Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 28

One of the most important reasons why young savages approaching p.u.b.erty are eager to receive their "decorations" remains to be considered. Tattooing, scarring, and mutilating are usually very painful processes. Now, as all who are familiar with the life of savages know, there is nothing they admire so much as courage in enduring torture of any kind. By showing fort.i.tude in bearing the pain connected with tattooing, etc., these young folks are thus able to win admiration, gratify their vanity, and show that they are worthy to be received in the ranks of adults. The Sea Dyaks are proud of their scars, writes Brooke Low.

"The women often prove the courage and endurance of the youngsters by placing a lighted ball of tinder in the arm and letting it burn into the skin. The marks ... are much valued by the young men as so many proofs of their power of endurance."

(Roth, II., 80.) Here we have an ill.u.s.tration which explains in the most simple way why scars _please_ both the men and the women, without making necessary the grotesque a.s.sumption that either s.e.x admires them as things of beauty. To take another case, equally eloquent: Bossu says of the Osage Indians that they suffer the pain of tattooing with pleasure in order to pa.s.s for men of courage. If one of them should have himself marked without having previously distinguished himself in battle, he would be degraded and looked upon as a coward, unworthy of such an honor. (Mallery, 1889-90, 394.)

Grosse is inclined to think (78) that it is in the male only that courage is expected and admired, but he is mistaken, as we may see, _e.g._, in the account given by Dobrizhoffer (II., 21) of the tattooing customs of the Abipones, whom he studied so carefully. The women, he says,

"have their face, breast, and arms covered with black figures of various shapes, so that they present the appearance of a Turkish carpet." "This savage ornament is purchased with blood and many groans."

The thorns used to puncture the skin are poisonous, and after the operation the girl has her eyes, cheeks, and lips so horribly swelled that she "looks like a Stygian fury." If she groans while undergoing the torture, or shows signs of pain in her face, the old woman who operates on her exclaims, in a rage: "You will die single, be a.s.sured.

Which of our heroes would think _so cowardly a girl_ worthy to be his wife?" Such courage, Dobrizhoffer explains further, is admired in a girl because it makes her "prepared to bear the pains of parturition in time." In some cases vanity supplies an additional motive why the girls should submit to the painful operation with fort.i.tude; for those of them who "are most p.r.i.c.ked and painted you may know to be of high rank."

Here again we see clearly that the tattooing is admired for other than esthetic reasons, and we realize how foolish it is to philosophize about the peculiar "taste" of these Indians in admiring a girl who looks like "a Turkish carpet" or "a Stygian fury." If they had even the rudiments of a sense of beauty they would not indulge in such disgusting disfigurements.

MUTILATION, FASHION, AND EMULATION

Grosse declares (80) that "we know definitely at least, that tattooing is regarded by the Eskimo as an embellishment." He bases this inference on Cranz's a.s.sertion that Eskimo mothers tattoo their daughters in early youth "for fear that otherwise they would not get a husband." Had Grosse allowed his imagination to paint a particular instance, he would have seen how grotesque his inference is. A favorite way among the Eskimo of securing a bride is, we are told, to drag her from her tent by the hair. This young woman, moreover, has never washed her face, nor does any man object to her filth. Yet we are asked to believe that an Eskimo could be so enamoured of the _beauty_ of a few simple lines tattooed on a girl's dirty face that he would refuse to marry her unless she had them! Like other champions of the s.e.xual selection theory, Grosse searches in the clouds for a comically impossible motive when the real reason lies right before his eyes. That reason is fashion. The tattoo marks are tribal signs (Bancroft, I., 48) which _every_ girl _must_ submit to have in obedience to inexorable custom, unless she is prepared to be an object of scorn and ridicule all her life.

The tyranny of fashion in prescribing disfigurements and mutilations is not confined to savages. The most amazing ill.u.s.tration of it is to be found in China, where the girls of the upper cla.s.ses are obliged to this day to submit to the most agonizing process of crippling their feet, which finally, as Professor Flower remarks in his book on _Fashion and Deformity_, a.s.sume "the appearance of the hoof of some animal rather than a human foot." There is a popular delusion that the Chinese approve of such deformed small feet because they consider them beautiful--a delusion which Westermarck shares (200). Since the Chinese consider small feet "the chief charm of women," it might be supposed, he says, that the women would at least have the pleasure of fascinating men by a "beauty" to acquire which they have to undergo such horrible torture;

"but Dr. Strieker a.s.sures us that in China a woman is considered immodest if she shows her artificially distorted feet to a man. It is even improper to speak of a woman's foot, and in decent pictures this part is always concealed under the dress."

