Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 2

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

Here there is an obvious ant.i.thesis between romantic and sensual. The same ant.i.thesis was used by Hegel in contrasting the sensual love of the ancient Greeks and Romans with what he calls modern "romantic"

love. Waitz-Gerland, too, in the six volumes of their _Anthropologie der Naturvolker_, repeatedly refer to (alleged) cases of "romantic love" among savages and barbarians, having in all probability adopted the term from Hegel. The peculiar appropriateness of the word romantic to designate imaginative love will be set forth later in the chapter ent.i.tled Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment. Here I will only add an important truth which I shall have occasion to repeat often--that _a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love_; for it is obvious, for instance, that an elopement prompted by the most frivolous sensual pa.s.sion, without a trace of real love, may lead to the most romantic incidents.

In the chapters on affection, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, I shall make it clear even to a Sat.u.r.day Reviewer that the gross sensual infatuation which leads a man to shoot a girl who refuses him, or a tramp to a.s.sault a woman on a lonely road and afterward to cut her throat in order to hide his crime, is absolutely antipodal to the refined, ardent, affectionate Romantic Love which impels a man to sacrifice his own life rather than let any harm or dishonor come to the beloved.

ANIMALS HIGHER THAN SAVAGES

Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin, in his second treatise on s.e.xual anomalies,[4] takes occasion to express his disbelief in my view that love before marriage is a sentiment peculiar to modern man. He declares that traits of such love occur even in the courtship of animals, particularly birds, and implies that this upsets my theory.

On the same ground a reviewer in a New York evening paper accused me of being illogical. Such criticisms ill.u.s.trate the vague ideas regarding evolution that are still current. It is a.s.sumed that all the faculties are developed step by step simultaneously as we proceed from lower to higher animals, which is as illogical as it would be to a.s.sume that since birds have such beautiful and convenient things as wings, and dogs belong to a higher genus of animals, therefore dogs ought to have better wings than birds. Most animals are cleaner than savages; why should not some of them be more romantic in their love-affairs? I shall take occasion repeatedly to emphasize this point in the present volume, though I alluded to it already in my first book (55) in the following pa.s.sage, which my critics evidently overlooked:

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

LOVE THE LAST, NOT THE FIRST, PRODUCT OF CIVILIZATION

Notwithstanding this striking and important fact, there is a large number of sentimental writers who make the extraordinary claim that the lower races, however savage they may be in everything else, are like ourselves in their amorous relations; that they love and admire personal beauty just as we do. The main object of the present volume is to demolish this doctrine; to prove that s.e.xual refinement and the sense of personal beauty are not the earliest but the latest products of civilization. I have shown elsewhere[5] that j.a.panese civilization is in many important respects far superior to ours; yet in their treatment of women and estimate of love, this race has not yet risen above the barbarous stage; and it will be shown in this volume that if we were to judge the ancient Greeks and the Hindoos from this point of view, we should have to deny them the epithet of civilized. Morgan found that the most advanced of American Indians, the Iroquois, had no capacity for love. His testimony in detail will be found in its proper place in this volume, together with that of competent observers regarding other tribes and races. Some of this evidence was known to the founders of the modern science of sociology. It led Spencer to write _en pa.s.sant_ (_Pr. Soc_., I., -- 337, --339) that "absence of the tender emotion ... habitually characterizes men of low types;" and that the "higher sentiments accompanying union of the s.e.xes ... do not exist among primitive men." It led Sir John Lubbock to write (50) regarding the lowest races that "love is almost unknown among them; and marriage, in its lowest phases, is by no means a matter of affection and companionship."

PLAN OF THIS VOLUME

These are casual adumbrations of a great truth that applies not only to the lowest races (savages) but to the more advanced barbarians as well as to ancient civilized nations, as the present volume will attempt to demonstrate. To make my argument more impressive and conclusive, I present it in a twofold form. First I take the fourteen ingredients of love separately, showing how they developed gradually, whence it follows necessarily that love as a whole developed gradually. Then I take the Africans, Australians, American Indians, etc., separately, describing their diverse amorous customs and pointing out everywhere the absence of the altruistic, supersensual traits which const.i.tute the essence of romantic love as distinguished from sensual pa.s.sion. All this will be preceded by a chapter on "How Sentiments Change and Grow," which will weaken the bias against the notion that so elemental a feeling as s.e.xual love should have undergone so great a change, by pointing out that other seemingly instinctive and unalterable feelings have changed and developed.

GREEK SENTIMENTALITY

The inclusion of the civilized Greeks in a treatise on Primitive Love will naturally cause surprise; but I cannot attribute a capacity for anything more than primitive sensual love to a nation which, in its prematrimonial customs, manifested none of the essential _altruistic_ traits of Romantic Love--sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, adoration, and purity. As a matter of course, the sensualism of a Greek or Roman is a much less coa.r.s.e thing than an Australian's, which does not even include kisses or other caresses.

While Greek love is not a sentiment, it may be sentimental, that is, an _affectation of sentiment_, differing from real sentiment as adulation does from adoration, as gallantry or the risking of life to secure favors do from genuine gallantry of the heart and self-sacrifice for the benefit of another. This important point which I here superadd to my theory, was overlooked by Benecke when he attributed a capacity for real love to the later Greeks of the Alexandrian period.

