Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 33

This, no doubt, is the truth about widow-burning; but it is not the whole truth. To comprehend all the horrors of the situation we must realize clearly that it was the fiendish selfishness of the men, extending even beyond death, which thus subjected their wives to a cruel death, and that the widows, on their part, did not follow them because of the promptings of affection, but either under physical compulsion or in consequence of a systematic course of moral reprobation and social persecution which made death preferable to life. In Peru, for instance, where widows were not killed against their will, but were allowed to choose between widowhood and being buried alive,

"the wife or servant who preferred life to the act of martyrdom, which was to attest their fidelity, was an object of general contempt, and devoted or doomed to a life worse than death."

The consequence of this was that

"generally the wives and servants offered themselves voluntarily, and there are even instances of wives who preferred suicide to prove their conjugal devotion when they were prevented from descending to the grave with the body of their consort." (Rivero and Tschudi, 186.)

Usually, too, superst.i.tion was called to aid to make the widows docile. In Fiji, for instance, to quote Westermarck's summing up (125) of several authorities, widows

"were either buried alive or strangled, often at their own desire, because they believed that in this way alone could they reach the realms of bliss, and that she who met her death with the greatest devotedness would become the favorite wife in the abode of spirits.

On the other hand, a widow who did not permit herself to be killed was considered an adulteress."

To realize vividly how far widow-burning is from being an act of voluntary wifely devotion one must read Abbe Dubois's account of the matter (I., chap. _21_). He explains that, however chaste and devoted a wife may have been during her husband's life, she is treated worse than the lowest outcast if she wants to survive him. By a "voluntary"

death, on the contrary, she becomes "an ill.u.s.trious victim of conjugal attachment," and is "considered in the light of a deity." On the way to the funeral pyre the accompanying mult.i.tude stretch out their hands toward her in token of admiration. They behold her as already translated into the paradise of Vishnu and seem to envy her happy lot.

The women run up to her to receive her blessing, and she knows that afterward crowds of votaries will daily frequent her shrine. The Brahmans compliment her on her heroism. (Sometimes drugs are administered to stifle her fears.) She knows, too, that it is useless to falter at the last moment, as a change of heart would be an eternal disgrace, not only to herself but to her relatives, who, therefore, stand around with sabres and rifles to _intimidate_ her. In short, with satanic ingenuity, every possible appeal is made to her family pride, vanity, longing for future bliss and divine honors after life, enforced by the knowledge that if she lives earth will be a h.e.l.l to her, so that refusal is next to impossible. And this is the much-vaunted "conjugal affection and fidelity" of Hindoo widows!

FEMININE DEVOTION IN ANCIENT LITERATURE

The practice of "voluntary" widow-burning is, as the foregoing shows, about as convincing proof of wifely devotion as the presence of an ox in the butcher's stall is proof of his gastronomic devotion to man. In reality it is, as I have said, simply the most diabolical aspect of man's aboriginal disposition to look on woman as made solely for his own comfort and pleasure, here and hereafter. Now it is very instructive to note that whenever there is a story of conjugal devotion in Oriental or ancient cla.s.sical literature it is nearly always inspired by the same spirit--the idea that the woman, as an inferior being, should subject herself to any amount of suffering if she can thereby save her sacred lord and master the slightest pang.

For instance, an old Arabic writer (Kamil Mobarrad, p. 529) relates how a devoted wife whose husband was condemned to death disfigured her beautiful face in order to let him die with the consoling feeling that she would not marry again. The current notion that such stories are proof of conjugal devotion is the fifth of the mistakes to be corrected in this chapter. These stories were written by men, selfish men, who intended them as lessons to indicate to the women what was expected of them. Were it otherwise, why should not the men, too, be represented, at least occasionally, as devoted and self-sacrificing?

