LIBRARY ANNEX i I II ili! Mi' iiiiilll: lUliilllilSI pi! Wlitf^' CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library HQ 21.F49P9 Primitive love and love-stories. 3 1924 021 840 297 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021840297 PRIMITIVE LOVE AND LOVE-STORIES Copyright, 1899, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS All rights reserved TROW DIRECTOnV VRINTINQ AND BDOKBINDINQ GOMPANT NEW YORK DEDICATED TO ONE WHO TAUGHT THE AUTHOR THAT CONJUGAL AFFECTION IS NOT INFERIOR TO ROMANTIC LOVE PREFACE Ojs" page 654 of the present volume reference is made to a cnstam prevalent in northern India of employiAg the family baj'ber to select the boys and girls to be married, it being con- fiidered too trivial and humiliating an act for the parents to attend to. In pronouncing such a custom ludicrous and out- rageous we must not forget that not much more than a cen- tury ,ago an English thinker, Samuel Johnson, expressed the opinion that marriages might as well be arranged by the Lord Chancellor without consulting the parties concerned. Scho- penhauer had, indeed, reason to claim that it had remained for him to discover the significance and importance of Jove. His ideas on the xelations between love, youth, health, and beauty ©pened up a, new vista of thought ; yet it was limited, because the question of heredity was only just beginning to be understood, and the theory of evolution, which has revolutionized all science, had not jet appeared on the horizon. The new science of anthropology, with its various branches, including sociology, ethnology, and comparative psychology, has within the last two or three decades brought together and discussed an immense number of facts relating to man in his varioais stages of development — :savagery, barbarism, semi-civilization, and civilization. Monographs have ap- peared in great numbers on various customs and institutions, including marriage, which has been discussed in several ex- haustive volumes. X/ove alone has remained to be specially considered from an evolutionary point of view. My own book, Romantic Low and Personal Beamt^, which appeared in 1887, did indeed touch upon this question, but very briefly. viii PREFACE inasmuch as its subject, as the title indicates, was modern romantic love. A book on such a subject was naturally and easily written virginibus puerisquej whereas the present volume, being concerned chiefly with the love-affairs of sav- ages and barbarians, could not possibly have been subjected to the same restrictions. Care has been taken, however, to exclude anything that might ofEend a healthy taste. If it has been necessary in some chapters to multiply un- pleasant facts, the reader must blame the sentimentalists who have so persistently whitewashed the savages that it has be- come necessary, in the interest of truth, to show them in their real colors. I have indeed been tempted to give my book the sub-title "A Vindication of Civilization" against the misrepresentations of these sentimentalists who try to create the impression that savages owe all their depravity to contact with whites, having been originally spotless angels. If my pictures of the unadulterated savage may in some cases produce the same painful impression as the sights in a mu- seum's " chamber of horrors," they serve, on the other hand, to show US that, bad as we may be, collectively, we are in- finitely superior in love-afEairs, as in everything else, to those primitive peoples ; and thus we are encouraged to hope for further progress in the future in the direction of purity and altruism. Although I have been obliged under the circumstances to indulge in a considerable amount of controversy, I have taken great pains to state the views of my opponents fairly, and to be strictly impartial in presenting facts with accuracy. Nothing could be more foolish than the ostrich policy, so often indulged in, of hiding facts in the hope that opponents will not see them. Had I found any data inconsistent with my theory I should have modified it in accordance with them. I have also been very careful in regard to my authorities. The chief cause of the great confusion reigning in anthropo- logical literature is that, as a rule, evidence is piled up with a pitchfork. Anyone who has been anywhere and expressed a globe-trotter's opinion is cited as a witness, with deplorable results. I have not only taken most of my multitudinous PREFACE ix facts from the original sources, bat I have critically examined the witnesses to see what right they have to parade as ex- perts ; as in the cases, for instance, of Oatlin, Schoolcraft, Chapman, and Stephens, who are responsible for many " false facts " that have misled philosophers. In writing a book like this the author's function is com- parable to that of an architect who gets his materials from various parts of the world and fashions them into a building of more or less artistic merit. The anthropologist has to gather his facts from a greater variety of sources than any other writer, and from the very nature of his subject he is obliged to quote incessantly. The following pages embody the results of more than twelve years' research in the libraries of America and Europe. In weaving my quotations into a continuous fabric I have adopted a plan which I believe to be ingenious, and which certainly saves space and annoyance. Instead of citing the full titles of books every time they are referred to either in the text or in footnotes, I merely give the author's name and the page number, if only one of his books is referred to ; and if there are several books, I give the initials — say Brinton, M. N. W., 130 ; which means Brinton's Myths of the New World, page 130. The key to the abbreviations will be found at the end of the volume in the bibliography, which also includes an author's index, sepa- rate from the index of subjects. This avoids the repetition of titles or of the customary useless " loc. cit.," and spares the reader the annoyance of constant interruption of his reading to glance at the bottom of the page, Not a few of the critics of my first book, ignoring the dif- ference between a romantic love-story and a story of romantic love, fancied they could refute me by simply referring to some ancient romantic story. To prevent a repetition of that procedure I have adorned these pages with a number of love- stories, adding critical comments wherever called for. These stories, I believe, augment, not only the interest but the scien- tific value of the monograph. In gathering them I have often wondered why no one anticipated me, though, to be sure, it was not an easy task, as they are scattered in hun- X PREFACE dfedS of books-, &M in scietitific periodiiGalB where few Would look for them. At the same time I csonfess that to me the tfAeiag of the ^lot of the CTOlmtioa of l©ve, with its diverse obfet&ele^j is inote faisoiaating than the plot of an individual love-story. At any rate, since we hiave thousa^nds 'Of such l'ot^'^toi'ie&, I am perhaps not m^istaken in aAsumiiiig that the gft)*"^ 6/ loM iUdf will be Wielcomed as a tpleasaait change* H. T. F. NSW t©BK, October 27, 1899. q INTENTS HISTORY OF AN IDEA Pages 1-19 Origin of a Book, 1— Skeptie&l Critics, S — Robert Burton, 3— Hegel on Greek Love, 4 — Shelley on Greek Love, 6 — Macau- lay, Bulwer-Lytton, Gautier, 8 — Goldsmith and Rousseau, 8 — Love a Compound Feelisig, 9 — Herbert Spencer's Analy- sis, ll^Aetive Impulses Must be Added, 13 — Sensuality the Antipode of Love, 14 — The Word Romantic, 15 — Animals Higher than Savages, 16 — Love the Last, Not the First, Product of Civilization, 16 — Plan of this Volume, 17 — Greek Sentimentality, 18 — Importance of Love, 18.' HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GRO W .... Pages 30-51 No Love of Romantic Scenery, 30 — No Love in Early Re- ligion, 21 — Murder as a Virtue, 28 — Slaughter of the Inno- cents, 30-^HonoraJble Polygamy, 34-^Curiosities of Modesty, 37 — Indiflerence to Chastity, 41— Horror of Incest, 46. WHAT IS ROMANTIC LOVE ? Pages 52-291 Ingredients of Love, 53. I. iNDrVIDUAl PRteFEBENCE PagBS 54-70 All Girls Equally Attractive, 54— Shallow Predilection, 56 — Repression of Preference, 56— Utility versus Sentiment, 57 — A Story of African Love, 58 — Similarity of Individuals and Sexes, 59 — Primary and Secondary Sexual Characters, 61 — Fastidious Sensuality is not Love, 61^ — Two Stories of In- dian Love, 62 — Feminine Ideals Superior to Masculine, 63 — Sex in Body and Mind, 64— True Femininity and its Female Enemies, 65— .Mysteries of Love, 67— An Oriental Love-Story, 69. II. MosroPOMSM Pages 71-82 Juliet and Nothing but Juliet, 71— Butterfly Love, 72— Ro- tnabtie Stories of Non-Romantic Love, 74— Obstacles to Mo- nopolism, 76— Wives amd Oirls in Common, 77— Trial Mar- t'ia^ges, 7S-^TWo Roman Lovers, 80. xii CONTENTS III. Jealousy Pages 83-108 Rage at Rivals, 83— Women as Private Property, 83— Horrible Punishments, 84— Essence of True Jealousy, 85— Absence of Masculine Jealousy, 87— Persian and Greek Jealousy, OS- Primitive Feminine Jealousy, 97— Absence of Feminine Jeal- ousy, 98— Jealousy Purged of Hate, 104— A Virtuous Sin, 105— Abnormal States, 106— Jealousy in Romantic Love, 108. IV. Coyness Pages 109-133 Women Who Woo, 109— Were Hebrew and Greek Women Coy? 114; Masculine Coyness, 116— Shy but not Coy, 117— Militarism and Mediaeval Women, 117 — What Made Women Coy? 119— Capturing Women, 131— The Comedy of Mock Capture, 133— Why the Women Resist, 135— Quaint Cus- toms, 137 — Greek and Roman Mercenary Coyness, 139 — Mod- esty and Coyness, 130— Utility of Coyness, 131 — ^How Women Propose, 133. V. Hope and Despair— Mixed Moods Pages 133-137 Amorous Antitheses, 133 — Courtship and Imagination, 135 — Effects of Sensual Love, 136. VI. Hyperbole Pages 137-147 Girls and Flowers, 138 — Eyes and Stars, 139 — Locks and Fra- grance, 140 — Poetic Desire for Contact, 141 — Nature's Sym- pathy with Lovers, 143 — Romantic but not Loving, 144 — The Power of Love, 146. Vn. Pride Pages 148-153 Comic Side of Love, 148— A Mystery Explained, 148 — Impor- tance of Pride, 149 — Varieties and Germs, 150 — Natural and Artificial Symptoms of Love, 153. VIII. Sympathy Pages 153-167 Egotism, Naked or Masked, 154 — Delight in the Torture of Others, 155 — Indiflference to Suffering, 158 — Exposing the Sick and Aged, 159 — Birth of Sympathy, 160 — Women Crueler than Men, 161 — Plato Denounces Sympathy, 163— Sham Al- truism in India, 164— Evolution of Sympathy, 165— Amorous Sympathy, 166. IX. Adoration Pages 167-180 Deification of Persons, 167— Primitive Contempt for Women, 169— Homage to Priestesses, 173— Kinship Through Females Only, 174— Woman's Domestic Rule, 176— Woman's Politi- cal Rule, 177 — Greek Estimate of Women, 178— Man- Wor- ship and Christianity, 179. CONTENTS xiii X. Uh-selfish Gallantry , Pages 180-195 The Gallant Rooster, 181— Ungallant Lower Races of Men, 181— Egyptian Love, 185— Arabian Love, 186— The Unchiv- alrous Greeks, 188— Ovid's Sham Gallantry, 189— Mediseval and Modern Gallantry, 190— "An Insult to Woman," 192— Summary, 193— A Sure Test of Love, 194. XI. Altruistic Self-Sacrifice Pages 195-206 The Lady and the Tiger, 196— A Greek Love-Story, 197— Per- sian Love, 199— Hero and Leander, 202— The Elephant and the Lotos, 202— Suicide is Selfish, 204. XII. Affection Pages 206-218 Erotic Assassins, 207— The Wisdom of Solomon, 309— Stuff and Nonsense, 210— Sacrifices of Cannibal Husbands, 211— Inclinations Mistaken for Affection, 212— Selfish Liking and Attachment, 313— Foolish Fondness, 214— Unselfish Affec- tion, 216. XIII. Mental Purity Pages 218-229 German Testimony, 219 — English Testimony, 320— Maiden Fancies, 222— Pathologic Love, 223— A Modem Sentiment, 234 — Persians, Turks, and Hindoos, 325 — Love Despised in Japan and China, 227 — Greek Scorn for Woman-Love, 228 — Penetrative Virginity, 228. XIV. Admiration of Personal Beauty . . .Pages 229-387 Darwin's Unfortunate Mistake, 230 — Decoration for Protec- tion,233 — War "Decorations," 233 — Amulets, Charms, Medi- cines, 236 — Mourning Language, 239 — Indications of Tribe or Rank, 341 — Vain Desire to Attract Attention, 245 — Objects of Tattooing, 247 — Tattooing on Pacific Islands, 248 — Tattooing in America, 251— Tattooing in Japan, 353 — Scarification, 254 — Alleged 'Testimony of Natives, 255 — Misleading Testimony of Visitors, 257 — "Decoration " at the Age of Puberty, 261 — " Decoration " as a Test of Courage, 364 — Mutilation, Fash- ion, and Emulation, 365 — Personal Beauty versus Personal Decoration, 369 — ^De Gustibus non est Disputandum? 372 — Indifference to Dirt, 274— Reasons for Bathing, 376— Corpu- lence versus Beauty-, 377— Fattening Girls for the Marriage Market, 378— Oriental Ideals, 280— The Concupiscence The- ory of Beauty, 281— Utility is not Beauty, 283— A New Sense Easily Lost Again, 284— Moral Ugliness, 385— Beautifying Intelligence, 385- The Strange Greek Attitude, 386. A Composite and Variable Sentiment. ..Pages 387-291 Definition of Love, 287— Why called Romantic, 289. xiv CONTENTS SENSUALITY, SENTIMENTALITY, AND SENTIMENT. Pages 292-303 Appetite and Longing, 292— Wites of an Oriental Girl, 3fl8 — Rarity of True Love, 301. MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE. .Pages 304-326 How Romantic Love is Metamorphosed, 304 — Why Savages Value Wives, 307 — Mourning to Order, 3.11 — Mourning for Entertainment, 315— The Truth about Widow-Burning, 317 — Feminine Devotion in Ancient Literature, '320 — Wives Es- teemed as Mothers Only, 321— Why Conjugal Precedes Ro- mantic Love, 322. OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE Pages 327-353 I. Ignorance and Stupidity, 327 — 11. Coarseness and Ob- scenity, 339— III. War, 330— IV. Cruelty, 331— V. Masculine Selflshnesg", 331— VI. Contempt for Women, 332— VII. Capture and 'Sale (*f Brides, 333— VIII. Infant Mawiages, 334 —IX. Pre- vention of Free Choice, 335 — X. Separation of the Sexes, 346 — XI. Sexual Taboos, 347— XII. Race Aversions, 349— XIII. Mul- tiplicity of Languages, 330— XIV. Social Barriers, 351 — XV. Religiotis Prejudice, 353. SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE ■ Pages 354-415 Bushman Qualifications for Love, 354— "Love in all Their Marriages, " 357— False Facts Regarding Hottentots, 362— Ef- feminate Men and Masculine Women, 364— How the Hottentot Woman "Rules at Home," 365— "Regard for Women," 366— Capadty for Refined Love, 367— Hottentot Coarseness, 368— Fat versus Sentiment, 369— South African Love-Poems, 370— A Hot- tentot Flirt, 371— Kaffir Morals, 371— Individual Preference for —Cows, 376— Bargaining for Brides, 377— Amorous Prefer- ences, 379— Zulu Girls not Coy, 380— Charms and Poems, 381— A Kaffir Love-Story, 382— Lower than Beasts, -384— Colonies of Free Lovers, 386— A Lesson in Gallantry, 387— Not a Particle of Romance, ^88— No Love Among Negroes, 389— A Queer iStory, 390 ; Suicides, 393— Poetic Love on the Congo, 392— Black Love in Kamerun, 394— A Slave Coast Love-StOTy, 3»6— The Maiden who Always Refused, 397— African Story-Books, 398— The Five Suitors, 399— Tamba and the Princess, 399— The Sewing Match, 400--Baling outthe Brook, 401— Proverbs about Women, 401— African Amazons, 402— Where Woman Commands, 408— No Chance for Romantic Love, 404— Pastoral Love, 405— Abyssin- ian Beauty and Flirtation, 408— Galla CoarsOT^ess, 408— -Somali Love-Affairs, 409— Arabic Influences, 413— Touareg Chivalry, 413 — An African Love-Letter, 414. CONTENTS ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE Pages 416-475 Personal Charms of Australians, 416— Cruel Treatment of Women, 419— Were Savages Corrupted by Whites ? 42a— Abo- riginal Horrors, 433— Naked and not Ashamed, 425— Is Civili- zation Demoralizing? 437— Aboriginal Wantonness, 428— Lower than Brutes, 430— Indifference to Chastity, 481— Useless Pre- cautions, 433— Survivals of Promiscuity, 435— Aboriginal De- pravity, 437— The Question of Promiscuity, 438— Why do Aus- tralians Marry? 441 — Curiosities of Jealousy, 443— Pugnacious Females, 446— Wife-Stealing, 448— Swapping Girls, 450— The Philosophy of Elopements, 452 — Charming a Woman by Magic, 456— Other Obstacles to Love, 458— Marriage Taboos and "In- cest," 459— Affection for Women and Dogs, 461— A Horrible Custom, 464— Romantic Affliction, 465— A Lock of Hair, 466— Two Native Stories, 467— Harrington's Love-Story, 469— Risk- ing Life for a Woman, 471 — Crerstaeoker's Love-Story, 473— Lor cal Color in Courtship, 473 — Love-Letters, 474. ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC. . , Pages 476-544 Where Women Propose, 476— Bornean Caged Girk, 480 — Charms of Dyak Women, 481— Dyak Morals, 482 — Nocturnal Courtship, 483 — Head Hunters A-Wooing, 484 — Fickle and Shallow Passion, 486— Dyak Love-Songs, 487— The Girl With the Clean Face, 488— Fijian Beflnements, 489 — How Cannibals Treat Women, 490— Fijian Modesty and Chastity, 493— Emo- tional Curiosities, 493 — Fijian Love-Poems, 494 — Serenades and Proposals, 496 — .Suicides and Bachelors, 497— Samoan Traits, 498 — Courtship Pantomime, 500 — Two Samoan Love-Stories, 501 — Personal Charms of South Sea Islanders, 503 — Tahitians and Their White Visitors, 504— Heartless Treatment of Women, 506 — ^Two Stories of Tahitiaa Infatuation, 508^-Captain Cook on Tahitian Love, 509— Were the Tongans Civilized ?' 510 — Love of Scenery, 513 — A Cannibal Bargain, 513 — The Handsome Chiefs, 514 — Honeymoon in a Cave, 515— A Hawaiian Cave- Story, 516 — Is this Romantic Love f 520 — Vagaries of Hawaiian Fondness, 531 — Hawaiian Morals, 522 — The Helen of Hawaii, 534— Intercepted Love-Letters, 535 — Maoris of New Zealand, 528- The Maiden of Hotprua, 529— The Man on the Tree, 531— Love in a Fortress, 582— Stratagem of an Elopement, 533— Maori Love-Poems, 586 — The Wooing-House, 339- Liberty of Choice and Respect for Women, 540— Maori Morals and Capacity for Love, 543. HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE Pages 545-639 The Red Lover, 546- The Foam Woman, 547— The Hump- back Magician, 548— The Buffalo King, 549— The Haunted Grove, 550— The Girl and the Scalp, 551— A Chippewa Love- Song, 552— How "Indian Stories" are Written, 552--^Beaility versus Romance, 555— Deceptive Modesty, 357— Were Indians xvi CONTENTS Corrupted by Whites? 559— The Noble Red Man, 563— Appar- ent Exceptions, 566 — Intimidating California Squaws, 568 — Going A-Calumeting, 569 — Squaws and Personal Beauty, 571 — Are North American Indians Gallant ? 572 — South American Gallantry, 586 — How Indians Adore Squaws, 589 — Choosing a Husband, 591— Compulsory "Free Choice," 593 — A British Columbia Story, 594 — The Danger of Coquetry, 595 — The Girl Market, 596— Other Ways of Thwarting Free Choice, 598— Cen- tral and South American Examples, 600 — Why Indians Elope, 602 — Suicide and Love, 605— Love-Charms, 610 — Curiosities of Courtship, 612 — Pantomimic Love-Making, 616 — Honeymoon, 617 — Music in Indian Courtship, 617 — Indian Love-Poems, 619; More Love-stories, 627— "White Man Too Much Lie," 630— The Story of Pocaiontas, 632 — Verdict: No Romantic Love, 633— The Unloving Eskimo, 637. INDIA— WILD TRIBES AND TEMPLE GIRLS. Pages 640-706 ' ' Whole Tracts of Feeling Unknown to Them, ' ' 640— Practi- cal Promiscuity, 641 — " Marvellously Pretty and Romantic," 643— Liberty of Choice, 645— Scalps arid Field-Mice, 647— A Topsy-Turvy Custom, 648 — PaiiAria Lads and Lasses, 649 — Child-Murder and Child-Marriage, 650 — Monstrous Parental Selfishness, 651 — How Hindoo Girls are Disposed of, 653 — Hin- doos Far Below Brutes, 655 — Contempt in Place of Love, 657 — Widows and Their Tormentors, 659 — Hindoo Depravity, 662 — Temple Girls, 664 — An Indian Aspasia, 665 — Symptoms of Fem- inine Love, 668 — Symptoms of Masculine Love, 673 — Lyrics and Dramas, 676—1. The Story of Sakuntala, 677—11. The Story of Urvasi, 680— III. Malavika and Agnimitra, 685 — IV. The Story of Savitri, 688— V. Nala and Damayanti, 690— Arti- ficial Symptoms, 694— The Hindoo God of Love, 696— Dying for Love, 698— What Hindoo Poets Admire in Wojnen, 699— The Old Story of Selfishness, 701 — Bayaderes and Princesses as Hero- ines, 703 — Voluntary Unions not Respectable, 704. DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE ROMANTIC LOVE ? Pages 707-731 The Story of Jacob and Rachel, 709— The Courting of Re- bekah, 714^How Ruth Courted Boaz, 715 — No Sympathy or Sentiment, 718 — A Masculine Ideal of Womanhood, 719 — Not the Christian Ideal of Love, 720 — Unchivalrous Slaughter of Women, 722— Pour More Bible Stories, 723— Abishag the Shu- nammite, 723— The Song of Songs, 724. GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS Pages 732-815 Champions of Greek Love, 732 — Gladstone on the Women of Homer, 734 — Achilles as a Lover, 736 — Odysseus, Libertine and Ruffian, 740— Was Penelope a Model Wife? 743— Hector and Andromache, 745— Barbarous Treatment of Greek Women, 747 CONTENTS xvii — Love in Sappho's Poems, 750— Masculine Minds in Female Bodies, 754 — Anacreon and Others, 756 — Woman and Love in ^schylus, 757— Woman and Love in Sophocles, 760^ Woman and Love in Euripides, 765— Romantic Love, Greek Style, 771— Platonic Love of Women, 774 — Spartan Opportunities for Love, 776— Amazonian Ideal of Greek Womanhood, 778— Athenian Orientalism, 781— Literature and Life, 782— Greek Love in Africa, 785— Alexandrian Chivalry, 789— The New Comedy, 792— Theocritus and Callimachus, 793 — Medea and Jason, 796— Poets and Hetairai,799— Short Stories, 803— Greek Romances, 806— Daphnis and Chloe, 809 — Hero and Leander, 811— Cupid and Psyche, 813. UTILITY AND FUTURE OF LOVE Pages 816-835 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX OF AUTHORS... Pages 827-841 INDEX OF SUBJECTS Pages 843-851 PRIMITIVE LOVE LOVE-STORIES HISTOKT OF AN IDEA " Love is always the same. As Sappho loTed, fifty years ago, so did people love ages before her ; so will they love thousands of years hence." These words, placed by Professor Ebers in the mouth of one of the characters in his historic novel. An Egyptian Princess, express the prevalent opinion on this subject, an opinion which I, too, shared fifteen years ago. Though an ardent champion of the theory of evolution, I believed that there was one thing in the world to which modern scientific ideas of gradual development did not apply — that love was too much part and parcel of human nature to have ever been different from what it is to-day. ORIGIK OF A BOOK It so happened that I began to collect notes for a paper on " How to Cure Love." It was at first intended merely as a personal experiment in emotional psychology. Afterward it occurred to me that such a sketch might be shaped into a readable magazine article. This, again, suggested a comple- mentary article on "How to Win Love" — a sort of modern Ovid in prose ; and then suddenly came the thought, "Why not write a book on love ?' There is none in the English lan- guage — strange anomaly — though love is supposed to be the most fascinating and influential thing in the world. It will 1 2 HISTORY OF AN IDEA surely be received with delight, especially if I associate with it some chapters on personal beauty, the chief inspirer of love. I shall begin by showing that the ancient Greeks and Eomans and Hebrews loved precisely as we love." Forthwith I took down from my shelves the classical authors that I had not touched since leaving college, and eagerly searched for all ref- erences to women, marriage, and love. To my growing sur- prise and amazement I found that not only did those ancient authors look upon women as inferior beings while I worshipped them, but in their descriptions of the symptoms of love I looked in vain for mention of those supersensual emotions and self- sacrificing impulses which overcame me when I was in love. " Can it be," I whispered to myself, " that, notwithstanding the universal opinion to the contrary, love is, after all, subject to the laws of development ? " This hypothesis threw me into a fever of excitement, with- out the stimulus of which I do not believe I should have had the courage and patience to collect, classify, and weave into one fabric the enormous number of facts and opinions contained within the covers of Romantic Love and Personal Beauty. I believed that at last something new under the sun had been found, and I was so much afraid that the discovery might leak out prematurely, that for two years I kept the first half of my title a secret, telling inquisitive friends merely that I was writing a book on Personal Beauty. And no one but an author who is in love with his theme and whose theme is love can quite realize what a supreme delight it was — with occasional moments of anxious suspense — to go through thou- sands of books in the libraries of America, England, France, and Germany and find that all discoverable facts, properly inter- preted, bore out my seemingly paradoxical and reckless theory. SKEPTICAL CRITICS "When the book appeared some of the critics accepted my conclusions, but a larger number pooh-poohed them. Here are a few specimen comments : " His great theses are, first, that romantic love is an en- tirely modern invention ; and, secondly, that romantic love . ROBERT BURTON 3 and conjugal love are two things essentially difiPerent. . . . Now both these theses are luckily false." " He is wrong when he says there was no such thing as pre- matrimonial love known to the ancients." " I don't believe in his theory at all, and . . . no one is likely to believe in it after candid examination." " A ridiculous theory." " It was a misfortune when Mr. Finck ran afoul of this theory." " Mr. Finck will not need to live many years in order to be ashamed of it." "Histhesis is not worth writing about." "It is true that he has uttered a profoundly original thought, but, unfortunately, the depth of its originality is surpassed by its fathomless stupidity." "If in the light of these and a million other facts, we should undertake to explain why nobody had anticipated Mr. Finck's theory that love is a modern sentiment, we should say it might be because nobody who felt inspired to write about it was ever so extensively unacquainted with the litera- ture of the human passions." " Romantic love has always existed, in every clime and age, since man left simian society ; and the records of travellers show that it is to be found even among the lowest savages." ROBBET BUETON While not a few of the commentators thus rejected or ridiculed my thesis, others hinted that I had been anticipated. Several suggested that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy had been my model. As a matter of fact, although one of the crit- ics referred to my book as " a marvel of epitomized research," I must confess, to my shame, that I was not aware that Bur- ton had devoted two hundred pages to what he calls Love- Melancholy, until I had finished the first sketch of my man- uscript and commenced to rewrite it. My experience thus furnished a striking verification of the witty epitaph which Burton wrote for himself and his book: "Known to few, unknown to fewer still." However, after reading Burton, I was surprised that any reader of Burton should have found anything in common between his book and mine, for he treated love as an appetite, I as a sentiment ; my subject was pure. 4 HISTORY OF AN IDEA supersensual affection, while his subject is frankly indicated in the following sentences : " I come at last to that heroical love, which is proper to men and women . . . and deserves much rather to be called burning lust than by such an honorable title." " This burning lust . . . begets rapes, incests, murders." "It rages with all sorts and conditions of men, yet is most evident among such as are young and lusty, in the flower of their years, nobly descended, high fed, such as live idly, at ease, and for that cause (which our divines call burning lust) this mad and beastly passion ... is named by our physicians heroical love, and a more honorable title put upon it. Amor nobilis, as Savonarola styles it, because noble men and women make a common practice of it, and are so ordinarily affected with it." " Carol us a Lorme . . . makes a doubt whether this heroical love be a disease. . . . TuUy . . . de- fines it a furious disease of the mind ; Plato madness itself." '' Grordonius calls this disease the proper passion of nobility." "This heroical passion or rather brutish burning lust of which we treat." The only honorable love Burton knows is that between husband and wife, while of such a thing as the evolution of love he had, of course, not the remotest conception, as his book appeared in 1631, or two hundred and thirty-eight years before Darwin's Origin of Species. HEGEL OS" GEBEK LOTE In a review of my book which appeared in the now defunct New York Star, the late George Parsons Lathrop wrote that the author " says that romantic love is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old. This idea, I rather think, he derived from Hegel, although he does not credit that philoso- pher with it." I read this criticism with mingled emotions. If it was true that Hegel had anticipated me, my claims to priority of discovery would vanish, even though the idea had come to me spontaneously ; but, on the other hand, the dis- appointment at this thought was neutralized by the reflection that I should gain the support of one of the most famous phi- losophers, and share with him the sneers and the ridicule be- stowed upon my theory. I wrote to . Mr. Lathrop, begging HEGEL ON GREEK LOVE 5 him to refer me to the volume and page of Hegel's nnmer- ous works where I could find the passage in question. He promptly replied that I should find it in the second volume of the Aesthetik (178-183). No doubt I ought to have known that Hegel had written on this subject ; but the fact that of more than two hundred American, English, and German re- viewers of my book whose notices I have seen, only one knew what had thus escaped my research, consoled me somewhat. Hegel, indeed, might well have copied Burton's epitaph. His Aesthetik is an abstruse, unindexed, three-volume work of 1,575 pages, which has not been reprinted since 1843, and is practically forgotten. Few know it, though all know of it. After perusing Hegel's pages on this topic I found, how- ever, that Mr. Lathrop had imputed to him a theory — my the- ory — which that philosopher would have doubtless repudiated emphatically. What Hegel does is simply to call attention to the fact that in the literature of the ancient Greeks and Eomans love is depicted only as a transient gratification of the senses, or a consuming heat of the blood, and not as a ro- mantic, sentimental affection of the soul. He does not gen- eralize, says nothing about other ancient nations,' and cer- tainly never dreamt of such a thing as asserting that love had ' been gradually and slowly developed from the coarse and self- ish passions of our savage ancestors to the refined and altru- istic feelings of modern civilized men and.women. He lived long before the days of scientific anthropology and Darwin- ism, and never thought of such a thing as looking upon the emotions and morals of primitive men as the raw material out of which our own superior minds have been fashioned. Nay, Hegel does not even say that sentimental love did not exist in the life of the Greeks and Eomans ; he simply as- serts that it is not to be found in their literature. The two things are by no means identical. Professor Eohde, an authority on the erotic writings of the 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. ' 6 HISTORY OF AN IDEA Greeks, expresses the opinion repeatedly that, whatever their literature may indicate, they themselves were capable of feeling strong and pure love ; and the eminent American psychologist. Professor William James, put forth the same opinion in a review of my book.* Indeed, this view was broached more than a hundred years ago by a German author, Basil von Eamdohr, who wrote four volumes on love and its history, entitled Venus Urania. His first two volumes are almost unreadably garrulous and dull, but the third and fourth contain an interesting account of various phases through which love has passed in literature. Yet he declares (Preface, vol. iii.) that "the nature [Wesen] of love is un- changeable, but the ideas we entertain in regard to it and the effects we ascribe to it, are subject to alteration." SHELLEY ON GREEK LOTE It is possible that Hegel may have read this book, for it appeared in 1798, while the first manuscript sketches of his lectures on esthetics bear the date of 1818. He may have also read Robert Wood's book entitled An Essay on the Orig- inal Genius and Writings of Homer, dated 1775, in which this sentence occurs : " Is it not very remarkable, that Ho- mer, so great a master of the tender and pathetic, who has exhibited human nature in almost every shape, and under every view, has not given a single instance of the powers and effects of love, distinct from sensual enjoyment, in the Iliad f " This is as far as I have been able to trace back this notion in modern literature. But in the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century I have come across several adumbra- tions of the truth regarding the Greeks,^ by Shelley, Lord Lytton, Lord Macaulay, and Theophile Gautier. Shelley's ideas are confused and contradictory, but interesting as show- ' In the New York Nation of September 32, and the Evening Post of Sep- tember 34, 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. 2 No important truth is ever born full-fledged. The Darwinian theory was conceived simultaneoualy by Wallace and Darwin, and both were anticipated by other writers. Nay, a German professor has written a treatise on the " Greek Predecessors of Darwin. " SHELLEY ON GREEK LOVE 7 ing the conflict between traditional opinion and poetic intui- tion. In his fragmentary discourse on " The Manners of the Ancients Relating to the Subject of Love," which was intended to serve as an introduction to Plato's Symposium, he re- marks that the women of the ancient Greeks, with rare excep- tions, possessed " the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably not extremely beautiful, at least there was no such disproportion in the attractions of the external form be- tween the female and male sex among the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans. They were certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the ac- quisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment ani- mates, as with another life of overpowering grace, the linea- ments and the gestures of every form which they inhabit. Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths." Having painted this life-like pict- ure of the Greek female mind, Shelley goes on to say per- versely : " Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of its legitimate object, that they were incapable of sentimental love, and that this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern times." He tries to justify this assertion by adding that " Man is in his wildest state a social being : a certain degree of civili- zation and refinement ever produces the want of sympathies still more intimate and complete ; and the gratification of the senses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connection. It soon becomes a very small part of that profound and com- plicated sentiment, which we call love, which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative, and sensi- tive." Here Shelley contradicts himself flatly by saying, in two consecutive sentences, that Greek women were " certainly de- void of the moral and intellectual loveliness " which inspires sentimental love, but that the men nevertheless could feel such love. His mind was evidently hazy on the subject, and that is probably the reason why his essay remained a fragment. 8 HISTORY OF AN IDEA MACAULAT, BULWEE-LTTTON, GAUTIEE Macanlay, with deeper insight than Shelley showed, realized that the passion of love may undergo changes. In his essay on Petrarch he notes that in the days of that poet love had be- come a new passion, and he clearly realizes the obstacles to love presented by Greek institutions. Of the two classes of women in Greece, the respectable and the hetairai, he says : " The matrons and their daughters, confined in the harem — insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but the mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were married — could rarely excite interest ; while their brilliant rivals, half graces, half harpies, elegant and refined, but fickle and rapacious, could never inspire respect." Lord Lytton wrote an essay on " The Influence of Love upon Literature and Real Life," in which he stated that " with Euripides commences the important distinction in the analysis of which all the most refined and intellectual of mod- ern erotic literature consists, viz., the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment. . . . He is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us intellectually in the antagonism and aflftnity between the sexes." Theophile Gautier clearly realized one of the difEerences be- tween ancient passion and modern love. In Mademoiselle de Maupin, he makes this comment on the ancient love-poems : "Through all the subtleties and veiled expressions one hears the abrupt and harsh voice of the master who endeav- ors to soften his manner in speaking to a slave. It is not, as in the love-poems written since the Christian era, a soul demanding love of another soul because it loves. . . . 'Make haste, Cynthia; the smallest wrinkle may prove the grave of the most violent passion.' It is in this brutal for- mula that all ancient elegy is summed up." GOLDSMITH AND ROUSSEAU In Romantic Love and Personal Beauty I intimated (116) that Oliver Goldsmith was the first author who had a suspi- cion of the fact that love is not the same everywhere and at all times. My surmise was apparently correct ; it is not re- LOVE A COMPOUND REELING 9 fnted by any of the references to love by the several authors just quoted, since all of these were written from about a half a century to a century later than Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (published in 1764), which contains his dialogue on " Whether Love be a Natural or a Fictitious Passion." His as- sertion therein that love existed only in early Rome, in chiv- alrous mediaeval Europe, and in China, all the rest of the world being, and having ever been, " utter strangers to its delights and advantages," is, of course a mere bubble of his poetic fancy, not intended to be taken too seriously, and, is, more- over, at variance with facts. It is odd that he overlooks the Greeks, whereas the other writers cited confine themselves to the Greeks and their Roman imitators. Ten years before Goldsmith thus launched the idea that most nations were and had ever been strangers to the delights and advantages of love, Jean Jacques Rousseau published a treatise, Discours sur I'inegalite (1754), in which he asserted that savages are strangers to jealousy, know no domes- ticity, and evince no preferences, being as well pleased with one woman as with another. Although, as we shall see later, many savages do have a crude sort of jealousy, domesticity, and individual preference, Rousseau, nevertheless, hints pro- phetically at a great truth — the fact that some, at any rate, of the phenomena of love are nob to be found in the life of savages. Such a thought, naturally, was too novel to be ac- cepted at once. Ramdohr, for instance, declares (III. 17) that he cannot convince himself that Rousseau is right. Yet, on the preceding page he himself had written that " it is un- reasonable to speak of love between the sexes among peoples that have not yet advanced so far as to grant women humane consideration," LOVE A COMPOUND FEELING All these things are of extreme interest as showing the blind struggles of a great idea to emerge from the mist into daylight. The greatest obstacle to the recognition of the fact that love has a history, and is subject to the laws of evo- lution, lay in the habit of looking upon it as a simple feeling. 10 HISTORY OF AN IDEA When I wrote my first book- on love, I beliered that Herbert Spencer was the first thinker who grasped the idea that love is a composite state of mind. I now see, however, that Sil- vins, in Shakspere's As You Like It (V. 3), gave a broad hint of the truth, three hundred years ago. Phoebe asks him to " tell what 't is to love," and he replies : It is to be all made of sighs and tears. . . . It is to be all made of faith and service. • . It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance. All humbleness, all patience, and impatience, AH purity, all trial, all obedience. Coleridge also vaguely recognized the composite nature of love in the first stanza of his famous poem : All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of love. And feed his sacred flame. And Swift adds, in " Cadenus and Vanessa : " Love, why do we one passion call. When 'tis a compound of them all ? The eminent Danish critic, George Brandes, though a special student of English literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one of his lectures on literary history (1873), that the book in which love is for the first time looked on as something composite and an attempt made to analyze it into its elements, is Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (which appeared in 1816). "In Adolphe," he says, "and in all the literature associated with that book, we are informed accurately how many,parts, how many grains, of friendship, devotion, vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual attraction, illusion, fancy, deception, hate, satiety, enthu- siasm, reasoning calculation, etc., are contained in the mixt- um compositum which the enamoured persons call love." This list, moreover, does not accurately name a single one of the HERBERT SPENCER'S ANALYSIS 11 essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated phenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states of mind which form part of the quintessence of ro- mantic love— gallant " service," " adoration," and " purity " — while " patience and impatience " may perhaps be accept- ed as an equivalent of what I call the mixed moods of hope and despair. HEEBBItT spencer's ANALYSIS Nevertheless the first thinker who treated love as a com- pound feeling and consciously attempted a philosophical analysis of it was Herbert Spencer. In 1855 he published his Principles of Psychology, and in 1870 appeared a greatly en- larged edition, paragraph 215 of which contains the follow- ing exposition of his views : " The passion which unites the sexes is habitually spoken of as though it were a simple feeling ; whereas it is the most compound, and therefore the most powerful, of all the feel- ings. Added to the purely physical elements of it are first to be noticed those highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty ; around which are aggregated a variety of pleasurable ideas, not in themselves amatory, but which have an organized relation to the amatory feeling. With this there is united the complex sentiment which we term affection — a sentiment which, as it exists between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an independent sentiment, but one which is here greatly exalted. Then there is the senti- ment of admiration, respect, or reverence — in itself one of considerable power, and which in this relation becomes in a high degree active. There comes next the feeling called love of approbation. To be preferred above all the world, and that by one admired beyond all others, is to have the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous experience : especially as there is added that indirect grati- fication of it which results from the preference being wit- nessed by unconcerned persons. Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment from, and sway over, another, is a proof of power which cannot fail agreeably to excite the amour propre. Yet again the proprietary feeling has its share in the general activity : there is the pleasure of possession — the two belong to each other. Once more, the relation allows of an extended 12 HISTORY OF AN IDEA liberty of action. Toward other persons a restrained behavior is requisite. Eound each there is a subtle boundary that may not be crossed — an individuality on which none may trespass. But in this ease the barriers are thrown down ; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is gratified. Finally, there is an exaltation of the sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by another's sympathetic participation; and the pleasures of another are added to the egoistic pleas- ures. Thus, round the physical feeling forming the nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple attachment, those of rever- ence, of love of approbation, of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. These, all greatly exalted, and severally tending to reflect their excitements on one another, unite to form the mental state we call love. And as each of them is itself comprehensive of multitudinous states of consciousness, we may say that this passion fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary excitations of which we are capable ; and that hence results its irresistible power." Kibot has copied this analysis of love in his Psychologie des Sentiments (p. 349), with t}ie comment that it is the best known to him (1896) and that he sees nothing to add or to take away from it. Inasmuch as it forms merely an episodic illustration in course of a general argument, it certainly bears witness to the keenness of Spencer's intellect. Yet I cannot agree with Eibot that it is a complete analysis of love. It aided me in conceiving the plan for my first book, but I soon found that it covered only a small part of the ground. Of the ingredients as suggested by him I accepted only two — Sympathy, and the feelings associated with Personal Beauty. What he called love of approbation, self-esteem, and pleasure of possession I subsummed under the name of Pride of Con- quest and Possession. Further reflection has convinced me that it would have been wiser if, instead of treating Komantic Love as a phase of affection (which, of course, was in itself quite correct), I had followed Spencer's example and made affection one of the ingredients of the amorous passion. In the present volume I have made the change and added also Adoration, which includes what Spencer calls " the senti- ment of admiration, respect, or reverence," while calling ACTIVE IMPULSES MUST BE ADDED 13 attention to the superlative phase of these sentiments which is so characteristic of the lover, who does not say, " I respect you," but " I adore you." I may therefore credit Spencer with having suggested three or four only of the fourteen essential ingredients which I find in love. ACTIVE IMPULSES MUST BE ADDED The most important distinction between Spencer's analysis of love and mine is that he treats it merely as a composite feeling, or a group of emotions, whereas I treat it as a complex state of mind including not only diverse feelings or sentiments — sympathy, admiration of beauty, jealousy, affection — but tha active, altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacri- fice, which are really more essential to an understanding of the essence of love, and a better test of it, than the senti- ments named by Spencer. He ignores also the absolutely essential traits of individual preference and monopolism, be- sides coyness, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and de- spair, and purity, with the diverse emotions accompanying them. An effort to trace the evolution of the ingredients of love was first made in my book, though in a fragmentary way, in which respect the present volume will be found a great improvement. Apart from the completion of the anal- ysis of love, my most important contribution to the study of this subject lies in the recognition of the fact that, " love" being so vague and comprehensive a term, the only satisfac- tory way of studying its evolution is to trace the evolution of each of its ingredients separately, as I do in the present volume in the long chapter entitled "What Is Komantic Love ? " In Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (180) I wrote that perhaps the main reason why no one had anticipated me in the theory that love is an exclusively modern sentiment was that no distinction had commonly been made between romantic love and conjugal affection, noble examples of the latter being recorded in countries where romantic love was not possible owing to the absence of opportunities for court- 14 HISTORY OF AN IDEA ship. I still hold that conjugal love antedated the romantic variety, but further study has convinced me that (as will be shown in the chapters on Conjugal Love and on India, and G-reece) much of what has been taken as evidence of wifely devotion is really only a proof of man's tyrannic selfishness which compelled the woman always to subordinate herself to her cruel master. The idea on which I placed so much em- phasis, that opportunity for prolonged courtship is essential to the growth of romantic love, was some years later set forth by Dr. Drummond in his Asfcent of Man where he comments eloquently on the fact that "affection needs time to grow." SENSUALITY THE ASTTIPODE OF LOVE ^ The keynote of my first book lies of course in the distinc- tion between sensual love and romantic love. This distinc- tion seemed to me so self-evident that I did not dwell on it at length, but applied myself chiefly to the task of prov- ing that savages and ancient nations knew only one kind, be- ing strangers to romantic or pure love. When I wrote (76) " No one, of course, would deny that sensual passion pre- vailed in Athens ; but sensuality is the very antipode of love," I never dreamed that anyone would object to this dis- tinction in itself. Great, therefore, was my amazement when, on reading the London Saturday Review's comments on my book, I came across the following : " and when we find Mr. Finck marking ofE Eomantic Love not merely from Conjugal Love, but from what he is pleased to call ' sensu- ality,' we begin to suspect that he really does not know what he is talking about." This criticism, with several others similar to it, was of great use to me, as it led to a series of studies, which convinced me that even at the present day the nature of romantic love is not understood by the vast ma- jority of Europeans and Americans, many of them very es- timable and intelligent individuals. THE WORD ROMANTIC 15 THE WOED KOMANTIC Another London paper, the Academy, took me to task for using the word " romantic " in the sense I applied to it. But in this case, too, further research has shown that I was justified in using that word to designate pure prematri- monial love. There is a passage in Steele's Lover (dated 1714) which proTes that it must have been in common use in a similar sense two centuries ago. The passage refers to " the reign of the amorous Charles the Second," and declares that " the licenses of that court did not only make the Love which the Vulgar call Roman tick, the object of Jest and Ridicule, but even common Decency and Modesty were almost abandoned as formal and unnatural." Here there is an obvious antithe- sis between romantic and sensual. The same antithesis was used by Hegel in contrasting the sensual love of the ancient Greeks and Romans with what he calls modem "romantic" love. "Waitz-Gerland, too, in the six volumes of their An- thropologie der Naturvolker, repeatedly refer to (alleged) cases of " romantic love " among savages and barbarians, having in all probability adopted the term from Hegel. The peculiar appropriateness of the word romantic to designate imaginative love will be set forth later in the chapter en- titled Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment. Here I will only add an important truth which I shall have occasion to repeat often — that a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love ; for it is obvious, for instance, that an elopement prompted by the most frivolous sensual pas- sion, without a trace of real love, may lead to the most ro- mantic incidents. In the chapters on affection, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, I shall make it clear even to a Saturday Reviewer that the gross sensual infatuation which leads a man to shoot a girl who refuses him, or a tramp to assault a woman on a lonely road and afterward to cut her throat in order to hide his crime, is absolutely antipodal to the refined, ardent, affection- ate Romantic Love which impels a man to sacrifice his own life rather than let any harm or dishonor come to the beloved. 16 HISTORY OF AN IDEA ANIMALS HI6HEB THAK SAVAGES Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin, in his second treatise on sexnal anomalies,^ takes occasion to express his disbelief in my vievr that love before marriage is a sentiment peculiar to modern man. He declares that traits of snch love occur even in the courtship of animals, particularly birds, and implies that this upsets my theory. On the same ground a reviewer in a New York evening paper accused me of being illogical. Such criticisms illustrate the vague ideas regarding evolution that are still current. It is assumed that all the faculties are de- veloped step by step simultaneously as we proceed from lower to higher animals, which is as illogical as it would be to assume that since birds have snch beautiful and convenient things as wings, and dogs belong to a higher genus of animals, there- fore dogs ought to have better wings than birds. Most ani- mals are cleaner than savages ; why should not some of them be more romantic in their love-affairs ? I shall take occasion repeatedly to emphasize this point in the present volume, though I alluded to it already in my first book (55) in the following passage, which my critics evidently overlooked : " In passing from animals to human beings we find at first not only no advance in the sexual relations, but a decided retrogression. Among some species of birds, courtship and marriage are infinitely more refined and noble than among the lowest savages, and it is especially in their treatment of females, both before and after mating, that not only birds but all animals show an immense superiority over primitive man ; for male animals fight only among themselves and never maltreat the females." LOVE THE LAST, NOT THE EIEST, PKODUCT OF CIVILIZATION Notwithstanding this striking and important fact, there is a large number of sentimental writers who make the ex- traordinary claim that the lower races, however savage they may be in everything else, are like ourselves in their amor- ous relations ; that they love and admire personal beauty ' Studien iiber die Libido Sexualis, I., Ft. L, 38. PLAN OF THIS VOLUME 17 just as we do. The main object of the present Tolume is to demolish this doctrine ; to prove that sexual refine- ment and the sense of personal beauty are not the earliest but the latest products of civilization. I have shown else- where^ that Japanese civilization is in many important re- spects far superior to ours ; yet in their treatment of women and estimate of love, this race has not yet risen above the barbarous stage ; and it will be shown in this volume that if we were to judge the ancient Greeks and the Hin- doos from this point of view, we should have to deny them the epithet of civilized. Morgan found that the most ad- vanced of American Indians, the Iroquois, had no capacity for love. His testimony in detail will be found in its proper place in this volume, together with that of competent ob- servers regarding other tribes and races. Some of this evi- dence was known to the founders of the modern science of sociology. It led Spencer to write en passant {Pr. 8oc., I., § 337, § 339) that "absence of the tender emotion . . . habitually characterizes men of low types ; " and that the " higher sentiments accompanying union of the sexes . . . do not exist among primitive men." It led Sir John Lub- bock to write (50) regarding the lowest races that " love is almost unknown among them ; and marriage, in its lowest phases, is by no means a matter of afEection and companion- ship." PLAN- OF THIS VOLUME These are casual adumbrations of a great truth that applies not only to the lowest races (savages) but to the more ad- vanced barbarians as well as to ancient civilized nations, as the present volume will attempt to demonstrate. To make my argument more impressive and conclusive, I present it in a twofold form. First I take the fourteen ingredients of love separately, showing how they developed gradually, whence it follows necessarily that love as a whole developed gradually. Then I take the Africans, Australians, American Indians, etc., separately, describing their diverse amorous customs ' In the last chapter of Lotos-l'ime in Japan. 18 HISTORY OF AN IDEA and pointing out everywhere the absence of the altruistic, supersensual traits which constitute the essence of romantic love as distinguished from sensual passion. All this will be preceded by a chapter on "How Sentiments Change and Grow," which will weaken the bias against the notion that so elemental a feeling as sexual love should have undergone so great a change, by pointing out that other seemingly instinc- tive and unalterable feelings have changed and developed. GREEK SEKTIMENTALITT The inclusion of the civilized Greeks in a treatise on Prim- itive Love will naturally cause surprise ; but I cannot attribute a capacity for anything more than primitive sensual love to a nation which, in its prematrimonial customs, manifested none of the essential altruistic traits of Romantic Love — sym- pathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, adoration, and purity. As a matter of course, the sensualism of a Greek or Roman is a much less coarse thing than an Australian's, which does not even include kisses or other caresses. While Greek love is not a sentiment, it may be sentimental, that is, an affecta- tion of sentiment, differing from real sentiment as adulation does from adoration, as gallantry or the risking of life to se- cure favors do from genuine gallantry of the heart and self- sacrifice for the benefit of another. This important point which I here superadd to my theory, was overlooked by Benecke when he attributed a capacity for real love to the later Greeks of the Alexandrian period. IMPORTANCE OF LOVE One of the most important theses advanced in Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (333, 424, etc.), was that love, far from being merely a passing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the reign of Natural Selection, be- fore the birth of love, cripples, the insane, the incurably dis- eased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to perish. Chris- tianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals and IMPORTANCE OF LOVE 19 saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, and hand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediator between these two agencies, love comes in ; for Cupid, as I have said, "does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of health and beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of single-blessedness ; " which in these days is not such a hardship as it used to be. This thought will be enlarged in the last chapter of the present volume, on the " Utility and Future of Love," which will indicate how the amorous sense is becoming more and more fastidious and beneficial. In the same chapter attention will be called, for the first time, to the three great strata in the evo- lution of parental love and morality. In the first, represented by savages, parents think chiefly of their own comfort, and children get the minimum of attention consistent with their preservation. In the second, which includes most of the modern Europeans and Americans, parents exercise care that their children shall make an advantageous marriage — that is a marriage which shall secure them wealth or comfort ; but the frequency with which girls are married off to old, infirm, or unworthy men, shows how few parents as yet have a thought of their grandchildren. In the next stage of moral evolution, which we are now entering, the grandchildren's welfare also will be considered. In consequence of the per- sistent failure to consider the grandchildren, the human race is now anything but a model of physical, intellectual, and moral perfection. Luckily love, even in its sensual stages, has counteracted this parental selfishness and myopia by in- ducing young folks to marry for health, youth, and beauty, and creating an aversion to old age, disease, and deformity. As love becomes more and more fastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moral beauty — that is becomes Eo- mantic Love — its sway becomes greater and greater, and the time will come when questions relating to it will form the most important chapters in treatises on moral philosophy, which now usually ignore them altogether. HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GEOW In conversation with friends I have found that the current belief that love must have been always and everywhere the same, because it is such a strong and elemental passion, is most easily shaken in this a priori position by pointing out that there are other strong feelings in our minds 'which were lack- ing among earlier and lower races. The love of grand, wild scenery, for instance — what we call romantic scenery — is as modern as the romantic love of men and women. Euskin tells us that in his youth he derived a pleasure from such scenery " comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near a noble and kind mistress." NO LOVE OB EOMANTIO SCENERT Savages, on the other hand, are prevented from appre- ciating snow mountains, avalanches, roaring torrents, ocean storms, deep glens, jungles, and solitudes, not only by their lack of refinement, but by their fears of wild animals, hu- man enemies, and evil spirits. "In the Australian bush," writes Tylor (P. C, II., 303), "demons whistle in the branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the trunks to seize the wayfarer ; " and Powers (88) writes in regard to California Indians that they listen to night noises with unspeakable horror : " It is difficult for us to conceive of the speechless terrors which these poor wretches suffer from the screeching of owls, the shrieking of night-hawks, the rustling of the trees ... all of which are only channels of poison wherewith the demons would smite them." To the primitive mind, the world over, a high mountain is the hor- ror of horrors, the abode of evil spirits, and an attempt to climb it certain death. So strong is this superstition that explorers have often experienced the greatest diflSculty in 30 NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION 21 getting natives to serve as porters of provisions in their as- cents of peaks.^ Even the Greeks and Eomans cared for landscape only in so far as it was humanized (parks and gar- dens) and habitable. " Their souls/' says Eohde (511)^ " could never have been touched by the sublime thrills we feel in the presence of the dark surges of the sea, the gloom of a primeval forest, the solitude and silence of sunlit moun- tain summits." And Humboldt, who first noted the absence in Greek and Roman writings of the admiration of romantic scenery, remarked (24) : " Of the eternal snow of the Alps, glowing in the rosy light of the morning or evening sun, of the loveliness of the blue glacier ice, of the stupendous grandeur of Swiss landscape, no description has come down to us from them ; yet there was a constant procession over these Alps, from Helvetia to Gallia, of statesmen and generals with literary men in their train. All these travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable roads ; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages their at- tention. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical treatise ' De Analogia.'" A sceptical reader might retort that the love of romantic scenery is so subtle a sentiment, and so far from being uni- versal even now, that it would be rash to argue from its absence among savages, Greeks, and Eomans, that love, a senti- ment so much stronger and more prevalent, could have been in the same predicament. Let us therefore take another sentiment, the religious, the vast power and wide prevalence of which no one will deny. NO LOVE IN EAELY RELIGION To a modern Christian, God is a deity who is all-wise, all- powerful, infinite, holy, the personification of all the highest virtues. To accuse this Deity of the slightest moral fiaw would be blasphemy. Now, without going so far down as the lowest savages, let us see what conception such barbarians as ' An amusing instance Of this trait may be found in Johnston's account of his ascent of the Kilima-Njaro (271-276). 22 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW the Polynesians have of their gods. The moral habits of some of them are indicated by their names—" The Rioter," " The Adulterer," "Ndauthina," who steals women of rank or beauty by night or by torchlight, "The Human-brain Eater," "The Murderer." Others of their gods are "proud, envious, covetous, revengeful, and the subject of every basest passion. They are demoralized heathen — monster ex- pressions of moral corruption" (Williams, 184). These gods make war, and kill and eat each other just as mortals do. The Polynesians believed, too, that " the spirits of the dead are eaten by the gods or demons" (Ellis, P. R., I., 275). It might be said that since a Polynesian sees no crime in adul- tery, revenge, murder, or cannibalism, his attributing such qualities to his gods cannot, from his point of view, be con- sidered blasphemous. Quite true; but my point is that men who have made so little progress in sympathy and moral perception as to see no harm in adultery, revenge, mur- der and cannibalism, and in attributing them to their gods, are altogether too coarse and callous to be able to experi- ence the higher religious emotions. This inference is borne out by what a most careful observer (Ellis, P. R., I., 291) says : " Instead of exercising those affections of gratitude, complacency, and love toward the objects of their worship which the living God supremely requires, they regarded their deities with horrific dread, and worshipped only with en- slaving fear." This " enslaving fear " is the principal ingredient of primi- tive religious emotion everywhere. To the savage and bar- barian, religion is not a consolation and a blessing, but a terror. Du Chaillu says of the equatorial Africans (103) that " their whole lives are saddened by the fears of evil spirits, witchcraft, and other kindred superstitions under which they labor." Benevolent deities, even if believed in, receive little or no attention, because, being good, they are supposed to do no harm anyway, whereas the malevolent gods must be pro- pitiated by sacrifices. The African Dahomans, for instance, ignore their Mahu because his intentions are naturally friendly, whereas their Satan, the wicked Legba, has bun- NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION 23 dreds of statues before which offerings are made. " Early re- ligions," as Mr. Andrew Lang tersely puts it, " are selfish, not disinterested. The worshipper is not contemplative, so much as eager to gain something to his advantage." If the gods fail to respond to the offerings made to them, the sacri- ficers naturally feel aggrieved, and show their displeasure in a way which to a person who knows refined religion seems shocking and sacrilegious. In Japan, China, and Corea, if the gods fail to do what is expected of them, their images are unceremoniously walloped. In India, if the rains fail, thou • sands of priests send up their prayers. If the drought still continues, they punish their idols by holding them under water. During a thunderstorm in Africa, Chapman (I., 45) witnessed the following extraordinary scene : " A great number of women, employed in reaping the ex- tensive corn-fields through which we passed were raising their hoes and voices to heaven, and, yelling furiously, cursed ' Morimo' (God), as the terrific thunder-claps succeeded each vivid flash of lightning. On inquiry I was informed by ' Old Booy ' that they were indignant at the interruption of their labors, and that they therefore cursed and menaced the cause. Such blasphemy was awful, even among heathens, and I fully expected to see the wrath of God fall upon them." If any pious reader of such details — which might he multi- plied a thousand-fold — still believes that religious emotion (like love !) is the same everywhere, let him compare his own devoted feelings during worship in a Christian church with the emotions which must sway those who participate in a re- ligious ceremony like that described in the following passage taken from Rowne/s Wild Tribes of India {10b). It refers to the sacrifices made by the Khonds to the God of War, the victims of which, both male and female, are often bought young and brought up for this special purpose : " For a month prior to the sacrifice there was much feasting and intoxication, with dancing round the Meriah, or victim , and on the day before the rite he was stupefied with toddy and bound at the bottom of a post. The assembled multitude then danced around the post to music, singing hymns of invocation to some such effect as follows : ' God, 24 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW we offer a sacrifice to you ! Give us good crops in return, good seasons, and health.' On the next day the victim was again intoxicated, and anointed with oil, which was wiped from his body by those present, and put on their heads as a blessing. The victim was then carried in procession round the village, preceded by music, and on returning to the post a hog was sacrificed to . . . the village deity . . . the blood from the carcass being allowed to flow into a pit prepared to receive it. The victim, made senseless by intox- ication, was now thrown into the pit, and his face pressed down till he died from suffocation in the blood and mire, a deafening noise with instruments being kept up all the time. The priest then cut a piece of flesh from the body and buried it with ceremony near the village idol, all the rest of the people going through the same form after him." Still more horrible details of these sacrifices are supplied by Dalton (288 ) : " Major Macpherson notes that the Meriah in some dis- tricts is put to death slowly by fire, the great object being to draw from the victim as many tears as possible, in the belief that the cruel Tari will proportionately increase the supply of rain." " Colonel Campbell thus describes the modus operandi in Chinna Kimedy : ' The miserable Meriah is dragged along the fields, surrounded by a crowd of half -intoxicated Kandhs, who, shouting and screaming, rush upon him, and with their knives cut the flesh piece-meal from his bones, avoiding the head and bowels, till the living skeleton, dying from loss of blood, is relieved from torture, when its remains are burnt and the ashes mixed with the new grain to preserve it from insects.' " In some respect, the civilized Hindoos are even worse than the wild tribes of India. Nothing is more sternly con- demned and utterly abhorred by modern religion than licen- tiousness and obscenity, but a well-informed and eminently trustworthy missionary, the Abb6 Dubois, declares that sensu- ality and licentiousness are among the elements of Hindoo re- ligious life : " Whatever their religion sets before them, tends to en- courage these vices ; and, consequently, all their senses, pas- sions, and interests are leagued in its favor" (II., 113, etc.). NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION 25 Their religious festivals " Are nothing but sports ; and on no occasion of life are modesty and decorum more carefully ex- cluded than during the celebration of their religious myste- ries." More immoral even than their own religious practices are the doings of their deities. The Bhagavata is a book which deals with the adventnres of the god Krishna, of whom Dubois says (II., 305) : " It was his chief pleasure to go every morning to the place where the women bathe, and, in concealment, to take advan- tage of their unguarded exposure. Then he rushed amongst them, took possession of their clothes, and gave a loose to the indecencies of language and of gesture. He maintained six- teen wives, who had the title of queens, and sixteen thousand concubines. ... In obscenity there is nothing that can be compared with the Bhagavata. It is, nevertheless, the de- light of the Hindu, and the first book they put into the hands of their children, when learning to read." Brahmin temples are little more than brothels, in each of which a dozen or more young Bayaderes are kept for the pur- pose of increasing the revenues of the gods and their priests. Religious prostitution and theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt, and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series of obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154) : " We are shocked at the morality of a nation which could supply the deceased with such literature for the eternal journey." Professor Eobertson Smith says that " in Arabia and elsewhere unre- stricted prostitution was practised at the temples and defended on the analogy of the license allowed to herself by the un- married mother goddess." Nor were the early Greeks much better. Some of their religious festivals were sensual orgies, some of their gods nearly as licentious as those of the Hindoos. Their supreme god, Zeus, is an Olympian Don Juan, and the legend of the birth of Aphrodite, their goddess of love, is in its original form unutterably obscene. Before religious emotion could make any approximation to the devout feelings of a modern Christian, it was necessary to eliminate all these licentious, cruel, and blasphemous features 36 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW of worship — the eating or slaughtering of human victims, the obscene orgies, as well as the spiteful and revengeful acts toward disobedient gods. The progress — like the Evolution of Komantic Love — has been from the sensual and selfish to the supersensual and unselfish. In the highest religious ideal, love of God takes the place of fear, adoration that of terror, self-sacrifice that of self-seeking. But we are still very far from that lofty ideal. " The lazzarone of Naples prays to his patron saint to favor his choice of a lottery ticket ; if it turns out an unlucky number he will take the little leaden image of the saint from his pocket, revile it, spit on it, and trample it- in the mud." "The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops because it made their parishioners in- different to prayers for their crops " (Brinton, H. S., 126, 83). These are extreme cases, but Italian lazzaroni and Swiss peasants are by no means the only church-goers whose worship is inspired not by love of God but by the expectation of secur- ing a personal benefit. AH those who pray for worldly pros- perity, or do good deeds for the sake of securing a happy hereafter for their souls, take a selfish, utilitarian view of the deity, and even their gratitude for favors received is too apt to be " a lively sense of possible favors to come." Still, there are now not a few devotees who love God for his own sake ; and who pray not for luxuries but that their souls may be forti- fied in virtue and their sympathies widened. But it is not necessary to dwell on this theme any longer, now that I have shown what I started out to demonstrate, that religious emo- tion is very complex and variable, that in its early stages it is made up of feelings which are not loving, reverential, or even respectful, but cruel, sacrilegious, criminal, and licentious ; that religion, in a word, has (like love, as I am trying to prove) passed through coarse, carnal, degrading, selfish, utili- tarian stages before it reached the comparatively refined, spiritual, sympathetic, and devotional attitude of our time. Besides the growing complexity of the religious sentiment and its gradual ennoblement, there are two points I wish to emphasize. One is that there are among us to-day thousands of intelligent and refined agnostics who are utter strangers to NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION 27 all religious emotions, just as there are thousands of men and women who have never known and never will know the emo- tions of sentimental love. Why, then, should it seem so very unlikely that whole nations were strangers to such love (as they were strangers to the higher religious sentiment), even though they were as intelligent as the Greeks and Komans ? I offer this consideration not as a conclusive argument, but merely as a means of overcoming a preconceived bias against my theory. The other point I wish to make clear is that our emotions change with our ideas. Obviously it would be absurd to sup- pose that a man whose ideas in regard to the nature of his gods do not prevent him from flogging them angrily in case they refuse his requests are the same as those of a pious Christian, who, if his prayers are not answered, says to his revered Creator : " Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven," and humbly prostrates himself. And if emotions in the religious sphere are thus metamorphosed with ideas, why is it so unlikely that the sexual passion, too, should " suffer a sea change into something rich and strange ? " The existence of the wide-spread prejudice against the notion that love is subject to the laws of development, is owing to the fact that the comparative psychology of the emotions and sentiments has been strangely neglected. An- thropology, the Klondike of the comparative psychologist, reveals things seemingly much more incredible than the ab- sence of romantic love among barbarians and partly civ- ilized nations who had not yet discovered the nobler super- sensual fascinations which women are capable of exerting. The nuggets of truth found in that science show that every virtue known to man grew up slowly into its present exalted form. I will illustrate this assertion with reference to one general feeling, the horror of murder, and then add a few pages regarding virtues relating to the sexual sphere and directly connected with the subject of this book. 28 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW MUBDEE AS A VIRTUE The committing of wilful murder is looked on with un- utterable horror in modern civilized communities, yet it took eons of time and the co-operation of many religious, social, and moral agencies before the idea of the sanctity of human life became what it is now when it might be taken for an instinct inherent in human nature itself. How far it is from being such an instinct we shall see by looking at the facts. Among the lowest races and even some of the higher barba- rians, murder, far from being regarded as a crime, is honored as a virtue and a source of glory. An American Indian's chief pride and claim to tribal honor lies in the number of scalps he has torn from the heads of men he has killed. Of the Fijian, Williams says (97) : " Shedding of blood is to him no crime, but a glory. Whoever may be the victim — whether noble or vulgar, old or young, man, woman, or child — whether slain in war or butchered by treach- ery, to be somehow an acknowledged murderer, is the object of a Fijian's restless ambition." The Australian feels the same irresistible impulse to kill every stranger he comes across as many of our comparatively civilized gentlemen feel toward every bird or wild animal they see. Lumholtz, while he lived among these savages, took good care to follow the ad- vice " never have a black fellow behind you ; " and he relates a story of a squatter who was walking in the bush with his black boy hunting brush monkeys, when the boy touched him on the shoulder from behind and said, " Let me go ahead." When the squatter asked why he wished to go before him, the native answered, "Because I feel such an inclination to kill you." Dalton (366) says of the Oraons in India : " It is doubtful if they see any moral guilt in murder." But the most as- tounding race of professional murderers are the Dyaks of Borneo. "Among them," says Earl, "the more heads a man has cut off, the more he is respected." " The white man reads," said a Dyak to St. John : " we hunt heads in- MURDER AS A VIRTUE 29 stead." "Our Dyaks," says Charles Brooke, "were eter- nally requesting to be allowed to go for heads, and their urgent entreaties often bore resemblance to children crying after sugar-plums." "An old Dyak," writes Dalton, "loves to dwell upon his success on these hunting excursions, and the terror of the women and children taken affords a fruitful theme of amusement at their meetings." Dalton speaks of one expedition from which seven hundred heads were brought home. The young women were carried off, the old ones killed and all the men's heads were cut off. Not that the women always escaped. Among the Dusun, as a rule, says Preyer, " the heads were obtained in the most cowardly way possible, a woman's or child's being just as good as a man's . . . so, as easier prey, the cowards seek them by lying in ambush near the plantations." Families are sometimes surprised while asleep and their heads cut off. Brooke tells of a man who for awhile kept company with a country- woman, and then slew her and ran off with her head. " It ought to be called head-stealing not head-hunting," says Hatton ; and Earl remarks : " The possession of a human head cannot be considered as a proof of the bravery of the owner for it is not necessary that he should have killed the victim with his own hands, his friends being permitted to assist him or even to perform the act themselves." It is to be noted that the Dyaks ' are not in other respects a fierce and diabolical race, but are at home, as Doty attests, " mild, gentle, and given to hospitality." I call special at- tention to this by way of indirectly answering an objection frequently urged against my theory : " How is it possible to suppose that a nation so highly civilized as the Greeks of Plato's time should have known love for women only in its lower, carnal phases ? " Well, we have here a parallel case. The Dyaks are " mild, gentle, and hospitable," yet their chief delight and glory is murder ! And as one of the main ob- jects, of this book is to dwell on the various obstacles which impeded the growth of romantic love, it will be interesting > Roth's sumptuous Tolume, British North Borneo, gives a life-like picture of the Dyaks from every point of view, with numerous illustrations. 30 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW to glance for a moment at the causes which prevented the Dyaks from recognizing the sanctity of life. Superstition is one of them ; they believe that persons killed by them will be their slaves in the next world. Pride is another. " How many heads did your father get ?" a Dyak will ask ; and if the number given is less than his own, the other will say, " Well, then yon have no occasion to be proud." A man's rank in this world as in the next depends on the number of his skulls ; hence the owner of a large number may be dis- tinguished by his proud bearing. But the head hunter's strangest and strongest motive is the desire to please women ! No Dyak maiden would condescend to marry a youth who has never killed a man, and in times when the chances for murder were few and far between, suitors have been com- pelled to wait a year or two before they could bag a skull and lead home their blushing bride. The weird details of this mode of courtship will be given in the chapter on Island Love on the Pacific SLAU6HTEE OF THE INNOCENTS. In all these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of the sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror at this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of slaughtering sick rela- tives and aged parents ; here I will confine myself to a few words regarding the maternal sentiment. The love of a mother for her offspring is by many philosophers considered the earliest and strongest of all sympathetic feelings ; a feel- ing stronger than death. If we can find a wide-spread failure of this powerful instinct, we shall have one more reason for not assuming as a matter of course, that the sentiment of love must have been always present. In Australian families it has been the universal custom to bring up only a few children in each family — usually two boys and a girl — the others being destroyed by their own SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS 31 parents, with no more compunction than we show in drown- ing superfluous puppies or kittens. The Kurnai tribe did not kill new-born infants, but simply left them behind. " The aboriginal mind does not seem to perceive the horrid idea of leaving an unfortunate baby to die miserably in a de- serted camp" (Fison and Howitt, 14). The Indians of both North and South America were addicted to the practice of infanticide. Among the Arabs the custom was so inveterate that as late as our sixth century, Mohammed felt called upon, in various parts of the Koran, to discountenance it. In the words of Professor Eobertson Smith (281) "Mohammed, when he took Mecca and received the homage of the women in the most advanced centre of Arabian civilization, still deemed it necessary formally to demand from them a promise not to commit child-murder." Among the wild tribes of India there are some who cling to their custom of infanti- cide with the tenacity of fanatics. Dalton (288-90) relates that with the Kandhs this custom was so wide-spread that in 1842 Major Macpherson reported that in many villages not a single female child could be found. The British Government rescued a number of girls and brought them up, giving them an education. Some of these were afterward given in mar- riage to respectable Kandh bachelors, " and it was expected that they at least would not outrage their own feeling as mothers by consenting to the destruction of their oilspring. Subsequently, however. Colonel Campbell ascertained that these ladies had no female children, and, on being closely questioned, they admitted that at their husbands' bidding they had destroyed them." In the South Sea Islands " not less than two-thirds of the children were murdered by their own parents." Ellis (P. E., I., 196-202) knew parents who had, by their own confession, killed four, six, eight, even ten of their children, and the only reason they gave was that it was the custom of the country. " J^o sense of irresolution or horror appeared to exist in the bosoms of those parents, who deliberately resolved on the deed before the child was born." " The murderous parents often came to their (the missionaries') houses almost 32 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW before their hands were cleansed from their children's blood, and spoke of the deed with worse than brutal insensibility, or with vaunting satisfaction at the triumph of their customs over the persuasions of their teachers." They refused to spare babies even when the missionaries offered to take care of them (II., 23). Neither Ellis, during a residence of eight years, nor Nott during thirty years' residence on the South Sea Islands, had known a single mother who was not guilty of this crime of infanticide. Three native women who hap- pened to be together in a room one day confessed that be- tween them they had killed twenty-one infants^nine, seven, and five respectively. These facts have long been familiar to students of anthro- pology, but their true significance has been obscured by the additional information that many tribes addicted to infanti- cide, nevertheless displayed a good deal of "affection" to- ward those whom they spared. A closer examination of the testimony reveals, however, that there is no true affection in these cases, but merely a shallow fondness for the little ones, thiefly for the sake of the selfish gratification it affords the parents to watch their gambols and to give vent to in- herited animal instincts. True affection is revealed only in self-sacrifice ; but the disposition to sacrifice themselves for their children is the one quality most lacking in these child- murderers. Sentimentalists, with their usual lack of insight and logical sense, have endeavored to excuse these assassins on the ground that necessity compelled them to destroy their infants. Their arguments have misled even so eminent a specialist as Professor E. B. Tylor into declaring (Anthro- pology, 427) that "infanticide comes from hardness of life rather than from hardness of heart." What he means, may be made clear by reference to the case of the Arabs who, liv- ing in a desert country, were in constant dread of suffering from scarcity of food ; wherefore, as Kobertson Smith re- marks (381), " to bury a daughter was regarded not only as a virtuous but as a generous deed, which is intelligible if the reason was that there would be fewer mouths to fill in the tribe." This explains the murders in question but does not SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS 33 show them to be excusable ; it explains them as being due to the vicious selfishness and hard-heartedness of parents who would rather kill their infants than restrain their sexual appetite when they had all the children they could provide for. In most cases the assassins of their own children had not even as much semblance of an excuse as the Arabs. Turner relates (284) that in the New Hebrides the women had to do all the work, and as it was supposed that they could not attend to more than two or three, all the others were buried alive ; in other words the babes were murdered to save trouble and allow the men to live in indolence. In the instances from India referred to above, various trivial excuses for female infanticide were offered : that it would save the expenses connected with the marriage rites ; that it was cheaper to buy girls than to bring them up, or, better still, to steal them from other tribes ; that male births are increased by the de- struction of female infants ; and that it is better to destroy girls in their infancy than to allow them to grow up and be- come causes of strife afterward. Among the Fijians, says Williams (154, 155), there is in infanticide "no admixture of anything like religious feeling or fear, but merely whim, expediency, anger, or indolence." Sometimes the general idea of woman's inferiority to man underlies the act. They will say to the pleading missionary : " Why should she live ? Will she wield a club ? Will she poise a spear ? " But it was among the women of Hawaii that the motives of infanticide reached their climax of frivolity. There mothers killed their children because they were too lazy to bring them up and cook for them ; or because they wished to preserve their own beauty, or were unwilling to suffer an interruption in their licentious amours ; or because they liked to roam about unburdened by babes ; and sometimes for no other reason than because they could not make them stop crying. So they buried them alive though they might be months or even years old (Ellis, P. R., IV., 240). These revelations show that it is not " hardness of life " but "hardness of heart" — sensual, selfish indulgence — that 34 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW smothers the parental instinct. To say that the conduct of such parents is brutal, would be a great injustice to brutes. No species of animals, however low in the scale of life, has ever been known to habitually kill its offspring. In their treatment of females and young ones, animals are indeed, as a rule, far superior to savages and barbarians. I emphasize this point because several of my critics have accused me of a lack of knowledge and thought and logic because I attributed some of the elements of romantic love to animals and denied them to primitive human beings. But there is no inconsist- ency in this. We shall see later on that there are other things in which animals are superior not only to savages but to some civilized peoples as high in the scale as Hindoos. HONORABLE POLYGAMY Turning now from the parental to the conjugal sphere we shall find further interesting instances showing How Senti- ments Change and Grow. The monogamous sentiment — the feeling that a man and his wife belong to each other exclu- sively — is now so strong that a person who commits bigamy not only perpetrates a crime for which the courts may im- prison him for five years, but becomes a social outcast with whom respectable people will have nothing more to do. The Mormons endeavored to make polygamy a feature of their re- ligion, but in 1882 Congress passed a law suppressing it and punishing offenders. Did this monogamous sentiment exist " always and everywhere ?" ' Livingstone relates {M. S. A., I., 306-312) that the King of the Beetjuans (South Africa) was surprised to hear that his visitor had only one wife : " When we explained to him that, by the laws of our country, people could not marry until they were of a mature age, and then could never have more than one wife, he said it was perfectly incomprehensible to him how a whole nation could submit voluntarily to such laws." He himself had five wives and one of these queens "remarked very judiciously that such laws as ours would not suit the Beetjuans because there were so great a number of women HONORABLE POLYGAMY 35 and the male population suffered such diminutions from the wars." Sir Samuel Baker {A. N., 147) says of the wife of the Chief of Latooka : " She asked many questions, how many wives I had ? and was astonished to hear that I was contented with one. This amused her immensely, and she laughed heartily with her daughter at the idea." In Equa- torial Africa, "if a man marries and his wife thinks that he can afford another spouse, she pesters him to marry again, and calls him a stingy fellow if he declines to do so " (Reade, 259). Livingstone {N. E. Z., 284) says of the Makalolo women : " On hearing that a man in England could marry but one wife, several ladies exclaimed that they would not like to live in such a country ; that they could not imagine how English ladies could relish such a custom, for, in their way of thinking, every man of respectability should have a number of wives, as a proof of his wealth. Similar ideas pre- vail all down the Zambesi." Some amusing instances are re- ported by Burton {T. T. G. L., I., 36, 78, 79). The lord of an African village appeared to be much ashamed because he had only two wives. His sole excuse was that he was only a boy — about twenty-two. Regarding the Mpongwe of the Gaboon, Burton says •. " Polygamy is, of course, the order of the day ; it is a necessity to the men, and even the women disdain to marry a ' one-wifer.' " In his book on the Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, G. S. Robertson writes : " It is considered a reproach to have only one wife, a sign of poverty and insignificance. There was on one occasion a heated discussion at K^mdesh concerning the best plans to be adopted to prepare for an expected attack. A man sitting on the outskirts of the assembly controverted something the .priest said. Later on the priest turned round fiercely and demanded to be told how a man with ' only one wife ' pre- sumed to offer an opinion at all." His religion allowed a Mohammedan to take four legiti- mate wives, while their prophet himself had a larger num- ber. A Hindoo was permitted by the laws of Manu to marry four women if he belonged to the highest caste, but if he was of the lowest caste he was condemned to monogamy. 