the English language--strange anomaly--though love is supposed to be the most fascinating and influential thing in the world. It will surely be received with delight, especially if I associate with it some chapters on personal beauty, the chief inspirer of love. I shall begin by showing that the ancient Greeks and Romans and Hebrews loved precisely as we love."

  Forthwith I took down from my shelves the classical authors that I hadnot touched since leaving college, and eagerly searched for allreferences to women, marriage, and love. To my growing surprise andamazement I found that not only did those ancient authors look uponwomen as inferior beings while I worshipped them, but in theirdescriptions of the symptoms of love I looked in vain for mention ofthose supersensual emotions and self-sacrificing impulses whichovercame me when I was in love. "Can it be," I whispered to myself,"that, notwithstanding the universal opinion to the contrary, love is,after all, subject to the laws of development?"

  This hypothesis threw me into a fever of excitement, without thestimulus of which I do not believe I should have had the courage andpatience to collect, classify, and weave into one fabric the enormousnumber of facts and opinions contained within the covers of _RomanticLove and Personal Beauty_. I believed that at last something new underthe sun had been found, and I was so much afraid that the discoverymight leak out prematurely, that for two years I kept the first halfof my title a secret, telling inquisitive friends merely that I waswriting a book on Personal Beauty. And no one but an author who is inlove with his theme and whose theme is love can quite realize what asupreme delight it was--with occasional moments of anxioussuspense--to go through thousands of books in the libraries ofAmerica, England, France, and Germany and find that all discoverablefacts, properly interpreted, bore out my seemingly paradoxical andreckless theory.

  SKEPTICAL CRITICS

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

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

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

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

  "A ridiculous theory."

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

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

  "His thesis is not worth writing about."

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

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

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

  ROBERT BURTON

  While not a few of the commentators thus rejected or ridiculed mythesis, others hinted that I had been anticipated. Several suggestedthat Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ had been my model. As a matterof fact, although one of the critics referred to my book as "a marvelof epitomized research," I must confess, to my shame, that I was notaware that Burton had devoted two hundred pages to what he callsLove-Melancholy, until I had finished the first sketch of mymanuscript and commenced to rewrite it. My experience thus furnished astriking verification of the witty epitaph which Burton wrote forhimself and his book: "Known to few, unknown to fewer still." However,after reading Burton, I was surprised that any reader of Burton shouldhave found anything in common between his book and mine, for hetreated love as an appetite, I as a sentiment; my subject was pure,supersensual affection, while his subject is frankly indicated in thefollowing sentences:

  "I come at last to that heroical love, which is proper to men and women ... and deserves much rather to be called burning lust than by such an honorable title." "This burning lust ... begets rapes, incests, murders." "It rages with all sorts and conditions of men, yet is most evident among such as are young and lusty, in the flower of their years, nobly descended, high fed, such as live idly, at ease, and for that cause (which our divines call burning lust) this mad and beastly passion ... is named by our physicians heroical love, and a more honorable title put upon it, _Amor nobilis_, as Savonarola styles it, because noble men and women make a common practice of it, and are so ordinarily affected with it." "Carolus a Lorme ... makes a doubt whether this heroical love be a disease.... Tully ... defines it a furious disease of the mind; Plato madness itself."

  "Gordonius calls this disease the proper passion of nobility."

  "This heroical passion or rather brutish burning lust of which we treat."

  The only honorable love Burton knows is that between husband and wife,while of such a thing as the evolution of love he had, of course, notthe remotest conception, as his book appeared in 1621, or two hundredand thirty-eight years before Darwin's _Origin of Species_.

  HEGEL ON GREEK LOVE

  In a review of my book which appeared in the now defunct New York_Star_, the late George Parsons Lathrop wrote that the author

  "says that romantic love is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old. This idea, I rather think, he derived from Hegel, although he does not credit that philosopher with it."

  I read this criticism with mingled emotions. If it was true that Hegelhad anticipated me, my claims to priority of discovery would vanish,even though the idea had come to me spontaneously; but, on the otherhand, the disappointment at this thought was neutralized by thereflection that I should gain the support of one of the most famousphilosophers, and share with him the sneers and the ridicule bestowedupon my theory. I wrote to Mr. Lathrop, begging him to refer me to thevolume and page of Hegel's numerous works where I could find thepassage in question. He promptly replied that I should find it in thesecond volume of the _Aesthetik_ (178-182). No doubt I ought to haveknown that Hegel had written on this subject; but the fact that ofmore than two hundred American, English, and German reviewers of mybook whose notices I have seen, only one knew what had thus escaped myresearch, consoled me somewhat. Hegel, indeed, might well have copiedBurton's epitaph. His _Aesthetik_ is an abstruse, unindexed,three-volume work of 1,575 pages, which has not been reprinted since1843, and is practically forgotten. Few know it, though all know ofit.

  After perusing Hegel's pages on this to
pic I found, however, that Mr.Lathrop had imputed to him a theory--my theory--which that philosopherwould have doubtless repudiated emphatically. What Hegel does issimply to call attention to the fact that in the literature of theancient Greeks and Romans love is depicted only as a transientgratification of the senses, or a consuming heat of the blood, and notas a romantic, sentimental affection of the soul. He does notgeneralize, says nothing about other ancient nations,[1] and certainlynever dreamt of such a thing as asserting that love had been graduallyand slowly developed from the coarse and selfish passions of oursavage ancestors to the refined and altruistic feelings of moderncivilized men and women. He lived long before the days of scientificanthropology and Darwinism, and never thought of such a thing aslooking upon the emotions and morals of primitive men as the rawmaterial out of which our own superior minds have been fashioned. Nay,Hegel does not even say that sentimental love did not exist in thelife of the Greeks and Romans; he simply asserts that it is not to befound in their literature. The two things are by no means identical.

  Professor Rohde, an authority on the erotic writings of the Greeks,expresses the opinion repeatedly that, whatever their literature mayindicate, they themselves were capable of feeling strong and purelove; and the eminent American psychologist, Professor William James,put forth the same opinion in a review of my book.[2] Indeed, thisview was broached more than a hundred years ago by a German author,Basil von Ramdohr, who wrote four volumes on love and its history,entitled _Venus Urania_. His first two volumes are almost unreadablygarrulous and dull, but the third and fourth contain an interestingaccount of various phases through which love has passed in literature.Yet he declares (Preface, vol. iii.) that "the nature [_Wesen_] oflove is unchangeable, but the ideas we entertain in regard to it andthe effects we ascribe to it, are subject to alteration."

  SHELLEY ON GREEK LOVE

  It is possible that Hegel may have read this book, for it appeared in1798, while the first manuscript sketches of his lectures on estheticsbear the date of 1818. He may have also read Robert Wood's bookentitled _An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_,dated 1775, in which this sentence occurs:

  "Is it not very remarkable, that Homer, so great a master of the tender and pathetic, who has exhibited human nature in almost every shape, and under every view, has not given a single instance of the powers and effects of love, distinct from sensual enjoyment, in the _Iliad_?"

  This is as far as I have been able to trace back this notion in modernliterature. But in the literature of the first half of the nineteenthcentury I have come across several adumbrations of the truth regardingthe Greeks,[3] by Shelley, Lord Lytton, Lord Macaulay, and TheophileGautier. Shelley's ideas are confused and contradictory, butinteresting as showing the conflict between traditional opinion andpoetic intuition. In his fragmentary discourse on "The Manners of theAncients Relating to the Subject of Love," which was intended to serveas an introduction to Plato's _Symposium_, he remarks that the womenof the ancient Greeks, with rare exceptions, possessed

  "the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably not extremely beautiful, at least there was no such disproportion in the attractions of the external form between the female and male sex among the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans. They were certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment animates, as with another life of overpowering grace, the lineaments and the gestures of every form which they inhabit. Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths." Having painted this life-like picture of the Greek female mind, Shelley goes on to say perversely:

  "Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of its legitimate object, that they were incapable of sentimental love, and that this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern times."

  He tries to justify this assertion by adding that

  "Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain degree of civilization and refinement ever produces the want of sympathies still more intimate and complete; and the gratification of the senses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connection. It soon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love, which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative, and sensitive."

  Here Shelley contradicts himself flatly by saying, in two consecutivesentences, that Greek women were "certainly devoid of the moral andintellectual loveliness" which inspires sentimental love, but that themen nevertheless could feel such love. His mind was evidently hazy onthe subject, and that is probably the reason why his essay remained afragment.

  MACAULAY, BULWER-LYTTON, GAUTIER

  Macaulay, with deeper insight than Shelley showed, realized that thepassion of love may undergo changes. In his essay on Petrarch he notesthat in the days of that poet love had become a new passion, and heclearly realizes the obstacles to love presented by Greekinstitutions. Of the two classes of women in Greece, the respectableand the hetairai, he says:

  "The matrons and their daughters, confined in the harem--insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but the mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were married--could rarely excite interest; while their brilliant rivals, half graces, half harpies, elegant and refined, but fickle and rapacious, could never inspire respect."

  Lord Lytton wrote an essay on "The Influence of Love upon Literatureand Real Life," in which he stated that

  "with Euripides commences the important distinction in the analysis of which all the most refined and intellectual of modern erotic literature consists, viz., the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment.... He is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us _intellectually_ in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes."

  Theophile Gautier clearly realized one of the differences betweenancient passion and modern love. In _Mademoiselle de Maupin,_ he makesthis comment on the ancient love-poems:

  "Through all the subtleties and veiled expressions one hears the abrupt and harsh voice of the master who endeavors to soften his manner in speaking to a slave. It is not, as in the love-poems written since the Christian era, a soul demanding love of another soul because it loves.... 'Make haste, Cynthia; the smallest wrinkle may prove the grave of the most violent passion.' It is in this brutal formula that all ancient elegy is summed up."

  GOLDSMITH AND ROUSSEAU

  In _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ I intimated (116) that OliverGoldsmith was the first author who had a suspicion of the fact thatlove is not the same everywhere and at all times. My surmise wasapparently correct; it is not refuted by any of the references to loveby the several authors just quoted, since all of these were writtenfrom about a half a century to a century later than Goldsmith's_Citizen of the World_ (published in 1764), which contains hisdialogue on "Whether Love be a Natural or a Fictitious Passion." Hisassertion therein that love existed only in early Rome, in chivalrousmediaeval Europe, and in China, all the rest of the world being, andhaving ever been, "utter strangers to its delights and advantages,"is, of course a mere bubble of his poetic fancy, not intended to betaken too seriously, and, is, moreover, at variance with facts. It isodd that he overlooks the Greeks, whereas the other writers citedconfine themselves to the Greeks and their Roman imitators.

  Ten years before Goldsmith thus launched the idea that most nationswere and had ever been strangers to the delights and advantages oflove, Jean Jacques Rousseau published a treatise, _Discours surl'inegalite_ (1754), in which he asserted that savages are strangersto jealousy, know no domesticity, and evince no preferences, being aswell pleased with one woman as with another. Although, as we sh
all seelater, many savages do have a crude sort of jealousy, domesticity, andindividual preference, Rousseau, nevertheless, hints prophetically ata great truth--the fact that some, at any rate, of the phenomena oflove are not to be found in the life of savages. Such a thought,naturally, was too novel to be accepted at once. Ramdohr, forinstance, declares (III. 17) that he cannot convince himself thatRousseau is right. Yet, on the preceding page he himself had writtenthat "it is unreasonable to speak of love between the sexes amongpeoples that have not yet advanced so far as to grant women humaneconsideration."

  LOVE A COMPOUND FEELING

  All these things are of extreme interest as showing the blindstruggles of a great idea to emerge from the mist into daylight. Thegreatest obstacle to the recognition of the fact that love has ahistory, and is subject to the laws of evolution lay in the habit oflooking upon it as a simple feeling.

  When I wrote my first book on love, I believed that Herbert Spencerwas the first thinker who grasped the idea that love is a compositestate of mind. I now see, however, that Silvius, in Shakspere's _AsYou Like It_ (V. 2), gave a broad hint of the truth, three hundredyears ago. Phoebe asks him to "tell what 't is to love," and hereplies:

  It is to be all made of sighs and tears.... It is to be all made of faith and service.... It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness, all patience, and impatience, All purity, all trial, all obedience.

  Coleridge also vaguely recognized the composite nature of love in thefirst stanza of his famous poem:

  All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of love, And feed his sacred flame.

  And Swift adds, in "Cadenus and Vanessa:"

  Love, why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all?

  The eminent Danish critic, George Brandes, though a special student ofEnglish literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one ofhis lectures on literary history (1872), that the book in which loveis for the first time looked on as something composite and an attemptmade to analyze it into its elements, is Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_(which appeared in 1816). "In _Adolphe_," he says,

  "and in all the literature associated with that book, we are informed accurately how many parts, how many grains, of friendship, devotion, vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual attraction, illusion, fancy, deception, hate, satiety, enthusiasm, reasoning calculation, etc., are contained in the _mixtum compositum_ which the enamoured persons call love."

  This list, moreover, does not accurately name a single one ofthe essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associatedphenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states ofmind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love--gallant"service," "adoration," and "purity"--while "patience and impatience"may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixedmoods of hope and despair.

  HERBERT SPENCER'S ANALYSIS

  Nevertheless the first thinker who treated love as a compound feelingand consciously attempted a philosophical analysis of it was HerbertSpencer. In 1855 he published his _Principles of Psychology_, and in1870 appeared a greatly enlarged edition, paragraph 215 of whichcontains the following exposition of his views:

  "The passion which unites the sexes is habitually spoken of as though it were a simple feeling; whereas it is the most compound, and therefore the most powerful, of all the feelings. Added to the purely physical elements of it are first to be noticed those highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty; around which are aggregated a variety of pleasurable ideas, not in themselves amatory, but which have an organized relation to the amatory feeling. With this there is united the complex sentiment which we term affection--a sentiment which, as it exists between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an independent sentiment, but one which is here greatly exalted. Then there is the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence--in itself one of considerable power, and which in this relation becomes in a high degree active. There comes next the feeling called love of approbation. To be preferred above all the world, and that by one admired beyond all others, is to have the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous experience: especially as there is added that indirect gratification of it which results from the preference being witnessed by unconcerned persons. Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment from, and sway over, another, is a proof of power which cannot fail agreeably to excite the _amour propre_. Yet again the proprietary feeling has its share in the general activity: there is the pleasure of possession--the two belong to each other. Once more, the relation allows of an extended liberty of action. Toward other persons a restrained behavior is requisite. Round each there is a subtle boundary that may not be crossed--an individuality on which none may trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is gratified. Finally, there is an exaltation of the sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by another's sympathetic participation; and the pleasures of another are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling forming the nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation, of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. These, all greatly exalted, and severally tending to reflect their excitements on one another, unite to form the mental state we call love. And as each of them is itself comprehensive of multitudinous states of consciousness, we may say that this passion fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary excitations of which we are capable; and that hence results its irresistible power."

  Ribot has copied this analysis of love in his _Psychologie desSentiments_ (p. 249), with the comment that it is the best known tohim (1896) and that he sees nothing to add or to take away from it.Inasmuch as it forms merely an episodic illustration in course of ageneral argument, it certainly bears witness to the keenness ofSpencer's intellect. Yet I cannot agree with Ribot that it is acomplete analysis of love. It aided me in conceiving the plan for myfirst book, but I soon found that it covered only a small part of theground. Of the ingredients as suggested by him I accepted onlytwo--Sympathy, and the feelings associated with Personal Beauty. Whathe called love of approbation, self-esteem, and pleasure of possessionI subsummed under the name of Pride of Conquest and Possession.Further reflection has convinced me that it would have been wiser if,instead of treating Romantic Love as a phase of affection (which, ofcourse, was in itself quite correct), I had followed Spencer's exampleand made affection one of the ingredients of the amorous passion. Inthe present volume I have made the change and added also Adoration,which includes what Spencer calls "the sentiment of admiration,respect, or reverence," while calling attention to the superlativephase of these sentiments which is so characteristic of the lover, whodoes not say, "I respect you," but "I adore you." I may thereforecredit Spencer with having suggested three or four only of thefourteen essential ingredients which I find in love.

  ACTIVE IMPULSES MUST BE ADDED

  The most important distinction between Spencer's analysis of love andmine is that he treats it merely as a composite feeling, or a group ofemotions, whereas I treat it as a complex state of mind including notonly diverse feelings or sentiments--sympathy, admiration of beauty,jealousy, affection--but the _active, altruistic impulses_ ofgallantry and self-sacrifice, which are really more essential to anunderstanding of the essence of love, and a better test of it, thanthe sentiments named by Spencer. He ignores also the absolutelyessential traits of individual preference and monopolism, besidescoyness, hyperbole, the mixed mood
s of hope and despair, and purity,with the diverse emotions accompanying them. An effort to trace theevolution of the ingredients of love was first made in my book, thoughin a fragmentary way, in which respect the present volume will befound a great improvement. Apart from the completion of the analysisof love, my most important contribution to the study of this subjectlies in the recognition of the fact that, "love" being so vague andcomprehensive a term, the only satisfactory way of studying itsevolution is to trace the evolution of each of its ingredientsseparately, as I do in the present volume in the long chapter entitled"What Is Romantic Love?"

  In _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ (180) I wrote that perhaps themain reason why no one had anticipated me in the theory that love isan exclusively modern sentiment was that no distinction had commonlybeen made between romantic love and conjugal affection, noble examplesof the latter being recorded in countries where romantic love was notpossible owing to the absence of opportunities for courtship. I stillhold that conjugal love antedated the romantic variety, but furtherstudy has convinced me that (as will be shown in the chapters onConjugal Love and on India, and Greece) much of what has been taken asevidence of wifely devotion is really only a proof of man's tyrannicselfishness which compelled the woman always to subordinate herself toher cruel master. The idea on which I placed so much emphasis, thatopportunity for prolonged courtship is essential to the growth ofromantic love, was some years later set forth by Dr. Drummond in his_Ascent of Man_ where he comments eloquently on the fact that"affection needs time to grow."

  SENSUALITY THE ANTIPODE OF LOVE

  The keynote of my first book lies of course in the distinction betweensensual love and romantic love. This distinction seemed to me soself-evident that I did not dwell on it at length, but applied myselfchiefly to the task of proving that savages and ancient nations knewonly one kind, being strangers to romantic or pure love. When I wrote(76) "No one, of course, would deny that sensual passion prevailed inAthens; but sensuality is the very antipode of love," I never dreamedthat anyone would object to this distinction in itself. Great,therefore, was my amazement when, on reading the London _SaturdayReview's_ comments on my book, I came across the following:

  "and when we find Mr. Finck marking off Romantic Love not merely from Conjugal Love, but from what he is pleased to call 'sensuality,' we begin to suspect that he really does not know what he is talking about."

  This criticism, with several others similar to it, was of great use tome, as it led to a series of studies, which convinced me that even atthe present day the nature of romantic love is not understood by thevast majority of Europeans and Americans, many of them very estimableand intelligent individuals.

  THE WORD ROMANTIC

  Another London paper, the _Academy_, took me to task for using theword "romantic" in the sense I applied to it. But in this case, too,further research has shown that I was justified in using that word todesignate pure prematrimonial love. There is a passage in Steele's_Lover_ (dated 1714) which proves that it must have been in common usein a similar sense two centuries ago. The passage refers to "the reignof the amorous Charles the Second," and declares that

  "the licenses of that court did not only make the Love which the Vulgar call Romantick, the object of Jest and Ridicule, but even common Decency and Modesty were almost abandoned as formal and unnatural."

  Here there is an obvious antithesis between romantic and sensual. Thesame antithesis was used by Hegel in contrasting the sensual love ofthe ancient Greeks and Romans with what he calls modern "romantic"love. Waitz-Gerland, too, in the six volumes of their _Anthropologieder Naturvoelker_, repeatedly refer to (alleged) cases of "romanticlove" among savages and barbarians, having in all probability adoptedthe term from Hegel. The peculiar appropriateness of the word romanticto designate imaginative love will be set forth later in the chapterentitled Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment. Here I will onlyadd an important truth which I shall have occasion to repeatoften--that _a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story ofromantic love_; for it is obvious, for instance, that an elopementprompted by the most frivolous sensual passion, without a trace ofreal love, may lead to the most romantic incidents.

  In the chapters on affection, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, I shallmake it clear even to a Saturday Reviewer that the gross sensualinfatuation which leads a man to shoot a girl who refuses him, or atramp to assault a woman on a lonely road and afterward to cut herthroat in order to hide his crime, is absolutely antipodal to therefined, ardent, affectionate Romantic Love which impels a man tosacrifice his own life rather than let any harm or dishonor come tothe beloved.

  ANIMALS HIGHER THAN SAVAGES

  Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin, in his second treatise on sexualanomalies,[4] takes occasion to express his disbelief in my view thatlove before marriage is a sentiment peculiar to modern man. Hedeclares that traits of such love occur even in the courtship ofanimals, particularly birds, and implies that this upsets my theory.On the same ground a reviewer in a New York evening paper accused meof being illogical. Such criticisms illustrate the vague ideasregarding evolution that are still current. It is assumed that all thefaculties are developed step by step simultaneously as we proceed fromlower to higher animals, which is as illogical as it would be toassume that since birds have such beautiful and convenient things aswings, and dogs belong to a higher genus of animals, therefore dogsought to have better wings than birds. Most animals are cleaner thansavages; why should not some of them be more romantic in theirlove-affairs? I shall take occasion repeatedly to emphasize this pointin the present volume, though I alluded to it already in my first book(55) in the following passage, which my critics evidently overlooked:

  "In passing from animals to human beings we find at first not only no advance in the sexual relations, but a decided retrogression. Among some species of birds, courtship and marriage are infinitely more refined and noble than among the lowest savages, and it is especially in their treatment of females, both before and after mating, that not only birds but all animals show an immense superiority over primitive man; for male animals fight only among themselves and never maltreat the females."

  LOVE THE LAST, NOT THE FIRST, PRODUCT OF CIVILIZATION

  Notwithstanding this striking and important fact, there is a largenumber of sentimental writers who make the extraordinary claim thatthe lower races, however savage they may be in everything else, arelike ourselves in their amorous relations; that they love and admirepersonal beauty just as we do. The main object of the present volumeis to demolish this doctrine; to prove that sexual refinement and thesense of personal beauty are not the earliest but the latest productsof civilization. I have shown elsewhere[5] that Japanese civilizationis in many important respects far superior to ours; yet in theirtreatment of women and estimate of love, this race has not yet risenabove the barbarous stage; and it will be shown in this volume that ifwe were to judge the ancient Greeks and the Hindoos from this point ofview, we should have to deny them the epithet of civilized. Morganfound that the most advanced of American Indians, the Iroquois, had nocapacity for love. His testimony in detail will be found in its properplace in this volume, together with that of competent observersregarding other tribes and races. Some of this evidence was known tothe founders of the modern science of sociology. It led Spencer towrite _en passant_ (_Pr. Soc_., I., Sec. 337, Sec.339) that "absence of thetender emotion ... habitually characterizes men of low types;" andthat the "higher sentiments accompanying union of the sexes ... do notexist among primitive men." It led Sir John Lubbock to write (50)regarding the lowest races that "love is almost unknown among them;and marriage, in its lowest phases, is by no means a matter ofaffection and companionship."

  PLAN OF THIS VOLUME

  These are casual adumbrations of a great truth that applies not onlyto the lowest races (savages) but to the more advanced barbarians aswell as to ancient civilized nations, as the present volume willattempt to demonstra
te. To make my argument more impressive andconclusive, I present it in a twofold form. First I take the fourteeningredients of love separately, showing how they developed gradually,whence it follows necessarily that love as a whole developedgradually. Then I take the Africans, Australians, American Indians,etc., separately, describing their diverse amorous customs andpointing out everywhere the absence of the altruistic, supersensualtraits which constitute the essence of romantic love as distinguishedfrom sensual passion. All this will be preceded by a chapter on "HowSentiments Change and Grow," which will weaken the bias against thenotion that so elemental a feeling as sexual love should haveundergone so great a change, by pointing out that other seeminglyinstinctive and unalterable feelings have changed and developed.

  GREEK SENTIMENTALITY

  The inclusion of the civilized Greeks in a treatise on Primitive Lovewill naturally cause surprise; but I cannot attribute a capacity foranything more than primitive sensual love to a nation which, in itsprematrimonial customs, manifested none of the essential _altruistic_traits of Romantic Love--sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice,affection, adoration, and purity. As a matter of course, thesensualism of a Greek or Roman is a much less coarse thing than anAustralian's, which does not even include kisses or other caresses.While Greek love is not a sentiment, it may be sentimental, that is,an _affectation of sentiment_, differing from real sentiment asadulation does from adoration, as gallantry or the risking of life tosecure favors do from genuine gallantry of the heart andself-sacrifice for the benefit of another. This important point whichI here superadd to my theory, was overlooked by Benecke when heattributed a capacity for real love to the later Greeks of theAlexandrian period.

  IMPORTANCE OF LOVE

  One of the most important theses advanced in _Romantic Love andPersonal Beauty_ (323, 424, etc.), was that love, far from beingmerely a passing episode in human life, is one of the most powerfulagencies working for the improvement of the human race. During thereign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, theinsane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed toperish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitalsand saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, andhand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediatorbetween these two agencies, love comes in; for Cupid, as I have said,"does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of health andbeauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life ofsingle-blessedness;" which in these days is not such a hardship as itused to be. This thought will be enlarged in the last chapter of thepresent volume, on the "Utility and Future of Love," which willindicate how the amorous sense is becoming more and more fastidiousand beneficial. In the same chapter attention will be called, for thefirst time, to the three great strata in the evolution of parentallove and morality. In the first, represented by savages, parents thinkchiefly of their own comfort, and children get the minimum ofattention consistent with their preservation. In the second, whichincludes most of the modern Europeans and Americans, parents exercisecare that their children shall make an advantageous marriage--that isa marriage which shall secure them wealth or comfort; but thefrequency with which girls are married off to old, infirm, or unworthymen, shows how few parents as yet have a thought of their_grandchildren_. In the next stage of moral evolution, which we arenow entering, the grandchildren's welfare also will be considered. Inconsequence of the persistent failure to consider the grandchildren,the human race is now anything but a model of physical, intellectual,and moral perfection. Luckily love, even in its sensual stages, hascounteracted this parental selfishness and myopia by inducing youngfolks to marry for health, youth, and beauty, and creating an aversionto old age, disease, and deformity. As love becomes more and morefastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moralbeauty--that is becomes Romantic Love--its sway becomes greater andgreater, and the time will come when questions relating to it willform the most important chapters in treatises on moral philosophy,which now usually ignore them altogether.

  HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW

  In conversation with friends I have found that the current belief thatlove must have been always and everywhere the same, because it is sucha strong and elemental passion, is most easily shaken in this _apriori_ position by pointing out that there are other strong feelingsin our minds which were lacking among earlier and lower races. Thelove of grand, wild scenery, for instance--what we call romanticscenery--is as modern as the romantic love of men and women. Ruskintells us that in his youth he derived a pleasure from such scenery"comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near anoble and kind mistress."

  NO LOVE OF ROMANTIC SCENERY

  Savages, on the other hand, are prevented from appreciating snowmountains, avalanches, roaring torrents, ocean storms, deep glens,jungles, and solitudes, not only by their lack of refinement, but bytheir fears of wild animals, human enemies, and evil spirits. "In theAustralian bush," writes Tylor (_P.C._, II., 203), "demons whistle inthe branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among thetrunks to seize the wayfarer;" and Powers (88) writes in regard toCalifornia Indians that they listen to night noises with unspeakablehorror:

  "It is difficult for us to conceive of the speechless terrors which these poor wretches suffer from the screeching of owls, the shrieking of night-hawks, the rustling of the trees ... all of which are only channels of poison wherewith the demons would smite them."

  To the primitive mind, the world over, a high mountain is the horrorof horrors, the abode of evil spirits, and an attempt to climb itcertain death. So strong is this superstition that explorers haveoften experienced the greatest difficulty in getting natives to serveas porters of provisions in their ascents of peaks.[6] Even the Greeksand Romans cared for landscape only in so far as it was humanized(parks and gardens) and habitable. "Their souls," says Rohde (511),

  "could never have been touched by the sublime thrills we feel in the presence of the dark surges of the sea, the gloom of a primeval forest, the solitude and silence of sunlit mountain summits."

  And Humboldt, who first noted the absence in Greek and Roman writingsof the admiration of romantic scenery, remarked (24):

  "Of the eternal snow of the Alps, glowing in the rosy light of the morning or evening sun, of the loveliness of the blue glacier ice, of the stupendous grandeur of Swiss landscape, no description has come down to us from them; yet there was a constant procession over these Alps, from Helvetia to Gallia, of statesmen and generals with literary men in their train. All these travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical treatise 'De Analogia.'"

  A sceptical reader might retort that the love of romantic scenery isso subtle a sentiment, and so far from being universal even now, thatit would be rash to argue from its absence among savages, Greeks, andRomans, that love, a sentiment so much stronger and more prevalent,could have been in the same predicament. Let us therefore take anothersentiment, the religious, the vast power and wide prevalence of whichno one will deny.

  NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION

  To a modern Christian, God is a deity who is all-wise, all-powerful,infinite, holy, the personification of all the highest virtues. Toaccuse this Deity of the slightest moral flaw would be blasphemy. Now,without going so far down as the lowest savages, let us see whatconception such barbarians as the Polynesians have of their gods. Themoral habits of some of them are indicated by their names--"TheRioter," "The Adulterer," "Ndauthina," who steals women of rank orbeauty by night or by torchlight, "The Human-brain Eater," "TheMurderer." Others of their gods are "proud, envious, covetous,revengeful, and the subject of every basest passion. They aredemoralized heathen--monster expressions of moral corruption"(Williams, 184). These gods make war, and kill and eat
each other justas mortals do. The Polynesians believed, too, that "the spirits of thedead are eaten by the gods or demons" (Ellis, _P.R_., I., 275). Itmight be said that since a Polynesian sees no crime in adultery,revenge, murder, or cannibalism, his attributing such qualities to hisgods cannot, from his point of view, be considered blasphemous. Quitetrue; but my point is that men who have made so little progress insympathy and moral perception as to see no harm in adultery, revenge,murder and cannibalism, and in attributing them to their gods, arealtogether too coarse and callous to be able to experience the higherreligious emotions. This inference is borne out by what a most carefulobserver (Ellis, _P.R._, I., 291) says:

  "Instead of exercising those affections of gratitude, complacency, and love toward the objects of their worship which the living God supremely requires, they regarded their deities with horrific dread, and worshipped only with enslaving fear."