Hector is tender to Andromache, and in the Sanscrit drama, _Kanisika's Wrath,_ the King and the Queen contend with one another as to who shall be the victim of that wrath; but these are the only instances of the kind that occur to me. This interesting question will be further considered in the chapters on India and Greece, where corroborative stories will be quoted. Here I wish only to emphasize again the need of caution and suspicion in interpreting the evidence relating to the human feelings.

WIVES ESTEEMED AS MOTHERS ONLY

So much for the feminine aspect of conjugal devotion. In regard to the masculine aspect something must be added to what was said in preceding pages (307-10). We saw there that primitive man desires wives chiefly as drudges and concubines. It was also indicated briefly that wives are valued as mothers of daughters who can be sold to suitors. As a rule, sons are more desired than daughters, as they increase a man's power and authority, and because they alone can keep up the superst.i.tious rites which are deemed necessary for the salvation of the father's selfish old soul. Now the non-existence or extreme rarity of conjugal attachment--not to speak of affection--is painfully indicated by the circ.u.mstance that wives were, among many races, valued (apart from grossly utilitarian and sensual motives) as mothers only, and that the men had a right, of which they commonly availed themselves, of repudiating a wife if she proved barren. On the lower Congo, says Dupont (96), a wife is not respected unless she has at least three children. Among the Somali, barren women are dieted and dosed, and if that proves unavailing they are usually chased away.

(Paulitschke, _B.E.A.S_., 30.) If a Greenlander's wife did not bear him any children he generally took another one. (Cranz, I., 147.) Among the Mexican Aztecs divorce, even from a concubine, was not easy; but in case of barrenness even the princ.i.p.al wife could be repudiated.

(Bancroft, II., 263-65.) The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Germans, the Chinese and j.a.panese, could divorce a wife on account of barrenness.

For a Hindoo the laws of Manu indicate that "a barren wife may be dispensed with in the eighth year; one whose children all die, in the tenth; one who bears only daughters, in the eleventh." The tragic import of such bare statements is hardly realized until we come upon particular instances like those related by the Indian auth.o.r.ess Ramabai (15):

"Of the four wives of a certain prince, the eldest had borne him two sons; she was therefore his favorite, and her face beamed with happiness.... But oh! what contrast to this happiness was presented in the apartments of the childless three. Their faces were sad and careworn; there seemed no hope for them in this world, since their lord was displeased with them on account of their misfortune."

"A lady friend of mine in Calcutta told me that her husband had warned her not to give birth to a girl, the first time, or he would never see her face again." Another woman

"had been notified by her husband that if she persisted in bearing daughters she should be superseded by another wife, have coa.r.s.e clothes to wear, scanty food to eat," etc.[127]

WHY CONJUGAL PRECEDES ROMANTIC LOVE

The conclusion to be drawn from the testimony collected in this chapter is that genuine conjugal love--the affection for a wife _for her own sake_--is, like romantic love, a product chiefly of modern civilization.

I say chiefly, because I am convinced that conjugal love was known sooner than romantic love, and for a very simple reason. Among those of the lower races where the s.e.xes were not separated in youth, a license prevailed which led to shallow, premature, temporary alliances that precluded all idea of genuine affection, even had these folk been capable of such a sentiment; while among those tribes and peoples that practised the custom of separating the boys and girls from the earliest age, and not allowing them to become acquainted till after marriage, the growth of real, prematrimonial affection was, of course, equally impossible. In married life this was different. Living together for years, having a common interest in their children, sharing the same joys and sorrows, husband and wife would learn the rudiments of sympathy, and in happy cases there would be an opportunity for the growth of liking, attachment, fondness, or even, in exceptional instances, of affection. I cannot sufficiently emphasize the fact that my theory is psychological or cultural, not chronological. The fact that a man lives in the year 1900 makes it no more self-evident that he should be capable of s.e.xual affection than the fact that a man lived seven centuries before Christ makes it self-evident that he could not love affectionately. Hector and Andromache existed only in the brain of Homer, who was in many respects thousands of years ahead of his contemporaries. Whether such a couple could really have existed at that time among the Trojans, or the Greeks, we do not know, but in any case it would have been an exception, proving the rule by the painful contrast of the surrounding barbarism.

