COMIC SIDE OF LOVE
"There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as thelover doth of the person beloved," said Bacon; "and therefore it iswell said that it is impossible to love and be wise."
Like everything else in this world, love has its comic side. Nothingcould be more amusing, surely, than the pride some men and womenexhibit at having secured for life a mate whom most persons would notcare to own a day. The idealizing process just described isresponsible for this comedy; and a very useful thing it is, too; fordid not the lover's fancy magnify the merits and minify the faults ofthe beloved, the number of marriages would not be so large as it is.Pride is a great match-maker. "It was a proud night with me," wroteWalter Scott,
"when I first found that a pretty young woman could think it worth her while to sit and talk with me hour after hour in a corner of the ball-room, while all the world were capering in our view."
Such an experience was enough to attune the heart-strings tolove. The youth felt flattered, and flattery is the food of love.
A MYSTERY EXPLAINED
Pride explains some of the greatest mysteries of love. "How _could_that woman have married such a manikin?" is a question one oftenhears. Money, rank, opportunity, lack of taste, account for much, butin many instances it was pride that first opened the heart to love;that is, pride was the first of the ingredients of love to capitulate,and the others followed suit. Probably that manikin was the firstmasculine being who ever showed her any attentions. "He appreciatesme!" she mused. "I admire his taste--he is not like other men--I likehim--I love him."
The compliment of a proposal touches a girl's pride and may prove theentering-wedge of love; hence the proverbial folly of accepting agirl's first refusal as final. And if she accepts, the thought thatshe, the most perfect being in the world, prefers him above all men,inflates his pride to the point of exultation; thenceforth he can talkand think only in "three pil'd hyperboles." He wants all the world toknow how he has been distinguished. In a Japanese poem translated byLafcadio Hearn (_G.B.F._, 38) a lover exclaims:
I cannot hide in my heart the happy knowledge that fills it; Asking each not to tell, I spread the news all round.
IMPORTANCE OF PRIDE
To realize fully how important an ingredient in love pride is, we needonly consider the effect of a refusal. Of all the pangs that make upits agony none is keener than that of wounded pride or vanity. Hencethe same lover who, if successful, wants all the world to know how hehas been distinguished, is equally anxious, in case of a refusal, tokeep it a secret. Schopenhauer went so far as to assert that both inthe pain of unrequited love and the joy of success, vanity is a moreimportant factor than the thwarting of sensual desires, because only apsychic disturbance can stir us so deeply.
Shakspere knew that while there are many kinds of pride, the best anddeepest is that which a man feels in his love. Some, he says, glory intheir birth, some in their skill, some in their wealth, some in theirbody's force, or their garments, or horses; but
All these I better in one general best, Thy love is better than high birth to me, Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost, Of more delight than hawks and horses be And having thee, of all men's pride I boast. --_Sonnet XCI_.
VARIETIES AND GERMS
While amorous pride has also an altruistic aspect in so far as thelover is proud not only of being chosen but also of another'sperfections, it nevertheless belongs, in the main, in the egoisticgroup, and there is therefore no reason why we should not look for itin the lower stages of erotic evolution. Pride and vanity are feelingswhich characterize all grades of human beings from the highest to thelowest. As regards amorous pride, however, it is obvious that theconditions for its existence are not favorable among such aboriginals,_e.g._, as the Australians. What occasion is there for pride on thepart of a man who exchanges his sister or daughter for another man'ssister or daughter, or on the part of the female who is thusexchanged? An American Indian's pride consists not in having won thefavor of one particular girl, but in having been able to buy or stealas many women as possible, married or unmarried; and the bride's prideis proportionate to her lover's prowess in this direction. I need notadd that the pride at being a successful squaw-stealer differs notonly in degree but in kind from the exultation of a white Americanlover at the thought that the most beautiful and perfect girl in theworld has chosen him above all men as her sole and exclusivesweetheart.
Gibbs says (I., 197-200) of the Indians of Western Washington andNorthwestern Oregon that they usually seek their wives among othertribes than their own.
"It seems to be a matter of pride, in fact, to unite the blood of several different ones in their own persons. The expression, I am half Snokwalmu, half Klikatat, or some similar one, is of every-day occurrence. With the chiefs, this is almost always the case."
This feeling, however, is of a tribal kind, lacking the individualityof amorous pride. It would approach the latter if a chief won anotherchiefs daughter in the face of rivalry and felt elated at this feat.Such cases doubtless occur among the Indians.
Shooter gives an amusing account of how the African Kaffirs, when agirl is averse to a marriage, attempt to influence her feelings beforeresorting to compulsion.
"The first step is to speak well of the man in her presence; the Kraal conspire to praise him--her mother praises him--all the admirers of his cattle praise him--he was never so praised before."
If these praises make her feel proud at the thought of marrying such aman, all is well; if not, she has to suffer the consequences. It isnot likely that this praising practice would prevail were it notsometimes successful.
If it ever is, we would have here a germ of amorous pride. Others maybe found in Hindoo literature, as in _Malati and Madhava_, where theintermediary speaks of having dwelt on the lover's merits and rank inthe presence of the heroine, in the hope of influencing her."Extolling the lover's merits" is mentioned as one of the ten stagesof love in the Hindoo _ars amandi_.
In Oriental countries in general, where it is difficult or impossiblefor young men and women to see one another before the wedding-day, thepraising of candidates by and to intermediaries has been a generalcustom. Dr. T. Loebel (9-14) relates that before a Turk reaches the ageof twenty-two his parents look about for a bride for him. They sendout female friends and intermediaries who "praise and exaggerate theaccomplishments of the young man" in houses where they suspect thepresence of eligible girls. These female intermediaries are calledkyz-goeruedschue or "girl-seers." Having found a maiden that appearssuitable, they exclaim, "What a lovely girl! She resembles an angel!What beautiful eyes! True gazelle-eyes! And her hair! Her teeth arelike pearls." When the young man hears the reports of this beauty, heforthwith falls in love with her, and, although he has never seen her,declares he "will marry her and no other." A sense of humor is notgiven to every man: Dr. Loebel remarks seriously that this disprovesthe slanderous assertion so often made that the Turks are incapable oftrue love!
In their treatment and estimate of women the ancient Greeks resembledthe modern Turks. The poets joined the philosophers in declaring that"nature herself," as Becker sums them up (Ill., 315), "assigned towoman a position far beneath man." As there is little occasion forpride in having won the favor of so inferior a being, the eroticliterature of the Greeks is naturally not eloquent on this subject.Such evidence of amorous pride as we find in it, and in Roman poetry,is usually in connection with mercenary women. The poets, being poor,had only one way of winning the favor of these wantons: they couldcelebrate their charms in verse. This aroused the pride of thehetairai, and their grateful caresses made the poets proud at having ameans of winning favor more powerful even than money. But with genuinelove these feelings have nothing to do.
NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS OF LOVE
In common with ambition and other strong passions, love has the powerof
changing a man's character for the time being. One of the speakersin Plutarch's dialogue on love ([Greek: Erotikos], 17) declares thatevery lover becomes generous and magnanimous, though he may have beenniggardly before; but, characteristically enough, it is the love forboys, not for women, that is referred to. A modern lover is affectedthat way by love for women. He feels proud of being distinguished bythe preference of such a girl, and on the principle of _noblesseoblige_, he tries to become worthy of her. This love makes thecowardly brave, the weak strong, the dull witty, the prosy poetic, theslouches tidy. Burton glows eloquent on this subject (Ill., 2),confounding, as usual, love with lust. Ovid notes that when Polyphemuscourted Galatea the desire to please made him arrange his hair andbeard, using the water as a mirror; wherein the Roman poet shows akeener sense of the effect of infatuation than his Greek predecessor,Theocritus, who (Id., XIV.) describes the enamoured Aischines as goingabout with beard neglected and hair dishevelled; or than Callimachus,concerning whose love-story of Acontius and Cydippe Mahaffy says (_G.L. and T.,_ 239):
"The pangs of the lover are described just as they are described in the case of his [Shakspere's] Orlando--dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes, disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit of writing the girl's name on every tree--symptoms which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because they found them in literature, and thought them the spontaneous expression of the grief of love, while they were really the artificial invention of Callimachus and his school, who thus fathered them upon human nature."
Professor Mahaffy overlooks, however, an important distinction whichShakspere makes. The witty Rosalind declares to Orlando, in herbantering way, that
"there is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving 'Rosalind' on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind ... _he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him_."
And when Orlando claims that he is that man, she replies, "There isnone of my uncle's marks upon you; he taught me to know a man inlove."
Orlando: "What were his marks?"
Rosalind:
"A lean cheek, _which you have not_, a blue eye and sunken, _which you have not_ ... a beard neglected, _which you have not_ ... Then your hose _should be_ ungartered, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation."
Shakspere knew that love makes a man tidy, not untidy, hence Rosalindfails to find the artificial Greek symptoms of love in Orlando, whileshe admits that he carves her name on trees and hangs poems on them;acts of which lovers are quite capable. In Japan it is a nationalcustom to hang love-poems on trees.
VIII. SYMPATHY
"Egotism," wrote Schopenhauer
"is a colossal thing; it overtops the world. For, if every individual had the choice between his own destruction and that of every other person in the world, I need not say what the decision would be in the vast majority of cases."
"Many a man," he declares on another page,[22] "would be capable ofkilling another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." Thegrim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion asa hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggerationafter all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, hewould have been fully justified in this doubt. An Australian has beenknown to bait his fish-hook with his own child when no other meat wasat hand; and murders committed for equally trivial and selfish reasonsare every-day affairs among wild tribes.
EGOTISM, NAKED OK MASKED
Egoism manifests itself in a thousand different ways, often in subtledisguise. Its greatest triumph lies in its having succeeded up to thepresent day in masquerading as love. Not only many modern egotists,but ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans,barbarians and savages, have been credited with love when in realitythey manifested nothing but sexual self-love, the woman in the casebeing valued only as an object without which the beloved Ego could nothave its selfish indulgence. By way of example let us take what Pallassays in his work on Russia (III., 70) of the Samoyedes:
"The wretched women of this nomadic people are obliged not only to do all the house-work, but to take down and erect the huts, pack and unpack the sleigh, and at the same time perform slavish duties for their husbands, who, except on a few amorous evenings, hardly bestow on them a look or a pleasant word, while expecting them to anticipate all their desires."
The typical shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much toprevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if hehappened to see a Samoyede on one of these "amorous evenings," that he"loved" his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse thathe loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means ofgratifying his selfish appetites. In the preceding pages I endeavoredto show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman,individual preference, monopolism, jealousy, hope and despair andhyperbolic expression of feeling, yet without giving the slightestindication of love--that is, of affection--for her. It is all egoism,and egoism is the antipode of love, which is a phase of altruism. Notthat these selfish ingredients are absent in genuine love. Romanticlove embraces both selfish and altruistic elements, but the former aresubdued and overpowered by the latter, and sexual passion is not loveunless the altruistic ingredients are present. It is these altruisticingredients that we must now consider, beginning with sympathy, whichis the entering wedge of altruism.