  This "enslaving fear" is the principal ingredient of primitivereligious emotion everywhere. To the savage and barbarian, religion isnot a consolation and a blessing, but a terror. Du Chaillu says of theequatorial Africans (103) that "their whole lives are saddened by thefears of evil spirits, witchcraft, and other kindred superstitionsunder which they labor." Benevolent deities, even if believed in,receive little or no attention, because, being good, they are supposedto do no harm anyway, whereas the malevolent gods must be propitiatedby sacrifices. The African Dahomans, for instance, ignore their Mahubecause his intentions are naturally friendly, whereas their Satan,the wicked Legba, has hundreds of statues before which offerings aremade. "Early religions," as Mr. Andrew Lang tersely puts it, "areselfish, not disinterested. The worshipper is not contemplative, somuch as eager to gain something to his advantage." If the gods fail torespond to the offerings made to them, the sacrificers naturally feelaggrieved, and show their displeasure in a way which to a person whoknows refined religion seems shocking and sacrilegious. In Japan,China, and Corea, if the gods fail to do what is expected of them,their images are unceremoniously walloped. In India, if the rainsfail, thousands of priests send up their prayers. If the drought stillcontinues, they punish their idols by holding them under water. Duringa thunderstorm in Africa, Chapman (I., 45) witnessed the followingextraordinary scene:

  "A great number of women, employed in reaping the extensive corn-fields through which we passed were raising their hoes and voices to heaven, and, yelling furiously, cursed 'Morimo' (God), as the terrific thunder-claps succeeded each vivid flash of lightning. On inquiry I was informed by 'Old Booy' that they were indignant at the interruption of their labors, and that they therefore cursed and menaced the cause. Such blasphemy was awful, even among heathens, and I fully expected to see the wrath of God fall upon them."

  If any pious reader of such details--which might he multiplied athousand-fold--still believes that religious emotion (like love!) isthe same everywhere, let him compare his own devoted feelings duringworship in a Christian church with the emotions which must sway thosewho participate in a religious ceremony like that described in thefollowing passage taken from Rowney's _Wild Tribes of India_ (105). Itrefers to the sacrifices made by the Khonds to the God of War, thevictims of which, both male and female, are often bought young andbrought up for this special purpose:

  "For a month prior to the sacrifice there was much feasting and intoxication, with dancing round the Meriah, or victim ... and on the day before the rite he was stupefied with toddy and bound at the bottom of a post. The assembled multitude then danced around the post to music, singing hymns of invocation to some such effect as follows: 'O God, we offer a sacrifice to you! Give us good crops in return, good seasons, and health.' On the next day the victim was again intoxicated, and anointed with oil, which was wiped from his body by those present, and put on their heads as a blessing. The victim was then carried, in procession round the village, preceded by music, and on returning to the post a hog was sacrificed to ... the village deity ... the blood from the carcass being allowed to flow into a pit prepared to receive it. The victim, made senseless by intoxication, was now thrown into the pit, and his face pressed down till he died from suffocation in the blood and mire, a deafening noise with instruments being kept up all the time. The priest then cut a piece of flesh from the body and buried it with ceremony near the village idol, all the rest of the people going through the same form after him."

  Still more horrible details of these sacrifices are supplied by Dalton(288):

  "Major Macpherson notes that the Meriah in some districts is put to death slowly by fire, the great object being to draw from the victim as many tears as possible, in the belief that the cruel Tari will proportionately increase the supply of rain."

  "Colonel Campbell thus describes the _modus operandi_ in Chinna Kimedy: 'The miserable Meriah is dragged along the fields, surrounded by a crowd of half-intoxicated Kandhs, who, shouting and screaming, rush upon him, and with their knives cut the flesh piece-meal from his bones, avoiding the head and bowels, till the living skeleton, dying from loss of blood, is relieved from torture, when its remains are burnt and the ashes mixed with the new grain to preserve it from insects.'"

  In some respect, the civilized Hindoos are even worse than the wildtribes of India. Nothing is more sternly condemned and utterlyabhorred by modern religion than licentiousness and obscenity, but awell-informed and eminently trustworthy missionary, the Abbe Dubois,declares that sensuality and licentiousness are among the elements ofHindoo religious life:

  "Whatever their religion sets before them, tends to encourage these vices; and, consequently, all their senses, passions, and interests are leagued in its favor" (II., 113, etc.).

  Their religious festivals "are nothing but sports; and on no occasionof life are modesty and decorum more carefully excluded than duringthe celebration of their religious mysteries."

  More immoral even than their own religious practices are the doings oftheir deities. The _Bhagavata_ is a book which deals with theadventures of the god Krishna, of whom Dubois says (II., 205):

  "It was his chief pleasure to go every morning to the place where the women bathe, and, in concealment, to take advantage of their unguarded exposure. Then he rushed amongst them, took possession of their clothes, and gave a loose to the indecencies of language and of gesture. He maintained sixteen wives, who had the title of queens, and sixteen thousand concubines.... In obscenity there is nothing that can be compared with the _Bhagavata_. It is, nevertheless, the delight of the Hindu, and the first book they put into the hands of their children, when learning to read."

  Brahmin temples are little more than brothels, in each of which adozen or more young Bayaderes are kept for the purpose of increasingthe revenues of the gods and their priests. Religious prostitution andtheological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt,and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series ofobscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154): "We areshocked at the morality of a nation which could supply the deceasedwith such literature for the eternal journey." Professor RobertsonSmith says that "in Arabia and elsewhere unrestricted prostitution waspractised at the temples and defended on the analogy of the licenseallowed to herself by the unmarried mother goddess." Nor were theearly Greeks much better. Some of their religious festivals weresensual orgies, some of their gods nearly as licentious as those ofthe Hindoos. Their supreme god, Zeus, is an Olympian Don Juan, and thelegend of the birth of Aphrodite, their goddess of love, is in itsoriginal form unutterably obscene.

  Before religious emotion could make any approximation to the devoutfeelings of a modern Christian, it was necessary to eliminate allthese licentious, cruel, and blasphemous features of worship--theeating or slaughtering of human victims, the obscene orgies, as wellas the spiteful and r
evengeful acts toward disobedient gods. Theprogress--like the Evolution of Romantic Love--has been from thesensual and selfish to the supersensual and unselfish. In the highestreligious ideal, love of God takes the place of fear, adoration thatof terror, self-sacrifice that of self-seeking. But we are still veryfar from that lofty ideal.

  "The lazzarone of Naples prays to his patron saint to favor his choice of a lottery ticket; if it turns out an unlucky number he will take the little leaden image of the saint from his pocket, revile it, spit on it, and trample it in the mud."

  "The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops becauseit made their parishioners indifferent to prayers for their crops"(Brinton, _R.S_., 126, 82). These are extreme cases, but Italianlazzaroni and Swiss peasants are by no means the only church-goerswhose worship is inspired not by love of God but by the expectation ofsecuring a personal benefit. All those who pray for worldlyprosperity, or do good deeds for the sake of securing a happyhereafter for their souls, take a selfish, utilitarian view of thedeity, and even their gratitude for favors received is too apt to be"a lively sense of possible favors to come." Still, there are now nota few devotees who love God for his own sake; and who pray not forluxuries but that their souls may be fortified in virtue and theirsympathies widened. But it is not necessary to dwell on this theme anylonger, now that I have shown what I started out to demonstrate, thatreligious emotion is very complex and variable, that in its earlystages it is made up of feelings which are not loving, reverential, oreven respectful, but cruel, sacrilegious, criminal, and licentious;that religion, in a word, has (like love, as I am trying to prove)passed through coarse, carnal, degrading, selfish, utilitarian stagesbefore it reached the comparatively refined, spiritual, sympathetic,and devotional attitude of our time.

  Besides the growing complexity of the religious sentiment and itsgradual ennoblement, there are two points I wish to emphasize. One isthat there are among us to-day thousands of intelligent and refinedagnostics who are utter strangers to all religious emotions, just asthere are thousands of men and women who have never known and neverwill know the emotions of sentimental love. Why, then, should it seemso very unlikely that whole nations were strangers to such love (asthey were strangers to the higher religious sentiment), even thoughthey were as intelligent as the Greeks and Romans? I offer thisconsideration not as a conclusive argument, but merely as a means ofovercoming a preconceived bias against my theory.

  The other point I wish to make clear is that our emotions change withour ideas. Obviously it would be absurd to suppose that a man whoseideas in regard to the nature of his gods do not prevent him fromflogging them angrily in case they refuse his requests are the same asthose of a pious Christian, who, if his prayers are not answered, saysto his revered Creator: "Thy will be done on earth as it is done inheaven," and humbly prostrates himself. And if emotions in thereligious sphere are thus metamorphosed with ideas, why is it sounlikely that the sexual passion, too, should "suffer a sea changeinto something rich and strange?"

  The existence of the wide-spread prejudice against the notion thatlove is subject to the laws of development, is owing to the fact thatthe comparative psychology of the emotions and sentiments has beenstrangely neglected. Anthropology, the Klondike of the comparativepsychologist, reveals things seemingly much more incredible than theabsence of romantic love among barbarians and partly civilized nationswho had not yet discovered the nobler super-sensual fascinations whichwomen are capable of exerting. The nuggets of truth found in thatscience show that every virtue known to man grew up slowly into itspresent exalted form. I will illustrate this assertion with referenceto one general feeling, the horror of murder, and then add a few pagesregarding virtues relating to the sexual sphere and directly connectedwith the subject of this book.

  MURDER AS A VIRTUE

  The committing of wilful murder is looked on with unutterable horrorin modern civilized communities, yet it took eons of time and theco-operation of many religious, social, and moral agencies before theidea of the sanctity of human life became what it is now when it mightbe taken for an instinct inherent in human nature itself. How far itis from being such an instinct we shall see by looking at the facts.Among the lowest races and even some of the higher barbarians, murder,far from being regarded as a crime, is honored as a virtue and asource of glory.

  An American Indian's chief pride and claim to tribal honor lies in thenumber of scalps he has torn from the heads of men he has killed. Ofthe Fijian, Williams says (97):

  "Shedding of blood is to him no crime, but a glory. Whoever may be the victim--whether noble or vulgar, old or young, man, woman, or child--whether slain in war or butchered by treachery, to be somehow an acknowledged murderer, is the object of a Fijian's restless ambition."

  The Australian feels the same irresistible impulse to kill everystranger he comes across as many of our comparatively civilizedgentlemen feel toward every bird or wild animal they see. Lumholtz,while he lived among these savages, took good care to follow theadvice "never have a black fellow behind you;" and he relates a storyof a squatter who was walking in the bush with his black boy huntingbrush monkeys, when the boy touched him on the shoulder from behindand said, "Let me go ahead." When the squatter asked why he wished togo before him, the native answered, "Because I feel such aninclination to kill you."

  Dalton (266) says of the Oraons in India: "It is doubtful if they seeany moral guilt in murder." But the most astounding race ofprofessional murderers are the Dyaks of Borneo. "Among them," saysEarl, "the more heads a man has cut off, the more he is respected.""The white man reads," said a Dyak to St. John: "_we_ hunt headsinstead." "Our Dyaks," says Charles Brooke, "were eternally requestingto be allowed to go for heads, and their urgent entreaties often boreresemblance to children crying after sugar-plums." "An old Dyak,"writes Dalton, "loves to dwell upon his success on these huntingexcursions, and the terror of the women and children taken affords afruitful theme of amusement at their meetings." Dalton speaks of oneexpedition from which seven hundred heads were brought home. The youngwomen were carried off, the old ones killed and all the men's headswere cut off. Not that the women always escaped. Among the Dusun, as arule, says Preyer,

  "the heads were obtained in the most cowardly way possible, a woman's or child's being just as good as a man's ... so, as easier prey, the cowards seek them by lying in ambush near the plantations."

  Families are sometimes surprised while asleep and their heads cut off.Brooke tells of a man who for awhile kept company with a countrywoman,and then slew her and ran off with her head. "It ought to be called_head-stealing_ not _head-hunting,"_ says Hatton; and Earl remarks:

  "The possession of a human head cannot be considered as a proof of the bravery of the owner for it is not necessary that he should have killed the victim with his own hands, his friends being permitted to assist him or even to perform the act themselves."

  It is to be noted that the Dyaks[7] are not in other respects a fierceand diabolical race, but are at home, as Doty attests, "mild, gentle,and given to hospitality." I call special attention to this by way ofindirectly answering an objection frequently urged against my theory:"How is it possible to suppose that a nation so highly civilized asthe Greeks of Plato's time should have known love for women only inits lower, carnal phases?" Well, we have here a parallel case. TheDyaks are "mild, gentle, and hospitable," yet their chief delight andglory is murder! And as one of the main objects of this book is todwell on the various obstacles which impeded the growth of romanticlove, it will be interesting to glance for a moment at the causeswhich prevented the Dyaks from recognizing the sanctity of life.Superstition is one of them; they believe that persons killed by themwill be their slaves in the next world. Pride is another. "How manyheads did your father get?" a Dyak will ask; and if the number givenis less than his own, the other will say, "Well, then you have nooccasion to be proud." A man's rank in this world as in the nextdepends on t
he number of his skulls; hence the owner of a large numbermay be distinguished by his proud bearing. But the head hunter'sstrangest and strongest motive is _the desire to please women_! NoDyak maiden would condescend to marry a youth who has never killed aman, and in times when the chances for murder were few and farbetween, suitors have been compelled to wait a year or two before theycould bag a skull and lead home their blushing bride. The weirddetails of this mode of courtship will be given in the chapter onIsland Love on the Pacific.

  SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS.

  In all these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of thesentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror atthis fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that thevictims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must deferto the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom ofslaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confinemyself to a few words regarding the maternal sentiment. The love of amother for her offspring is by many philosophers considered theearliest and strongest of all sympathetic feelings; a feeling strongerthan death. If we can find a wide-spread failure of this powerfulinstinct, we shall have one more reason for not assuming as a matterof course, that the sentiment of love must have been always present.

  In Australian families it has been the universal custom to bring uponly a few children in each family--usually two boys and a girl--theothers being destroyed by their own parents, with no more compunctionthan we show in drowning superfluous puppies or kittens. The Kurnaitribe did not kill new-born infants, but simply left them behind. "Theaboriginal mind does not seem to perceive the horrid idea of leavingan unfortunate baby to die miserably in a deserted camp" (Fison andHowitt, 14). The Indians of both North and South America were addictedto the practice of infanticide. Among the Arabs the custom was soinveterate that as late as our sixth century, Mohammed felt calledupon, in various parts of the Koran, to discountenance it. In thewords of Professor Robertson Smith (281):

  "Mohammed, when he took Mecca and received the homage of the women in the most advanced centre of Arabian civilization, still deemed it necessary formally to demand from them a promise not to commit child-murder."

  Among the wild tribes of India there are some who cling to theircustom of infanticide with the tenacity of fanatics. Dalton (288-90)relates that with the Kandhs this custom was so wide-spread that in1842 Major Macpherson reported that in many villages not a singlefemale child could be found. The British Government rescued a numberof girls and brought them up, giving them an education. Some of thesewere afterward given in marriage to respectable Kandh bachelors,

  "and it was expected that they at least would not outrage their own feeling as mothers by consenting to the destruction of their offspring. Subsequently, however, Colonel Campbell ascertained that these ladies had no female children, and, on being closely questioned, they admitted that at their husbands' bidding they had destroyed them."

  In the South Sea Islands "not less than two-thirds of the childrenwere murdered by their own parents." Ellis (_P.R_., I., 196-202) knewparents who had, by their own confession, killed four, six, eight,even ten of their children, and the only reason they gave was that itwas the custom of the country.

  "_No sense of irresolution or horror appeared to exist_ in the bosoms of those parents, who deliberately resolved on the deed before the child was born." "The murderous parents often came to their (the missionaries') houses almost before their hands were cleansed from their children's blood, and spoke of the deed with worse than brutal insensibility, or with vaunting satisfaction at the triumph of their customs over the persuasions of their teachers."

  They refused to spare babies even when the missionaries offered totake care of them (II., 23). Neither Ellis, during a residence ofeight years, nor Nott during thirty years' residence on the South SeaIslands, had known a single mother who was not guilty of this crime ofinfanticide. Three native women who happened to be together in a roomone day confessed that between them they had killed twenty-oneinfants--nine, seven, and five respectively.

  These facts have long been familiar to students of anthropology, buttheir true significance has been obscured by the additionalinformation that many tribes addicted to infanticide, neverthelessdisplayed a good deal of "affection" toward those whom they spared. Acloser examination of the testimony reveals, however, that there is notrue affection in these cases, but merely a shallow fondness for thelittle ones, chiefly for the sake of the selfish gratification itaffords the parents to watch their gambols and to give vent toinherited animal instincts. True affection is revealed only inself-sacrifice; but the disposition to sacrifice themselves for theirchildren is the one quality most lacking in these child-murderers.Sentimentalists, with their usual lack of insight and logical sense,have endeavored to excuse these assassins on the ground that necessitycompelled them to destroy their infants. Their arguments have misledeven so eminent a specialist as Professor E.B. Tylor into declaring(_Anthropology,_ 427) that "infanticide comes from hardness of liferather than from hardness of heart." What he means, may be made clearby reference to the case of the Arabs who, living in a desert country,were in constant dread of suffering from scarcity of food; wherefore,as Robertson Smith remarks (281), "to bury a daughter was regarded notonly as a virtuous but as a generous deed, which is intelligible ifthe reason was that there would be fewer mouths to fill in the tribe."This explains the murders in question but does not show them to beexcusable; it explains them as being due to the vicious selfishnessand hard-heartedness of parents who would rather kill their infantsthan restrain their sexual appetite when they had all the childrenthey could provide for.

  In most cases the assassins of their own children had not even as muchsemblance of an excuse as the Arabs. Turner relates (284) that in theNew Hebrides the women had to do all the work, and as it was supposedthat they could not attend to more than two or three, all the otherswere buried alive; in other words the babes were murdered to savetrouble and allow the men to live in indolence. In the instances fromIndia referred to above, various trivial excuses for femaleinfanticide were offered: that it would save the expenses connectedwith the marriage rites; that it was cheaper to buy girls than tobring them up, or, better still, to steal them from other tribes; thatmale births are increased by the destruction of female infants; andthat it is better to destroy girls in their infancy than to allow themto grow up and become causes of strife afterward. Among the Fijians,says Williams (154, 155), there is in infanticide "no admixture ofanything like religious feeling or fear, but _merely whim, expediency,anger, or indolence_." Sometimes the general idea of woman'sinferiority to man underlies the act. They will say to the pleadingmissionary: "Why should she live? Will she wield a club? Will shepoise a spear?"

  But it was among the women of Hawaii that the motives of infanticidereached their climax of frivolity. There mothers killed their childrenbecause they were too lazy to bring them up and cook for them; orbecause they wished to preserve their own beauty, or were unwilling tosuffer an interruption in their licentious amours; or because theyliked to roam about unburdened by babes; and sometimes for no otherreason than because they could not make them stop crying. So theyburied them alive though they might be months or even years old(Ellis, _P.R_., IV., 240).

  These revelations show that it is not "hardness of life" but "hardnessof heart"--sensual, selfish indulgence--that smothers the parentalinstinct. To say that the conduct of such parents is brutal, would bea great injustice to brutes. No species of animals, however low in thescale of life, has ever been known to habitually kill its offspring.In their treatment of females and young ones, animals are indeed, as arule, far superior to savages and barbarians. I emphasize this pointbecause several of my critics have accused me of a lack of knowledgeand thought and logic because I attributed some of the elements ofromantic love to animals and denied them to primitive human beings.But there is no inconsistency in this. We shall see later on th
atthere are other things in which animals are superior not only tosavages but to some civilized peoples as high in the scale as Hindoos.

  HONORABLE POLYGAMY

  Turning now from the parental to the conjugal sphere we shall findfurther interesting instances showing How Sentiments Change and Grow.The monogamous sentiment--the feeling that a man and his wife belongto each other exclusively--is now so strong that a person who commitsbigamy not only perpetrates a crime for which the courts may imprisonhim for five years, but becomes a social outcast with whom respectablepeople will have nothing more to do. The Mormons endeavored to makepolygamy a feature of their religion, but in 1882 Congress passed alaw suppressing it and punishing offenders. Did this monogamoussentiment exist "always and everywhere?"

  Livingstone relates (_M.S.A._, I., 306-312) that the King of theBeetjuans (South Africa) was surprised to hear that his visitor hadonly one wife:

  "When we explained to him that, by the laws of our country, people could not marry until they were of a mature age, and then could never have more than one wife, he said it was perfectly incomprehensible to him how a whole nation could submit voluntarily to such laws."

  He himself had five wives and one of these queens

  "remarked very judiciously that such laws as ours would not suit the Beetjuans because there were so great a number of women and the male population suffered such diminutions from the wars."

  Sir Samuel Baker (_A.N._, 147) says of the wife of the Chief ofLatooka:

  "She asked many questions, how many wives I had? and was astonished to hear that I was contented with one. This amused her immensely, and she laughed heartily with her daughter at the idea."

  In Equatorial Africa, "if a man marries and his wife thinks that hecan afford another spouse, she pesters him to marry again, and callshim a stingy fellow if he declines to do so" (Reade, 259). Livingstone(_N.E.Z._, 284) says of the Makalolo women:

  "On hearing that a man in England could marry but one wife, several ladies exclaimed that they would not like to live in such a country; that they could not imagine how English ladies could relish such a custom, for, in their way of thinking, every man of respectability should have a number of wives, as a proof of his wealth. Similar ideas prevail all down the Zambesi."

  Some amusing instances are reported by Burton (_T.T.G.L._, I., 36, 78,79). The lord of an African village appeared to be much ashamedbecause he had only two wives. His sole excuse was that he was only aboy--about twenty-two. Regarding the Mpongwe of the Gaboon, Burtonsays: "Polygamy is, of course, the order of the day; it is a necessityto the men, and even the women disdain to marry a 'one-wifer.'" In hisbook on the Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, G.S. Robertson writes:

  "It is considered a reproach to have only one wife, a sign of poverty and insignificance. There was on one occasion a heated discussion at Kamdesh concerning the best plans to be adopted to prepare for an expected attack. A man sitting on the outskirts of the assembly controverted something the priest said. Later on the priest turned round fiercely and demanded to be told how a man with 'only one wife' presumed to offer an opinion at all."

  His religion allowed a Mohammedan to take four legitimate wives, whiletheir prophet himself had a larger number. A Hindoo was permitted bythe laws of Manu to marry four women if he belonged to the highestcaste, but if he was of the lowest caste he was condemned to monogamy.

  King Solomon was held in honor though he had unnumbered wives,concubines, and virgins at his disposal.

  How far the sentiment of monogamy--one of the essential ingredients ofRomantic Love--had penetrated the skulls of American Indians may beinferred from the amusing and typical details related by the historianParkman (_O.T._, chap. xi.) of the Dakota or Sioux Indians, among whomhe sojourned. The man most likely to become the next chief was afellow named Mahto-Tatonka, whose father had left a family of thirty,which number the young man was evidently anxious to beat:

  "Though he appeared not more than twenty-one years old, he had oftener struck the enemy, and stolen more horses and more squaws than any young man in the village. We of the civilized world are not apt to attach much credit to the latter species of exploits; but horse-stealing is well-known as an avenue to distinction on the prairies, and the other kind of depredation is esteemed equally meritorious. Not that the act can confer fame from its own intrinsic merits. Any one can steal a squaw, and if he chooses afterward to make an adequate present to her rightful proprietor, the easy husband for the most part rests content; his vengeance falls asleep, and all danger from that quarter is averted. Yet this is esteemed but a pitiful and mean-spirited transaction. The danger is averted, but the glory of the achievement also is lost. Mahto-Tatonka proceeded after a more gallant and dashing fashion. Out of several dozen squaws whom he had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for one, but snapping his fingers in the face of the injured husband, had defied the extremity of his indignation, and no one had yet dared to lay the hand of violence upon him. He was following close in the footsteps of his father. The young men and the young squaws, each in their way, admired him. The one would always follow him to war, and he was esteemed to have an unrivalled charm in the eyes of the other."

  Thus the admiration of the men, the love (Indian style) of the women,and the certainty of the chieftainship--the highest honor accessibleto an Indian--were the rewards of actions which in a civilizedcommunity would soon bring such a "brave" to the gallows. Some of theagencies by which the belief that wife-stealing and polygamy arehonorable was displaced by the modern sentiment in favor of monogamy,will be considered later on. Here I simply wish to enforce theadditional moral that not only the _ideas_ regarding bigamy andpolygamy have changed, but the _emotions_ aroused by such actions;execration having taken the place of admiration. Judging by suchcases, is it likely that ideas concerning women and love could changeso utterly as they have since the days of the ancient Greeks, withoutchanging the emotions of love itself? Sentiments consist of ideas andemotions. If both are altered, the sentiments must have changed as amatter of course. Let us take as a further example the sentiment ofmodesty.

  CURIOSITIES OF MODESTY

  There are many Christian women who, if offered the choice betweendeath and walking naked down the street, would choose death as beingpreferable to eternal disgrace and social suicide. If they preferredthe other alternative, they would be arrested and, if known to berespectable, sent to an insane asylum. The English legend relates that"peeping Tom" was struck blind because he did not stay in the house ascommanded when the good Lady Godiva was obliged to ride naked throughthe market-place. So strong, indeed, is the sentiment of modesty inour community that the old-fashioned philosophers used to maintain itwas an innate instinct, always present under normal conditions. Thefact that every child has to be gradually taught to avoid indecentexposure, ought to have enlightened these philosophers as to theirerror, which is further made plain to the orthodox by the Biblicalstory that in the beginning of human life the man and his wife wereboth naked and not ashamed.

  Naked and not ashamed is the condition of primitive man whereverclimatic and other motives do not prescribe dress. Writing of theArabs at Wat El Negur, Samuel Baker says (_N.T.A_., 265):

  "Numbers of young girls and women were accustomed to bathe perfectly naked in the river just before our tent. I employed them to catch small fish for bait; and for hours they would amuse themselves in this way, screaming with excitement and fun, and chasing the small fry with their long clothes in lieu of nets; their figures were generally well-shaped.... The men were constantly bathing in the clear waters of the Athabara, and were perfectly naked, although close to the women; we soon became accustomed to this daily scene, as we do at Brighton and other English bathing towns."

  In his work on Germa
n Africa (II., 123) Zoeller says that in Togoland

  "the young girls did not hesitate in the least to remove their only article of clothing, a narrow strip of cloth, rub themselves with a native soap and then take a dip in the lagoon, before the eyes of white men as well as black."

  A page would be required merely to enumerate the tribes in Africa,Australia, and South America which never wear any clothing.

  Max Buchner (352-4) gives a graphic description (1878) of the nudefemale surf swimmers in the Hawaiian Islands. Nor is this indifferenceto nudity manifested only by these primitive races. In Japan, to thepresent day, men and women bathe in the same room, separated merely bya partition, two or three feet high.[8] Zoeller relates of the Cholosof Ecuador (_P. and A_., 364) that "men and women bathe together inthe rivers with a naivete surpassing that of the South Sea Islanders."A writer in the _Ausland_ (1870, p. 294) reports that in Paraguay hesaw the women washing their only dress, and while they waited for thesun to dry it, they stood by naked calmly smoking their cigars.

  But natural indifference to nudity is the least of the curiosities ofmodesty. Sometimes nakedness is actually prescribed by law or bystrict etiquette. In Rohl all women who are not Arabic are forbiddento wear clothing of any sort. The King of Mandingo allowed no women,not even princesses, to approach him unless they were naked (Hellwald,77-8). Dubois (I., 265) says that in some of the southern provinces ofIndia the women of certain castes must uncover their body from thehead to the girdle when speaking to a man: "It would be thought a wantof politeness and good breeding to speak to men with that part of thebody clothed."

  In his travels among the Cameroon negroes Zoeller (II., 185) cameacross a strange bit of religious etiquette in regard to nudity. Thewomen there wear nothing but a loin cloth, except in case of a death,when, like ourselves, they appear all in black--with a startlingdifference, however. One day, writes Zoeller,

  "I was astounded to see a number of women and girls strolling about stark naked before the house of a man who had died of diphtheria. This, I was told, was their mourning dress.... The same custom prevails in other parts of West Africa."

  Modesty is as fickle as fashion and assumes almost as many differentforms as dress itself. In most Australian tribes the women (as well asthe men) go naked, yet in a few they not only wear clothes but go outof sight to bathe. Stranger still, the Pele islanders were soinnocent of all idea of clothing that when they first saw Europeansthey believed that their clothes were their skins. Nevertheless, themen and women bathed in different places. Among South American Indiansnudity is the rule, whereas some North American Indians used to placeguards near the swimming-places of the women, to protect them fromspying eyes.

  According to Gill (230), the Papuans of Southwestern New Guinea "gloryin their nudeness and consider clothing fit only for women." There aremany places where the women alone were clothed, while in others thewomen alone were naked. Mtesa, the King of Uganda, who died in 1884,inflicted the death penalty on any man who dared to approach himwithout having every inch of his legs carefully covered; but the womenwho acted as his servants were stark naked (Hellwald, 78).

