Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 85

A great mistake was made by the Greeks when they distinguished celestial from earthly love. The distinction itself was all right, but their application of it was all wrong. Had they known romantic love as we know it, they could not have made the grievous blunder of calling the love between men and women worldly, reserving the word celestial for the friendship between men. Equally mistaken were those mediaeval sages who taught that the celestial s.e.xual virtues are celibacy and virginity--a doctrine which, if adopted, would involve the suicide of the human race, and thus stands self-condemned. No, _celestial love is not asceticism; it is altruism_. Romantic love is celestial, for it is altruistic, yet it does not preach contempt of the body, and its goal is marriage, the chief pillar of civilization. The admiration of a beautiful, well-rounded, healthy body is as legitimate and laudable an ingredient of romantic love as the admiration of that mental beauty which distinguishes it from sensual love. It is not only that the lovers themselves are ent.i.tled to partners with healthy, attractive bodies; it is a duty they owe to the next generation not to marry anyone who is likely to transmit bodily or mental infirmities to the next generation. It is quite as reprehensible to marry for spiritual reasons alone as to be guided only by physical charms.

Love is nature's radical remedy for disease, whereas marriage, as practised in the past, and too often in the present, is little more than a legalized crime. "One of the last things that occur to a marrying couple is whether they are fit to be represented in posterity," writes Dr. Harry Campbell (_Lancet_, 1898).

"Theft and murder are considered the blackest of crimes, but neither the law nor the church has raised its voice against the marriage of the unfit, for neither has realized that worse than theft and well-nigh as bad as murder is the bringing into the world, through disregard of parental fitness, of individuals full of disease-tendencies."

On this point the public conscience needs a thorough rousing. If a mother deliberately gave her daughter a draught which made her a cripple, or an invalid, or an imbecile, or tuberculous, everybody would cry out with horror, and she would become a social outcast. But if she inflicts these injuries on her granddaughter, by marrying her daughter to a drunkard, in the hope of reforming him, or to a wealthy degenerate, or an imbecile baron, no one says a word, provided the marriage law has been complied with.

It is owing to these persistent crimes against grandchildren that the human race as a whole is still such a miserable rabble, and that recruiting offices and insurances companies tell such startling tales of degeneracy. Love would cure this, if there were more of the right kind. Until there is, much good may be done by accepting it as a guide, and building up a sentiment in favor of its instinctive object and ideal. I have described in one chapter the obstacles which r.e.t.a.r.ded the growth of love, and in another I have shown how sentiments change and grow. Most of those obstacles are being gradually removed, and public opinion is slowly but surely changing in favor of love. Building up a new sentiment is a slow process. At first it may be a mere hut for a hermit thinker, but gradually it becomes larger and larger as thousands add their mite to the building fund, until at last it stands as a sublime cathedral admonishing all to do their duty. When the Cathedral of Love is finished the horror of disease and vice will have become as absolute a bar to marriage as the horror of incest is now; and it will be acknowledged that the only true marriage of reason is a marriage of love.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Albrecht Weber and other German scholars, while practically agreeing with Hegel regarding the Greeks and Romans, claim, that the amorous poetry of the ancient Hindoo has the sentimental qualities of modern European verse.

[2] In the New York _Nation_ of September 22, and the _Evening Post_ of September 24, 1887. My reasons for not agreeing with these two distinguished professors will be dwelt on repeatedly in the following pages. If they are right, then literature is not, as it is universally held to be, a mirror of life.

[3] No important truth is ever born full fledged. The Darwinian theory was conceived simultaneously by Wallace and Darwin, and both were antic.i.p.ated by other writers. Nay, a German professor has written a treatise on the "Greek Predecessors of Darwin."

[4] _Studien uber die Libido s.e.xualis_, I., Pt. I., 28.

[5] In the last chapter of _Lotos-Time in j.a.pan_.

[6] An amusing instance of this trait may be found in Johnston's account of his ascent of the Kilima-Njaro (271-276).