DELIGHT IN THE TORTURE OF OTHERS
Sympathy means sharing the pains and pleasures of another--feeling theother's joys and sorrows as if they were our own, and therefore aneagerness to diminish the other's pains and increase the pleasures.Does uncivilized man exhibit this feeling? On the contrary, he gloatsover another's anguish, while the other's joys arouse his envy. Pityfor suffering men and animals does not exist in the lower strata ofhumanity. Monteiro says (_A. and C._, 134) that the negro
"has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or compassion for suffering. A fellow-creature, or animal, writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highly provocative of merriment and enjoyment. I have seen a number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children, stand round, roaring with laughter, at seeing a poor mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and roll about in agony on the ground till a white man put it out of its misery."
Cozzens relates (129-30) an instance of Indian cruelty which hewitnessed among the Apaches. A mule, with his feet tied, was thrown onthe ground. Thereupon two of these savages advanced and commenced withknives to cut the meat from the thighs and fleshy parts of the animalin large chunks, while the poor creature uttered the most terriblecries. Not till the meat had been cut clean to the bone did they killthe beast. And this hideous cruelty was inflicted for no other reasonthan because meat cut from a live animal "was considered more tender,"Custer, who knew the Indian well, describes him as "a savage in everysense of the word; one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceedsthat of any wild beast of the desert." In the _Jesuit Relations_ (Vol.XIII., 61) it takes _ten_ pages to describe the tortures inflicted bythe Hurons on a captive. Theodore Roosevelt writes in his _Winning ofthe West_ (I., 95):
"The nature of the wild Indians has not changed. Not one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot so much as look another in the face and speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out--these tortures can be mentioned, but there are others, equally normal and customary, which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims."
In his famous book, _The Jesuits in North America_, the historianParkman gives many harrowing details of Indian cruelty towardprisoners; harmless women
and children being subjected to the samefiendish tortures as the men. On one occasion he relates of theIroquois (285) that
"they planted stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace, and bound to them those of their prisoners whom they meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old age to infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side. Then, as they retreated, they set the town on fire, and laughed with savage glee at the shrieks of anguish that rose from the blazing dwellings."
On page 248 he relates another typical instance of Iroquois cruelty.Among their prisoners
"were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt, their captors took the infants from them, tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter."
Later on all the prisoners were subjected to further tortures
"designed to cause all possible suffering without touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, cutting off their fingers with clamshells, scorching them with firebrands, and other indescribable tortures."
They cut off the breasts of one of the women and compelled her to eatthem. Then all the women were stripped naked, and forced to dance tothe singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter ofthe crowd.
If anyone in this hostile crowd had shown the slightest sympathy withthe victims of this satanic cruelty, he would have been laughed at andinsulted; for to the American Indians ferocity was a virtue, while"pity was a cowardly weakness at which their pride revolted." Theywere deliberately trained to cruelty from infancy, children beingtaught to break the legs of animals and otherwise to torture them. Norwere the women less ferocious than the men; indeed, when it came totorturing prisoners, the squaws often led the men. In the face of suchfacts, it seems almost like mockery to ask if these Indians werecapable of falling in love. Could a Huron to whom cruelty was avirtue, a duty, and whose chief delight was the torture of men andwomen or animals, have harbored in his mind such a delicate,altruistic sentiment as romantic love, based on sympathy withanother's joys and sorrows? You might as well expect a tiger to makeromantic love to the Bengal maiden he has carried into the jungle forhis supper. Cruelty is not incompatible with appetite, but it is afatal obstacle to love based on affection. Facts prove this naturalinference. The Iroquois girls were coarse wantons who indulged in freelust before marriage, and for whom the men felt such passion as ispossible under the circumstances.
The absurdity of the claim that these cruel Indians felt love is mademore glaringly obvious if we take a case nearer home; imagining aneighbor guilty of torturing harmless captive women with the obscenecruelty of the Indians, and yet attributing to him a capacity forrefined love! The Indians would honor such a man as a colleague andhero; we should send him to the penitentiary, the gallows, or themadhouse.
INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING
It would be foolish to retort that the savage's delight in the tortureof others is manifested only in the case of his enemies, for that isnot true; and where he does not directly exult over the sufferings ofothers, he still shows his lack of sympathy by his indifference tothose sufferings, often even in the case of his nearest relatives. TheAfrican explorer Andersson (_O.R._, 156) describes the"heart-rendering sorrow--at least outwardly," of a Damara woman whosehusband had been killed by a rhinoceros, and who wailed in a mostmelancholy way:
"I heartily sympathized with her, and I am sure I was the only person present of all the members assembled ... who at all felt for her lonely condition. Many a laugh was heard, but no one looked sad. No one asked or cared about the man, but each and all made anxious inquiries after the rhinoceros--such is the life of barbarians. Oh, ye sentimentalists of the Rousseau school--for some such still remain--witness what I have witnessed, and do witness daily, and you will soon cease to envy and praise the life of the savages."
"A sick person," writes Galton (190), "meets with no compassion; he is pushed out of his hut by his relations away from the fire into the cold; they do all they can to expedite his death, and when he appears to be dying, they heap oxhides over him till he is suffocated. Very few Damaras die a natural death."
In his book on the Indian Tribes of Guiana (151, 225) the Rev. W.H.Brett gives two typical instances of the lack of sympathy in the NewWorld. The first is that of a poor young girl who was dreadfully burntby lying in a hammock when it caught fire:
"She seemed a very meek and patient child, and her look of gratitude for our sympathy was most affecting. Her friends, however, took no trouble about her, and she probably died soon after."
The second case is that of an Arawak boy who, during a canoe voyage,was seized with cholera. The Indians simply cast him on the edge ofthe shore, to be drowned by the rising tide.
Going to the other end of the continent we find Le Jeune writing ofthe Canadian Indians (in the _Jesuit Relations_, VI., 245): "Thesepeople are very little moved by compassion. They give the sick foodand drink, but otherwise show no regard for them." In the secondvolume of the _Relations_ (15) the missionary writer tells of a sickgirl of nine, reduced to skin and bone. He asked the permission of theparents to baptize her, and they answered that he might take her andkeep her, "for to them she was no better than a dead dog." And again(93) we read that in case of illness "they soon abandon those whoserecovery is deemed hopeless."
Crossing the Continent to California we find in Powers (118) apathetic account of the lack of filial piety, or sympathy with oldage, which, he says, is peculiar to Indians in general. After a manhas ceased to be useful as a warrior, though he may have been a heroof a hundred battles, he is compelled to go with his sons into theforest and bear home on his poor old shoulders the game they havekilled. He totters along behind them "almost crushed to earth beneatha burden which their unencumbered strength is greatly more able tosupport, but they touch it not with so much as one of their fingers."
EXPOSING THE SICK AND AGED
"The Gallinomeros kill their aged parents in a most coldbloodedmanner," says Bancroft (I., 390), and this custom, too, prevails onboth sides of the Continent. The Canadians, according to Lalemant(_Jesuit Relations_, IV., 199),
"kill their fathers and mothers when they are so old that they can walk no longer, thinking that they are thus doing them a good service; for otherwise they would be compelled to die of hunger, as they have become unable to follow others when they change their location."
Henry Norman, in his book on the Far East, explains (553) why so fewdeaf, blind, and idiots are found among savages: they are destroyed orleft to perish. Sutherland, in studying the custom of killing the agedand diseased, or leaving them to die of exposure, found expresstestimony to the prevalence of this loveless habit in twenty-eightdifferent races of savages, and found it denied of only one. Lewis andClarke give a list of Indian tribes by whom the aged were abandoned tostarvation (II., Chap. 7), adding:
"Yet in their villages we saw no want of kindness to the aged: on the contrary, probably because in villages the means of more abundant subsistence renders such cruelty unnecessary, old people appeared to be treated with attention."
But it is obvious that kindness which does not go beyond the pointwhere it interferes with our own comfort, is not true altruism. If oneof two men who are perishing of thirst in the desert finds a cupful ofwater and shares it with the other, he shows sympathy; but if he findsa whole spring and shares it with the companion, his action does notdeserve that name. It would be superfluous to make this remark were itnot that the sentimentalists are constantly pointing to such sharingof abundance as evidence of sympathetic kindness. There is a wholevolume of philosophy in Bates's remark (293)
concerning BrazilianIndians: "The good-fellowship of our Cucamas seemed to arise, not fromwarm sympathy, but simply from the absence of eager selfishness insmall matters." The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune devotes a whole chapter(V., 229-31) to such good qualities as he could find among theCanadian Indians. He is just to the point of generosity, but he iscompelled to end with these words: "And yet I would not dare to assertthat I have seen one act of real moral virtue in a savage. They havenothing but their own pleasure and satisfaction in view."
BIRTH OF SYMPATHY
Schoolcraft relates a story of an Indian girl who saved her agedfather's life by carrying him on her back to the new camping-place(_Oneota,_ 88). Now Schoolcraft is not a witness on whom one can relysafely, and his case could be accepted as an illustration of anaboriginal trait only if it had been shown that the girl in questionhad never been subject to missionary influences. Nevertheless, such anact of filial devotion may well have occurred on the part of a woman.It was in a woman's heart that human sympathy was first born--together with her child. The helpless infant could not have survivedwithout her sympathetic care, hence there was an important use forwomanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow, while man,immersed in wars and selfish struggles, remained hard of heart andknew not tenderness.
Yet in woman, too, the growth of sympathy was painfully slow. Thepractice of infanticide, for selfish reasons, was, as we shall see inlater chapters, horribly prevalent among many of the lower races, andeven where the young were tenderly reared, the feeling toward them washardly what we call affection--a conscious, enduring devotion--but asort of animal instinct which is shared by tigers and other fierce andcruel animals, and which endures but a short time. In Agassiz's bookon Brazil we read (373), that the Indians "are cold in their familyaffections; and though the mothers are very fond of their babies, theyseem comparatively indifferent to them as they grow up." As anillustration of this trait Agassiz mentions a sight he witnessed oneday. A child who was to be taken far away to Rio stood on the deckcrying, "while the whole family put off in a canoe, talking andlaughing gaily, without showing him the least sympathy."
