Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 31

"Sentiment has a peculiar place between thought and feeling, in which it also approaches the meaning of principle. It is more than that feeling which is sensation or emotion, by containing more of thought and by being _more lofty_, while it contains too much feeling to be merely thought, and it _has large influence over the will_; for example, the sentiment of patriotism; the sentiment of honor; the world is ruled by sentiment. The thought in a sentiment is often that of _duty_, and is penetrated and _exalted_ by feeling."

Herbert Spencer sums up the matter concisely _(Psych_., II., 578) when he speaks of "that remoteness from sensations and appet.i.tes and from ideas of such sensations and appet.i.tes which is the common trait of the feelings we call sentiments."

It is hardly necessary to point out that in our Baghdad girl's love-affairs there is no "remoteness from sensations and appet.i.tes,"

no "illumination of the senses by the soul," no "intellectualized emotion," no "thought made affectionate, sympathetic, moral." But there is in it, as I have said, a touch of sentimentality. If sentiment is properly defined as "higher feeling," sentimentality is "_affectation_ of fine or tender feeling or exquisite sensibility."

Heartless coquetry, prudery, mock modesty, are bosom friends of sentimentality. While sentiment is the n.o.blest thing in the world, sentimentality is its counterfeit, its caricature; there is something theatrical, operatic, painted-and-powdered about it; it differs from sentiment as astrology differs from astronomy, alchemy from chemistry, the sham from the real, hypocrisy from sincerity, artificial posing from natural grace, genuine affection from selfish attachment.

RARITY OF TRUE LOVE

Sentimentality, as I have said, precedes sentiment in the history of love, and it has been a special characteristic of certain periods, like that of the Alexandrian Greeks and their Roman imitators, to whom we shall recur in a later chapter, and the mediaeval Troubadours and Minnesingers. To the present day sentimentality in love is so much more abundant than sentiment that the adjective sentimental is commonly used in an uncomplimentary sense, as in the following pa.s.sage from one of Krafft-Ebing's books (_Psch. s.e.x_., 9):

"Sentimental love runs the risk of degenerating into caricature, especially in cases where the sensual ingredient is weak.... Such love has a flat, saccharine tang. It is apt to become positively ludicrous, whereas in other cases the manifestations of this strongest of all feelings inspire in us sympathy, respect, awe, according to circ.u.mstances."

Steele speaks in _The Lover_ (23, No. 5) of the extraordinary skill of a poet in making a loose people "attend to a Pa.s.sion which they never, or that very faintly, felt in their own Bosoms." La Rochefoucauld wrote: "It is with true love as with ghosts; everybody speaks of it, but few have seen it." A writer in _Science_ expressed his belief that romantic love, as described in my first book, could really be experienced only by men of genius. I think that this makes the circle too small; yet in these twelve years of additional observation I have come to the conclusion that even at this stage of civilization only a small proportion of men and women are able to experience full-fledged romantic love, which seems to require a special emotional or esthetic gift, like the talent for music. A few years ago I came across the following in the London _Tidbits_ which echoes the sentiments of mult.i.tudes:

"Latour, who sent a pathetic complaint the other day that though he wished to do so he was unable to fall in love, has called forth a sympathetic response from a number of readers of both s.e.xes. These ladies and gentlemen write to say that they also, like Latour, cannot understand how it is that they are not able to feel any experience of tender pa.s.sion which they read about so much in novels, and hear about in actual life."

At the same time there are not a few men of genius, too, who never felt true love in their own hearts. Herder believed that Goethe was not capable of genuine love, and Grimm, too, thought that Goethe had never experienced a self-absorbing pa.s.sion. Tolstoi must have been ever a stranger to genuine love, for to him it seems a degrading thing even in marriage. A suggestive and frank confession may be found in the literary memoirs of Goncourt.[122] At a small gathering of men of letters Goncourt remarked that hitherto love had not been studied scientifically in novels. Zola thereupon declared that love was not a specific emotion; that it does not affect persons so absolutely as the writers say; that the phenomena characterizing it are also found in friendship, in patriotism, and that the intensity of this emotion is due entirely to the antic.i.p.ation of carnal enjoyment. Turgenieff objected to these views; in his opinion love is a sentiment which has a unique color of its own--a quality differentiating it from all other sentiments--eliminating the lover's own personality, as it were. The Russian novelist obviously had a conception of the purity of love, for Goncourt reports him as "speaking of his first love for a woman as a thing entirely spiritual, having nothing in common with materiality."