[7] Roth's sumptuous volume, _British North Borneo_, gives a life-like picture of the Dyaks from every point of view, with numerous ill.u.s.trations.

[8] See the chapter on Nudity and Bathing in my _Lotos-Time in j.a.pan_.

[9] Bancroft, II., 75; Wallace, 357; Westermarck, 195; Humboldt, III., 230.

[10] See especially the ninth chapter of Westermarck's _History of Human Marriage_, 186-201.

[11] Westermarck (74) devotes half a page in fine type to an enumeration of the peoples among whom many such customs prevailed, and his list is far from being complete.

[12] See Westermarck, Chap. XX., for a list of monogamous peoples.

[13] The vexed question of promiscuity hinges on this distinction. As a matter of _form_ promiscuity may not have been the earliest phase of human marriage, but as a matter of _fact_ it was. Westermarck's ingeniously and elaborately built up argument against the theory of promiscuity is a leaning tower which crashes to the ground when weighted by this one consideration. See the chapter on Australia.

[14] For a partial list of peoples who practised trial marriage and frequent divorce see Westermarck, 518-521, and C. Fischer, uber die Probennachte der deutschen Bauernmadchen_. Leipzig, 1780.

[15] For the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality see the chapter on Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment.

[16] Johnston states (in Schoolcraft, IV., 224) that the wild Indians of California had their rutting season as regularly as have the deer and other animals. See also Powers (206) and Westermarck (28). In the Andaman Islands a man and woman remained together only till their child was weaned, when they separated to seek new mates (_Trans.

Ethnol. Soc_., V., 45).

[17] The other cases of "jealousy" cited by Westermarck (117-122) are all negatived by the same property argument; to which he indeed alludes, but the full significance of which he failed to grasp. It is a pity that language should be so crude as to use the same word jealousy to denote three such entirely different things as rage at a rival, revenge for stolen property, and anguish at the knowledge or suspicion of violated chast.i.ty and outraged conjugal affection.

Anthropologists have studied only the lower phases of jealousy, just as they have failed to distinguish clearly between l.u.s.t and love.

[18] All these facts, it is hardly necessary to add, serve as further ill.u.s.trations to the chapter How Sentiments Change and Grow.

[19] For "love" read covet. We shall see in the chapter on Australia that love is a feeling altogether beyond the mental horizon of the natives.

[20] Rohde, 35, 28, 147. See his list of corroborative cases in the long footnote, pp. 147-148.

[21] Compare this with what Rohde says (42) about the Homeric heroes and their complete absorption in warlike doings.

[22] _Grundlage der Moral_, -- 14.

[23] _Wagner and his Works_, II., 163.

[24] In Burton the translator has changed the s.e.x of the beloved. This proceeding, a very common one, has done much to confuse the public regarding the modernity of Greek love. It is not Greek love of women, but romantic friendship for boys, that resembles modern love for women.

[25] A mult.i.tude of others may be found in an interesting article on "s.e.xual Taboo" by Crawley in the _Journal of the Anthropological Inst.i.tute_, xxvi.

[26] New York _Evening Post_, January 21, 1899.

[27] Fitzroy, II., 183; _Trans. Ethn. Soc_., New Series, III., 248-88.

[28] That moral infirmities, too, were capable of winning the respect of savages, may be seen in Carver's _Travels in North America_ (245).

[29] Garcia _Origin de los Indios de el Nuevo Mondo_; McLennan; Ingham (Westermarck, 113) concerning the Bakongo; Giraud-Teulon, 208, 209, concerning Nubians and other Ethiopians.

[30] See Letourneau, 332-400; Westermarck, 39-41, 96-113; Grosse, 11-12,50-63, 75-78, 101-163, 107, 180.

[31] Charlevoix, V. 397-424; Letourneau, 351. See also Mackenzie, _V.

fr. M._, 84, 87; Smith, _Arauc._, 238; _Bur. Ethnol._, 1887, 468-70.