WOMEN CRUELER THAN MEN
Apart from instinctive maternal love, sympathy appears to be as far toseek in the savage women as in the men. Authorities agree that inrespect of cruelty the squaws even surpass the warriors. Thus Le Jeuneattests (_Jes. Rel._, VI., 245), that among the Canadians the womenwere crueler toward captives than the men. In another place (V., 29),he writes that when prisoners were tortured the women and girls "blewand drove the flames over in their direction to burn them." In everyHuron town, says Parkman (_Jes. in N.A._, XXXIV.), there were oldsquaws who "in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded themen." The same is asserted of the Comanche women, who "delight intorturing the male prisoners." Concerning Chippewa war captives,Keating says (I., 173): "The marriageable women are reduced toservitude and are treated with great cruelty by the squaws." Among theCreeks the women even used to pay a premium of tobacco for theprivilege of whipping prisoners of war (Schoolcraft, V., 280). Theseare typical instances. In Patagonia, writes Falkner (97), the Indianwomen follow their husbands, armed with clubs, sometimes and swords,and ravage and plunder the houses of everything they can find. Powersrelates that when California Indians get too old to fight they have toassist the women in their drudgery. Thereupon the women, instead ofsetting them a good example by showing sympathy for their weakness,take their revenge and make them feel their humiliation keenly.Obviously among these savages, cruelty and ferocity have no sex,wherefore it would be as useless in one sex as in the other to seekfor that sympathy which is an ingredient and a condition of romanticlove.
PLATO DENOUNCES SYMPATHY
From a Canadian Indian to a Greek philosopher it seems a far cry; yetthe transition is easy and natural. To the Indian, as Parkman pointsout, "pity was a cowardly weakness," to be sternly repressed asunworthy of a man. Plato, for his part, wanted to banish poetry fromhis ideal republic because it overwhelms our feelings and makes usgive way to sympathies which in real life our pride causes us torepress and which are "deemed the part of a woman" (_Repub._, X.,665). As for the special form of sympathy which enters into the noblerphases of the love between men and women--fusing their hearts andblending their souls--Plato's inability to appreciate such a thing maybe inferred from the fact that in this same ideal republic he wantedto abolish the marriage even of individual bodies. Of the marriage ofsouls he, like the other Greeks, knew nothing. To him, as to hiscountrymen in general, love between man and woman was mere animalpassion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, orfriendship, or to filial, parental, or brotherly love.
From the point of view of sympathy, the difference between ancientpassion and modern love is admirably revealed in Wagner's_Tannhaeuser_. As I have summed it up elsewhere[23]:
"Venus shares only the joys of Tannhaeuser, while Elizabeth is ready to suffer with him. Venus is carnal and selfish, Elizabeth affectionate and self-sacrificing. Venus degrades, Elizabeth ennobles; the depth of her love atones for the shallow, sinful infatuation of Tannhaeuser. The abandoned Venus threatens revenge, the forsaken Elizabeth dies of grief."
There are stories of wifely devotion in Greek literature, but, likeOriental stories of the same kind (especially in India) they have asuspicious appearance of having been invented as object-lessons forwives, to render them more subservient to the selfish wishes of thehusbands. Plutarch counsels a wife to share her husband's joys andsorrows, laugh when he laughs, weep when he weeps; but he fails tosuggest the virtue of reciprocal sympathy on the husband's part; yetPlutarch had much higher notions regarding conjugal life than most ofthe Greeks. An approximation to the modern ideal is found only when weconsider the curious Greek adoration of boys. Callicratides, inLucian's [Greek: Erotes], after expressing his contempt for women andtheir ways, contrasts with them the manners of a well-bred youth whospends his time associating with poets and philosophers, or takinggymnastic and military exercises. "Who would not like," he continues,
"to sit opposite such a boy, hear him talk, share his labors, walk with him, nurse him in illness, go to sea with him, share darkness and chains with him if necessary? Those who hated him should be my enemies, those who loved him my friends. When he dies, I too should wish to die, and one grave should cover us."
Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism.Callicratides does not say he will die _for_ the other, or that theother's pleasures are to him more important than his own.[24]
SHAM ALTRUISM IN INDIA
India is generally credited with having known and practised altruismlong before Christ came to preach it. Kalidasa anticipates a modernidea when he remarks, in _Sakuntala_, that "Among persons who are veryfond of each other, grief shared is grief halved." India, too, isfamed for its monks or penitents, who were bidden to be compassionateto all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless thosethat cursed them (Mann, VI., 48). But in reality the penitents wereactuated by the most selfish of motives; they believed that by obeyingthose precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they wouldget such power that even the gods would dread them; and the Sanscritdramas are full of illustrations of the detestably selfish use theymade of the power thus acquired. In _Sakuntala_ we read how a poorgirl's whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one ofthese "saints," for the trivial reason that, being absorbed inthoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to hispersonal comforts at once; while _Kausika's Rage_ illustrates thediabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes aking and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations. Itis possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest andhaving no other companions, learned to love the animals that came tosee them; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos ingeneral is merely a matter of superstition and not an outcome ofsympathy. He has not even a fellow-feeling for suffering human beings.How far he was from reali
zing Christ's "blessed are the merciful," maybe inferred from what the Abbe Dubois says:
"The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his heart. He will see an unhappy being perish on the road, or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste; and will not stir to help him to a drop of water, though it were to save his life."
"To kill a cow," says the same writer (I., 176), "is a crime which theHindoo laws punish with death;" and these same Hindoos treat women,especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd tosuppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could beactuated by sympathy in their devout attitude toward some animals.Superstition is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person whokills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive.In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally.What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with suchsuperstitions:
"The enraged multitude did not wait for the slow process of law, but put the offender to death with their own hands." At the same time some animals "which were deemed divinities in one home, were treated as nuisances and destroyed in others." (Kendrick, II., I-21.)
EVOLUTION OF SYMPATHY
If we study the evolution of human sympathy we find that it begins,not in reference to animals but to human beings. The first stage is amother's feeling going out to her child. Next, the family as a wholeis included, and then the tribe. An Australian kills, as a matter ofcourse, everyone he comes across in the wilderness not belonging tohis tribe. To the present day race hatred, jingoism, and religiousdifferences obstruct the growth of cosmopolitan sympathy such asChrist demanded. His religion has done much, however, to widen thecircle of sympathy and to make known its ravishing delights. Thedoctrine that it is more blessed to give than to receive is literallytrue for those who are of a sympathetic disposition. Parents enjoy thepleasures of their children as they never did their own egotisticdelights. In various ways sympathy has continued to grow, and at thepresent day the most refined and tender men and women include animalswithin the range of their pity and affection. We organize societiesfor their protection, and we protest against the slaughter of birdsthat live on islands, thousands of miles away. Our imagination hasbecome so sensitive and vivid that it gives us a keen pang to think ofthe happy lives of these birds as being ruthlessly cut short and theiryoung left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation.If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whomBurton wrote in his _Two Trips to Gorilla Land_, that "Cruelty seemsto be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments areconnected with causing pain and inflicting death"--we need no otherargument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romanticlove, because that implies a capacity for the tenderest and subtlestsympathy. I would sooner believe a tiger capable of such love than asavage, for the tiger practises cruelty unconsciously and accidentallywhile in quest of food, whereas the primitive man indulges in crueltyfor cruelty's sake, and for the delight it gives him. We have here onemore illustration of the change and growth of sentiments. Man'semotions develop as well as his reasoning powers, and one might aswell expect an Australian, who cannot count five, to solve a problemin trigonometry as to love a woman as we love her.
AMOROUS SYMPATHY
In romantic love altruism reaches its climax. Turgenieff did notexaggerate when he said that "it is in a man really in love as if hispersonality were eliminated." Genuine love makes a man shed egoism asa snake sheds its skin. His one thought is: "How can I make her happyand save her from grief" at whatever cost to his own comfort. Amoroussympathy implies a complete self-surrender, an exchange ofpersonalities:
My true love hath my heart, and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given. --_Sidney_.
It is the secret sympathy, The silver link, the silken tie, Which heart to heart, and mind to mind, In body and in soul can bind. --_Scott_.
To a woman who wishes to be loved truly and permanently, a sympatheticdisposition is as essential as modesty, and more essential thanbeauty. The author of _Love Affairs of Some Famous Men_ has wittilyremarked that "Love at first sight is easy enough; what a girl wantsis a man who can love her when he sees her every day." That, he mighthave added, is impossible unless she can enter into another's joys andsorrows. Many a spark of love kindled at sight of a pretty face andbright eyes is extinguished after a short acquaintance which reveals acold and selfish character. A man feels instinctively that a girl whois not a sympathetic sweetheart will not be a sympathetic wife andmother, so he turns his attention elsewhere. Selfishness in a man isperhaps a degree less offensive, because competition and the strugglefor existence necessarily foster it; yet a man who does not merge hispersonality in that of his chosen girl is not truly in love, howevermuch he may be infatuated. There can be sympathy without love, but nolove without sympathy. It is an essential ingredient, an absolutetest, of romantic love.
IX. ADORATION
Silvius, in _As You Like It_, says that love is "all adoration," andin _Twelfth Night_, when Olivia asks: "How does he love me?" Violaanswers: "With adorations." Romeo asks: "What shall I swear by?" andJuliet replies:
Do not swear at all; Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, Which is the god of my idolatry, And I'll believe thee.
DEIFICATION OF PERSONS
Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the"deification of persons," and that women adore as well as men. Helena,in _All's Well that Ends Well_, says of her love for Bertram:
Thus, Indian-like Religious in mine error, I adore The sun that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more.
"Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau,Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element ofhumanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within thelast few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort ofinstinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modernlover is like a sculptor who takes an ordinary block of marble andcarves a goddess out of it. His belief that his idol is a livinggoddess is, of course, an illusion, but the _feeling_ is real, howeverfantastic and romantic it may seem. He is so thoroughly convinced ofthe incomparable superiority of his chosen divinity that "it ismarvellous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he isin a panic when he thinks of it," as Charles Dudley Warner puts it.Ouida speaks of "the graceful hypocrisies of courtship," and no doubtthere are many such; but in romantic love there is no hypocrisy; itsdevotion and adoration are absolutely sincere.
The romantic lover adores not only the girl herself but everythingassociated with her. This phase of love is poetically delineated inGoethe's _Werther_:
"To-day," Werther writes to his friend, "I could not go to see Lotta, being unavoidably detained by company. What was there to do? I sent my valet to her, merely in order to have someone about me who had been near her. With what impatience I expected him, with what joy I saw him return! I should have liked to seize him by the hand and kiss him, had I not been ashamed.
"There is a legend of a Bononian stone which being placed in the sun absorbs his rays and emits them at night. In such a light I saw that valet. The knowledge that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, the buttons and the collar of his coat, made all these things valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand dollars, so happy was I in his presence. God forbid that you should laugh at this. William, are these things phantasms if they make us happy?"
Fielding wrote a poem on a half-penny which a young lady had given toa beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half-crown. Sir RichardSteele wrote to Miss Scurlock:
"You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have worn,
or I cannot live; otherwise you must expect that I'll kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your handkerchief."
Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fairsex. The lover worships the very ground she trod on, and is enrapturedat the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her.To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, inperpetual hyperbole:
It's a year almost that I have not seen her; Oh! last summer green things were greener, Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer. --_C.G. Rossetti_.
PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN
The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, anentirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from beinguniversal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345): "Amongourselves woman-worship nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost,if not entirely, absent among the peasantry." Still less would weexpect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warliketimes, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons moreuseful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor worship,which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. Forthese reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims ofnatural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferiorto men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughterwas bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--orrather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.
A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extractsfrom the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contemptfor women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by thelower races in all parts of the world. But as the attitude ofAfricans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to befully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to afew sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss,II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spreadthat a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to andfro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim wasonly a woman, whereupon quiet was restored. If an Indian refuses toquarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains(VI., 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of awarrior, as she is too far beneath him. In Tahiti the head of ahusband or father was sacred from a woman's touch. Offerings to thegods would have been polluted if touched by a woman. In Siam the wifehad to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband's, to remind her ofher inferiority. No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maorichief. Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in anycorner of the tent except her own; after pitching the tent she wasobliged to fumigate it before the men would enter. The Zulus regardtheir women "with haughty contempt." Among Mohammedans a woman has adefinite value only in so far as she is related to a husband;unmarried she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her.(Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls byelders and priests is the insulting
"Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive thee." "On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that she is an unwelcome guest in the family." (Ramabai Saravasti, 13.)
William Jameson Reid, who visited some of the unexplored regions ofNortheastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness andmisery of woman's lot among the Pa-Urgs:
"Although, owing to the scarcity, a woman is a valuable commodity, she is treated with the utmost contempt, and her existence is infinitely worse than the very animals of her lord and master. Polyandry is generally practised, increasing the horror of her position, for she is required to be a slave to a number of masters, who treat her with the most rigorous harshness and brutality. From the day of her birth until her death (few Pa-Urg women live to be fifty) her life is one protracted period of degradation. She is called upon to perform the most menial and degrading of services and the entire manual labor of the community, it being considered base of a male to engage in other labor than that of warfare and the chase....
"When a child is to be born the mother is driven from the village in which she lives, and is compelled to take up her abode in some roadside hut or cave in the open country, a scanty supply of food, furnished by her husbands, being brought to her by the other women of the tribe. When the child is born the mother remains with it for one or two months, and then leaving it in a cave, returns to the village and informs her eldest husband of its birth and the place where she has left it. If the child is a male, some consideration is shown to her; should it be a female, however, her lot is frightful, for aside from the severe beating to which she is subjected by her husband, she suffers the scorn and contumely of the rest of the tribe. If a male child, the husband goes to the cave and brings it back to the village; if it is of the opposite sex he is left to his own volition; sometimes he returns with the female infant; as often he ignores it entirely and allows it to perish, or may dispose of it to some other man as a prospective wife."[26]
In Corea women are so little esteemed that they do not even receiveseparate names, and a husband considers it an act of condescension tospeak to his wife. When a young man of the ruling classes marries, hespends three or four days with his bride, then returns to hisconcubine, "in order to prove that he does not care much for thebride." (Ploss, II., 434.) "The condition of Chinese women is mostpitiable," writes the Abbe Hue:
"Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and accompany her to the tomb. Her birth is commonly regarded as a humiliation and a disgrace to the family--an evident sign of the malediction of heaven. If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is regarded and treated as a creature radically despicable, and scarcely belonging to the human race."
He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for thebride is to commit suicide. Even the Japanese, so highly civilized insome respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likeningthemselves to heaven and the women to earth. There are ten stations onthe way up the sacred mount Fuji. Formerly no woman was allowed toclimb above the eighth. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of theUniversity of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his _Things Japanese_ (274) inwhich he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the_Kojiki_ he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women inancient as in modern Japan. Some years afterward six of the chiefliterati of the old school translated this introduction into Japanese.They patted the author on the head for many things, but when theyreached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrathexploded:
"The subordination of women to men," so ran their commentary, "is an extremely correct custom. To think the contrary is to harbor European prejudice.... For the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand law of heaven and earth. To ignore this, and to talk of the contrary as barbarous, is absurd."
The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated bythe men, Chamberlain says on another page,
"has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any generous European heart.... At the present moment the greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still her husband's drudge. She fetches and carries for him, bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth on his walks abroad, waits upon him at meals, may be divorced at his good pleasure."
This testimony regarding a nation which in some things--especiallyaesthetic culture and general courteousness--surpasses Europe andAmerica, is of special value, as it shows that love, based on sympathywith women's joys and sorrows, and adoration of their peculiarqualities, is everywhere the last flower of civilization, and not, asthe sentimentalists claim, the first. If even the advanced Japaneseare unable to feel romantic love--for you cannot adore what youegotistically look down on--it is absurd to look for it amongbarbarians and savage
s, such as the Fuegians, who, in times ofnecessity, eat their old women, or the Australians, among whom notmany women are allowed to die a natural death, "they being generallydespatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good foodmay not be lost."[27]
There are some apparent exceptions to the universal contempt forfemales even among cannibals. Thus it is known that the PeruvianCasibos never eat women. It is natural to jump to the conclusion thatthis is due to respect for the female sex. It is, however, as Tschudishows, assignable to exactly the opposite feeling:
"All the South American Indians, who still remain under the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated to injure them. Among a few of the less rude nations this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a certain unconquerable contempt of females. With the anthropophagi the feeling extends, fortunately, to their flesh, which is held to be poisonous."
The Caribs had a different reason for making it unlawful to eat women."Those who were captured," says P. Martyr, "were kept for breeding, aswe keep fowl, etc," Sir Samuel Baker relates (_A.N._, 240), that amongthe Latookas it was considered a disgrace to kill a woman--not,however, because of any respect felt for the sex, but because of thescarcity and money value of women.
HOMAGES TO PRIESTESSES
Equally deceptive are all other apparent exceptions to the customarycontempt for women. While the women of Fiji, Tonga, and other islandsof the Pacific were excluded from all religious worship, and Papuanfemales were not even allowed to approach a temple, it is not uncommonamong the inferior races for women to be priestesses. Bosnian relates(363) that on the African Slave Coast the women who served aspriestesses enjoyed absolute sway over their husbands, who were in thehabit of serving them on their knees. This, however, was contrary tothe general rule, wherefore it is obvious that the homage was not tothe woman as such, but to the priestess. The feeling inspired in suchcases is, moreover, fear rather than respect; the priestess amongsavages is a sorceress, usually an old woman whose charms have faded,and who has no other way of asserting herself than by assuming apretence to supernatural powers and making herself feared as asorceress. Hysterical persons are believed by savages to be possessedof spirits, and as women are specially liable to hysteria and tohallucinations, it was natural that they should be held eligible forpriestly duties. Consequently, if there was any respect involved hereat all, it was for an infirmity, not for a virtue--a result ofsuperstition, not of appreciation or admiration of special femininequalities.[28]
KINSHIP THROUGH FEMALES ONLY
Dire confusion regarding woman's status has been created in many mindsby three distinct ethnologic phenomena, which are, moreover, oftenconfounded: (1) kinship and heredity through females; (2) matriarchy,or woman's rule in the family (domestic); (3) gynaicocracy, or woman'srule in the tribe (political).
(1) It is a remarkable fact that among many tribes, especially inAustralia, America, and Africa, children are named after their mother,while rank and property, too, are often inherited in the female lineof descent. Lafitau observed this custom among American Indians morethan a century ago, and in 1861 a Swiss jurist, Bachofen, published abook in which he tried to prove, with reference to this "kinshipthrough mothers only," that it indicated that there was a time whenwomen everywhere ruled over men. A study of ethnologic data shows,however, that this inference is absolutely unwarranted by the facts.In Australia, for instance, where children are most commonly namedafter their mother's clan, there is no trace of woman's rule over man,either in the present or the past. The man treats the woman as amaster treats his slaves, and is complete master of her children.Cunow, an authority on Australian relationships, remarks (136):
"Nothing could be more perverse than to infer from the custom of reasoning kinship through females, that woman rules there, and that a father is not master of his children. On the contrary, the father regards himself everywhere, even in tribes with a female line of descent, as the real procreator. He is considered to be the one who plants the germ and the woman as merely the soil in which it grows. And as the wife belongs to him, so does the child that comes from her womb. Therefore he claims also those children of his wife concerning whom he knows or assumes that he did not beget them; for they grew on his soil."
Similarly with the American Indians. Grosse has devoted several pages(73-80) to show that with the tribes among which kinship throughfemales prevails woman's position is not in the least better than withthe others. Everywhere woman is bought, obliged to submit to polygamy,compelled to do the hardest and least honorable work, and oftentreated worse than a dog. The same is true of the African tribes amongwhom kinship in the female line prevails.
If, therefore, kinship through mothers does not argue femalesupremacy, how did that kinship arise? Le Jeune offered a plausibleexplanation as long ago as 1632. In the _Jesuit Relations_ (VI., 255),after describing the immorality of the Indians, he goes on to say:
"As these people are well aware of this corruption, they prefer to take the children of their sisters as heirs, rather than their own, or than those of their brothers, calling in question the fidelity of their wives, and being unable to doubt that these nephews come from their own blood. Also among the Hurons--who are more licentious than our Montagnais, because they are better fed--it is not the child of a captain but his sister's son, who succeeds the father."
The same explanation has been advanced by other writers and by thenatives of other countries where kinship through females prevails;[29]and it doubtless holds true in many cases.
In others the custom of naming children after their mothers isprobably simply a result of the fact that a child is always moreclosely associated with the mother than with the father. She brings itinto the world, suckles it, and watches over it; in the primitivetimes, even if promiscuity was not prevalent, marriages were of shortduration and divorces frequent, wherefore the male parentage would beso constantly in doubt that the only feasible thing was to name thechildren after their mothers. For our purposes, fortunately, thisknotty problem of the origin of kinship through females, which hasgiven sociologists so much trouble,[30] does not need to be solved. Weare concerned solely with the question, "Does kinship in the femaleline indicate the supremacy of women, or their respectful treatment?"and that question, as we have seen, must be answered with a mostemphatic No. There is not a single fact to bear out the theory thatman's rule was ever preceded by a period when woman ruled. The lowerwe descend, the more absolute and cruelly selfish do we find man'srule over woman. The stronger sex everywhere reduces the weaker topractical slavery and holds it in contempt. Primitive woman has notyet developed these qualities in which her peculiar strength lies, andif she had, the men would be too coarse to appreciate them.