  While the etiquette of modesty is thus subject to an endless varietyof details, every nation and tribe enforces its own ideal of proprietyas the only correct thing. In Tahiti and Tonga it would be consideredhighly indecent to go about without being tattooed. Among Samoans andother Malayans the claims of propriety are satisfied if only the navelis covered. "The savage tribes of Sumatra and Celebes have a likefeeling about the knee, which is always carefully covered"(Westermarck, 207). In China it is considered extremely indecent if awoman allows her bare feet to be seen, even by her husband, and asimilar idea prevails among some Turkish women, who carefully wrap uptheir feet before they go to bed (Ploss, I., 344). Hindoo women mustnot show their faces, but it is not improper to wear a dress so gauzythat the whole figure is revealed through it. "In Moruland," says EminBey,

  "the women mostly go about absolutely naked, a few only attaching a leaf behind to their waistband. It is curious to note, on meeting a bevy of these uncovered beauties carrying water, that the first thing they do with their free hand is to cover the face."

  These customs prevail in all Moslem countries. Mariti relates in his_Viaggi_ (II., 288):

  "Travelling in summer across the fields of Syria I repeatedly came across groups of women, entirely naked, washing themselves near a well. They did not move from the place, but simply covered the face with one hand, their whole modesty consisting in the desire not to be recognized."

  Sentimental topsy-turviness reaches its climax in those cases wherewomen who usually go naked are ashamed to be seen clothed. Such casesare cited by several writers,[9] and appear to be quite common. Themost amusing instance I have come across is in a little-known volumeon Venezuela by Lavayasse, who writes (190):

  "It is known that those [Indians] of the warm climates of South America, among whom civilization has not made any progress, have no other dress than a small apron, or kind of bandage, to hide their nakedness. A lady of my acquaintance had contracted a kindness for a young Paria Indian woman, who was extremely handsome. We had given her the name of Grace. She was sixteen years old, and had lately been married to a young Indian of twenty-five, who was our sportsman. This lady took a pleasure in teaching her to sew and embroider. We said to her one day, 'Grace, you are extremely pretty, speak French well, and are always with us: you ought not therefore to live like the other native women, and we shall give you some clothes. Does not your husband wear trousers and a shirt?' Upon this she consented to be dressed. The lady lost no time in arranging her dress, a ceremony at which I had the honor of assisting. We put on a shift, petticoats, stockings, shoes, and a Madras handkerchief on her head. She looked quite enchanting, and saw herself in the looking-glass with great complacency. Suddenly her husband returned from shooting, with three or four Indians, when the whole party burst into a loud fit of laughter at her, and began to joke about her new habiliments. Grace was quite abashed, blushed, wept, and ran to hide herself in the bed-chamber of the lady, where she stript herself of the clothes, went out of the window, and returned naked into the room. A proof that when her husband saw her dressed for the first time, she felt a sensation somewhat similar to that which a European woman might experience who was surprised without her usual drapery."

  Another paradox remains to be noted. Anthropologists have now provedbeyond all possibility of doubt that modesty, far from having led tothe use of clothing, was itself merely a secondary consequence of thegradual adoption of apparel as a protection. They have also shown[10]that the earliest forms of dress were extremely scanty, and wereintended not to cover certain parts of the body, but actually andwantonly to call attention to them, while in other cases the onlyparts of the body habitually covered were such as we should considerit no special impropriety to leave uncovered. But enough has been saidto demonstrate what we started out to prove: that the strong sentimentof modesty in our community--so strong that many insist it must bepart and parcel of human nature (like love!)--has, like all the othersentiments here discussed, grown up slowly from microscopicbeginnings.

  INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY

  Closely connected with modesty, and yet entirely distinct from it, isanother and still stronger sentiment--the regard for chastity. Many anAmerican officer whose brave wife accompanied him in a frontier warhas been asked by her to promise that he would shoot her with his ownrevolver rather than let her fall into the clutches of licentiousIndians. Though deliberate murder is punishable by death, no Americanjury has ever convicted a man for slaying the seducer of his wife,daughter, or sister. Modern law punishes rape with death, and itsvictim is held to have suffered a fate worse than death. The brightestof all jewels in a bride's crown of virtues is chastity--a jewelwithout which all the others
lose their value. Yet this jewel ofjewels formerly had no more value than a pebble in a brook-bed. Thesentiment in behalf of chastity had no existence for ages, and for along time after it came into existence chastity was known not as avirtue but only as a necessity, inculcated by fear of punishment orloss of worldly advantages.

  In support of this statement a whole volume might be written; but asabundant evidence will be given in later chapters relating to thelower races in Africa, Australia, Polynesia, America, and Asia, only afew instances need be cited here. In his recent work on the _Originand Growth of the Moral Sense_ (1898), Alexander Sutherland, anAustralian author, writes (I., 180):

  "In the House of Commons papers for 1844 will be found some 350 printed pages of reports, memoranda, and letters, gathered by the standing committee appointed in regard to the treatment of aboriginals in the Australian colonies. All these have the same unlovely tale to tell of an absolute incapacity to form even a rudimentary notion of chastity. One worthy missionary, who had been for some years settled among tribes of New South Wales, _as yet brought in contact with no other white men_, writes with horror of what he had observed. The conduct of the females, even young children, is most painful; they are cradled in prostitution and fostered in licentiousness. Brough Smith (II., 240) quotes several authorities who record that in Western Australia the women in early youth were almost prostitutes. 'For about six months after their initiation into manhood the youths were allowed an unbounded licence, and there was no possible blame attached to the young unmarried girl who entertained them'" (179).

  In Lewis and Clark's account of their expedition across the AmericanContinent they came to the conclusion that there was an utter absenceof regard for chastity "among all Indians," and they relate thefollowing as a sample (439):

  "Among all the tribes, a man will lend his wife or daughter for a fish-hook or a strand of beads. To decline an offer of this sort is indeed to disparage the charms of the lady, and therefore gives such offence, that, although we had occasionally to treat the Indians with rigor, nothing seemed to irritate both sexes more than our refusal to accept the favors of the females. On one occasion we were amused by a Clatsop, who, having been cured of some disorder by our medical skill, brought his sister as a reward for our kindness. The young lady was quite anxious to join in this expression of her brother's gratitude, and mortified we did not avail ourselves of it."

  De Varigny, who lived forty years in the Hawaiian Islands, says (159)that

  "the chief difficulty of the missionaries in the Sandwich Islands was teaching the women chastity; they knew neither the word nor the thing. Adultery, incest, fornication, were the common order of things, accepted by public opinion, and even consecrated by religion."

  The same is true of other Polynesians, the Tahitians, for instance, ofwhom Captain Cook wrote that they are

  "people who have not even the idea of decency, and who gratify every appetite and passion before witnesses, with no more sense of impropriety than we feel when we satisfy our hunger at a social board with our friends."

  Among the highest of all these island peoples, the Tongans, the onlyrestriction to incontinence was that the lover must not be changed toooften.

  What Dalton says of the Chilikata Mishmis, one of the wild tribes ofIndia, applies to many of the lower races in all parts of the world:

  "Marriage ceremony there is, I believe, none; it is simply an affair of purchase, and the women thus obtained, if they can be called wives, are not much bound by the tie. The husbands do not expect them to be chaste; they take no cognizance of their temporary liaisons so long as they are not deprived of their services. If a man is dispossessed of one of his wives, he has a private injury to avenge, and takes the earliest opportunity of retaliating, but he cannot see that a woman is a bit the worse for a little incontinency."

  In many cases not only was there complete indifference to chastity,but virginity in a bride was actually looked on with disfavor. TheFinnish Votyaks considered it honorable in a girl to be a motherbefore she was a wife. The Central American Chibchas were like thePhilippine Bisayos, of whom a sixteenth century writer, quoted byJagor, said that a man is unhappy to find his bride above suspicion,"because, not having been desired by anyone, she must have some badquality which will prevent him from being happy with her."

  The wide prevalence in all parts of the world of the custom of lendingor exchanging wives, or offering wife or daughter to a guest,[11] alsobears witness to the utter indifference to chastity, conjugal andmaiden; as does the custom known as the _jus primae noctis._ Dr. KarlSchmidt has tried very hard to prove that such a "right" to the bridenever existed. But no one can read his treatises without noting thathis argument rests on a mere quibble, the word _jus_. There may havebeen no codified _law_ or "right" allowing kings, bishops, chiefs,landlords, medicine men, and priests to claim brides first, but thatthe _privilege_ existed in various countries and was extensively madeuse of, there can be no doubt. Westermarck (73-80), Letourneau(56-62), Ploss (I., 400-405), and others have collected abundantproofs. Here I have room for only a few instances, showing that thosewhom we would consider the _victims_ of such a horrible custom, notonly submitted to it with resignation, but actually looked on it as an_honor_ and a highly coveted privilege.

  "The aboriginal inhabitants of Teneriffe are represented as having married no woman who had not previously spent a night with the chief, which was considered a great honor."

  "Navarette tells us that, on the coast of Malabar, the bridegroom brought the bride to the King, who kept her eight days in the palace; and the man took it 'as a great honor and favor that the King should make use of her.'"

  "Egede informs us that the women of Greenland thought themselves fortunate if an Angekokk, or prophet, honored them with his caresses; and some husbands even paid him, because they believed that the child of such a holy man could not but be happier and better than others." (Westermarck, 77, 80.)

  "In Cumana the priests, who were regarded as holy, slept only with unmarried women, 'porque tenian por honorosa costumbre que ellos las quitassen la virginidad.'" (Bastian, _K.A.A._, II., 228.)

  From this lowest depth of depravity it would be interesting, if spaceand the architectural plan of this volume permitted, to trace thegrowth of the sentiment which demands chastity; noting, in the firstplace, how married women were compelled, by the jealous fury of theirmasters, to practise continence; how, very much later, virginity beganto be valued, not, indeed, at first, as a virtue having a value andcharm of its own, but as a means of enhancing the market value ofbrides. Indifference to masculine chastity continued much longerstill. The ancient civilized nations had advanced far enough to valuepurity in wives and maidens, but it hardly occurred to them that itwas man's duty to cultivate the same virtue. Even so austere andeminent a moral philosopher as Cicero declared that one would have tobe very severe indeed to ask young men to refrain from illicitrelations. The mediaeval church fathers endeavored for centuries toenforce the doctrine that men should be as pure as women, with whatsuccess, every one knows. A more powerful agency in effecting a reformwas the loathsome disease which in the fifteenth century began tosweep away millions of licentious men, and led to the survival of thefittest from the moral point of view. The masculine standard is stilllow, but immense progress has been made during the last hundred years.The number of prostitutes in Europe is still estimated at sevenhundred thousand, yet that makes only seven to every thousand females,and though there are many other unchaste women, it is safe to say thatin England and America, at any rate, more than nine hundred out ofevery thousand females are chaste, whereas among savages, as a rule,nearly all females are prostitutes (in the moral sense of the word),before they marry. In view of this astounding progress
there is noreason to despair regarding man's future. It would be a great triumphof civilization if the average man could be made as pure as theaverage woman. At the same time, since the consequences of sin areinfinitely more serious in women, it is eminently proper that theyshould be in the van of moral progress.

  Chastity, modesty, polygamy, murder, religion, and nature have nowfurnished us an abundance of illustrations showing the changeablenessand former non-existence of sentiments which in us are so strong thatwe are inclined to fancy they must have been the same always andeverywhere. Before proceeding to prove that romantic love is anothersentiment of which the same may be said, let us pause a moment todiscuss a sentiment which presents one of the most difficult problemsin the psychology of love, the Horror of Incest.

  HORROR OF INCEST

  A young man does not fall in love with his sister though she be themost attractive girl he knows. Nor does her father fall in love withher, nor the mother with the son, or the son with the mother. Not onlyis there no sexual love between them, but the very idea of marriagefills their mind with unutterable horror, and in the occasional caseswhere such a marriage is made through ignorance of the relationship,both parties usually commit suicide, though they are guiltless ofdeliberate crime. Here we have the most striking and absolute proofthat circumstances, habits, ideas, laws, customs, can and do utterlyannihilate sexual love in millions of individuals. Why then should itbe so unlikely that the laws and customs of the ancient Greeks, forinstance, with their ideas about women and marriage, should haveprevented the growth of sentimental love? Note the modesty of myclaim. While it is certain that both the sensual and the sentimentalsides of sexual love are stifled by the horror of incest, all that Iclaim in regard to ancient and primitive races is that the sentimentalside of love was smothered by unfavorable circumstances and hinderedin growth by various obstacles which will be described later on inthis volume. Surely this is not such a reckless theory as it seemed tosome of my critics.

  Like the other sentiments discussed in this chapter, the horror ofincest has been found to be absent among races in various stages ofdevelopment. Incestuous unions occurred among Chippewas and otherAmerican Indians. Of the Peruvian Indians, Garcilasso de la Vega saysthat some cohabited with their sisters, daughters, or mothers; similarfacts are recorded of some Brazilians, Polynesians, Africans, and wildtribes of India. "Among the Annamese, according to a missionary whohas lived among them for forty years, no girl who is twelve years oldand has a brother is a virgin" (Westermarck, 292). Gypsies allow abrother to marry a sister, while among the Veddahs of Ceylon themarriage of a man with his younger sister is considered _the_ propermarriage. In the Indian Archipelago and elsewhere there are tribes whopermit marriage between parents and their children. The legends ofIndia and Hindoo theology abound in allusions to incestuous unions,and a nation's mythology reflects its own customs. According to Strabothe ancient Irish married their mothers and sisters. Among thelove-stories of the ancient Greeks, as we shall see later on, thereare a surprising number the subject of which is incest, indicatingthat that crime was of not infrequent occurrence. But it is especiallyby royal personages that incest has been practised. In ancient Persia,Parthia, Egypt, and other countries the kings married their ownsisters, as did the Incas of Peru, for political reasons, other womenbeing regarded as too low in rank to become queens; and the samephenomenon occurs in Hawaii, Siam, Burma, Ceylon, Madagascar, etc. Insome cases incestuous unions for kings and priests are even prescribedby religion. At the licentious festivals common among tribes inAmerica, Africa, India, and elsewhere, incest was one of the manyforms of bestiality indulged in; this gives it a wide prevalence.

  Much ingenuity has been expended in attempts to account for the originof the horror of incest. The main reason why it has so far remainedmore or less of a mystery, is that each writer advanced a singlecause, which he pressed into service to explain all the facts, theresult being confusion and contradiction. In my opinion differentagencies must be assumed in different cases. When we find amongAustralians, American Indians (and even the Chinese), customs,enforced by the strongest feelings, forbidding a man to marry a womanbelonging to the same clan or having the same surname, though not atall related, while allowing a marriage with a sister or other nearblood relative, we are obviously not dealing with a question of incestat all, but with some of the foolish taboos prevalent among theseraces, the origin of which they themselves have forgotten. Mr. AndrewLang probably hit the nail on the head when he said (258) in regard tothe rule which compels savages to marry only outside of the tribe,that these prohibitions "must have arisen in a stage of culture whenideas of kindred were confused, included kinship with animals andplants, and were to us almost, if not quite, unintelligible." To speakof instinct and natural selection teaching the Veddahs to abhormarriage with an elder sister while making union with a younger sister_the_ proper marriage (Westermarck, 292) is surely to assume thatinstinct and natural selection act in an asinine way, which they neverdo--except in asses.

  In a second class of cases, where lower races have ideas similar toours, I believe that the origin of domestic chastity must be sought inutilitarian practices. In the earlier stages of marriage, girls areusually bought of their parents, who profit by the sale or barter. Nowwhen a man marries a girl to be his wife and maid of all work, he doesnot want to take her to his home hampered by a bevy of young children.Fathers guilty of incestuous practices would therefore be unable todispose of their daughters to advantage, and thus a prejudice in favorof domestic purity would gradually arise which a shrewd medicine manwould some day raise to the rank of a religious or social taboo.

  As regards modern society, Darwin, Brinton, Hellwald, Bentham, andothers have advocated or endorsed the view that the reason why such ahorror of incestuous unions prevails, is that novelty is the chiefstimulus to the sexual feelings, and that the familiarity of the samehousehold breeds indifference. I do not understand how any thinker canhave held such a view for one moment. When Bentham wrote (_Theory ofLegislation_, pt. iii., chap. V.) that "individuals accustomed to seeeach other from an age which is capable neither of conceiving desirenor of inspiring it, will see each other with the same eyes to the endof life," he showed infinitely less knowledge of human nature than theauthor of _Paul and Virginia_, who makes a boy and a girl grow upalmost like brother and sister, and at the proper time fall violentlyin love with one another. Who cannot recall in his own experience lovemarriages of schoolmates or of cousins living in intimate associationfrom their childhood? To say that such bringing up together creates"indifference" is obviously incorrect; to say that it leads to"aversion" is altogether unwarranted; and to trace to it such afeeling as our horror at the thought of marrying a sister, or mother,is simply preposterous.

  The real source of the horror of incest in civilized communities wasindicated more than two thousand years ago by Plato. He believed thatthe reason why incestuous unions were avoided and abhorred, was to befound in the constant inculcation, at home and in literature, that

  "They are unholy, hated of God, and most infamous.... Everyone from his earliest childhood has heard men speaking in the same manner about them always and everywhere, whether in comedy or in the graver language of tragedy. When the poet introduces on the stage a Thyestes or an Oedipus, or a Macareus having secret intercourse with his sister, he represents him, when found out, ready to kill himself as the penalty of his sin." (_Laws,_ VIII., 838.)

  Long before Plato another great "medicine man," Moses, saw thenecessity of enforcing a "taboo" against incest by the enactment ofspecial severe laws relating to intercourse between relatives; andthat there was no "instinct" against incest in his time is shown bythe fact that he deemed it necessary to make such circumstantial lawsfor his own people, and by his specific testimony that "in all thesethings the nations are defiled which I cast out from before you, andthe land is defiled." Regarding his motives in making such laws,Milman has justly remarked (_H.J_., I., 220),

 
"The leading principle of these enactments was to prohibit near marriage between those parties among whom, by the usage of their society, early and frequent intimacy was unavoidable and might lead to abuse."

  If Moses lived now, he would still be called upon to enact his laws;for to this day the horror of incest is a sentiment which it isnecessary to keep up and enforce by education, moral precept,religion, and law. It is no more innate or instinctive than thesentiment of modesty, the regard for chastity, or the disapproval ofbigamy. Children are not born with it any more than with the feelingthat it is improper to be seen naked. Medical writers bear witness tothe wide prevalence of unnatural practices among children, even ingood families, while in the slums of the large cities, where thefamilies are herded like swine, there is a horrible indulgence inevery kind of incest by adults as well as children.

  Absolute proof that the horror of incest is not innate liesfurthermore in the unquestionable fact that a man can escape thecalamity of falling in love with his sister or daughter only if he_knows_ the relationship. There are many instances on record--to whichthe daily press adds others--of incestuous unions brought about byignorance of the consanguinity. Oedipus was not saved by an instinctfrom marrying his mother. It was only after the discovery of therelationship that his mind was filled with unutterable horror, whilehis wife and mother committed suicide. This case, though legendary, istypical--a mirror of actuality--showing how potent _ideas_ are toalter _emotions_. Yet I am assailed for asserting that the Greeks andthe lower races, whose ideas regarding women, love, polygamy,chastity, and marriage were so different from ours, also differed fromus in their feelings--the quality of their love. There were numerousobstacles to overcome before romantic love was able toemerge--obstacles so serious and diverse that it is a wonder they wereever conquered. But before considering those obstacles it will beadvisable to explain definitely just what romantic love is and how itdiffers from the sensual "love" or lust which, of course, has alwaysexisted among men as among other animals.

  WHAT IS ROMANTIC LOVE?

  How does it feel to be in love?

  When a man loves a girl, he feels such an overwhelming _individualpreference_ for her that though she were a beggar-maid he would scornthe offer to exchange her for an heiress, a princess, or the goddessof beauty herself. To him she seems to have a monopoly of all thefeminine charms, and she therefore monopolizes his thoughts andfeelings to the exclusion of all other interests, and he longs notonly for her reciprocal affection but for a monopoly of it. "Does shelove me?" he asks himself a hundred times a day. "Sometimes she seemsto treat me with cold indifference--is that merely the instinctiveassertion of feminine _coyness_, or does she prefer another man?" Thepangs, the agony of _jealousy_ overcome him at this thought. He hopesone moment, despairs the next, till his _moods_ become so _mixed_ thathe hardly knows whether he is happy or miserable. He, who is usuallyso bold and self-confident, is humbled; feels utterly unworthy of her.In his fancy she soars so far above all other women that calling heran angel seems not a _hyperbole_, but a compliment to the angel.Toward such a superior being the only proper attitude is _adoration_.She is spotless as an angel, and his feelings toward her are as_pure_, as free from coarse cravings, as if she were a goddess. Howroyally _proud_ a man must feel at the thought of being preferredabove all mortals by this divine being! In _personal beauty_ had sheever a peer? Since Venus left this planet, has such grace been seen?In face of her, the strongest of all impulses--selfishness--isannihilated. The lover is no longer "number one" to himself; his ownpleasures and comforts are ignored in the eager desire to please her,to show her _gallant_ attentions. To save her from disaster or griefhe is ready to _sacrifice_ his life. His cordial _sympathy_ makes himshare all her joys and sorrows, and his _affection_ for her, though hemay have known her only a few days--nay, a few minutes--is as strongand devoted as that of a mother for the child that is her own fleshand blood.

  INGREDIENTS OF LOVE

  No one who has ever been truly in love will deny that thisdescription, however romantic it may seem in its apparentexaggeration, is a realistic reflection of his feelings and impulses.As this brief review shows, Individual Preference, Monopolism,Coyness, Jealousy, Mixed Moods of Hope and Despair, Hyperbole,Adoration, Purity, Pride, Admiration of Personal Beauty, Gallantry,Self-sacrifice, Sympathy, and Affection, are the essential ingredientsin that very composite mental state, which we call romantic love.Coyness, of course, occurs only in feminine love, and there are othersexual differences which will be noted later on. Here I wish to pointout that the fourteen ingredients named may be divided into two groupsof seven each--the egoistic and the altruistic. The prevailing notionthat love is a species of selfishness--a "double selfishness," somewiseacre has called it--is deplorably untrue and shows how little thepsychology of love has heretofore been understood.

  It has indeed an egoistic side, including the ingredients I havecalled Individual Preference, Monopolism, Jealousy, Coyness,Hyperbole, Mixed Moods, and Pride; and it is not a mere accident thatthese are also the seven features which may be found in sensual lovetoo; for sensuality and selfishness are twins. But the later and moreessential characteristics of romantic love are the altruistic andsupersensual traits--Sympathy, Affection, Gallantry, Self-sacrifice,Adoration, Purity, and Admiration of Personal Beauty. The twodivisions overlap in some places, but in the main they are accurate.It is certain that the first group precedes the second, but the orderin which the ingredients in each group first made their appearancecannot be indicated, as we know too little of the early history ofman. The arrangement here adopted is therefore more or less arbitrary.I shall try in this long chapter to answer the question "What isRomantic Love?" by discussing each of its fourteen ingredients andtracing its evolution separately.

  I. INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE

  If a man pretended to be in love with a girl while confessing that heliked other girls equally well and would as soon marry one as another,everybody would laugh at him; for however ignorant many persons may beas to the subtler traits of sentimental love, it is known universallythat a decided and obstinate preference for one particular individualis an absolute condition of true love.

  ALL GIRLS EQUALLY ATTRACTIVE

  As I have just intimated, a modern romantic lover would not exchange abeloved beggar-maid for an heiress or princess; nor would he give herfor a dozen other girls, however charming, and with permission tomarry them all. Now if romantic love had always existed, the lowerraces would have the same violent and exclusive preference forindividuals. But what are the facts? I assert, without fear ofcontradiction from any one familiar with anthropological literature,that a savage or barbarian, be he Australian, African, American, orAsiatic, would laugh at the idea of refusing to exchange one woman fora dozen others equally young and attractive. It is not necessary todescend to the lowest savages to find corroboration of this view. Dr.Zoeller, an unusually intelligent and trustworthy observer, says, inone of his volumes on German Africa (III., 70-71), that

  "on the whole no distinction whatever is made between woman and woman, between the good-looking and the ugly, the intelligent and the stupid ones. In all my African experiences I have never heard of a single young man or woman who conceived a violent passion for a particular individual of the opposite sex."

  So in other parts of Africa. The natives of Borgou, we are told by R.and J. Lander, marry with perfect indifference. "A man takes no morethought about choosing a wife than he does in picking a head ofwheat." Among the Kaffirs, says Fritsch (112) it may occur that a manhas an inclination toward a particular girl; but he adds that "insuch cases the suitor is obliged to pay several oxen more than iscustomary, and as he usually takes cattle more to heart than women,such cases are rare;" and though, when he has several wives, he mayhave a favorite, the attachment to her is shallow and transient, forshe is at any moment liable to displacement by a new-comer. Among theHottentots at Angra Pequena, when a man covets a girl he goes to herhut, prepares a cup of coffee
and hands it to her without saying aword. If she drinks half of it, he knows the answer is Yes. "If sherefuses to touch the coffee, the suitor is not specially grieved, butproceeds to another hut to try his luck again in the same way."(Ploss, I., 454.)

  Of the Fijians Williams (148) says: "Too commonly there is no expressfeeling of connubial bliss, men speak of 'our women' and women of 'ourmen' without any distinctive preference being apparent." Catlin,speaking (70-71) of the matrimonial arrangements of the PawneeIndians, says that daughters are held as legitimate merchandise, and,as a rule, accept the situation "with the apathy of the race." A manwho advertised for a wife would hardly be accused of individualpreference or anything else indicating love. From a remark made byGeorge Gibbs (197) we may infer that the Indians of Oregon andWashington used to advertise for wives, in their own fashion:

  "It is not unusual to find on the small prairies human figures rudely carved upon trees. These I have understood to have been cut by young men who were in want of wives, as a sort of practical intimation that they were in the market as purchasers."

  It might be suggested that such a crude love-letter _to the sex ingeneral_, as compared with one of our own love-letters to a particulargirl, gives a fair idea of what Indian love is, compared with the loveof civilized men and women.

  SHALLOW PREDILECTION

  Even where there is an appearance of predilection it is apt to beshallow and fragile. In the _Jesuit Relations_ (XVIII., 129) we readhow a Huron youth came to one of the missionaries and said he needed awife to make his snow-shoes and clothes. "I am in love with a younggirl," said he. "I beg you to call my relatives together and toconsider whether she is suitable for me. If you decide that it is formy good, I will marry her; if not, I will follow your advice." Otheryoung Indians used to come to the missionaries to ask them to findwives for them. I have been struck, in reading Indian love-stories, bythe fact that their gist usually lies not in an exhibition of decidedpreference for one man but of violent _aversion_ to another--some oldand disagreeable suitor. It is well known, too, that among Indians, asamong Australians, marriage was sometimes considered an affair of thetribe rather than of the individual; and we have some curiousillustrations of the way in which various tribes of Indians would tryto crush the germs of individual preference.

  REPRESSION OF PREFERENCE

  Thus Hunter relates (243) of the Missouri and Arkansas tribes that "Itis considered disgraceful for a young Indian publicly to prefer onewoman to another until he has distinguished himself either in war orin the chase." Should an Indian pay any girl, though he may have knownher from childhood, special attention before he has won reputation asa warrior, "he would be sure to suffer the painful mortification of arejection; he would become the derision of the warriors and thecontempt of the squaws." In the _Jesuit Relations_ (III., 73) we readof some of the Canadian Indians that

  "they have a very rude way of making love; for the suitor, as soon as he shows a preference for a girl, does not dare look at her, nor speak to her, nor stay near her unless accidentally; and then he must force himself not to look her in the face, nor to give any sign of his passion, otherwise he would be the laughing-stock of all, and his sweetheart would blush for him."

  Not only must he show no preference, but the choice, too, is not leftto him; for the relatives take up the matter and decide whether hisage, skill as a hunter, reputation, and family make him a desirablematch.

  In the face of such facts, can we agree with Rousseau that to a savageone woman is as good as another? The question is very difficult toanswer, because if a man is to marry at all, he must choose aparticular girl, and this choice can be interpreted as preference,though it may be quite accidental. It is probable, as I havesuggested, that with a people as low as the Australians it would bedifficult to find a man having sufficient predilection for one youngwoman to refuse to exchange her for two others. Probably the same istrue of the higher savages and even of the barbarians, as a rule.

  UTILITY VERSUS SENTIMENT

  We do, indeed, find, at a comparatively early stage, evidences of onegirl or man being chosen in preference to others; but when we examinethese cases closely we see that the choice is not based on _personal_qualities but on utilitarian considerations of the most selfish orsensual description. Thus Zoeller, in the passage just referred to,says of the negro:

  "It is true that when he buys a woman he prefers a young one, but his motive for so doing is far from being mental admiration of beauty. He buys the younger ones because they are youthful, strong, and able to work for him."

  Similarly Belden, who lived twelve years among the Plains Indians,states (302) that "the squaws are valued by the middle-aged men onlyfor their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever istaken of their personal beauty." The girls are no better than the men.Young Comanche girls, says Parker (Schoolcraft, V., 683) "are notaverse to marry very old men, particularly if they are chiefs, as theyare always sure of something to eat." In describing Amazon ValleyIndians, Wallace says (497-498) that there is

  "a trial of skill at shooting with the bow and arrow, and if the young man does not show himself a good marksman, the girl refuses him, on the ground that he will not be able to shoot fish and game enough for the family."