IMPORTANCE OF LOVE

One of the most important theses advanced in _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ (323, 424, etc.), was that love, far from being merely a pa.s.sing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the reign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to perish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals and saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, and hand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediator between these two agencies, love comes in; for Cupid, as I have said, "does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of health and beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of single-blessedness;" which in these days is not such a hardship as it used to be. This thought will be enlarged in the last chapter of the present volume, on the "Utility and Future of Love," which will indicate how the amorous sense is becoming more and more fastidious and beneficial. In the same chapter attention will be called, for the first time, to the three great strata in the evolution of parental love and morality. In the first, represented by savages, parents think chiefly of their own comfort, and children get the minimum of attention consistent with their preservation. In the second, which includes most of the modern Europeans and Americans, parents exercise care that their children shall make an advantageous marriage--that is a marriage which shall secure them wealth or comfort; but the frequency with which girls are married off to old, infirm, or unworthy men, shows how few parents as yet have a thought of their _grandchildren_. In the next stage of moral evolution, which we are now entering, the grandchildren's welfare also will be considered. In consequence of the persistent failure to consider the grandchildren, the human race is now anything but a model of physical, intellectual, and moral perfection. Luckily love, even in its sensual stages, has counteracted this parental selfishness and myopia by inducing young folks to marry for health, youth, and beauty, and creating an aversion to old age, disease, and deformity. As love becomes more and more fastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moral beauty--that is becomes Romantic Love--its sway becomes greater and greater, and the time will come when questions relating to it will form the most important chapters in treatises on moral philosophy, which now usually ignore them altogether.

HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW

In conversation with friends I have found that the current belief that love must have been always and everywhere the same, because it is such a strong and elemental pa.s.sion, is most easily shaken in this _a priori_ position by pointing out that there are other strong feelings in our minds which were lacking among earlier and lower races. The love of grand, wild scenery, for instance--what we call romantic scenery--is as modern as the romantic love of men and women. Ruskin tells us that in his youth he derived a pleasure from such scenery "comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near a n.o.ble and kind mistress."

NO LOVE OF ROMANTIC SCENERY

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sceptical reader might retort that the love of romantic scenery is so subtle a sentiment, and so far from being universal even now, that it would be rash to argue from its absence among savages, Greeks, and Romans, that love, a sentiment so much stronger and more prevalent, could have been in the same predicament. Let us therefore take another sentiment, the religious, the vast power and wide prevalence of which no one will deny.

NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION

To a modern Christian, G.o.d is a deity who is all-wise, all-powerful, infinite, holy, the personification of all the highest virtues. To accuse this Deity of the slightest moral flaw would be blasphemy. Now, without going so far down as the lowest savages, let us see what conception such barbarians as the Polynesians have of their G.o.ds. The moral habits of some of them are indicated by their names--"The Rioter," "The Adulterer," "Ndauthina," who steals women of rank or beauty by night or by torchlight, "The Human-brain Eater," "The Murderer." Others of their G.o.ds are "proud, envious, covetous, revengeful, and the subject of every basest pa.s.sion. They are demoralized heathen--monster expressions of moral corruption"

(Williams, 184). These G.o.ds make war, and kill and eat each other just as mortals do. The Polynesians believed, too, that "the spirits of the dead are eaten by the G.o.ds or demons" (Ellis, _P.R_., I., 275). It might be said that since a Polynesian sees no crime in adultery, revenge, murder, or cannibalism, his attributing such qualities to his G.o.ds cannot, from his point of view, be considered blasphemous. Quite true; but my point is that men who have made so little progress in sympathy and moral perception as to see no harm in adultery, revenge, murder and cannibalism, and in attributing them to their G.o.ds, are altogether too coa.r.s.e and callous to be able to experience the higher religious emotions. This inference is borne out by what a most careful observer (Ellis, _P.R._, I., 291) says:

"Instead of exercising those affections of grat.i.tude, complacency, and love toward the objects of their worship which the living G.o.d supremely requires, they regarded their deities with horrific dread, and worshipped only with enslaving fear."

This "enslaving fear" is the princ.i.p.al ingredient of primitive religious emotion everywhere. To the savage and barbarian, religion is not a consolation and a blessing, but a terror. Du Chaillu says of the equatorial Africans (103) that "their whole lives are saddened by the fears of evil spirits, witchcraft, and other kindred superst.i.tions under which they labor." Benevolent deities, even if believed in, receive little or no attention, because, being good, they are supposed to do no harm anyway, whereas the malevolent G.o.ds must be propitiated by sacrifices. The African Dahomans, for instance, ignore their Mahu because his intentions are naturally friendly, whereas their Satan, the wicked Legba, has hundreds of statues before which offerings are made. "Early religions," as Mr. Andrew Lang tersely puts it, "are selfish, not disinterested. The worshipper is not contemplative, so much as eager to gain something to his advantage." If the G.o.ds fail to respond to the offerings made to them, the sacrificers naturally feel aggrieved, and show their displeasure in a way which to a person who knows refined religion seems shocking and sacrilegious. In j.a.pan, China, and Corea, if the G.o.ds fail to do what is expected of them, their images are unceremoniously walloped. In India, if the rains fail, thousands of priests send up their prayers. If the drought still continues, they punish their idols by holding them under water. During a thunderstorm in Africa, Chapman (I., 45) witnessed the following extraordinary scene:

"A great number of women, employed in reaping the extensive corn-fields through which we pa.s.sed were raising their hoes and voices to heaven, and, yelling furiously, cursed 'Morimo' (G.o.d), as the terrific thunder-claps succeeded each vivid flash of lightning.