WOMAN'S DOMESTIC RULE
(2) As we ascend in the scale we find a few cases where women rule orat least share the rule with the men; but these occur not amongsavages but with the lower and higher barbarians, and at the same timethey are, as Grosse remarks (161), "among the scarcest curiosities ofethnology." The Garos of Assam have women at the head of their clans.Dyak women are consulted in political matters and have equal rightswith the men. Macassar women in Celebes also are consulted as regardspublic affairs, and frequently ascend the throne. A few similar caseshave been noted in Africa, where, _e.g._, the princesses of theAshantees domineer over their husbands; but these apply only to theruling class, and do not concern the sex as a whole. Some strangetales of masculine submission in Nicaragua are told by Herrera. Butthe best-known instance is that of the Iroquois and Hurons. Theirwomen, as Lafitau relates (I., 71), owned the land, and the crops,they decided upon peace or war, took charge of slaves, and mademarriages. The Huron Wyandots had a political council consisting offour women. The Iroquois Seneca women could chase lazy husbands fromthe premises, and could even depose a chief. Yet these cases are notconclusive as to the
real status of the women in the tribe. The factscited are, as John Fiske remarks (_Disc. Amer_., I., 68), "notincompatible with the subjection of women to extreme drudgery andill-treatment." Charlevoix, one of the eye-witnesses to theseexceptional privileges granted to some Indian women, declaresexpressly that their domination was illusory; that they were, at home,the slaves of their husbands; that the men despised them thoroughly,and that the epithet "woman" was an insult.[31] And Morgan, who madesuch a thorough study of the Iroquois, declares (322) that "the Indianregarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man,and, from nature and habit, she actually considered herself to be so."The two honorable employments among Indians were war and hunting, andthese were reserved for the men. Other employments were considereddegrading and were therefore gallantly reserved for the women.
WOMAN'S POLITICAL RULE
Comanche Indians, who treated their squaws with especial contempt,nevertheless would not hesitate on occasion to submit to the rule of afemale chief (Bancroft, I., 509); and the same is true of other tribesin America, Africa, etc. (Grosse, 163). In this respect, barbarians donot differ from civilized races; queenship is a question of blood orfamily and tells us nothing whatever about the status of women ingeneral. As regards the "equal rights" of the Dyak women just referredto, if they really have them, it is not as women, but as men, that is,in so far as they have become like men. This we see from what Schwanersays (I., 161) of the tribes in the Southeast:
"The women are allowed great privileges and liberties. Not infrequently they rule at home and over whole tribes with manly power, incite to war, and often personally lead the men to battle."
Honors paid to such viragoes are honors to masculinity, not tofemininity.
GREEK ESTIMATE OF WOMEN
Here again the transition from the barbarian to the Greek is easy andnatural. The ancient Greek looked down on women as women. "One man,"exclaims Iphigenia in Euripides, "is worth more than ten thousandwomen." There were, of course, certain virtues that were esteemed inwomen, but these, as Becker has said, differed but little from thoserequired of an obedient slave. It is only in so far as women displayedmasculine qualities that they were held worthy of higher honor. Theheroines of Plutarch's essay on "The Virtues of Women" are women whoare praised for patriotic, soldier-like qualities, and actions. Platobelieved that men who were bad in this life would, on their nextbirth, be women. The elevation of women, he held, could be bestaccomplished by bringing them up to be like men. But this matter willbe discussed more fully in the chapter on Greece, as will that of the_adulation_ which was paid to wanton women by Greek and Roman poets,and which has been often mistaken for _adoration_. George Eliot speaksof "that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels tobe greater and better than himself." No Greek ever felt a woman to be"greater and better than himself," wherefore true adoration--thedeification of persons--was out of the question. But there was noreason why a Greek or Roman should not have indulged in servileflattery and hypocritical praise for the selfish purpose of securingthe carnal favors of a mercenarily coy courtesan. He was capable ofadulation but not of adoration, for one cannot adore a slave, a drudgeor a wanton. The author of the _Lover's Lexicon_ claims, indeed, that"love can and does exist without respect," but that is false.Infatuation of the senses may exist without respect, but refined,sentimental love is blighted by the discovery of impurity orvulgarity. Adoration is essential to true love, and adoration includesrespect.
MAN-WORSHIP AND CHRISTIANITY
If we must, therefore, conclude that man in primitive and ancienttimes was unable to feel that love of which adoration is an essentialingredient, how is it with women? From the earliest times, have theynot been taught, with club and otherwise, to look up to man as asuperior being, and did not this enable them to adore him with truelove? No, for primitive women, though they might fear or admire manfor his superior power, were too coarse, obscene, ignorant, anddegraded--being as a rule even lower than the men--to be able to shareeven a single ingredient of the refined love that we experience. Atthe same time it may be said (though it sounds sarcastic) that womanhad a natural advantage over man in being gradually trained to anattitude of devotion. Just as the care of her infants taught hersympathy, so the daily inculcated duty of sacrificing herself for herlord and master fostered the germs of adoration. Consequently we findat more advanced stages of civilization, like those represented byIndia, Greece, and Japan, that whenever we come across a story whosespirit approaches the modern idea of love, the embodiment of that loveis nearly always a woman. Woman had been taught to worship man whilehe still wallowed in the mire of masculine selfishness and despisedher as an inferior. And to the present day, though it is notconsidered decorous for young women to reveal their feelings tillafter marriage or engagement, they adore their chosen ones:
For love's insinuating fire they fan With sweet ideas of a god like man.
In this respect, as in so many others, woman has led civilization.Man, too, gradually learned to doff his selfishness, and to respectand adore women, but it took many centuries to accomplish the change,which was due largely to the influence of Christ's teachings. As longas the aggressive masculine virtues alone were respected, femininegentleness and pity could not but be despised as virtues of a lowergrade, if virtues at all. But as war became less and less the sole orchief occupation of the best men, the feminine virtues, and those whoexercised them, claimed and received a larger share of respect.
Christianity emphasized and honored the feminine virtues of patience,meekness, humility, compassion, gentleness, and thus helped to placewomen on a level with man, and in the noblest of moral qualities evenabove him. Mariolatry, too, exerted a great influence. The worship ofone immaculate woman gradually taught men to respect and adore otherwomen, and as a matter of course, it was the lover who found iteasiest to get down on his knees before the girl he worshipped.
X. UNSELFISH GALLANTRY.
One day while lunching at an African foudak, half way between Tangierand Tetuan, I was led to moralize on the conjugal superiority ofMohammedan roosters to Mohammedan men. Noticing a fine large cock inthe yard, I threw him a handful of bread-crumbs. He was all alone atthe moment and might have easily gobbled them all up. Instead of doingsuch a selfish thing, he loudly summoned his harem with that peculiarclucking sound which is as unmistakable to fowls as is the word dinneror the boom of a gong to us. In a few seconds the hens had gatheredand disposed of the bread, leaving not a crumb to their gallant lordand master. I need not add that the Sultan of a human harem in Moroccowould have behaved very differently under analogous circumstances.
THE GALLANT ROOSTER
The dictionary makers derive the word gallant from all sorts of rootsin divers languages, meaning gay, brave, festive, proud, lascivious,and so on. Why not derive if from the Latin _gallus_, rooster? Arooster combines in himself all the different meanings of the wordgallant. He is showy in appearance, brave, daring, attentive tofemales, and, above all, chivalrous, that is, inclined to showdisinterested courtesy to the weaker sex, as we have just seen. Inthis last respect, it is true, the rooster stands not alone. It is atrait of male animals in general to treat their females unselfishly inregard to feeding and otherwise.
UNGALLANT LOWER RACES OF MEN
If we now turn to human beings, we have to ascend many strata ofcivilization before we come across anything resembling the unselfishgallantry of the rooster. The Australian savage, when he has speared akangaroo, makes his wife cook it, then selects the juiciest cuts forhimself and the other men, leaving the bones to the women and dogs.
Ascending to the much higher Polynesians and American Indians we stillfind that the women have to content themselves with what the menleave. A Hawaiian even considers it a disgrace to eat at the sameplace as his wife, or with the same utensils.
What Kowney says (173) of the Nagas of India--"she does everything thehusband will not, and he considers it effeminate to do anything butfight, hunt, and fish"--is tr
ue of the lower races in general. AnAfrican Kaffir, says Wood (73), would consider it beneath his dignityto as much as lift a basket of rice on the head of even his favoritewife; he sits calmly on the ground and allows some woman to help hisbusy wife. "One of my friends," he continues,
"when rather new to Kaffirland, happened to look into a hut and there saw a stalwart Kaffir sitting and smoking his pipe, while the women were hard at work in the sun, building huts, carrying timber, and performing all kinds of severe labor. Struck with a natural indignation at such behavior, he told the smoker to get up and work like a man. This idea was too much even for the native politeness of the Kaffir, who burst into a laugh at so absurd a notion. 'Women work,' said he, 'men sit in the house and smoke.'"
MacDonald relates (in _Africana_, I., 35) that "a woman always kneelswhen she has occasion to talk to a man." Even queens must in somecases go on their knees before their husbands. (Ratzel, I., 254.)Caille gives similar testimony regarding the Waissulo, and Mungo Park(347) describes the return of one of his companions to the capital ofDentila, after an absence of three years:
"As soon as he had seated himself upon a mat, by the threshold of his door, a young woman (his intended bride) brought a little water in a calabash, and kneeling down before him, desired him to wash his hands; when he had done this, the girl, with a tear of joy sparkling in her eyes, drank the water; this being considered as the greatest proof she could possibly give him of her fidelity and attachment."
An Eskimo, when building a house, looks on lazily while his womencarry stones "almost heavy enough to break their backs." The ungallantmen not only compel the women to be their drudges, but slyly create asentiment that it is disgraceful for a man to assist them. Of thePatagonian Indians Falkner asserts that the women are so rigidly"obliged to perform their duty, that their husbands cannot help themon any occasion, or in the greatest distress, without incurring thehighest ignominy," and this is the general feeling, of which otherillustrations will be given in later chapters. Foolish sentimentalistshave tried to excuse the Indians on the ground that they have no timeto attend to anything but fighting and hunting. But they always makethe squaws do the hard work, whether there be any war and hunting ornot. A white American girl, accustomed to the gallant attentions ofher lover, would not smile on the red Dacota suitor of whom Riggswrites (205):
"When the family are abed and asleep, he often visits her in her mother's tent, or he finds her out in the grove in the day time gathering fuel. She has the load of sticks made up, and when she kneels down to take it on her back, possibly he takes her hand and helps her up and then walks home by her side. Such was the custom In the olden time."
Still, there is a germ of gallantry here. The Dacota at least helps toload his human donkey, while the Kaffir refuses to do even that.