Exceptions may possibly occur among the lower races, through happy combinations of circ.u.mstances. C.C. Jones describes (69) a picture of conjugal devotion among Cherokee Indians:

"By the side of the aged Mico Tomo-chi-chi, as, thin and weak, he lies upon his blanket, hourly expecting the summons of the pale-king, we see the sorrowing form of his old wife, Scenauki, bending over and fanning him with a bunch of feathers."

In his work on the Indians of California (271), Powers writes:

"An aged Achomauri lost his wife, to whom he had been married probably half a century, and he tarred his face in mourning for her as though he were a woman--_an act totally unprecedented_, and regarded by the Indians as evincing an _extraordinary_ affection."

St. John relates the following incident in his book on Borneo:

"Ijan, a Balau chief, was bathing with his wife in the Lingga River, a place notorious for man-eating alligators, when Indra Lela, pa.s.sing in a boat, remarked, 'I have just seen a very large animal swimming up the stream.' Upon hearing this, Ijan told his wife to go up the steps and he would follow. She got safely up, but he, stopping to wash his feet, was seized by the alligator, dragged into the middle of the stream, and disappeared from view. His wife, hearing a cry, turned round, and seeing her husband's fate, sprang into the river, shrieking 'Take me also,' and dived down at the spot where she had seen the alligator sink with his prey. No persuasion could induce her to come out of the water; she swam about, diving in all the places most dreaded from being a resort of ferocious reptiles, seeking to die with her husband; at last her friends came down and forcibly removed her to their house."

These stories certainly imply conjugal attachment, but is there any indication in them of affection? The Cherokee squaw mourns the impending death of her husband, which is a selfish feeling. The Californian, similarly, laments the loss of his spouse. The only thing he does is to "tar his face in mourning," and even this is regarded by the other Indians as "extraordinary" and "unprecedented." As for the woman in the third story, it is to be noted that her act is one of selfish despair, not of self-sacrifice for her husband's sake. We shall see in later chapters that women of her grade abandon themselves to suicidal impulses, not only where there is occasion for real distress, but often on the most trivial pretexts. A few days later, in all probability, that same woman would have been ready to marry another man. There is no evidence of altruistic action--action for another's benefit--in any of these incidents, and altruism is the only test of genuine affection as distinguished from mere liking, attachment, and fondness, which, as was explained in the chapter on Affection, are the products of selfishness, more or less disguised. If this distinction had been borne in mind a vast amount of confusion could have been avoided in works of exploration and the anthropological treatises based on them. Westermarck, for instance, cites on page 357 a number of authors who a.s.serted that s.e.xual affection, or even the appearance of it, was unknown to the Hovas of Madagascar, the Gold Coast, and Winnabah natives, the Kabyles, the Beni-Amer, the Chittagong Hill Tribes, the Ponape islanders, the Eskimo, the Kutchin, the Iroquois, and North American Indians in general; while on the next pages he cites approvingly authors who fancied they had discovered s.e.xual affection among tribes some of whom (Australians, Andamanese, Bushmans) are far below the peoples just mentioned. The cause of this discrepancy lies not in these races themselves, but in the inaccurate use of words, and the different standards of the writers, some accepting the rubbing of noses or other s.e.xual caresses as evidence of "affection," while others take any acts indicating fondness, attachment, or a suicidal impulse as signs of it.

In a recent work by Tyrrell (165), I find it stated that the Eskimo marriage is "purely a love union;" and in reading on I discover that the author's idea of a "love union" is the absence of a marriage ceremony! Yet I have no doubt that Tyrrell will be cited hereafter as evidence that love unions are common among the Eskimos. So, again, when Lumholtz writes (213) that an Australian woman

"may happen to change husbands many times in her life, but sometimes, despite the fact that her consent is not asked, she gets the one she loves--for a black woman can love too"

--we are left entirely in the dark as to what kind of "love" is meant--sensual or sentimental, liking, attachment, fondness, or real affection. Surely it is time to put an end to such confusion, at least in scientific treatises, and to acquire in psychological discussions the precision which we always employ in describing the simplest weeds or insects.