To explain this apparent anomaly Westermarck a.s.sumes that the object of the concealment "is to excite through the unknown!" To such fantastic nonsense does the doctrine of s.e.xual selection lead. In reality there is no reason for supposing that the Chinese consider crippled feet--looking like "the hoof of an animal"--beautiful any more than mutilations of other parts of the body. In all probability the origin of the custom of crippling women's feet must be traced to the jealousy of the men, who devised this procedure as an effective way of preventing their wives from leaving their homes and indulging in amorous intrigues; other practices with the same purpose being common in Oriental countries. In course of time the foot-binding became an inexorable fashion which the foolishly conservative women were more eager to continue than the men. All accounts agree that the anti-foot-binding movement finds its most violent and stubborn opponents in the women themselves. The _Missionary Review_ for July, 1899, contains an article summing up a report of the _Tien Tsu Hui,_ or "Natural Foot Society," which throws a bright light on the whole question and from which I quote as follows:

"The male members of a family may be opposed to the maiming of their female relatives by the senseless custom, but the women will support it. One Chinese even promised his daughter a dollar a day to keep her natural feet, and another, having failed with his older girls, arranged that his youngest should be under his personal supervision night and day. The one natural-footed girl was sought in marriage for the dollars that had been faithfully laid by for her.

But at her new home she was so _ridiculed_ by the hundreds who came to see her--and her feet--that she lost her reason.

The other girl also became insane as a result of the _persecutions_ which she had to endure."

Thus we see that what keeps up this hideous custom is not the women's desire to arouse the esthetic admiration and amorous pa.s.sion of the _men_ by a hoof of beauty, but the fear of ridicule and persecution by the other women, slaves of fashion all. These same motives are the source of most of the ugly fashions prevalent even in civilized Europe and America. Theophile Gautier believed that most women had no sense of beauty, but only a sense of fashion; and if explorers and missionaries had borne in mind the fundamental difference between fashion and esthetics, anthropological literature would be the poorer by hundreds of "false facts" and ludicrous inferences.[113]

The ravages of fashion are aggravated by emulation, which has its sources in vanity and envy. This accounts for the extremes to which mutilations and fashions often go among both, civilized and uncivilized races, and of which a startling instance will be described in detail in the next paragraph. Few of our rich women wear their jewels because of their intrinsic beauty. They wear them for the same reason that Polynesian or African belles wear all the beads they can get. In Mariner's book on the Tongans (Chap. XV.) there is an amusing story of a chiefs daughter who was very anxious to go to Europe. Being asked why, she replied that her great desire was to ama.s.s a large quant.i.ty of beads and then return to Tonga, "because in England beads are so common that no one would admire me for wearing them, and _I should not have the pleasure of being envied."_ Bancroft (I., 128) says of the Kutchin Indians: "_Beads are their wealth,_ used in the place of money, and the rich among them literally load themselves with necklaces and strings of various patterns." Referring to the tin ornaments worn by Dyaks, Carl Bock says he has "counted as many as sixteen rings in a single ear, each of them the size of a dollar"; while of the Ghonds Forsyth tells us (148) that they "deck themselves with an inordinate amount of what they consider ornaments. _Quant.i.ty rather than quality is aimed at."_

PERSONAL BEAUTY VERSUS PERSONAL DECORATION

Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced so far in this long chapter, a.s.sume that savages and barbarians have no esthetic sense at all, not even a germ of it? Not necessarily. I believe that the germ of a sense of visible beauty _may_ exist even among savages as well as the germ of a musical sense; but that it is little more than a childish pleasure in bright and l.u.s.trous sh.e.l.ls and other objects of various colors, especially red and yellow, everything beyond that being usually found to belong to the region of utility (language of signs, desire to attract attention, etc.) and not to _esthetics_--that is, _the love of beauty for its own sake._ Such a germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants _years before they have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty;_ and this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it, I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration of personal beauty is not one of the motives which induce a savage to marry a particular girl or man; for most of the "decorations"