Colonel James Smith, who had been adopted by the Indians, relates (45)how one day he helped the squaws to hoe corn. They approved of it, butthe old men afterward chid him for degrading himself by hoeing cornlike a squaw. He slyly adds that, as he was never very fond of work,they had no occasion to scold him again. We read in Schoolcraft (V.,268) that among the Creeks, during courtship, the young man used tohelp the girl hoe the corn in her field, plant her beans and set polesfor them to run upon. But this was not intended as an act of gallantassistance; it had a symbolic meaning. The running up of the beans onthe poles and the entwining of their vines was "thought emblematicalof their approaching union and bondage." Morgan states expressly inhis classical work on the Iroquois (332) that "no attempts by theunmarried to please or gratify each other by acts of personalattention were ever made." In other words the Indians knew notgallantry in the sense of disinterested courtesy to the weakersex--the gallantry which is an essential ingredient of romantic love.
Germs of gallantry may perhaps be found in Borneo where, as St. Johnrelates (I., 161), a young Dyak may help the girl he wants to marry inher farm work, carrying home her load of vegetables or wood, or makeher presents of rings, a petticoat, etc. But such a statement must beinterpreted with caution.
The very fact that they make the women do the field work and carry thewood habitually, shows that the Dyaks are not gallant. Momentaryfavors for the sake of securing favors in return, or of arranging anephemeral Bornean "marriage," are not acts of disinterested courtesyto the weaker sex. The Dyaks themselves clearly understand that suchattentions are mere bids for favors. As a missionary cited by LingRoth (1., 13.1) remarks:
"If a woman handed to a man betel-nut and sirah to eat, or if a man paid her the smallest attention, such as we should term only common politeness, it would be sufficient to excuse a jealous husband for striking a man."
It is the same in India.
"The politeness, attention, and gallantry which the Europeans practise toward the ladies, although often proceeding from esteem and respect, are invariably ascribed by the Hindoos to a different motive."
(Dubois, I., 271.) Here, as everywhere in former times, woman existednot for her own sake but for man's convenience, comfort, and pleasure;why, therefore, should he bother to do anything to please her? In the_Kaniasoutram_ there is a chapter on the duties of a model wife, inwhich she is instructed to do all the work not only at home but ingarden, field, and stable. She must go to bed after her husband andget up before him. She must try to excel all other wives in faithfullyserving her lord and master. She must not even allow the maid-servantto wash his feet, but must do it with her own hands. The _Laws ofManu_ are full of such precepts, most of them amazingly ungallant. Thehorrible maltreatment of women in India, which it would be anunpardonable euphuism to call simply ungallant, will be dwelt on in alater chapter.
It has been said a thousand times that the best measure of a nation'scivilization is its treatment of women. It would be more accurate tosay that kind, courteous treatment of women is the last and highestproduct of civilization. The Greeks and Hindoos had reached a highlevel of culture in many respects, yet, judged by their treatment ofwomen, the Greeks were barbarians and the Hindoos incarnate fiends.Scholars are sometimes surprisingly reckless in their assumptions.Thus Hommel (1., 417) declares that woman must have held an honoredposition in Babylonia,[32] because in the ancient texts that have comedown to us the words mother and wife always precede the words fatherand husband. Yet, as Dubois mentions incidentally, the Brahmin textsalso place the feminine word before the masculine, and the Brahminstreat women more cruelly than the lowest savages treat them.
EGYPTIAN LOVE
I have not been able to find evidence of a gallant, chivalrous,magnanimous attitude toward women in the records of any ancientnation, and as romantic love is inconceivable without such anattitude, and a constant interchange of kindnesses, we may infer fromthis alone that these nations were strangers to such love. ProfessorEbers makes a special plea for the Egyptians. Noting the statements ofHerodotus and Diodorus regarding the greater degree of liberty enjoyedby their women as compared with the Greek, he bases thereon theinference that in their treatment of women the Egyptians were superiorto all other nations of antiquity. Perhaps they were; it is notclaiming much. But Professor Kendrick notes (I., 46) that although itmay be true that the Egyptian women went to market and carried ontrades while the men remained at home working at the loom, this iscapable of receiving quite a different interpretation from that givenby Ebers. The Egyptians regarded work at the loom more as a matter ofskill than the Greeks did; and if they allowed the women to do themarketing, that may have been because they preferred to have themcarry the heavy burdens and do the harder work, after the fashion ofsavages and barbarians.
If the Egyptians ever did show any respect for women they havecarefully wiped out all traces of it in modern life. To-day,
"among the lower classes and in rural districts the wife is her husband's servant. She works while he smokes and gossips. But among the higher classes, too, the woman
actually stands far below the man. He never chats with her, never communicates to her his affairs and cares. Even after death she does not rest by his side, but is separated from him by a wall." (Ploss, II., 450.)
Polygamy prevails, as in ancient times, and polygamy everywhereindicates a low position of woman. Ebers comments on thecircumspection shown by the ancient Egyptians in drawing up theirmarriage contracts, adding that "in many cases there were even trialmarriages"--a most amazing "even" in view of what he is trying toprove. A modern lover, as I have said before, would reject the veryidea of such a trial marriage with the utmost scorn and indignation,because he feels certain that his love is eternal and unalterable.Time may show that he was mistaken, but that does not affect hispresent feeling. That sublime confidence in the eternity of hispassion is one of the hall-marks of romantic love. The Egyptian had itnot. He not only sanctioned degrading trial marriages, but enacted abarbarous law which enabled a man to divorce any wife at pleasure bysimply pronouncing the words "thou art expelled." In modern Egypt,says Lane (I., 247-51), there are many men who have had twenty,thirty, or more wives, and women who have had a dozen or morehusbands. Some take a new wife every month. Thus the Egyptians arematrimonially on a level with the savage and barbarian North AmericanIndians, Tasmanians, Samoans, Dyaks, Malayans, Tartars, many negrotribes, Arabs, etc.
ARABIAN LOVE
Arabia is commonly supposed to be the country in which chivalryoriginated. This belief seems to rest on the fact that the Arabsspared women in war. But the Australians did the same, and where womenare saved only to be used as slaves or concubines we cannot speak ofchivalry. The Arabs treated their own women well only when they wereable to capture or buy slaves to do the hard work for them; in othercases their wives were their slaves. To this day, when the familymoves, the husband rides on the camel while the wife trudges along onfoot, loaded down with kitchen utensils, bedding, and her child ontop. If a woman happens to ride on a camel she must get off and walkif she meets a man, by way of showing her respect for the superiorsex. (Niebuhr, 50.) The birth of a daughter is regarded as a calamity,mitigated only by the fact that she will bring in some money as abride. Marriage is often little more than a farce. Burckhardt knewBedouins who, before they were fifty years old, had been married tomore than fifty different women. Chavanne, in his book on the Sahara(397-401), gives a pathetic picture of the fate of the Arab girls:
"Usually wedded very young (the marriage of a youth of fourteen to a girl of eleven is nothing unusual), the girl finds in most cases, after five or six years, that her conjugal career is at an end. The husband tires of her and sends her back, without cogent reasons, to her parents. If there are no parents to return to, she abandons herself, in many cases, to the vice of prostitution."
If not discarded, her fate is none the less deplorable. "While youngshe receives much attention, but when her charms begin to fade shebecomes the servant of her husband and of his new wife."
Chavanne gives a glowing description of the ravishing but short-livedbeauty of the Arab girl; also a specimen of the amorous songsaddressed to her while she is young and pretty. She is compared to agazelle; to a palm whose fruits grow high up out of reach; she isequal in value to all Tunis and Algiers, to all the ships on theocean, to five hundred steeds and as many camels. Her throat is like apeach, her eyes wound like arrows. Exaggerations like these abound inthe literature of the Arabs, and are often referred to as proof thatthey love as we do. In truth, they indicate nothing beyond selfish,amorous desires. The proof of unselfish affection lies not in words,however glowing and flattering, but in kind _actions_; and the actionsof the Arabs toward their women are disgustingly selfish, exceptduring the few years that they are young and pretty enough to serve astoys. The Arabs, with all their fine talk, are practically on a levelwith the Samoyedes who, as we saw, ignore or maltreat their wives,"except on an occasional amorous evening"; on a level with the SiouxIndian, of whom Mrs. Eastman remarks that a girl is to him an objectof contempt and neglect from her birth to her grave, except during thebrief period when he wants her for his wife and may have a doubt ofhis success.
THE UNCHIVALROUS GREEKS
A few pages back I cited the testimony of Morgan, who lived many yearsamong the Indians and studied them with the intelligence of an expertethnologist, that "no attempts by the unmarried to please or gratifyeach other by acts of personal attention were ever made." From this wecan, once more, make a natural transition from the aboriginal Americanto the ancient Greek. The Greek men, says the erudite Becker (III.,335), "were quite strangers to that considerate, self-sacrificingcourtesy and those minute attentions to women which we commonly callgallantry," Greek literature and all that we know of Greek life, bearout this assertion fully. It is true the Alexandrian poets and theirRoman imitators frequently use the language of sentimental gallantry;they declare themselves the slaves of their mistresses, are eager towear chains, to go through fire, to die for them, promising to taketheir love to the next world. But all these things are mere "words,words, words"--adulation the insincerity of which is exposed as soonas we examine the actions and the motives of these poets, of whom morewill be said in a later chapter. Their flatteries are addressedinvariably to hetairai; they are conceived and written with theselfish desire to tickle the vanity of these wantons in the hope andexpectation of receiving favors for which the poets, who were usuallypoor, were not able to pay in any other way. Thus these poets arebelow the Arabs, for these sons of the desert at least address theirflatteries to the girls whom they are eager to marry, whereas theGreek and Roman poets sought merely to beguile a class of women whosecharms were for sale to anyone. One of these profligate men mightcringe and wail and cajole, to gain the good will of a capriciouscourtesan, but he never dreamed of bending his knees to win the honestlove of the maid he took to be his wife (that he might have maleoffspring.) Roman love was not romantic, nor was Greek. It was franklysensual, and the gallantry of the men was of a kind that made themerect golden images in public places to honor Phryne and otherprostitutes. In a word, their gallantry was sham gallantry; it wasgallantry not in the sense of polite attentions to women, springingfrom unselfish courtesy and esteem, but in the sinister sense ofprofligacy and amorous intrigue. There were plenty of gallants, but noreal gallantry.
OVID'S SHAM GALLANTRY
While it is undoubtedly true that Ovid exercised a greater influenceon mediaeval bards, and through them on modern erotic writers, thanany other ancient poet, and while I still maintain that he anticipatedand depicted some of the imaginative phases of modern love (see my_R.L.P.B_., 90-92), a more careful study of the nature of gallantryhasconvinced me that I erred in finding the "morning dawn of romanticlove" in the counsels regarding gallant behavior toward women given inthe pages of Ovid.[33] He does, indeed, advise a lover never to noticethe faults of a woman whose favor he wishes to win, but to complimenther, on the contrary, on her face, her hair, her tapering fingers, herpretty foot; to applaud at the circus whatever she applauds; to adjusther cushion and put the footstool in its place; to keep her cool byfanning her; and at dinner, when she has put her lips to the wine-cupto seize the cup and put his lips to the same place. But when Ovidwrote this, nothing was farther from his mind than what we understandby gallantry--an eagerness to perform acts of disinterested courtesyand deference for the purpose of pleasing a respected or adored woman.His precepts are, on the contrary, grossly utilitarian, being intendednot for a man who wishes to win the heart and hand of an honest girl,but for a libertine who has no money to buy the favors of a wanton,and therefore must rely on flatteries and obsequious fawning.