Morgan, the great authority on the Iroquois--the most intelligent of North American Indians--lived long enough among them to realize vaguely that there must be a difference between s.e.xual attachment before and after marriage, and that the latter is an earlier phenomenon in human evolution. After declaring that among the Indians "marriage was not founded on the affections ... but was regulated exclusively as a matter of physical necessity," he goes on to say:

"Affection after marriage would naturally spring up between the parties from a.s.sociation, from habit, and from mutual dependence; but of that marvellous pa.s.sion which originates in a higher development of the pa.s.sions of the human heart, and is founded upon a cultivation of the affections between the s.e.xes, they were entirely ignorant. In their temperaments they were below this pa.s.sion in its simplest forms."

He is no doubt right in declaring that the Indians before marriage were "in their temperaments" below affectionate love "in its simplest forms"; but, that being so, it is difficult to see how they could have acquired real affection after marriage. As a matter of fact we know that they treated their wives with a selfishness which is entirely incompatible with true affection. The Rev. Peter Jones, moreover, an Indian himself, tells us in his book on the Ojibwas:

"I have scarcely ever seen anything like social intercourse between husband and wife, and it is remarkable that the women say little in presence of the men."

Obviously, at the beginning of the pa.s.sage quoted, Morgan should have used the word attachment in place of affection. Bulmer (by accident, I suspect) uses the right word when he says (Brough Smyth, 77) that Australians, notwithstanding their brutal forms of marriage, often "get much attached to each other." At the same time it is easy to show that, if not among Australians or Indians, at any rate with such a people as the ancient Greeks, conjugal affection may have existed while romantic love was still impossible. The Greeks looked down on their women as inferior beings. Now one can feel affection--conjugal or friendly--toward an inferior, but one cannot feel adoration--and adoration is absolutely essential to romantic love. Before romantic love could be born it was necessary that women should not only be respected as equal to man but worshipped as his superior. This was not done by any of the lower or ancient races; hence romantic love is a peculiarly modern sentiment, later than any other form of human affection.

OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE

When Shakspere wrote that "The course of true love never did run smooth" he had in mind individual cases of courtship. But what is true of individuals also applies to the story of love itself. For many thousands of years savagery and barbarism "proved an unrelenting foe to love," and it was with almost diabolical ingenuity that obstacles to its birth and growth were maintained and multiplied. It was crushed, balked, discountenanced, antagonized, discredited, disheartened so persistently that the wonder is not that there should be so little true love even at the present day, but that there is any at all. A whole volume might be written on the Obstacles to Love; my original plan for this book included a long chapter on this matter; but partly to avoid repet.i.tion, partly to save s.p.a.ce, I will condense my material to a few pages, considering briefly the following obstacles: I. Ignorance and stupidity. II. Coa.r.s.eness and obscenity.

III. War. IV. Cruelty. V. Masculine selfishness. VI. Contempt for women. VII. Capture and sale of brides. VIII. Infant marriages. IX.

Prevention of free choice. X. Separation of the s.e.xes. XI. s.e.xual taboos. XII. Race aversion. XIII. Multiplicity of languages. XIV.

Social barriers. XV. Religious prejudice.