described in the preceding pages are not elements of _personal_ beauty at all, but are either external appendages to that beauty, or mutilations of it. I have shown by a superabundance of facts that these "decorations" do not serve the purpose of exciting the amorous pa.s.sion and preference of the opposite s.e.x, except non-esthetically and indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as marks of rank, wealth, distinction in war, etc. I shall now proceed to show, much more briefly, that still less does personal beauty proper serve among the lower races as a stimulant of s.e.xual pa.s.sion. This we should expect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure in bright baubles must long precede the pleasure in beautiful faces or figures. Every one who has been among Indians or other savages knows that nature produces among them fine figures and sometimes even pretty faces; but these are not appreciated. Galton told Darwin that he saw in one South African tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls, but they were not attractive to the natives. Zoller saw at least one beautiful negress; Wallace describes the superb figures of some of the Brazilian Indians and the Aru Islanders in the Malay Archipelago (354); and Barrow says that some of the Hottentot girls have beautiful figures when young--every joint and limb well turned. But as we shall see presently, the criterion of personal charm among Hottentots, as among savages in general, is fat, not what we call beauty. Ugliness, whether natural or inflicted by fashion, does not among these races act as a bar to marriage. "Beauty is of no estimation in either s.e.x,"

we read regarding the Creeks in Schoolcraft (V., 272): "It is strength or agility that recommends the young man to his mistress; and to be a skilful or swift hunter is the highest merit with the woman he may choose for a wife." Belden found that the squaws were valued "only for their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever is taken of their personal beauty," etc., etc. Nor can the fact that savages kill deformed children be taken as an indication of a regard for personal beauty. Such children are put out of the way for the simple reason that they may not become a burden to the family or the tribe.

Advocates of the s.e.xual selection theory make much ado over the fact that in all countries the natives prefer their own peculiar color and features--black, red, or yellow, flat noses, high cheek bones, thick lips, etc.--and dislike what we consider beautiful. But the likes of these races regarding personal appearance have no more to do with a sense of beauty than their dislikes. It is merely a question of habit.

They like their own faces because they are used to them, and dislike ours because they are strange. In their aversion to our faces they are actuated by the same motive that makes a European child cry out and run away in terror at sight of a negro--not because he is ugly, for he may be good-looking, but because he is strange.

Far from admiring such beauty as nature may have given them, the lower races exercise an almost diabolical ingenuity in obliterating or mutilating it. Hundreds of their visitors have written of certain tribes that they would not be bad looking if they would only leave nature alone. Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeb.a.l.l.s, has escaped the uglifying process. "Nothing is too absurd or hideous to please them," writes Cameron. The Eskimos afford a striking ill.u.s.tration of the fact that a germ of taste for ornamentation in general is an earlier manifestation of the esthetic faculty than the appreciation of personal beauty; for while displaying considerable skill and ingenuity in the decorations of their clothes, canoes, and weapons, they mutilate their persons in various ways and allow them to be foul and malodorous with the filth of years. One of the most disgusting mutilations on record is that practised by the Indians of British Columbia, who insert a piece of bone in the lower lip, which, gradually enlarged, makes it at last project three inches. Bancroft (I., 98) devotes three pages to the lip mutilation indulged in by the Thlinkeet females. When the operation is completed and the block is withdrawn "the lip drops down upon the chin like a piece of leather, displaying the teeth, and presenting altogether a ghastly spectacle."

The lower teeth and gum, says one witness, are left quite naked; another says that the plug "distorts every feature in the lower part of the face"; a third that an old woman, the wife of a chief, had a lip "ornament" so large "that by a peculiar motion of her under-lip she could almost conceal her whole face with it"; and a fourth gives a description of this "abominably revolting spectacle," which is too nauseating to quote.

DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM (?)

"Abominably revolting," "hideous," "filthy," "disgusting,"

"atrocious"--such are usually the words of observers in describing these shocking mutilations. Nevertheless they always apply the word "ornamentation" to them, with the implication that the savages look upon them as beautiful, although all that the observers had a right to say was that they pleased the savages and were approved by fashion.

What is worse, the philosophers fell into the pitfall thus dug for them. Darwin thinks that the mutilations indulged in by savages show "how different is the standard of _taste_"; Humboldt (III., 236) reflects on the strange fact that nations "attach the idea of beauty"

to whatever configuration nature has given them; and Ploss (I., 48) declares bluntly that there is no such thing as an absolute standard of beauty and that savages have "just as much right" to their ideas on the subject as we have to admire a madonna of Raphael. This view, indeed, is generally held; it is expressed in the old saw, _De gustibus non est disputandum_. Now it is true that it is _unwise_ to dispute about tastes _conversationally_; but scientifically speaking, that old saw has not a sound tooth in it.

