Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 91

[257] Hall, _Narrat. of Second Arctic Exp._, 102; Cranz, I, 207-12 (German ed.); Letourneau, _E.d.M._, 72.

[258] Among the Nagas, we read in Dalton (43), "maidens are prized for their physical strength more than for their beauty and family;" and the reason is not far to seek. "The women have to work incessantly, while the men bask in the sun."

[259] Shortt in _Trans. Ethnol. Soc_., _N.S._, VII., 464.

[260] For our purposes it is needless to continue this list; but I may add that of the very few tribes Westermarck ventured to claim specifically for his side, three at any rate--the Miris, Todas, and Kols (Mundas) do not belong there. The state of mind prevalent among the Miris is indicated by Dalton's observation (33) that "two brothers will unite and from the proceeds of their joint labor buy a wife between them." In regard to the Todas, Westermarck apparently forgot what he himself had written about them on a previous page (53), after Shortt:

"When a man marries a girl, she becomes the wife of his brothers as they successively reach manhood, and they become the husbands of all her sisters, when they are old enough to marry."

To speak of "liberty of choice" in such cases, or of the marriage being only "ostensibly" arranged by the parents, is nonsense. As for the Kols, what Dalton says about the Mundas (194) not only indicates that parental interference is more than "ostensible," but makes clear that what these girls enjoy is not free choice but what is euphemistically called "free love," before marriage:

"Among Mundas having any pretensions to respectability the young people are not allowed to arrange these affairs [matrimonial] for themselves. Their parents settle it all for them, French fashion, and after the liberty they have enjoyed, and the liaisons they are sure to have made, this interference on the part of the old folk must be very aggravating to the young ones."

If the dissolute or imbecile advocates of "free love" had their way, we should sink to the level of these wild tribes of India; but there is no danger of our losing again the large "tracts of mind, and thought, and feeling" we have acquired since our ancestors, who came from India, were in such a degraded state as these neighbors of theirs.

[261] Statistics have shown that twenty-eight per cent of the females were married before their fourth year. The ancient _Sutras_ ordained the age of six to seven the best for girls to marry, and declared that a father who waits till his daughter is twelve years old must go to h.e.l.l. The evils are aggravated by the fact noted by Dr. Ryder (who gives many pathetic details) that a Hindoo girl of ten often appears like an European child of six, owing to the weak physique inherited from these girl mothers. Yet Mrs. Mansell relates:

"Many pitiable child-wives have said to me, 'Oh, Doctor mem Sahib, I implore you, do give me medicine that I may become a mother.' I have looked at their innocent faces and tender bodies, and asked, 'Why?' The reply has invariably been, 'My husband will discard me if I do not bear a child.'"

[262] _Journal of Nat. Indian a.s.soc._, 1881, 543-49.

[263] The roots of this superst.i.tion, which has created such unspeakable misery in India, go back to the oldest times of which there are records. The Vedas say, "Endless are the worlds for those men who have sons; but there is no place for those who have no male offspring."

[264] Dr. S. Armstrong-Hopkins writes in her recent volume _Within the Purdah_ (51-52): "A few years ago the English Government pa.s.sed a law to the effect that no bride should go to the house of her mother-in-law before she arrived at the age of twelve years. I am witness, however, as is every practising physician in India, that this law is utterly ignored.... Often and often have I treated little women patients of five, six, seven, eight, nine years, who were at that time living with their husbands."

[265] If Darwin had dwelt on such facts in his _Descent of Man_, and contrasted man's vileness with the devotion, sympathy, and self-sacrifice shown by birds and other animals, he would have aroused less indignation among his ignorant contemporaries. In these respects it was the animals who had cause to resent his theory.

[266] Dr. Ryder says in her pathetic book, _Little Wives of India_: "A man may be a vile and loathsome creature; he may be blind, a lunatic, an idiot, a leper, or diseased in any form; he may be fifty, sixty, or seventy years old, and may be married to a child of five or ten, who positively loathes his presence; but if he claims her she must go.

There is no other form of slavery equal to it on the face of the earth."

[267] The London _Times_ of November 11, 1889, had the following in its column about India:

"Two shocking cases of wife killing lately came before the courts, in both cases the result of child marriage.

In one a child aged ten was strangled by her husband.

In the second case a child of tender years was ripped open with a wooden peg. Brutal s.e.xual exasperation was the sole apparent reason in both instances. Compared with the terrible evils of child marriage, widow cremation is of infinitely inferior magnitude."

[268] Manu's remark that "where women are honored there the G.o.ds are pleased" is one of those expressions of unconscious humor which naturally escaped him, but should not have escaped European sociologists. What he understands by "honoring women" may be gathered from many maxims in his volume like the following (the references being to the pages of Burnell and Hopkins's version):

"This is the nature of women, to seduce men here" (40);

"One should not be seated in a secluded place with a mother, sister, or daughter; the powerful host of the senses compels even a wise man" (41).