  These cases are typical, and might be multiplied indefinitely; theyshow how utterly individual preference on personal grounds is out ofthe question here. It is true that many of our own girls marry forsuch utilitarian reasons; but no one would be so foolish as to speakof these marriages as love-matches, whereas in the cases of savages weare often invited by sentimentalists to witness the "manifestation oflove" whenever a man shows a utilitarian or sensual interest in aparticular girl. A modern civilized lover marries a girl for her ownsake, because he is enamoured of her individuality, whereas theuncivilized suitor cares not a fig for the other's individuality; hetakes her as an instrument of lust, a drudge, or as a means of raisinga family, in order that the superstitious rites of ancestor-worshipmay be kept up and his selfish soul rest in peace in the next world.He cares not for her personally, for if she proves barren herepudiates her and marries another. Trial marriages are thereforewidely prevalent. The Dyaks of Borneo, as St. John tells us, oftenmake as many as seven or eight such marriages; with them marriage is"a business of partnership for the purpose of having children,dividing labor, and by means of their offspring providing for theirold age."

  A STORY OF AFRICAN LOVE

  An amusing incident related by Ernst von Weber (II., 215-6) indicateshow easily utilitarian considerations override such skin-deeppreference as may exist among Africans. He knew a girl named Yannikiwho refused to marry a young Kaffir suitor though she confessed thatshe liked him. "I cannot take him," she said, "as he can offer onlyten cows for me and my father wants fifteen." Weber observed, that itwas not kind of her father to let a few cows stand in the way of herhappiness; but the African damsel did not fall in with his sentimentalview of the case. Business and vanity were to her much more importantmatters than individual preference for a particular lover, and sheexclaimed, excitedly:

  "What! You expect my father to give me away for ten cows? That would be a fine sort of a bargain! Am I not worth more than Cilli, for whom the Tambuki chief paid twelve cows last week? I am pretty, I can cook, sew, crochet, speak English, and with all these accomplishments you want my father to dispose of me for ten miserable cows? Oh, sir, how little you esteem me! No, no, my father is quite right in refusing to yield in this matter; indeed, in my opinion he might boldly ask thirty cows for me, for I am worth that much."

  SIMILARITY OF INDIVIDUALS AND SEXES

  It is not difficult to explain why among the lower races individualpreference either does not occur at all or is so weak and utilitarianthat the difference of a few cows more or less may decide a lover'sfate. Like sunflowers in the same garden, the girls in a tribe differso little from one another that the
re is no particular cause fordiscrimination. They are all brought up in exactly the same way, eatthe same food, think the same thoughts, do the same work--carryingwater and wood, dressing skins, moving tents and utensils, etc.; theyare alike uneducated, and marry at the same childish age before theirminds can have unfolded what little is in them; so that there is smallreason why a man should covet one of them much more than another. Asavage may be as eager to possess a woman as a miser is to own a goldpiece: but he has little more reason to prefer one girl to anotherthan a miser has to prefer one gold piece to another of the same size.

  Humboldt observed (_P.E_., 141) that "in barbarous nations there is aphysiognomy peculiar to the tribe or horde rather than to anyindividual." It has been noted by various observers that the lower therace is the more do its individuals thus resemble one another. Nay,this approximation goes so far as to make even the two sexes much lessdistinct than they are with us. Professor Pritsch, in his classicaltreatise on the natives of South Africa (407), dwells especially onthe imperfect sexual differentiation of the Bushmen. The faces,stature, limbs, and even the chest and hips of the women differ solittle from those of the men that in looking at photographs (as hesays and illustrates by specimens), one finds it difficult to tellthem apart, though the figures are almost nude. Both sexes are equallylean and equally ugly. The same may be said of the typicalAustralians, and in Professor and Mrs. Agassiz's _Journey in Brazil_(530) we read that

  "the Indian woman has a very masculine air, extending indeed more or less to her whole bearing; for even her features have rarely the feminine delicacy of higher womanhood. In the Negro, on the contrary, the narrowness of chest and shoulder characteristic of the woman is almost as marked in the man; indeed, it may well be said, that, while the Indian female is remarkable for her masculine build, the negro male is equally so for his feminine aspect."

  In the _Jesuit Relations_ there are repeated references to thedifficulty of distinguishing squaws from male Indians except bycertain articles of dress. Burton writes of the Sioux _(C.O.S_., 59)that "the unaccustomed eye often hesitates between the sexes." InSchoolcraft (V., 274) we are told concerning the Creek women that"being condemned to perform all the hard labor, they are _universallymasculine in appearance_, without one soft blandishment to render themdesirable or lovely." Nor is there anything alluringly feminine in thedisposition which, as all observers agree, makes Indian women morecruel in torture than the most pitiless men. Equally decisive is thetestimony regarding the similarity of the sexes, physical and mental,in the islands of the Pacific. Hawkesworth (II., 446) found the womenof New Zealand so lacking in feminine delicacy that it was difficultto distinguish them from the men, except by their voices. Captain Cook(II., 246) observed in Fiji differences in form between men andfemales, but little difference in features; and of the Hawaiians hewrote that with few exceptions they

  "have little claim to those peculiarities that distinguish the sex in other countries. There is, indeed, a more remarkable equality in the size, color, and figure of both sexes, than in most places I have visited."

  PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SEXUAL CHARACTERS

  A most important inference may be deduced from these facts. A man doesnot, normally, fall in love with a man. He falls in love with a woman,because she is a woman. Now when, as in the cases cited, the men andwomen differ only in regard to the coarsest anatomical peculiaritiesknown as the primary sexual qualities, it is obvious that their "love"also can consist only of such coarse feelings and longings as theseprimary qualities can inspire. In other words they can know the greatpassion only on its sensual side. Love, to them, is not a sentimentbut an appetite, or at best an instinct for the propagation of thespecies.

  Of the secondary sexual qualities--those not absolutely necessary forthe maintenance of the species--the first to appear prominently inwomen is _fat_; and as soon as it does appear, it is made a ground ofindividual preference. Brough Smyth tells us that in Australia a fatwoman is never safe from being stolen, no matter how old and ugly shemay be. In the chapter on Personal Beauty I shall marshal a number offacts showing that among the uncivilized and Oriental races ingeneral, fat is the criterion of feminine attractiveness. It is soamong coarse men (_i.e._, most men) even in Europe and America to thisday. Hindoo poets, from the oldest times to Kalidasa and from Kalidasato the present day, laud their heroines above all things for theirlarge thighs--thighs so heavy that in walking the feet make animpression on the ground "deep as an elephant's hoofs."

  FASTIDIOUS SENSUALITY IS NOT LOVE

  It is hardly necessary to say that the "love" based on _these_secondary qualities is not sentimental or romantic. It may,however--and this is a very important point to remember--be extremelyviolent and stubborn. In other words, there may he a strong individualpreference in love that is entirely sensual. Indeed, lust may he asfastidious as love. Tarquinius coveted Lucretia; no other woman wouldhave satisfied him. Yet he did not _love_ her. Had he loved _her_ hewould have sacrificed his own life rather than offered violence to onewho valued her honor more than her life. He loved only _himself_; hisone object was to please his beloved ego; he never thought of herfeelings and of the consequences of his act to her. The literature ofancient Rome, Greece, and Oriental countries is full of such cases ofindividualized "love" which, when closely examined, reduce themselvesto cases of selfish lust--eagerness to gratify an appetite with aparticular victim, for whom the "lover" has not a particle ofaffection, respect, or sympathy, not to speak of adoration or gallant,self-sacrificing devotion. Unless we have positive evidence of thepresence of these traits of unselfish affection, we are not entitledto assume the existence of genuine love; especially among races thatare coarse, unsympathetic, and cruel.

  TWO STORIES OF INDIAN LOVE

  From this point of view we must judge two Indian love-stories relatedby Keating (II., 164-166):

  I. A Chippewa named Ogemans, married to a woman called Demoya, fell in love with her sister. When she refused him he affected insanity. His ravings were terrible, and nothing could appease him but her presence; the moment he touched her hand or came near her he was gentle as they could wish. One time, in the middle of a winter night, he sprang from his couch and escaped into the woods, howling and screaming in the wildest manner; his wife and her sister followed him, but he refused to be calmed until the sister (Okoj) laid her hand on him, when he became quiet and gentle. This kind of performance he kept up a long time till all the Indians, including the girl, became convinced he was possessed by a spirit which she alone could subdue. So she married him and never after was he troubled by a return of madness.

  II. A young Canadian had secured the favor of a half-breed girl who had been brought up among the Chippewas and spoke only their language. Her name was Nisette, and she was the daughter of a converted squaw who, being very pious, induced the young couple to go to an Algonquin village and get regularly married by a clergyman. Meanwhile the Canadian's love cooled away, and by the time they reached the village he cared no more for the poor girl. Soon thereafter she became the subject of fits and was finally considered to be quite insane. The only lucid intervals she had were in the presence of her inconstant husband. Whenever he came near her, her reason would return, and she would appear the same as before her illness. Flattered by what he deemed so strong an evidence of his influence over her, the Canadian felt a return of kindness toward her, and was finally induced to renew his attentions, which, being well received, they were soon united by a clergyman. Her reason appeared to be restored, and her improving health showed that her happiness was complete.

  FEMININE IDEALS SUPERIOR TO MASCULINE

  Keating's guide was convinced that in both these cases the insanitywas feigned for the selfish purpose of working upon the feelings ofthe unwilling party. Even apart from that, there is no trace ofevidence in either
story that the feelings of the lovers rose abovesensual attachment, though the girl, being half white, might have beencapable of an approximation to a higher feeling. Indeed it is amongwomen that such approximations to a higher type of attachment must besought; for the uncivilized woman's basis of individual preference,while apt to be utilitarian, is less sensual than the man's. She isinfluenced by his manly qualities of courage, valor, aggressiveness,because those are of value to her, while he chooses her for herphysical charms and has little or no appreciation of the higherfeminine qualities. Schoolcraft (V., 612) cites the following as anIndian girl's ideal:

  "My love is tall and graceful as the young pine waving on the hill---and as swift in his course as the stately deer. His hair is flowing, and dark as the blackbird that floats through the air, and his eyes, like the eagle's, both piercing and bright. His heart, it is fearless and great--and his arm it is strong in the fight."

  Now it is true that Schoolcraft is a very unreliable witness in suchmatters, as we shall see in the chapter on Indians. He had a way oftaking coarse Indian tales, dressing them up in a fine romantic garband presenting them as the aboriginal article. An Indian girl wouldnot be likely to compare a man's hair to a blackbird's feathers, andshe certainly would never dream of speaking of a "tall and gracefulpine waving on the hill." She might, however, compare his swiftness toa deer's, and she might admire his sharp sight, his fearlessness, hisstrong arm in a fight; and that is enough to illustrate what I havejust said--that her preference, though utilitarian, is less sensualthan the man's. It includes mental elements, and as moreover herduties as mother teach her sympathy and devotion, it is not to bewondered at that the earliest approximations to a higher type of loveare on the part of women.

  SEX IN BODY AND MIND

  As civilization progresses, the sexes become more and moredifferentiated, thus affording individual preference an infinitelygreater scope. The stamp of sex is no longer confined to the pelvisand the chest, but is impressed on every part of the body. The women'sfeet become smaller and more daintily shaped than the men's, the limbsmore rounded and tapering and less muscular, the waist narrower, theneck longer, the skin smoother, softer, and less hairy, the hands morecomely, with more slender fingers, the skeleton more delicate, thestature lower, the steps shorter, the gait more graceful, the featuresmore delicately cut, the eyes more beautiful, the hair more luxuriantand lustrous, the cheeks rounder and more susceptible to blushes, thelips more daintily curved, the smile sweeter.

  But the mind has sex as well as the body. It is still in process ofevolution, and too many individuals still approximate the type of thevirago or the effeminate man; but the time will come for all, as ithas already come for many, when a masculine trait in a woman'scharacter will make as disagreeable an impression as a blacksmith'ssinewy arm on the body of a society belle would make in a ball-room.To call a woman pretty and sweet is to compliment her; to call a manpretty and sweet would be to mock or insult him. The ancient Greeksbetrayed their barbarism in amorous matters in no way moreconspicuously than by their fondness for coy, effeminate boys, andtheir admiration of masculine goddesses like Diana and Minerva.Contrast this with the modern ideal of femininity, as summed up byShakspere:

  Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth, Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, But that our soft conditions and our hearts Should well agree with our external parts?

  TRUE FEMININITY AND ITS FEMALE ENEMIES

  A woman's voice differs from a man's not only in pitch but in timbre;its quality suggests the sex. There is great scope for variety, fromthe lowest contralto to the highest soprano, as there is in man's fromthe lowest bass to the highest tenor; a variety so great that voicesdiffer as much as faces and can be instantly recognized; but unless ithas the proper sexual quality a voice affects us disagreeably. Acoarse, harsh voice has marred many a girl's best marriage chances,while, on the other hand, it may happen that "the ear loveth beforethe eye." Now what is true of the male and female voice holds true ofthe male and female mind in all its diverse aspects. We expect men tobe not only bigger, stronger, taller, hardier, more robust, but morecourageous and aggressive, more active, more creative, more sternlyjust, than women; while coarseness, cruelty, selfishness, andpugnacity, though not virtues in either sex, affect us much lessrepulsively in men than in women, for the reason that the masculinestruggle for existence and competition in business foster selfishness,and men have inherited pugnacious instincts from their fightingancestors, while women, as mothers, learned the lessons of sympathyand self-sacrifice much sooner than men. The distinctively femininevirtues are on the whole of a much higher order than the masculine,which is the reason why they were not appreciated or fostered at soearly an epoch. Gentleness, modesty, domesticity, girlishness,coyness, kindness, patience, tenderness, benevolence, sympathy,self-sacrifice, demureness, emotionality, sensitiveness, are femininequalities, some of which, it is true, we expect also in gentlemen; buttheir absence is not nearly so fatal to a man as it is to a woman. Andas men gradually approach women in patience, tenderness, sympathy,self-sacrifice, and gentleness, it behooves women to keep theirdistance by becoming still more refined and feminine, instead oftrying, as so many of them do, to approach the old masculinestandard--one of the strangest aberrations recorded in all socialhistory.

  Men and women fall in love with what is unlike, not with what is likethem. The refined physical and mental traits which I have described inthe preceding paragraphs constitute some of the secondary sexualcharacters by which romantic love is inspired, while sensual love isbased on the primary sexual characters. Havelock Ellis (19) has welldefined a secondary sexual character as "one which, by more highlydifferentiating the sexes, helps to make them more attractive to eachother," and so to promote marriages. And Professor Weissmann, famedfor his studies in heredity, opens up deep vistas of thought when hedeclares (II., 91) that

  "all the numerous differences in form and function which characterize sex among the higher animals, all the so-called 'secondary sexual characters,' affecting even the highest mental qualities of mankind, are nothing but adaptations to bring about the union of the hereditary tendencies of two individuals."

  Nature has been at work on this problem of differentiating the sexesever since it created the lowest animal organisms, and this fact,which stands firm as a rock, gives us the consoling assurance that thepresent abnormal attempts to make women masculine by giving them thesame education, employments, sports, ideals, and political aspirationsas men have, must end in ignominious failure. If the viragoes hadtheir way, men and women would in course of time revert to thecondition of the lowest savages, differing only in their organs ofgeneration. How infinitely nobler, higher, more refined and,fascinating, is that ideal which wants women to differ from men byevery detail, bodily and mental; to differ from them in the higherqualities of disposition, of character, of beauty, physical andspiritual, which alone make possible the existence of romantic love asdistinguished from lust on one side and friendship on the other.

  MYSTERIES OF LOVE

  If these secondary sexual characters could be destroyed by theextraordinary--one might almost say criminal--efforts of unsexedtermagants to make all women ape men and become like them, romanticlove, which was so slow in coming, would disappear again, leaving onlysensual appetite, which may be (selfishly) fastidious and intense, buthas no depth, duration, or altruistic nobility, and which, whensatiated, cares no more for the object for which it had temporarilyhungered. It is these secondary sexual characters, with their subtleand endless variations, that have given individual preference such awide field of choice that every lover can find a girl after his heartand taste. A savage is like a gardener who has only one kind offlowers to choose between--all of one color too; whereas we, with ourdiverse secondary characters, our various intermixtures ofnationalities, our endless shades of blonde and brunette, anddifferences in manners and education can have our choice among thelilies, roses, violets,
pansies, daisies, and thousands of otherflowers--or the girls named after them. Samuel Baker says there are nobroken hearts in Africa. Why should there be when individuals are sosimilar that if a man loses his girl he can easily find another justlike her in color, face, rotundity, and grossness? A civilized loverwould mourn the loss of his bride--though he were offered his choiceof the beauties of Baltimore--because it would be _absolutelyimpossible to duplicate her_.

  In that last line lies the explanation of one of the mysteries ofmodern love--its stubborn fidelity to the beloved after the choice hasbeen made. But there is another mystery of individual preference thatcalls for an explanation--its capriciousness, apparent or real, inmaking a choice--that quality which has made the poets declare sooften that "love is blind." On this point much confusion of ideasprevails.

  Matters are simplified if we first dispose of those numerous cases inwhich the individual preference is only approximate. If a girl ofeighteen has the choice between a man of sixty and a youth of twenty,she will, if she exercises a _personal_ preference, take the youth, asa matter of course, though he may be far from her ideal. Suchpreference is generic rather than individual. Again, in most cases offirst love, as I have remarked elsewhere (_R.L.P.B_., 139) "man fallsin love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man orwoman." Young men and women inherit, from a long series of ancestors,a disposition to love which at puberty reveals itself in vaguelongings and dreams. The "bump of amativeness," as a phrenologistmight say, is like a powder magazine, ready to explode at a touch, andit makes no great difference what kind of a match is applied. In laterlove affairs the match is a matter of more importance.

  Robert Burton threw light on the "capriciousness" and accidentally ofthis kind of (apparent) amorous preference when he wrote that "it isimpossible, almost, for two young folks equal in years to livetogether and not be in love;" and further he says, sagaciously:

  "Many a serving man, by reason of this opportunity and importunity, inveigles his master's daughter, many a gallant loves a dowdy, many a gentleman runs after his wife's maids; many ladies dote upon their men, as the queen in Aristo did upon the dwarf, many matches are so made in haste and they are compelled, as it were by necessity, so to love, which had they been free, come in company with others, seen that variety which many places afford, or compared them to a third, would never have looked upon one another."

  Such passions are merely pent-up emotions seeking to escape one way oranother. They do not indicate real, intense preference, but at best anapproach to it; for they are not properly individualized, and, asSchopenhauer pointed out, the differences in the intensity oflove-cases depend on their different degrees of individualization--an_apercu_ which this whole chapter confirms. Yet these mereapproximations to real preference embrace the vast majority ofso-called love-affairs. Genuine preference of the highest type findsits explanation in special phases of sympathy and personal beautywhich will be discussed later on.

  What is usually considered the greatest mystery of the amorous passionis the disposition of a lover to "see Helen's beauty in a brow ofEgypt." "What can Jack have seen in Jill to become infatuated withher, or she in him?" The trouble with those who so often ask thisquestion is that they fix the attention on the beloved instead of onthe lover, whose lack of taste explains everything. The error is oflong standing, as the following story related by the Persian poetSaadi (of the thirteenth century) will show (346):

  AN ORIENTAL LOVE-STORY

  "A king of Arabia was told that Mujnun, maddened by love, had turned his face toward the desert and assumed the manners of a brute. The king ordered him to be brought in his presence and he wept and said: 'Many of my friends reproach me for my love of her, namely Laila; alas! that they could one day see her, that my excuse might be manifest for me.' The king sent for her and beheld a person of tawny complexion, and feeble frame of body. She appeared to him in a contemptible light, inasmuch as the lowest menial in his harem, or seraglio, surpassed her in beauty and excelled her in elegance. Mujnun, in his sagacity, penetrated what was passing in the king's mind and said: 'It would behove you, O King, to contemplate the charms of Laila through the wicket of a Mujnun's eye, in order that the miracle of such a spectacle might be illustrated to you.'"

  This story was referred to by several critics of my first book asrefuting my theory regarding the modernity of true love. They seemedto think, with the Persian poet, that there must be somethingparticularly wonderful and elevated in the feelings of a lover who isindifferent to the usual charms of femininity and prefers ugliness.This, indeed, is the prevalent sentiment on the subject, though themore I think of it, the more absurd and topsy turvy it seems to me. Dowe commend an Eskimo for preferring the flavor of rancid fish oil tothe delicate bouquet of the finest French wine? Does it evince aparticularly exalted artistic sense to prefer a hideous daub to aTitian or Raphael? Does it betoken a laudable and elevated taste inmusic to prefer a vulgar tune to one that has the charms of a romanticor classical work of acknowledged beauty? Why, then, should wespecially extol Mujnun for admiring a woman who was devoid of allfeminine charms? The confusion probably arises from fancying that shemust have had mental charms to offset her ugliness, but nothingwhatever is said about such a notion, which, in fact, would have beenutterly foreign to the Oriental, purely sensual, way of regardingwomen.

  Fix the attention on the man in the story instead of on the woman andthe mystery vanishes. Mujnun becomes infatuated with an ugly womansimply because he has no taste, no sense of beauty. There are millionsof such men the world over, just as there are millions who cannotappreciate choice wines, good music, and fine pictures. Everywhere themajority of men prefer vulgar tunes, glaring chromos, and coarsewomen--luckily for the women, because most of them are coarse, too."Birds of a feather flock together"--there you have the philosophy ofpreference so far as such love-affairs are concerned. How often do wesee a bright, lovely girl, with sweet voice and refined manners,neglected by men who crowd around other women of their own rude andvulgar caste! Most men still are savages so far as the ability toappreciate the higher secondary sexual qualities in women isconcerned. But the exceptions are growing more numerous. Among savagesthere are no exceptions. Romantic love does not exist among them, bothbecause the women have not the secondary sexual qualities, andbecause, even if they had them, the men would not appreciate them orbe guided by them in their choice of mates.

  II. MONOPOLISM

  Whenever she speaks, my ravished ear No other voice but hers can hear, No other wit but hers approve: Tell me, my heart, if this be love? --_Lyttleton_.

  Every lover of nature must have noticed how the sun monopolizes theattention of flowers and leaves. Twist and turn them whichever way youplease, on returning afterward you will find them all facing thebeloved sun again with their bright corollas and glossy surface.Romantic love exacts a similar monopoly of its devotees. Be theirfeelings as various, their thoughts as numerous, as the flowers in agarden, the leaves in a forest, they will always be turned toward thebeloved one.

  JULIET AND NOTHING BUT JULIET

  A man may have several intimate friends, and a mother may dote on adozen or more children with equal affection; but romantic love is amonopolist, absolutely exclusive of all participation and rivalry. Agenuine Romeo wants Juliet, the whole of Juliet, and nothing butJuliet. She monopolizes his thoughts by day, his dreams at night; herimage blends with everything he sees, her voice with everything hehears. His imagination is a lens which gathers together all the lightand heat of a giant world and focuses them on one brunette or blonde.He is a miser, who begrudges every smile, every look she bestows onothers, and if he had his own way he would sail with her to-day to adesert island and change their names to Mr. and Mrs. Robinson Crusoe.This is not fanciful hyperbole, but a plain statement in prose of apsychological truth. The poets did not exaggerate when they pennedsuch sen
timents as these:

  She was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts, Which terminated all. --_Byron_.

  Thou art my life, my love, my heart, The very eyes of me, And hast command of every part, To live and die for thee. --_Herrick_.

  Give me but what that ribband bound, Take all the rest the world goes round. --_Waller_.

  But I am tied to very thee By every thought I have; Thy face I only care to see Thy heart I only crave. --_Sedley_.

  I see her in the dewy flowers, Sae lovely sweet and fair: I hear her voice in ilka bird, Wi' music charm the air: There's not a bonnie flower that springs By fountain, shaw, or green; There's not a bonny bird that sings, But minds me o' my Jean. --_Burns_.

  For nothing this wide universe I call Save thou, my rose: in it thou art my all. --_Shakspere_.

  Like Alexander I will reign, And I will reign alone, My thoughts shall evermore disdain A rival on my throne. --_James Graham_.

  Love, well thou know'st no partnerships allows. Cupid averse, rejects divided vows. --_Prior_.

  O that the desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race And, hating no one, love but only her. --_Byron_.

  BUTTERFLY LOVE

  The imperative desire for an absolute monopoly of one chosen girl,body and soul--_and one only_--is an essential, invariable ingredientof romantic love. Sensual love, on the contrary, aims rather at amonopoly of all attractive women--or at least as many as possible.Sensual love is not an exclusive passion for one; it is a ficklefeeling which, like a giddy butterfly, flits from flower to flower,forgetting the fragrance of the lily it left a moment ago in the sweethoney of the clover it enjoys at this moment. The Persian poet Sadi,says (_Bustan_, 12), "Choose a fresh wife every spring or New Year'sDay; for the almanack of last year is good for nothing." Anacreoninterprets Greek love for us when he sings:

  "Can'st count the leaves in a forest, the waves in the sea? Then tell me how oft I have loved. Twenty girls in Athens, and fifteen more besides; add to these whole bevies in Corinth, and from Lesbos to Ionia, from Caria and from Rhodos, two thousand sweethearts more.... Two thousand did I say? That includes not those from Syros, from Kanobus, from Creta's cities, where Eros rules alone, nor those from Gadeira, from Bactria, from India--girls for whom I burn."

  Lucian vies with Anacreon when he makes Theomestus (_Dial. Amor._)exclaim: "Sooner can'st thou number the waves of the sea and thesnowflakes falling from the sky than my loves. One succeeds another,and the new one comes on before the old is off." We call such a thinglibertinism, not love. The Greeks had not the name of Don Juan, yetDon Juan was their ideal both for men and for the gods they made inthe image of man. Homer makes the king of gods tell his own spouse(who listens without offence) of his diverse love-affairs (_Iliad_,xiv., 317-327). Thirteen centuries after Homer the Greek poet Nonnusgives ([Greek: Dionusiaka], vii.) a catalogue of twelve of Zeus'samours; and we know from other sources (_e.g., Hygin, fab._, 155) thatthese accounts are far from exhaustive. A complete list would matchthat yard-long document made for Don Juan by Leporello in Mozart'sopera. A French writer has aptly called Jupiter the "Olympian DonJuan;" yet Apollo and most of the other gods might lay claim to thesame title, for they are represented as equally amorous, sensual, andfickle; seeing no more wrong in deserting a woman they have made loveto, than a bee sees in leaving a flower whose honey it has stolen.

  Temporarily, of course, both men and gods focus their interest on onewoman--maybe quite ardently--and fiercely resent interference, as anangry bee is apt to sting when kept from the flower it hasaccidentally chosen; but that is a different thing from the monopolismof true love.

  ROMANTIC STORIES OF NON-ROMANTIC LOVE

  The romantic lover's dream is to marry one particular woman and heralone; the sensual lover's dream embraces several women, or many. Theunromantic ideal of the ancient Hindoo is romantically illustrated ina story told in the _Hitopadesa_ of a Brahman named Wedasarman. Oneevening someone made him a present of a dish of barley-meal. Hecarried it to the market hall and lay down in a corner near where apotter had stored his wares. Before going to sleep, the Brahmanindulged in these pleasant reveries:

  "If I sell this dish of meal I shall probably get ten farthings for it. For that I can buy some of these pots, which I can sell again at a profit; thus my money will increase. Then I shall begin to trade in betel-nuts, dress-goods and other things, and thus I may bring my wealth up to a hundred thousand. With that I shall be able to marry _four wives_, and to the youngest and prettiest of them I shall give my tenderest love. How the others will be tortured by jealousy! But just let them dare to quarrel. They shall know my wrath and feel my club!"

  With these words he laid about him with his club, and of course brokehis own dish besides many of the potter's wares. The potter hearingthe crash, ran to see what was the matter, and the Brahman wasignominiously thrown out of the hall.

  The polygamous imagination of the Hindoos runs riot in many of theirstories. To give another instance: _The Kathakoca, or Treasury ofStories_ (translated by C.H. Tawney, 34), includes an account of theadventures of King Kanchanapura, who had five hundred wives; and ofSanatkumara who beheld eight daughters of Manavega and married them.Shortly afterward he married a beautiful lady and her sister. Then heconquered Vajravega and married one hundred maidens.

  Hindoo books assure us that women, unless restrained, are no betterthan men. We read in the same _Hitopadesa_ that they are likecows--always searching for new herbs in the meadows to graze on. Inpolyandrous communities the women make good use of theiropportunities. Dalton, in his book on the wild tribes of Bengal, tellsthis quaint story (36):

  "A very pretty Dophla girl once came into the station of Luckimpur, threw herself at my feet and in most poetical language asked me to give her protection. She was the daughter of a chief and was sought in marriage and promised to a peer of her father who had many other wives. She would not submit to be one of many, and besides she loved and she eloped with her beloved. This was interesting and romantic. She was at the time in a very coarse travelling dress, but assured of protection she took fresh apparel and ornament from her basket and proceeded to array herself, and very pretty she looked as she combed and plaited her long hair and completed her toilette. In the meantime I had sent for the 'beloved,' who had kept in the background, and alas! how the romance was dispelled when a _dual_ appeared! _She had eloped with two men!_"

  Every reader will laugh at this denouement, and that laugh is eloquentproof that in saying there can be no real love without absolutemonopolism of one heart by another I simply formulated and emphasizeda truth which we all feel instinctively. Dalton's tale also brings outvery clearly the world-wide difference between a romantic love-storyand a story of romantic love.

  Turning from the Old World to the New we find stories illustrating thesame amusing disregard of amorous monopolism. Rink, in his book ofEskimo tales and traditions, cites a song which voices the reveries ofa Greenland bachelor:

  "I am going to leave the country--in a large ship--for that sweet little woman. I'll try to get some beads--of those that look like boiled ones. Then when I've gone abroad--I shall return again. My nasty little relatives--I'll call them all to me--and give them a good thrashing--with a big rope's end. Then I'll go to marry--_taking two at once_. That darling little creature--shall only wear clothes of the spotted seal-skins, and the other little pet shall have c
lothes of the young hooded seals."