On inquiry I was informed by 'Old Booy' that they were indignant at the interruption of their labors, and that they therefore cursed and menaced the cause. Such blasphemy was awful, even among heathens, and I fully expected to see the wrath of G.o.d fall upon them."

If any pious reader of such details--which might he multiplied a thousand-fold--still believes that religious emotion (like love!) is the same everywhere, let him compare his own devoted feelings during worship in a Christian church with the emotions which must sway those who partic.i.p.ate in a religious ceremony like that described in the following pa.s.sage taken from Rowney's _Wild Tribes of India_ (105). It refers to the sacrifices made by the Khonds to the G.o.d of War, the victims of which, both male and female, are often bought young and brought up for this special purpose:

"For a month prior to the sacrifice there was much feasting and intoxication, with dancing round the Meriah, or victim ... and on the day before the rite he was stupefied with toddy and bound at the bottom of a post. The a.s.sembled mult.i.tude then danced around the post to music, singing hymns of invocation to some such effect as follows: 'O G.o.d, we offer a sacrifice to you!

Give us good crops in return, good seasons, and health.' On the next day the victim was again intoxicated, and anointed with oil, which was wiped from his body by those present, and put on their heads as a blessing. The victim was then carried, in procession round the village, preceded by music, and on returning to the post a hog was sacrificed to ... the village deity ... the blood from the carca.s.s being allowed to flow into a pit prepared to receive it. The victim, made senseless by intoxication, was now thrown into the pit, and his face pressed down till he died from suffocation in the blood and mire, a deafening noise with instruments being kept up all the time. The priest then cut a piece of flesh from the body and buried it with ceremony near the village idol, all the rest of the people going through the same form after him."

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

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

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

In some respect, the civilized Hindoos are even worse than the wild tribes of India. Nothing is more sternly condemned and utterly abhorred by modern religion than licentiousness and obscenity, but a well-informed and eminently trustworthy missionary, the Abbe Dubois, declares that sensuality and licentiousness are among the elements of Hindoo religious life:

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

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

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

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

Brahmin temples are little more than brothels, in each of which a dozen or more young Bayaderes are kept for the purpose of increasing the revenues of the G.o.ds and their priests. Religious prost.i.tution and theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt, and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series of obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154): "We are shocked at the morality of a nation which could supply the deceased with such literature for the eternal journey." Professor Robertson Smith says that "in Arabia and elsewhere unrestricted prost.i.tution was practised at the temples and defended on the a.n.a.logy of the license allowed to herself by the unmarried mother G.o.ddess." Nor were the early Greeks much better. Some of their religious festivals were sensual orgies, some of their G.o.ds nearly as licentious as those of the Hindoos. Their supreme G.o.d, Zeus, is an Olympian Don Juan, and the legend of the birth of Aphrodite, their G.o.ddess of love, is in its original form unutterably obscene.

Before religious emotion could make any approximation to the devout feelings of a modern Christian, it was necessary to eliminate all these licentious, cruel, and blasphemous features of worship--the eating or slaughtering of human victims, the obscene orgies, as well as the spiteful and revengeful acts toward disobedient G.o.ds. The progress--like the Evolution of Romantic Love--has been from the sensual and selfish to the supersensual and unselfish. In the highest religious ideal, love of G.o.d takes the place of fear, adoration that of terror, self-sacrifice that of self-seeking. But we are still very far from that lofty ideal.

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

"The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops because it made their parishioners indifferent to prayers for their crops"

(Brinton, _R.S_., 126, 82). These are extreme cases, but Italian lazzaroni and Swiss peasants are by no means the only church-goers whose worship is inspired not by love of G.o.d but by the expectation of securing a personal benefit. All those who pray for worldly prosperity, or do good deeds for the sake of securing a happy hereafter for their souls, take a selfish, utilitarian view of the deity, and even their grat.i.tude for favors received is too apt to be "a lively sense of possible favors to come." Still, there are now not a few devotees who love G.o.d for his own sake; and who pray not for luxuries but that their souls may be fortified in virtue and their sympathies widened. But it is not necessary to dwell on this theme any longer, now that I have shown what I started out to demonstrate, that religious emotion is very complex and variable, that in its early stages it is made up of feelings which are not loving, reverential, or even respectful, but cruel, sacrilegious, criminal, and licentious; that religion, in a word, has (like love, as I am trying to prove) pa.s.sed through coa.r.s.e, carnal, degrading, selfish, utilitarian stages before it reached the comparatively refined, spiritual, sympathetic, and devotional att.i.tude of our time.