36 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW King Solomon was held in honor though he had unnumbered wives, concubines, and virgins at his disposal. How far the sentiment of monogamy — one of the essential ingredients of Komantic Love— had penetrated the skulls of American Indians may be inferred from the amusing and typical details related by the historian Parkman (0. T., chap, xi.) of the Dakota or Sioux Indians, among whom he sojourned. The man most likely to become the next chief was a fellow named Mahto-Tatonka, whose father had left a family of thirty, which number the young man was evidently anxious to beat : " Though he appeared not more than twenty-one years old, he had oftener struck the enemy, and stolen more horses and more squaws than any young man in the village. We of the civilized world are not apt to attach much credit to the latter species of exploits ; but horse-stealing is well-known as an avenue to distinction on the prairies, and the other kind of depredation is esteemed equally meritorious. Not that the act can confer fame from its own intrinsic merits. Any one can steal a squaw, and if he chooses afterward to make an adequate present to her rightful proprietor, the easy husband for the most part rests content ; his vengeance falls asleep, and all danger from that quarter is averted. Yet this is esteemed but a pitiful and mean-spirited transaction. The danger is averted, buttheglory of the achievement also is lost. Mahto-Tatonka proceeded after a more gallant and dashing fashion. Out of several dozen squaws whom he had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for one, but snapping his fingers in the face of the injured husband, had defied the ex- tremity of his indignation, and no one had yet dared to lay the hand of violence upon him. He was following close in the footsteps of his father. The young men and the young squaws, each in their way, admired him. The one would always follow him to war, and he was esteemed to have an unrivalled charm in the eyes of the other." Thus the admiration of the men, the love (Indian style) of the women, and the certainty of the chieftainship — the high- est honor accessible to an Indian — were the rewards of actions which in a civilized community would soon bring such a " brave " to the gallows. Some of the agencies by which the belief that wife-stealing and polygamy are honorable was dis- CURIOSITIES OF MODESTY 37 placed by the modern sentiment in favor of monogamy, will be considered later on. Here I simply wish to enforce the additional moral that not only the ideas regarding bigamy and polygamy have changed, but the emotions aroused by such actions ; execration having taken the place of admiration. Judging by such cases, is it likely that ideas concerning women and love could change so utterly as they have since the days of the ancient Greeks, without changing the emotions of love itself ? Sentiments consist of ideas and emotions. If both are altered, the sentiments must have changed as a mat- ter of course. Let us take as a further example the senti- ment of modesty. CUEIOSITIES OF MODESTY There are many Christian women who, if offered the choice between death and walking naked down the street, would choose death as being preferable to eternal disgrace and social suicide. If they preferred the other alternative, they would be arrested and, if known to be respectable, sent to an insane asylum. The English legend relates that "peeping Tom" was struck blind because he did not stay in the house as com- manded when the good Lady G-odiva was obliged to ride naked through the market-place. So strong, indeed, is the senti- ment of modesty in our community that the old-fashioned philosophers used to maintain it was an innate instinct, always present under normal conditions. The fact that every child, has to be gradually taught to avoid indecent exposure, ought to have enlightened these philosophers as to their error, which is further made plain to the orthodox by the Biblical story that in the beginning of human life the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed. Naked and not ashamed is the condition of primitive man wherever climatic and other motives do not prescribe dress. Writing of the Arabs at Wat El Negur, Samuel Baker says (iV. T. A., 265) : " Numbers of young girls and women were accustomed to bathe perfectly naked in the river just before our tent. I 38 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW employed them to catch small fish for bait ; and for honrs they would amuse themselves in this way, screaming with ex- citement and fnn, and chasing the small fry with their long clothes in lieu of nets ; their figures were generally well- shaped. . . . The men were constantly bathing in the clear waters of the Athabara, and were perfectly naked, al- though close to the women ; we soon became accustomed to this daily scene, as we do at Brighton and other English bathing towns." In his work on German Africa (II., 133) Zoller says that in Togoland " the young girls did not hesitate in the least to remove their only article of clothing, a narrow strip of cloth, rub themselves with a native soap and then take a dip in the lagoon, before the eyes of white men as well as black." A page would be required merely to enumerate the tribes in Africa, Australia, and ■ South America which never wear any clothing. Max Buchner (352-4) gives a graphic description (1878) of the nude female surf swimmers in the Hawaiian Islands. Nor is this indifference to nudity manifested only by these primi- tive races. In Japan, to the present day, men and women bathe in the same room, separated merely by a partition, two or three feet high.i Zoller relates of the Cholos of Ecuador (P. and A., 364) that " men and women bathe together in the rivers with a naivete surpassing that of the South Sea Islanders." A writer in the Ausland (1870, p. 294) reports that in Para- guay he saw the women washing their only dress, and while they waited for the sun to dry it, they stood by naked calmly smoking their cigars. But natural indifference to nudity is the least of the curi- osities of modesty. Sometimes nakedness is actually pre- scribed by law or by strict etiquette. In Eohl all women who are not Arabic are forbidden to wear clothing of any sort. The King of Mandingo allowed no women, not even prin- cesses, to approach him unless they were naked (Hellwald, 77-8). Dubois (I., 265) says that in some of the southern provinces of India the women of certain castes must uncover their body from the head to the girdle when speaking to a ' See the chapter on Nudity and Bathing in my Lotos-Time in Japan. CURIOSITIES OF MODESTY 39 man : " It would be thought a want of politeness and good breeding to speak to men with that part of the body clothed." In his travels among the Cameroon negroes Zoller (II., 185) came across a strange bit of religious etiquette in regard to nudity. The women there wear nothing but a loin cloth, except in case of a death, when, like ourselves, they appear all in black — with a startling difference, however. One day, writes Zoller, " I was astounded to see a number of women and girls strolling about stark naked before the house of a man who had died of diphtheria. This, I was told, was their mourning dress. . . . The same custom prevails in other parts of West Africa." Modesty is as fickle as fashion and assumes almost as many different forms as dress itself. In most Australian tribes the women (as well as the men) go naked, yet in a few they not only wear clothes but go out of sight to bathe. Stranger still, the Pele islanders were so innocent of all idea of clothing that when they first saw Europeans they believed that their clothes were their skins. Nevertheless, the men and women bathed in different places. Among South American Indians nudity is the rule, whereas some North American Indians used to place guards near the swimming-places of the women, to pro- tect them from spying eyes. According to Gill (230), the Papuans of Southwestern New Guinea " glory in their nudeness and consider clothing fit only for women." There are many places where the women alone were clothed, while in others the women alone were naked. Mtesa, the King of Uganda, who died in 1884, in- flicted the death penalty on any man who dared to approach him without having every inch of his legs carefully covered ; but the women who acted as his servants were stark naked (Hellwald, 78). While the etiquette of modesty is thus subject to an end- less variety of details, every nation and tribe enforces its own ideal of propriety as the only correct thing. In Tahiti and Tonga it would be considered highly indecent to go about without being tattooed. Among Samoans and other Malay- ans the claims of propriety are satisfied if only the navel is 40 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW covered. " The savage tribes of Sumatra and Celebes have a like feeling^ about the knee, which is always carefully cov- ered" (Westermarck, 307). In China it is considered ex- tremely indecent if a woman allows her bare feet to be seen, even by her husband, and a similar idea prevails among some Turkish women, who carefully wrap up their feet before they go to bed (Ploss, I., 344). Hindoo women must not show their faces,, but it is not improper to wear a dress so gauzy that the whole figure is revealed through it. " In Moruland," says Emin Bey, "the women mostly go about absolutely naked, a few only attaching a leaf behind to their waistband. It is curious to note, on meeting a bevy of these uncovered beauties carrying water, that the first thing they do with their free hand is to cover the face." These customs prevail in all Moslem countries. Mariti re- lates in his Viaggi (II., 383) : "Travelling in summer across the fields of Syria I repeatedly came across groups of women, entirely naked, washing themselves near a well. They did not move from the place, but simply covered the face with one hand, their whole modesty consisting in the desire not to be recognized. " Sentimental topsy-turviness reaches its climax in those cases where women who usually go naked are ashamed to be seen clothed. Such cases are cited by several writers,* and appear to be quite common. The most amusing instance I have come across is in a little-known volume on Venezuela by Lavayasse, who writes (190) : " It is known that those [Indians] of the warm climates of South America, among whom civilization has not made any progress, have no other dress than a small apron, or kind of bandage, to hide their nakedness. A lady of my acquaint- ance had contracted a kindness for a young Paria Indian woman, who was extremely handsome. We had given her the name of Grace. She was sixteen years old, and had lately been married to a young Indian of twenty-five, who was our sportsman. This lady took a pleasure in teaching her to sew and embroider. We said to her one day, 'Grace, you are extremely pretty, speak French well, and are always with us : 1 Bancroft, 11 , 75 ; Wallace, 857 ; Westermarck, 195 ; Humboldt, III. , 330. INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY 41 you ougtt not therefore to live like the other native women, and we shall give you some clothes. Does not your husband wear trousers and a shirt ?" Upon this she consented to be dressed. The lady lost no time in arranging her dress, a ceremony at which I had the honor of assisting. We put on a shift, petticoats, stockings, shoes, and a Madras handker- chief on her head. She looked quite enchanting, and saw herself in the looking-glass with great complacency. Sud- denly her husband returned from shooting, with three or four Indians, when the whole party burst into a loud fit of laughter at her, and began to joke about her new habiliments. Grace was quite abashed, blushed, wept, and ran to hide herself in the bed-chamber of the lady, where she stript herself of the clothes, went out of the window, and returned naked into the room. A proof that when her husband saw her dressed for the first time, she felt a sensation somewhat similar to that which a European woman might experience who was sur- prised without her usual drapery." Another paradox remains to be noted. Anthropologists have now proved beyond all possibility of doubt that modesty, far from having led to the use of clothing, was itself merely a secondary consequence of the gradual adoption of apparel as a protection. They have also shown ^ that the earliest forms of dress were extremely scanty, and were intended not to cover certain parts of the body, but actually and wantonly to call attention to them, while in other cases the only parts of the body habitually covered were such as we should con- sider it no special impropriety to leave uncovered. But enough has been said to demonstrate what we started out to prove : that the strong sentiment of modesty in our commun- ity — so strong that many insist it must be part and parcel of human nature (like love !) — has, like all the other sentiments here discussed, grown up slowly from microscopic beginnings. INDIFFEKEKCE TO CHASTITY Closely connected with modesty, and yet entirely distinct from it, is another and still stronger sentiment — the regard for chastity. Many an American oflBcer whose brave wife accom- 1 See especially the ninth chapter of Westermarck'e History of Human Mar- riage, 186-301. 43 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW panied him in a frontier war has been asked by her to prom- ise that he would shoot her with his own revolver rather than let her fall into the clutches of licentious Indians. Though deliberate murder is punishable by death, no American jury has ever convicted a man for slaying the seducer of his wife, daughter, or sister. Modern law punishes rape with death, and its victim is held to have suffered a fate worse than death. The brightest of all jewels in a bride's crown of virtues is chastity — a jewel without which all the others lose their value. Yet this jewel of jewels formerly had no more value than a pebble in a brook-bed. The sentiment in behalf of chastity had no existence for ages, and for a long time after it came into existence chastity was known not as a virtue but only as a necessity, inculcated by fear of punishment or loss of worldly advantages. In support of this statement a whole volume might be written ; but as abundant evidence will be given in later chapters relating to the lower races in Africa, Australia, Polynesia, America, and Asia, only a few instances need be cited here. In his recent work on the Origin and Growth of the Moral Sense (1898), Alexander Sutherland, an Australian author, writes (I., 180) : " In the House of Commons papers for 1844 will be found some 350 printed pages of reports, memoranda, and letters, gathered by the standing committee appointed in regard to the treatment of aboriginals in the Australian colonies. All these have the same unlovely tale to tell of an absolute in- capacity to form even a rudimentary notion of chastity. One worthy missionary, who had been for some years settled among tribes of N"ew South Wales, as yet Irought in contact with no other white men, writes with horror of what he had observed. The conduct of the females, even young children, is most painful ; they are cradled in prostitution and fostered in licentiousness. Brough Smith (II., 340) quotes several authorities who record that in Western Australia the women in early youth were almost prostitutes. ' For about six months after their initiation into manhood the youths were allowed an unbounded licence, and there was no possible blame attached to the young unmarried girl who entertained them" (179). INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY 43 In Lewis and Clark's account of their expedition across the American Continent they came to the conclusion that there was an utter absence of regard for chastity " among all Ind- ians," and they relate the following as a sample (439) : " Among all the tribes, a man will lend his wife or daughter for a fish-hook or a strand of beads. To decline an ofEer of this sort is indeed to disparage the charms of the lady, and therefore gives such offence, that, although we had occasion- ally to treat the Indians with rigor, nothing seemed to irritate both sexes more than our refusal to accept the favors of the females. On one occasion we were amused by a Clatsop, who, having been cured of some disorder by our medical skill, brought his sister as a reward for our kindness. The young lady was quite anxious to join in this expression of her brother's gratitude, and mortified we did not avail ourselves of it." De Varigny, who lived forty years in the Hawaiijin Islands, says (159) that " the chief difficulty of the missionaries in the Sandwich Islands was teaching the women chastity ; they knew neither the word nor the thing. Adultery, incest, for- nication, were the common order of things, accepted by pub- lic opinion, and even consecrated by religion." The same is true of other Polynesians, the Tahitians, for instance, of whom Captain Cook wrote that they are "people who have not even the idea of decency, and who gratify every appetite and passion before witnesses, with no more sense of impro- priety than we feel when we satisfy our hunger at a social board with our friends." Among the highest of all these island peoples, the Tongans, the only restriction to inconti- nence was that the lover must not be changed too often. What Dalton says of the Chilikata Mishmis, one of the wild tribes of India, applies to many of the lower races in all parts of the world : " Marriage ceremony there is, I believe, none ; it is simply an affair of purchase, and the women thus obtained, if they can be called wives, are not much bound by the tie. The husbands do not expect them to be chaste ; they take no cog- nizance of their temporary liaisons so long as they are not de- prived of their services. If a man is dispossessed of one of his wives, he has a private injury to avenge, and takes the 44 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW earliest opportunity of retaliating, but he cannot see that a woman is a bit the worse for a little incontinency." In many cases not only was there complete indifference to. chastity, bnt virginity in a bride was actually looked on with disfavor. The Finnish Votyaks considered it honorable in a girl to be a mother before she was' a wife. The Central American Chibchas were like the Philippine Bisayos, of whom a sixteenth century writer, quoted by Jagor, said that a man is unhappy to find his bride above suspicion, " because, not having been desired by anyone, she must have some bad qual- ity which will prevent him from being happy with her." The wide prevalence in all parts of the world of the custom of lending or exchanging wives, or offering wife or daughter to a guest,' also bears witness to the utter indifference to chastity, conjugal and maiden ; as does the custom known as the jus primcB noctis. Dr. Karl Schmidt has tried very hard to prove that such a " right " to the bride never existed. But no one can read his treatises without noting that his argu- ment rests on a mere quibble, the word^MS. There may have been no codified laio or "right" allowing kings, bishops, chiefs, landlords, medicine men, and priests to claim brides first, but that the privilege existed in various countries and was extensively made use of, there can be no doubt. Wester- marck (73-80), Letourneau (56-62), Ploss (I., 400-405), and others have collected abundant proofs. Here I have room for only a few instances, showing that those whom we would con- sider the victims of such a horrible custom, not only submit- ted to it with resignation, but actually looked on it as an honor and a highly coveted privilege. " The aboriginal inhabitants of Teneriffe are represented as having married no woman who had not previously spent a night with the chief, which was considered a great honor." "Navarette tells us that, on the coast of Malabar, the bridegroom brought the bride to the King, who kept her eight days in the palace ; and the man took it ' as a great honor and favor that the King should make use of her.' " ' 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. INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY 45 " Bgede informs ns that the women of Greenland thought themselves fortunate if an Angekokk, or prophet, honored them with his caresses ; and some husbands even paid him, because they believed that the child of such a holy man could not but be happier and better than others." (Westermarck, 77, 80.) "In Cumana the priests, who were regarded as holy, slept only with unmarried women, ' porque tenian por honorosa cos- tumbre que ellos las quitassen la virginidad.'" (Bastian, K. A. A., II., 328.) Prom this lowestdepth of depravity it would be interesting, if space and the architectural plan of this volume permitted, to trace the growth of the sentiment which demands chastity ; not- ing, in the first place, how married women were compelled, by the jealous fury of their masters, to practise continence ; how, very much later, virginity began to be valued, not, indeed, at first, as a virtue having a value and charm of its own, but as a means of enhancing the market value of brides. Indifference to masculine chastity continued much longer still. The an- cient civilized nations had advanced far enough to value purity in wives and maidens, but it hardly occurred to them that it was man's duty to cultivate the same virtue. Even so austere and eminent a moral philosopher as Cicero declared that one would have to be very severe indeed to ask young men to refrain from illicit relations. The mediaeval church fathers endeavored for centuries to enforce the doctrine that men should be as pure as women, with what success, every one knows. A more powerful agency in effecting a reform was the loathsome disease which in the fifteenth century began to sweep away millions of licentious men, and led to the survival of the fittest from the moral point of view. The masculine standard is still low, but immense progress has been made during the last hundred years. The number of prostitutes in Europe is still estimated at seven hundred thousand, yet that makes only seven to every thousand females, and though there are many other unchaste women, it is safe to say that in England and America, at any rate, more than nine hundred out of every thousand females are chaste, whereas among sav- ages, as a rule, nearly all females are prostitutes (in the moral 46 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW sense of the word), before they marry. In view of this as- tounding progress there is no reason to despair regarding man's future. It would be a great triumph of civilization if the average man could be made as pure as the average woman. At the same time, since the consequences of sin are infinitely more serious in women, it is eminently proper that they should be in the van of moral progress. Chastity, modesty, polygamy, murder, religion, and nature have now furnished us an abundance of illustrations showing the changeableness and former non-existence of sentiments which in us are so strong that we are inclined to fancy they must have been the same always and everywhere. Before proceed- ing to prove that romantic love is another sentiment of which the same may be said, let us pause a moment to dis- cuss a sentiment which presents one of the most difiBcult problems in the psychology of love, the Horror of Incest. HORROR OF IKCEST A young man does not fall in love with his sister though she be the most attractive girl he knows. Nor does her father fall in love with her, nor the mother with the son, or the son with the mother. Not only is there no sexual love between them, but the very idea of marriage fills their mind with unutterable horror, and in the occasional cases where such a marriage is made through ignorance of the relationship, both parties usually commit suicide, though they are guiltless of deliberate crime. Here we have the most striking and absolute proof that circumstances, habits, ideas, laws, customs, can and do ut- terly annihilate sexual love in millions of individuals. Why then should it be so unlikely that the laws and customs of the ancient Greeks, for instance, with their ideas about women and marriage, should have prevented the growth of sentimental love ? Note the modesty of my claim. While it is certain that both the sensual and the sentimental sides of sexual love are stifled by the horror of incest, all that I claim in regard fo ancient and primitive races is that the sentimental side of love was smothered by unfavorable circumstances and hindered HORROR OF INCEST 47 in growth by various obstacles which will be described later on in this volume. Surely this is not such a reckless theory as it seemed to some of my critics. Like the other sentiments discussed in this chapter, the horror of incest has been found to be absent among races in various stages of development. Incestuous unions occurred among Chippewas and other American Indians. Of the Peru- vian Indians, Garcilasso de la Vega says that some cohabited with their sisters, daughters, or mothers ; similar facts are re- corded of some Brazilians, Polynesians, Africans, and wild tribes of India. " Among the Annamese, according to a mis- sionary who has lived among them for forty years, no girl who is twelve years old and has a brother is a virgin " (Wester- marck, 393). Gypsies allow a brother to marry a sister, while among the Veddahs of Ceylon the marriage of a man with his younger sister is considered the proper marriage. In the Ind- ian Archipelago and elsewhere there are tribes who permit marriage between parents and their children. The legends of India and Hindoo theology abound in allusions to incestuous unions, and a nation's mythology reflects its own customs. According to Strabo the ancient Irish married their mothers and sisters. Among the love-stories of the ancient Greeks, as we shall see later on, there are a surprising number the svib- ject of which is incest, indicating that that crime was of not infrequent occurrence. But it is especially by royal person- ages that incest has been practised. In ancient Persia, Parthia, Egypt, and other countries the kings married their own sisters, as did the Incas of Peru, for political reasons, other women being regarded as too low in rank to become queens ; and the same phenomenon occurs in Hawaii, Siam, Burma, Ceylon, Madagascar, etc. In some cases incestuous unions for kings and priests are even prescribed by religion. At the licentious festivals common among tribes in America, Africa, India, and elsewhere, incest was one of the many forms of bestiality in- dulged in ; this gives it a wide prevalence. Much ingenuity has been expended in attempts to account for the origin of the horror of incest. The main reason why it has so far remained more or less of a mystery, is that each 48 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW writer advanced a single cause, which he pressed into service to explain all the facts, the result being confusion and con- tradiction. In my opinion different agencies must be assumed in different cases. When we find among Australians, Amer- ican Indians (and even the Chinese), customs, enforced by the strongest feelings, forbidding a man to marry a woman be- longing to the same clan or having the same surname, though not at all related, while allowing a marriage with a sister or other near blood relative, we are obviously not dealing with a question of incest at all, but with some of the foolish taboos prevalent among these races, the origin of which they them- selves have forgotten. Mr. Andrew Lang probably hit the nail on the head when he said (258) in regard to the rule which compels savages to marry only outside of the tribe, that these prohibitions " must have arisen in a stage of cult- ure when ideas of kindred were confused, included kinship with animals and plants, and were to us almost, if not quite, unintelligible." To speak of instinct and natural selection teaching the Veddahs to abhor marriage with an elder sister while making union with a younger sister the proper marriage (Westermarck. 392) is surely to assume that instinct and natu- ral selection act in an asinine way, which they never do — ex- cept in asses. In a second class of cases, where lower races have ideas similar to ours, I believe that the origin of domestic chastity must be sought in utilitarian practices. In the earlier stages of marriage, girls are usually bought of their parents, who profit by the sale or barter. Now when a man marries a girl to be his wife and maid of all work, he does not want to take her to his home hampered by a bevy of young children. Fathers guilty of incestuous practices would therefore be un- able to dispose of their daughters to advantage, and thus a prejudice in favor of domestic purity would gradually arise which a shrewd medicine man would some day raise to the rank of a religious or social taboo. As regards modern society, Darwin, Brinton, Hellwald, Bentham, and others have advocated or endorsed the view that the reason why such a horror of incestuous unions HORROR OF INCEST 49 preyails, is that novelty is the chief stimulus to the sexual feelings, and that the familiarity of the same household breeds indifference. I do not understand how any thinker can have, held such a view for one moment. When Bentham wrote {Theory of Legislation, pt. iii., chap, V.) that "individuals accustomed to see each other from an age which is capable neither of conceiving desire nor of inspiring it, will see each other with the same eyes to the end of life," he showed infi- nitely less knowledge of human nature than the author of Paul and Virginia, who makes a boy and a girl grow up almost like brother and sister, and at the proper time fall violently in love with one another. Who cannot recall in his own experience love marriages of schoolmates or of cousins living in intimate association from their childhood ? To say that such bringing up together creates "indifference" is ob- viously incorrect ; to say that it leads to " aversion " is alto- gether unwarranted ; and to trace to it such a feeling as our horror at the thought of marrying a sister, or mother, is sim- ply preposterous. The real source of the horror of incest in civilized commu- nities was indicated more than two thousand years ago by Plato. He believed that the reason why incestuous unions were avoided and abhorred, was to be found in the constant inculcation, at home and in literature, that " They are unholy, hated of God, and most infamous. . . . Everyone from his earliest childhood has heard men speaking in the same manner about them always and every- where, whether in comedy or in the graver language of tragedy. When the poet introduces on the stage a Thyestes or an (Edi- pus, or a Macareus having secret intercourse with his sister, he represents him, when found out, ready to kill himself as the penalty of his sin." {Latos, VIII., 838.) Long before Plato another great " medicine man," Moses, saw the necessity of enforcing a " taboo " against incest by the enactment of special severe laws relating to intercourse between relatives ; and that there was no " instinct" against incest in his time is shown by the fact that he deemed it necessary to make such circumstantial laws for his own 50 HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW people, .and by his specific testimony that " in all these things the nations are defiled which I cast out from before you, and the land is defiled." Regarding his' motives in making such laws, Milman has justly remarked {H. J., I., 230), "The leading principle of these enactments was to prohibit near marriage between those parties among whom, by the usage of their society, early and frequent intimacy was unavoidable and might lead to abuse." If Moses lived now, he would still be called upon to enact his laws ; for to this day the horror of incest is a sentiment which it is necessary to keep up and enforce by education, moral precept, religion, and law. It is no more innate or instinctive than the sentiment of modesty, the regard for chastity, or the disapproval of bigamy. Children are not born with it any more than with the feeling that it is improper to be seen naked. Medical writers bear witness to the wide prevalence of unnatural practices among children, even in good families, while in the slums of the large cities, where the families are herded like swine, there is a horrible indulgence in every kind of incest by adults as well as children. Absolute proof that the horror of incest is not innate lies furthermore in the unquestionable fact that a man can escape the calamity of falling in love with his sister or daughter only if he knows the relationship. There are many instances on record — to which the daily press adds others — of incest- uous unions brought about by ignorance of the consanguinity. (Edipus was not saved by an instinct from marrying his mother. It was only after the discovery of the relationship that his mind was filled with unutterable horror, while his wife and mother committed suicide. This case, though leg- endary, is typical — a mirror of actuality — showing how potent ideas are to alter emotions. Yet I am assailed for asserting that the Greeks and the lower races, whose ideas regarding women,- love, polygamy, chastity, and marriage were so different from ours, also differed from us in their feelings — the quality of their love. There were numerous obstacles to overcome before romantic love was able to emerge — obstacles so serious and diverse that it is a wonder HORROR OF INCEST 51 they were ever conquered. Bat before considering those ob- stacles it will be advisable to explain definitely just what romantic love is and how it differs from the sensual " love " or lust which, of course, has always existed among men as among other animals. WHAT IS EOMANTIC LOVE? How does it feel to be in love ? When a man loves a girl, lie feels such an overwhelming individual preference for her that thoagh she were a beggar- maid he would scorn the offer to exchange her for an heiress, a princess, or the goddess of beauty herself. To him she seems to have a monopoly of all the feminine charms, and she therefore monopolizes his thoughts and feelings to the exclusion of all other interests, and he longs not only for her reciprocal affection but for a monopoly of it. "Does she love me ? " he asks himself a hundred times a day. " Some- times she seems to treat me with cold indifference — is that merely the instinctive assertion of feminine coyness, or does she prefer another man ? " The pangs, the agony oi jealousy overcome him at this thought. He hopes one moment, de- spairs the next, till his moods become so mixed that he hardly knows whether he is happy or miserable. He, who is usually so bold and self-confident, is humbled; feels ut- terly unworthy of her. In his fancy she soars so far above all other women that calling her an angel seems not a hyperbole, but a compliment to the angel. Toward such a superior being the only proper attitude is adoration. She is spotless as an angel, and his feelings toward her are as pure, as free from coarse cravings, as if she were a goddess. How royally proud a man must feel at the thought of being pre- ferred above all mortals by this divine being ! In personal leauty had she ever a peer ? Since Venus left this planet, has such grace been seen ? In face of her, the strongest of all impulses — selfishness — is annihilated. The lover is no longer " number one " to himself ; his own pleasures and comforts are ignored in the eager desire to please her, to show her gallant attentions. To save her from disaster or 52 INGREDIENTS OF LOVE 53 grief he is ready to sacrifice his life. His cordial sympathy makes him share all her joys and sorrows, and his affection for her, though he may have known her only a few days — nay, a few minutes — is as strong and devoted as that of a mother for the child that is her own flesh and blood. INGREDIENTS OF LOVE No one who has ever been truly in love will deny that this description, however romantic it may seem in its apparent ex- aggeration, is a realistic reflection of his feelings and impulses. As this brief review shows. Individual Preference, Monopol- ism, Coyness, Jealousy, Mixed Moods of Hope and Despair, Hyperbole, Adoration, Purity, Pride, Admiration of Personal Beauty, Gallantry, Self-sacrifice, Sympathy, and Affection, are the essential ingredients in that very composite mental state which we call romantic love. Coyness, of course, oc- curs only in feminine love, and there are other sexual differ- ences which will be noted later on. Here I wish to point out that the fourteen ingredients named may be divided into two groups of seven each — the egoistic and the altruistic. The prevailing notion that love is a species of selfishness — a " double selfishness," some wiseacre has called it — is deplor- ably untrue and shows how little the psychology of love has heretofore been understood. It has indeed an egoistic side, including the ingredients I have called Individual Preference, Monopolism, Jealousy, Coyness, Hyperbole, Mixed Moods, and Pride ; and it is not a mere accident that these are also the seven features which may be found in sensual love too ; for sensuality and selfish- ness are twins. But the later and more essential character- istics of romantic love are the altruistic and supersensual traits — Sympathy, Affection, Gallantry, Self-sacrifice, Adora- tion, Purity, and Admiration of Personal Beauty. The two divisions overlap in some places, but in the main they are accurate. It is certain that the first group precedes the second, but the order in which the ingredients in each group first made their appearance cannot be indicated, as we know 54 ROMANTIC LOVE— INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE too little of the early history of man. The arrangement here adopted is therefore more or less arbitrary. I shall try in this long chapter to answer the question "What is Komantic Love ? " by discussing each of its fourteen ingredients and tracing its evolution separately. I. INDIVIDUAL PEEFEKENCB If a man pretended to be in love with a girl while confess- ing that he liked other girls equally well and would as soon marry one as another, everybody would laugh at him ; for however ignorant many persons may be as to the subtler traits of sentimental love, it is known universally that a decided and obstinate preference for one particular individual is an absolute condition of true love. ALL GIRLS EQUALLY ATTBACTIVE As I have just intimated, a modern romantic lover would not exchange a beloved beggar-maid for an heiress or prin- cess ; nor would he give her for a dozen other girls, however charming, and with permission to marry them all. Now if romantic love had always existed, the lower races would have the same violent and exclusive preference for individ- uals. But what are the facts ? I assert, without fear of con- tradiction from any one familiar with anthropological litera- ture, that a savage or barbarian, be he Australian, African, American, or Asiatic, would laugh at the idea of refusing to exchange one woman for a dozen others equally young and attractive. It is not necessary to descend to the lowest sav- ages to find corroboration of this view. Dr. Zoller, an un- usually intelligent and trustworthy observer, says, in one of his volumes on German Africa (III., 70-71), that "on the whole no distinction whatever is made between woman and woman, between the good-looking and the ugly, the intelli- gent and the stupid ones. In all my African experiences I have never heard of a single young man or woman who con- ceived a violent passion for a particular individual of the ALL GIRLS EQUALLY ATTRACTIVE 55 opposite sex." So in other parts of Africa. The natives of Borgou, we are told by R. and J. Lander, marry with perfect indifference. " A man takes no more thought about choosing a wife than he does in picking a head of wheat." Among the Kaffirs, says Pritsch (113) it may occur that a man has an inclination toward a particular girl ; but he adds that "in such cases the suitor is obliged to pay several oxen more than is customary, and as he usually takes cattle more to heart than women, such cases are rare ; " and though, when he has several wives, he may have a favorite, the attachment to her is shallow and transient, for she is at any moment liable to displacement by a new-comer. Among the Hottentots at Angra Pequena, when a man covets a girl he goes to her hut, prepares a cup of coffee and hands it to her without saying a word. If she drinks half of it, he knows the answer is Yes. " If she refuses to touch the coffee, the suitor is not specially grieved, but proceeds to another hut to try his luck again in the same way." (Floss, I., 454.) Of the Pijians Williams (148) says : " Too commonly there is no express feeling of connubial bliss, men speak of ' our women ' and women of ' our men ' without any distinctive preference being apparent." Catlin, speaking (70-71) of the matrimonial arrangements of the Pawnee Indians, says that daughters are held as legitimate merchandise, and, as a rule, accept the situation " with the apathy of the race." A man who advertised for a wife would hardly be accused of indi- vidual preference or anything else indicating love. Prom a remark made by George Gibbs (197) we may infer that the Indians of Oregon and Washington used to advertise for wives, in their own fashion : " It is not unusual to find on the small prairies human figures rudely carved upon trees. These I have understood to have been cut by young men who were in want of wives, as a sort of practical intimation that they were in the market as purchasers." It might be suggested that such a crude love-letter to the sex in general, as compared with one of our own love-letters to a particular girl, gives a fair idea of what Indian love is, compared with the love of civilized men and women. 