  Powers (227) tells a tragic tale of the California Indians, which insome respects reminds one of the man who jumped into a bramble-bushand scratched out both his eyes.

  "There was once a man who loved two women and wished to marry them. Now these two women were magpies, but they loved him not, and laughed his wooing to scorn. Then he fell into a rage and cursed these two women, and went far away to the North. There he set the world on fire, then made for himself a tule boat, wherein he escaped to sea, and was never seen more."

  Belden, who spent twelve years among the Sioux and other Indians,writes (302):

  "I once knew a young man who had about a dozen horses he had captured at different times from the enemy, and who fell desperately in love with a girl of nineteen. _She loved him in return_, but said she could not bear to leave her tribe, and go to a Santee village, unless her two sisters, aged respectively fifteen and seventeen, went with her. Determined to have his sweetheart, the next time the warrior visited the Yankton village he took several ponies with him, and bought all three of the girls from their parents, giving five ponies for them."

  OBSTACLES TO MONOPOLISM

  Heriot, during his sojourn among Canadian Indians, became convincedfrom what he saw that love does not admit of divided affections, andcan hardly coexist with polygamy (324). Schoolcraft notes the "curiousfact" concerning the Indian that after a war "one of the first thingshe thought of as a proper reward for his bravery was to take anotherwife." In the chapter entitled "Honorable Polygamy" we saw how, inpolygamous communities the world over, monogamy was despised as the"poor man's marriage," and was practised, not from choice, but fromnecessity. Every man who was able to do so bought or stole severalwomen, and joined the honorable guild of polygamists. Such a custom,enforced by a strong public opinion, created a sentiment which greatlyretarded the development of monopolism in sexual love. A young Indianmight dream of marrying a certain girl, not, however, with a view togiving her his whole heart, but only as a beginning. The woman, it istrue, was expected to give herself to one husband, but he seldomhesitated to lend her to a friend as an act of hospitality, and inmany cases, would hire her out to a stranger in return for gifts.

  In not a few communities of Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Australia,Africa, and America polyandry prevailed; that is, the woman wasexpected to bestow her caresses in turn on two or more men, to thedestruction of the desire for exclusive possession which is animperative trait of love. Rowney describes (154) what we might callsyndicate marriage which has prevailed among the Meeris of India:

  "All the girls have their prices, the largest price for the best-looking girl varying from twenty to thirty pigs, and, if one man cannot give so many, he has no objection to take partners to make up the number."

  According to Julius Caesar, it was customary among the ancient Britonsfor brothers, and sometimes for father and sons, to have their wivesin common, and Tacitus found evidence of a similar custom among theancient Germans; while in some parts of Media it was the ambition ofthe women to have two or more husbands, and Strabo relates that thosewho succeeded looked down with pride on their less fortunate sisters.When the Spaniards first arrived at Lanzarote, in South America, theyfound the women married to several husbands, who lived with theircommon spouse in turn each a month. The Tibetans, according to SamuelTurner, look on marriage as a disagreeable duty which the members of afamily must try to alleviate by sharing its burdens. The Nair woman inIndia may have up to ten or twelve husbands, with each of whom shelives ten days at a time. Among some Himalayan tribes, when the oldestbrother marries, he generally shares his wife with his youngerbrothers.

  WIVES AND GIRLS IN COMMON

  Of the Port Lincoln Tribe in Australia, Schuermann says (223) that thebrothers practically have their wives in common.

  "A peculiar nomenclature has arisen from these singular connections; a woman honors the brothers of the man to whom she is married by the indiscriminate name of husbands; but the men make a distinction, calling their own individual spouses yungaras, and those to whom they have a secondary claim, by right of brotherhood, kartetis."

  R.H. Codrington, a scientifically educated missionary who hadtwenty-four years' experience on the islands of the Pacific, wrote avaluable book on the Melanesians in which occur the following luminousremarks:

  "All women who may become wives in marriage, and are not yet appropriated, are to a certain extent looked upon by those who may be their husbands as open to a more or less legitimate intercourse. In fact, appropriation of particular women to their own husbands, though established by every sanction of native custom, has by no means so strong a hold in native society, nor in all probability anything like so deep a foundation in the history of the native people, as the severance of either sex by divisions which most strictly limit the intercourse of men and women to those of the section or sections to which they themselves do not belong. Two proofs or exemplifications of this are conspicuous. (1) There is probably no place in which the common opinion of Melanesians approves the intercourse of the unmarried youths and girls as a thing good in itself, though it allows it as a thing to be expected and excused; but intercourse within the limit which restrains from marriage, where two members of the same division are concerned, is a crime, is incest.... (2) The feeling, on the other hand, that the intercourse of the sexes was natural where the man and woman belonged to different divisions, was shown by that feature of native hospitality which provided a guest with a temporary wife." Though now denied in some places, "there can be no doubt that it was common everywhere."

  Nor can there be any doubt that what Codrington here says of theMelanesians applies also to Polynesians, Australians, and touncivilized peoples in general. It shows that even where monogamyprevails--as it does quite extensively among the lower races[12]--wemust not look for monopolism as a matter of course. The two are veryfar from being identical. Primitive marriage is not a matter ofsentiment but of utility and sensual greed. Monogamy, in its lowerphases, does not exclude promiscuous intercourse before marriage and(with the husband's permission) after marriage. A man appropriates aparticular woman, not because he is solicitous for a monopoly of herchaste affections, but because he needs a drudge to cook and toil forhim. Primitive marriage, in short, has little in common with civilizedmarriage except the name--an important fact the disregard of which hasled to no end of confusion in anthropological and sociologicalliterature.[13]

  TRIAL MARRIAGES

  At a somewhat higher stage, marriage becomes primarily an institutionfor raising soldiers for the state or sons to perform ancestorworship. This is still very far from the modern ideal which makesmarriage a lasting union of two loving souls, children or no children.Particularly instructive, from our point of view, is the custom oftrial marriage, which has prevailed among many peoples differingotherwise as widely as ancient Egyptians and modern Borneans.[14] Amodern lover would loathe the idea of such a trial marriage, becausehe feels sure that his love will be eternal and unalterable. He may bemistaken, but that at any rate is his ideal: it includes lastingmonopolism. If a modern sweetheart offered her lover a temporarymarriage, he would either firmly and anxiously decline it, fearingthat she might take advantage of the contract and leave him at the endof the year; or, what is much more probable, his love, if genuine,would die a sudden death, because no respectable girl could make suchan offer, and genuine love cannot exist without respect for thebeloved, whatever may be said to the contrary by those who know notthe difference between sensual and sentimental love.

  TWO ROMAN LOVERS

  While I am convinced that all these things are as stated, I do notwish to deny that monopolism of a violent kind may and does occur inlove which is merely sensual. In fact, I have expressly classedmonopolism among those seven ingredients of
love which occur in itssensual as well as its sentimental phases. For a correct diagnosis oflove it is indeed of great importance to bear this in mind, as wemight otherwise be led astray by specious passages, especially inGreek and Roman literature, in which sensual love sometimes reaches adegree of subtility, delicacy, and refinement, which approximate it tosentimental love, though a critical analysis always reveals thedifference. The two best instances I know of occur in Tibullus andTerence. Tibullus, in one of his finest poems (IV., 13), expresses themonopolistic wish that his favorite might seem beautiful to him only,displeasing all others, for then he would be safe from all rivalry;then he might live happy in forest solitudes, and she alone would beto him a multitude:

  Atque utinam posses uni mihi bella videri; Displiceas aliis: sic ego tutus ero.

  Sic ego secretis possum bene vivere silvis Qua nulla humano sit via trita pede. Tu mihi curarum requies, tu nocte vel atra Lumen, et in solis tu mihi turba locis.

  Unfortunately, the opening line of this poem:

  Nulla tuum nobis subducet femina lectum,

  and what is known otherwise of the dissolute character of the poet andof all the women to whom he addressed his verses, make it only tooobvious that there is here no question of purity, of respect, ofadoration, of any of the qualities which distinguish supersensual lovefrom lust.

  More interesting still is a passage in the _Eunuchus_ of Terence (I.,2) which has doubtless misled many careless readers into accepting itas evidence of genuine romantic love, existing two thousand years ago:

  "What more do I wish?" asks Phaedria of his girl Thais: "That while at the soldier's side you are not his, that you love me day and night, desire me, dream of me, expect me, think of me, hope for me, take delight in me, finally, be my soul as I am yours."

  Here, too, there is no trace of supersensual, self-sacrificingaffection (the only sure test of love); but it might be argued thatthe monopolism, at any rate, is absolute. But when we read the wholeplay, even that is seen to be mere verbiage andaffectation--sentimentality,[15] not sentiment. The girl in questionis a common harlot "never satisfied with one lover," as Parmeno tellsher, and she answers: "Quite true, but do not bother me"--and herPhaedria, though he talks monopolism, does not _feel_ it, for in thefirst act she easily persuades him to retire to the country for a fewdays, while she offers herself to a soldier. And again, at the end ofthe play, when he seems at last to have ousted his military rival, thelatter's parasite Gnatho persuades him, without the slightestdifficulty, to continue sharing the girl with the soldier, because thelatter is old and harmless, but has plenty of money, while Phaedria ispoor.

  Thus a passage which at first sight seemed sentimental and romantic,resolves itself into flabby sensualism, with no more moral fibre thanthe "love" of the typical Turk, as revealed, for instance, in a lovesong, communicated by Eugene Schuyler (I., 135):

  "Nightingale! I am sad! As passionately as thou lovest the rose, so loudly sing that my loved one awake. Let me die in the embrace of my dear one, for I envy no one. I know that thou hast many lovers; but what affair of mine is that?"

  One of the most characteristic literary curiosities relating tomonopolism that I have found occurs in the Hindoo drama, _Malavika andAgnimitra_ (Act V.). While intended very seriously, to us it reads forall the world like a polygamous parody by Artemus Ward of Byron'slines just cited ("She was his life, The ocean to the river of histhoughts, Which terminated all"). An Indian queen having generouslybestowed on her husband a rival to be his second wife, Kausiki, aBuddhist nun, commends her action in these words:

  "I am not surprised at your magnanimity. If wives are kind and devoted to their husbands they even serve them by bringing them new wives, like the streams which become channels for conveying the water of the rivers to the ocean."

  Monopolism has a watch-dog, a savage Cerberus, whose duty it is toward off intruders. He goes by the name of Jealousy, and claims ourattention next.

  III. JEALOUSY

  For love, thou know'st, is full of jealousy. --_Shakspere_.

  Jealousy may exist apart from sexual love, but there can be no suchlove without jealousy, potential at any rate, for in the absence ofprovocation it need never manifest itself. Of all the ingredients oflove it is the most savage and selfish, as commonly witnessed, and weshould therefore expect it to be present at all stages of thispassion, including the lowest. Is this the case? The answer dependsentirely upon what we mean by jealousy. Giraud-Teulon and Le Bon haveheld--as did Rousseau long before them--that this passion is unknownamong almost all uncivilized peoples, whereas the latest writer on thesubject, Westermarck, tries to prove (117) that "jealousy isuniversally prevalent in the human race at the present day" and that"it is impossible to believe that there ever was a time when man wasdevoid of that powerful feeling." It seems strange that doctors shoulddisagree so radically on what seems so simple a question; but we shallsee that the question is far from being simple, and that the disputearose from that old source of confusion, the use of one word forseveral entirely different things.

  RAGE AT RIVALS

  It is among fishes, in the scale of animal life, that jealousy firstmakes its appearance, according to Romanes. But in animals "jealousy,"be it that of a fish or a stag, is little more than a transient rageat a rival who comes in presence of the female he himself covets orhas appropriated. This murderous wrath at a rival is a feeling which,as a matter of course a human savage may share with a wolf or analligator; and in its ferocious indulgence primitive man placeshimself on a level with brutes--nay, below them, for in the strugglehe often kills the female, which an animal never does. This wrath isnot jealousy as we know it; it lacks a number of essential moral,intellectual, imaginative elements as we shall presently see; some ofthese are found in the amorous relations of birds, but not of savages,who are now under discussion. If it is true that, as some authoritiesbelieve, there was a time when human beings had, like animals, regularand limited annual mating periods, this rage at rivals must have oftenassumed the most ferocious aspect, to be followed, as with animals, bylong periods of indifference.[16]

  WOMEN AS PRIVATE PROPERTY

  It is obvious, however, that since the human infant needs parentalcare much longer than young animals need it, natural selection musthave favored the survival of the offspring of couples who did notseparate after a mating period but remained together some years. Thistendency would be further favored by the warrior's desire to have aprivate drudge or conjugal slave. Having stolen or bought such a"wife" and protected her against wild beasts and men, he would come tofeel a sense of _ownership_ in her--as in his private weapons. Shouldanyone steal his weapons, or, at a higher stage, his cattle or otherproperty, he would be animated by a _fierce desire for revenge_; andthe same would be the case if any man stole his wife--or her favors.This savage desire for revenge is the second phase of "jealousy," whenwomen are guarded like other property, encroachment on which impelsthe owner to angry retaliation either on the thief or on the wife whohas become his accomplice. Even among the lowest races, such as theFuegians and Australians, great precautions are taken to guard womenfrom "robbers." From the nature of the case, women are more difficultto guard than any other kind of "movable" property, as they are apt tomove of their own accord. Being often married against their will, tomen several times their age, they are only too apt to make commoncause with the gallant. Powers relates that among the CaliforniaIndians, a woman was severely punished or even killed by her husbandif seen in company with another man in the woods; and an Australiantakes it for granted, says Curr, "that his wife has been unfaithful tohim whenever there has been an opportunity for criminality." Thepoacher may be simply flogged or fined, but he is apt to be mutilatedor killed. The "injured husband" reserves the right to intrigue withas many women as he pleases, but his wife, being his absoluteproperty, has no rights of her own, and if she follows his bad examplehe
mutilates or kills her too.

  HORRIBLE PUNISHMENTS

  Strangling, stoning, burning, impaling, flaying alive, tearing limbfrom limb, throwing from a tower, burying alive, disemboweling,enslaving, drowning, mutilating, are some of the punishments inflictedby savages and barbarians in all parts of the world on adulterous menor women. Specifications would be superfluous. Let one case stand fora hundred. Maximilian Prinz zu Wied relates (I., 531, 572), that theIndians (Blackfeet),

  "severely punished infidelity on the part of their wives by cutting off their noses. At Fort Mackenzie we saw a number of women defaced in this hideous manner. In about a dozen tents we saw at least half a dozen females thus disfigured."

  Must we not look upon the state of mind which leads to such terribleactions as genuine jealousy? Is there any difference between it andthe feeling we ourselves know under that name? There is--a world-widedifference. Take Othello, who though a Moor, acts and feels more likean Englishman. The desire for revenge animates him too: "I'll tear herto pieces," he exclaimed when Iago slanders Desdemona--"will chop herinto messes," and as for Cassio,

  Oh, that the slave had forty thousand lives! One is too poor, too weak for my revenge.

  * * * * *

  Arise, black vengeance from the hollow hell.

  ESSENCE OF TRUE JEALOUSY

  But this eagerness for revenge is only one phase of his passion.Though it leads him, in a frenzy of despair, to smother his wife, itis yet, even in his violent soul, subordinate to those feelings of_wounded honor and outraged affection_ which constitute the essence oftrue jealousy. When he supposes himself betrayed by his wife and hisfriend he clutches, as Ulrici remarks (I., 404), with the blinddespair of a shipwrecked man to his sole remaining property--_honor_:

  "His honor, as he thinks, demands the sacrifice of the lives of Desdemona and Cassio. The idea of honor in those days, especially in Italy, inevitably required the death of the faithless wife as well as that of the adulterer. Othello therefore regards it as his duty to comply with this requirement, and, accordingly it is no lie when he calls himself 'an honorable murderer,' doing 'naught in hate, but all in honor,'.... Common thirst for revenge would have thought only of increasing the sufferings of its victim, of adding to its own satisfaction. But how touching, on the other hand, is Othello's appeal to Desdemona to pray and to confess her sins to Heaven, that he may not kill her soul with her body! Here, at the moment of the most intense excitement, in the desperate mood of a murderer, his love still breaks forth, and we again see the indestructible nobility of his soul."

  Schlegel erred, therefore, when he maintained that Othello's jealousywas of the sensual, Oriental sort. So far as it led to the murder, itwas; but Shakspere gave it touches which allied it to the truejealousy of the heart of which Schlegel himself has aptly said that itis "compatible with the tenderest feeling and adoration of the belovedobject." Of such tender feeling and adoration there is not a trace inthe passion of the Indian who bites off his wife's nose or lower lipto disfigure her, or who ruthlessly slays her for doing once what hedoes at will. Such expressions as "outraged affection," or "alienatedaffection," do not apply to him, as there is no affection in the caseat all; no more than in that of the old Persian or Turk who sews upone of his hundred wives in a sack and throws her into the riverbecause she was starving and would eat of the fruits of the tree ofknowledge. This Oriental jealousy is often a "dog-in-the-manger"feeling. The Iroquois were the most intelligent of North AmericanIndians, yet in cases of adultery they punished the woman solely, "whowas supposed to be the only offender" (Morgan, 331). Affection is outof the question in such cases, anger at a slave's disobedience, andvengeance, being the predominant feelings. In countries where woman isdegraded and enslaved, as Verplanck remarks (III., 61),

  "the jealous revenge of the master husband, for real or imagined evil, is but the angry chastisement of an offending slave, not the _terrible sacrifice of his own happiness involved in the victim's punishment._ When woman is a slave, a property, a thing, all that jealousy may prompt is done, to use Othello's own distinction, 'in hate' and 'not in love.'"

  Another equally vital distinction between the jealousy of savagery andcivilization is indicated in these lines from _Othello_:

  I had rather be a toad, And live upon the vapor of a dungeon, Than keep a corner in the thing I love For other's uses.

  And again:

  I had been happy, if the general camp, Pioners and all, had tasted her sweet body, So I had nothing known.

  ABSENCE OF MASCULINE JEALOUSY

  It is the knowledge, or suspicion, that he has not a monopoly of hiswife that tortures Shakspere's Othello, and constitutes the essence ofhis jealousy, whereas a savage is his exact antipode in that respect;he cares not a straw if the whole camp shares the embraces of hiswife--_provided he knows it and is rewarded for it_. Wounded pride,violated chastity, and broken conjugal vows--pangs which goad us intojealousy--are considerations unknown to him. In other words, his"jealousy" is not a solicitude for marital honor, for wifely purityand affection, but simply a question of lending his property and beingpaid for it. Thus, in the case of the Blackfeet Indians referred to amoment ago, the author declares that while they mutilated erring wivesby cutting off their noses (the Comanches and other tribes, down tothe Brazilian Botocudos, did the same thing), they eagerly offeredtheir wives and daughters in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. In thisrespect, too, this case is typical. Sutherland found (I., 184) that inregard to twenty-one tribes of Indians out of thirty-eight there wasexpress record of unlimited intercourse before marriage and theloaning or exchanging of wives. In seventeen he could not get expressinformation, and in only four was it stated that a chaste girl wasmore esteemed than an unchaste one. In the chapter on Indifference toChastity I cited testimony showing that in Australia, the PacificIslands, and among aborigines in general, chastity is not valued as avirtue. There are plenty of tribes that attempt to enforce it, but forcommercial, sensual, or at best, genealogical reasons, not from aregard for personal purity; so that among all these lower racesjealousy in our sense of the word is out of the question.

  Care must be taken not to be imposed on by deceptive facts andinaccurate testimony. Thus Westermarck says (119) that

  "in the Pelew Islands it is forbidden even to speak about another man's wife or mention her name. In short, the South Sea Islanders are, as Mr. Macdonald remarks, generally jealous of the chastity of their wives."

  Nothing could be more misleading than these two sentences. The men are_not_ jealous of the women's _chastity_, for they unhesitatingly lendthem to other men; they are "jealous" of them simply as they are oftheir other movable property. As for the Pelew Islanders inparticular, what Westermarck cites from Ymer is quite true; it is alsotrue that if a man beats or insults a woman he must pay a fine orsuffer the death penalty; and that if he approaches a place wherewomen are bathing he must put them on their guard by shouting. But allthese things are mere whimsicalities of barbarian custom, for thePelew Islanders are notoriously unchaste even for Polynesians. Theyhave no real family life; they have club-houses in which men consortpromiscuously with women; and no moral restraint of any sort is putupon boys and girls, nor have they any idea of modesty or decency.[17](Ploss, II., 416; Kotzebue, III., 215.)

  A century ago Alexander Mackenzie wrote (66) regarding the Knistenauxor Cree Indians of the Northwest:

  "It does not appear ... that chastity is considered by them as a virtue; or that fidelity is believed to be essential to the happiness of wedded life; though it sometimes happens that the infidelity of a wife is punished by the husband with the loss of her hair, nose, and perhaps life; such severity proceeds from its having been practised without his permission; for a temporary exchange of wives is not uncommon; and the offer of th
eir persons is considered as a necessary part of the hospitality due to strangers."

  Of the Natchez Indians Charlevoix wrote (267): "There is no such thingas jealousy in these marriages; on the contrary the Natchez, withoutany ceremony, lend one another their wives." Concerning the Eskimos weread in Bancroft:

  "They have no idea of morality, and the marriage relation sits so loosely as to hardly excite jealousy in its abuse. Female chastity is held a thing of value only as men hold property in it." "A stranger is always provided with a female companion for the night, and during the husband's absence he gets another man to take his place" (I., 81, 80).

  The evidence collected by him also shows that the Thlinkeets andAleuts freely exchanged or lent their wives. Of the coast Indians ofSouthern Alaska and British Columbia, A.P. Niblack says (_Smithson.Rep_., 1888, 347):

  "Jealousy being unknown amongst the Indians, and sanctioned prostitution a common evil, the woman who can earn the greatest number of blankets or the largest sum of money wins the admiration of others for herself and a high position for her husband by her wealth."

  In the same government reports (1886, Pt. I.) C. Willoughby writes ofthe Quinault Agency Washington Indians: "In their domestic relationschastity seems to be almost unknown." Of the Chippewayans Hearnerelates (129) that it is a very common custom among the men toexchange a night's lodging with each other's wives. But this is so farfrom being considered as an act which is criminal, that it is esteemedby them as one of the strongest ties of friendship between twofamilies.[18] The Hurons and many other tribes from north to south hadlicentious festivals at which promiscuous intercourse prevailedbetraying the absence of jealousy. Of the Tupis of Brazil Southey says(I., 241): "The wives who found themselves neglected, consoledthemselves by initiating the boys in debauchery. The husbands seem tohave known nothing of jealousy." The ancient inhabitants of Venezuelalived in houses big enough to hold one hundred and sixty persons, andHerrera says of them:

  "They observed no law or rule in matrimony, but took as many wives as they would, and they as many husbands, quitting one another at pleasure, without reckoning any harm done on either part. There was no such thing as jealousy among them, all living as best pleased them, without taking offence at one another."

  The most painstaking research has failed to reveal to me a singleIndian tribe in North or South America that showed a capacity for realjealousy, that is, anguish based on a sense of violated wifelychastity and alienated affection. The actions represented as due tojealousy are always inspired by the desire for revenge, never by theanguish of disappointed affection; they are done in hate, not in love.A chief who kills or mutilates one of his ten wives for consortingwith another man without his consent, acts no more from jealousy,properly so called, than does a father who shoots the seducer of hisdaughter, or a Western mob that lynches a horse-thief. Among theAustralian aborigines killing an intriguing wife is an every-dayoccurrence, though "chastity as a virtue is absolutely unknown amongstall the tribes of which there are records," as one of the bestinformed authorities, J.D. Wood, tells us (403). Detailed evidencethat the same is true of the aborigines of all the continents will begiven in later chapters. The natives usually share their females bothbefore and after marriage; monopoly of body and soul--of which truejealousy is the guardian--is a conception beyond their moral horizon.A few more illustrations may be added.

  Burton (_T.T.G.L._, II., 27) cites a writer who says that the nativesof Sao Paulo had a habit of changing wives for a time, "alleging, incase of reproof, that they are not able to eat always of the samedish." Holub testifies (II., 83) that in South Africa jealousy "rarelyshows itself very prominently;" and he uses the word in the widestsense. The fierce Masai lend their wives to guests. The Mpongwe of theGaboon River send out their wives--with a club if necessary--to earnthe wages of shame (Campiegne, 192). In Madagascar Ellis (137) foundsensuality gross and universal, though concealed. Unchastity in eithersex was not regarded as a vice, and on the birth of the king'sdaughter "the whole capital was given up to promiscuous debauchery."According to Mrs. French Sheldon (_Anth. Inst._, XXL, 360), all alongthe east coast of Africa no shame attaches to unchastity beforemarriage. It is needless to add that in all such cases punishment of awife cannot be prompted by real jealousy for her "chastity." It isalways a question of proprietorship. Cameron relates _(Across Africa_,II., Chap. IV.) that in Urua the chief boasted that he exercised aright to any woman who might please his fancy, when on his journeysabout the country.

  "Morals are very lax throughout the country, and wives are not thought badly of for being unfaithful; the worst they may expect being severe chastisement from the injured husband. But he never uses excessive violence for fear of injuring a valuable piece of household furniture."

  When Du Chaillu travelled through Ashango Land King Quenqueza rose toreceive him.

  "With the figurative politeness of a negro chief, he assured me that his town, his forests, his slaves, his wives, were mine (he was quite sincere with regard to the last") (19).

  Asia affords many instances of the absence of jealousy. Marco Poloalready noted that in Thibet, when travellers arrived at a place, itwas customary to distribute them in the houses, making them temporarymasters of all they contained, including the women, while theirhusbands meanwhile lodged elsewhere. In Kamtschatka it was considereda great insult if a guest refused a woman thus offered him. Mostastounding of all is what G.E. Robertson relates of the Kaffirs ofHindu-Kush (553):

  "When a woman is discovered in an intrigue, a great outcry is made, and the neighbors rush to the scene with much laughter. A goat is sent for on the spot for a peace-making feast between the gallant and the husband. Of course the neighbors also partake of the feast; _the husband and wife both look very happy_, and so does every one else except the lover, who has to pay for the goat, and in addition will have to pay six cows later on."

  Here we see a great value attached apparently to conjugal fidelity,but in reality an utter and ludicrous indifference to it.

  Asia is also the chief home of polyandry, though, as we saw in thepreceding chapter, this custom has prevailed on other continents too.The cases there cited to show the absence of monopoly also prove theabsence of jealousy. The effect of polyandry is thus referred to byColonel King (23):

  "A Toda woman often has three or four husbands, who are all brothers, and with each of whom she cohabits a month at a time. What is more singular, such men as, by the paucity of women among the tribe, are prevented from obtaining a share in a wife, are allowed, with the permission of the fraternal husbands, to become temporary partners with them. Notwithstanding these singular family arrangements, the greatest harmony appears to prevail among all parties--husbands, wives, and lovers."

  Whatever may have been the causes leading to the strange custom ofmarrying one woman to several men--poverty, the desire to reduce thepopulation in mountainous regions, scarcity of women due to femaleinfanticide, the need of protection of a woman during the absence ofone husband--the fact stares us in the face that a race of men whocalmly submit to such a disgusting practice cannot know jealousy. So,too, in the cases of _jus primae noctis_ (referred to in the chapteron Indifference to Chastity), where the men not only submitted to anoutrage so damnable to our sense of honor, affection, and monopoly,but actually coveted it as a privilege or a religious blessing andpaid for it accordingly. Note once more how the sentiments associatedwith women and love change and grow.

  Petherick says (151) that among the Hassangeh Arabs, marriages arevalid only three or four days, the wives being free the rest of thetime to make other alliances. The married men, far from feeling this agrievance,

  "felt themselves highly flattered by any attentions paid to their better halves during their free-and-easy days. They seem to take such attentions as evidence that their wives a
re attractive."

  A readiness to forgive trespasses for a consideration is widelyprevalent. Powers says that with the California Indians "no adulteryis so flagrant but the husband can be placated with money, at aboutthe same rate that would be paid for murder." The Tasmaniansillustrate the fact that the same tribes that are the most ferociousin the punishment of secret amours--that is, infringements on theirproperty rights--are often the most liberal in lending their wives. AsBonwick tells us (72), they felt honored if white men paid attentionto them. A circumstance which seems to have puzzled some naivewriters: that Australians and Africans have been known to show less"jealousy" of whites than of their own countrymen, finds an easyexplanation in the greater ability of the white man to pay for thehusband's complaisance. In some cases, in the absence of a fine, thehusband takes his revenge in other ways, subjecting the culprit's wifeto the same outrage (as among natives of Guiana and New Caledonia) ordelivering his own guilty (or rather disobedient) wife to young men(as among the Omahas) and then abandoning her. The custom of acceptingcompensation for adultery prevailed also among Dyaks, Mandingoes,Kaffirs, Mongolians, Pahari and other tribes of India, etc. Falknersays (126) that among the Patagonians in cases of adultery the wife isnot blamed, but the gallant is punished

  "unless he atones for the injury by some valuable present. They have so little decency in this respect, that oftentimes, at the command of the wizards, they superstitiously send their wives to the woods to prostitute themselves to the first person they meet."

  PERSIAN AND GREEK JEALOUSY

  Enough has been said to prove the incorrectness of Westermarck'sassertion (515) that the lack of jealousy is "a rare exception in thehuman race." Real jealousy, as a matter of fact, is unknown to thelower races, and even the feeling of revenge that passes by that nameis commonly so feeble as to be obliterated by compensations of a moreor less trifling kind. When we come to a stage of civilization likethat represented by Persians and other Orientals, or by the ancientGreeks, we find that men are indeed no longer willing to lend theirwives. They seem to have a regard for chastity and a desire forconjugal monopoly. Other important traits of modern jealousy are,however, still lacking, notably affection. The punishments arehideously cruel; they are still inflicted "in hate, not in love." Inother words, the jealousy is not yet of the kind which may form aningredient of love. Its essence is still "bloody thoughts andrevenge."