"No act is to be done according to (her) own will by a young girl, a young woman, or even by an old woman, though in (their own) houses."

"In her childhood (a girl) should be under the will of her father; in (her) youth, of (her) husband; her husband being dead, of her sons; a woman should never enjoy her own will" (130).

"Though of bad conduct or debauched, or even devoid of good qualities, a husband must always be worshipped like a G.o.d by a good wife."

"For women there is no separate sacrifice, nor vow, nor even fast; if a woman obeys her husband, by that she is exalted in heaven" (131).

"Day and night should women be kept by the male members of the family in a state of dependence" (245)....

"Women being weak creatures, and having no share in the _mantras_, are falsehood itself" (247).

Quite in the spirit of these ordinances of the great Manu are the directions for wives given in the _Padma Purana_, one of the books of highest authority, whose rules are, as Dubois informs us (316), kept up in full vigor to this day. A wife, we read therein, must regard her husband as a G.o.d, though he be a very devil. She must laugh if he laughs, eat after him, abstain from food which _he_ dislikes, burn herself after his death. If he has another wife she must not interfere, must always keep her eyes on her master, ready to receive his commands; she must never be gloomy or discontented in his presence; and though he abuse or even beat her she must return only meek and soothing words.

[269] In Calcutta nearly one-half the females--42,824 out of 98,627--were widows. In India in general one-fifth of the women (or, excluding the Mohammedans, one-third) are widows.

[270] _Journal of the National Indian a.s.soc._, 1881, 624-30.

[271] Ploss-Bartels, I., 385-87; Lamairesse, 18, 95, XX., etc.

[272] Here again we must guard against the nave error of benevolent observers of confounding chast.i.ty with an a.s.sumption of modest behavior. In describing the streets of Delhi Ida Pfeiffer says (_L.V.R.W._, 148):

"The prettiest girlish faces peep modestly out of these curtained bailis, and did one not know that in India an unveiled face is never an innocent one, the fact certainly could not be divined from their looks or behavior." It happens to be the fashion even for bayaderes to preserve an appearance of great propriety in public.

[273] Pp. 143 and 160 of Kellner's edition of this drama (Reclam). The extent to which indifference to chast.i.ty is sometimes carried in India may be inferred from the facts that in the famous city of Vasali "marriage was forbidden, and high rank attached to the lady who held office as the chief of courtesans;" and that the same condition prevails in British India to this day in a town in North Canara (Balfour, _Cyclop. of India_, II., 873).

[274] Hala's date is somewhat uncertain, but he flourished between the third and fourth centuries A.D. Professor Weber's translation of his seven hundred poems, with the professor's comments, takes up no fewer than 1,023 pages of the _Abhandlungen fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes_, Vols. V. and VII. I have selected all those which throw light on the Hindoo conception of love, and translated them carefully from Weber's version. Hala's anthology served as prototype, about the twelfth century, to a similar collection of arya verses, the erotic Saptacati of Govardhana, also seven hundred in number, but written in Sanskrit.

Of these I have not been able to find a version in a language that I can read, but the other collection is copious and varied enough to cover all the phases of Hindoo love. The verses were intended, as already indicated, to be sung, for the Hindoos, too, knew the power of music as a pastime and a feeder of the emotions. "If music be the food of love, play on," says the English Shakespere, and the "Hindoo Shakespere" wrote more than a thousand years before him:

"Oh, how beautifully our master Rebhila has sung! Yes, indeed, the zither is a pearl, only it does not come from the depths of the sea. How its tones accord with the heart that longs for love, how it helps to while away time at a rendezvous, how it a.s.suages the grief of separation, and augments the delights of the lovers!"

(_Vasantasena_, Act III., 2.)

[275] The disadvantage of arguing against the believers in primitive, Oriental, and ancient amorous sentiment is that some of the strongest evidence against them cannot be cited in a book intended for general reading. Professor Weber declares in his introduction to Hala's anthology that these poems take us through all phases of sentimental love (_innigen Liebeslebens_) to the most licentious situations. He is mistaken, as I have shown, in regard to the sentiment, but there can be no doubt about the licentiousness. Numbers 5, 23, 62, 63, 65, 71, 72, 107, 115, 139, 161, 200, 223, 237, 241, 242, 300, 305, 336, 338, 356, 364, 369, 455, 483, 491, 628, 637, depict or suggest improper scenes, while 61, 213, 215, 242, 278, 327, 476, 690 are frankly obscene. Lower and higher things are mixed in these poems with a navete that shows the absence of any idea of refinement.