56 ROMANTIC LOVE— INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE SHALLOW PEEDILECTIOSr Even where there is an appearance of predilection it is apt to be shallow and fragile. In the Jesuit Relations (XVIII. , 139) we read .how a Huron youth came to one of the missionaries and said he needed a wife to make his snow-shoes and clothes. " I am in love with a young girl," said he. " I beg you to call my relatives together and to consider whether she is suitable for me. If you decide that it is for my good, I will marry her ; if not, I will follow your advice." Other young Indians used to come to the missionaries to ask them to find wives for them. I have been struck, in reading Indian love-stories, by the fact that their gist usually lies not in an exhibition of decided preference for one man but of violent aversion to another — some old and disagreeable suitor. It is well known, too, that among Indians, as among Australians, marriage was sometimes considered an affair of the tribe rather than of the individual ; and we have some curious illustrations of the way in which various tribes of Indians would try to crush the germs of individual preference. REPEESSION OF PKBEEKENCB Thus Hunter relates (243) of the Missouri and Arkansas tribes that " It is considered disgraceful for a young Indian publicly to prefer one woman to another until he has distin- guished himself either in war or in the chase." Should an Indian pay any girl, though he may have known her from childhood, special attention before he has won reputation as a warrior, " he would be sure to suffer the painful mortifi- cation of a rejection ; he would become the derision of the warriors and the contempt of the squaws." In the Jesuit Relations (III., 73) we read of some of the Canadian Indians that " they have a very rude way of making love ; for the suitor, as soon as he shows a preference for a girl, does not dare look at her, nor speak to her, nor stay near her unless accidentally ; and then he must force himself not to look her UTILITY VERSUS SENTIMENT 57 in the face, nor to give any sign of his passion, otherwise he would be the laughing-stock of all, and his sweetheart would blush for him." Not only must he show no preference, but the choice, too, is not left to him ; for the relatives take up the matter and decide whether his age, skill as a hunter, rep- utation, and family make him a desirable match. In the face of such facts, can we agree with Eousseau that to a savage one woman is as good as another ? The question is very difiScult to answer, because if a man is to marry at all, he must choose a particular girl, and this choice can be inter- preted as preference, though it may be quite accidental. It is probable, as I have suggested, that with a people as low as the Australians it would be difficult to find a man having sufficient predilection for one young woman to refuse to ex- change her for two others. Probably the same is true of the higher savages and even of the barbarians, as a rule. UTILITY VERSUS SENTIMENT We do, indeed, find, at a comparatively early stage, evi- dences of one girl or man being chosen in preference to others ; but when we examine these cases closely we see that the choice is not based on personal qualities but on utilita- rian considerations of the most selfish or sensual description. Thus Zoller, in-the passage just referred to, says of the negro : " It is true that when he buys a woman he prefers a young one, but his motive for so doing is far from being mental ad- miration of beauty. He buys the younger ones because they are youthful, strong, and able to work for him." Similarly Belden, who lived twelve years among the Plains Indians, states (302) that " the squaws are valued by the middle-aged men only for their strength and ability to work, and no ac- count whatever is taken of their personal beauty." The girls are no better than the men. Young Comanche girls, says Parker (Schoolcraft, V., 683) "are not averse to marry very old men, particularly if they are chiefs, as they are always sure of something to eat." In describing Amazon Valley Indians, Wallace says (497-498) that there is "a trial of skill 58 ROMANTIC LOVE— INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE at shooting with the bow and arrow, and if the young man does not show himself a good marksman, the girl refuses him, on the ground that he will not be able to shoot fish and game enough for the family." These cases are typical, and might be multiplied indefi- nitely ; they show how utterly individual preference on per- sonal grounds is out of the question here. It is true that many of our own girls marry for such utilitarian reasons ; but no one would be so foolish as to speak of these marriages as love-matches, whereas in the cases of savages we are often invited by sentimentalists to witness the " manifestation of love " whenever a man shows a utilitarian or sensual interest in a particular girl. A modern civilized lover marries a girl for her own sake, because he is enamoured of her individuality, whereas the uncivilized suitor cares not a fig for the other's individuality ; he takes her as an instrument of lust, a drudge, or as a means of raising a family, in order that the supersti- tious rites of ancestor-worship may be kept up and his selfish soul rest in peace in the next world. He cares not for her personally, for if she proves barren he repudiates her and marries another. Trial marriages are therefore widely prev- alent. The Dyaks of Borneo, as St. John tells us, often make as many as seven or eight such marriages ; with them marriage is " a business of partnership for the purpose of having children, dividing labor, and by means of their off- spring providing for their old age." A STOKT OF AFEICAK LOVE An amusing incident related by Ernst von Weber (II., 215-6] indicates how easily utilitarian considerations override such skin-deep preference as may exist among Africans. He knew a girl named Yanniki who refused to marry a young KafiBr suitor though she confessed that she liked him. " I cannot take him," she said, "as he can offer only ten cows for me knd my father wants fifteen." Weber observed that it was not kind of her father to let a few cows stand in the way of her happiness ; but the African damsel did not fall in with SIMILARITY OF INDIVIDUALS AND SEXES 59 his sentimental view of the case. Business and vanity were to her much more important matters than individual prefer- ence for a particular lover, and she exclaimed, excitedly : "What! You expect my father to give me away for ten cows ? That would be a fine sort of a bargain ! Am I not worth more than Cilli, for whom the Tambuki chief paid twelve cows last week ? I am pfetty, I can cook, sew, crochet, speak English, and with all these accomplishments yoii want my father to dispose of me for ten miserable cows ? Oh, sir, how little you esteem me ! No, no, my father is quite right in re- fusing to yield in this matter ; indeed, in my opinion he might boldly ask thirty cows for me, for I am worth that much." SIMILAEITT OF INDIVIDUALS AKD SEXES It is not difficult to explain why among the lower races in- dividual preference either does not occur at all or is so weak and utilitarian that the difference of a few cows more or less may decide a lover's fate. Like sunflowers in the same garden, the girls in a tribe differ so little from one an- other that there is no particular cause for discrimination. They are all brought up in exactly the same way, eat the same food, think the same thoughts, do the same work- carrying water and wood, dressing skins, moving tents and utensils, etc. ; they are alike uneducated, and marry at the same childish age before their minds can have unfolded what little is in them ; so that there is small reason why a man should covet one of them much more than another. A sav- age may be as eager to possess a woman as a miser is to own a gold piece : but he has little more reason to prefer one girl to another than a miser has to prefer one gold piece to an- other of the same size. Humboldt observed {P E., 141) that "in barbarous nations there is ai physiognomy peculiar to the tribe or horde rather than to any individual." It has been noted by various ob- servers that the lower the race is the more do its individuals thus resemble one another. Nay, this approximation goes so far as to make even the two sexes much less distinct than they 60 ROMANTIC LOVE— INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE are with us. Professor Fritsch, in his classical treatise on thfe natives of South Africa (407), dwells especially on the im- perfect sexual differentiation of the Bushmen. The faces, stature, limbs, and even the chest and hips of the women dif- fer so little from those of the men that in looking at photo- graphs (as he says and illustrates by specimens), one finds it difiicult to tell them apart, though the figures are almost nude. Both sexes are equally lean and equally ugly. The same may be said of the typical Australians, and in Professor and Mrs. Agassiz's Journey in Brazil (530) we read that " the Indian woman has a very masculine air, extending indeed more or less to her whole bearing ; for even her features have rarely the feminine delicacy of higher womanhood. In the Negro, on the contrary, the narrowness of chest and shoulder characteristic of the woman is almost as marked in the man ; indeed, it may well be said, that, while the Indian female is remarkable for her masculine build, the negro male is eqiially so for his feminine aspect." In the Jesuit Relations there are repeated references to the difficulty of distinguishing squaws from male Indians except by certain articles of dress. Burton writes of the Sioux (C. 0. 8., 59) that "the unac- customed eye often hesitates between the sexes." In School- craft (V., 374) we are told concerning the Greek women that " being condemned to perform all the hard labor, they are universally masculine in appearance, without one soft blan- dishment to render them desirable or lovely." Nor is there anything alluringly feminine in the disposition which, as all observers agree, makes Indian women more cruel in torture than the most pitiless men. Equally decisive is the testimony regarding the similarity of the sexes, physical and mental, in the islands of the Pacific. Hawkesworth (II., 446) found the women of New Zealand so lacking in feminine delicacy that it was difficult to distinguish them from the men, except by their voices. Captain Cook (II., 246) observed in Fiji differ- ences in form between men and females, but little difference in features ; and of the Hawaiians he wrote that with few ex- ceptions they "have little claim to those peculiarities that distinguish the sex in other countries. There is, indeed, a FASTIDIOUS SENSUALITY IS NOT LOVE 61 more remarkable equality in the size, color, and figure of both sexes, than in most places I have visited." PRIMAKT AND SECONDARY SEXUAL CHABACTERS A most important inference may be deduced from these facts. A man does not, normally, fall in love with a man. He falls in love with a woman, because she is a woman. Now when, as in the cases cited, the men and women differ only in regard to the coarsest anatomical peculiarities known as the primary sexual qualities, it is obvious that their " love " also can consist only of such coarse feelings and longings as these primary qualities can inspire. In other words they can know the great passion only on its sensual side. Love, to them, is (lot a sentiment but an appetite, or at best an instinct for the propagation of the species. Of the secondary sexual qualities — those not absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the species — the first to ap- pear prominently in women is fat ; and as soon as it does appear, it is made a ground of individual preference. Brough Smyth tells us that in Australia a fat woman is never safe from being stolen, no matter how old and ugly she may be. In the chapter on Personal Beauty I shall marshal a number of facts showing that among the uncivilized and Oriental races in general, fat is the criterion of feminine attractive- ness. It is so among coarse men (i.e., most men) even in Europe and America to this day. Hindoo poets, from the oldest times to Kalidasa and from Kalidasa to the present day, laud their heroines above all things for their large thighs — thighs so heavy that in walking the feet make an impression on the ground " deep as an elephant's hoofs." FASTIDIOUS SENSUALITY IS NOT LOVE It is hardly necessary to say that the "love" based on these secondary qualities is not sentimental or romantic. It may, however — and this is a very important point to re- member — be extremely violent and stubborn. In other words. 62 ROMANTIC LOVE— INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE there may be a strong individual preference in love that is entirely sensual. Indeed, lust may be as fastidious as love. Tarquinins coveted Lucretia ; no other woman would have satisfied him. Yet he did not love her. Had he loved her he would have sacrificed his own life rather than offered vio- lence to one who valued her honor more than her life. He loved only himself ; his one object was to please his beloved ego ; he never thought of her feelings and of the conse- quences of his act to her. The literature of ancient Rome, Greece, and Oriental countries is full of such cases of indi- vidualized " love " which, when closely examined, reduce themselves to cases of selfish lust — eagerness to gratify an appetite with a particular victim, for whom the " lover " has not a particle of affection, respect, or sympathy, not to speak of adoration or gallant, self-sacrificing devotion. Unless we have positive evidence of the presence of these traits of unselfish affection, we are not entitled to assume the existence of genuine love ; especially among races that are coarse, unsympathetic, and cruel. TWO STOEIES OF INDIAK LOTE Prom this point of view we must judge two Indian love- stories related by Keating (II., 164-166) : I. A Chippewa named Ogemans, married to a woman called Demoya, fell in love with her sister. When she refused him he affected insanity. His ravings were terrible, and nothing could appease him but her presence ; the moment he touched her hand or came near her he was gentle as they could wish. One time, in the middle of a winter night, he sprang from his couch and escaped into the woods, howling and screaming in the wildest manner ; his wife and her sister followed him, but he refused to be calmed until the sister (Okoj) laid her hand on him, when he became quiet and gentle. This kind of performance he kept up a long time till all the Indians, including the girl, became convinced he was possessed by a spirit which she alone could subdue. So she married him and never after was he troubled by a return of madness. II. A young Canadian had secured the favor of a half- breed girl who had been brought up among the Chippewas FEMININE IDEALS SUPERIOR TO MASCULINE 63 and spoke only their language. Her name was Nisette, and she was the daughter of a converted squaw who, being very pious, induced the young couple to go to an Algonquin vil- lage and get regularly married by a clergyman. Meanwhile the Canadian's love cooled away, and by the time they reached the village he cared no more for the poor girl. Soon thereafter she became the subject of fits and was finally considered to be quite insane. The only lucid intervals she had were in the presence of her inconstant husband. When- ever he came near her, her reason would return, and she would appear the same as before her illness. Flattered by what he deemed so strong an evidence of his influence over her, the Canadian felt a return of kindness toward her, and was finally induced to renew his attentions, which, being well received, they were soon united by a clergyman. Her reason appeared to be restored, and her improving health showed that her happiness was complete. FEMINIKE IDEALS SUPERIOR TO MASCtTLIITE Keating's guide was convinced that in both these cases the insanity was feigned for the selfish purpose of working upon the feelings of the unwilling party. Even apart from that, there is no trace of evidence in either story that the feel- ings of the lovers rose above sensual attachment, though the girl, being half white, might have been capable of an ap- proximation to a higher feeling. Indeed it is among women that such approximations to a higher type of attachment must be sought; for the uncivilized woman's basis of in- dividual preference, while apt to be utilitarian, is less sen- sual than the man's. She is influenced by his manly qual- ities of courage, valor, aggressiveness, because those are of value to her, while he chooses her for her physical charms and has little or no appreciation of the higher feminine qualities. Schoolcraft (V., 612) cites the following as an Indian girl's ideal : " My love is tall and graceful as the young pine wav- ing on the hill — and as swift in his course as the stately deer. His hair is flowing, and dark as the blackbird that floats through the air, and his eyes, like the eagle's, both piercing and bright. His heart, it is fearless and great — and his arm it is strong in the fight." Now it is true that Schoolcraft is 64 ROMANTIC LOVE— INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE a very unreliable witness in such matters, as we shall see in the chapter on Indians. He had a way of taking coarse Ind- ian tales, dressing them up in a fine romantic garb and pre- senting tham as the aboriginal article. An Indian girl would not be likely to compare a man's hair to a blackbird's feathers, and she certainly would never dream of speaking of a " tall and graceful pine waving on the hill." She might, however, compare his swiftness to a deer's, and she might admire his sharp sight, his fearlessness, his strong arm in a fight ; and that is enough to illustrate what I have just said — that her preference, though utilitarian, is less sensual than the man's. It includes mental elements, and as moreover her duties as mother teach her sympathy and devotion, it is not to be won- dered at that the earliest approximations to a higher type of love are on the part of women. SEX IN BODY AND MIND As civilization progresses, the sexes become more and more differentiated, thus affording individual preference an in- finitely greater scope. The stamp of sex is no longer con- fined to the pelvis and the chest, but is impressed on every part of the body. The women's feet become smaller and more daintily shaped than the men's, the limbs more rounded and tapering and less muscular, the waist narrower, the neck longer, the skin smoother, softer, and less hairy, the hands more comely, with more slender fingers, the skeleton more delicate, the stature lower, the steps shorter, the gait more graceful, the features more delicately cut, the eyes more beautiful, the hair more luxuriant and lustrous, the cheeks rounder and more susceptible to blushes, the lips more dain- tily curved, the smile sweeter. But the mind has sex as well as the body. It is still in process of evolution, and too many individuals still approxi- mate the type. of the virago or the effeminate man ; but the time will come for all, as it has already come for many, when a masculine trait in a woman's character will make as disa- greeable an impression as a blacksmith's sinewy arm on the TRUE FEMININITY AND ITS FEMALE ENEMIES 65 body of a society belle would make in a ball-room. To call a woman pretty and sweet is to compliment her ; to call a man pretty and sweet would be to mock or insult him. The an- cient Greeks betrayed their barbarism in amorous matters in no way more conspicuously than by their fondness for coy, efEeminate boys, and their admiration of masculine goddesses like Diana and Minerva. Contrast this with the modem ideal of femininity, as summed up by Shakspere : Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth, Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, But that our soft conditions and our hearts Should well agree with our external parts ? TRUE FEMININITY AND ITS FEMALE ENEMIES A woman's voice differs from a man's not only in pitch but in timbre ; its quality suggests the sex. There is great scope for variety, from the lowest contralto to the highest soprano, as there is in man's from the lowest bass to the highest tenor ; a variety so great that voices differ as much as faces and can be instantly recognized ; but unless it has the proper sexual quality a voice affects us disagreeably. A coarse, harsh voice has marred many a girl's best marriage chances, while, on the other hand, it may happen that " the ear loveth before the eye." Now what is true of the male and female voice holds true of the male and female mind in all its diverse aspects. We expect men to be not only bigger, stronger, taller, har- dier, more robust, but more courageous and aggressive, more active, more creative, more sternly just, than women ; while coarseness, cruelty, selfishness, and pugnacity, though not virtues in either sex, affect us much less repulsively in men than in women, for the reason that the masculine struggle for existence and competition in business foster selfishness, and men have inherited pugnacious instincts from their fighting ancestors, while women, as mothers, learned the lessons of sympathy and self-sacrifice much sooner than men. The dis- tinctively feminine virtues are on the whole of a much higher order than the masculine, which is the reason why they were 66 ROMANTIC LOVE— INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE not appreciated or fostered at so early an epoch. Gentle- ness, modesty, domesticity, girlishness, coyness, kindness, pa- tience, tenderness, benevolence, sympathy, self-sacrifice, de^ mureness, emotionality, sensitiveness, are feminine qualities, some of which, it is true, we expect ajlso in gentlemen ; but their absence is not nearly so fatal to a man as it is to a woman. And as men gradually approach women in patience, tenderness, sympathy, self-sacrifice, and gentleness, - it be- hooves women to keep their distance by becoming still more refined and feminine, instead of trying, as so many of them do, to approach the old masculine standard — one of the strangest aberrations recorded in all social history. Men and women fall in love with what is unlike, not with what is like them. The refined physical and. mental traits which I have described in the preceding paragraphs constitute some of the secondary sexual characters by which romantic love is inspired, while sensual love is based on the primary sexual characters. Havelock Ellis (19) has well defined a secondary sexual character as "one which, by more highly differentiating the sexes, helps to make them more attractive to each other, ^' and so to promote marriages. And Professor Weissmann, famed for his studies in heredity, opens up deep vistas of thought when he declares (II., 91) that " all the nu- merous differences in form and function which characterize sex among the higher animals, all the so-called ' secondary sexual characters,' affecting even the highest mental qualities of mankind, are nothing but adaptations to bring about the union of the hereditary tendencies of two individuals." Nat- ure has been at work on this problem of differentiating the sexes ever since it created the lowest animal organisms, and this fact, which stands firm as a rock, gives us the consoling assurance that the present abnormal attempts to make women masculine by giving them the same education, employments, sports, ideals, and political aspirations as men have, must end in ignominious failure. If the viragoes had their way, men and women would in course of time revert to the condi- tion of the lowest savages, differing only in their organs of generation. How infinitely nobler, higher, more refined and MYSTERIES OF LOVE 67 fascinating, is that ideal whicli wants women to differ from men by every detail, bodily and mental ; to difEer from them in the higher qualities of disposition, of character, of beauty, physical and spiritual, which alone make possible the exist- ence of romantic love as distinguished from lust on one side and friendship on the other. MYSTERIES OF LOVE If these secondary sexual characters could be dfestroyed by the extraordinary — one might almost say criminal — efforts of unsexed termagants to make all women ape men and become like them, romantic love, which was so slow in coming, would disappear again, leaving only sensual appetite, which may be (selfishly) fastidious and intense, but has no depth, duration, or altruistic nobility, and which, when satiated, cares no more for the object for which it had temporarily hungered. It is these secondary sexual characters, with their subtle and end- less variations, that have given individual preference such a wide field of choice that every lover can find a girl after his heart and taste. A savage is like a gardener who has only one kind of flowers to choose between — all of one color too ; whereas we, with our diverse secondary characters, our various intermixtures of nationalities, our endless shades of blonde and brunette, and differences in manners and education can have our choice among the lilies, roses, violets, pansies, dais- ies, and thousands of other flowers — or the girls named after them. Samuel Baker says there are no broken hearts in Africa. Why should there be when individuals are so similar that if a man loses his girl he can easily find another just like her in color, face, rotundity, and grossness ? A civilized lover would mourn the loss of his bride — though he were offered his choice of the beauties of Baltimore — because it would be absolutely impossible to duplicate her. In that last line lies the explanation of one of the mysteries of modern love — its stubborn fidelity to the beloved after the choice has been made. But there is another mystery of indi- vidual preference that calls for an explanation — its capricious- 68 ROMANTIC LOVE— INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE ness, apparent or real, in making a choice — that quality which has made the poets declare so often that " love is blind." On this point much confusion of ideas prevails. Matters are simplified if we first dispose of those numer- ous cases in which the individual preference is only approxi- mate. If a girl of eighteen has the choice between a man of sixty and a youth of twenty, she will, if she exercises a per- sonal preference, take the youth, as a matter of course, though he may be far from her ideal. Such preference is generic rather than individual. Again, in most cases of first love, as I have remarked elsewhere {R. L. P. B., 139) " man falls in love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or woman." Young men and women inherit, from a long series of ancestors, a disposition to love which at puberty reveals itself in vague longings and dreams. The " bump of amativeness," as a phrenologist might say, is like a powder magazine, ready to explode at a touch, and it makes no great difEerence what kind of a match is applied. In later love affairs the match is a matter of more importance. Eobert Burton threw light on the " capriciousness " and accidentality of this kind of (apparent) amorous preference when he wrote that " it is impossible, almost, for two young folks equal in years to live together and not be in love ; " and further he says, sagaciously : " Many a serving man, by reason of this opportunity and importunity, inveigles his master's daughter, many a gallant loves a dowdy, many a gentleman runs after his wife's maids ; many ladies dote upon their men, as the queen in Aristo did upon the dwarf, many matches are so made in haste and they are compelled, as it were by necessity, so to love, which had they been free, come in company with others, seen that variety which many places afford, or compared them to a third, would never have looked upon one another." Such passions are merely pent-up emotions seeking to es- cape one way or another. They do not indicate real, intense preference, but at best an approach to it ; for they are not properly individualized, and, as Schopenhauer pointed out, the differences in the intensity of love-cases depend on their AN ORIENTAL LOVE-STORY 69 different degrees of individualization — an aper^u which this whole chapter confirms. Yet these mere approximations to real preference embrace the vast majority of so-called love- affairs. Genuine preference of the highest type finds its ex- planation in special phases of sympathy and personal beauty which will be discussed later on. What is usually considered the greatest mystery of the amorous passion is the disposition of a lover to " see Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt." "What can Jack have seen in Jill to become infatuated with her, or she in him ?" The trouble with those who so often ask this question is that they fix the attention on the beloved instead of on the lover, whose lack of taste explains everything. The error is of long stand- ing, as the following story related by the Persian poet Saadi (of the thirteenth century) will show (346) * AN ORIENTAL LOVE-STOKT "A king of Arabia was told that Mujnun, maddened by love, had turned his face toward the desert and assumed the man- ners of a brute. The king ordered him to be brought in his presence and he wept and said : ' Many of my friends reproach me for my love of her, namely Laila ; alas ! that they could one day see her, that my excuse might be manifest for me.' The king sent for her and beheld a person of tawny complexion, and feeble frame of body. She appeared to him in a contemptible light, inasmuch as the lowest menial in his harem, or seraglio, surpassed her in beauty and excelled her in elegance. Mujnun, in his sagacity, penetrated what was passing in the king's mind and said : 'It would behove you, King, to contemplate the charms of Laila through the wicket of a Mujnun's eye, in order that the miracle of such a spectacle might be illustrated to you.' " This story was referred to by several critics of my first book as refuting my theory regarding the modernity of true love. They seemed to think, with the Persian poet, that there must be something particularly wonderful and elevated in the feelings of a lover who is indifferent to the usual charms of femininity and prefers ugliness. This, indeed, is the prevalent sentiment on the subject, though the more I '?0 ROMANTIC LOVE— INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE ihink of it, the more absurd and topsy turvy it seems to me. Do we commend an Eskimo for preferring the flavor of ran- cid fish oil to the delicate bouquet of the finest French wine ? Does it evince a particularly exalted artistic sense to prefer a hideous daub to a Titian or Raphael ? Does it betoken a laud- able and elevated taste in music to prefer a vulgar tune to one that has the charms of. a romantic or classical work of ac- knowledged beauty ? Why, then, should we specially extol Mujnun for admiring a woman who was devoid of all femi- nine charms ? The confusion probably arises from fancying that she must have had mental charms to ofEset her ugliness, but nothing whatever is said about such a notion, which, in fact, would have been utterly foreign to the Oriental, purely sensual, way of regarding women. Fix the attention on the man in the story instead of on the woman and the mystery vanishes. Mujnun becomes infatu- ated with an ugly woman simply because he has no taste, no sense of beauty. There are millions of such men the world over, just as there are millions who cannot appreciate choice wines, good music, and fine pictures. Everywhere the ma- jority of men prefer vulgar tunes, glaring chromos, and coarse women — luckily for the women, because most of them are coarse, too. " Birds of a feather flock together " — there you have the philosophy of preference so far as such love-affairs are concerned. How often do we see a bright, lovely girl, with sweet voice and refined manners, neglected by men who crowd around other women of their own rude and vulgar caste ! Most men still are savages so far as the ability to appreciate the higher secondary sexual qualities in women is concerned. But the exceptions are growing more numerous. Among savages there are no exceptions. Eomantic love does not ex- ist among them, both because the women have not the sec- ondary sexual qualities, and because, even if they had them, the men would not appreciate them or be guided by them in their choice of mates. JULIET AND NOTHING BUT JULIET 71 II. MONOPOLISM Whenever she speaks, my ravished ear No other voice but hers can hear, No other wit but hers approve : Tell nie, my heart, if this be love? — Lyttleton. Every lover of nature must have noticed how the sun mo- nopolizes the attention of flowers and leaves. Twist and turn them whichever way you please, on returning afterward you will find them all facing the beloved sun again with their bright corollas and glossy surface. Eomantic love exacts a similar 'monopoly of its devotees. Be their feelings as various, their thoughts as numerous, as the flowers in a garden, the leaves in a forest, they will always be turned toward the be- loved one. JULIET AND NOTHING BUT JULIET A man may have several intimate friends, and a mother may dote on a dozen or more children with equal affection ; but romantic love is a monopolist, absolutely exclusive of all participation and rivalry. A genuine Eomeo wants Juliet, the whole of Juliet, and nothing but Juliet. She monopolizes his thoughts by day, his dreams at night ; her image blends with everything he sees, her voice with everything he heai-s. His imagination is a lens which gathers together all the light and heat of a giant world and focuses them on one brunette or blonde. He is a miser, who begrudges every smile, every look she bestows on others, and if he had his own way he would sail with her to-day to a desert island and change their names to Mr. and Mrs. Kobinson Crusoe. This is not fanciful hyperbole, but a plain statement in prose of a psychological truth. The poets did not exaggerate when they penned such sentiments as these : She was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts, Which terminated all. — Byron. ?3 ROMANTIC LOVE— MONOPOLISM Thou art my life, my love, my heart. The very eyes of me, And hast command of every part. To live and die for thee. — Herrick. Give me but what that ribband bound. Take all the rest the world goes round. — WcUler, But I am tied to very thee By every thought I have ; Thy face I only care to see Thy heart I only crave. — Sedley. I see her in the dewy flowers, Sae lovely sweet and fair : I hear her voice in ilka bird, Wi' music charm the air : There's not a bonnie flower that springs By fountain, shaw, or green ; There's not a bonny bird that sings, But minds me o' my Jean. — Bwrns. For nothing this wide universe I call Save thou, my rose : in it thou art my all. — ShaJcspere, Like Alexander I will reign, And I will reign alone, My thoughts shall evermore disdain A rival on my throne. — Ja/mes Oraha/m. Love, well thou know'st no partnerships allows. Cupid averse, rejects divided vows. — Prior. O that the desert were my dwelling-place, "With one fair spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race And, hating no one, love but only her. — Byron. BUTTBKELT LOVE The imperative desire for an absolute monopoly of one chosen girl, body and soul — and one only — is an essential, in- variable ingredient of romantic love. Sensual love, on the contrary, aims rather at a monopoly of all attractive women — or at least as many as possible. Sensual love is not an ex- clusive passion for one ; it is a fickle feeling which, like a BUTTERFLY LOVE 73 giddy butterfly, flits from flower to flower, forgetting the fra- grance of the lily it left a moment ago in the sweet honey of the clover it enjoys at this moment. The Persian poet Sadi, says {Bustan, 12), " Choose a fresh wife every spring or New Year's Day ; for the almanack of last year is good for noth- ing." Anacreon interprets Greek love for us when he sings : " Can'st count the leaves in a forest, the waves in the sea ? Then tell me how oft I have loved. Twenty girls in Athens, and fifteen more besides ; add to these whole bevies in Co- rinth, and from Lesbos to Ionia, from Caria and from Eho- dos, two thousand sweethearts more. . . , Two thousand did I say ? That includes not those from Syros, from Kanobus, from Creta's cities, where Eros rules alone, nor those from Gadeira, from Bactria, from India — girls for whom I burn." Lucian vies with Anacreon when he makes Theomestus (Dial Amor.) exclaim : "Sooner can'st thou number the waves of the sea and the snowflakes falling from the sky than my loves. One succeeds another, and the new one comes on before the old is off." We call such a thing libertinism, not love. The Greeks had not the name of Don Juan, yet Don Juan was their ideal both for men and for the gods they made in the image of man. Homer makes the king of gods tell his own spouse (who listens without ofEence) of his diverse love-afEairs {Iliad, xiv., 317-337'). Thirteen centuries after Homer the Greek poet Nonnus gives (Aiovuffia/ca, vii.) a catalogue of twelve of Zeus's amours ; and we know from other sources {e.g., Hygin, fab., 155) that these accounts are far from ex- haustive. A complete list would match that yard-long docu- ment made for Don Juan by Leporello in Mozart's opera. A French writer has aptly called Jupiter the " Olympian Don Juan ; " yet Apollo and most of the other gods might lay claim to the same title, for they are represented as equally amorous, sensual, and fickle ; seeing no more wrong in deserting a woman they have made love to, than a bee sees in leaving a flower whose honey it has stolen. Temporarily, of course, both men and gods focus their in- terest on one woman — maybe quite ardently — and fiercely 74 ROMANTIC LOVE— MONOPOLISM resent interferencej as an angry bee is apt to sting when kept from the flower it has accidentally chosen ; but that is a dif- ferent thing from the monopolism of true love. EOMAKTIC STOEIES OV NOK-EOMANTIC LOVE The romantic lover's dream is to marry one particular woman and her alone ; the sensual lover's dream embraces several women, or many. The unromantic ideal of the ancient Hmdoo is romantically illustrated in a story told in the Hitopadesa of a Brahman named Wedasarman. One even- ing someone made him a present of a dish of barley-meal. He carried it to the market hall and lay down in a corner near where a potter had stored his wares. Before going to sleep, the Brahman indulged in these pleasant reveries : " If I sell this dish of meal I shall probably get ten farthings for it. For that I can buy some of these pots, which I can sell again at >a profit ; thus my money will increase. Then I shall begin to trade in betel-nuts, dress-goods and other things, and thus I may bring my wealth up to a hundred thousand. With that I shall be able to mavry four wives, and to the youngest and prettiest of them I shall give my tenderesfc love. How the others will be tortured by jealousy ! But just let them dare to quarrel. They shall know my wrath and feel my club ! " With these words he laid about him with his club, and of course broke his own dish besides many of the potter's wares. The potter hearing the crash, ran to see what was the matter, and the Brahman was ignominiously thrown out of the hall. The polygamous imagination of the Hindoos runs riot in many of their stories. To give another instance : The Katha- koga, orxTreasury of Stories (translated by 0. H. Tawney, 34), includes an account of the adventures of King Kanchana- pura, who had five hundred wives ; and of Sanatkumara who beheld eight daughters of MS^navega and married them. Shortly afterward he married a beautiful lady and her sister. Then he conquered Vajravega and married one hundred maidens. Hindoo books assure us that women, unless restrained} are STORIES OF NON-ROMANTIC LOVE 75 no better than men. We read in the same Hitopadesa that they are like cows — always searching for new herbs in the meadows to graze on. In polyandrous communities the women make good use of their opportunities. Dalton, in his book on the wild tribes of Bengal, tells this quaint story (36) : " A very pretty Dophla girl once came into the station of Luckimpur, threw herself at my feet and in most poetical language asked me to give her protection. She was the daughter of a chief and was sought in marriage and promised to a peer of her father who had many other wives. She would not submit to be one of many, and besides she loved and she eloped with her beloved. This was interesting and romantic. She was at the time in a very coarse travelling dress, but as- sured of protection she took fresh apparel and ornament from her basket and proceeded to array herself, and very pretty she looked as she combed and plaited her long hair and completed her toilette. In the meantime I had sent for the 'beloved,' who had kept in the background, and alas ! how the romance was dispelled when a dual appeared ! She had eloped with two men ! " Every reader will laugh at this denouement, and that laugh is eloquent proof that in saying there can be no real love with- out absolute monopolism of one heart by another I simply formulated and emphasized a truth which we all feel in- stinctively. Dalton's tale also brings out very clearly the world-wide difference between a romantic love-story and a story of romantic love. Turning from the Old World to the New we find stories illus- trating the same amusing disregard of amorous monopolism. Kink, in his book of Eskimo tales and traditions, cites a song which voices the reveries of a Greenland bachelor : "1 am going to leave the country — in a large ship — for that sweet little woman. I'll try to get some beads — of those that look like boiled ones. Then when I've gone abroad — I shall return again. My nasty little relatives — I'll call them all to me — and give them a good thrashing — with a big rope's end. Then I'll go to marry — taking two at once. That darling little creature — shall only wear clothes of the spotted seal-skins, and the other little pet shall have clothes of the young hooded seals." 