  Reich cites (256) a typical instance of Oriental ferocity toward anerring wife, from a book by J.J. Strauss, who relates that on June 9,1671, a Persian avenged himself on his wife for a trespass by flayingher alive, and then, as a warning to other women, hanging up her skinin the house. Strauss saw with his own eyes how the flayed body wasthrown into the street and dragged out into a field. Drowning insacks, throwing from towers, and other fiendish modes of vengeancehave prevailed in Persia as far back as historic records go; and thewomen, when they got a chance, were no better than the men. Herodotusrelates how the wife of Xerxes, having found her husband's cloak inthe house of Masista, cut off his wife's breasts and gave them to thedogs, besides mutilating her otherwise, as well as her daughter.

  The monogamous Greeks were not often guilty of such atrocities, buttheir custom (nearly universal and not confined to Athens, as is oftenerroneously stated) of locking up their women in the interior of thehouses, shutting them off from almost everything that makes lifeinteresting, betrays a kind of jealousy hardly less selfish than thatof the savages who disposed of their wives as they pleased. Itpractically made slaves and prisoners of them, quite in the Orientalstyle. Such a custom indicates an utter lack of sympathy andtenderness, not to speak of the more romantic ingredients of love,such as adoration and gallantry; and it implies a supreme contempt forand distrust of, character in wives, all the more reprehensiblebecause the Greeks did not value purity _per se_ but only forgenealogical reason, as is proved by the honors they paid to thedisreputable hetairai. There are surprisingly few references tomasculine jealousy in Greek erotic literature. The typical Greek loverseems to have taken rivalry as blandly as the hero of Terence's playspoken of in the last chapter, who, after various outbursts ofsentimentality, is persuaded, in a speech of a dozen lines, to sharehis mistress with a rich officer. Nor can I see anything but maudlinsentimentality in such conceits as Meleager utters in two of his poems(_Anthology_, 88, 93) in which he expresses jealousy of sleep, for itsprivilege of closing his mistress's eyes; and again of the flies whichsuck her blood and interrupt her slumber. The girl referred to isZenophila, a common wanton (see No. 90). This is the sensual side ofthe Greek jealousy, chastity being out of the question.

  The purely genealogical side of Greek masculine jealousy is strikinglyrevealed in the _Medea_ of Euripides. Medea had, after slaying her ownbrother, left her country to go with Jason to Corinth. Here Jason,though he had two children by her, married the daughter of the KingCreon. With brutal frankness, but quite in accordance with the selfishGreek ideas, he tries to explain to Medea the motives for his secondmarriage: that they might all dwell in comfort instead of sufferingwant,

  "and that I might rear my sons as doth befit my house; further, that I might be the father of brothers for the children thou hast borne, and raise these to the same high rank, uniting the family in one--_to my lasting bliss_. Thou, indeed, hast no need of more children, but me it profits to help my present family by that which is to be. Have I miscarried here? Not even thou wouldst say so unless a rival's charms rankled in thy bosom. No, but you women have such strange ideas, that you think all is well so long as your married life runs smooth; but if some mischance occur to ruffle your love, all that was good and lovely erst you reckon as your foes. Yea, men should have begotten children from some other source, no female race existing; thus would no evil ever have fallen on mankind."

  Jason, Greek-fashion, looked upon a woman's jealousy as mere unbridledlust, which must not be allowed to stand in the way of the men'sselfish desire to secure filial worship of their precious shades afterdeath. As Benecke remarks (56): "For a woman to wish to keep herhusband to herself was a sign that she was at once unreasonable andlascivious." The women themselves were trained and persuaded to takethis view. The chorus of Corinthian women admonishes Medea: "And ifthy lord prefers a fresh love, be not angered with him for that; Zeuswill judge 'twixt thee and him herein." Medea herself says to Jason:"Hadst thou been childless still, I could have pardoned thy desire forthis new union." And again: "Hadst thou not had a villain's heart,thou shouldst have gained my consent, then made this match, instead ofhiding it from those who loved thee"--a sentiment which would seem tous astounding and inexplicable had we not became familiar with it inthe preceding pages relating to savages and barbarians, by whom whatwe call infidelity was considered unobjectionable, provided it was notdone secretly.

  By her subsequent actions Medea shows in other ways that her jealousyis entirely of the primitive sort--fiendish revenge proceeding fromhate. Of the chorus she asks but one favor: "Silence, if haply I cansome way or means devise to _avenge_ me on my husband for this crueltreatment;" and the chorus agrees: "Thou wilt be taking a justvengeance on thy husband, Medea." Creon, having heard that she hadthreatened with mischief not only Jason but his bride and her father,wants her to leave the city. She replies, hypocritically:

  "Fear me not, Creon, my position scarce is such that I should seek to quarrel with princes. Why should I, for how hast thou injured me? Thou hast betrothed thy daughter where thy fancy prompted thee. No, 'tis my husband I hate."

  But as soon as the king has left her, she sends to the innocent bridea present of a beautifully embroidered robe, poisoned by witchcraft.As soon as the bride has put it on she turns pale, foam issues fromher mouth, her eyeballs roll in their sockets, a flame encircles her,preying on her flesh. With an awful shriek she sinks to the earth,past all recognition save to the eye of her father, who folds her inhis arms, crying, "Who is robbing me of thee, old as I am
and ripe fordeath? Oh, my child! would I could die with thee!" And his wish isgranted, for he

  "found himself held fast by the fine-spun robe...and then ensued a fearful struggle. He strove to rise but she still held him back; and if ever he pulled with all his might, from off his bones his aged flesh he tore. At last he gave it up, and breathed forth his soul in awful suffering; for he could no longer master the pain."

  Not content with this, Medea cruelly slays Jason's children--her ownflesh and blood--not in a frenzied impulse, for she has meditated thatfrom the beginning, but to further glut her revengeful spirit. "I didit," she says to Jason, "to vex thy heart." And when she hears of theeffect of the garment she had sent to his bride, she implores themessenger, "Be not so hasty, friend, but tell the manner of her death,for thou wouldst give me double joy, if so they perished miserably."

  PRIMITIVE FEMININE JEALOUSY

  A passion of which such horrors are a possible outcome may well haveled Euripides to write: "Ah me! ah me! to mortal man how dread ascourge is love!" But this passion is not love, or part of love. Thehorrors of such "jealousy" are often witnessed in modern life, but notwhere true love--affection--ever had its abode. It is the jealousy ofthe savage, which still survives, as other low phases of sexualpassion do. The records of missionaries and others who have dweltamong savages contain examples of deeds as foul, as irrational, asvindictive as Medea's; deeds in which, as in the play of Euripides,the fury is vented on innocent victims, while the real culprit escapeswith his life and sometimes even derives amusement from the situation.In _Oneota_ (187-90), Schoolcraft relates the story of an Indian'swife who entered the lodge when his new bride was sitting by his sideand plunged a dagger in her heart. Among the Fuegians Bove found (131)that in polygamous households many a young favorite lost her lifethrough the fury of the other wives. More frequently this kind ofjealousy vents itself in mutilations. Williams, in his book on theFijians (152), relates that one day a native woman was asked, "How isit that so many of you women are without a nose?" The answer was: "Itgrows out of a plurality of wives. Jealousy causes hatred, and thenthe stronger tries to cut or bite off the nose of the one she hates,"He also relates a case where a wife, jealous of a younger favorite,"pounced on her, and tore her sadly with nails and teeth, and injuredher mouth by attempting to slit it open," A woman who had for twoyears been a member of a polygamous family told Williams thatcontentions among the women were endless, that they knew no comfort,that the bitterest hatred prevailed, while mutual cursings andrecriminations were of daily occurrence. When one of the wives is sounfortunate as to fall under the husband's displeasure too, the others"fall upon her, cuffing, kicking, scratching, and even trampling onthe poor creature, so unmercifully as to leave her half dead." Bournewrites (89), that Patagonian women sometimes "fight like tigers.Jealousy is a frequent occasion. If a squaw suspects her liege lord ofundue familiarity with a rival, she darts upon the fair enchantresswith the fury of a wild beast; then ensues such a pounding,scratching, hair-pulling, as beggars description." Meanwhile the gaydeceiver stands at a safe distance, chuckling at the fun. Thelicentiousness of these Indians, he says, is equal to their cruelty.Powers (238) gives this graphic picture of a domestic scene commonamong the Wintun Indians of California. A chief, he says, may have twoor more wives, but the attempt to introduce a second frequently leadsto a fight.

  "The two women dispute for the supremacy, often in a desperate pitched battle with sharp stones, seconded by their respective friends. They maul each other's faces with savage violence, and if one is knocked down her friends assist her to regain her feet, and the brutal combat is renewed until one or the other is driven from the wigwam. The husband stands by and looks placidly on, and when all is over he accepts the situation, retaining in his lodge the woman who has conquered the territory."

  ABSENCE OF FEMININE JEALOUSY

  As a rule, however, there is more bark than bite in the conduct of thewives of a polygamous household, as is proved by the ease with whichthe husband, if he cares to, can with words or presents overcome theobjections of his first wife to new-comers; even, for instance, in thecase of such advanced barbarians as the Omaha Indians, who are said tohave actually allowed a wife to punish a faithless husband--anexception so rare as to be almost incredible. Dorsey says of theOmahas (26):

  "When a man wishes to take a second wife he always consults his first wife, reasoning thus with her: 'I wish you to have less work to do, so I think of taking your sister, your aunt, or your brother's daughter for my wife. You can then have her to aid you with your work.' Should the first wife refuse, the man cannot marry the other woman. Generally no objection is offered, if the second woman be one of the kindred of the first wife. Sometimes the wife will make the proposition to her husband: 'I wish you to marry my brother's daughter, as she and I are one flesh.'"

  Concerning the inhabitants of the Philippine island of Mindanao, aGerman writer says (_Zeit. fuer Ethn_., 1885, 12):

  "The wives are in no way jealous of one another; on the contrary, they are glad to get a new companion, as that enables them to share their work with another."

  Schwaner says of the Borneans that if a man takes a second wife hepays to the first the _batu saki_, amounting to from sixty to onehundred guilders, and moreover he gives her presents, consisting ofclothes, "in order to appease her completely," In reference to thetribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon, Gibbs says(198):

  "The accession of a new wife in the lodge very naturally produces jealousy and discord, and the first often returns for a time in dudgeon to her friends, to be reclaimed by her husband when he chooses, perhaps after propitiating her by some presents."

  Such instances might be multiplied _ad libitum_.

  In a still larger number of cases primitive woman's objection torivals is easily overcome by the desire for the social position,wealth, and comfort which polygamy confers. I have already cited, inthe chapter on Honorable Polygamy, a number of typical incidentsshowing how vanity, the desire to belong to a man who can affordseveral wives, or the wish to share the hard domestic or field workwith others, often smothers the feeling of jealousy so completely thatwives laugh at the idea of having their husbands all to themselves,beg them to choose other companions, or even use their own hard-earnedmoney to buy them for their husbands. As this point is of exceptionalimportance, as evidencing radical changes in the ideas relating tosexual relations--and the resulting feelings themselves--furtherevidence is admissible.

  Of the Plains Indians in general Colonel Dodge remarks (20):

  "Jealousy would seem to have no place in the composition of an Indian woman, and many prefer to be, even for a time, the favorite of a man who already has a wife or wives, and who is known to be a good husband and provider, rather than tempt the precarious chances of an untried man."

  And again:

  "I have known several Indians of middle age, with already numerous wives and children, who were such favorites with the sex that they might have increased their number of wives to an unlimited extent had they been so disposed, and this, too, from among the very nicest girls of the tribe."

  E.R. Smith, in his book on the Araucanians (213-14) tells of a Mapuchewife who, when he saw her,

  "was frequently accompanied by a younger and handsomer woman than herself, whom she pointed out, with evident satisfaction, as her 'other self'--that is, her husband's wife number two, a recent addition to the family. Far from being dissatisfied, or entertaining any jealousy toward the newcomer, she said that she wished her husband would marry again; for she considered it a great relief to have someone to assist her in her household duties and in the maintenance of her husband."

  McLean, who spent twenty-five years among the Tacullies and otherIndians of the Hudson Bay region, says (301) that while polygamyprevail
s "the most perfect harmony seems to subsist among them."Hunter, who knew the Missouri and Arkansas Indians well, says (255)that "jealousy is a passion but little known, and much less indulged,among the Indians." In cases of polygamy the wives have their ownlodges, separated by a short distance. They "occasionally visit eachother, and generally live on the most friendly terms." But even thisseparation is not necessary, as we see from Catlin, who relates (I.,119) that among the Mandans it is common to see six or eight wives ofa chief or medicine man "living under one roof, and all apparentlyquiet and contented."

  In an article on the Zulus (_Humanitarian_, March, 1897), Miss Colensorefers to the fact that while polygamy is the custom, each wife hasher own hut, wherefore

  "you have none of the petty jealousies and quarrelling which distinguish the harems of the East, among the Zulu women, who, as a rule, are most friendly to each other, and the many wives of a great chief will live in a little colony of huts, each mistress in her own house and family, and interchanging friendly visits with the other ladies similarly situated."

  But in Africa, too, separation is not essential to secure a peacefulresult. Paulitschke (_B.E.A.S_., 30) reports that among the Somalipolygamy is customary, two wives being frequent, and he adds that "thewives live together in harmony and have their household in common."Among the Abyssinian Arabs, Sir Samuel Baker found (127) that"concubinage is not considered a breach of morality; neither is itregarded by the legitimate wives with jealousy." Chillie (_Centr.Afr_., 158), says of the Landamas and Nalous: "It is very remarkablethat good order and perfect harmony prevail among all these women whoare called to share the same conjugal couch." The same writer says ofthe polygamous Foulahs (224):

  "In general the women appear very happy, and by no means jealous of each other, except when the husbands make a present to one without giving anything to the rest."

  Note the last sentence; it casts a strong light on our problem. Itsuggests that even where a semblance of jealousy is manifested by suchwomen it may often be an entirely different thing from the jealousy weassociate with love; envy, greed, or rivalry being more accurate termsfor it. Here is another instance in point. Drake, in his work on theIndians of the United States has the following (I., 178):

  "Where there is a plurality of wives, if one gets finer goods than the others, there is sure to be some quarrelling among the women; and if one or two of them are not driven off, it is because the others have not strength enough to do so. The man sits and looks on, and lets the women fight it out. If the one he loves most is driven off, he will go and stay with her, and leave the others to shift for themselves awhile, until they can behave better, as he says."

  The Rev. Peter Jones gives this description (81) of a fight hewitnessed between the two wives of an Ojibway chief:

  "The quarrel arose from the unequal distribution of a loaf of bread between the children. The husband being absent, the wife who had brought the bread to the wigwam gave a piece of it to each child, but the best and largest portion to her _own_. Such partiality immediately led to a quarrel. The woman who brought the bread threw the remainder in anger to the other; she as quickly cast it back again; in this foolish way they kept on for some time, till their fury rose to such a height that they at length sprang at one another, catching hold of the hair of the head; and when each had uprooted a handful their ire seemed satisfied."

  To make clear the difference between such ebullitions of temper andthe passion properly called jealousy, let us briefly sum up thecontents of this chapter. In its first stage it is a mere masculinerage in presence of a rival. An Australian female in such a casecalmly goes off with the victor. A savage looks upon his wife, not asa person having rights and feelings of her own, but as a piece ofproperty which he has stolen or bought, and may therefore do withwhatever he pleases. In the second stage, accordingly, women areguarded like other movable property, infringement on which is fiercelyresented and avenged, though not from any jealous regard for chastity,for the same husband who savagely punishes his wife for secretadultery, willingly lends her to guests as a matter of hospitality, orto others for a compensation. In some cases the husband's "woundedfeelings" may be cured by the payment of a fine, or subjecting theculprit's wife to indignities. At a higher stage, where some regard ispaid to chastity--at least in the women reserved for genealogicalpurposes--masculine jealousy is still of the sensual type, which leadsto the life-long imprisonment of women in order to enforce a fidelitywhich in the absence of true love could not be secured otherwise. Asfor the wives in primitive households, they often indulge in "jealous"squabbles, but their passion, though it may lead to manifestations ofrage and to fierce and cruel fights, is after all only skin deep, forit is easily overcome with soft words, presents, or the desire for thesocial position and comfort which can be secured in the house of a manwho is wealthy enough to marry several women--especially if thehusband is rich and wise enough to keep the women in separate lodges;though even that is often unnecessary.

  There is no difficulty in understanding why primitive feminine"jealousy," despite seeming exceptions, should have been so shallowand transient a feeling. Everything conspired to make it so. From theearliest times the men made systematic efforts to prevent the growthof that passion in women because it interfered with their own selfishdesires. Hearne says of the women of the Northern Indians that "theyare kept so much in awe of their husbands, that the liberty ofthinking is the greatest privilege they enjoy" (310); and A.H. Keane(_Journ. of Anthrop. Inst_., 1883) remarks that while the Botocudosoften indulge in fierce outbreaks of jealousy, "the women have not yetacquired the right to be jealous, a sentiment implying a certaindegree of equality between the sexes." Everywhere the women weretaught to subordinate themselves to the men, and among the Hindoos asamong the Greeks, by the ancient Hebrews as well as by the mediaevalArabs freedom from jealousy was inculcated as a supreme virtue. Rachelactually fancied she was doing a noble thing in giving her handmaidsto Jacob as concubines. Lane (246) quotes the Arab historianEl-Jabartee, who said of his first wife:

  "Among her acts of conjugal piety and submission was this that she used to buy for her husband beautiful slave girls, with her own wealth, and deck them with ornaments and apparel, and so present them to him confidently looking to the reward and recompense which she should receive [in Paradise] for such conduct."

  "In case of failure of an heir," says Griffis, in his famous work onJapan (557), "the husband is fully justified, often strongly advisedeven by his wife, to take a handmaid to raise up seed to preservetheir ancestral line." A Persian instance is given by Ida Pfeiffer(261), who was introduced at Tabreez to the wives of Behmen-Mirza,concerning whom she writes:

  "They presented to me the latest addition to the harem--a plump brown little beauty of sixteen; and they seemed to treat their new rival with great good nature and told me how much trouble they had been taking to teach her Persian."

  JEALOUSY PURGED OF HATE

  Casting back a glance over the ground traversed, we see that women aswell as men--primitive, ancient, oriental--were either strangers tojealousy of any kind, or else knew it only as a species of anger,hatred, cruelty, and selfish sensuality; never as an ingredient oflove. Australian women, Lumholtz tells us (203), "often have bitterquarrels about men whom they love[19] and are anxious to marry. If thehusband is unfaithful, the wife frequently becomes greatly enraged."As chastity is not by Australians regarded as a duty or a virtue, suchconduct can only be explained by referring to what Roth, for instance,says (141) in regard to the Kalkadoon. Among these, where a man mayhave as many as four or five wives,

  "the discarded ones will often, through jealousy, fight with her whom they consider more favored; on such occasions they may often resort to stone-throwing, or even use fire-sticks and stone-knives with which to mutilate the genitals."

  Similarly, v
arious cruel disfigurements of wives by husbands or otherwives, previously referred to as customary among savages, have theirmotive in the desire to mar the charms of a rival or a disobedientconjugal slave. The Indian chief who bites off an intriguing wife'snose or lower lip takes, moreover, a cruel delight at sight of thepain he inflicts--a delight of which he would be incapable were hecapable of love. To such an Indian, Shakspere's lines

  But O, what damned minutes tells he o'er Who dotes yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves,

  would be as incomprehensible as a Beethoven symphony. With his usualgenius for condensation, Shakspere has in those two lines given theessentials of true jealousy--suspicion causing agony rather thananger, and proceeding from love, not from hate. The fear, distress,humiliation, anguish of modern jealousy are in the mind of the injuredhusband. He suffers torments, but has no wish to torment either of theguilty ones. There are, indeed, even in civilized countries, husbandswho slay erring wives; but they are not civilized husbands: likeOthello, they still have the taint of the savage in them. Civilizedhusbands resort to separation, not to mutilation or murder; and indismissing the guilty wife, they punish themselves more than her--forshe has shown by her actions that she does not love him and thereforecannot feel the deepest pang of the separation. There is no anger, nodesire for revenge.

  How comes this gentle concord in the world, That hatred is so far from jealousy?

  It comes in the world through love--through the fact that a man--or awoman--who truly loves, cannot tolerate even the thought of punishingone who has held first place in his or her affections. Modern lawemphasizes the essential point when it punishes adultery because of"alienation of the affections."

  A VIRTUOUS SIN

  Thus, whereas the "jealousy" of the savage who is transported by hissense of proprietorship to bloody deeds and to revenge is a mostignoble passion, incompatible with love, the jealousy of moderncivilization has become a noble passion, justified by moral ideals andaffection--"a kind of godly jealousy which I beseech you call avirtuous sin."

  Where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy Doth call himself Affection's sentinel.

  And let no one suppose that by purging itself of bloody violence,hatred, and revenge, and becoming the sentinel of _affection_,jealousy has lost any of its intensity. On the contrary, its depth isquintupled. The bluster and fury of savage violence is only amomentary ebullition of sensual passion, whereas the anguish ofjealousy as we feel it is

  Agony unmix'd, _incessant_ gall, Corroding every thought, and blasting all Love's paradise.

  Anguish of mind is infinitely more intense than mere physical pain,and the more cultivated the mind, the deeper is its capacity for such"agony unmix'd." Mental anguish doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnawthe inwards, and create a condition in which "not poppy, normandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall evermedicine" the victim to that sleep which he enjoyed before. His heartis turned to stone; he strikes it and it hurts his hand. Trifles lightas air are proofs to him that his suspicions are realities, and lifeis no longer worth living.

  O now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars That make ambition virtue!

  ABNORMAL STATES

  The assertion that modern jealousy is a noble passion is of course tobe taken with reservations. Where it leads to murder or revenge it isa reversion to the barbarous type, and apart from that it is, like allaffections of the mind, liable to abnormal and morbid states. HarryCampbell writes in the _Lancet_ (1898) that

  "the inordinate development of this emotion always betokens a neurotic diathesis, and not infrequently indicates the oncoming of insanity. It is responsible for much useless suffering and not a little actual disease."

  Dr. O'Neill gives a curious example of the latter, in the sameperiodical. He was summoned to a young woman who informed him that shewished to be cured of jealousy: "I am jealous of my husband, and ifyou do not give me something I shall go out of my mind." The husbandprotested his innocence and declared there was no cause whatever forher accusations:

  "The wife persisted in reiterating them and so the wrangle went on till suddenly she fell from her chair on the floor in a fit, the spasmodic movements of which were so strange and varied that it would be almost impossible to describe them. At one moment the patient was extended at full length with her body arched forward in a state of opisthotonos. The next minute she was in a sitting position with the legs drawn up, making, while her hands clutched her throat, a guttural noise. Then she would throw herself on her back and thrust her arms and legs about to the no small danger of those around her. Then becoming comparatively quiet and supine she would quiver all over while her eyelids trembled with great rapidity. This state perhaps would be followed by general convulsive movements in which she would put herself into the most grotesque postures and make the most unlovely grimaces. At last the fit ended, and exhausted and in tears she was put to bed. The patient was a lithe, muscular woman and to restrain her movements during the attack with the assistance at hand was a matter of impossibility, so all that could be done was to prevent her injuring herself and to sprinkle her freely with cold water. The after-treatment was more geographical than medical. The husband ceased doing business in a certain town where the object of his wife's suspicions lived."

  I have been told by a perfectly healthy married woman that whenjealous of her husband she felt a sensation as of some liquid wellingup in her throat and suffocating her. Pride came into play in part;she did not want others to think that her husband preferred anignorant girl to her--a woman of great physical and mental charm.

  Such jealousy, if unfounded, may be of the "self-harming" kind ofwhich one of Shakspere's characters exclaims "Fie! beat it hence!" Toooften, however, women have cause for jealousy, as modern civilized manhas not overcome the polygamous instincts he has inherited from hisancestors since time immemorial. But whereas cause for femininejealousy has existed always, the right to feel it is a modernacquisition. Moreover, while Apache wives were chaste from fear andGreek women from necessity, modern civilized women are faithful fromthe sense of honor, duty, affection, and in return for their devotionthey expect men to be faithful for the same reasons. Their jealousyhas not yet become retrospective, like that of the men; but theyjustly demand that after marriage men shall not fall below thestandard of purity they have set up for the women, and they insist ona conjugal monopoly of the affections as strenuously as the men do. Indue course of time, as Dr. Campbell suggests, "we may expect themonogamous instinct in man to be as powerful as in some of the loweranimals; and feminine jealousy will help to bring about this result;for if women were indifferent on this point men would never improve."

  JEALOUSY IN ROMANTIC LOVE

  The jealousy of romantic love, preceding marriage, differs from thejealousy of conjugal love in so far as there can be no claim to amonopoly of affection where the very existence of any reciprocatedaffection still remains in doubt. Before the engagement the uncertainlover in presence of a rival is tortured by doubt, anxiety, fear,despair, and he may violently hate the other man, though (as I knowfrom personal experience) not necessarily, feeling that the rival hasas much claim to the girl's attention as he has. Duels between rivallovers are not only silly, but are an insult to the girl, to whom thechoice ought to be submitted and the verdict accepted manfully. A manwho shoots the girl herself, because she loves another and refuseshim, puts himself on a level below the lowest brute, and cannot pleadeither true love or true jealousy as his excuse. After the engagementthe sense of monopoly and the consciousness of plighted troth enterinto the lover's feelings, and intruders are properly warded off withindignation. In romantic jealousy the leading role is played by theimagination; it loves to torture its victim by conjuring visions ofthe beloved smiling on a rival, encircled
by his arm, returning hiskisses. Everything feeds his suspicions; he is "dwelling in acontinual 'larum of jealousy." Oft his jealousy "shapes faults thatare not" and he taints his heart and brain with needless doubt. "Tenthousand fears invented wild, ten thousand frantic views of horridrivals, hanging on the charms for which he melts in fondness, eat himup." Such passion inflames love but corrodes the soul. In perfectlove, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, jealousy ispotential only, not actual.

  IV. COYNESS

  When a man is in love he wears his heart on his sleeve and feels eagerto have the beloved see how passionately it throbs for her. When agirl is in love she tries to conceal her heart in the innermostrecesses of her bosom, lest the lover discover her feelingsprematurely. In other words, coyness is a trait of feminine love--theonly ingredient of that passion which is not, to some extent, commonto both sexes. "The cruel nymph well knows to feign, ... coy looks andcold disdain," sang Gay; and "what value were there in the love of themaiden, were it yielded without coy delay?" asks Scott.

  'Tis ours to be forward and pushing; 'Tis yours to affect a disdain,

  Lady Montagu makes a man say, and Richard Savage sings:

  You love; yet from your lover's wish retire; Doubt, yet discern; deny, and yet desire. Such, Polly, are your sex--part truth, part fiction, Some thought, much whim, and all a contradiction.

  "Part truth, part fiction;" the girl romances regarding her feelings;her romantic love is tinged with coyness. "She will rather die thangive any sign of affection," says Benedick of Beatrice; and in thatline Shakspere reveals one of the two essential traits of genuinemodern coyness--_dissemblance of feminine affection_.

  Was coyness at all times an attribute of femininity, or is it anartificial product of modern social conditions and culture? Is coynessever manifested apart from love, or does its presence prove thepresence of love? These two important questions are to be answered inthe present section.

  WOMEN WHO WOO

  The opinion prevails that everywhere and always the first advanceswere made by the men, the women being passive, and coyly reserved.This opinion--like many other notions regarding the relations of thesexes--rests on ignorance, pure ignorance. In collecting the scatteredfacts bearing on this subject I have been more and more surprised atthe number of exceptions to the rule, if, indeed, rule it be. Not onlyare there tribes among whom women _must_ propose--as in the TorresStraits Islands, north of Australia, and with the Garos of India,concerning whom interesting details will be given in later chapters;but among many other savages and barbarians the women, instead ofrepelling advances, make them.

  "In all Polynesia," says Gerland (VI., 127), "it was a commonoccurrence that the women wooed the men." "A proposal of marriage,"writes Gill (_Savage Life in Polynesia_, II.), "may emanate withpropriety from a woman of rank to an equal or an inferior." In anarticle on Fijian poetry (731-53), Sir Arthur Gordon cites thefollowing native poem:

  The girls of Vunivanua all had lovers, But I, poor I, had not even one. Yet I fell desperately in love one day, My eye was filled with the beauty of Vasunilawedua. She ran along the beach, she called the canoe-men. She is conveyed to the town where her beloved dwells. Na Ulumatua sits in his canoe unfastening its gear. He asks her, "Why have you come here, Sovanalasikula?" "They have been falling in love at Vunivanua," she answers; "I, too, have fallen in love. I love your lovely son, Vasunilawedua." Na Ulumatua rose to his feet. He loosened a tambua whale's tooth from the canoe. "This," he said, presenting it to her, "is my offering to you for your return. My son cannot wed you, lady." Tears stream from her eyes, they stream down on her breast. "Let me only live outside his house," she says; "I will sleep upon the wood-pile. If I may only light his seluka [cigarrette] for him, I shall rejoice. If I may only hear his voice from a distance, it will suffice. Life will be pleasant to me." Na Ulumatua replied, "Be magnanimous, lady, and return. We have many girls of our own. Return to your own land. Vasunilawedua cannot wed a stranger." Sovanalasikula went away crying. She returned to her own town, forlorn. Her life was sadness. Ia nam bosulu.