If a peasant who has never had an opportunity to cultivate his musical sense insisted that a certain piano was exquisitely in tune and had as beautiful a tone as any other piano, whereas an expert musician declared that it had a shrill tone and was terribly out of tune, would anybody be so foolish as to say that the peasant had as much right to his opinion as the musician? Or if an Irish toper declared that a bottle of Chambertin, over which French epicures smacked their lips, was insipid and not half as fine as the fusel-oil on which he daily got drunk, would not everybody agree that the Irishman was no judge of liquors, and that the reason why he preferred his cheap whiskey to the Burgundy was that his nerves of taste were too coa.r.s.e to detect the subtle and exquisite bouquet of the French wine? In both these examples we are concerned only with simple questions of sense perception; yet in the matter of personal beauty, which involves not only the senses, but the imagination, the intellect, and the subtlest feelings, we are asked to believe that any savage who has never seen a woman but those of his own race has as much right to his opinion as a Ruskin or a t.i.tian, who have given their whole life to the study of beauty!

If an astronomer--to take another ill.u.s.tration--were told that _de astronomia non est disputandum_, and that the Namaquas, who believe that the moon is made of bacon, or the Brazilian tribes who think that an eclipse consists in an attempt on the part of a monstrous jaguar to swallow the sun--have as much right to their opinion as he has, he would consider the person who advanced such an argument either a wag or a fool. Only a wag or a fool, again, would argue that a Fijian has just as much right as we have to his opinions on medical matters, or on the morality of polygamy, infanticide, and cannibalism. Yet when we come across a dirty, malodorous savage, so stupid that he cannot count ten, who mutilates every part of his body till he has lost nearly all semblance to a human being, we are soberly asked to look upon this as merely a "difference in the standard of esthetic taste," and to admit that the savage has "as much right to his taste," as we have. The more I think of it, the more I am amazed at this unjust and idiotic discrimination against the esthetic faculty--a discrimination for which I can find no other explanation than the fact already referred to, that most men of science know so much less about matters of beauty than about everything else in the world. They labor under the delusion that the sense of beauty is one of the earliest products of mental evolution, whereas their own att.i.tude in the matter affords painful proof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day that a steatopygous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because an African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlot is beautiful because she pleases a drunken libertine.

What makes the traditional att.i.tude of scientific men in this matter the less pardonable is that--as we have seen--there is always a simple, practical explanation for the predilections of these savages, so that there is no necessity whatever for a.s.suming the existence of so paradoxical and impossible a thing as an esthetic admiration of these hideous deformities. Thus, in regard to the nauseating lip "ornaments" of the Thlinkeets just referred to, the testimony collected by Bancroft indicates unmistakably that they are approved of, perpetuated, and aggravated for two reasons--both non-esthetic--namely, as indications of rank, and from the necessity of conforming to fashion. Ladies of distinction, we read, increase the size of their lip plug. Langsdorff even saw women "of very high rank"

with this "ornament" full five inches long and three broad; Dixon says the mutilation is always in proportion to the person's wealth; and Mayne relates, in his book on the British Columbia Indians, that "a woman's rank among women is settled according to the size of her wooden lip."

INDIFFERENCE TO DIRT

That savages can have no sense of personal beauty is further proved by their habitual indifference to personal cleanliness, the most elementary and imperative of esthetic requirements. When we read in McLean (II., 153) that some Eskimo girls "might pa.s.s as pretty if divested of their filth;" or in Cranz (I., 134) that "it is almost sickening to view their hands and faces smeared with grease ... and their filthy clothes swarming with vermin;" and when we further read in Kotzebue (II., 56) regarding the Kalush that his "filthy countrywomen with their lip-trough ... often awaken in him the most vehement pa.s.sion," we realize vividly that that pa.s.sion is a coa.r.s.e appet.i.te which exists quite apart from, and independently of, anything that might be considered beautiful or ugly.

The subject is not a pleasant one; but as it is one of my strongest arguments, I must be pardoned for giving some more unsavory details.

Among some of the British Columbia Indians "pretty women may be seen; nearly all have good eyes and hair, but the state of filth in which they live generally neutralizes any natural charms they may possess."

(Mayne, 277.) Lewis and Clarke write (439) regarding the Chinook Indians:

"Their broad, flat foreheads, their falling b.r.e.a.s.t.s, their ill-shaped limbs, the awkwardness of their positions, and _the filth which intrudes through their finery_--all these render a Chinook or Clatsop beauty in full attire one of the most disgusting objects in nature."

Muir says of the Mono Indians of the California Mountains (93): "The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified, and seemed so ancient and so undisturbed it might also possess a geological significance."

Navajo girls "usually evince a catlike aversion to water."