[32] How capable of honoring women the Babylonians were may be inferred from the testimony of Herodotus (I., ch. 199) that every woman had to sacrifice her chast.i.ty to strangers in the temple of Mylitta.

[33] It gives me great pleasure to correct my error in this place. Not a few critics of my first book censured me for underrating Roman advances in the refinements of love. As a matter of fact I overrated them.

[34] _Life Among the Modocs_ (228). It must be borne in mind that Joaquin Miller here describes his own ideas of chivalry. He did not, as a matter of course, find anything resembling them among the Modocs.

If he had, he would have said so, for he was their friend, and married the girl referred to. But while the Indians themselves never entertain any chivalrous regard for women, they are acute enough to see that the whites do, and to profit thereby. One morning when I was writing some pages of this book under a tree at Lake Tahoe, California, an Indian came to me and told me a pitiful tale about his "sick squaw" in one of the neighboring camps. I gave him fifty cents "for the squaw," but ascertained later that after leaving me he had gone straight to the bar-room at the end of the pier and filled himself up with whiskey, though he had specially and repeatedly a.s.sured me he was "d.a.m.ned good Indian," and never drank.

[35] _Magazin von Reisebeschreibungen_, I., 283.

[36] The Rev. Isaac Malek Yonan tells us, in his book on _Persian Women_ (138), that most Armenian women "are very low in the moral scale." It is obvious that only one of the wanton cla.s.s could be in question in Trumbull's story, for the respectable women are, as Yonan says, not even permitted to talk loudly or freely in the presence of men. This clergyman is a native Persian, and the account he gives of his countrywomen, unbia.s.sed and sorrowful, shows that the chances for romantic love are no better in modern Persia than they were in the olden times. The women get no education, hence they grow up "really stupid and childlike." He refers to "the low estimation in which women are held," and says that the likes and dislikes of girls about to be married are not consulted. Girls are seldom betrothed later than the seventh to the tenth year, often, indeed, immediately after birth or even before. The wife cannot sit at the same table with her husband, but must wait on him "like an accomplished slave." After he has eaten she washes his hands, lights his pipe, then retires to a respectful distance, her face turned toward the mud wall, and finishes what is left. If she is ill or in trouble, she does not mention it to him, "for she could only be sure of harsh, rough words instead of loving sympathy." Their degraded Oriental customs have led the Persians to the conclusion that "love has nothing to do with the matrimonial connection," the main purpose of marriage being "the convenience and pleasure of a degenerate people" (34-114). So far this Persian clergyman. His conclusions are borne out by the observations of the keen-eyed Isabella Bird Bishop, who relates in her book on Persia how she was constantly besieged by the women for potions to bring back the "love" of their husbands, or to "make the favorite hateful to him."

She was asked if European husbands "divorce their wives when they are forty?" A Persian who spoke French a.s.sured her that marriage in his country was like buying "a pig in a poke," and that "a woman's life in Persia is a very sad thing."

[37] _Magazin fur d. Lit. des In-und Auslandes_, June 30, 1888.

[38] The philosophy of widow-burning will be explained under the head of Conjugal Love.

[39] Willoughby, in his article on Washington Indians, recognizes the predominance of the "animal instinct" in the parental fondness of savages, and so does Hutchinson (I., 119); but both erroneously use the word "affection," though Hutchinson reveals his own misuse of it when he writes that "the savage knows little of the higher affection subsequently developed, which has a worthier purpose than merely to disport itself in the mirth of childhood and at all hazards to avoid the annoyance of seeing its tears." He comprehends that the savage "gratifies _himself_" by humoring the whims "of his children." Dr.

Abel, on the other hand, who has written an interesting pamphlet on the words used in Latin, Hebrew, English, and Russian to designate the different kinds and degrees of what is vaguely called love, while otherwise making clear the differences between liking, attachment, fondness, and affection, does not sufficiently emphasize the most important distinction between them--the selfishness of the first three and the unselfish nature of affection.