  Tregear (102) describes the "wooing house" in which New Zealand girlsused to stand up in the dark and say: "I love so-and-so, I want himfor a husband;" whereupon the chosen lover, if willing, would say yes,or cough to signify his assent. Among the Pueblo Indians

  "the usual order of courtship is reversed; when a girl is disposed to marry, she does not wait for a young man to propose to her, but selects one to her own liking and consults her father, who visits the parents of the youth and acquaints them with his daughter's wishes. It seldom happens that any objections to the match are made" (Bancroft, I., 547);

  and concerning the Spokane Indians the same writer says (276) that agirl "may herself propose if she wishes." Among the Moquis, "insteadof the swain asking the hand of the fair one, she selects the youngman who is to her fancy, and then her father proposes the match to thesire of the lucky youth" (Schoolcraft, IV., 86). Among the Dariens,says Heriot (325), "it is considered no mark of forwardness" in awoman "openly to avow her inclination," and in Paraguay, too, womenwere allowed to propose (Moore, 261). Indian girls of the Hudson Riverregion

  "were not debarred signifying their desire to enter matrimonial life. When one of them wished to be married, she covered her face with a veil and sat covered as an indication of her desire. If she attracted a suitor, negotiations were opened with parents or friends, presents given, and the bride taken" (Ruttenber).

  A comic mode of catching a husband is described in an episode from thetale "Owasso and Wayoond" (Schoolcraft, _A.R._ II., 210-11):

  "Manjikuawis was forward in her advances toward him. He, however, paid no attention to it, and shunned her. She continued to be very assiduous in attending to his wants, such as cooking and mending his mocassins. She felt hurt and displeased at his indifference, and resolved to play him a trick. Opportunity soon offered. The lodge was spacious, and she dug a hole in the ground, where the young man usually sat, covering it very carefully. When the brothers returned from the chase the young man threw himself down carelessly at the usual place, and fell into the cavity, his head and feet remaining out, so that he was unable to extricate himself. 'Ha! ha!' cried Manjikuawis, as she helped him out, 'you are mine, I have caught you at last, and I did it on purpose.' A smile came over the young man's face, and he said, 'So be it, I will be yours;' and from that moment they lived happily as man and wife."

  It was a common thing among various Indian tribes for the women tocourt distinguished warriors; and though they might have no choice inthe matter, they could at any rate place themselves temptingly in theway of these braves, who, on their part, had no occasion to be coy,since they could marry all the squaws they pleased. The squaws, too,did not hesitate to indulge, if not in two husbands, in more than onelover. Commenting on the Mandans, for instance, Maximilian Prinz zuWied declares (II., 127) that "coyness is not a virtue of the Indianwomen; they often have two or three lovers at a time." Among thePennsylvania Indians it was a common thing for a girl to make suit toa young man.

  "Though the first address may be by the man, yet the other is the most common. The squaws are generally very immodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young men to the blush. The men commonly appear to be possessed of much more modesty than the women." (Bancroft, II., 140.)

  Even a coating of culture does not seem to curb the young squaw'spropensity to make the first advances. Captain R.H. Pratt (_U.S. Geol.and G.S_., IX., 260), of the Carlisle School, relates an amusing storyof a Kiowa young man who, under a variety of circumstances, "nevercared for girl. 'But when Laura say she love me, then I began to carefor girl.'"

  In his _First Footsteps_ (85, 86) Burton gives a glimpse of the"coyness" of Be
douin women:

  "We met a party of Esa girls, who derided my color and doubted the fact of my being a Moslem. The Arabs declared me to be a shaykh of shaykhs, and translated to the prettiest of the party an impromptu proposal of marriage. She showed but little coyness and stated her price to be an Andulli or necklace, a couple of Tobes--she asked one too many--a few handfuls of beads, and a small present for her papa. She promised, naively enough, to call next day and inspect the goods. The publicity of the town did not deter her, but the shamefacedness of my two companions prevented our meeting again."

  In his book on Southern Abyssinia Johnston relates how, while stayingat Murroo, he was strongly recommended to follow the example of hiscompanions and take a temporary wife. There was no need of hunting forhelpmates--they offered themselves of their own accord. One of thegirls who presented herself as a candidate was stated by her friendsto be a very strong woman, who had already had four or five husbands."I thought this a rather strange recommendation," he adds, "but it wasevidently mentioned that she might find favor in my eyes." He foundthat the best way out of such a dilemma was to engage the first oldhag that came along and leave it to her to ward off the others.Masculine coyness under such conditions has its risks. Johnstonmentions the case of an Arab who, in the region of the Muzeguahs,scorned a girl who wanted to be his temporary wife; whereupon "thewhole tribe asserted he had treated them with contempt by his haughtyconduct toward the girl, and demanded to know if she was not goodenough for him." He had to give them some brass wire and blue soodbefore he could allay the national indignation aroused by his refusalto take the girl. Women have rights which must be respected, even inAfrica!

  In Dutch Borneo there is a special kind of "marriage by stratagem"called _matep_. If a girl desires a particular man he is inveigledinto her house, the door is shut, the walls are hung with cloth ofdifferent colors and other ornaments, dinner is served up and he isinformed of the girl's wish to marry him. If he declines, he isobliged to pay the value of the hangings and the ornaments. (Roth,II., CLXXXI.)

  "Uncertain, coy, and hard to please" obviously cannot be sung of suchwomen.

  In one of the few native Australian stories on record the two wives ofa man are represented as going to his brother's hut when he wasasleep, and imitating the voice of an emu. The noise woke him, and hetook his spear to kill them; but as soon as he ran out the two womenspoke and requested him to be their husband. (Wood's _Native Tribes_,210.)

  The fact that Australian women have absolutely no choice in theassignment of husbands, must make them inclined to offer themselves tomen they like, just as Indian girls offer themselves to noted warriorsin the hope of thus calling attention to their personal attractions.As we shall see later, one of the ways in which an Australian wins awife is by means of magic. In this game, as Spencer and Gillen tell us(556), the women sometimes take the initiative, thus inducing a man toelope with them.

  WERE HEBREW AND GREEK WOMEN COY?

  The English language is a queer instrument of thought. While coynesshas the various meanings of shyness, modest reserve, bashfulness,shrinking from advances or familiarity, disdainfulness, the verb "tocoy" may mean the exact opposite--to coax, allure, entice, woo, decoy.It is in _this_ sense that "coyness" is obviously a trait of primitivemaidens. What is more surprising is to find in brushing asideprejudice and preconceived notions, that among ancient nations too itis in this second sense rather than in the first that women are "coy."The Hebrew records begin with the story of Adam and Eve, in which Eveis stigmatized as the temptress. Rebekah had never seen the man chosenfor her by her male relatives, yet when she was asked if she would gowith his servant, she answered, promptly, "I will go." Rachel at thewell suffers her cousin to kiss her at first sight. Ruth does all thecourting which ends in making her the wife of Boaz. There is noshrinking from advances, real or feigned, in any of these cases; nosuggestion of disguised feminine affection; and in two of them thewomen make the advances. Potiphar's wife is another biblical case. Theword coy does not occur once in the Bible.

  The idea that women are the aggressors, particularly in criminalamours, is curiously ingrained in the literature of ancient Greece. Inthe _Odyssey_ we read about the fair-haired goddess Circe, decoyingthe companions of Odysseus with her sweet voice, giving them drugs andpotions, making them the victims of swinish indulgence of theirappetites. When Odysseus comes to their rescue she tries to allure himtoo, saying, "Nay, then, pat up your blade within its sheath, and letus now approach our bed that there we too may join in love and learnto trust each other." Later on Odysseus has his adventure with theSirens, who are always "casting a spell of penetrating song, sittingwithin a meadow," in order to decoy passing sailors. Charybdis isanother divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymphCalypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, untilafter seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home "becausethe nymph pleased him no more." Nor does the human Nausicaea manifestthe least coyness when she meets Odysseus at the river. Though he hasbeen cast on the shore naked, she remains, after her maids have runaway alarmed, and listens to his tale of woe. Then, after seeing himbathed, anointed, and dressed, she exclaims to her waiting maids: "Ah,might a man like this be called my husband, having his home here andcontent to stay;" while to him later on she gives this broad hint:"Stranger, farewell! when you are once again in your own land,remember me, and how before all others it is to me you owe the savingof your life."

  Nausicaea is, however, a prude compared with the enamoured woman as theGreek poets habitually paint her. Pausanias (II., Chap. 31), speakingof a temple of Peeping Venus says:

  "From this very spot the enamoured Phaedra used to watch Hippolytus at his manly exercises. Here still grows the myrtle with pierced leaves, as I am told. For being at her wit's ends and finding no ease from the pangs of love, she used to wreak her fury on the leaves of this myrtle."

  Professor Rohde, the most erudite authority on Greek eroticliterature, writes (34):

  "It is characteristic of the Greek popular tales which Euripides followed, in what might be called his tragedies of adultery, that they _always make the woman the vehicle of the pernicious passion_; it seems as if Greek feeling could not conceive of a _man_ being seized by an unmanly soft desire and urged on by it to passionate disregard of all human conventions and laws."

  MASCULINE COYNESS

  Greek poets from Stesichorus to the Alexandrians are fond ofrepresenting coy men. The story told by Athenaeus (XIV., ch. 11) ofHarpalyke, who committed suicide because the youth Iphiclus coylyspurned her, is typical of a large class. No less significant is thecircumstance that when the coy backwardness happens to be on the sideof a female, she is usually a woman of masculine habits, devoted toDiana and the chase. Several centuries after Christ we still find inthe romances an echo of this thoroughly Greek sentiment in the coyattitude, at the beginning, of their youthful heroes.[20]

  The well-known legend of Sappho--who flourished about a thousand yearsbefore the romances just referred to were written--is quite in theGreek spirit. It is thus related by Strabo:

  "There is a white rock which stretches out from Leucas to the sea and toward Cephalonia, that takes its name from its whiteness. The rock of Leucas has upon it a temple of Apollo, and the leap from it was supposed to stop love. From this it is said that Sappho first, as Menander says somewhere, in pursuit of the haughty Phaon, urged on by maddening desire, threw herself from its far-seen rocks, imploring thee [Apollo], lord and king."

  Four centuries after Sappho we find Theocritus harping on the sametheme. His _Enchantress_ is a monologue in which a woman relates howshe made advances to a youth and won him. She saw him walking alongthe road and was so smitten that she was prostrated and confined toher bed for ten days. Then she sent her slave to waylay the youth,with these instructions: "If you see him alone, say to him: 'Simaithadesires you,' and br
ing him here." In this case the youth is not coyin the least; but the sequel of the story is too bucolic to be toldhere.

  SHY BUT NOT COY

  It is well-known that the respectable women of Greece, especially thevirgins, were practically kept under lock and key in the part of thehouse known as the gynaikonitis. This resulted in making them shy andbashful--but not coy, if we may judge from the mirror of life known asliterature. Ramdohr observes, pertinently (III., 270):

  "Remarkable is the easy triumph of lovers over the innocence of free-born girls, daughters of citizens, examples of which may be found in the _Eunuchus_ and _Adelphi_ of Terence. They call attention to the low opinion the ancients had of a woman's power to guard her sensual impulses, and of her own accord resist attacks on her honor."

  The Abbe Dubois says the same thing about Hindoo girls, and the reasonwhy they are so carefully guarded. It is hardly necessary to add thatsince no one would be so foolish as to call a man honest who refrainsfrom stealing merely because he has no opportunity, it is equallyabsurd to call a woman honest or coy who refrains from vice onlybecause she is locked up all the time. The fact (which seems to giveWestermarck (64-65) much satisfaction), that some Australians,American Indian and other tribes watch young girls so carefully, doesnot argue the prevalence of chaste coyness, but the contrary. If thegirls had an instinctive inclination to repel improper advances itwould not be necessary to cage and watch them. This inclination is notinborn, does not characterize primitive women, but is a result ofeducation and culture.

  MILITARISM AND MEDIAEVAL WOMEN

  Greatly as Greeks and Indians differ in some respects, they have twothings in common--a warlike spirit and contempt for women. "When Greekmeets Greek then comes a tug of war," and the Indian's chief delightis scalp hunting. The Greeks, as Rohde notes (42),

  "depict their greatest heroes as incited to great deeds only by eagerness for battle and desire for glory. The love of women barely engages their attention transiently in hours of idleness."

  Militarism is ever hostile to love except in its grossest forms. Itbrutalizes the men and prevents the growth of feminine qualities,coyness among others. Hence, wherever militarism prevails, we seek invain for feminine reserve. An interesting illustration of this may befound in a brochure by Theodor Krabbes, _Die Frau im AltfranzoesischenKarls-Epos_ (9-38). The author, basing his inferences on an exhaustivestudy and comparison of the Chansons de Geste of the eleventh andtwelfth centuries, draws the following general conclusions:

  "Girlish shyness is not a trait of the daughters, least of all those of heathen origin. Masculine tendencies characterize them from childhood. Fighting pleases them and they like to look on when there is a battle.... Love plays an important role in nearly all the Chansons de Geste.... The woman wooes, the man grants: nearly always in these epics we read of a woman who loves, rarely of one who is loved.... In the very first hour of their acquaintance the girl is apt to yield herself entirely to the chosen knight, and she persists in her passion for him even if she is entirely repulsed. There is no more rest for her. Either she wooes him in person, or chooses a messenger who invites the coveted man to a rendezvous. The heathen woman who has to guard captured Franks and who has given her heart to one of them, hies herself to the dungeon and offers him her love. She begs for his love in return and seeks in every way to win it. If he resists, she curses him, makes his lot less endurable, withholds his food or threatens him with death until he is willing to accede to her wishes. If this has come to pass she overwhelms him with caresses at the first meeting. She is eager to have them reciprocated; often the lover is not tender enough to please her, then she repeatedly begs for kisses. She embraces him delightedly even though he be in full armor and in presence of all his companions. Girlish shyness and modest backwardness are altogether foreign to her nature.... She never has any moral scruples.... If he is unwilling to give up his campaign, she is satisfied to let him go the next morning if he will only marry her.

  "The man is generally described as cold in love. References to a knight's desire for a woman's love are very scant, and only once do we come across a hero who is quite in love. The young knight prefers more serious matters; his first desire is to win fame in battle, make rich booty.[21] He looks on love as superfluous, indeed he is convinced that it incapacitates him from what he regards as his proper life-task. He also fears the woman's infidelity. If he allows her to persuade him to love, he seeks material gain from it; delivery from captivity, property, vassals.... The lover is often tardy, careless, too deficient in tenderness, so that the woman has to chide him and invite his caresses. A rendezvous is always brought about only through her efforts, and she alone is annoyed if it is disturbed too soon. Even when the man desires a woman, he hardly appears as a wooer. He knows he is sure of the women's favor; they make it easy for him; he can have any number of them if he belongs to a noble family.... Even when the knight is in love--which is very rare--the first advances are nearly always made by the woman; it is she who proposes marriage.

  "Marriage as treated in the epics is seldom based on love. The woman desires wedlock, because she hopes thereby to secure her rights and better her chances of protection. It is for this reason that we see her so often eagerly endeavoring to secure a promise of marriage."

  WHAT MADE WOMEN COY?

  Sufficient evidence has now been adduced to make it clear that thefirst of the two questions posed at the outset of this chapter must beanswered in the negative. Coyness is _not_ an innate or universaltrait of femininity, but is often absent, particularly where man'sabsorption in war and woman's need of protection prevent its growthand induce the females to do the courting. This being the case and warbeing the normal state of the lower races, our next task is toascertain what were the influences that induced woman to adopt thehabit of repelling advances instead of making them. It is one of themost interesting questions in sexual psychology, which has never beenanswered satisfactorily; it and gains additional interest from thefact that we find among the most ancient and primitive races phenomenawhich resemble coyness and have been habitually designated as such. Aswe shall see in a moment, this is an abuse of language, confoundinggenuine resistance or aversion with coyness.

  Chinese maidens often feel so great an aversion to marriage aspractised in their country that they prefer suicide to it. Douglassays (196) that Chinese women often ask English ladies, "Does yourhusband beat you?" and are surprised if answered "No." The gallantChinaman calls his wife his "dull thorn," and there are plenty ofreasons apart from Confucian teachings why "for some days before thedate fixed, the bride assumes all the panoply of woe, and weeps andwails without ceasing." She is about to face the terrible ordeal ofbeing confronted for the first time with the man who has been chosenfor her, and who may be the ugliest, vilest wretch in theworld--possibly even a leper, such cases being on record. Douglas(124) reports the case of six girls who committed suicide together toavoid marriage. There exist in China anti-matrimonial societies ofgirls and young widows, the latter doubtless, supplying the experiencethat serves as the motive for establishing such associations.

  Descending to the lowest stratum of human life as witnessed inAustralia, we find that, as Meyer asserts (11), the bride appears"generally to go very unwillingly" to the man she has been assignedto. Lumholtz relates that the man seizes the woman by the wrists andcarries her off "despite her screams, which can be heard till she is amile away." "The women," he says, "always make resistance; for they donot like to leave their tribe, and in many instances they have thebest of reasons for kicking their lovers." What are these reasons? Asall observers testify, they are not allowed any voice in the choice oftheir husbands. They are usually bartered by their father or brothersfor other women, and in many if not most cases
the husbands assignedto them are several times their age. Before they are assigned to aparticular man the girls indulge in promiscuous intercourse, whereasafter marriage they are fiercely guarded. They may indeed attempt toelope with another man more suited to their age, but they do so at therisk of cruel injury and probable death. The wives have to do all thedrudgery; they get only such food as the husbands do not want, and onthe slightest suspicion of intrigue they are maltreated horribly.Causes enough surely for their resistance to obligatory marriage. Thisresistance is a frank expression of genuine unwillingness, oraversion, and has nothing in common with real coyness, which signifiesthe mere _semblance_ of unwillingness on the part of a woman who is atleast _half-willing_. Such expressions as Goldsmith's "the coy maid,half willing to be pressed," and Dryden's

  When the kind nymph would coyness feign, And hides but to be found again,

  indicate the nature of true coyness better than any definitions. Thereare no "coy looks," no "feigning" in the actions of an Australian girlabout to be married to a man who is old enough to be her grandfather.The "cold disdain" is real, not assumed, and there is no "dissemblanceof feminine affection."

  CAPTURING WOMEN

  The same reasoning applies to the customs attending wife-capturing ingeneral, which has prevailed in all parts of the world and stillprevails in some regions. To take one or two instances of a hundredthat might be cited from books of travel in all parts of the world:Columbus relates that the Caribs made the capture of women the chiefobject of their expeditions. The California Indians worked up theirwarlike spirit by chanting a song the substance of which was, "let usgo and carry off girls" (Waitz, IV., 242). Savages everywhere havelooked upon women as legitimate spoils of war, desirable as concubinesand drudges. Now even primitive women are attached to their homes andrelatives, and it is needless to say their resistance to the enemy whohas just slain their father and brothers and is about to carry themoff to slavery, is genuine, and has no more trace of coyness in itthan the actions of an American girl who resists the efforts ofunknown kidnappers to drag her from her home.

  But besides real capture of women there has existed, and still existsin many countries, what is known as sham-capture--a custom which haspuzzled anthropologists sorely. Herbert Spencer illustrates it(_P.S._, I., Sec. 288) by citing Crantz, who says, concerning theEskimos, that when a damsel is asked in marriage, she

  "directly falls into the greatest apparent consternation, and runs out of doors tearing her hair; for single women always affect the utmost bashfulness and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they should lose their reputation for modesty."

  Spencer also quotes Burckhardt, who describes how the bride amongSinai Arabs defends herself with stones, even though she does notdislike the lover; "for according to custom, the more she struggles,bites, kicks, cries, and strikes, the more she is applauded ever afterby her own companions." During the procession to the husband's camp"decency obliges her to cry and sob most bitterly." Among theAraucanians of Chili, according to Smith (215) "it is a point of honorwith the bride to resist and struggle, however willing she may be."

  While conceding that "the manners of the inferior races do not implymuch coyness," Spencer, nevertheless, thinks "we cannot supposecoyness to be wholly absent." He holds that in the cases just citedcoyness is responsible for the resistance of the women, and he goes sofar as to make this coyness "an important factor," in accounting forthe custom of marriage by capture which has prevailed among so manypeoples in all parts of the world. Westermarck declares (388) thatthis suggestion can scarcely be disproved, and Grosse (105) echoes hisjudgment. To me, on the contrary, it seems that these distinguishedsociologists are putting the cart before the horse. They make thecapture a sequence of "coyness," whereas in truth the coyness (if itmay be so called) is a result of capture. The custom of wife capturecan be easily explained without calling in the aid of what we haveseen to be so questionable a thing as primitive female coyness.Savages capture wives as the most coveted spoils of war. They capturethem, in other instances, because polygamy and female infanticide havedisturbed the equilibrium of the sexes, thus compelling the young mento seek wives elsewhere than in their own tribes; and the same resultis brought about (in Australia, for instance), by the old men's habitof appropriating all the young women by a system of exchange, leavingnone for the young men, who, therefore, either have to persuade themarried women to elope--at the risk of their lives--or else arecompelled to steal wives elsewhere. In another very large number ofcases the men stole brides--willing or unwilling--to avoid payingtheir parents for them.

  THE COMEDY OF MOCK CAPTURE

  Thus the custom of real capture is easily accounted for. What callsfor an explanation is the _sham_ capture and resistance in cases whereboth the parents and the bride are perfectly willing. Why shouldprimitive maidens who, as we have seen, are rather apt than not tomake amorous advances, repel their suitors so violently in theseinstances of mock capture? Are they, after all, coy--more coy thancivilized maidens? To answer this question let us look at one ofSpencer's witnesses more carefully. The reason Crantz gives for theEskimo women's show of aversion to marriage is that they do it, "lestthey lose their reputation for modesty." Now modesty of any kind is aquality unknown to Eskimos. Nansen, Kane, Hayes, and other explorershave testified that the Eskimos of both sexes take off all theirclothes in their warm subterranean homes. Captain Beechey hasdescribed their obscene dances, and it is well-known that theyconsider it a duty to lend their wives and daughters to guests. Someof the native tales collected by Rink (236-37; 405) indicate mostunceremonious modes of courtship and nocturnal frolics, which do notstop even at incest. To suppose that women so utterly devoid of moralsensibility could, of their own accord and actuated by modesty andbashfulness manifest such a coy aversion to marriage that force has tobe resorted to, is manifestly absurd. In attributing their antics tomodesty, Crantz made an error into which so many explorers havefallen--that of interpreting the actions of savages from the point ofview of civilization--an error more pardonable in an unsophisticatedtraveller of the eighteenth century than in a modern sociologist.

  If we must therefore reject Herbert Spencer's inference as to theexistence of primitive coyness and its consequences, how are we toaccount for the comedy of mock capture? Several writers have tried tocrack the nut. Sutherland (I., 200) holds that sham capture is not asurvival of real capture, but "the festive symbolism of the contrastin the character of the sexes--courage in the man and shyness in thewoman"--a fantastic suggestion which does not call for discussion,since, as we know, the normal primitive woman is anything but shy.Abercromby (I., 454) is another writer who believes that sham captureis not a survival of real capture, but merely a result of the innategeneral desire on the part of the men to display courage--a view whichdodges the one thing that calls for an explanation--the resistance ofthe women. Grosse indulges in some curious antics (105-108). First heasks: "Since real capture is everywhere an exception and is looked onas punishable, why should the semblance of capture have ever become ageneral and approved custom?" Then he asks, with a sneer, whysociology should be called upon to answer such questions anyhow; and amoment later he, nevertheless, attempts an answer, on Spencerianlines. Among inferior races, he remarks, women are usually coveted asspoils of war. The captured women become the wives or concubines ofthe warriors and thus represent, as it were, trophies of their valor.Is it not, therefore, inevitable that the acquisition of a wife byforce should be looked on, among warlike races, as the most honorableway of getting her, nay, in course of time, as the only one worthy ofa warrior? But since, he continues, not all the men can get wives inthat way, even among the rudest tribes, these other men consoledthemselves with investing the peaceful home-taking of a bride alsowith the show of an honorable capture.

  In other words, Grosse declares on one page that it is absurd toderive approved sham capture from real capture because real capture iseverywhere exceptional only and is always considered punishable; y
ettwo pages later he argues that sham capture _is_ derived from realcapture because the latter is so honorable! As a matter of fact, amongthe lowest races known, wife-stealing is not considered honorable.Regarding the Australians, Curr states distinctly (I., 108) that itwas not encouraged because it was apt to involve a whole tribe in warfor one man's sake. Among the North American Indians, on the otherhand, where, as we saw in the chapter on Honorable Polygamy, awife-stealer is admired by both men and women, sham capture does _not_prevail. Grosse's argument, therefore, falls to the ground.

  WHY THE WOMEN RESIST

  Prior to all these writers Sir John Lubbock advanced (98) stillanother theory of capture, real and sham. Believing that men once hadall their wives in common, he declares that

  "capture, and capture alone, could originally give a man the right to monopolize a woman to the exclusion of his fellow-clansmen; and that hence, even after all necessity for actual capture had long ceased, the symbol remained; capture having, by long habit, come to be received as a necessary preliminary to marriage."

  This theory has the same shortcoming as the others. While accountingfor the capture, it does not explain the resistance of the women. Inreal capture they had real reasons for kicking, biting, and howling,but why should they continue these antics in cases of sham capture?Obviously another factor came into play here, which has been strangelyoverlooked--parental persuasion or command. Among savages a fatherowns his daughter as absolutely as his dog; he can sell or exchangeher at pleasure; in Australia, "swapping" daughters or sisters is thecommonest mode of marriage. Now, stealing brides, or eloping to avoidhaving to pay for them, is of frequent occurrence everywhere amonguncivilized races. To protect themselves against such loss of personalproperty it must have occurred to parents at an early date that itwould be wise to teach their daughters to resist all suitors until ithas become certain that their intentions are honorable--that is, thatthey intend to pay. In course of time such teaching (strengthened bythe girls' pride at being purchased for a large sum) would assume theform of an inviolable command, having the force of a taboo and, withthe stubbornness peculiar to many social customs, persisting longafter the original reasons have ceased to exist.

  In other words, I believe that the peculiar antics of the brides incases of sham capture are neither due to innate feminine coyness norare they a direct survival of the genuine resistance made in realcapture; but that they are simply a result of parental dictation whichassigns to the bride the role she must play in the comedy of"courtship." I find numerous facts supporting this view, especially inReinsberg-Dueringsfeld's _Hochzeitsbuch_ and Schroeder's_Hochzeitsgebraeuche der Esten_.

  Describing the marriage customs of the Mordvins, Mainow says that thebridegroom sneaks into the bride's house before daybreak, seizes herand carries her off to where his companions are waiting with theirwagons. "Etiquette," he adds, "_demands_ she should resist violentlyand cry loudly, even if she is entirely in favor of the elopement."Among the Votyaks girl-stealing (kukem) occurs to this day. If thefather is unwilling or asks too much, while the young folks arewilling, the girl goes to work in the field and the lover carries heroff. _On the way to his house she is cheerful, but when they reach thelover's house she begins to cry and wail_, whereupon she is locked upin a cabin that has no window. The father, having found out where sheis, comes and demands payment. If the lover offers too little, theparent plies his whip on him. Among the Ostyaks such elopements, toavoid payment, are frequent. Regarding the Esthonians, Schroeder says(40): "When the intermediary comes, the girl _must_ conceal herself insome place until she is either found, _with her father's consent_,or appears of her own accord."

  In the old epic "Kalewipoeg," Salme hides in the garret and Linda inthe bath-room, and refuse to come out till after much coaxing andurging.

  QUAINT CUSTOMS

  The words I have italicized indicate the passive role played by thegirls, who simply carry out the instructions given to them. Theparents are the stage-managers, and they know very well what theywant--money or brandy. Among the Mordvins, as soon as the suitor andhis friends are seen approaching the bride's house, it is barricaded,and the defenders ask, "Who are you?" The answer is, "Merchants.""What do you wish?" "Living goods." "We do not trade!" "We shall takeher by force." A show of force is made, but finally the suitors areadmitted, after paying twenty kopeks. In Little Russia it is customaryto barricade the door of the bride's house with a wheel, but afteroffering a bottle of brandy as a "pass" the suitor's party is allowedto enter.

  Among the Esthonians custom _demands_ (Schroeder, 36), that a comedylike the following be enacted. The intermediary comes to the bride'shouse and pretends that he has lost a cow or a lamb, and askspermission to hunt for it. The girl's relatives at first stubbornlydeny having any knowledge of its whereabouts, but finally they allowthe suitors to search, and the bride is usually found without muchdelay. In Western Prussia (Berent district), after the bridegroom hasmade his terms with the bride and her parents, he comes to their houseand says: "We were out hunting and saw a wounded deer run into thishouse. May we follow its tracks?" Permission is granted, whereupon themen start in pursuit of the bride, who has hidden away with the othervillage maidens. At last the "hound"--one of the bridegroom'scompanions--finds her and brings her to the lover.

  Similar customs have prevailed in parts of Russia, Roumania, Servia,Sardinia, Hungary, and elsewhere. In Old Finland the comedy continueseven after the nuptial knot has been tied. The bridal couple returneach to their home. Soon the groom appears at the bride's house anddemands to be admitted. Her father refuses to let him in. A "pass" isthereupon produced and read, and this, combined with a few presents,finally secures admission. In some districts the bride remainsinvisible even during the wedding-dinner, and it is "good form" forher to let the guests wait as long as possible, and not to appearuntil after considerable coaxing by her mother. When a Votyakbridegroom comes after the bride on the wedding-day she is denied tohim three times. After that she is searched for, dragged from herhiding-place, and her face covered with a cloth, while she screams andstruggles. Then she is carried to the yard, placed on a blanket withher face down, and the bridegroom belabors her with a stick on apillow which has been tied on her back. After that she becomesobedient and amiable. A Mordvin bride must try to escape from thewagon on the way to the church. In Old Finland the bride wasbarricaded in her house even after the wedding, and the Island Swedeshave the same custom. This burlesque of bridal resistance aftermarriage occurs also among the wild tribes of India. "After remainingwith her husband for ten days only," writes Dalton (192), "it is _thecorrect thing_ for the wife to run away from him, and tell all herfriends that she loves him not and will see him no more." Thehusband's duty is to seek her eagerly.