The poet declares expressly that a rich man will not need his _ArsAmandi_, but that it is written for the poor, who may be able toovercome the greed of the hetairai by tickling their vanity. Hetherefore teaches his readers how to deceive such a girl with falseflattery and sham gallantry. The Roman poet uses the word _domina_,but this _domina_, nevertheless, is his mistress, not in the sense of
one who dominates his heart and commands his respect and affection,but of a despised being lower than a concubine, on whom he smiles onlytill he has beguiled her. It is the story of the cat and the mouse.
MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN GALLANTRY
How different this from the modern chivalry which in face of womanhoodmakes a gentleman even out of a rough California miner. Joaquin Millerrelates how the presence of even an Indian girl--"a bud that inanother summer would unfold itself wide to the sun," affected the menin one of the camps. Though she seldom spoke with the miners, yet themen who lived near her hut dressed more neatly than others, kept theirbeards in shape, and shirt-bosoms buttoned up when she passed by:
"On her face, through the tint of brown, lay the blush and flush of maidenhood, the indescribable sacred something that makes a maiden holy to every man of a manly and chivalrous nature; that makes a man utterly unselfish and perfectly content to love and be silent, to worship at a distance, as turning to the holy shrines of Mecca, to be still and bide his time; caring not to possess in the low, coarse way that characterizes your common love of to-day, but choosing rather to go to battle for her--bearing her in his heart through many lands, through storms and death, with only a word of hope, a smile, a wave of the hand from a wall, a kiss, blown far, as he mounts his steed below and plunges into the night. That is love to live for. I say the knights of Spain, bloody as they were, were a noble and a splendid type of men in their day."[34]
While the knights of Spain and other parts of mediaeval Europedoubtless professed sentiments of chivalry like those uttered byJoaquin Miller, there was as a rule nearly as much sham in theirpretensions as in Ovid's rules for gallant conduct. In the days ofmilitant chivalry, in the midst of deeds of extravagant homage toindividual ladies, women in general were as much despised andmaltreated as at any other time. "The chivalrous spirit is above allthings a class spirit," as Freeman wrote (V., 482):
"The good knight is bound to endless fantastic courtesies toward men, and still more toward women, of a certain rank; he may treat all below that rank with any degree of scorn and cruelty."
This is still very far removed from the modern ideal; the knight maybe considered to stand half-way between the boor and the gentleman: heis polite, at least, to some women, while the gentleman is polite toall, kind, gentle, sympathetic, without being any the less manly.Nevertheless there was an advantage in having some conception ofgallantry, a determination and vow to protect widows and orphans, torespect and honor ladies. Though it was at first only a fashion, withall the extravagances and follies usual to fashions, it did much goodby creating an ideal for later generations to live up to. From thispoint of view even the quixotic pranks of the knights who fought duelsin support of their challenge that no other lady equalled theirs inbeauty, were not without a use. They helped to enforce the fashion ofpaying deference to women, and made it a point of honor, thus forcingmany a boor to assume at least the outward semblance and conduct of agentleman. The seed sown in this rough and stony soil has slowlygrown, until it has developed into true civilization--a word of whichthe last and highest import is civility or disinterested devotion tothe weak and unprotected, especially to women.
In our days chivalry includes compassion for animals too. I have neverread of a more gallant soldier than that colonel who, as related in_Our Animal Friends_ (May, 1899), while riding in a Western desert atthe head of five hundred horsemen, suddenly made a slightdetour--which all the men had to follow--because in the direct path ameadow lark was sitting on her nest, her soft brown eyes turnedupward, watching, wondering, fearing. It was a nobler deed than manyof the most gallant actions in battle, for these are often done fromselfish motives--ambition, the hope of promotion--while this deed wasthe outcome of pure unselfish sympathy.
"Five hundred horses had been turned aside, and five hundred men, as they bent over the defenceless mother and her brood, received a lesson in that broad humanity which is the essence of higher life."
To this day there are plenty of ruffians--many of them in fineclothes--who are strangers to chivalrous feelings toward defencelesswomen or animals--men who behave as gentlemen only under compulsion ofpublic opinion. The encouraging thing is that public opinion has takenso strong a stand in favor of women; that it has written _Place auxDames_ on its shield in such large letters. While the red Americansquaw shared with the dogs the bones left by her contemptuousungallant husband, the white American woman is served first at tableand gets the choicest morsels; she receives the window-seat in thecars, the lower berth in the sleeper; she has precedence in societyand wherever she is in her proper place; and when a ship is about tosink, the captain, if necessary (which is seldom the case), standswith drawn revolver prepared to shoot any man who would ungallantlyget into a boat before all the women are saved.
"AN INSULT TO WOMAN"
This change from the primitive selfishness described in the precedingpages, this voluntary yielding by man of the place of honor and of theright of the strongest, is little less than a miracle; it is thegrandest triumph of civilization. Yet there are viragoes who have hadthe indecency to call gallantry an "insult to woman." There is indeeda kind of gallantry--the Ovidian--which is an insult to women; buttrue masculine gallantry is woman's chief glory and conquest,indicating the transformation of the savage's scorn for woman'sphysical weakness into courteous deference to her as the nobler, morevirtuous and refined sex. There are some selfish, sour, disappointedold maids, who, because of their lack of feminine traits, repel menand receive less than their share of gallant courtesy. But that istheir own fault. Ninety-nine per cent. of all women have a happier lotto-day than at any previous time in history, and this change is due tothe growth of the disinterested courtesy and sympathy known asgallantry. At the same time the change is strikingly illustrated inthe status of old maids themselves. No one now despises an unselfishwoman simply because she prefers to remain single; but formerly oldmaids were looked on nearly everywhere with a contempt that reachedits climax among the Southern Slavs, who, according to Krauss (Ploss,II., 491), treated them no better than mangy dogs. No one associatedwith them; they were not tolerated in the spinning-room or at thedances; they were ridiculed and derided; were, in short, regarded as adisgrace to the family.
SUMMARY
To sum up: among the lower races man habitually despises and maltreatswoman, looking on her as a being made, not for her own sake, but forhis comfort and pleasure. Gallantry is unknown. The Australian whofights for his family shows courage, not gallantry, for he is simplyprotecting his private property, and does not otherwise show theslightest regard for his women. Nor does the early custom of servingfor a wife imply gallantry; for here the suitor serves the parents,not the maid; he simply adopts a primitive way of paying for a bride.Sparing women in battle for the purpose of making concubines or slavesof them is not gallantry. One might as well call a farmer gallantbecause, when he kills the young roosters for broilers, he saves theyoung hens. He lets these live because he needs eggs. The motive inboth cases is utilitarian and selfish. Ovidian gallantry does notdeserve such a name, because it is nothing but false flattery for theselfish purpose of beguiling foolish women. Arabic flatteries are of asuperior order because sincere at the time being and addressed togirls whom the flatterer desires to marry. But this gallantry, too, isonly skin deep. Its motives are sensual and selfish, for as soon asthe girl's physical charm begins to fade she is contemptuouslydiscarded.
Our modern gallantry toward women differs radically from all thoseattitudes in being unselfish. It is synonymous with truechivalry--disinterested devotion to those who, while physicallyweaker, are considered superior morally and esthetically. It treatsall women with polite deference, and does so not because of a vow or acode, but because of the natural promptings of a kind, sympatheticdisposition. It treats a woman not as a toper does a whiskey bottle,applying it to his lips as long as it can intoxicate him with pleasureand then
throwing it away, but cherishes her for supersensualattributes that survive the ravages of time. To a lover, inparticular, such gallantry is not a duty, but a natural impulse. Helies awake nights devising plans for pleasing the object of hisdevotion. His gallantry is an impulse to sacrifice himself for thebeloved--an instinct so inbred by generations of practice that noweven a child may manifest it. I remember how, when I was six or sevenyears old, I once ran out the school-house during recess to pick upsome Missouri hailstones, while others, large as marbles, were fallingabout me, threatening to smash my skull. I gave the trophies to adark-eyed girl of my age--not with a view to any possible reward, butsimply because I loved her more than all the other girls combined andwanted to please her.
A SURE TEST OF LOVE
Black relates in his _Things Chinese_, that after the wedding ceremony
"the bride tries hard ... to get a piece of her husband's dress under her when she sits down, for if she does, it will insure her having the upper hand of him, while he tries to prevent her and to do the same thing himself."
Similar customs prevail in other parts of the world, as among theEsthonians. (Schroeder, 234.) After the priest has united the couplethey walk toward the wagon or sleigh, and in doing so each of the twotries to be first to step on the other's foot, because that willdecide who is to rule at home. Imagine such petty selfishness, such adisgraceful lack of gallantry, on the very wedding-day! In our owncountry, when we hear of a bride objecting to the word "obey" in thewedding ceremony, we may feel absolutely sure that the marriage is nota love-match, at least as far as she is concerned. A girl truly inlove with a man laughs at the word, because she feels as if she wouldrather be his slave than any other man's queen; and as for the lover,the bride's promise to "obey" him seems mere folly, for he isdetermined she shall always remain the autocratic queen of his heartand actions. Conjugal disappointments may modify that feeling, to besure, but that does not alter the fact that while romantic loveexists, one of its essential ingredients is an impulse of gallantdevotion and deference on both sides--an impulse which on occasionrises to self-sacrifice, which is simply an extreme phase ofgallantry.
XI. ALTRUISTIC SELF-SACRIFICE
In the very olden time, if we may confide in the ingenious FrankStockton, there lived a semi-barbaric king who devised a highlyoriginal way of administering justice, leaving the accused man's fatepractically in his own hands. There was an arena with the king'sthrone on one side and galleries for the people all around. On asignal by the king a door beneath him opened and the accused subjectstepped out into the amphitheatre. Directly opposite the throne weretwo doors, exactly alike, and side by side. The person on trial had towalk to those doors and open either of them. If he opened one, theresprang out a fierce tiger who immediately tore him to pieces; if theother, there came forth a beautiful lady, to whom he was forthwithmarried. No one ever knew behind which of the doors was the tiger, sothat the audience no more than the prisoner knew whether he was to bedevoured or married.