[276] I have here followed Kellner, though Boehtlingk's version is more literal and Oriental: "Mir aber brennt Liebe, O Grausamer, Tag und Nacht gewaltig die Glieder, deren Wunsche auf dich gerichtet sind."

[277] _Anas Casarea_, a species of duck which, in Hindoo poetry, is allowed to be with his mate only in the daytime and must leave her at night, in consequence of a curse; thereupon begin mutual lamentations.

[278] For a Hindoo, unless he has a son to make offerings after his death, is doomed to live over again his earthly life with all its sorrows. A daughter will do, provided she has a son to attend to the rites.

[279] The sequel of the story, relating to the misfortunes of Nala and Damayanti after marriage, will be referred to presently. The famous tale herewith briefly summarized occurs in the _Mahabharata_, the great epic or mythological cyclopaedia of India, which embraces 220,000 metric lines, and antedates in the main the Christian era. The story of Savitri also occurs in the _Mahabharata_; and these two episodes have been p.r.o.nounced by specialists the gems not only of that great epic, but of all Hindoo literature. I have translated from the edition of H.C. Kellner, which is based on the latest and most careful revisions of the Sanscrit text. I have also followed Kellner's edition of Kalidasa's _Sakuntala_ and Otto Fritze's equally critical versions of the same poet's _Urvasi_ and _Malavika and Agnimitra_. Some of the earlier translators, notably Ruckert, permitted themselves unwarranted poetic licenses, modernizing and sentimentalizing the text, somewhat as Professor Ebers did the thoughts and feelings of the ancient Egyptians. I will add that while I have been obliged to greatly condense the stories of the above dramas, I have taken great care to retain all the speeches and details that throw light on the Hindoo conception of love, reserving a few, however, for comment in the following paragraphs.

[280] Our poets speak of fright making the hair stand on end--but only on the head. Can the alleged Hindoo phenomenon be identical with what we call goose flesh--French frisson? That would make it none the less artificial as a symptom of love. Hertel says, in his edition of the _Hitopadesa_ (26):

"With the Hindoos it is a consequence of great excitement, joy as well as fear, that the little hairs on the body stand erect. The expression has become conventional."

[281] _Hitopadesa_ (25). This gratification the Hindoos regard as one of the four great objects of life, the other three being liberty (emanc.i.p.ation of the soul), wealth, and the performance of religious duties.

[282] Robert Brown has remarked that "moral and intellectual qualities seem to be entirely omitted from the seven points which, according to Manu, make a good wife." And Ward says (10) that no attention is paid to a bride's mind or temper, the only points being the bride's person, her family, and the prospect of male offspring.

[283] This is the list, as given by the eminent Sanscrit scholar, Professor Albrecht Weber in the _Abhandlungen fur die Kunde des Abendlandes_, Vol. V., 135. Burton, in his original edition of the _Arabian Nights_ (III., 36), gives the stages thus: love of the eyes; attraction of the manos or mind; birth of desire; loss of sleep; loss of flesh; indifference to objects of sense; loss of shame; distraction of thought; loss of consciousness; death. _Cf_. Lamairesse, p. 179.

[284] Preferably in Boehtlingk's literal version, which I have followed whenever Kellner idealizes. In this case Kellner speaks of covering "den Umfang des Brustepaars," while Boethlingk has "das starke Brustepaar," which especially arouse the king's "love."

[285] It would hardly be surprising if Kalidasa had had some conception of true love sentiment, for not only did he possess a delicate poetic fancy, but he lived at a time when tidings of the chivalrous treatment and adoration of women might have come to him from Arabia or from Europe. The tradition that he flourished as early as the first century of our era was demolished by Professor Weber (_Ind. Lit. Ges._, 217). Professor Max Muller (91) found no reason to place him earlier than our sixth century; and more recent evidence indicates that he lived as late as the eleventh. Yet he had no conception of supersensual love; marriage was to him, as to all Hindoos, a union of bodies, not of souls. He had not learned from the Arabs (like the Persian poet Saadi, of the thirteenth century, whom I referred to on p. 199) that the only test of true love is self-sacrifice. It is true that Bhavabhuti, the Hindoo poet, who is believed to have lived at the end of our seventh century, makes one of the lovers in _Malati and Madhava_ slay a tiger and save his beloved's life; but that is also a case of self-defence. The other lover--the "hero" of the drama--faints when he sees his friend in danger!

Generally speaking, there is a peculiar effeminacy, a lack of true manliness, about Hindoo lovers They are always moping, whining, fainting; the kings--the typical lovers--habitually neglect the affairs of state to lead a life of voluptuous indulgence. Hindoo sculpture emphasizes the same trait: "Even in the conception of male figures," says Lubke (109), "there is a touch of this womanly softness;" there is "a lack of an energetic life, of a firm contexture of bone and muscle." It is not of such enervated stuff that true lovers are made.