And now follows Goncourt's confession:

"In all this, the thing to regret is that neither Flaubert ... nor Zola, nor myself, have ever been very seriously in love and that we are therefore unable to describe love.

Turgenieff alone could have done that, but he lacks precisely the critical sense which we could have exercised in this matter had we been in love after his fashion."

The vast majority of the human race has not yet got beyond the sensual stage of amorous evolution, or realized the difference between sentimentality and sentiment. There is much food for thought in this sentence from Henry James's charming essay on France's most poetic writer--Theophile Gautier:

"It has seemed to me rather a painful exhibition of the prurience of the human mind that in most of the notices of the author's death (those at least published in England and America), this work alone [_Mile. de Maupin_] should have been selected as the critic's text."

Readers are interested only in emotions with which they are familiar by experience. Howells's refined love-scenes have often been sneered at by men who like raw whiskey but cannot appreciate the delicate bouquet of Chambertin. As Professor Ribot remarks: in the higher regions of science, art, religion, and morals there are emotions so subtle and elevated that

"not more than one individual in a hundred thousand or even in a million can experience them. The others are strangers to them, or do not know of their existence except vaguely, from what they hear about them. It is a promised land, which only the select can enter."

I believe that romantic love is a sentiment which more than one person in a million can experience, and more than one in a hundred thousand.

How many more, I shall not venture to guess. All the others know love only as a sensual craving. To them "I love you" means "I long for you, covet you, am eager to enjoy you"; and this feeling is not love of another but self-love, more or less disguised--the kind of "love"

which makes a young man shoot a girl who refuses him. The mediaeval writer Leon Hebraeus evidently knew of no other when he defined love as "a desire to enjoy that which is good"; nor Spinoza when he defined it as _laetetia concomitante idea externae causae_--a pleasure accompanied by the thought of its external cause.

MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE

Having distinguished romantic or sentimental love from sentimentality on one side and sensuality on the other, it remains to show how it differs from conjugal affection.

HOW ROMANTIC LOVE IS METAMORPHOSED

On hearing the words "love letters," does anybody ever think of a man's letters to his wife? No more than of his letters to his mother.

He may love both his wife and his mother dearly, but when he writes love letters he writes them to his sweetheart. Thus, public opinion and every-day literary usage clearly recognize the difference between romantic love and conjugal affection. Yet when I maintained in my first book that romantic love differs as widely from conjugal affection as maternal love differs from friendship; that romantic love is almost as modern as the telegraph, the railway, and the electric light; and that perhaps the main reasons why no one had antic.i.p.ated me in an attempt to write a book to prove this, were that no distinction had heretofore been made between conjugal and romantic love, and that the apparent occurrence of n.o.ble examples of conjugal attachment among the ancient Greeks had obscured the issue--there was a chorus of dissenting voices. "The distinction drawn by him between romantic and conjugal love," wrote one critic, "seems more fanciful than real." "He will not succeed," wrote another, "in convincing anybody that romantic and conjugal love differ in kind instead of only in degree or place"; while a third even objected to my theory as "essentially immoral!"

Mr. W.D. Howells, on the other hand, accepted my distinction, and in a letter to me declared that he found conjugal affection an even more interesting field of study than romantic love. Why, indeed, should anyone be alarmed at the distinction I made? Is not a man's feeling toward his sweetheart different from his feeling toward his mother or sister? Why then should it be absurd or "immoral" to maintain that it differs from his feeling toward his wife? What I maintain is that romantic love disappears gradually, to be replaced, as a rule, by conjugal affection, which is sometimes a less intense, at other times a more intense, feeling than the emotions aroused during courtship.