76 ROMANTIC LOVE— MONOPOLISM Powers (337) tells a tragic tale of the California Indians, which in some respects reminds one of the man who jumped into a bramble-bush and scratched out both his eyes. " Thei-e was once a man who loved two women and wished to marry them. Now these two women were magpies, but they loved him not, and laughed his wooing to scorn. Then he fell into a rage and cursed these two women, and went far away to the North. There he set the world on fire, then made for himself a tule boat, wherein he escaped to sea, and was never seen more.' Belden, who spent twelve years among the Sioux and other Indians, writes (303) : "I once knew a young man who had about a dozen horses he had captured at different times from the enemy, and who fell desperately in love with a girl of nineteen. She loved him in return, but said she could not bear to leave her tribe, and go to a Santee village, unless her two sisters, aged respectively fifteen and seventeen, went with her. Determined to have his sweetheart, the next time the warrior visited the Yankton village he took several ponies with him, and bought all three of the girls from their parents, giving five ponies for them." OBSTACLES TO MONOPOLISM Heriot, during his sojourn among Canadian Indians, be- came convinced from what he saw that love does not admit of divided affections, and can hardly coexist with polygamy (334). Schoolcraft notes the "curious fact" concerning the Indian that after a war " one of the first things he thought of as a proper reward for his bravery was to take another wife." In the chapter entitled " Honorable Polygamy " we saw how, in polygamous communities the world over, monogamy was despised as the "poor man's marriage," and was practised, not from choice, but from necessity. Every man who was able to do so bought or stole several women, and joined the honorable guild of polygamists. Such a custom, enforced by a strong public opinion, created a sentiment which greatly retarded the development of monopolism in sexual love. A young Indian might dream of marrying a certain girl, not. WIVES AND GIRLS IN COMMON 77 however, with a view to giving her his whole heart, but only as a beginning. The woman, it is true, was expected to give herself to one husband, but he seldom hesitated to lend her to a friend as an act of hospitality, and in many cases would hire her out to a stranger in return for gifts. In not a few communities of A§ia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Australia, Africa, and America polyandry prevailed ; that is, the woman was expected to bestow her caresses in turn on two or more men, to the destruction of the desire for exclusive possession which is an imperative ]brait of love. Eowney describes (154) what we might call syndicate marriage which has prevailed among the Meeris of India : " All the girls have their prices, the largest price for the best-looking girl vary- ing from twenty to thirty pigs, and, if one man cannot give so many, he has no objection to take partners to make up the number." According to Julius Caesar, it was customary among the ancient Britons for brothers, and sometimes for father and sons, to have their wives in cdmmon, and Tacitus found evidence of a similar custom among the ancient Germans ; while in some parts of Media it was the ambition of the women to have two or more husbands, and Strabo relates that those who succeeded looked down with pride on their less fortunate sisters. When the Spaniards first arrived at Lanzarote, in South America, they found the women mar- ried to several husbands, who lived with their common spouse in turn each a month. The Tibetans, according to Samuel Turner, look on marriage as a disagreeable duty which the members of a family must try to alleviate by sharing its burdens. The N"air woman in India may have up to ten or twelve husbands, with each of whom she lives ten days at a time. Among some Himalayan tribes, when the oldest brother marries, he generally shares his wife with his younger brothers. WIVES AND GIELS HJT COMMON Of the Port Lincoln Tribe in Australia, Schiirmann says (233) that the brothers practically have their wives in com- mon. " A peculiar nomenclature has arisen from these sin- 78 ROMANTIC LOVE— MONOPOLISM gukf connections ; a woman honors the brothers of the man to whom she is married by the indiscriminate name of hus- bands ; but the men make a distinction, calling their own individual spouses yungaras, and those to whom they have a secondary claim, by right of brotherhood, kartetis." R H. Codrington, a scientifically educated missionary who had twenty-four years' experience on the islands of the Pacific, wrote a valuable book on the Melanesians in which occur the following luminous remarks : "All women who may become wives in marriage, and are not yet appropriated, are to a certain extent looked upon by those who may be their husbands as open to a more or less legitimate intercourse. In fact, appropriation of particular women to their own husbands, though established by every sanction of native custom, has by no means so strong a hold in native society, nor in all probability anything like so deep a foundation in the history of the native people, as the sever- ance of either sex by divisions which most strictly limit the intercourse of men and women to those of the section or sec- tions to which they themselves do not belong. Two proofs or exemplifications of this are conspicuous. (1) There is probably no place in which the common opinion of Melan- esians approves the intercourse of the unmarried youths and girls as a thing good in itself, though it allows it as a thing to be expected and excused ; but intercourse within the limit which restrains from marriage, where two members of the same division are concerned, is a crime, is incest. . . . (2) The feeling, on the other hand, that the intercourse of ■ the sexes was natural where the man and woman belonged to different divisions, was shown by that feature of native hospitality which provided a guest with a temporary wife." Though now denied in some places, " there can be no doubt that it was common everywhere." Nor can there be any doubt that what Codrington here says of the Melanesians applies also to Polynesians, Australians, and to uncivilized peoples in general. It shows that even where monogamy prevails — as it does quite extensively among the lower races* — we must not look for monopolism as a matter of course. The two are very far from being identical. Primitive marriage is not a matter of sentiment but of utility > See Westermarck, Chap, xx., for a list of monogamous peoples. TRIAL MARRIAGES 79 and sensnal greed. Monogamy, in its lower phases, does not exclude promiscuous intercourse before marriage and (with the husband's permission) after marriage. A man ap- propriates a particular woman, not because he is solicitous for a monopoly of her chaste afEections, but because he needs a drudge to cook and toil for him. Primitive marriage, in short, has little in common with civilized marriage except the name — an important fact the disregard of which has led to no end of confusion in anthropological and sociological literature.* TRIAL MAERIAGES At a somewhat higher stage, marriage becomes primarily an institution for raising soldiers for the state or sons to per- form ancestor worship. This is still very far from the modern ideal which makes marriage a lasting union of two loving souls, children or no children. Particularly instructive, from our point of view, is the custom of trial marriage, which has prevailed among many peoples differing otherwise as widely as ancient Egyptians and modern Borneans.' A modern lover would loathe the idea of such a trial marriage, because he feels sure that his love will be eternal and unalterable. He may be mistaken, but that at any rate is his ideal : it includes last- ing monopolism. If a modern sweetheart offered her lover a temporary marriage, he would either firmly and anxiously 'decline it, fearing that she might take advantage of the con- tract and leave him at the end of the year ; or, what is much more probable, his love, if genuine, would die a sudden death, because no respectable girl could make such an offer, and genuine love cannot exist without respect for the beloved, whatever may be said to the contrary by those who know not the difference between sensual and sentimental love. > 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. Westermarok'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. ' For a partial list of peoples who practised trial marriage and frequent divorce see Westermarck, 618-531, and C. Fischer, Ueber die Probenachte der deutschen Bauernmddchen, Leipzig, 1780. 80 ROMANTIC LOVE— MONOPOLISM TWO KOMAN' LOVEKS While I am conyinced that all these things are as stated, J. do not wish to deny that monopolism of a violent kind may and does occur in love which is merely sensual. In fact, I have expressly classed monopolism among those seven in- gredients of love which occur in its sensual as well as its sen- timental phases. For a correct diagnosis of love it is indeed of great importance to bear this in mind, as we might other- wise be led astray by specious passages, especially in Greek and Eoman literature, in which sensual love sometimes reaches a degree of subtility, delicacy, and refinement, which ap- proximate it to sentimental love, though a critical analysis always reveals the difEerence. The two best instances I know of occur in Tibullus and Terence. TibuUus, in one of his finest poems (IV., 13), expresses the monopolistic wish that his favorite might seem beautiful to him only, displeasing all others, for then he would be safe from all rivalry ; then he might live happy in forest solitudes, and she alone would be to him a multitude : Atque utinam posses uni mihi bella yideii ; Displiceas aliis : sic ego tutus ero. Sic ego secretis possum bene vivere silvis Qua nulla huraano sit yia trita pede. ' Tu mihi curarnm requies, tu nocte Tel atra Lumen, et in soils tu mihi turba locis. Unfortunately, the opening line of this poem : Nulla tuum nobis subducet femina lectum, and what is known otherwise of the dissolute character of the poet and of all the women to whom he addressed his verses, make it only too obvious that there is here no question of purity, of respect, of adoration, of any of the qualities which distinguish supersensual love from lust. More interesting still is a passage in the Eunuchus of TWO ROMAN LOVERS 81 Terence (I., 2) which |jjas doubtless misled many careless readers into accepting it as evidence of genuine romantic love, existing two thousand years ago : " What more do I wish ? " asks Phaedria of his girl Thais : " That while at the soldier's side you are not his, that you love me day and night, desire me, dream of me, expect me, think of me, hope for me, take delight in me, finally, be my soul as I am ' yours." Here, too, there is no trace of supersensual, self-sacrificing affection (the only sure test of love) ; but it might be argued that the monopolism, at any rate, is absolute. But when we read the whole play, even that is seen to be mere verbiage and affectation — sentimentality,^ not sentiment. The girl in ques- tion is a common harlot " never satisfied with one lover," as Parmeno tells her, and she answers : " Quite true, but do not bother me"— and her Phaedria, though he talks monopolism, does not feel it, for in the first act she easily persuades him to retire to the country for a few days, while she offers her- self to a soldier. And again, at the end of the play, when he seems at last to have ousted his military rival, the lat- ter's parasite Gnatho persuades him, without the slightest difficulty, to continue sharing the girl with the soldier, be- cause the latter is old and harmless, but has plenty of money, while Phaedria is poor. Thus a passage which at first sight seemed sentimental and romantic, resolves itself into flabby sensualism, with no more moral fibre than the " love " of the typical Turk, as revealed, for instance, in a love song, communicated by Eugene Schuy- ler (I., 135) : " Nightingale ! I am sad ! As passionately as thou lovest the rose, so loudly sing that my loved one awake. Let me die in the embrace of my dear one, for I envy no one. I know that thou hast many lovers ; but what affair of mine is that ? " One of the most characteristic literary curiosities relating to monopolism that I have found occurs in the Hindoo drama, Malavika and Agnimitra (Act V.). While intended very ' For the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality see the chapter on Sensuality, Sentimentality^ and Sentiment. 82 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY seriously, to us it reads for all the ||orld like a polygamons parody by Artemus Ward of Byron's lines just cited (" She was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts. Which terminated all "). An Indian queen having generously be- stowed on her husband a rival to be his second wife, Kausiki, a Buddhist nun, commends her action in these words : " I am not surprised at your magnanimity. If wives are kind and devoted to their husbands they even serve them by bring- ing them new wives, like the streams which become channels for conveying the water of the rivers to the ocean." Monopolism has a watch-dog, a savage Cerberus, whose duty it is to ward ofE intruders. He goes by the name of Jealousy, and claims our attention next. III. JEALOUSY For love, thou know'st, is full of jealousy, — Shakspere. Jealousy may exist apart from sexual love, but there can be no such love without jealousy, potential at any rate, for in the absence of provocation it need never manifest it- self. Of all the ingredien.ts of love it is the most savage and selfish, as commonly witnessed, and we should therefore ex- pect it to be present at all stages of this passion, including the lowest. Is this the case ? The answer depends entirely upon what we mean by jealousy. Giraud-Teulon and Le Bon have held — as did Eousseau long before them — that this pas- sion is unknown among almost all uncivilized peoples, where- as the latest writer on the subject, Westermarck, tries to prove (117) that " jealousy is universally prevalent in the human race at the present day " and that " it is impossible to believe that there ever was a time when man was devoid of that powerful feeling." It seems strange that doctors should disagree so radically on what seems so simple a question ; but we shall see that the question is far from being simple, and that the dispute arose from that old source of confusion, the use of one word for several entirely different things. WOMEN AS PRIVATE PROPERTY 83 EAGB AT RIVALS It Ib among fishes, in the scale of animal life, that jealousy first makes its appearance, according to Romanes. But in animals " jealousy," be it that of a fish or a stag, is little more than a transient rage at a rival who comes in presence of the female he himself covets or has appropriated. This murderous wrath at a rival is a feeling which, as a mat- ter of course a human savage may share with a wolf or an alligator ; and in its ferocious indulgence primitive man places himself on a level with brutes — nay, below them, for in the struggle he often kills the female, which an animal never does. This wrath is not jealousy as we know it ; it lacks a number of essential moral, intellectual, imaginative elements as We shall presently see ; some of these are found in the amorous relations of birds, but not of savages, who are now under discussion. If it is true that, as some authorities be- lieve, there was a time when human beings had, like animals, regular and limited annual mating periods, this rage at rivals must have often assumed the most ferocious aspect, to be followed, as with animals, by long periods of indifference.' WOMElir AS PEIVATE PKOPEKTT It is obvious, however, that since the human infant needs parental care much longer than young animals need it, natural selection must have favored the survival of the off- spring of couples who did not separate after a mating period but remained together some years. This tendency would be further favored by the warrior's desire to have a private drudge or conjugal slave. Having stolen or bought such a "wife" and protected her against wild beasts and men, he would come to feel a sensfe of oivnersMp in her — as in his pri- ' Johnston states (in Schoolcraft, IV., 324) that the wild Indians of Califor- nia had their rutting season as regularly as have the deer and other animals. See also Powers (206) and Westermarck (38). In the Andaman Islands a man and woman remained together only till their child was weaned, when they sep- arated to seek new mates (TVans. Bthnol. Soc, V., 45). 84 ROlvrANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY vate weapons. Should anyone steal his weapons, or, at a higher stage, his cattle or other property, he would be ani- mated by a fierce desire for revenge ; and the same would be the case if any man stole his wife — or her favors. This say- age desire for revenge is tlie second phase' of "jealousy," when women are guarded like other property, encroachment on which impels the owner to angry retaliation either on the thief or on the wife who has become his accomplice. Even among the lowest races, such as the Fuegians and Australians, great precautions are taken to guard women from " robbers." Prom the nature of the case, women are more difficult to guard than any other kind of "movable" property, as they are apt to move of their own accord. Being often married jagainst their will, to men several times their age, they are only too apt to make common cause with the gallant. Powers relates that among the California Indians, a woman was severely punished or even killed by her husband if seen in company with another man in the woods ; and an Australian takes it for granted, says Curr, "that his wife has been un- faithful to him whenever there has been an opportunity for criminality." The poacher may be simply flogged or fined, but he is apt to be mutilated or killed. The " injured hus- band" reserves the right to intrigue with as many women as he pleases, but his wife, being his absolute property, has no rights of her own, and if she follows his bad example he muti- lates or kills her too. HORRIBLE PUITISHirBlSrTS Strangling, stoning, burning, impaling, flaying alive, tear- ing limb from limb, throwing from a tower, burying alive, disemboweling, enslaving, drowning, mutilating, are some of the punishments inflicted by savages and barbarians in all parts of the world on adulterous men or women. Specifica- tions would be superfluous. Let one case stand for a hundred. Maximilian Prinz zu Wied relates (I., 531, 573), that the Ind- ians (Blackfeet), "severely punished infidelity on the part of their wives by cutting ofE their noses. At Fort Macken- ESSENCE OF TRUE JEALOUSY 85 zie we saw a number of women defaced in this hideous man- ner. In about a dozen tents we saw at least half a dozen females thus disfigured." Must we not look upon the state of mind which leads to such terrible actions as genuine jealousy ? Is there any difference between it and the feeling we ourselves know under that name ? There is — a world-wide difference. Take Othello, who though a Moor, acts and feels more like an Englishman. The desire for revenge animates him too : "I'll tear her to pieces," he exclaimed when lago slanders Desdemona — " will chop her into messes," and as for Oassio, Oh, that the slave had forty thousand lives 1 One is too poor, too weak for my revenge. .Ti Arise, black vengeance from the hollow hell, ESSENCE OF TRUE JEALOUSY But this eagerness for revenge is only one phase of his pas- sion. Though it leads him, in a frenzy of despair, to smother his wife, it is yet, even in his violent soul, subordinate to those feelings of wounded honor and outraged affection which consti- tute the essence of true jealousy. When he supposes himself betrayed by his wife and his friend he clutches, as Ulrici re- marks (I., 404), with the blind despair of a shipwrecked man to his sole remaining property — honor : "His honor, as he thinks, demands the sacrifice of the lives of Desdemona and Oassio. The idea of honor in those days, especially in Italy, inevitably required the death of the faith- less wife as well as that of the adulterer. Othello therefore regards it as his duty to comply with this requirement, and, accordingly it is no lie when he calls himself ' an honorable murderer,' doing 'naught in hate, but all in honor.' . . . Common thirst for revenge would have thought only of in- creasing the sufferings of its victim, of adding to its own satisfaction. But how touching, on the other hand, is Othello's appeal to Desdemona to pray and to confess her sins to Heaven, that he may not kill her soul with her body ! Here, at the moment of the most intense excitement, inidie desperate mood of a murderer, his love still breaks forth, and we again see the indestructible nobility of his soul." 86 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY Schlegel erred, therefore, when he maintained that Othello's jealousy was of the sensual, Oriental sort. So far as it led to the murder, it was ; but Shakspere gave it touches which allied it to the true jealousy of the heart of which Schlegel himself has aptly said that it is " compatible with the ten- derest feeling and adoration of the beloved object." Of such tender feeling and adoration there is not a trace in the pas- sion of the Indian who bites off his wife's nose or lower lip to disfigure her, or who ruthlessly slays her for doing once what he does at will. Such expressions as " outraged affection," or "alienated afEection," do not apply to him, as there is no affection in the case at all ; no more than in that of the old Persian or Turk who sews up one of his hundred wives in a sack and throws her into the river because she was starving and would eat of the fruits of the tree of knowledge. This Oriental jealousy is often a "dog-in-the-manger" feeling. The Iroquois were the most intelligent of North American Indians, yet in cases of adultery they punished the woman solely, " who was supposed to be the only offender " (Morgan, 331). Affection is out of the question in such cases, anger at a slave's disobedience, and vengeance, being the predominant feelings. In countries where woman is degraded and en- slaved, as Verplanck remarks (III., 61), "the jealous re- venge of the master husband, for real or imagined evil, is but the angry chastisement of an offending slave, not the terrible sacrifice of his own happiness involved in the victim's punishment. When woman is a slave, a property, a thing, all that jealousy may prompt is done, to use Othello's own distinction, 'in hate' and ' not in love.'" Another equally vital distinction between the jealousy of sav- agery and civilization is indicated in these lines from Othello : I had rather be a toad, And lire upon the vapor of a dungeon, Thau keep a corner in the thing I love For other's uses. And again : I had been happy, if the general camp, Pionera and all, had tasted her sweet body, So I had nothing known. ABSENCE OF MASCULINE JEALOUSY 87 ABSEKCB OF MASCULINE JEALOUSY It is the knowledge, or suspicion, that he has not a monop- oly of his wife that tortures Shakspere's Othello, and consti- tutes the essence of his jealousy, whereas a savage is his exact antipode in that respect ; he cares not a straw if the whole camp shares the embraces of his wife— provided he knows it and is rewarded for it. Wounded pride, violated chastity, and broken conjugal vows — ^pangs which goad us into jealousy — are considerations unknown to him. In other words, his " jeal- ousy " is not a solicitude for marital honor, for wifely purity and affection, but simply a question of lending his property and being paid for it. Thus, in the case of the Blackfeet Indians referred to a moment ago, the author declares that while they mutilated erring wives by cutting off their noses (the Coman- ches and other tribes, down to the Brazilian Botocndos, did the samething), they eagerly offered their wives and daughters in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. In this respect, too, this case is typical. Sutherland found (I., 184) that in regard to twenty-one tribes of Indians out of thirty-eight there was express record of unlimited intercourse before marriage and the loaning or exchanging of wives. In seventeen he "Could not get express information, and in only four was it stated that a chaste girl was more esteemed than an unchaste one. In the chapter on Indifference to Chastity I cited testi- mony showing that in Australia, the Pacific Islands, and among aborigines in general, chastity is not valued as a virtue. There are plenty of tribes that attempt to enforce ft, but for commercial, sensual, or at best, genealogical reasons, not from a regard for personal purity ; so that among all these lower races jealousy in our sense of the word is out of the question. Care must be taken not to be imposed on by deceptive facts and inaccurate testimony. Thus Westermarck says (119) that " in the Pelew Islands it is forbidden even to speak about another man's wife or mention her name. In short, the South Sea Islanders are, as Mr. Macdonald remarks, generally jealous of the chastity of their wives." Nothing could be more mis- 88 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY leading than these two sentences. The men are not jealous of the women's chastity, for they unhesitatingly lend them to other men ; they are "jealous" of them simply as they are of their other movable property. As for the Pelew Islanders in particular, what Westermarck cites from Ymef is quite true ; it is also true that if a man beats or insults a woman he must pay a fine or suffer the death penalty ; and that if he ap- proaches a place where women are bathing he must put them on their guard by shouting. But all these things are mere whimsicalities of barbarian custom, for the Pelew Islanders are notoriously unchaste even for Polynesians. They have no real family life ; they have club-houses in which men con- sort promiscuously with women ; and no moral restraint of any sort is put upon boys and girls, nor have they any idea of modesty or decency.^ (Ploss, II., 416 ; Kotzebue, III., 315.) A century ago Alexander Mackenzie wrote (66) regarding the Knistenaux or Cree Indians of the Northwest : " It does not appear . . . that chastity is considered by them as a virtue ; or that fidelity is believed to be essen- tial to the happiness of wedded life ; though it sometimes happens that the infidelity of a wife is punished by the hus- band«with the loss of her hair, nose, and perhaps life ; such severity proceeds from its having been practised without his permission ; for a temporary exchange of wives is not uncom- mon ; and the offer of their persons is considered as a neces- sary part of the hospitality due to strangers." Of the Natchez Indians Charlevoix wrote (267) : " There is no such thing as jealousy in these marriages ; on the contrary the Natchez, without any ceremony, lend one another their wives." Concerning the Eskimos we read in Bancroft : " They have no idea of morality, and the marriage relation sits so loosely as to hardly excite jealousy in its abuse. Fe- male chastity is held a thing of value only as men hold prop- > The other cases of "jealousy" cited by Westermarok (117-123) are all nega- tived 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 knowl- edge or suspicion of violated chastity and outraged conjugal affection. Anthro- pologists have studied only the lower phases of jealousy, just as they have failed to distinguish clearly between lust and love. ABSENCE OF MASCULINE JEALOUSY 89 erty in it." "A stranger is always provided with a female companion for the night, and during the husband's absence he gets another man to take his place" (I., 81, 80). The evidence collected by him also shows that the Thlinkeets and Aleuts freely exchanged or lent their wives. Of the coast Ind- ians of Southern Alaska and British Columbia, A. P. Nib- lack says {Smithson. Bep., 1888, 347) : "Jealousy being un- known amongst the Indians, and sanctioned prostitution a common evil, the woman who can earn the greatest number of blankets or the largest sum of money wins the admiration of others for herself and a high position for her husband by her wealth.'* In the same government reports (1886, Pt. I.) C. Willoughby writes of the Q:uinault Agency Washington Indians : "In their domestic relations chastity seems to be almost unknown." Of the Chippewayans Hearne relates (129) that it is a very common custom among the men to ex- change a night's lodging with each other's wives. But this is so far from being considered as an a6t which is criminal, that it is esteemed by them* as one of the stirongest ties of friendship between two families.' The Hurons and many other tribes from north to south had licentious festi- vals at which promiscuous intercourse prevailed betraying the absence of jealousy. Of the Tupis of Brazil Southey says (I., 241) : " The wives who found themselves neglected, con- soled themselves by initiating the boys in debauchery. The husbands seem to have known nothing of jealousy." The ancient inhabitants of Venezuela lived in houses big enough to hold one hundred and sixty persons, and Herrera says of them : " They observed no law or rule in matrimony, but took as many wives as they would, and they as many husbands, quitting one another at pleasure, without reckoning any harm done on either part. There was no such thing as jealousy among them, all living as best pleased them, without taking offence at one another." The most painstaking research has failed to reveal to me a single Indian tribe in North or South America that showed a > All these facts, it is hajdly necessary to add, serve as further illustrations to the chapter How Sentiments Change and Grow. 90 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY capacity for real jealousy, that is, anguish based on a sense of violated wifely chastity and alienated affection. The actions represented as due to jealousy are always inspired by the de- sire for revenge, never by the anguish of disappointed affec- tion ; they are done in hate, not in love. A chief who kills or mutilates one of his ten wives for consorting with another man without his consent, acts no more from jealousy, prop- erly so called, than does a father who shoots the seducer of his daughter, or a Western mob that lynches a horse-thief. Among the Australian aborigines killing an intriguing wife is an every-day occurrence, though " chastity as a virtue is absolutely unknown amongst all the tribes of which there are records," as one of the best informed authorities, J. D. Wood, tells us (403). Detailed evidence that the same is true of the aborigines of all the continents will be given in later chap- ters. The natives usually share their females both before and after marriage ; monopoly of body and soul — of which true jealousy is the guardian — is a conception beyond their moral horizon. A few more illustrations may be added. Burton (T. T. 6. L., II., 27) cites a writer who' says that the natives of Sao Paulo had a habit of changing wives for a time, '' alleging, in case of reproof, that they are not able to eat always of the same dish." Holub testifies (II., 83) that in South Africa jealousy " rarely shows itself very prominent- ly ; " and he uses the word in the widest sense. The fierce Masai lend their wives to gwests. The Mpongwe of the Ga- boon Eiver send out their wives — with a club if necessary — to earn the wages of shame (CampiSgne, 192). In Madagascar Ellis (137) found sensuality gross and universal, though con- cealed. Unchastity in either sex was not regarded as a vice, and on the birth of the king's daughter "the whole capital was given up to promiscuous debauchery." According to Mrs. French Sheldon (Anth. Inst., XXI., 360), all along the east coast of Africa no shame attaches to unchastity be- fore marriage. It is needless to add that in all such cases punishment of a wife cannot be prompted by real jealousy for her " chastity." It is always a question of proprietorship. Cameron relates (Across Africa, II., Chap. IV.) that in Urna ABSENCE OF MASCULINE JEALOUSY 91 the chief boasted that he exercised a right to any woman who might please his fancy, when on his journeys about the country. " Morals are very lax throughout the country, and wives are hot thought badly of for being unfaithful ; the worst they may expect being severe chastisement from the injured husband. But he never uses excessive violence for fear of injuring a valuable piece of household furniture." When Dn Chailla travelled through Ashango Land King Qnenqueza rose to receive him. " With the figurative po- liteness of a negro chief, he assured me that his town, his forests, his slaves, his wives, were mine (he was quite sincere with regard to the last ") (19). Asia afEords many instances of the absence of jealousy. Marco Polo already noted that in Thibet, when travellers ar- rived at a place, it was customary to distribute them in the houses, making them temporary masters of all they contained, including the women, while their husbands meanwhile lodged elsewhere. In Kamtschatka it was considered a great insult if a guest refused a woman thus offered him. Most astound- ing of all is what G. E. Eobertson relates of the Kaffirs of Hindu-Kush (553) : "When a woman is discovered in an intrigue, a great outcry is made, and the neighbors rush to the scene with much laughter. A goat is sent for on the spot for a peace-making feast between the gallant and the husband. Of course the neighbors also partake of the feast ; the husband and wife loth look very happy, and so does every one else except the lover, who has to pay for the. goat, and in addition will have to pay six cows later on." Here we see a great value attached apparently to conjugal fidelity, but in reality an utter and ludicrous indifference to it. Asia is also the chief home of polyandry, though, as we saw in the preceding chapter, this custom has prevailed on other continents too. The cases there cited to show the absence of monopoly also prove the absence of jealousy. The effect of polyandry is thus referred to by Colonel King (33) : " A Toda woman often has three or four husbands, who are all brothers, and with each of whom she cohabits a month 92 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY ' at a time. What is more' singular, such men as, by the paucity of women among th? tribe, are prevented from ob- taining a share in a wife, are allowed, with the permission of the frateriial husbands, to become temporary partners with them.' Notwithstaiidihg these singular family arrangements, the greatest harmony appears to prevail among all parties — husbands, wives, and lovers," Whatever' may have been the causes leading to the strange custom of marrying one woman to several men — poverty, the desire to reduce the population in mountainous regions, scar- city of women due to female infanticide, the need of protection of a woman during the absence of one husband^the fact stares us in the face that a race of men who calnily submit to such a disgusting practice cannot know jealousy. So, too, in the cases of jus prim(B noctis (referred to in the chapter oh Indiffer- ence to Chastity), where the men not only submitted to an outrage so damnable to our sense of honor, affection, and monopoly, but actually coveted it as a privilege or a religious blessing and paid for it accordingly. Note once more how the sentiments associated with women and love cshange and grow. Petherick says (151) that among the Hassangeh Arabs, marriages are valid only three or four days, the wives being free the rest of the time to make other alliances. The married men, far from feeling this a grievance, " felt them- selves highly flattered by any attentions paid to their better halves during their free-and-easy days. They seem to take snch attentions as evidence that their wives are attractive." A readiness to forgive trespasses for a consideration is widely prevalent. Powers says that with the California Indians "no •adultery is so flagrant but the husband can be placated with money, at about the same rate that would be paid for mur- der." The Tasmanians illustrate the fact that the same tribes that are the most ferocious in the punishment of secret amours — that is, infringements on their property rights — are often the most liberal in lending their wives. As Bbnwick tells us (72), they felt honored if white men paid attention to them. A circumstance which seems to have puzzled some naive writers : that Australians and Africans have been PERSIAN AND GREEK JEALOUSY 93 known to show less " jealousy " of whites than of their own countrymen, finds an easy explanation in the greater ability of the white man to pay for the husband's complaisance. In some cases, in the absence of a fine, the husband takes his revenge in other ways, subjecting the culprit's wife to the same outrage (as among natives of Guiana and New Cale- donia) or delivering his own guilty (or rather disobedient) wife to young men (as among the Omahas) and then abandon- ing her. The custom of accepting compensation for adultery prevailed also among Dyaks, Mandingoes, Kaffirs, Mongoli- ans, Pahari and other tribes of India, etc. Falkner says (126) that among the Patagonians in cases of adultery the wife is not blamed, but the gallant is punished " unless he atones for the injury by some valuable present. They have so little decency in this respect, that oftentimes, at the com- mand of the wizards, they superstitiously send their wives to the woods to prostitute themselves to the firat person they meet." PERSIAK A-NO GREEK JEALOUSY Enough has been said to prove the incorrectness of Wester- marck's assertion (515) that the lack of jealousy is " a rare ex- ception in the human race." Real jealousy, as a matter of fact, is unknown to the lower races, and even the feeling of revenge that passes by that name is commonly so feeble as to he obliterated by compensations of a more or less trifling kind. When we come to a stage of civilization like that represented by Persians and other Orientals, or by the an- cient Greeks, we find that men are indeed no longer willing to lend their wives. They seem to have a regard for chas- tity and a desire for conjugal monopoly. Other important traits of modern jealousy are, however, still lacking, notably affection. The punishments are hideously cruel ; they are still inflicted "in hate, not in love." In other words, the jealousy is not yet of the kind which may form an ingredient of love. Its essence is still " bloody thoughts and revenge." Reich cites (256) a typical instance of Oriental ferocity to- ward an erring wife, from a book by J. J. Strauss, who relates 94 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY that on June 9, 1671, a Persian avenged himself on his wife for a trespass by flaying her alive, and then, as a warning to other women, hanging up her skin in the house. Strauss saw with his own eyes how the flayed body was thrown into the street and dragged out into a field. Drowning in sacks, throwing from towers, and other fiendish modes of vengeance have prevailed in Persia as far back as historic records go ; and the women, when they got a chance, were no better than the men. Herodotus relates how the wife of Xerxes, having found her husband's cloak in the house of Masista, cut ofE his wife's breasts and gave them to the dogs, besides mutilating her otherwise, as well as her daughter. The monogamous Greeks were not often guilty of such atrocities, but their custom (nearly universal and not confined to Athens, as is often erroneously stated) of locking up their women in the interior of the houses, shutting them off from almost everything that makes life interesting, betrays a kind of jealousy hardly less selfish than that of the savages who dis- posed of their wives as they pleased. It practically made slaves and prisoners of them, quite in the Oriental style. Such a cus- tom indicates an utter lack of sympathy and tenderness, not to speak of the more romantic ingredients of love, such as adora- tion and gallantry ; and it implies a supreme contempt for and distrust of, character in wives, all the more reprehensible be- caiise the Greeks did not value purity ^er se but only for genea- logical reason, as is proved by the honors they paid to the dis- reputable hetairai. There are surprisingly few references to masculine jealousy in Greek erotic literature. The typical Greek lover seems to have taken rivalry as blandly as the hero of Terence's play spoken of in the last chapter, who, after vari^ ous outbursts of sentimentality, is persuaded, in a speech of a dozen lines, to share his mistress with a rich officer. Nor can I see anything but maudlin sentimentality in such con- ceits as Meleager utters in two of his poems {Anthology, 88, 93) in which he expresses jealousy of sleep, for its privilege of closing his mistress's eyes ; and again of the flies which suck her blood and interrupt her slumber. The girl referred to is Zenophila, a common wanton (see No. 90). This is the PERSIAN AND GREEK JEALOUSY 95 sensual side of the Greek jealousy, chastity being out of the question. The purely genealogical side of Greek masculine jealousy is strikingly revealed in the Medea of Euripides. Medea had, after slaying her own brother, left her country to go with Jason to Corinth. Here Jason, though he had two children by her, married the daughter of the King Creon. With brutal frankness, but quite in accordance with the selfish Greek ideas, he tries to explain to Medea the motives for his second marriage : that they might all dwell in comfort instead of suffering want, "and that I might rear my sons as doth befit my house ; further, that I might be the father of brothers for the chil- dren thou hast borne, and raise these to the same high rank, uniting the family in one — to my lasting bliss. Thou, in- deed, hast no need of more children, but me it profits to help my present family by that which is to be. Have I mis- carried here ? Not even thou wouldst say so unless a rival's charms rankled in thy bosom. No, but you women have such strange ideas, that you think all is well so long as your married life runs smooth ; but if some mischance occur to ruffle your love, all that was good and lovely erst you reckon as your foes. Yea, men should have begotten children from some other source, no female race existing; thus would no evil ever have fallen on mankind." Jason, Greek-fashion, looked upon a woman's jealousy as mere unbridled lust, which must not be allowed to stand in the way of the men's selfish desire to secure filial worship of their precious shades after death. As Benecke remarks (56) : "For a woman to wish to keep her husband to herself was a sign that she was at once unreasonable and lascivious." The women themselves were trained and persuaded to take this view. The chorus of Corinthian women admonishes Medea : " And if thy lord prefers a fresh love, be not angered with him for that ; Zeus will judge 'twixt thee and him herein." Medea herself says to Jason : " Hadst thou been childless still, I could have pardoned thy desire for this new union." And again : "Hadst thou not had a villain's heart, thou shouldst have gained my consent, then made this match, instead of hiding it from those 96 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY who loved thee " — a sentiment which would seem to us as- tounding and inexplicable had we not became familiar with it in the preceding pages relating to savages and barbarians, by whom what we call infidelity was considered unobjectionable, provided it was not done secretly. By her subsequent actions Medea shows in other ways that her jealousy is entirely of the primitive sort — fiendish revenge proceeding from hate. Of the chorus she asks but one favor : " Silence, if haply I can some way or means devise to avenge me on my husband for this cruel treatment ;" and the chorus agrees : " Thou wilt be taking a just vengeance on thy husband, Medea." Creon, having heard that she had threatened with mischief not only Jason but his bride and her father, wants her to leave the city. She replies, hypocritically : " Fear me not, Creon, my position scarce is such that I should seek to quarrel with princes. Why should I, for how hast thou in- jured me ? Thou hast betrothed thy daughter where thy fancy prompted thee. No, 'tis my husband I hate." But as soon as the king has left her, she sends to the innocent bride a present of a beautifully embroidered robe, poisoned by witchcraft. As soon as the bride has put it on she turns pale, foam issues from her mouth, her eyeballs roll in their sockets, a flame encircles her, preying on her flesh. With an awful shriek she sinks to the earth, past all recognition save to the eye of her father, who folds her in his arms, crying, " Who is robbing me of thee, old as I am and ripe for death ? Oh, my child ! would I could die with thee ! " And his wish is granted, for he " found himself held fast by the fine-spun robe . . . and then ensued a fearful struggle. He strove to rise but she still held him back ; and if ever he pulled with all his might, from off his bones his aged flesh he tore. At last he gave it up, and breathed forth his soul in awful suffering ; for he could no longer master the pain." Not content with this, Medea cruelly slays Jason's children — ^her own flesh and blood — not in a frenzied impulse, for she has meditated that from the begin- ning, but to further glut her revengeful spirit. " I did it," she says to Jason, " to vex thy heart." And when she hears of the effect of the garment she had sent to his bride, she implores PRIMITIVE FEMININE JEALOUSY 97 the messenger, "Be not so hasty, friend, but tell the manner of her death, for thou wonldst give me double joy, if so they perished miserably." PRIMITIVE FEMININE JEALOUSY A passion of which such horrors are a possible outcome may well have led Euripides to write : " Ah me ! ah me ! to mortal man how dread a scourge is love ! " But this passion is not love, or part of love. The horrors of such "jealousy" are often witnessed in modern life, but not where true love — affection — ever had its abode. It is the jealousy of the savage, which still survives, as other low phases of sexual passion do. The records of missionaries and others who have dwelt among savages contain examples of deeds as foul, as irrational, as vin- dictive as Medea's ; deeds in which, as in the play of Euripides, the fury is vented on innocent victims, while the real culprit escapes with his life and sometimes even derives amusement from the situation. In Oneota (187-90), Schoolcraft relates the story of an Indian's wife who entered the lodge when his new bride was sitting by his side and plunged a dagger in her heart. Among the Fuegians Bove found (131) that in polyg- amous households many a young favorite lost her life through the fury of the other wives. More frequently this kind of jealousy vents itself in mutilations. Williams, in his book on the Fijians (152), relates that one day a native woman was asked, "How is it that so many of you women are without a nose ? " The answer was : " It grows out of a plurality of wives. Jealousy causes hatred, and then the stronger tries to cut or bite off the nose of the one she hates." He also relates a case where a wife, jealous of a younger favorite, " pounced on her, and tore her sadly with nails and teeth, and injured her mouth by attempting to slit it open." A woman who had for two years been a member of a polygamous family told Williams that contentions among the women were endless, that they knew no comfort, that the bitterest hatred prevailed, while mutual cursings and recriminations were of daily oc- currence. When one of the wives is so unfortunate as to fall 98 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY under the husband's displeasure too, the others "fall upon her, cuffing, kicking, scratching, and even trampling on the poor creature, so unmercifully as to leave her half dead." Bourne writes (89), that Patagonian women sometimes "fight like tigers. Jealousy is a frequent occasion. If a squaw sus- pects her liege lord of undue familiarity with a rival, she darts upon the fair enchantress with the fury of a wild beast ; then ensues such a pounding, scratching, hair-pulling, as beg- gars