  "I have seen a young wife thus found and claimed, and borne away, screeching and struggling in the arms of her husband, from the midst of a crowded bazaar. No one interferes on these occasions."

  More than enough has now been said to prove that in cases of shamcapture the girls simply follow their village customs blindly. Left tothemselves they might act very differently, but as it is, all thegirls in each district _must_ do the same thing, however silly. Aboutthe real feelings of the girls these comedies tell us nothingwhatever. With coyness--that is, a woman's concealment of her feelingstoward a man she likes--these actions have no more to do than the manin the moon has with anthropology. Least of all do they tell usanything about love, for the girls must all act alike, whether theyfavor a man or not. Regarding the absence of love we have, moreover,the direct testimony of Dr. F. Kreutzwald (Schroeder, 233). Thatmarriages are made in heaven is, he declares, true in a certain sense,so far as the Esthonians are concerned; for "the parties concernedusually play a passive role.... Love is not one of the requisites, itis an unknown phenomenon." Utilitarianism, he adds, is the basis oftheir marriages. The suitor tries to ascertain if the girl he wants isa good worker; to find this out he may even watch her secretly whileshe is
spinning, thrashing, or combing flax.

  "Most of the men proceed at random, and it is not unusual for a suitor who has been refused in one place and another to proceed at once to a third or fourth.... Many a bridegroom sees his bride for the first time at the ceremony of the priestly betrothal, and he cannot therefore be blamed for asking: 'Which of these girls is my bride?'"

  GREEK AND ROMAN MERCENARY COYNESS

  So far our search for that coyness which is an ingredient of modernlove has been in vain. At the same time it is obvious that sincecoyness is widely prevalent at the present day it must have been inthe past of use to women, else it would not have survived andincreased. The question is: how far down in the scale of civilizationdo we find traces of it? The literature of the ancient Greeksindicates that, in a certain phase and among certain classes, it wasknown to them. True, the respectable women, being always locked up andhaving no choice in the selecting of their partners, had no occasionfor the exercise of any sort of coyness. But the hetairai appear tohave understood the advantages of assumed disdain or indifference inmaking a coveted man more eager in his wooing. In the fifteenth ofLucian's [Greek: Etairikoi dialogoi] we read about a wanton who lockedher door to her lover because he had refused to pay her two talentsfor the privilege of exclusive possession. In other cases, the poetsstill feel called upon to teach these women how to make men submissiveby withholding caresses from them. Thus in Lucian, Pythias exclaims:

  "To tell the truth, dear Joessa, you yourself spoiled him with your excessive love, which you even allowed him to notice. You should not have made so much of him: men, when they discover that, easily become overweening. Do not weep, poor girl! Follow my advice and keep your door locked once or twice when he tries to see you again. You will find that that will make him flame up again and become frantic with love and jealousy."

  In the third book of his treatise on the Art of Love, Ovid adviseswomen (of the same class) how to win men. He says, in substance:

  "Do not answer his letters too soon; all delay inflames the lover, provided it does not last too long.... What is too readily granted does not long retain love. Mix with the pleasure you give mortifying refusals, make him wait in your doorway; let him bewail the 'cruel door;' let him beg humbly, or else get angry and threaten. Sweet things cloy, tonics are bitter."

  MODESTY AND COYNESS

  Feigned unwillingness or indifference in obedience to such advice mayperhaps be called coyness, but it is only a coarse primitive phase ofthat attitude, based on sordid, mercenary motives, whereas true moderncoyness consists in an impulse, grounded in modesty, to concealaffection. The germs of Greek venal coyness for filthy lucre may befound as low down as among the Papuan women who, as Bastian notes(Ploss, I., 460) exact payment in shell-money for their caresses. Ofthe Tongans, highest of all Polynesians, Mariner says (Martin, II.,174):

  "It must not be supposed that these women are always easily won; the greatest attentions and fervent solicitations are sometimes requisite, even though there be no other lover in the way. This happens sometimes from a spirit of coquetry, at other times from a dislike to the party, etc."

  Now coquetry is a cousin of coyness, but in whatever way this Tongancoquetry may manifest itself (no details are given) it certainly lacksthe regard for modesty and chastity which is essential to moderncoyness; for, as the writer just referred to attests, Tongan girls arepermitted to indulge in free intercourse before marriage, the onlything liable to censure being a too frequent change of lovers.

  That the anxious regard for chastity, modesty, decorum, which cannotbe present in the coquetry of these Tongan women, is one of theessential ingredients of modern coyness has long been felt by thepoets. After Juliet has made her confession of love which Romeooverhears in the dark, she apologizes to him because she fears that hemight attribute her easy yielding to light love. Lest he think her tooquickly won she "would have frowned and been perverse, and said himnay." Then she begs him trust she'll "_prove more true_ than thosethat have more cunning to be strange." Wither's "That coy one in thewinning, _proves a true one_ being won," expresses the same sentiment.

  UTILITY OF COYNESS

  Man's esteem for virtues which he does not always practise himself, isthus responsible, in part at least, for the existence of moderncoyness. Other factors, however, aided its growth, among them man'sfickleness. If a girl did not say nay (when she would rather say yes),and hold back, hesitate, and delay, the suitor would in many casessuck the honey from her lips and flit away to another flower.Cumulative experience of man's sensual selfishness has taught her tobe slow in yielding to his advances. Experience has also taught womenthat men are apt to value favors in proportion to the difficulty ofwinning them, and the wisest of them have profited by the lesson.Callimachus wrote, two hundred and fifty years before Christ, that hislove was "versed in pursuing what flies (from it), but flits past whatlies in its mid path"--a conceit which the poets have since echoed athousand times. Another very important thing that experience taughtwomen was that by deferring or withholding their caresses and smilesthey could make the tyrant man humble, generous, and gallant. Girlswho do not throw themselves away on the first man who happens along,also have an advantage over others who are less fastidious and coy,and by transmitting their disposition to their daughters they give itgreater vogue. Female coyness prevents too hasty marriages, and thegirls who lack it often live to repent their shortcomings at leisure.Coyness prolongs the period of courtship and, by keeping the suitor insuspense and doubt, it develops the imaginative, sentimental side oflove.

  HOW WOMEN PROPOSE

  Sufficient reasons, these, why coyness should have gradually become ageneral attribute of femininity. Nevertheless, it is an artificialproduct of imperfect social conditions, and in an ideal world womenwould not be called upon to romance about their feelings. As a mark ofmodesty, coyness will always have a charm for men, and a woman devoidof it will never inspire genuine love. But what I have elsewherecalled "spring-chicken coyness"--the disposition of European girls tohide shyly behind their mammas--as chickens do under a hen at thesight of a hawk--is losing its charm in face of the frankconfidingness of American girls in the presence of gentlemen; and asfor that phase of coyness which consists in concealing affection for aman, girls usually manage to circumvent it in a more or less refinedmanner. Some girls who are coarse, or have little control of theirfeelings, propose bluntly to the men they want. I myself have knownseveral such cases, but the man always refused. Others have a thousandsubtle ways of betraying themselves without actually "givingthemselves away." A very amusing story of how an ingenious maidentries to bring a young man to bay has been told by Anthony Hope.Dowden calls attention to the fact that it is Juliet "who proposes andurges on the sudden marriage." Romeo has only spoken of love; it isshe who asks him, if his purpose be marriage, to send her word nextday. In _Troilus and Cressida_ (III., 2), the heroine exclaims:

  But, though I loved you well, I woo'd you not; And yet, good faith, I wished myself a man, Or that we women had men's privilege Of speaking first.

  In his _Old Virginia_ (II., 127) John Fiske tells a funny story of howParson Camm was wooed. A young friend of his, who had been courtingMiss Betsy Hansford of his parish, asked him to assist him with hiseloquence. The parson did so by citing to the girl texts from theBible enjoining matrimony as a duty. But she beat him at his own game,telling him to take his Bible when he got home and look at 2 Sam. xii.7, which would explain her obduracy. He did so, and found this: "AndNathan said to David, _thou art the man._" The parson took thehint--and the girl.

  V. HOPE AND DESPAIR--MIXED MOODS

  _She never told her love_; But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought; And, with a green and yellow melancholy, She sat, like Patience on a monument, _Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed_?

 
asks Viola in _As You Like It_. It _was_ love indeed; but only twophases of it are indicated in the lines quoted--coyness ("She nevertold her love") and the mixture of emotions ("smiling at grief"),which is another characteristic of love. Romantic love is a pendulumswinging perpetually between hope and despair. A single unkind word orsign of indifference may make a lover feel the agony of death, while asmile may raise him from the abyss of despair to heavenly heights ofbliss. As Goethe puts it:

  Himmelhoch jauchzend Zum Tode betruebt, Gluecklich allein Ist die Seele die liebt.

  AMOROUS ANTITHESES

  When a Marguerite plucks the petals of a marguerite, muttering "heloves me--he loves me not," her heart flutters in momentary anguishwith every "not," till the next petal soothes it again.

  I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe; Under love's heavy burden do I sink,

  wails Romeo; and again:

  Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O anything, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

  * * * * *

  Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears; What is it else? a madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

  In commenting on Romeo, who in his love for Rosaline indulges inemotion for emotion's sake, and "stimulates his fancy with thesought-out phrases, the curious antitheses of the amorous dialect ofthe period," Dowden writes:

  "Mrs. Jameson has noticed that in _All's Well that Ends Well_ (I., 180-89), Helena mockingly reproduces this style of amorous antithesis. Helena, who lives so effectively in the world of fact, is contemptuous toward all unreality and affectation."

  Now, it is quite true that expressions like "cold fire" and "sickhealth" sound unreal and affected to sober minds, and it is also truethat many poets have exercised their emulous ingenuity in inventingsuch antitheses just for the fun of the thing and because it has beenthe fashion to do so. Nevertheless, with all their artificiality, theywere hinting at an emotional phenomenon which actually exists.Romantic love is in reality a state of mind in which cold and heat mayand do alternate so rapidly that "cold fire" seems the only properexpression to apply to such a mixed feeling. It is literally truethat, as Bailey sang, "the sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love;"literally true that "the sweets of love are washed with tears," asCarew wrote, or, as H.K. White expressed it, "'Tis painful, though'tis sweet to love." A man who has actually experienced the feeling ofuncertain love sees nothing unreal or affected in Tennyson's

  The cruel madness of love The honey of poisoned flowers,

  or in Drayton's

  'Tis nothing to be plagued in hell But thus in heaven tormented,

  or in Dryden's

  I feed a flame within, which so torments me That it both pains my heart, and yet enchants me: 'Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it, That I had rather die than once remove it,

  or in Juliet's

  Good-night! good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.

  This mysterious mixture of moods, constantly maintained through thealternations of hope and doubt, elation and despair,

  And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng

  as Coleridge puts it; or

  Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet; Where pleasures mixed with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear

  as Swift rhymes it, is thus seen to be one of the essential and mostcharacteristic ingredients of modern romantic love.

  COURTSHIP AND IMAGINATION

  Here, again, the question confronts us, How far down among the strataof human life can we find traces of this ingredient of love? Do wefind it among the Eskimos, for instance? Nansen relates (II., 317),that

  "In the old Greenland days marriage was a simple and speedy affair. If a man took a fancy to a girl, he merely went to her home or tent, caught her by the hair or anything else which offered a hold, and dragged her off to his dwelling without further ado."

  Nay, in some cases, even this unceremonious "courtship" wasperpetrated by proxy! The details regarding the marriage customs oflower races already cited in this volume, with the hundreds more to begiven in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader thatprimitive courtship--where there is any at all--is habitually a"simple and speedy affair"--not always as simple and speedy as withNansen's Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and playof those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains. Fancy thedifference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I.,161), "thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear ofcorn," and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the infernobecause a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him sohappy that he would not change places with a king, unless his belovedwere to be queen. Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguishand rapture, because they have no imagination. It is only when theimagination comes into play that we can look for the joys and sorrows,the hopes and fears, that help to make up the sum and substance ofromantic love.

  EFFECTS OF SENSUAL LOVE

  At the same time it would be a great mistake to assume that themanifestation of mixed moods proves the presence of romantic love.After all, the alternation of hope and despair which produces thosebitter-sweet paradoxes of the varying and mixed emotions, is one ofthe _selfish_ aspects of passion: the lover fears or hopes for_himself_, not for the other. There is, therefore, no reason why weshould not read of troubled or ecstatic lovers in the poems of theancient writers, who, while knowing love only as selfish lust,nevertheless had sufficient imagination to suffer the agonies ofthwarted purpose and the delights of realized hopes. As a boat-load ofshipwrecked sailors, hungry and thirsty, may be switched from deadlydespair to frantic joy by the approach of a rescuing vessel, so may aman change his moods who is swayed by what is, next to hunger andthirst, the most powerful and imperious of all appetites. We must not,therefore, make the reckless assumption that the Greek and Sanscritwriters must have known romantic love, because they describe men andwomen as being prostrated or elated by strong passion. When Euripidesspeaks of love as being both delectable and painful; when Sappho andTheocritus note the pallor, the loss of sleep, the fears and tears oflovers; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim, at sight ofLeucippe: "I was overwhelmed by conflicting feelings: admiration,astonishment, agitation, shame, assurance;" when King Pururavas, inthe Hindoo drama, _Urvasi_ is tormented by doubts as to whether hislove is reciprocated by the celestial Bayadere (apsara); when, in_Malati_, a love-glance is said to be "anointed with nectar andpoison;" when the arrows of the Hindoo gods of love are called hard,though made of flowers; burning, though not in contact with the skin;voluptuous, though piercing--when we come across such symptoms andfancies we have no right as yet to infer the existence of romanticlove; for all these things also characterize sensual passion, which islove only in the sense of _self_-love, whereas, romantic love isaffection for _another_--a distinction which will be made more andmore manifest as we proceed in our discussion of the ingredients oflove, especially the last seven, which are altruistic. It is only whenwe find these altruistic ingredients associated with the hopes andfears and mixed moods that we can speak of romantic love. The symptomsreferred to in this paragraph tell us about selfish longings, selfishpleasures and selfish pains, but nothing whatever about affection forthe person who is so eagerly coveted.

  VI. HYPERBOLE

  As long as love was supposed to be an uncompounded emotion and nodistinction was made between appetite and sentiment--that is betweenthe selfish desire of eroticism and the self-sacrificing ardor ofaltruistic affection--it was natural enough that the opinion shouldhave preva
iled that love has been always and everywhere the same,inasmuch as several of the traits which characterize the modernpassion--stubborn preference for an individual, a desire for exclusivepossession, jealousy toward rivals, coy resistance and the resultingmixed moods of doubt and hope--were apparently in existence in earlierand lower stages of human development. We have now seen, however, thatthese indications are deceptive, for the reason that lust as well aslove can be fastidious in choice, insistent on a monopoly, and jealousof rivals; that coyness may spring from purely mercenary motives, andthat the mixed moods of hope and despair may disquiet or delight menand women who know love only as a carnal appetite. We now take up oursixth ingredient--Hyperbole--which has done more than any other toconfuse the minds of scholars as regards the antiquity of romanticlove, for the reason that it presents the passion of the ancients inits most poetic and romantic aspects.

  GIRLS AND FLOWERS

  Amorous hyperbole may be defined as obvious exaggeration in praisingthe charms of a beloved girl or youth; Shakspere speaks of"exclamations hyperbolical ... praises sauced with lies." Such"praises sauced with lies" abound in the verse and prose of Greek andRoman as well as Sanscrit and other Oriental writers, and they assumeas diverse forms as in modern erotic literature. The commonest is thatin which a girl's complexion is compared to lilies and roses. TheCyclops in Theocritus tells Galatea she is "whiter than milk ...brighter than a bunch of hard grapes." The mistress of Propertius hasa complexion white as lilies; her cheeks remind him of "rose leavesswimming on milk."

  Lilia non domina sunt magis alba mea; Ut Moeotica nix minio si certet Eboro, Utque rosae puro lacte natant folia. (II., 2.)

  Achilles Tatius wrote that the beauty of Leucippe's countenance

  "might vie with the flowers of the meadow; the narcissus was resplendent in her general complexion, the rose blushed upon her cheek, the dark hue of the violet sparkled in her eyes, her ringlets curled more closely than do the clusters of the ivy--her face, therefore, was a reflex of the meadows."

  The Persian Hafiz declares that "the rose lost its color at sight ofher cheeks and the jasmines silver bud turned pale." A beauty in the_Arabian Nights_, however, turns the tables on the flowers. "Who daresto liken me to a rose?" she exclaims.

  "Who is not ashamed to declare that my bosom is as lovely as the fruit of the pomegranate-tree? By my beauty and grace! by my eyes and black hair, I swear that any man who repeats such comparison shall be banished from my presence and killed by the separation; for if he finds my figure in the ban-tree and my cheeks in the rose, what then does he seek in me?"

  This girl spoke more profoundly than she knew. Flowers are beautifulthings, but a spot red as a rose on a cheek would suggest the hecticflush of fever, and if a girl's complexion were as white as a lily shewould be shunned as a leper. In hyperbole the step between the sublimeand the ridiculous is often a very short one; yet the rose and lilysimile is perpetrated by erotic poets to this day.

  EYES AND STARS

  The eyes are subjected to similar treatment, as in Lodge's lines

  Her eyes are sapphires set in snow Resembling heaven by every wink.

  Thomas Hood's Ruth had eyes whose "long lashes veiled a light that hadelse been all too bright." Heine saw in the blue eyes of his belovedthe gates of heaven. Shakspere and Fletcher have:

  And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn!

  When Romeo exclaims:

  Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. ... her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night,

  he excels, both in fancy and in exaggeration, all the ancient poets;but it was they who began the practice of likening eyes to brightlights. Ovid declares (_Met._, I., 499) that Daphne's eyes shone witha fire like that of the stars, and this has been a favorite comparisonat all times. Tibullus assures us (IV., 2) that "when Cupid wishes toinflame the gods, he lights his torches at Sulpicia's eyes." In theHindoo drama _Malati and Madhava_, the writer commits the extravaganceof making Madhava declare that the white of his mistresses eyessuffuses him as with a bath of milk!

  Theocritus, Tibullus ("candor erat, qualem praefert Latonia Luna"),Hafiz, and other Greek, Roman, and Oriental poets are fond ofcomparing a girl's face or skin to the splendors of the moon, and eventhe sun is none too bright to suggest her complexion. In the _ArabianNights_ we read: "If I look upon the heaven methinks I see the sunfallen down to shine below, and thee whom I desire to shine in hisplace." A girl may, indeed, be superior to sun and moon, as we see inthe same book: "The moon has only a few of her charms; the sun triedto vie with her but failed. Where has the sun hips like those of thequeen of my heart?" An unanswerable argument, surely!

  LOCKS AND FRAGRANCE

  When William Allingham wrote: "Her hair's the brag of Ireland, soweighty and so fine," he followed in the wake of a hundred poets, whohad made a girl's tresses the object of amorous hyperbole. Dianeme's"rich hair which wantons with the love-sick air" is a pretty conceit.The fanciful notion that a beautiful woman imparts her sweetness tothe air, especially with the fragrance of her hair, occurs frequentlyin the poems of Hafiz and other Orientals. In one of these the poetchides the zephyr for having stolen its sweetness while playing withthe beloved's loose tresses. In another, a youth declares that if heshould die and the fragrance of his beloved's locks were wafted overhis grave, it would bring him back to life. Ben Jonson's famous linesto Celia:

  I sent thee late a rosy wreath, Not so much honoring thee As giving it a hope that there It could not withered be; But thou thereon did'st only breathe And sent'st it back to me; Since when it grows, and smells, I swear, Not of itself but thee!

  are a free imitation of passages in the Love Letters (Nos. 30 and 31)of the Greek Philostratus: "Send me back some of the roses on whichyou slept. Their natural fragrance will have been increased by thatwhich you imparted to them." This is a great improvement on thePersian poets who go into raptures over the fragrant locks of fairwomen, not for their inherent sweetness, however, but for theartificial perfumes used by them, including the disgusting musk! "Is acaravan laden with musk returning from Khoten?" sings one of thesebards in describing the approach of his mistress.

  POETIC DESIRE FOR CONTACT

  Besides such direct comparisons of feminine charms to flowers, to sunand moon and other beautiful objects of nature, amorous hyperbole hasseveral other ways of expressing itself. The lover longs to be somearticle of dress that he might touch the beloved, or a bird that hemight fly to her, or he fancies that all nature is love-sick insympathy with him. Romeo's

  See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O, that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek!

  is varied in Heine's poem, where the lover wishes he were a stool forher feet to rest on, a cushion for her to stick pins in, or acurl-paper that he might whisper his secrets into her ears; and inTennyson's dainty lines:

  It is the miller's daughter, And she is grown so dear, so dear, That I would be the jewel That trembles at her ear; For hid in ringlets day and night I'd touch her neck so warm and white.

  And I would be the girdle About her dainty, dainty waist, And her heart would beat against me In sorrow and in rest; And I should know if it beat right, I'd clasp it round so close and tight.

  And I would be the necklace, And all day long to fall and rise Upon her balmy bosom With her laughter or her sighs, And I would be so light, so light, I scarce should be unclasped at night.

  Herein, too, our modern poets were anticipated by the ancients.Anacreon wishes he were a mirror that he might reflect the image ofhis beloved; or the gown she wears every day; or the water that lavesher limb
s; or the balm that anoints her body; or the pearl that adornsher neck; or the cloth that covers her breast; or the shoes that aretrodden by her feet.

  The author of an anonymous poem in the Greek _Anthology_ wishes hewere a breath of air that he might be received in the bosom of hisbeloved; or a rose to be picked by her hand and fastened on her bosom.Others wish they were the water in the fountain from which a girldrinks, or a dolphin to carry her on its back, or the ring she wears.After the Hindoo Sakuntala has lost her ring in the river the poetexpresses surprise that the ring should have been able to separateitself from that hand. The Cyclops of Theocritus wishes he had beenborn with the gills of a fish so that he might dive into the sea tovisit the nymph Galatea and kiss her hands should her mouth berefused. One of the goatherds of the same bucolic poet wishes he werea bee that he might fly to the grotto of Amaryllis. From such fanciesit is but a short step to the "were I a swallow, to her I would fly"of Heine and other modern poets.

  NATURE'S SYMPATHY WITH LOVERS

  In the ecstasy of his feeling Rosalind's lover wants to have her namecarved on every tree in the forest; but usually the lover assumes thatall things in the forests, plants or animals, sympathize with him evenwithout having his beloved's name thrust upon them.

  For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And, thou away, the very birds are mute; Or if they sing, 't is with so dull a cheer, That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.

  "Why are the roses so pale?" asks Heine.

  "Why are the violets so dumb in the green grass? Why does the lark's song seem so sad, and why have the flowers lost their fragrance? Why does the sun look down upon the meadows so cold and morose, and why is the earth so gray and desolate? Why am I ill and melancholy, and why, my love, did you leave me?"

  In another poem Heine declares:

  "If the flowers knew how deeply my heart is wounded, they would weep with me. If the nightingales knew how sad I am, they would cheer me with their refreshing song. If the golden stars knew my grief, they would come down from their heights to whisper consolation to me."

  This phase of amorous hyperbole also was known to the ancient poets.Theocritus (VII., 74) relates that Daphnis was bewailed by the oaksthat stood on the banks of the river, and Ovid (151) tells us, inSappho's epistle to Phaon, that the leafless branches sighed over herhopeless love and the birds stopped their sweet song. Musaeus feltthat the waters of the Hellespont were still lamenting the fate whichovertook Leander as he swam toward the tower of Hero.

  ROMANTIC BUT NOT LOVING

  If a romantic love-poem were necessarily a poem of romantic love, thespecimens of amorous hyperbole cited in the preceding pages wouldindicate that the ancients knew love as we know it. In reality,however, there is not, in all the examples cited, the slightestevidence of genuine love. A passion which is merely sensual mayinspire a gifted poet to the most extravagantly fanciful expressionsof covetous admiration, and in all the cases cited there is nothingbeyond such sensual admiration. An African Harari compares the girl helikes to "sweet milk fresh from the cow," and considers that coarseremark a compliment because he knows love only as an appetite. A gypsypoet compares the shoulders of his beloved to "wheat bread," and aTurkish poem eulogizes a girl for being like "bread fried in butter."(Ploss, L, 85, 89.)

  The ancient poets had too much taste to reveal their amorous desiresquite so bluntly as an appetite, yet they, too, never went beyond theconfines of self-indulgence. When Propertius says a girl's cheeks arelike roses floating on milk; when Tibullus declares another girl'seyes are bright enough to light a torch by; when Achilles Tatius makeshis lover exclaim: "Surely you must carry about a bee on your lips,they are full of honey, your kisses wound"--what is all this except arevelation that the poet thinks the girl pretty, that her beauty_gives him pleasure_, and that he tries to express that pleasure bycomparing her to some other object--sun, moon, honey, flowers--thatpleases his senses? Nowhere is there the slightest indication that heis eager to _give her pleasure_, much less that he would be willing tosacrifice his own pleasures for her, as a mother, for instance, wouldfor a child. His hyperboles, in a word, tell us not of love foranother but of a self-love in which the other figures only as a meansto an end, that end being his own gratification.

  When Anacreon wishes he were the gown worn by a girl, or the waterthat laves her limbs, or the string of pearls around her neck, he doesnot indicate the least desire to make _her_ happy, but an eagerness toplease _himself_ by coming in contact with her. The daintiest poeticconceit cannot conceal this blunt fact. Even the most fanciful of allforms of amorous hyperbole--that in which the lover imagines that allnature smiles or weeps with him--what is it but the most colossalegotism conceivable?

  The amorous hyperbole of the ancients is romantic in the sense offanciful, fictitious, extravagant, but not in the sense in which Ioppose romantic love to selfish sensual infatuation. There is nointimation in it of those things that differentiate love fromlust--the mental and moral charms of the women, or the adoration,sympathy, and affection, of the men. When one of Goethe's characterssays: "My life began at the moment I fell in love with you;" or whenone of Lessing's characters exclaims: "To live apart from her isinconceivable to me, would be my death"--we still hear the note ofselfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, theresult of a change in the way of regarding women. Where women arelooked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbolecannot be sincere; it is either nothing but "spruce affectation" orelse an illustration of the power of sensual love. No ancient authorcould have written what Emerson wrote in his essay on Love, of thevisitations of a power which

  "made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage.... When the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on.... When all business seemed an impertinence, and all men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures."

  THE POWER OF LOVE

  In the essay "On the Power of Love," to which I have referred inanother place, Lichtenberg bluntly declared he did not believe thatsentimental love could make a sensible adult person so extravagantlyhappy or unhappy as the poets would have us think, whereas he wasready to concede that the sexual appetite may become irresistible.Schopenhauer, on the contrary, held that sentimental love is the morepowerful of the two passions. However this may be, either is strongenough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole inliterature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, "speaking in aperpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love." "The major partof lovers," writes Robert Burton,

  "are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace, danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow; yet this furious lust precipitates, counterpoiseth, weighs down on the other."

  Professor Bain, discussing all the human emotions in a volume of 600pages, declares, regarding love (138), that

  "the excitement at its highest pitch, in the torrent of youthful sensations and ungratified desires is probably the most furious and elated experience of human nature."

  In whatever sense we take this, as referring to sensual or sentimentallove, or a combination of the two, it explains why erotic writers ofall times make such lavish use of superlatives and exaggerations.Their strong feelings can only be expressed in strong language."Beauty inflicts a wound sharper than any arrow," quoth AchillesTatius. Meleager declares: "Even the winged Eros in the air becameyour prisoner, sweet Timarion, because your eye drew him down;" and inanother place: "the
cup is filled with joy because it is allowed totouch the beautiful lips of Zenophila. Would that she drank my soul inone draught, pressing firmly her lips on mine" (a passage whichTennyson imitated in "he once drew with one long kiss my whole soulthrough my lips"). "Not stone only, but steel would be melted byEros," cried Antipater of Sidon. Burton tells of a cold bath thatsuddenly smoked and was very hot when Coelia came into it; and ananonymous modern poet cries:

  Look yonder, where She washes in the lake! See while she swims, The water from her purer limbs New clearness take!

  The Persian poet, Saadi, tells the story of a young enamoured Dervishwho knew the whole Koran by heart, but forgot his very alphabet inpresence of the princess. She tried to encourage him, but he onlyfound tongue to say, "It is strange that with thee present I shouldhave speech left me;" and having said that he uttered a loud groan andsurrendered his soul up to God.

  To lovers nothing seems impossible. They "vow to weep seas, live infire, eat rocks, tame tigers," as Troilus knew. Mephistophelesexclaims:

  So ein verliebter Thor verpufft Euch Sonne, Mond und alle Sterne Zum Zeitvertreib dem Liebchen in die Luft.

  (Your foolish lover squanders sun and moon and all the stars toentertain his darling for an hour.) Romantic hyperbole is the realismof love. The lover is blind as to the beloved's faults, andcolor-blind as to her merits, seeing them differently from normalpersons and all in a rosy hue. She really seems to him superior toevery one in the world, and he would be ready any moment to join theranks of the mediaeval knights who translated amorous hyperbole intoaction, challenging every knight to battle unless he acknowledged thesuperior beauty of his lady. A great romancer is the lover; heretouches the negative of his beloved, in his imagination, removesfreckles, moulds the nose, rounds the cheeks, refines the lips, andadds lustre to the eyes until his ideal is realized and he seesHelen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.

  ... For to be wise and love Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above.

  VII. PRIDE

  I dare not ask a kiss, I dare not beg a smile, Lest having that or this I might grow proud the while. --_Herrick_.

  Let fools great Cupid's yoke disdain, Loving their own wild freedom better, Whilst proud of my triumphant chain I sit, and court my beauteous fetter. --_Beaumont_.