The process may be compared to a modulation in music, in which some of the tones in a chord are retained while others are displaced by new ones. Such modulations are delightful, and the new harmony may be as beautiful as the old. A visitor to Wordsworth's home wrote:

"I saw the old man walking in the garden with his wife. They were both quite old, and he was almost blind; but they seemed like sweethearts courting, they were so tender to each other and attentive."

A husband may be, and should be, quite as tender, as attentive, as gallant and self-sacrificing, as sympathetic, proud, and devoted as a lover; yet all his emotions will appear in a new orchestration, as it were. In the gallant attentions of a loving husband, the anxious eagerness to please is displaced by a pleasant sense of duty and gentlemanly courtesy. He still prefers his wife to all other women and wants a monopoly of her love; but this feeling has a proprietary tinge that was absent before. Jealousy, too, a.s.sumes a new aspect; it may, temporarily, bring back the uncertainty of courtship, but the emotion is colored by entirely different ideas: jealousy in a lover is a green-eyed monster gnawing merely at his hopes, and not, as in a husband, threatening to destroy his property and his family honor--which makes a great difference in the quality of the feeling and its manifestation. The wife, on her part, has no more use for coyness, but can indulge in the luxury of bestowing gallant attentions which before marriage would have seemed indelicate or forward, while after marriage they are a pleasant duty, rising in some cases to heroic self-sacrifice.

If even within the sphere of romantic love no two cases are exactly alike, how could love before marriage be the same as after marriage when so many new experiences, ideas, and a.s.sociations come into play?

Above all, the feelings relating to the children bring an entirely new group of tones into the complex harmony of affection. The intimacies of married life, the revelation of characteristics undiscovered before marriage, the deeper sympathy, the knowledge that theirs is "one glory an' one shame"--these and a hundred other domestic experiences make romantic love undergo a change into something that may be equally rich and strange but is certainly quite different. A wife's charms are different from a girl's and inspire a different kind of love. The husband loves

Those virtues which, before untried, The wife has added to the bride,

as Samuel Bishop rhymes it. In their predilection for maidens, poets, like novelists, have until recently ignored the wife too much. But Cowper sang:

What is there in the vale of life Half so delightful as a wife, When friendship, love and peace combine To stamp the marriage bond divine?

The stream of pure and genuine love Derives its current from above; And earth a second Eden shows, Where'er the healing water flows.

Some of the specifically romantic ingredients of love, on the other hand--adoration, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair--do not normally enter into conjugal affection. No one would fail to see the absurdity of a husband's exclaiming

O that I were a glove upon that hand That I might touch that cheek.

He _may_ touch that cheek, and kiss it too--and that makes a tremendous difference in the tone and tension of his feelings. Unlike the lover, the husband does not think, feel, and speak in perpetual hyperboles. He does not use expressions like "beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical," or speak of

The cruel madness of love The honey of poisonous flowers.

There is no madness or cruelty in conjugal love: in its normal state it is all peace, contentment, happiness, while romantic love, in its normal state, is chiefly unrest, doubt, fear, anxiety, torture and anguish of heart--with alternating hours of frantic elation--until the Yes has been spoken.

The emotions of a husband are those of a mariner who has entered into the calm harbor of matrimony with his treasure safe and sound, while the romantic lover is as one who is still on the high seas of uncertainty, storm-tossed one moment, lifted sky-high on a wave of hope, the next in a dark abyss of despair. It is indeed lucky that conjugal affection does differ so widely from romantic love; such nervous tension, doubt, worry, and constant friction between hope and despair would, if continued after marriage, make life a burden to the most loving couples.