description." Meanwhile the gay deceiver stands at a safe distance, chuckling at the fun. The licentiousness of these Indians, he says, is equal to their cruelty. Powers (238) gives this graphic picture of a domestic scene common among the Wintun Indians of California. A chief, he says, may have two or more wives, but the attempt to introduce a second frequently leads to a fight. " The two women dispute for the supremacy, often in a desperate pitched battle with sharp stones, seconded by their respective friends. They maul each other's faces with savage violence, and if one is knocked down her friends assist her to regain her feet, and the brutal combat is renewed until one or the other is driven from the wigwam. The husband stands by and looks placidly on, and when all is over he accepts the situation, retaining in his lodge the woman who has conquered the territory." ABSENCE OF EEMINIiTE JEALOUSY As a rule, however, there is more bark than bite in the conduct of the wives of a polygj,mous household, as is proved by the ease with which the husband, if he cares to, can with words or presents overcome the objections of his first wife to new-comers ; even, for instance, in the case of such advanced barbarians as the Omaha Indians, who are said to have actu- ally allowed a wife to punish a faithless husband — an excep- tion so rare as to be almost incredible. Dorsey says of the Omahas (26) : " When a man wishes to take a second wife he always con- sults his first wife, reasoning thus with her : ' I wish you to have less work to do, so I think of taking your sister, your aunt, or your brother's daughter for my wife. You can then ABSENCE OF FEMININE JEALOUSY 99 have her to aid you with your work/ Should the first wife refuse, the man cannot marry the other woman. Generally no objection is offered, if the second woman be one of the kindred of the first wife. Sometimes the wife will make the proposition to her husband : ' I wish you to marry my brother's daughter, as she and I are one flesh.' " J « Concerning the inhabitants of the Philippine island of Mindanao, a German writer says {Zeit. fur Ethn., 1885, 12) : " The wives are in no way jealous of one another ; on the contrary, they are glad to get a new companion, as that enables them to share their work with another." Schwaner says of the Borneans that if a man takes a second wife he pays to the first the hatu saki, amounting to from sixty to one hundred guilders, and moreover he gives her presents, consisting of clothes, "in order to appease her completely." In reference to the tribes of Western Washing- ton and Northwestern Oregon, Gibbs says (198) : " The accession of a new wife in the lodge very naturally produces jealousy and discord, and the first often returns for a time in dudgeon to her friends, to be reclaimed by her husband when he chooses, perhaps after propitiating her by some presents." Such instances might be multiplied ad libitum. In a still larger number of cases primitive woman's objec- tion to rivals is easily overcome by the desire for the social position, wealth, and comfort which polygamy confers. I have already cited, in the chapter on Honorable Polygamy, a number of typical incidents showing how vanity, the desire to belong to a man who can afford several wives, or the wish to share the hard domestic or field work with others, often smothers the feeling of jealousy so completely that wives laugh at the idea of having their husbands all to themselves, beg them to choose other companions, or even use their own hard-earned money to buy them for their husbands. As this point is of exceptional importance, as evidencing radical changes in the ideas relating to sexual relations — and the resulting feelings themselves — further evidence is admissible. Of the Plains Indians in general Colonel Dodge remarks (20) ; " Jealousy would seem to have no place in the com- 100 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY position of an Indian woman, and many prefer to be, even for a time, the favorite of a man who already has a wife or wives, and who is known to be a good husband and provider, rather than tempt the precarious chances of an untried man." And again : "I have known several Indians of middle age, with already numerous wives and children, who were such favorites with the sex that they might have increased their number of wives to an unlimited extent had they been so disposed, and this, too, from among the very nicest girls of the tribe/' E. E. Smith, in his book on the Araucanians (213-14) tells of a MapuchS wife who, when he saw her, " was frequently accompanied by a younger and handsomer woman than herself, whom she pointed out, with evident satisfaction, as her ' other self ' — that is, her husband's wife number two, a recent addition to the family. Par from being dissatisfied, or entertaining any jealousy toward the new- comer, she said that she wished her husband would marry again ; for she considered it a great relief to have someone to assist her in her household duties and in the mainten- ance of her husband." McLean, who spent twenty-five years among the Tacullies and other Indians of the Hudson Bay region, says (301) that while polygamy prevails "the most perfect harmony seems to subsist among them." Hunter, who knew the Missouri and Arkansas Indians well, says (255) that " jealousy is a passion but little known, and much less indulged, among the Indians." In cases of polygamy the wives have their own lodges, separated by a short distance. They "occasionally visit each other, and generally live on the most friendly terms." But even this separation is not necessary, as we see from Catlin, who relates (I., 119) that among the Mandans it is common to see six or eight wives of a chief or medicine man " living under one roof, and all apparently quiet and contented." In an article on the Zulus {Humanitarian, March, 1897), Miss Colenso refers to the fact that while polygamy is the custom, each wife has her own hut, wherefore "you have none of the petty jealousies and quarrelling which dis-' tinguish the harems of the East, among the Zulu women. ABSENCE OF FEMININE JEALOUSY 101 ■who, as a rule, are most friendly to each other, and the many wives of a great chief will live in a little colony of huts, each mistress in her own house and family, and interchanging friendly visits with the other ladies similarly situated." But in Africa, too, separation is not essential to secure a peaceful result. Paulitschke {B. E. A. 8., 30) reports that among the Somali polygamy is customary, two wives being frequent, and he adds that " the wives live together in harmony and have their household in common." Among the Abyssinian Arabs, Sir Samuel Baker found (127) that "concubinage is not considered a breach of morality ; neither is it regarded by the legitimate wives with jealousy." Chillie {Centr. Afr., 158), says of the Landamas and Nalous : " It is very remark- able that good order and perfect harmony prevail among all these women who are called to share the same conjugal couch." The same writer says of the polygamous Foulahs (224) : "In general the women appear very happy, and by no means jealous of each other, except when the husbands make a present to one without giving anything to the rest." Note the last sentence ; it casts a strong light on our prob- lem. It suggests that even where a semblance of jealousy is manifested by such women it may often be an entirely dif- ferent thing from the jealousy we associate with love ; envy, greed, or rivalry being more accurate terms for it. Here is another instance in point. Drake, in his work on the Indians of the United States has the following (I., 178) : " Where there is a plurality of wives, if one gets finer goods than the others, there is sure to be some quarrelling among the women ; and if one or two of them are not driven oif, it is because the others have not strength enough to do so. The man sits and looks on, and lets the women fight it out. If the one he loves most is driven off, he will go and stay with her, and leave the others to shift for themselves awhile, until they can behave better, as he says." The Eev. Peter Jones gives this description (81) of a fight he witnessed between the two wives of an Ojibway chief : " The quarrel arose from the unequal distribution of a loaf of bread between the children. The husband being absent. 102 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY the wife who had brought the bread to the wigwam gave a piece of it to each child, but the best and largest portion to her own. Such partiality immediately led to a quarrel. The woman who brought the bread threw the remainder in anger to the other ; she as quickly cast it back again ; in this fool- ish way they kept on for some time, till their fury rose to such a height that they at length sprang at one another, catching hold of the hair of the head ; and when each had uprooted a handful their ire seemed satisfied." To make clear the difference between such ebullitions of temper and the passion properly called jealousy, let us briefly sum up the contents of this chapter. In its first stage it is a mere masculine rage in presence of a rival. An Australian fe- male in such a case calmly goes off with the victor. A savage looks upon his wife, not as a person having rights and feel- ings of her own, but as a piece of property which he has stolen or bought, and may therefore do with whatever he pleases. In the second stage, accordingly, women are guarded like other movable property, infringement on which is fiercely resented and avenged, though not from any jealous regard for chastity, for the same husband who savagely punishes his wife for secret adultery, willingly lends her to guests as a mat- ter of hospitality, or to others for a compensation. In some cases the husband's " wounded feelings " may be cured by the payment of a fine, or subjecting the culprit's wife to in- dignities. At a higher stage, where some regard is paid to chastity — at least in the women reserved for genealogical pur- poses — masculine jealousy is still of the sensual type, which leads to the life-long imprisonment of women in order to en- force a fidelity which in the absence of true love could not be secured otherwise. As for the wives in primitive households, they often indulge in " jealous " squabbles, bat their passion, though it may lead to manifestations of rage and to fierce and cruel fights, is after all only skin deep, for it is easily over- come with soft words, presents, or the desire for the social .position and comfort which can be secured in the house of a man who is wealthy enough to marry several women — especial- ly if the husband is rich and wise enough to keep the women in separate lodges ; though even that is often unnecessary. ABSENCE OF FEMININE JEALOUSY 103 There is no difficulty in understanding why primitive fem- inine "jealousy," despite seeming exceptions, should have been so shallow and transient a feeling. Everything con- spired to make it so. From the earliest times the men made systematic efforts to prevent the growth of that passion in women because it interfered with their own selfish desires. Hearne says of the women of the Northern. Indians that " they are kept so much in awe of their husbands, that the liber- ty of thinking is the greatest privilege they enjoy" (310); and A. H. Keane {Journ. of Anthrop. Inst., 1883) remarks that while the Botocudos often indulge in fierce outbreaks of jealousy, " the women have not yet acquired the right to be jealous, a sentiment implying a certain degree of equality between the sexes." Everywhere the women were taught to subordinate themselves to the men, and among the Hindoos as among the Greeks, by the ancient Hebrews as well as by the mediaeval Arabs freedom from jealousy was inculcated as a supreme virtue. Kachel actually fancied she was doing a noble thing in giving her handmaids to Jacob as concubines. Lane (346) quotes the Arab historian El-Jabartee, who said of his first wife : " Among her acts of conjugal piety and sub- mission was this that she used to buy for her husband beauti- ful slave girls, with her own wealth, and deck them with ornaments and apparel, and so present them to him, confi- dently looking to the reward and recompense which she should receive [in Paradise] for such conduct." " In case of failure of an heir," says Griffis, in his famous work on Japan (557), " the husband is fully justified, often strongly advised even by his wife, to take a handmaid to raise up seed to preserve their ancestral line." A Persian instance is given by Ida Pfeiffer (261), who was introduced at Tabreez to the wives of Behmen-Mirza, concerning whom she writes : " They presented to me the latest addition to the harem — a plump brown little beauty of sixteen ; and they seemed to treat their new rival with great good nature and told me how much trouble they had been taking to teach her Persian," 104 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY JEALOUSY PURGED OE HATE Casting back a glance over the gronnd traversed, we see that women as well as men — primitive, ancient, oriental — were either strangers to jealousy of any kind, or else knew it only as a species of anger, hatred, cruelty, and selfish sensuality ; never as an ingredient of love. Australian women, Lumholtz tells us (303), " often have bitter quarrels about men whom they love ^ and are anxious to marry. If the husband is un- faithful, the wife frequently becomes greatly enraged." As chastity is not by Australians regarded as a duty or a virtue, such conduct can only be explained by referring to what Eoth, for instance, says (141) in regard to the Kalkadoon. Among these, where a man may have as many as four or five wives, " the discarded ones will often, through jealousy, fight with her whom they consider more favored ; on such occasions they may often resort to stone-throwing, or even use fire-sticks and stone-knives with which to mutilate the genitals." Sim- ilarly, various cruel disfigurements of wives by husbands or other wives, previously referred to as customary among sav- ages, have their motive in the desire to mar the charms of a rival or a disobedient conjugal slave. The Indian chief who bites ofE an intriguing wife's nose or lower lip takes, moreover, a cruel delight at sight of the pain he infiicts — a delight of which he would be incapable were he capable of love. To such an Indian, Shakspere's lines But O, what damned minutes tells he o'er Who dotes yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves, would be as incomprehensible as a Beethoven symphony. With his usual "genius for condensation, Shakspere has in those two lines given the essentials of true jealousy — suspicion causing agony rather than anger, and proceeding from love, not from hate. The fear, distress, humiliation, anguish of modern jealousy are in the mind of the injured husband. He suffers torments, but has no wish to torment either of the guilty > 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. A VIRTUOUS SIN 105 ones. There are, indeed, even in civilized countries, hus- bands who slay erring wives ; but they are not civilized hus- bands : like Othello, they still have the taint of the savage in them. Civilized husbands resort to separation, not to mutilation or murder ; and in dismissing the guilty wife, they punish themselves more than her — for she has shown by her actions that she does not love him and therefore cannot feel the deepest pang of the separation. There is no anger, no desire for revenge. How comes this gentle concord in the world, That hatred is so far from jealousy? It comes in the world through love — through the fact that a man — or a woman — who truly loves, cannot tolerate even the thought of punishing one who has held first place in his or her affections. Modern law emphasizes the essential point when it punishes adultery because of " alienation of the affec- tions." A VIRTUOUS SIN Thus, whereas the " jealousy " of the savage who is trans- ported by his sense of proprietorship to bloody deeds and to revenge is a most ignoble passion, incompatible with love, the jealousy of modern civilization has become a noble passion, justified by moral ideals and affection — " a kind of godly jealousy which I beseech you call a virtuous sin." Where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy Doth call himself Affection's sentinel. And let no one suppose that by purging itself of bloody violence, hatred, and revenge, and becoming the sentinel of affection, jealousy has lost any of its intensity. On the con- trary, its depth is quintupled. The bluster and fury of sav- age violence is only a momentary ebullition of sensual passion, whereas the anguish of jealousy as we feel it is Agony unmix'd, incessant gall, Corroding every thought, and blasting all Love's paradise. 106 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY Anguisli of mind is infinitely more intense than mere physical pain, and the more cultivated the mind, the deeper is its ca- pacity for such " agony unmix'd." Mental anguish doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw the inwards, and create a condition in which "not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever medicine " the victim to that sleep which he enjoyed before. His heart is turned to stone ; he strikes it and it hurts his hand. Trifles light as air are proofs to him that his suspicions are realities, and life is no longer worth living. O uovr for ever Farewell the tranquil mind ! farewell content ! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars That make ambition virtue ! ABNORMAL STATES The assertion that modern jealousy is a noble passion is of course to be taken with reservations. Where it leads to mur- der or revenge it is a reversion to the barbarous type, and apart from that it is, like all affections of the mind, liable to abnor- mal and morbid states. Harry Campbell writes in the Lancet (1898) that " the inordinate development of this emotion al- ways betokens a neurotic diathesis, and not infrequently indi- cates the oncoming of insanity. It is responsible for much useless suffering and not a little actual disease." Dr. O'Ifeill gives a curious example of the latter, in the same periodical. He was summoned to a young woman who informed him that she wished to be cured of jealousy: "1 am jealous of my husband, and if you do not give me something I shall go out of my mind." The husband protested his innocence and de- clared there was no cause whatever for her accusations : " The wife persisted in reiterating them and so the wrangle went on till suddenly she fell from her chair on the floor in a fit, the spasmodic movements of which were so strange and varied that it would be almost impossible to describe them. At one moment the patient was extended at full length with her body arched forward in a state of opisthotonos. The next minute she was in a sitting position with the legs drawn ABNORMAL STATES 107 np, makingj while her hands clutched her throat, a guttural noise. Then she would throw herself on her back and thrust her arms and legs about to the no small danger of those around her. Then becoming comparatively quiet and supine she would quiver all over while her eyelids trembled with great rapidity. This state perhaps would be followed by general convulsive movements in which she would put herself into the most grotesque postures and make the most unlovely grimaces. At last the fit ended, and exhausted and in tears she was put to bed. The patient was a lithe, muscular woman and to restrain her movements during the attack with the assistance at hand was a matter of impossibility, so all that could be done was to prevent her injuring herself and to sprinkle her freely with cold water. The after-treatment was more geographical than medical. The husband ceased doing business in a certain town where the object of his wife's suspicions lived." I have been told by a perfectly healthy married woman that when jealous of her husband she felt a sensation as of some liquid welling up in her throat and suffocating her. . Pride came into play in part ; she did not want others to think that her husband preferred an ignorant girl to her — a woman of great physical and mental charm. Such jealousy, if unfounded, may be of the " self-harm- ing'' kind of which one of Shakspere's characters exclaims " Fie ! beat it hence ! " Too often, however, women have cause for jealousy, as modern civilized man has not over- come the polygamous instincts he has inherited from his ancestors since time immemorial. But whereas cause for feminine jealousy has existed always, the right to feel it is a modern acquisition. Moreover, while Apache wives were chaste from fear and Greek women from necessity, modern civilized women are faithful from the sense of honor, duty, affection, and in return for their devotion they expect men to be faithful for the same reasons. Their jealousy has not yet become retrospective, like that of the men ; but they justly demand that after marriage men shall not fall below the standard of purity they have set up for the women, and they insist on a conjugal monopoly of the affections as strenuously as the men do. In due course of time, as Dr. Campbell sug- 108 ROMANTIC LOVE— JEALOUSY gests, " we may expect the monogamous instinct in man to be as powerful as in some of the lower animals ; and feminine jealousy will help to bring about this result ; for if women were indifEerent on this point men would never improve. JEALOUSY IN ROMANTIC LOVE The jealousy of romantic love, preceding marriage, differs from the jealousy of conjugal love in so far as there can be no claim to a monopoly of afEection where the very existence of any reciprocated afEection still remains in doubt. Before the engagement the uncertain lover in presence of a rival is tor- tured by doubt, anxiety, fear, despair, and he may violently hate the other man, though (as I know from personal experi- ence) not necessarily, feeling that the rival has as much claim to the girl's attention as he has. Duels between rival lovers are not only silly, but are an insult to the girl, to whom the choice ought to be submitted and the verdict accepted manfully. A man who shoots the girl herself, because she loves another and refuses him, puts himself on a, level be- low the lowest brute, and cannot plead either true love or true jealousy as his excuse. After the engagement the sense of monopoly and the consciousness of plighted troth enter into the lover's feelings, and intruders are properly warded off with indignation. In romantic jealousy the leading r61e is played by the imagination ; it loves to torture its victim by conjuring visions of the beloved smiling on a rival, encircled by his arm, returning his kisses. Everything feeds his sus- picions ; he is " dwelling in a continual 'laram of jealousy." Oft his jealousy " shapes faults that are not " and he taints his heart and brain with needless doubt. " Ten thousand fears invented wild, ten thousand frantic views of horrid rivals, hanging on the charms for which he melts in fond- ness, eat him up." Such passion inflames love but corrodes the soul. In perfect love, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, jealousy is potential only, not actual. WOMEN WHO WOO 109 IV. COYNESS When a man is in love he wears his heart on his sleeve and feels eager to have the beloved see how passionately it throbs for her. When a girl is in love she tries to conceal her heart in the innermost recesses of her bosom, lest the lover discover her feelings prematurely. In other words, coyness is a trait of feminine love — the only ingredient of that passion which is not, to some extent, common to both sexes. " The cruel nymph well knows to feign, . . . coy looks and cold dis- dain," sang Gay ; and " what value were there in the love of the maiden, were it yielded without coy delay ? " asks Scott. 'Tis ours to be forward and pushing; 'Tis yours to affect a disdain, Lady Montagu makes a man say, and Kichard Savage sings : You love ; yet from your lover's wish retire ; Doubt, yet discern ; deny, and yet desire. Such, Polly, are your sex — part truth, part fiction, Some thought, much whim, and all a contradiction. " Part truth, part fiction ; " the girl romances regarding her feelings ; her romantic love is tinged with coyness. " She will rather die than give any sign of affection," says Benedick of Beatrice ; and in that line Shakspere reveals one of the two essential traits of genuine modern coyness — dissemblance of feminine affection. Was coyness at all times an attribute of femininity, or is it an artificial product of modern social conditions and culture? Is coyness ever manifested apart from love, or does its pres- ence prove the presence of love ? These two important ques- tions are to be answered in the present section. woMEif WHO woo The opinion prevails that everywhere and always the first advances were made by the men, the women being passive, and coyly reserved. This opinion — like many other notions regarding the relations of the sexes — rests on ignorance, pure 110 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS ignorance. In collecting the scattered facts bearing on this subject I have been more and more surprised at the number of exceptions to the rule, if, indeed, rule it be. ISTot only are there tribes among whom women must propose — as in the Torres Straits Islands, north of Australia, and with the Garos of India, concerning whom interesting details will be given in later chapters ; but among many other savages and barbarians the women, instead of repelling advances, make them. "In all Polynesia," says Gerland (VI., 137), "it was a common occurrence that the women wooed the men." " A proposal of marriage," writes Gill {Savage Life in -Polynesia, II.), "may emanate with propriety from a woman of rank to an equal or an inferior." In an article on Fijian poetry (731- 53), Sir Arthur Gordon cites the following native poem : The girls of VunlTanna all had lovers, But I, poor I, had not even one. Yet I fell desperately in love one day, My eye was filled with the beauty of Vasunilawedua." Slie ran along the beach, she called the canoe-men. She is conveyed to the town where her beloved dwells. Na Ulumatua sits in his canoe unfastening its gear. He asks her, " Why have you come here, Sovanalasikula? " "They have been falling in love at Vunivanua," she answers; " I, too, have fallen in love. I love your lovely son, Vasunilawedua." Na Ulumatua rose to his feet. He loosened a tambua [whale's tooth] from the canoe. " This," he said, presenting it to her, " is my offering to you for your re- turn. My son cannot wed you, lady." Tears stream from her eyes, they stream down on her breast. " Let me only live outside his house," she says ; " I will sleep upon the wood-pile. If I may only light his seluka [cigar- rette] for him, I shall rejoice. If I may only hear his voice from a distance, it will suffice. Life will be pleasant to me." Na Ulumatua replied, " Be magnanimous, lady, and return. We have many girls of our own. Return to your own land. Vasunilawedua cannot wed a stranger. " Sovanalasikula went away crying. She returned to her own town, forlorn. Her life was sadness. la nam bosulu. WOMEN WHO WOO 111 Tregear (102) describes the " wooing house " in which New Zealand girls used to stand up in the dark and say : "I love so-and-so, I want him for a husband ; " whereupon the chosen lover, if willing, would say yes, or cough to signify his assent. Among the Pueblo Indians ''' the usual order of courtship is reversed ; when a girl is disposed to marry, she does not wait 'for a young man to propose to her, but selects one to her own liking and consults her father, who visits the parents of the youth and acquaints them with his daughter's wishes. It seldom happens that any objections to the match are made " (Bancroft, I., 547) ; and concerning the Spokane Indians the same writer says (276) that a girl " may herself propose if she wishes." Among the Moquis, " instead of the swain asking the hand of the fair one, she selects the young man who is to her fancy, and then her father proposes the match to the sire of the lucky youth " (Schoolcraft, IV., 86). Among the Da- riens, says Heriot (325), " it is considered no mark of for- wardness" in a woman "openly to avow her inclination," and in Paraguay, too, women were allowed to propose (Moore, 261). Indian girls of the Hudson River region " were not debarred signifying their desire to enter matrimonial life. When one of them wished to be married, she covered her face with a veil and sat covered as an indication of her desire. If she attracted a suitor, negotiations were opened with parents or friends, presents given, and the bride taken " (Ruttenber). A comic mode of catching a husband is described in an episode from the tale " Owasso and Wayoond " (Schoolcraft, A. R., II., 210-11) : "Manjikuawis was forward in her advances toward hinj. He, however, paid no attention to it, and shunned her. She continued to be very assiduous in attending to his wants, such as cooking and mending his mocassins. She felt hurt and displeased at his indiiference, and resolved to play him a trick. Opportunity soon offered. The lodge was spacious, and she dug a hole in the ground, where the young man usually sat, covering it very carefully. When the brothers returned from the chase the young man threw himself down carelessly at the usual place, and fell into the cavity, his head and feet remaining out, so that he was unable to ex- 112 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS tricate himselii. ' Ha ! ha ! ' cried Manjikaawis, as she helped him out, ' you are mine, I have caught you at last, and I did it on purpose.' A smile came over the young man's face, and he said, ' So be it, I will be yours ; ' and from that moment they lived happily as man and wife." It was a common thing among various Indian tribes for the women to court distinguished warriors ; and though they might have no choice in the matter, they could at any rate place themselves temptingly in the way of these braves, who, on their part, had no occasion to be coy, since they could marry all the squaws they pleased. The squaws, too, did not hesitate to indulge, if not in two husbands, in more than one lover. Commenting on the Mandans, for instance, Maximilian Prinz zu Wied declares (II., 137) that " coyness is not a virtue of the Indian women ; they often have two or three lovers at a time." Among the Pennsylvania Indians it was a common thing for a girl to make suit to a young man. " Though the first address may be by the man, yet the other is the most common. The squaws are generally very immodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young men to the blush. The men commonly appear to be possessed of much more modesty than the women." (Bancroft, II., 140.) Even a coating of culture does not seem to curb the young squaw's propensity to make the first advances. Captain E. H. Pratt {U. S. Oeol. and G. S., IX., 260), of the Carlisle School, relates an amusing story of a Kiowa young man who, under a variety of circumstances, " never cared for girl. ' But when Laura say she love me, then I began to care for girl.' " In his Mrst Footsteps (85, 86) Burton gives a glimpse of the " coyness " of Bedouin women : " We met a party of Esa girls, who derided my color and doubted the fact of my being a Moslem. The Arabs de- clared me to be a shaykh of shaykhs, and translated to the prettiest of the party an impromptu proposal of marriage. She showed but little coyness and stated her price to be an Andnlli or necklace, a couple of Tobes — she asked one too many — a few handfuls of beads, and a small present for her papa. She promised, naively enough, to call next day and inspect the goods. The' publicity of the town did not deter WOMEN WHO WOO 113 her, bnt the shamef acedness of my two companions prevented our meeting again." In his book on Southern Abyssinia Johnston relates how, while staying at Murroo, he was strongly recommended to follow the example of his companions and take a temporary wife. There was no need of hunting for helpmates — they offered themselves of their own accord. One of the girls who presented herself as a candidate was stated by her friends to be a very strong woman, who had already had four or five hus- bands. " I thought this a rather strange recommendation," he adds, " but it was evidently mentioned that she might find favor in my eyes." He found that the best way out of such a dilemma was to engage the first old hag that came along and leave it to her to ward off the others. Masculine coyness under such conditions has its risks. Johnston mentions the case of an Arab who, in the region of the Muzeguahs, scorned a girl who wanted to be his temporary wife ; whereupon " the whole tribe asserted he had treated them with contempt by his haughty conduct toward the girl, and demanded to know if she was not good enough for him.'* He had to give them some br^ss wire and blue sood before he could allay the na- tional indignation aroused by his refusal to take the girl. Women have rights which must be respected, even in Africa ! In Dutch Borneo there is a special kind of " marriage by stratagem " called matep. If a girl desires a particular man he is inveigled into her house, the door is shut, the walls are hung with cloth of different colors and other ornaments, dinner is served up and he is informed of the girl's wish to marry him. If he declines, he is obliged to pay the value of the hangings and the ornaments. (Roth, II., CLXXXI.) " Uncertain, coy, and hard to please " obviously cannot be sung of such women. In one of the few native Australian stories on record the two wives of a man are represented as going to his brother's hut when he was asleep, and imitating the voice of an emu. The noise woke him, and he took his spear to kill them ; but as soon as he ran out the two women spoke and re- 114 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS quested him to be their husband. (Wood's Native Tribes, 210.) The fact that Australian women have absolutely no choice in the assignment of husbands, must make them inclined to offer themselves to men they like, just as Indian girls offer themselves to noted warriors in the hope of thus calling at- tention to their personal attractions. As we shall see later, one of the ways in which an Australian wins a wife is by means of magic. In this game, as Spencer and Gillen tell us (556), the women sometimes take the initiative, thus in- ducing a man to elope with them. WBKB HEBREW AND GREEK WOMEN COY? The English language is a queer instrument of thought. While coyness has the various meanings of shyness, modest reserve, bashfulness, shrinking from advances or familiarity, disdainfulness, the verb " to coy " may mean the exact op- posite — to coax, allure, entice, woo, decoy. It is in this sense that "coyness" is obviously a trait of primitive maidens. What is more surprising is to find in brushing aside prejudice and preconceived notions, that among ancient nations too it is in this second sense rather than in the first that women are " coy." The Hebrew records begin with the story of Adam and Eve, in which Eve is stigmatized as the temptress. Kebekah had never seen the man chosen for her by her male relatives, yet when she was asked if she would go with his servant, she answered, promptly, " I will go." Eachel at the well, suffers her cousin to kiss her at first sight. Ruth does all the courting which ends in making her the wife of Boaz. There is no shrinking from advances, real or feigned, in any of these cases ; no suggestion of disguised feminine affection ; and in two of them the women make the advances. Potiphar's wife is another biblical case. The word coy does not occur once in the Bible. The idea that women are the aggressors, particularly in criminal amours, is curiously ingrained in the literature of ancient Greece. In the Odyssey we read about the fail-- WERE GREEK WOMEN COY? 115 haired goddess Circe, decoying the companions of Odysseus with her sweet voice, giving them drugs and potions, making them the victims of swinish indulgence of their appetites. When Odysseus comes to their rescue she tries to allure him too, saying, " Nay, then, put up your blade within its sheath, and let us now approach our bed that there we too may join in love and learn to trust each other." Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the Sirens, who are always " casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow," in order to decoy passing sailors. Chary bdis is another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymph Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home " because the nymph pleased him no more." Nor does the human Nausicaa manifest the least coyness when she meets Odysseus at the river. Though he has been cast on the shore naked, she I'emains, after her maids have run away alarmed, and listens to his tale of woe. Then, after seeing him bathed, anointed, and dressed, she exclaims to her wait- ing maids : "Ah, might a man like this be called my hus- band, having his home here and content to stay ; " while to him later on she gives this broad hint : " Stranger, farewell ! when you are once again in your own land, remember me, and how before all others it is to me you owe the saving of your life." Nausicaa is, however, a prude compared with the enamoured woman as the Greek poets habitually paint her. Pausanias (II., Chap. 31), speaking of a temple of Peeping Venus says: " From this very spot the enamoured Phaedra used to watch Hippolytus at his manly exercises. Here still grows the myrtle with pierced leaves, as I am told. For being at her wit's ends and finding no ease from the pangs of love, she used to wreak her fury on the leaves of this myrtle." Profess- or Kohde, the most erudite authority on Greek erotic litera- ture, writes (34) : " It is characteristic of the Greek popular tales which Euripides followed, in what might be called his tragedies of adultery, that they always make the woman the vehicle of the pernicious passion ; it seems as if Greek feeling 116 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS could not conceive of a man being seized by an unmanly soft desire and urged on by it to passionate disregard of all human conventions and laws." MASCULIlfE COYNESS Greek poets from Stesichorus to the Alexandrians are fond of representing coy men. The story told by Athenseus (XIV., ch. 11) of Harpalyke, who committed suicide be- cause the youth Iphiclus coyly spurned her, is typical of a large class. No less significant is the circumstance that when the coy backwardness happens to be on the side of a female, she is usually a woman of masculine habits, devoted to Di- ana and the chase. Several centuries after Christ we still find in the romances an echo of this thoroughly Greek senti- ment in the coy attitude, at the beginning, of their youthful heroes.' The well-known legend of Sappho — who flourished about a thousand years before the romances just referred to were written — is quite in the Greek spirit. It is thus related by Strabo : " There is a white rock which stretches out from Leucas to the sea and toward Cephalonia, that takes its name from its whiteness. The rock of Leucas has iipon it a temple of Apollo, and the leap from it was supposed to stop love. From this it is said that Sappho first, as Menander says somewhere, in pursuit of the haughty Phaon, urged on by maddening desire, threw herself from its far-seen rocks, imploring thee [Apollo], lord and king." Pour centuries after Sappho we find Theocritus harping on the same theme. His Enchantress is a monologue in which a woman relates how she made advances to a youth and won him. She saw him walking along the road and was so smitten that she was prostrated and confined to her bed for ten days. Then she sent her slave to waylay the youth, with these in- structions : " If you see him alone, say to him : ' Simaitha ' Bohde, 35, 28, 147. See his list of corroboiative cases in the long footnote, pp. 147-148. MILITARISM AND MEDIEVAL WOMEN 117 desires you,' and bring him here." In this case the youth is not coy in the least ; but the sequel of the story is too bucolic to be told here. SHY BUT NOT COY It is well-known that the respectable women of Greece, es- pecially the virgins, were practically kept under lock and key in the part of the house known as the gynaikonitis. This re- sulted in making them shy and bashful — but not coy, if we may judge from the mirror of life known as literature. Kam- dohr observes, pertinently (III., 370) : "Eemarkable is the easy triumph of lovers over the innocence of free-born girls, daughters of citizens, examples of which may be found in the Eunuchus and Adelphi of Terence. They call atten- tion to the low opinion the ancients had of a woman's power to guard her sensual impulses, and of her own accord resist attacks on her honor." The Abbe Dubois says the same thing about Hindoo girls, and the reason why they are so carefully guarded. It is hardly necessary to add that since no one would be so foolish as to call a man honest who refrains from stealing merely because he has no opportunity, it is equally absurd to call a woman honest or coy who refrains from vice only because she is locked up all the time. The fact (which seems to give Westermarck (64^65) much satis- faction), that some Australians, American Indian and other tribes watch young girls so carefully, does not argue the pre- valence of chaste coyness, but the contrary. If the girls had an instinctive inclination to repel improper advances it would not be necessary to cage and watch them. This inclination is not inborn, does not characterize primitive women, but is a result of education and culture. MILITARISM AN^D MEDIEVAL WOMEN Greatly as Greeks and Indians differ in some respects, they have two things in common — a warlike spirit and contempt for women. " When Greek meets Greek then comes a tug of war," and the Indian's chief delight is scalp hunting. 118 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS The Greeks, as Eohde notes (42), " depict their greatest heroes as incited to great deeds only by eagerness for battle and desire for glory. The love of women barely engages their attention transiently in hours of idleness." Militarism is ever hostile to love except in its grossest forms. It brutalizes the men and prevents the growth of feminine qualities, coyness among others. Hence, wherever militarism prevails, we seek in vain for feminine reserve. An interesting illustration of this may be found in a brochure by Theodor Krabbes, Die Frau im Altfranzbsischen Karls-Hpos (9-38). The author, basing his inferences on an exhaustive study and comparison of the Chansons de Geste of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, draws the following general conclusions : " Girlish shyness is not a trait of the daughters, least of all those of heathen origin. Masculine tendencies characterize them from childhood. Fighting pleases them and they like to look on when there is a battle. . . . Love plays an important r61e in nearly all the Chansons de Geste. . . . The woman wooes, the man grants : nearly always in these epics we read of a woman who loves, rarely of one who is loved. ... In the very first hour of their acquaintance the girl is apt to yield herself entirely to the chosen knight, and she persists in her passion for him even if she is entirely repulsed. There is no more rest for her. Either she wooes him in person, or chooses a messenger who invites the coveted man to a rendezvous. The heathen woman who has to guard captured Franks and who has given her heart to one of them, hies herself to the dungeon and offers him her love. She begs for his love in return and seeks in every way to win it. If he resists, she curses him, makes his lot less endurable, withholds his food or threatens him with death until he is willing to accede to her wishes. If this has come to pass she overwhelms him with caresses at the first meeting. She is eager to have them reciprocated ; often the lover is not tender enough to please her, then she repeatedly begs for kisses. She embraces him delightedly even though he be in full armor and in presence of all his companions. Girlish shyness and modest backwardness are altogether foreign to her nature. . . . She never has any moral scruples. . . . If he is unwilling to give up hiif campaign, she is satisfied to let him go the next morning if he will only marry her. " The man is generally described as cold in love. Kefer- WHAT MADE WOMEN COY? 119 ences to a knight's desire for- a woman's love are very scant, and only once do we come across a hero who is qnite in love. The young knight prefers more serious matters ; his first de- sire is to win fame in battle, make rich booty.' He looks on love as superfluous, indeed he is convinced that it inca- pacitates him from what he regards as his proper life-task. He also fears the woman's infidelity. If he allows her to persuade him to love, he seeks material gain from it ; deliv- ery from captivity, property, vassals. . . . The lover is often' tardy, careless, too deficient in tenderness, so that the- woman has to chide him and invite his caresses. A rendez- vous is always brought about only through her efforts, and she alone is annoyed if it is disturbed too soon. Even when the man desires a woman, he hardly appears as a wooer. He knows he is sure of the women's favor ; they make it easy for him ; he can have any number of them if he belongs to a noble family. . . . Even when the knight is in love — which is very rare — the first advances are nearly always made by the woman ; it is she who proposes marriage. " Marriage as treated in the epics is seldom based on love. The woman desires wedlock, because she hopes thereby to secure her rights and better her chances of protection. It is for this reason that we see her so often eagerly endeavoring to secure a promise of marriage. " WHAT MADE WOMBK COT ? SuflBcient evidence has now been adduced to make it clear that the first of the two questions posed at the outset of this chapter must be answered in the negative. Coyness is not an innate or universal trait of femininity, but is often absent, particularly where man's absorption in war and woman's need of protection prevent its growth and induce the females to do the courting. This being the case and war being the normal state of the lower races, our next task is to ascertain what were the influences that induced woman to adopt the habit of repelling advances instead of making them. It is one of the most interesting questions in sexual psychology, which has never been answered satisfactorily ; it and gains additional interest from the fact that we flnd among the 1 Compare this with what Bohde says (43) about the Homeric heroes and their complete absorption in warlike doings. 