This semi-barbaric king had a daughter who fell in love with ahandsome young courtier. When the king discovered this love-affair hecast the youth into prison and had his realm searched for the fiercestof tigers. The day came when the prisoner had to decide his own fatein the arena by opening one of the doors. The princess, who was one ofthe spectators, had succeeded, with the aid of gold, in discoveringthe secret of the doors; she knew from which the tiger, from which thelady, would issue. She knew, too, who the lady was behind the otherdoor--one of the loveliest of the damsels of the court--one who haddared to raise her eyes to her loved one and had thereby aroused herfiercest jealousy. She had thought the matter over, and was preparedfor action. The king gave the signal, and the courtier appeared. Hehad expected the princess to know on which side lay safety for him,nor was he wrong. To his quick and anxious glance at her, she repliedby a slight, quick movement of her arm to the right. The youth turned,and without the slightest hesitation opened the door on the right.Now, "which came out of the opened door--the lady or the tiger?"
THE LADY AND THE TIGER
With that question Stockton ends his story, and it is generallysupposed that he does not answer it. But he does, on the precedingpage, in these words:
"Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded, semi-barbaric princess, her soul at white heat beneath the combined fires of despair and jealousy. She had lost him, but who should have him?"
In these words the novelist hints plainly enough that the question wasdecided by a sort of dog-in-the-manger jealousy. If the princess couldnot have him, certainly her hated rival should never enjoy his love.The tiger, we may be sure, was behind the door on the right.
In allowing the tiger to devour the courtier, the princess showed thather love was of the primitive, barbarous type, being in realityself-love, not other-love. She "loved" the man not for his own sake,but only as a means of gratifying her desires. If he was lost to_her_, the tiger might as well dine on him. How differently anAmerican girl would have acted, under the impulse of romantic love!Not for a moment could she have tolerated the thought of his dying,through her fault--the thought of his agony, his shrieks, his blood.She would have _sacrificed her own happiness instead of her beloved'slife_. The lady would have come out of the door opened by him. Supposethat, overcome by selfish jealousy, she acted otherwise; and supposethat an amphitheatre full of cultured men and women witnessed herdeed: would there not be a cry of horror, condemning her as worse thanthe tiger, as absolutely incapable of the feeling of true love? Andwould not this cry of horror reveal on the part of the spectators aninstinctive perception of the truth which this chapter, this wholebook, is written to enforce, that voluntary self-sacrifice, wherecalled for, is the supreme, the infallible, test of love?
A GREEK LOVE-STORY
If we imagine the situation reversed--a man delivering his "beloved"into the clutches of a tiger rather than to the legitimate caresses ofa rival--our horror at his loveless selfishness would be doubled. Yetthis is the policy habitually followed by savages and barbarians. Inlater chapters instances will be given of such wooers killing covetedgirls with their own spears as soon as they find that the rival is thewinner. After what has been said about the absence of unselfishgallantry among the lower races it would, of course, be useless tolook for instances of altruistic self-sacrifice for a woman's sake,since such sacrifice implies so much more than gallantry. As for theGreeks, in all my extensive reading I have come across only one authorwho seemingly appreciates the significance of self-sacrifice for awoman loved. Pausanias, in his _Description of Greece_ (Bk. VII.,chap. 21), relates this love-story:
"When Calydon still existed there was among the priests of Dionysus one named Coresus, whom love made, without any fault of his own, the most wretched of mortals. He loved a girl Callirrhoe, but as great as his love for her was her hatred of him. When all his pleadings and offerings of presents failed to change the girl's attitude, he at last prostrated himself before the image of Dionysus, imploring his help. The god granted the prayers of his priest, for suddenly the Calydonians began to lose their senses, like drunkards, and to die in fits of madness. They appealed to the oracle of Dodona ... which declared that the calamity was due to the wrath of the god Dionysus, and that it would not cease until Coresus had sacrificed to Dionysus either Callirrhoe or anyone else willing to die for her. Now when the girl saw no way of escaping, she sought refuge with her former educators, but when they too refused to receive her, nothing remained for her but death. When all the preparations for the sacrifice had been made in accordance with the precepts of the oracle of Dodona, she was brought to the altar, adorned like an animal that is to be sacrificed; Coresus, however, whose duty it was to offer the sacrifice, let love prevail in place of hate, and slew himself instead of Callirrhoe, thus proving by his deed that he had been anim
ated by the purest love. But when Callirrhoe saw Coresus as a corpse, overcome by pity and repentance for her treatment of him, she went and drowned herself in the fountain not far from the Calydonian harbor, which since that time is known as the fountain of Callirrhoe."
If a modern lover, desiring to possess a girl, got her into apredicament which culminated in the necessity of his either slayingher with his own hands or killing himself, and did not choose thelatter alternative, we should regard him as more contemptible than thevilest assassin. To us self-sacrifice in such a case would seem not atest of love, nor even of honor so much as of common decency, and weshould expect a man to submit to it even if his love of the poor girlhad been a mere infatuation of the senses. However, in view of thecontempt for women, and for love for women, prevalent among the Greeksin general, we may perhaps discover at least a gleam of better thingsin this legend of masculine self-sacrifice.
PERSIAN LOVE
A closer approximation to our ideal may be found in a story related bythe Persian poet Saadi (358):
"There was a handsome and well-disposed young man, who was embarked in a vessel with a lovely damsel: I have read that, sailing on the mighty deep, they fell together into a whirlpool: When the pilot came to offer him assistance; God forbid that he should perish in that distress; he was answering, from the midst of that overwhelming vortex, Leave me and take the hand of my beloved! The whole world admired him for this speech, which, as he was expiring, he was heard to make; learn not the tale of love from that faithless wretch who can neglect his mistress when exposed to danger. In this manner ended the lives of those lovers; listen to what has happened, that you may understand; for Saadi knows the ways and forms of courtship, as well as the Tazi, or modern Arabic, is understood at Baghdad."
How did this Persian poet get such a correct and modern notion aboutlove into his head? Obviously not from his experiences andobservations at home, for the Persians, as the scholarly Dr. Polakobserves in his classical work on them (I., 206), do not know love inour sense of the word. The love of which their poets sing has either asymbolical or an entirely carnal meaning. Girls are married offwithout any choice of their own at the early age of twelve orthirteen; they are regarded as capital and sold for cash, and childrenare often engaged in the cradle. When a Persian travels, he leaves hiswife at home and enters into a temporary marriage with other women inthe towns he visits. In rural districts if the traveller is a personof rank, the mercenary peasants eagerly offer their daughters for such"marriages." (Hellwald, 439.) Like the Greek poets the Persians showtheir contempt for women by always speaking of boy-favorites whentheir language rises above the coarsest sensuality. Public opinionregarding Persian stories and poems has been led astray by the changesof sex and the expurgations made freely by translators. Burton, whoseversion of the _Thousand and One Nights_ was suppressed in England,wrote _(F.F._, 36), that "about one-fifth is utterly unfit fortranslation, and the most sanguine Orientalist would not dare torender literally more than three-quarters of the remainder."
Where, then, I repeat, did Saadi get that modern European idea ofaltruistic self-sacrifice as a test of love? Evidently from Europe byway of Arabia. His own language indicates this--his suspicious boastof his knowledge of real love as of one who has just made a strangediscovery, and his coupling it with the knowledge of Arabic. Now it iswell known that ever since the ninth century the Persian mind had beenbrought into a contact with the Arabic which became more and moreintimate. The Arabs had a habit of sacrificing their lives inchivalrous efforts to save the life or honor of maidens whom the enemyendeavored to kidnap. The Arabs, on their part, were in close contactwith the European minds, and as they helped to originate thechivalrous spirit in Europe, so they must have been in turn influencedby the developments of the troubadour spirit which culminated in suchmaxims as Montagnogout's declaration that "a true lover desires athousand times more the happiness of his beloved than his own." AsSaadi lived in the time of the troubadours--the twelfth and thirteenthcenturies--it was easy for him to get a knowledge of the European"ways and forms of courtship." In Persia itself there was no courtshipor legitimate lovemaking, for the "lover" hardly ever had met hisbride before the wedding-day. Nevertheless, if we may believe WilliamFranklin,[35] a Persian woman might command a suitor to spend all dayin front of her house reciting verses in praise of her beauty; andH.C. Trumbull naively cites, as evidence that Orientals love just aswe do, the following story:
"Morier tells ... of a large painting in a pleasure-house in Shiraz, illustrative of the treatment of a loyal lover by a heartless coquette, which is one of the popular legends of Persia. Sheik Chenan, a Persian of the true faith, and a man of learning and consequence, fell in love with an Armenian lady of great beauty who would not marry him unless he changed his religion. To this he agreed. Still she would not marry him unless he would drink wine. This scruple also he yielded. She resisted still, unless he consented to eat pork. With this also he complied. Still she was coy, and refused to fulfil her engagement, unless he would be contented to drive swine before her. Even this condition he accepted. She then told him that she would not have him at all, and laughed at him for his pains. The picture represents the coquette at her window, laughing at Sheik Chenan as he is driving his pigs before her."
This story suggests and may have been invented in imitation of thefoolish and capricious tests to which mediaeval dames in Europe puttheir quixotic knights. Few of these knights, as I have said elsewhere_(R.L.P.B._, 100), "were so manly as the one in Schiller's ballad,who, after fetching his lady's glove from the lion's den, threw it inher face," to show how his feelings toward her had changed. If thePersian in Trumbull's story had been manly and refined enough to becapable of genuine love, his feelings toward a woman who couldwantonly subject him to such persistent insults and degradation, wouldhave turned into contempt. Ordinary sensual infatuation, on the otherhand, would be quite strong enough and unprincipled enough to lead aman to sacrifice religion, honor, and self-respect, for a capriciouswoman. This kind of self-sacrifice is not a test of true love, for itis not altruistic. The sheik did not make his sacrifice to benefit thewoman he coveted, but to benefit himself, as he saw no other way ofgratifying his own selfish desires.[36]
HERO AND LEANDER
Very great importance attaches to this distinction between selfish andaltruistic self-sacrifice. The failure to make this distinction isperhaps more than anything else responsible for the current beliefthat romantic love was known to the ancients. Did not Leander risk andsacrifice his life _for Hero_, swimming to her at night across thestormy Hellespont? Gentle reader, he did not. He risked his life forthe purpose of continuing his illicit amours with a priestess of Venusin a lonely tower. As we shall see in the chapter devoted to Greekromances, there is in the story told by Musaeus not a single traitrising above frank sensuality. In his eagerness to gratify hisappetite, Leander risked Hero's life as well as his own. His swimmingacross the strait was, moreover, no more than any animal would do tomeet its mate on the other side of a river. It was a romantic thing todo, but it was no proof of romantic love. Bearing in mind whatWestermarck says (134)--
"With wild animals sexual desire is not less powerful as an incentive to strenuous exertion than hunger and thirst. In the rut-time, the males, even of the most cowardly species, engage in mortal combats"
Primitive Love and Love-Stories Page 4