(Schoolcraft, IV., 214.) Cozzens relates (128) how, among the Apaches, "the sight of a man washing his face and hands almost convulsed them with laughter." He adds that their personal appearance explained their surprise. Burton (80) found among the Sioux a dislike to cleanliness "which nothing but the fear of the rod will subdue."

"In an Indian village," writes Neill (79), "all is filth and litter.... Water, except in very warm weather, seldom touches their bodies."

The Comanches are "disgustingly filthy in their persons."

(Schoolcraft, I., 235.) The South American Waraus "are exceedingly dirty and disgusting in their habits, and their children are so much neglected that their fingers and toes are frequently destroyed by vermin." (Bernau, 35.) The Patagonians "are excessively filthy in their personal habits." (Bourne, 56.) The Mundrukus "are very dirty"

(Markham, 172), etc.

Of the Damara negroes, Anderson says (_N._, 50): "Dirt often acc.u.mulates to such a degree on their persons as to make the color of their skins totally undistinguishable;" and Galton (92) "could find no pleasure in a.s.sociating or trying to chat with these Damaras, they were so filthy and disgusting in every way." Thunberg writes of the Hottentots (73) that they "find a peculiar pleasure in filth and stench;" wherein they resemble Africans in general. Griffith declares that the hill tribes of India are "the dirtier the farther we advance;" elsewhere[114] we read:

"Both males and females, as a cla.s.s, are very dirty and filthy in both person and habits. They appear to have an antipathy to bathing, and to make matters worse, they have a habit of anointing their bodies with _ghee_ (melted b.u.t.ter);"

and of another of these tribes:

"The Karens are a dirty people. They never use soap, and their skins are enamelled with dirt. When water is thrown on them, it rolls off their backs like globules of quicksilver on a marble slab. To them bathing has a cooling, but no cleansing effect."

The Mishinis are "disgustingly dirty." By the Kirgliez "uncleanliness is elevated into a virtue hallowed by tradition." The Kalmucks are described as filthy, the Kamtschadales as exceedingly so, etc.

REASONS FOR BATHING.

Among the inhabitants of the islands of the Pacific we meet with apparent exceptions. These natives are practically amphibious, spending half their time in the ocean, and are therefore of necessity clean. So are certain coast negroes and Indian tribes living along river-banks. But Ellis _(Pol. Res._, I., 110) was shrewd enough to see that the habit of frequent bathing indulged in by the South Sea Islanders was a luxury--a result of the hot climate--and not an indication of the virtue of cleanliness. In this respect Captain Cook showed less ac.u.men, for he remarks (II., 148) that "nothing appears to give them greater pleasure than personal cleanliness, to produce which they frequently bathe in ponds." His confusion of ideas is made apparent in the very next sentence, where he adds that the water in most of these ponds "stinks intolerably." That it is merely the desire for comfort and sport that induces the Polynesians to bathe so much is proved further by the att.i.tude of the New Zealanders. Hawksworth declares (III., 451) that they "stink like Hottentots;" and the reason lies in the colder climate which makes bathing less of a luxury to them. The Micronesians also spend much of their time in the water, for comfort, not for cleanliness. Gerland cites grewsome details of their nastiness. (Waitz, V., Pt. II., 81, 188.) The Kaffirs, says Gardiner (101), "although far from cleanly," are fond of bathing. In some other cases the water is sought for its warmth instead of its coolness. In Brazil the morning air is much colder than the water, wherefore the natives take to the river for comfort, as the j.a.panese do in winter to their hot tubs. All Indians, says Bancroft (I., 83), "attach great importance to their sweatbaths," not for cleanliness--for they are "extremely filthy in their persons and habits"--but "as a remedial measure."

Unless they happen to indulge in bathing for comfort, the lowest of savages are also the dirtiest. Leigh writes (147) that in South Australia many of the women, including the wives of chiefs, had "sore eyes from the smoke, the filth, and their abominable want of cleanliness." Sturt (II., 53) refers to the Australian women as "disgusting objects." At funerals, "the women besmear themselves with the most disgusting filth." The naked boys in Taplin's school "had no notion of cleanliness." The youths from the age of ten to sixteen or seventeen were compelled by custom to let their hair grow, the result being "a revolting ma.s.s of tangled locks and filth." (Woods, 20, 85.) Sturt sums up his impressions by declaring (II., 126): "Really, the loathsome condition and hideous countenances of the women would, I should imagine, have been a complete antidote to the s.e.xual pa.s.sion."