120 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS most ancient and primitive races phenomena which resemble coyness and have been habitually designated as such. As we shall see in a moment, this is an abuse of language, confound- ing genuine resistance or aversion with coyness. Chinese maidens often feel so great an aversion to marriage as practised in their country that they prefer suicide to it. Douglas says (196) that Chinese women often ask English ladies, " Does your husband beat yoa ? " and are surprised if answered "No." The gallant Chinaman calls his wife his "dull thorn," and there are plenty of reasons apart from Confucian teachings why "for some days before the date fixed, the bride assumes all the panoply of woe, and weeps and wails without ceasing." She i^ about to face the terrible ordeal of being confronted for the first time with the man who has been chosen for her, and who may be the ugliest, vilest wretch in the world — possibly even a leper, such cases being on record. Douglas (124) reports the case of six girls who committed suicide together to avoid marriage. There exist in China anti-matrimonial societies of girls and young widows, the latter doubtless, supplying the experience that serves as the motive for establishing such associations. Descending to the lowest stratum of human life as wit- nessed in Australia, we find that, as Meyer asserts (11), the bride appears " generally to go very unwillingly " to the man she has been assigned to. Lumholtz relates that the man seizes the woman by the wrists and carries her off " despite her screams, which can be heard till she is a mile away." " The women," he says, "always make resistance; for they do not like to leave their tribe, and in many in- stances they have the best of reasons for kicking their lovers." What are these reasons ? As all observers testify, they are not allowed any voice in the choice of their husbands. They are usually bartered by their father or brothers for other women, and in many if not most cases the husbands assigned to them are several times their age. Before they are assigned to a particular man the girls indulge in promiscuous inter- course, whereas after marriage they are fiercely guarded. They may indeed attempt to elope with another man more CAPTURING WOMEN 121 suited to their age, but they do so at the risk of cruel injury and probable death. The wives have to do all the drudgery ; they get only such food as the husbands do not want, and on the slightest suspicion of intrigue they are maltreated hor- ribly. Causes enough surely for their resistance to oblig- atory marriage. This resistance is a frank expression of gen- uine unwillingness, or aversion, and has nothing in common with real coyness, which signifies the mere semblance of un- willingness on the part of a woman who is at least half-will- ing. Such expressions as Goldsmith's " the coy maid, half willing to be pressed," and Dryden's When the kind nymph would coyness feign, And hides but to be found again, indicate the nature of true coyness better than any definitions. There are no " coy looks," no "feigning" in the actions of an Australian girl about to be married to a man who is old enough to be her grandfather. The " cold disdain " is real, not assumed, and there is no "dissemblance of feminine affection." CAPTUKIlirG WOMEN The same reasoning applies to the customs attending wife- capturing in general, which has prevailed in all parts of the world and still prevails in some regions. To take one or two instances of a hundred that might be cited from books of travel in all parts of the world : Columbus relates that the Caribs made the capture of women the chief object of their expeditions. The California Indians worked up their warlikeb spirit by chanting a song the substance of which was, " let us go and carry off girls " (Waitz, IV., 242). Savages everywhere have looked upon women as legitimate spoils of war, desirable as concubines and drudges. Now even primitive women are attached to their homes and relatives, and it is needless to say their resistance to the enemy who has Just slain their father and brothers and is about to carry them off to slavery, is gen- nine, and has no more trace of coyness in it than the actions 122 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS of an American girl who resists the efforts of unknown kid- nappers to drag her from her home. But besides real capture of women there has existed, and still exists in many countries, what is known as sham-capt- ure — a custom which has puzzled anthropologists sorely. Herbert Spencer illustrates it (P. S., I., § 288) by citing Crantz, who says, concerning the Eskimos, that when a damsel is asked in marriage, she " directly falls into the greatest apparent consternation, and runs out of doors tearing her hair ; for single women always affect the utmost bashfulness and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they should lose their reputation for modesty." Spencer also quotes Burckhardt, who describes how the bride among Sinai Arabs defends herself with stones, even though she does not dislike the lover ; " for according to cus- tom, the more she struggles, bites, kicks, cries, and strikes, the more she is applauded ever after by her own companions." During the procession to the husband's camp " decency ob- liges her to cry and sob most bitterly." Among the Arau- canians of Chili, according to Smith (215) "it is a point of honor with the bride to resist and struggle, however willing she may be." While conceding that "the manners of the inferior races do not imply much coyness," Spencer, nevertheless, thinks " we cannot suppose coyness to be wholly absent." He holds that in the cases just cited coyness is responsible for the resistance of the women, and he goes so far as to make this coyness " an important factor," in accounting for the custom of marriage by capture which has prevailed among so .many peoples in all parts of the world. Westermarck de- clares (388) that this ^suggestion can scarcely be disproved, and Grosse (105) echoes his judgment. To me, on the con- trary, it seems that these distinguished sociologists are put- ting the cart before the horse. They make the capture a sequence of "coyness," whereas in truth the coyness (if it may be so called) is a result of capture. The custom of wife capture can be easily explained without calling in the aid of what we have seen to be so questionable a thing as primitive THE COMEDY OF MOCK CAPTURE 123 female coyness. Savages capture wives as the most coveted spoils of war. They capture them, in other instances, be- cause polygamy and female infanticide have disturbed the equilibrium of the sexes, thus compelling the young men to seek wives elsewhere than in their own tribes ; and the same result is brought about (in Australia, for instance), by the old men's habit of appropriating all the young women by a system of exchange, leaving none for the young men, who, therefore, either have to persuade the married women to elope — at the risk of their lives — or else are compelled to steal wives else- where. In another very large number of cases the men stole brides — willing or unwilling — to avoid paying their parents for them. THE COMEDY OF MOCK CAPTURE Thus the custom of real capture is easily accounted for. What calls for an explanation is the sham capture and resist- ance in cases where both the parents and the bride are per- fectly willing. Why should primitive maidens who, as we have seen, are rather apt than not to make amorous advances, repel their suitors so violently in these instances of mock capture ? Are they, after all, coy — more coy than civilized maidens ? T.o answer this question let us look at one of Spencer's witnesses more carefully. The reason Crantz gives for the Eskimo women's show of aversion to marriage is that they do it, "lest they lose their reputation for modesty." Now modesty of any kind is a quality unknown to Eskimos. Nansen, Kane, Hayes, and other explorers have testified that the Eskimos of both sexes take off all their clothes in their warm subterranean homes. Captain Beechey has described their obscene dances, and it is well-known that they consider it a duty to lend their wives and daughters to guests. Some of the native tales collected by Eink (336-37 ; 405) indicate most unceremonious modes of courtship and nocturnal frolics, which do not stop even at incest. To suppose that women so utterly devoid of moral sensibility could, of their own accord and actuated by modesty and bashfulness manifest such a coy aversion to marriage that force has to be resorted to, is mani- 124 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS festly absurd. In attributing their antics to modesty, Crantz made an error into which so many explorers have fallen — that of interpreting the actions of savages from the point of view of civilization — an error more pardonable in an unsophisti- cated traveller of the eighteenth century than in a modern sociologist. If we must therefore reject Herbert Spencer's inference as to the existence of primitive coyness and .its consequences, how are we to account for the comedy of mock capture ? Several writers have tried to crack the nut. Sutherland (I., 200) holds that sham capture is not a survival of real capture, but " the festive symbolism of the contrast in the character of the sexes — courage in the man and shyness in the woman" — a fantastic suggestion which does not call for discussion, since, as we know, the normal primitive woman is anything but shy. Abercromby (I., 454) is another writer who believes that sham capture is not a survival of real capture, but merely a result of the innate general desire on the part of the men to display courage — a view which dodges the one thing that calls for an explanation — the resistance of the women. Grosse indulges in some curious antics (105-108). First he asks : " Since real capture is everywhere an exception and is looked on as punishable, why should the semblance of capture have ever become a general and approved custom ?" Then he asks, with a sneer, why sociology should be called upon to answer such questions anyhow ; and a moment later he, nevertheless, attempts an answer, on Spencerian lines. Among inferior races, he remarks, women are usually coveted as spoils of war. The captured women become the wives or concubines of the warriors and thus represent, as it were, trophies of their valor. Is it not, therefore, inevitable that the acquisi- tion of a wife by force should be looked on, among warlike races, as the most honorable way of getting her, nay, in course of time, as the only one worthy of a warrior ? But since, he continues, not all the men can get wives in that way, even among the rudest tribes, these other men consoled themselves with investing the peaceful home-taking of a bride also with the show of an honorable capture. WHY THE WOMEN RESIST 125 In other words, Grosse declares on one page that it is absurd to derive approved sham capture from real capture because real capture is everywhere exceptional only and is always con- sidered punishable ; yet two pages later he argues that sham capture is derived from real capture because the latter is so honorable ! As a matter of fact, among the lowest races known, wife-stealing is not considered honorable. Kegarding the Australians, Curr states distinctly (I., 108) that it was not encouraged because it was apt to involve a whole tribe in war for one man's sake. Among the North American Indians, on the other hand, where, as we saw in the chapter on Honorable Polygamy, a wife-stealer is admired by both men and women, sham capture does not prevail. Grosse's argument, therefore, falls to the ground. WHY THE WOMEN RESIST Prior to all these writers Sir John Lubbock advanced (98) still another theory of capture, real and sham. Believing that men once had all their wives in common, he declares that "capt- ure, and capture alone, could originally give a man the right to monopolize a woman to the exclusion of his fellow-clans- men ; and that hence, even after all necessity for actual capt- ure had long ceased, the symbol remained ; capture having, by long habit, come to be received as a necessary preliminary to marriage." This theory has the same shortcoming as the others. While accounting for the capture, it does not ex- plain the resistance of the women. In real capture they had real reasons for kicking, biting, and howling, but why should they continue these antics in cases of sham capt- ure ? Obviously another factor came into play here, which has been strangely overlooked — parental persuasion or com- mand. Among savages a father owns his daughter as abso- lutely as his dog ; he can sell or exchange her at pleasure ; in Australia, "swapping" daughters or sisters is the commonest mode of marriage. Now, stealing brides, or eloping to avoid having to pay for them, is of frequent occurrence everywhere among uncivilized races. To protect themselves against such 12'6 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS loss of personal property it must have occurred to parents at an early date that it would be wise to teach their daughters to resist all suitors until it has become certain that their inten- tions are honorable — that is, that they intend to pay. In course of time such teaching (strengthened by the girls' pride at being purchased for a large sum) would assume the form of an inviolable command, having the force of a taboo and, with the stubbornness peculiar to many social customs, persisting long after the original reasons have ceased to exist. In other words, I believe that the peculiar antics of the brides in cases of sham capture are neither due to innate fem- inine coyness nor are they a direct survival of the genuine resistance made in real capture ; but that they are simply a result of parental dictation which assigns to the bride the rdle she must play in the comedy of " courtship." I find numerous facts supporting this view, espacially in Keinsberg- . Diiringsfeld's Hochzeitshuch and Schroeder's Hochzeitsge- irauche der Esten. Describing the marriage customs of the Mordvins, Mainow says that the bridegroom sneaks into the bride's house before daybreak, seizes her and carries her off to where his compan- ions are waiting with their wagons. " Etiquette," he adds, "de- mands that she should resist violently and cry loudly, even if she is entirely in favor of the elopement." Among the Votyaks girl-stealing (kukem) occurs to this day. If the father is un- willing or asks too much, while the young folks are willing, the girl goes to work in the field and the lover carries her off. On the way to Ms house she is cheerful, hut when they reach the lover's house she begins to cry and wail, whereupon she is locked up in a cabin that has no window. The father, having found out where she is, comes and demands payment. If the lover offers too little, the parent plies his whip on him. Among the Ostyaks such elopements, to avoid payment, are frequent. Eegarding the Esthonians, Schroeder says (40) : "When the intermediary comes, the girl must conceal herself in some place until she is either found, with her father's consent, or appears of her own accord." In the old epic QUAINT CUSTOMS 127 " Kalewipoeg," Salme hides in the garret and Linda in the bath-room, and refuse to come out till after mnch coaxing and urging. QUAINT CUSTOMS The words I have italicized indicate the passive r61e played by the girls, who simply carry oat the instructions given to them. The parents are the stage-managers, and they know very well what they want — money or brandy. Among the Mordvins, as soon as the suitor and his friends are seen ap- proaching the bride's house, it is barricaded, and the defend- ers ask, "Who are you?" The answer is, "Merchants." "What do you wish?" "Living goods." "We do not trade !" "We shall take her by force." A show of force is made, but finally the suitors are admitted, after paying twenty kopeks. In Little Russia it is customary to barricade the door of the bride's . house with a wheel, but after offering a bottle of brandy as a "pass" the suitor's party is allowed to enter. Among the Esthonians custom demands (Schroeder, 36), that a comedy like the following be enacted. The intermed- iary comes to the bride's house and pretends that he has lost a cow or a lamb, and asks permission to hunt for it. The girl's relatives at first stubbornly deny having any knowl- edge of its whereabouts, but finally they allow the suitors to search, and the bride is usually found without much delay. In Western Prussia (Berent district), after the bridegroom has made his terms with the bride and her parents, he comes to their house and says: "We were out hunting and saw a wounded deer run into this house. May we follow its tracks ?" Permission is granted, whereupon the men start in pursuit of the bride, who has hidden away with the other village maidens. At last the "hound" — one of the bride- groom's companions — finds her and brings her to the lover. Similar customs have prevailed in parts of Russia, Ron- mania, -Servia, Sardinia, Hungary, and elsewhere. In Old Finland the comedy continues even after the nuptial knot 128 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS has been tied. The bridal couple return each to their home. Soon the groom appears at the bride's house and demands to be admitted. Her father refuses to let him in. A "pass" is thereupon produced and read, and this, combined with a few presents, finally secures admission. In some districts the bride remains invisible even during the wedding-dinner, and it is " good form " for her to let the guests wait as long as possible, and not to appear until after considerable coaxing by her mother. When a Votyak bridegroom comes after the bride on the wedding-day she is denied to him three times. After that she is searched for, dragged from her hiding-place, and her face covered with a cloth, while she screams and struggles. Then she is carried to the yard, placed on a blanket with her face down, and the bridegroom belabors her with a stick on a pillow which has been tied on her back. After that she becomes obedient and amiable. A Mordvin bride must try to escape irom the wagon on the way to the church. In Old Finland the bride was barricaded in her house even after the wedding, and the Island Swedes have the same custom. This burlesque of bridal resistance after marriage occurs also among the wild tribes of India. " After remaining with her husband for ten days only," writes Dal- ton (193), "it is the correct thing for the wife to run away from him, and tell all her friends that she loves him not and will see him no more." The husband's duty is to seek her eagerly. " I have seen a young wife thus found and claimed and borne away, screeching and struggling in the arms of her husband, from the midst of a crowded bazaar. No one inter- feres on these occasions." More than enough has now been said to prove that in cases of sham capture the girls simply follow their village customs blindly. Left to themselves they might act very differently, but as it is, all the girls in each district must do the same thing/ however silly. About the real feelings of the girls these comedies tell ns nothing whatever. "With coyness — that is, a woman's concealment of her feelings toward a man she likes — these actions have no more to do than the man in the moon has with anthropology. Least of all do they tell MERCENARY COYNESS 129 us anything about love, for the girls must all act alike, whether they favor a man or not. Kegarding the absence of love we have, moreover, the direct testimony of Dr. F. Kveutzwald (Schroeder, 233). That marriages are made in heaven is, he declares, true in a certain sense, so far as the Esthonians are concerned ; for "the parties concerned usually play a passive rdle. ..." Love is not one of the requisites, it is an un- known phenomenon." Utilitarianism, he adds, is the basis of their marriages. The suitor tries to ascertain if the girl he wants is a good worker ; to find this out he may even watch her secretly while she is spinning, thrashing, or combing flax. " Most of the men proceed at random, and it is not unusual for a suitor Vho has been refused in one place and another to proceed at once to a third or fourth. . . . Many a bridegroom sees his bride for the first time at the ceremony of the priestly betrothal, and he cannot therefore be blamed for asking : ' Which of these girls is my bride ?'" GEEEK AND ROMAN' MEKCENAKY COYNESS So far our search for that coyness which is an ingredient of modern love has been in vain. At the same time it is obvious that since coyness is widely prevalent at the present day it must have been in the past of use to women, else it would not have survived and increased. The question is : how far down in the scale of civilization do we find traces of it ? The literature of the ancient Greeks indicates that, in a cer- tain phase and among certain classes, it was known to them. True, the respectable women, being always locked up and having no choice in the selecting of their partners, had no occasion for the exercise of any sort of coyness. But the hetairai appear to have understood the advantages of assumed disdain or indifference in making a coveted man more eager in his wooing. In the fifteenth of Lucian's 'Eraipt/col SioXoyot we read about a wanton who locked her door to her lover because he had refused to pay her two talents for the privilege of exclusive possession. In other cases, the poets still feel called upon to teach these women how to 130 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS make men submissive by withholding caresses from them. Thus in Lucian, Pythias exclaims : "To tell the truth, dear Joessa, you yourself spoiled him with your excessive love, which you even allowed him to notice. You should not have made so much of him : men, when they discover that, easily become overweening. Do not weep, poor girl ! Follow my advice and keep your door locked once or twice when he tries to see you again. You will find that that will make him flame up again and become frantic with love and jealousy." In the third book of his treatise on the Art of Love, Ovid advises women (of the same class) how to win men. He says, in substance: "Do not answer his letters too soon ; all delay inflames the lover, pro- vided it does not last too long. . . ■ . What is too readily granted does not long retain love. Mix with the pleasure you give mortifying refusals, make him wait in your door- way ; let him bewail the ' cruel door ; ' let him beg humbly, or else get angry and threaten. Sweet things cloy, tonics are bitter." MODESTY AND COYNESS Feigned unwillingness or indifference in obedience to such advice may perhaps be called coyness, but it is only a coarse primitive phase of that attitude, based on sordid, mercenary motives, whereas true modern coyness consists in an impulse, grounded in modesty, to conceal affection. The germs of Greek venal coyness for filthy lucre may be found as low down as among the Papuan women who, as Bastian notes (Ploss, I., 460) exact payment in shell-money for their caresses. Of the Tongans, highest of all Polynesians, Mariner says (Martin, II., 174) : " It must not be supposed that these women are always easily won ; the greatest attentions and fer- vent solicitations are sometimes requisite, even though there be no other lover in the way. This happens sometimes from a spirit of coquetry, at other times from a dislike to the party, etc." Now coquetry is a cousin of coyness, but in whatever way this Tongan coquetry may- manifest itself (no details are given) it certainly lacks the regard for modesty and chastity which is essential to modern coyness ; for, as the writer just referred to attests, Tongan girls are permitted to indulge in UTILITY OF COYNESS 131 free intercourse before marriage, the only thing liable to cen- sure being a too frequent change of lovers. That the anxious regard for chastity, modesty, decorum, which cannot be present in the coquetry of these Tongan women, is one of the essential ingredients of modern coyness has long been felt by the poets. After Juliet has made her confession of love which Romeo overhears in the dark, she apologizes to him because she fears that he might attribute her easy yielding to light love. Lest he think her too quickly won she " would have frowned and been perverse, and said him nay." Then she begs him trust she'll "prove more true than those that have more cunning to be strange." Wither's "That coy one in the vfinmug, proves a true one being won," expresses the same sentiment. UTILITY OF COYNESS Man's esteem for virtues which he does not always practise himself, is thus responsible, in part at least, for the existence of modern coyness. Other factors, however, aided its growth, among them man's fickleness. If a girl did not say nay (when she would rather say yes), and hold back, hesitate, and delay, the suitor would in many cases suck the honey from her lips and flit away to another flower. Cumulative experience of man's sensual selfishness has taught her to be slow in yielding to his advances. Experience has also taught women that men are apt to value favors in proportion to the diSiculty of winning them, and the wisest of them have profited by the lesson. Callimachus wrote, two hundred and fifty years before Christ, that his love was " versed in pursuing what files (from it), but flits past what lies in its mid path " — a conceit which the poets have since echoed a thousand times. Another very im- portant thing that experience taught women was that by de- ferring or withholding their caresses and smiles they could make the tyrant man humble, generous, and gallant. Girls who do not throw themselves away on the first man who hap- pens along, also have an advantage over others who are less fastidious and coy, and by transmitting their disposition to 132 ROMANTIC LOVE— COYNESS their daughters they give it greater vogue. Female coyness prevents too hasty marriages, and the girls who lack it often live to repent their shortcomings at leisure. Coyness pro- longs the period of courtship and, by keeping the suitor in suspense and doubt, it develops the imaginative, sentimental side of love. HOW WOMEN' PROPOSE Sufficient reasons, these, why coyness should have gradually become a general attribute of femininity. Nevertheless, it is an artificial product of imperfect social conditions, and in an ideal world women would not be called upon to romance about their feelings. As a mark of modesty, coyness will always have a charm for men, and a woman devoid of it will never inspire genuine love. But what I have elsewhere called "^ spring-chicken coyness " — the disposition of European girls to hide shyly behind their mammas — as chickens do under a hen at the sight of a hawk — is losing its charm in face of the frank confidingness of American girls in the presence of gen- tlemen ; and as for that phase of coyness which consists in con- cealing affection for a man, girls usually manage to circum- vent it in a more or less refined manner. Some girls who are coarse, or have little control of their feelings, propose bluntly to the men they want. I myself have known several such cases, but the man always refused. Others have a thousand subtle ways of betraying themselves without actually "giving themselves away." A very amusing story of how an ingeni- ous maiden tries to bring a young man to bay has been told by Anthony Hope. Dowden calls attention to the fact that it is Juliet " who proposes and urges on the sudden marriage." Eomeo has only spoken of love ; it is she who asks him, if his purpose be marriage, to send her word next day. In Troihis and Cressida (III., 3), the heroine exclaims : But, though I loved you well, I woo'd you not ; And yet, good faith, I wished myself a man, Or that we women had men's privilege Of speaking first. AMOROUS ANTITHESES 133 In his Old Virginia (II., 127) John Fiske tells a funny story of how Parson Camm was wooed. A young friend of his, who had been courting Miss Betsy Hansford of his parish, asked him to assist him with his eloquence. The parson did so by citing to the girl texts from the Bible enjoining matri- mony as a duty. But she beat him at his own game, telling him to take his Bible when he got home and look at 2 Sam. xii. 1, which would explain her obduracy. He did so, and found this : " And Nathan said to David, thou art the man." The parson took the hint — and the girl. V. HOPE AND DESPAIR— MIXED MOODS She never told her love ; But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek : she pined in thought ; And, ■vrith a green and yellow melancholy, She sat, like Patience on a monument. Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed t asks Viola in ^s You Like It. It loas love indeed ; but only two phases of it are indicated in the lines quoted — coy- ness ("She never told her love") and the mixture of emotions ("smiling at grief"), which is another characteristic of love. Romantic love is a pendulum swinging perpetually between hope and despair. A single unkind word or sign of indifEer- ence may make a lover feel the agony of death, while a smile may raise him from the abyss of despair to heavenly heights of bliss. As Goethe puts it : Himmehoch jauchzend Zum Tode betriibt, Gliicklich allein 1st die Seele die liebt. AMOROUS ANTITHESES When a Marguerite plucks the petals of a marguerite, mut- tering "he loves me — rhe loves me not," her heart flutters in momentary anguish with every "not," tiU the next petal soothes it again. 134 ROMANTIC LOVE— MIXED MOODS I cannot bound a. pitch above dull woe ; Under love's heavy burden do I sink, wails Borneo ; and again : Why then, O brawling love ! loving hate ! O anything, of nothing first create ! O heavy lightness ! serious vanity ! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms ! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health ! Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs ; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes ; Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears ; What is it else? a madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet. In commenting on Eomeo, who in his love for Eosaline in- dulges in emotion for emotion's sake^ and " stimulates his fancy with the sought-out phrases, the curious antitheses of the amorous dialect of the period," Dowden writes : " Mrs. Jameson has noticed that in All's Well that Ends Well (I., 180-89), Helena mockingly reproduces this style of amor- ous antithesis. Helena, who lives so effectively in the world of fact, is contemptuous toward all unreality and affecta- tion." Now, it is quite true that expressions like " cold fire " and " sick health" sound unreal and affected to sober minds, and it is also true that many poets have exercised their emulous ingenuity in inventing such antitheses just for the fun of the thing and because it has been the fashion to do so. Never- theless, with all their artificiality, they were hinting at an emotional phenomenon which actually exists. Eomantic love is in reality a state of mind in which cold and heat may and do alternate so rapidly that "cold fire" seems the only proper expression to apply to such a mixed feeling. It is lit- erally true that, as Bailey sang, " the sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love;" literally true that "the sweets of love are washed with tears," as Carew wrote, or, as H. K. White ex- pressed it, " 'Tis painful, though 'tis sweet to love." A man COURTSHIP AND IMAGINATION 135 who has actually experienced the feeling of uncertain loye sees nothing unreal or affected in Tennyson's The cruel madness of lore The honey of poisoned flowers, or in Drayton's 'Tis nothing to be plagued in hell But thus in heaven tormented, or in Dryden's I feed a flame within, which so torments me That it both pains my heart, and yet enchants me : 'Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it, That I had rather die than once remove it, or in Juliet's Good-night ! good-night ! parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good-night till it be morrow. This mysterious mixture of moods, constantly maintained through the alternations of hope and doubt, elation and de- spair. And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng as Coleridge puts it ; or Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet ; Where pleasures mixed with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear as Swift rhymes it, is thus seen to be one of the essential and most characteristic ingredients of modern romantic love. COURTSHIP AND IMAGINATION' Here, again, the question confronts us. How far down among the strata of human life can we find traces of this ingredient of love ? Do we find it among the Eskimos, for instance ? Nansen relates (II., 317), that "In the old Greenland days marriage was a simple and speedy affair. If a man took a fancy to a 136 ROMANTIC LOVE— MIXED MOODS girl, he merely went to her home or tent, caught her by the hair or anything else which offered a hold, and dragged her off to his dwelling without further ado." Nay, in some cases, eyen this unceremonious "courtship" was perpetrated by proxy ! The details regarding the marriage customs of lower races already cited in this volunie, with the hundreds more to be given in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader that primitive courtship — where there is any at all — is habitually a " simple and speedy affair " — not always as simple and speedy as with, Hansen's Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and play of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains. Fancy the difference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I., 161), "thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn," and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the inferno because a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him so happy that he would not change places with a king, unless his beloved were to be queen. Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguish and rapture, because they have no imag- ination. It is only when the imagination comes into play that we can look for the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, that help to make up the sum and substance of romantic love. EFFECTS OF SElfSUAL LOVE At the same time it would be a great mistake to assume that the manifestation of mixed moods proves the presence of romantic love. After all, the alternation of hope and despair which produces those bitter-sweet paradoxes of the varying and mixed emotions, is one of the selfish aspects of passion : the lover fears or hopes for himself, not for the other. There is, therefore, no reason why we should not read of troubled or ecstatic lovers in the poems of the ancient writers, who, while knowing love only as selfish lustj nevertheless had sufficient imagination to suffer the agonies of thwarted pur- pose and the delights of realized hopes. As a boat-load of shipwrecked sailors, hungry and thirsty, may be switched from deadly despair to frantic joy by the approach of a res- EFFECTS OF SENSUAL LOVE 137 cuing vessel, so may a man change his moods who is swayed by what is, next to hunger and thirst, the most powerful and imperious of all appetites. We must not, therefore, make the reckless assumption that the Greek and Sanscrit writers must have known romantic love, because they describe men and women as being prostrated or elated by strong passion. When Euripides speaks of love as being both delectable and painful ; when Sappho and Theocritus note the pallor, the loss of sleep, the fears and tears of lovers ; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim, at sight of Leucippe : " I was overwhelmed by conflicting feelings : admiration, astonishment, agitation, shame, assurance ; " when King Pururavas, in the Hindoo drama, Urvasi is tormented by doubts as to whether his love is reciprocated by the celestial Bayadere (apsara) ; when, in il/aZa^i, a love-glance is said to be " anointed with nectar and poison - " when the arrows of the Hindoo gods of love are called hard, though made of flowers ; burning, though not in contact with the skin ; voluptuous, though piercing — when we come across such symptoms and fancies we have no right as yet to infer the existence of romantic love ; for all these things also characterize sensual passion, which is love only in the sense of se^-love, whereas, romantic love is af- fection tov. another — a distinction which will be made more and more manifest as we proceed in our discussion of the in- gredients of love, especially the last seven, which are altruistic. It is only when we find these altruistic ingredients associated with the hopes and fears and mixed moods that we can speak of romantic love. The symptoms referred to in this para- graph tell us about selfish longings, selfish pleasures and selfish pains, but nothing whatever about afEection for the person who is so eagerly coveted. VI. HYPEEBOLE As long as love was supposed to be an uncompounded emotion and no distinction was made between appetite and sentiment — that is between the selfish desire of eroticism and 138 ROMANTIC LOVE— HYPERBOLE the self-sacrificing ardor of altruistic affection — it was natural enough that the opinion should have prevailed that love has been always and everywhere the same, inasmuch as several of the traits which characterize the modem passion — stubborn preference for an individual, a desire for exclusive possession, jealousy toward rivals, coy resistance and the resulting mixed moods of doubt and hope — were apparently in existence in earlier and lower stages of human development. We have now seen, however, that these indications are deceptive, for the reason that lust as well as love can be fastidious in choice, in- sistent on a monopoly, and jealous of rivals ; that coyness may spring from purely mercenary motives, and that the mixed moods of hope and despair may disquiet or delight men and women who know love only as a carnal appetite. We now take up our sixth ingredient — Hyperbole — which has done more than any other to confuse the minds of scholars as regards the antiquity of romantic love, for the reason that it presents the passion of the ancients in its most poetic and romantic aspects. GIELS ANT) FLOWEES Amorous hyperbole may be defined as obvious exaggeration in praising the charms of a beloved girl or youth ; Shakspere speaks of " exclamations hyperbolical . . . praises sauced with lies." Such " praises sauced with lies " abound in the verse and prose of Greek and Roman as well as Sanscrit and other Oriental writers, and they assume as diverse forms as in modern erotic literature. The commonest is that in which a girl's complexion is compared to lilies and roses. The Cy- clops in Theocritus tells Galatea she is " whiter than milk . . . brighter than a bunch of hard grapes." The mis- tress of Propertius has a complexion white as lilies ; her cheeks remind him of " rose leaves swimming on milk." liilia non domina sunt magis alba mea ; TJt Moeotica nix minio si certet Eboro, Utque rosae puro lacte natant folia. (II., 2.) EYES AND STARS 139 Achilles Tatius wrote that the beauty of Leucippe's counte- nance " might vie with the flowers of the meadow ; the nar- cissus was resplendent in her general complexion, the rose blushed upon her cheek, the dark hue of the violet sparkled in her eyes, her ringlets curled more closely than do the clusters of the ivy — her face, therefore, was a reflex of the meadows." The Persian Hafiz declares that "the rose lost its color at sight of her cheeks and the jasmines silver bud turned pale." A beauty in the Arabian Nights, however, turns the tables on the flowers. " Who dares to liken me to a rose ? " she exclaims. " Who is not ashamed to declare that my bosom is as lovely as the fruit of the pomegranate-tree ? By my beauty and grace ! by my eyes and black hair, I swear that any man who repeats such comparison shall be banished from my presence and killed by the separation ; for if he finds my figure in the ban-tree and my cheeks in the rose, what then does he seek in me ?" This girl spoke more profoundly than she knew. Flowers are beautiful things, but a spot red as a rose on a cheek would suggest the hectic flush of fever, and if a girl's complexion were as white as a lily she would be shunned as a leper. In hyperbole the step between the sublime and the ridiculous is often a very short one ; yet the rose and lily simile is perpe- trated by erotic poets to this day. EYES AND STARS The eyes are subjected to similar treatment, as in Lodge's lines Her eyes are sapphires set in snow Resembling heaven by every wink. Thomas Hood's Kuth had eyes whose " long lashes veiled a light that had else been all too bright." Heine saw in the blue eyes of his beloved the gates of heaven. Shakspere and Fletcher have : And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn ! 140 ROMANTIC LOVE— HYPERBOLE When Eomeo exclaims : Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. . . . her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night, he excels, both in fancy and in exaggeration, all the ancient poets ; hut it was they who began the practice of likening eyes to bright lights. Ovid declares {Met., I., 499) that Daph- ne's eyes shone with a fire like that of the stars, and this has been a favorite comparison at all times. Tibullus assures us (IV., 2) that " when Cupid wishes to inflame the gods, he lights his torches at Sulpicia's eyes." In the Hindoo drama Malati and Madhava, the writer commits the extravagance of making Madhava declare that the white of his mistress's eyes suffuses him as with a bath of milk ! Theocritus, Tibullus ( " candor erat, qualem praefert La- tonia Luna"), Hafiz, and other Greek, Eoman, and Oriental poets are fond of comparing a girl's face or skin to the splen- dors of the moon, and even the sun is none too bright to suggest her complexion. In the Arabian MgMs we read : " If I look upon the heaven methinks I see the sun fallen down to shine below, and thee whom I desire to shine in his place." A girl may, indeed, be superior to sun and moon, as we see in the same book : " The moon has only a few of her charms ; the sun tried to vie with her but failed. Where has the sun hips like those of the queen of my heart ? " An un- answerable argument, surely ! LOCKS AND FKAGRAITCE When William Allingham wrote : "Her hair's the brag of Ireland, so weighty and so fine," he followed in the wake of a hundred poets, who had made a girl's tresses the object of amorous hyperbole. Dianeme's " rich hair which wantons with the love-sick air " is a pretty conceit. The fanciful notion that a beautiful woman imparts her sweetness to the POETIC DESIRE FOR CONTACT 141 air, especially with the fragrance of her hair, occurs frequent- ly in the poems of Hafiz and other Orientals. In one of these the poet chides the zephyr for having stolen its sweetness while playing with the beloved's loose tresses. In another, a youth declares that if he should die and the fragrance of his beloved's locks were wafted over his grave, it would bring him back to life. Ben Jonson's famous lines to Celia : I sent thee late a rosy wreath, Not so much honoring thee As giving it a hope that there It could not withered be ; But thou thereon did'st only breathe And sent'at it back to me ; Since when it grows, and smells, I swear, Not of itself but thee ! are a free imitation of passages in the Love Letters (N"os. 30 and 31) of the Greek Philostratus : " Send me back some of the roses on which you slept Their natural fragrance will have been increased by that which you imparted to them." This is a great improvement on the Persian poets who go into raptures over the fragrant locks of fair women, not for their inherent sweetness, however, but for the artificial perfumes used by them, including the disgusting musk ! "Is a caravan laden with musk returning from Khoten ?" sings one of these bards in describing the approach of his mistress. POETIC DESIRE FOB CONTACT Besides such direct comparisons of feminine charms to flowers, to sun and moon and other beautiful objects of nature, amorous hyperbole has several other ways of expressing itself. The lover longs to be some article of dress that he might touch the beloved, or a bird that he might fly to her, or he fancies that all nature is love-sick in sympathy with him. Borneo's See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand ! O, that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek ! 