I. IGNORANCE AND STUPIDITY

Intelligence alone does not imply a capacity for romantic love. Dogs are the most intelligent of all animals, but they know nothing of love; the most intelligent nations of antiquity--the Greeks, Romans and Hebrews--were strangers to this feeling; and in our times we have seen that such intelligent persons as Tolstoi, Zola, Groncourt, Flaubert have been confessedly unable to experience real love such as Turgenieff held up to them. On the other hand, there can be no genuine love without intelligence. It is true that maternal love exists among the lowly, but that is an instinct developed by natural selection, because without it the race could not have persisted. Conjugal attachment also was, as we have seen, necessary for the preservation of the race; whereas romantic love is not necessary for the preservation of the race, but is merely a means for its improvement; wherefore it developed slowly, keeping pace with the growth of the intellectual powers of discrimination, the gradual refinement of the emotions, and the removal of diverse obstacles created by selfishness, coa.r.s.eness, foolish taboos, and prejudices. A savage lives entirely in his senses, hence sensual love is the only kind he can know. His love is as coa.r.s.e and simple as his music, which is little more than a monotonous rhythmic noise. Just as a man, unless he has musical culture, cannot understand a Schumann symphony, so, unless he has intellectual culture, he cannot love a woman as Schumann loved Clara Wieck.

Stupid persons, men and women with blunt intellects, also have blunt feelings, excepting those of a criminal, vengeful kind. Savages have keener senses than we have, but their intellect and emotions are blunt and untrained. An Australian cannot count above ten, and Galton says (132) that Damaras in counting "puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for units." Spix and Martins (384) found it very difficult to get any information from the Brazilian (Coroado) because "scarcely has one begun to question him about his language when he gets impatient, complains of headache, and shows that he cannot endure this effort"--for he is used to living entirely in and for his senses.

Fancy such savages writing or reading a book like _The Reveries of a Bachelor_ and you will understand why stupidity is an obstacle to love, and realize the unspeakable folly of the notion that love is always and everywhere the same. The savage has no imagination, and imagination is the organ of romantic love; without it there can be no sympathy, and without sympathy there can be no love.

II. COa.r.s.eNESS AND OBSCENITY

Kissing and other caresses are, as we have seen, practices unknown to savages. Their nerves being too coa.r.s.e to appreciate even the more refined forms of sensualism, it follows of necessity that they are too coa.r.s.e to experience the subtle manifestations of imaginative sentimental love. Their national addiction to obscene practices and conversation proves an insuperable obstacle to the growth of refined s.e.xual feelings. Details given in later chapters will show that what Turner says of the Samoans, "From their childhood their ears are familiar with the most obscene conversation;" and what the Rev. George Taplan writes of the "immodest and lewd" dances of the Australians, applies to the lower races in general. The history of love is, indeed, epitomized in the evolution of the dance from its aboriginal obscenity and licentiousness to its present function as chiefly a means of bringing young people together and providing innocent opportunities for courtship; two extremes differing as widely as the coa.r.s.e drum accompaniment of a primitive dance from the sentimental melodies, soulful harmonies, and exquisite orchestral colors of a Strauss waltz.

A remark made by Taine on Burns suggests how even acquired coa.r.s.eness in a mind naturally refined may crush the capacity for true love:

"He had enjoyed too much.... Debauch had all but spoiled his fine imagination, which had before been 'the chief source of his happiness'; and he confessed that, instead of tender reveries, he had now nothing but sensual desires."

The poets have done much to confuse the public mind in this matter by their fanciful and impossible pastoral lovers. The remark made in my first book, that "only an educated mind can feel romantic love," led one of its reviewers to remark, half indignantly, half mournfully, "There goes the pastoral poetry of the world at a single stroke of the pen." Well, let it go. I am quite sure that if these poetic dreamers had ever come across a shepherdess in real life--dirty, unkempt, ignorant, coa.r.s.e, immoral--they would themselves have made haste to disavow their heroines and seek less malodorous "maidens" for embodiments of their exalted fancies of love[128]. Richard Wagner was promptly disillusioned when he came across some of those modern shepherdesses, the Swiss dairy-maids. "There are magnificent women here in the Oberland," he wrote to a friend, "but only so to the eye; they are all tainted with rabid vulgarity."