WHY SAVAGES VALUE WIVES

The notion that genuine romantic love does not undergo a metamorphosis in marriage is the first of five mistakes I have undertaken to correct in this chapter. The second is summed up in Westermarck's a.s.sertion (359-60) that it is

"impossible to believe that there ever was a time when conjugal affection was entirely wanting in the human race ... it seems, in its most primitive form, to have been as old as marriage itself. It must be a certain degree of affection that induces the male to defend the female during her period of pregnancy."

Now I concede that natural selection must have developed at an early period in the history of man, as in the lower animals, some kind of an _attachment_ between male and females. A wife could not seek her daily food in the forest and at the same time defend herself and her helpless babe against wild beasts and human enemies. Hence natural selection favored those groups in which the males attached themselves to a particular female for a longer time than the breeding-season, defending her from enemies and giving her a share of their game. But from this admitted fact to the inference that it is "affection" that makes the husband defend his wife, there is a tremendous logical skip not warranted by the situation. Instead of making such an a.s.sumption offhand, the scientific method requires us to ask if there is not some other way of accounting for the facts more in accordance with the selfish disposition and habits of savages. The solution of the problem is easily found. A savage's wife is his property, which he has acquired by barter, service, fighting, or purchase, and which he would be a fool not to protect against injury or rivals. She is to him a source of utility, comfort, and pleasure, which is reason enough why he should not allow a lion to devour her or a rival to carry her off.

She is his cook, his slave, his mule; she fetches wood and water, prepares the food, puts up the camp, and when it is time to move carries the tent and kitchen utensils, as well as her child to the next place. If his motive in protecting her against men and beasts were _affection_, he would not thus compel her to do all the work while he walks unburdened to the next camping-place.

Apart from these home comforts there are selfish reasons enough why savages should take the trouble to protect their wives and rear children. In Australia it is a universal custom to exchange a daughter for a new wife, discarding or neglecting the old one; and the habit of treating children as merchandise prevails in various other parts of the world. The gross utilitarianism of South African marriages is ill.u.s.trated in Dr. Fritsch's remarks on the Ama-Zulus. "As these women too are slaves, there is not much to say about love, marriage, or conjugal life," he says. The husband pays for his wife, but expects her to repay him for his outlay by hard work and _by bearing children whom he can sell_. "If she fails to make herself thus useful, if she falls ill, becomes weak, or remains childless, he often sends her back to her father and demands rest.i.tution of the cattle he had paid for her;" and his demand has to be complied with. Lord Randolph Churchill (249) was informed by a native of Mashonaland that he had his eye on a girl whom he desired to marry, because "if he was lucky, his wife might have daughters whom he would be able to sell in exchange for goats." Samuel Baker writes in one of his books of African exploration (_Ism_., 341):

"Girls are always purchased if required as wives. It would be quite impossible to obtain a wife for love from any tribe that I have visited. 'Blessed is he that hath his quiver full of them' (daughters). A large family of girls is a source of wealth to the father, as he sells each daughter for twelve or fifteen cows to her suitor."

Of the Central African, Macdonald says (I., 141):

"The more wives he has the richer he is. It is his wives that maintain him. They do all his ploughing, milling, cooking, etc. They may be viewed as superior servants, who combine all the capacities of male servants and female servants in Britain--who do all his work and ask no wages."

We need not a.s.sume a problematic affection to explain why such a man marries.

But the savage's princ.i.p.al marriage motive is, of course, sensualism.

If he wants to own a particular girl he must take care of her. If he tires of her it is easy enough to get rid of her or to make her a drudge pure and simple, while her successor enjoys his caresses.

Speaking of Pennsylvania Indians, Buchanan remarks navely (II., 95) that "the wives are the true servants of their husbands; otherwise the men are very affectionate to them." On another page (102) he inadvertently explains what he means by this paradox: "the ancient women are used for cooks, barbers, and other services, the younger for dalliance." In other words, Buchanan makes the common mistake of applying the altruistic word affection to what is nothing more than selfish indulgence of the sensual appet.i.te. So does Pajeken when he tells us in the _Ausland_ about the "touching tenderness" of a Crow chief toward a fourteen-year-old girl whom he had just added to the number of his wives.