142 ROMANTIC LOVE— HYPERBOLE is varied in Heine's poem, where the lover wishes he were a stool for her feet to rest on, a cushion for her to stick pins in, or a curl-paper that he might whisper his secrets into her ears ; and in Tennyson's dainty lines : It is the miller's daughter, And she is grown so dear, so dear. That I would be the jewel That trembles at her ear ; For hid in ringlets day and night I'd touch her neck so warm and white. And I would be the girdle About her dainty, dainty waist, And her heart would beat against me In sorrow and in rest ; And I should know if it beat right, I'd clasp it round so close and tight. And I would be the necklace. And all day long to fall and rise Upon her balmy bosom With her laughter or her sighs, And I would be so light, so light, I scarce should be unclasped at night. Herein, too, our modern poets were anticipated by the ancients. Anacreon wishes he were a mirror that he might reilect the image of his beloved ; or the gown she wears every day ; or the water that laves her limbs ; or the balm that anoints her body ; or the pearl that adorns her neck ; or the cloth that covers her breast ; or the shoes that are trodden by her feet. The author of an anonymous poem in the Greek Anthology wishes he were a breath of air that he might be received in the bosom of .his beloved ; or a rose to be picked by her hand and fastened on her bosom. Others wish they were the water in the fountain from which a girl drinks, or a dolphin to carry her on its back, or the ring she wears. After the Hindoo Sakuntala has lost her ring in the river the poet expresses surprise that the ring should have been able to separate itself from that hand. The Cyclops of Theocritus NATURE'S SYMPATHY WITH LOVERS 143 wishes he had been bom with the gills of a fish so that he might dive into the sea to visit the nymph Galatea and kiss her hands should her mouth be refused. One of the goat- herds of the same bucolic poet wishes he were a bee that he might fly to the grotto of Amaryllis. From such fancies it is but a short step to the " were I a swallow, to her I would fly " of Heine and other modern poets. natueb's sympathy with lovees In the ecstasy of his feeling Eosalind's lover wants to have her name carved on every tree in the forest ; but usually the lover assumes that all things in the forests, plants or ani- mals, sympathize with him even without having his beloved's name thrust upon them. For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And, thou away, the very birds are mute ; Or if they sing, 't is with so dull a cheer. That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near. "Why are the roses so pale?" asks Heine. "Why are the violets so dumb in the green grass ? Why does the lark's song seem so sad, and why have the flowers lost their fragrance ? Why does the sun look down upon the meadows so cold and morose, and why is the earth so gray and desolate ? Why am I ill and melancholy, and why, my love, did you leave me ? " In another poem Heine declares : " If the flowers knew how deeply my heart is wounded, they would weep with me. If the nightingales knew how .sad I am, they would cheer me with their refreshing song. If the golden stars knew my grief, they would come down from their heights to whisper consolation to me." This phase of amorous hyperbole also was known to the an- cient poets. Theocritus (VII., 74) relates that Daphnis was bewailed by the oaks that stood on the banks of the river, and Ovid (151) tells us, in Sappho's epistle to Phaon, that the leafless branches sighed over her hopeless love and the birds stopped their sweet song. Museeus felt that the waters of 144 ROMANTIC LOVE— HYPERBOLE the Hellespont were still lamenting the fate which overtook Leander as he swam toward the tower of Hero. EOMANTIC BUT NOT LOVING If a romantic love-poem were necessarily a poem of ro- mantic love, the specimens of amorous hyperbole cited in the preceding pages would indicate that the ancients knew love as we know it. In reality, however, there is not, in all the ex- amples cited, the slightest evidence of genuine love. A passion which is merely sensual may inspire a gifted poet to the most extravagantly fanciful expressions of covetous admiration, and in all the cases cited there is nothing beyond such sensual admiration. An African Harari compares the girl he likes to "sweet milk fresh from the cow," and considers that coarse remark a compliment because he knows love only as an appetite. A gypsy poet compares the shoulders of his be- loved to "wheat bread," and a Turkish poem eulogizes a girl for being like " bread fried in butter." (Ploss, I., 85, 89.) The ancient poets had too much taste to reveal their amor- ous desires quite so bluntly as an appetite, yet they, too, never went beyond the confines of self-indulgence. When Pro- pertius says a girl's cheeks are like roses floating on milk ; when Tibullus declares another girl's eyes are bright enough to light a torch by ; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover ex- claim : " Surely you must carry about a bee on your lips, they are full of honey, your kisses wound " — what is all this except a revelation that the poet thinks the girl pretty, that her beauty gives him pleasure, and that he tries to express that pleasure by comparing her to some other object — sun, moon, honey, flowers — that pleases his senses ? Nowhere is there the slightest indication that he is eager to give her pleasure, much less that he would be willing to sacrifice his own pleasures for her, as a mother, for instance, would for a child. His hyperboles, in a word, tell us not of love for another but of a self-love in which the other figures only as a means to an end, that end being his own gratification. ROMANTIC BUT NOT LOVING 145 When Anacreon wishes he were the gown worn by a girl, or the water that laves her limbs, or the string of pearls around her neck, he does not indicate the least desire to make her happy, but an eagerness to please himself hy coming in con- tact with her. The daintiest poetic conceit cannot conceal this blunt fact. Even the most fanciful of all forms of amo- rous hyperbole — that in which the lover imagines that all nature smiles or weeps with him — what is it but the most colossal egotism conceivable ? The amorous hyperbole of the ancients is romantic in the sense of fanciful, fictitious, extravagant, but not in the sense in which I oppose romantic love to selfish sensual infatua- tion. There is no intimation in it of those things that dif- ferentiate love from lust — the mental and moral charms of the women, or the adoration, sympathy, and affection of the men. "When one of Goethe's characters says : " My life be- gan at the moment I fell in love with you ; " or when one of Lessing's characters exclaims : " To live apart from her is inconceivable to me, would be my death " — we still hear the note of selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the result of a change in the way of regarding women. Where women are looked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbole cannot be sincere ; it is either nothing but " spruce affectation" or else an illus- tration of the power of sensual love. No ancient author could have written what Emerson wrote in his essay on Love, of the visitations of a power which "made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments ; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory ; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone ; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage. . . . When the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on. . . . When all business seemed an im- pertinence, and all men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures." 146 ROMANTIC LOVE— HYPERBOLE THE POWER OF lOVE In the essay " On the Power of Love," to which I have re- ferred in another place, Lichtenberg bluntly declared he did not believe that sentimental love could make a sensible adult person so extravagantly happy or unhappy as the poets would have us think, whereas he was ready to concede that the sexual appetite may become irresistible. Schopenhauer, on the con- trary, held that sentimental love is the more powerful of the two passions. However this may be, either is strong enough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole in literature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, " speaking in a per- petual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love. " " The major part of lovers," writes Eobert Burton, "are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace, danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow ; yet this furious lust precipitates, coun- terpoiseth, weighs down on the other." Professor Bain, dis- cussing all the human emotions in a volume of 600 pages, declares, regarding love (138), that " the excitement at its highest pitch, in the torrent of youthful sensations and un- gratified desires is probably the most furious and elated ex- perience of human nature." In whatever sense we take this, as referring to sensual or sentimental love, or a combination of the two, it explains why erotic writers of all times make suchlavishuseof superlatives and exaggerations. Their strong feelings can only be expressed in strong language. " Beauty inflicts a wound sharper than any arrow," quoth Achilles Tatius. Meleager declares : " Even the winged Bros in the air became your prisoner, sweet Timarion, because your eye drew him down ; " and in another place : "the cup is filled with joy because it is allowed to touch the beautiful lips of Zenophila. Would that she drank my soul in one draught, pressing firmly her lips on mine " (a passage which Tennyson imitated in " he once drew with one long kiss my whole soul through my lips "). " Not stone only, but steel would be melted by Bros," cried Antipater of Sidon. Burton tells of a cold bath THE POWER OF LOVE 147 that suddenly smoked and was very hot when Ccelia came into it ; and an anonymous modern poet cries : Look yonder, where She washes in the lake 1 See while she swims, The water from her purer limbs New clearness take ! The Persian poet, Saadi, tells the story of a young enam- oured Dervish who knew the whole Koran by heart, but forgot his very alphabet in presence of the princess. She tried to en- courage him, but he only found tongue to say, " It is strange that with thee present I should have speech left me ; " and having said that he uttered a loud groan and surrendered his soul up to God. To lovers nothing seems impossible. They " vow to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers," as Troilus knew. Mephistopheles exclaims : So ein rerliebter Thor verpufft Euch Sonne, Mond und alle' Sterne Zum Zeitvertreib dem Liebchen in die Luft. (Your foolish lover squanders sun and moon and all the stars to entertain his darling for an hour.) Eomantic hyper- bole is the realism of love. The lover is blind as to the be- loved's faults, and color-blind as to her merits, seeing them differently from normal persons and all in a rosy hue. She really seems to him superior to every one in the world, and he would be ready any moment to join the ranks of the mediaeval knights who translated amorous hyperbole into action, chal- lenging every knight to battle unless he acknowledged the superior beauty of his lady. A great romancer is the lover ; he retouches the negative of his beloved, in his imagination, removes freckles, moulds the nose, rounds the cheeks, refines the lips, and adds lustre to the eyes until his ideal is realized and he sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. For to be wise and love Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above. 148 ROMANTIC LOVE— PRIDE VII. PRIDE I dare not ask a. kiss, I dare not beg a smile, Lest having that or this I might grow proud the while. — Berrick. Let fools great Cupid's yoke disdain, LoTiug their own wild freedom better. Whilst proud of my triumphant chain I sit, and court my beauteous fetter. — Beawmont. COMIC SIDE OF LOVE " There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person beloved," said Bacon ; " and therefore it is well said that it is impossible to love and be wise." Like everything else in this world, love has its comic side. Nothing could be more amusing, surely, than the pride some men and women exhibit at having secured for life a mate whom most persons would not care to own a day. The idealizing process just described is responsible for this comedy ; and a very useful thing it is, too ; for did not the lover's fancy magnify the merits and minify the faults of the beloved, the number of marriages would not be so large as it is. Pride is a great match-maker. " It was a proud night with me," wrote Wal- ter Scott, " when I first found that a pretty young woman could think it worth her while to sit and talk with me hour after hour in a corner of the ball-room, while all the world were capering in our view." Such an experience was enough to attune the heart-strings to love. The youth felt flattered, and flattery is the food of love. A MYSTERY E:^PLAIKED Pride explains some of the greatest mysteries of love. " How could that woman have married such a manikin ? " is a question one often hears. Money, rank, opportunity, lack of taste, account for much, but in many instances it was pride that first opened the heart to love ; that is, pride was the first IMPORTANCE OF PRIDE 149 of the ingredients of love to capitulate, and the others followed suit. Probably that manikin was the first masculine being who ever showed her any attentions. " He appreciates me ! " she mused. " I admire his taste — he is not like other men — I like him — I love him." The compliment of a proposal touches a girl's pride and may prove the entering-wedge of love ; hence the proverbial folly of accepting a girl's first refusal as final. And if she accepts, the thought that she, the most perfect being in the world, prefers him above all men, inflates his pride to the point of exultation ; thenceforth he can talk and think only in " three pil'd hyperboles." He wants all the world to know how he has been distinguished. In a Japanese poem transla- ted by Laf cadio Hearn {G. B. F., 38) a lover exclaims : I cannot hide in my heart the happy knowledge that fills it ; Asking each not to tell, I spread the news all round. IMPORTAN'CE OF PKIDE To realize fully how important an ingredient in love pride is, we need only consider the effect of a refusal. Of all the pangs that make up its agony none is keener than that of wounded pride or vanity. Hence the same lover who, if suc- cessful, wants all the world to know how he has been distin- guished, is equally anxious, in case of a refusal, to keep it a secret. Schopenhauer went so far as to assert that both in the pain of unrequited love and the joy of success, vanity is a more important factor than the thwarting of sensual desires, because only a psychic disturbance can stir us so deeply. Shakspere knew that while there are many kinds of pride, the best and deepest is that which a man feels in his love. Some, he says, glory in their birth, some in their skill, some in their wealth, some in their body's force, or their garments, or horses ; but All these I better in one general best, Thy love is better than high birth to me, Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost, Of more delight than hawks and horses be And having thee, of all men's pride I boast. — Sonnet XOI. 150 ROMANTIC LOVE— PRIDE VARIETIES AND GERMS While amorous pride has also an altruistic aspect in so far as the lover is proud not only of being chosen but also of an- other's perfections, it nevertheless belongs, in the main, in the egoistic group, and there is therefore no reason why we should not look for it in the lower stages of erotic evolution. Pride and vanity are feelings which characterize all grades of human beings from the highest to the lowest. As regards amorous pride, however, it is obvious that the conditions for its exist- ence are not favorable among such aboriginals, e.g., as the Australians. What occasion is there for pride on the part of a man who exchanges his sister or daughter for another man's sister or daughter, or on the part of the female who is thus exchanged ? An American Indian's pride consists not in having won the favor of one particular girl, but in having been able to buy or steal as many women as possible, married or unmarried ; and the bride's pride is proportionate to her lover's prowess in this direction. I need not add that the pride at being a successful squaw-stealer differs not only in degree but in kind from the exultation of a white American lover at the thought that the most beautiful and perfect girl in the world has chosen him above all men as her sole and exclusive sweetheart. Gibbs says (I. , 197-300) of the Indians of Western Wash,- ington and Northwestern Oregon that they usually seek their wives among other tribes than their own. " It seems to be a matter of pride, in fact, to unite the blood of several different ones in their own persons. The expression, I am half Snok- walmu, half Klikatat, or some similar one, is of every-day oc- currence. With the chiefs, this is almost always the case." This feeling, however, is of a tribal kind, lacking the indi- viduality of amorous pride. It would approach the latter if a chief won another chief's daughter in the face of rivalry and felt elated at this feat. Such cases doubtless occur among the Indians. Shooter gives an amusing account of how the African Kaf - firs, when a girl is averse to a marriage, attempt to influence VARIETIES AND GERMS 151 her feelings before resorting to compulsion. " The first step is to speak well of the man in her presence ; the Kraal con- spire to praise him — her mother praises him — all the ad- mirers of his cattle praise him — he was never so praised be- fore." If these praises make her feel proud at the thought of marrying such a man, all is well ; if not, she has to suffer the consequences. It is not likely that this praising practice would prevail were it not sometimes successful. If it ever is, we would have here a germ of amorous pride. Others may be found in Hindoo literature, as in Malati and Madhava, where the intermediary speaks of having dwelt on the lover's merits and rank in the presence of the heroine, in the hope of influencing her. " Extolling the lover's merits " is mentioned as one of the ten stages of love in the Hindoo ars amandi. In Oriental countries in general, where it is difficult or impossible for young men and women to see one another before the wedding-day, the praising of candidates by and to intermediaries has been a general custom. Dr. T. Lobel (9-14) relates that before a Turk reaches the age of twenty-two his parents look about for a bride for him. They send out female friends and intermediaries who "praise and exagger- ate the accomplishments of the young man " in houses where they suspect the presence of eligible girls. These female intermediaries are called kyz-goriidschii or "girl-seers." Having found a maiden that appears suitable, they exclaim, "What a lovely girl! She resembles an angel! What beautiful eyes ! True gazelle-eyes ! And her hair ! Her teeth are like pearls." When the young man hears the reports of this beauty, he forthwith falls in love with her, and, although he has never seen her, declares he "will marry her and no other." A sense of humor is not given to every man : Dr. Lobel remarks seriously that this disproves the slanderous assertion so often made that the Turks are incapable of true love ! In their treatment and estimate of women the ancient Greeks resembled the modern Turks. The poets joined the philosophers in declaring that "nature herself," as Becker 152 ROMANTIC LOVE— PRIDE sums them up (III.j 315), "assigned to woman a position far beneath man." As there is little occasion for pride in having won the favor of so inferior a being, the erotic literature of the Greeks is naturally not eloquent on this subject. Such evidence of amorous pride as we find in it, and in Eoman poetry, is usually in connection with mercenary women. The poets, being poor, had only one way of winning the favor of these wantons : they could celebrate their charms in verse. This aroused the pride of the hetairai, and their grateful caresses made the poets proud at having a means of winning favor more powerful even than money. But with genuine love these feelings have nothing to do. NATUEAL AND AETIFICIAL SYMPTOMS OF LOVE In common with ambition and other strong passions, love has the power of changing a man's character for the time being. One of the speakers in Plutarch's dialogue on love (EpowiKos, 17) declares that every lover becomes generous and magnanimous, though he may have been niggardly before ; but, characteristically enough, it is the love for boys, not for women, that is referred to. A modern lover is aifected that way by love for women. He feels proud of being distin- guished by the preference of such a girl, and on the principle of noblesse oblige, he tries to become worthy of her. This love makes the cowardly brave, the weak strong, the dull witty, 'the prosy poetic, the slouches tidy. Burtpn glows eloquent on this subject (III., 3), confounding, as usual, love with lust. Ovid notes that when Polyphemus courted Galatea the desire to please made him arrange his hair and beard, using the water as a mirror ; wherein the Eoman poet shows a keener sense of the efEect of infatuation than his Greek predecessor, Theocritus, who (Id., XIV.) describes the enamoured Ais- chines as going about with beard neglected and hair dishev- elled ; or than Callimachus, concerning whose love-story of Acontius and Cydippe Mahaffy says {G. L. and T., 339) : " The pangs of the lover are described just as they are described in the case of his [Shakspere's] Orlando — SYMPTOMS OF LOVE 153 dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes, disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit of writing the girl's name on every tree — symptoms which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because they found them in literature, and thought them the spontaneous expression of the grief of love, while they were really the artificial invention of Callimachus and his school, who thus fathered them upon human nature/' Professor Mahaflfy overlooks, however, an important dis- tinction which Shakspere makes. The witty Rosalind de- clares to Orlando, in her bantering way, that "there is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving ' Rosalind ' on their barks ; hangs odes upon haw- thorns and elegies on brambles, all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind . . . he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him." And when Orlando claims that he is that man, she replies, " There is none of my uncle's marks upon you ; he taught me to know a man in love." Orlando : " What were his marks ? " Rosalind : " A lean cheek, which you have not, a blue eye and sunken, which you have not ... a beard neglected, which you have not. . . . Then your hose should be un- gartered, your bonnet unhanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation." Shakspere knew that love makes a man tidy, not untidy, hence Rosalind fails to find the artificial Greek symptoms of love in Orlando, while she admits that he carves her name on trees and hangs poems on them ; acts of which lovers are quite capable. In Japan it is a national custom to hang love- poems on trees. VIII. SYMPATHY " Egotism," wrote Schopenhauer " is a colossal thing ; it overtops the world. For, if every individual had the choice be- tween his own destruction and that of every other person in the world, I need not say what the decision would be in the vast 154 ROMANTIC LOVE— SYMPATHY majority of cases." "Many a man," he declares on another page,' " would be capable of killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as a hyperbole ; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he would have been fully justified in this doubt. An Australian has been known to bait his fish-hook with his own child when no other meat was at hand ; and murders committed for equally trivial and selfish reasons are every-day afEairs among wild tribes. EGOTISM, KAKED OR MASKED Egoism manifests itself in a thousand different ways, often in subtle disguise. Its greatest triumph lies in its having succeeded up to the present day in masquerading as love. Not only many modern egotists, but ancient Egyptians, Per- sians, and Hindoos, Greeks, and Eomans, barbarians and savages, have been credited with love when in reality they manifested nothing but sexual self-love, the woman in the case being valued only as an object without which the be- loved Ego could not have its selfish indulgence. By way of example let us take what Pallas says in his work on Enssia (III., 70) of the Samoyedes : "The wretched women of this nomadic people are obliged not only to do all the house-work, but to take down and erect the huts, pack and unpack the sleigh, and at the same time perform slavish duties for their husbands, who, except on a few amorous evenings, hardly be- stow on them a look or a pleasant word, while expecting them to anticipate all their desires." The typical shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much to prevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if he happened to see a Samoyede on one of these " amorous evenings," that he " loved" his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse that he loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means of gratifying his selfish appetites. In the preced- ' Orundlage der Moral, j 14. DELIGHT IN THE TORTURE OF OTHERS 155 ing pages I endeavored to show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman, individual preference, monopol- ism, jealousy, hope and despair and hyperbolic expression of feeling, yet without giving the slightest indication of love — that is, of affection — for her. It is all egoism, and egoism is the antipode of love, which is a phase of altruism. Not that these selfish ingredients are absent in genuine love. Koman- tic love embraces both selfish and altruistic elements, but the former are subdued and overpowered by the latter, and sexual passion is not love unless the altruistic ingredients are present. It is these altruistic ingredients that we must now consider, beginning with sympathy, which is the entering wedge of altruism. DELIGHT IN THE TOKTITKE OF OTHERS Sympathy means sharing the pains and pleasures of an- other — feeling the other's joys and sorrows as if they were our own, and therefore an eagerness to diminish the other's pains and increase the pleasures. Does uncivilized man ex- hibit this feeling ? On the contrary, he gloats over another's anguish, while the other's joys arouse his envy. Pity for sufi^ering men and animals does not exist in the lower strata of humanity. Monteiro says {A. and C, 134) that the negro " has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or compassion for suffering. A fellow-creature, or animal, writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highly provocative of merriment and enjoyment. I have seen a number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children, stand round, roaring with laugh- ter, at seeing a poor mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and roll about in agony on the ground till a white man put it out of its misery." Cozzens relates (129-30) an instance of Indian cruelty which he witnessed among the Apaches. A mule, with his feet tied, was thrown on the ground. Thereupon two of these savages advanced and commenced with knives to cut the meat from the thighs and fleshy parts of the animal in large chunks, while the poor creature uttered the most terrible cries. N"ot till the meat had been cut clean to the bone did they kill the 156 ROMANTIC LOVE— SYMPATHY beast. And this hideous cruelty was inflicted for no other reason than because meat cut from a live animal " was con- sidered more tender." Custer, who knew the Indian well, describes him as " a savage in every sense of the word ; one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds that of arty wild beast of the desert." In the Jesuit Relations (Vol. XIII., 61) it takes ten pages to describe the tortures inflicted by the Hurons on a captive. Theodore Eoosevelt writes in his Winning of the West (I., 95) : " The nature of the wild Indians has not changed. Not one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes tor- ments which a civilized man cannot so much as look another in the face and speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, flnger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out — these tortures can be mentioned, but there are others, equally normal and customary, which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims." In his famous book. The Jesuits in North America, the historian Parkman gives many harrowing details of Indian cruelty toward prisoners ; harmless women and children being subjected to the same fiendish tortures as the men. On one occasion he relates of the Iroquois (285) that " they planted stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace, and bound to them those of their prisoners whom they meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old age to infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side. Then, as they retreated, they set the town on fire, and laughed with savage glee at the shrieks of anguish that rose from the blazing dwellings." On page 248 he relates another typical instance of Iroquois cruelty. Among their prisoners " were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt, their captors took the infants from them, tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter." Later on all the prisoners were subjected to further tortures " designed to cause all possible suffering without touching DELIGHT IN THE TORTURE OF OTHERS 157 life. It consisted in blows with sticks and cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, catting off their fingers with clam- shells, scorching them with firebrands, and other indescriba- ble tortures." They cut off the breasts of one of the women and compelled her to eat them. Then all the women were stripped naked, and forced to dance to the singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of the crowd. If anyone in this hostile crowd had shown the slightest sympathy with the victims of this satanic cruelty, he would have been laughed at and insulted ; for to the American Ind- ians ferocity was a virtue, while " pity was a cowardly weak- ness at which their pride revolted." They were deliberately trained to cruelty from infancy, children being taught to break the legs of animals and otherwise to torture them. Nor were the women less ferocious than the men ; indeed, when it came to torturing prisoners, the squaws often led the men. In the face of such facts, it seems almost like mockery to ask if these Indians were capable of falling in love. Could a Huron to whom cruelty was a virtue, a duty, and whose chief delight was the torture of men and women or animals, have harbored in his mind such a delicate, altruistic sentiment as romantic love, based on sympathy with another's joys and sorrows ? You might as well expect a tiger to make romantic love to the Bengal maiden he has carried into the jungle for his sup- per. Cruelty is not incompatible with appetite, but it is a fatal obstacle to love based on affection. Facts prove this natural inference. The Iroquois girls were coarse wantons who indulged in free lust before marriage, and for whom the men felt such passion as is possible under the circum- stances. The absurdity of the claim that these cruel Indians felt love is made more glaringly obvious if we take a case nearer home; imagining a neighbor guilty of torturing harmless captive women with the obscene cruelty of the Indians, and yet attributing to him a capacity for refined love ! The Ind- ians would honor such a man as a colleague and hero ; we should send him to the penitentiary, the gallows, or the mad- house. 158 ROMANTIC LOVE— SYMPATHY INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING It would be foolish to retort that the savage's delight in the torture of others is manifested only in the case of his enemies, for that is not true ; and where he does not directly exult over the sufferings of others, he still shows his lack of sympathy by his indifference to those sufferings, often even in the case of his nearest relatives. The African explorer Andersson (0. R., 156) describes the "heart-rendering sorrow — at least outwardly," of a Damara woman whose husband had been killed by a rhinoceros, and who wailed in a most melancholy way: " I heartily sympathized with her, and I am sure I was the only person present of all the members assembled . . . who at all felt for her lonely condition. Many a laugh was heard, but no one looked sad. No one asked or cared about the man, but each and all made anxious inquiries after the rhinoceros — such is the life of barbarians. Oh, ye sentimen- talists of the Rousseau school — for some such still remain — witness what I have witnessed, and do witness daily, and you will soon cease to envy and praise the life of the savages." "A sick person," writes G-alton (190), "meets with no compassion ; he is pushed out of his hut by his relations away from the fire into the cold ; they do all they can to expedite his death, and when he appears to be dying, they heap ox- hides over him till he is suffocated. Very few Damaras die a natural death." In his book on the Indian Tribes of Guiana (151, 235) the Rev. W. H. Brett gives two typical instances of the lack of sympathy in the New World. The first is that of a poor young girl who was dreadfully burnt by lying in a hammock when it caught fire : " She seemed a very meek and patient child, and her look of gratitude for our sympathy was most affecting. Her friends, however, took no trouble about her, and she probably died soon after." The second case is that of an Arawak boy who, during a canoe voyage, was seized with cholera. The Indians simply cast him on the edge of the shore, to be drowned by the rising tide. Going to the other end of the continent we find Le Jeune EXPOSING THE SICK AND AGED 159 writing of the Canadian Indians (in the Jesuit Relations, VI., 245) : "These people are very little moved by compas- sion. They give the sick food and . drink, but otherwise show no regard for them." In the second volume of the Relations (15) the missionary writer tells of a sick girl of nine, reduced to skin and bone. He asked the permission of the parents to baptize her, and they answered that he might take her and keep her, " for to them she was no better than a dead dog." And again (93) we read that in case of illness " they soon abandon those whose recovery is deemed hope- less." Crossing the Continent to California we find in Powers (118) a pathetic account of the lack of filial piety, or sym- pathy with old age, which, he says, is peculiar to Indians in general. After a man has ceased to be useful as a warrior, though he may have been a hero of a hundred battles, he is compelled to go with his sons into the forest and bear home on his poor old shoulders the game they have killed. He tot- ters along behind them " almost crushed to earth beneath a burden which their unencumbered strength is greatly more able to support, but they touch it not with so much as one of their fingers." EXPOSING THE SICK AND AGED " The Gallinomeros kill their aged parents in a most cold- blooded manner," says Bancroft (I., 390), and this custom, too, prevails on both sides of the Continent. The Canadians, according to Lalemant {Jesuit Relations, IV., 199), "kill their fathers and mothers when they are so old that they can walk no longer, thinking that they are thus doing them a good service ; for otherwise they would be compelled to die of hunger, as they have become unable to follow others when they change their location." Henry Norman, in his book on the Far East, explains (553) why so few deaf, blind, and idiots are found among savages : they are destroyed or left to perish. Sutherland, in studying the custom of killing the aged and diseased, or leaving them to die of exposure, found express testimony to the prevalence of this loveless habit in 160 ROMANTIC LOVE— SYMPATHY twenty-eight difEerent races of savages, and found it denied of only one. Lewis and Clarke give a list of Indian tribes by whom the aged were abandoned to starvation (II., Chap. 7), aidding : " Yet in their villages we saw no want of kindness to the aged : on the contrary, probably because in villages the means of more abundant subsistence renders such cruelty unnecessary, old people appeared to be treated with atten- tion." But it is obvious that kindness which does not go be- yond the point where it interferes with our own comfort, is not true altruism. If one of two men who are perishing of thirst in the desert finds a cupful of water and shares it with the other, he shows sympathy ; but if he finds a whole spring and shares it with the companion, his action does not deserve that name. It would be superfluous to make this remark were it not that the sentimentalists are constantly pointing to such sharing of abundance as evidence of sympathetic kindness. There is a whole volume of philosophy in Bates's remark (393) concern- ing Brazilian Indians : " The good-fellowship of our Oucdmas seemed to arise, not from warm sympathy, but simply from the absence of eager selfishness in small matters." The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune devotes a whole chapter (V., 239-31) to such good qualities as he could find among the Canadian Indians. He is just to the point of generosity, but he is compelled to end with these words : " And yet I would not dare to assert that I have seen one act of real moral virtue in a savage. They have nothing but their own pleasure and satis- faction in view." BIRTH OF SYMPATHY Schoolcraft relates a story of an Indian girl who saved her aged father's life by carrying him on her back to the new camping-place (Oneota, 88). Now Schoolcraft is not a wit- ness on whom one can rely safely, and his case could be ac- cepted as an illustration of an aboriginal trait only if it had been shown that the girl in question had never been subject to missionary influences. Nevertheless, such an act of filial devotion may well have occurred on the part of a woman. It was in a woman's heart that human sympathy was first born WOMEN CRUELER THAN MEN 161 — together with her child. The helpless infant could not have survived without her sympathetic care, hence there was an important use for womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow, while man, immersed in wars and selfish struggles, remained hard of heart and knew not tenderness. Yet in woman, too, the growth of sympathy was painfully slow. The practice of infanticide, for selfish reasons, was, as we shall see in later chapters, horribly prevalent among many of the lower races, and even where the young were tenderly reared, the feeling toward them was hardly what we call affection — a conscious, enduring devotion — but a sort of ani- mal instinct which is shared by tigers and other fierce and cruel animals, and which endures but a short time. In Agassiz's book on Brazil we read (373), that the Indians " are cold in their family affections ; and though the mothers are very fond of their babies, they seem comparatively indifferent to them as they grow up." As an illustration of this trait Agassiz. mentions a sight he witnessed one day. A child who was to be taken far away to Rio stood on the deck crying, "while the whole family put off in a canoe, talking and laughing gaily, without showing him the least sympathy." WOMEN CKUELEE THAIT MEN Apart from instinctive maternal love, sympathy appears to be as far to seek in the savage women as in the men. Author- ities agree that in respect of cruelty the squaws even surpass the warriors. Thus Le Jeune attests (Jes. Eel., VI., 245), that among the Canadians the women were cruder toward captives than the men. In another place (V., 29), he writes that when prisoners were tortured the women and girls " blew and drove the flames over in their direction to burn them." In every Huron town, says Parkman (Jes. in N'. A., XXXIV.), there were old squaws who "in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the men." The same is asserted of the Comanche women, who "delight in torturing the male prisoners." Concerning Chippewa war captives, Keating says (I., 173) : " The marriageable women are reduced to 162 ROMANTIC LOVE— SYMPATHY servitude and are treated with great cruelty by the squaws/' Among the Creeks the women even used to pay a premium of tobacco for the privilege of whipping prisoners of war (Schoolcraft, V., 280). These are typical instances. In Patagonia, writes Falkner (97), the Indian women follow their husbands, armed with clubs, sometimes and swords, and ravage and plunder the houses of everything they can find. Powers relates that when California Indians get too old to fight they have to assist the women in their drudgery. There- upon the women, instead of setting them a good example by showing sympathy for their weakness, take their revenge and make them feel their humiliation keenly. Obviously among these savages, cruelty and ferocity have no sex, wherefore it would be as useless in one sex as in the other to seek for that sympathy which is an ingredient and a condition of romantic love. PLATO DENOUNCES STMPATHT From a Canadian Indian to a Greek philosopher it seems a far cry ; yet the transition is easy and natural. To the Ind- ian, as Parkman points out, "pity was a cowardly weakness," to be sternly repressed as unworthy of a man. Plato, for his part, wanted to banish poetry from his ideal republic because it overwhelms our feelings and makes us give way to sympa- thies which in real life our pride causes us to repress and which are " deemed the part of a woman " {Eepub., X., 665). As for the special form of sympathy which enters iiito the nobler phases of the love between men and women — fusing their hearts and blending their souls — Plato's inability to ap- preciate such a thing may be inferred from the fact that in this same ideal republic he wanted to abolish the marriage even of individual bodies. Of the marriage of souls he, like the other Greeks, knew nothing. To him, as to his country- men in general, love between man and woman was mere animal passion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, or friendship, or to filial, parental, or brother- ly love. From the point of view of sympathy, the difference between PLATO DENOUNCES SYMPATHY 163 ancient passion and modern love is admirably revealed in Wagner's Tannhduser. As I have summed it up else- where : ' " Venus shares only the joys of Tannhauser, while Elizabeth is ready to suffer with him. Venus is carnal and selfish, Elizabeth affectionate and self-sacrificing. Venus de- grades, Elizabeth ennobles ; the depth of her love atones for the shallow, sinful infatuation of Tannhauser. The aban- doned Venus threatens revenge, the forsaken Elizabeth dies of grief." There are stories of wifely devotion in Greek litera- ture, but, like Oriental stories of the same kind (especially in India) they have a suspicious appearance of having been in- vented as object-lessons for wives, to render them more sub- servient to the selfish wishes of the husbands. Plutarch counsels a wife to share her husband's joys and sorrows, laugh when he laughs, weep when he weeps ; but he fails to suggest the virtue of reciprocal sympathy on the hus- band's part ; yet Plutarch had much higher notions regard- ing conjugal life than most of the Greeks. An approxima- tion to the modern ideal is found only when we consider the curious Greek adoration of boys. Callicratides, in Lucian's 'Epiores, after expressing his contempt for women and their ways, contrasts with them the manners of a well-bred youth who spends his time associating with poets and philosophers, or taking gymnastic and military exercises. " Who would not like," he continues, " to sit opposite such a boy, hear him talk, share his labors, walk with him, nurse him in illness, go to sea with him, share darkness and chains with him if necessary ? Those who hated him should be my enemies, those who loved hiBa my friends. When he dies, I too should wish to die, and one grave should cover us. " Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism. Cal- licratides does not say he will die for the other, or that the other's pleasures are to him more important than his own.^ ■ Wagner and his Works, IL, 163. ' In Burton the translator has changed the sex of the beloved. This proceed- ing, 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 friend- ship for boys, that resembles modern love for women. 164 ROMANTIC LOVE— SYMPATHY SHAM ALTEUISM IN' INDIA India is generally credited with having known and practised altruism long before Christ came to preach it. Kalidasa an- ticipates a modern idea when he remarks, in Sakuntala, that " Among persons who are very fond of each other, grief shared is grief halved." India, too, is famed for its monks or peni- tents, who were bidden to be compassionate to all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless those that cursed them (Manu, VI., 48). But in reality the penitents were actuated by the most selfish of motives ; they believed that by obeying those precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they would get such power that even the gods would dread them : and the Sanscrit dramas are full of illustrations of the detest- ably selfish use they made of the power thus acquired. In Sakuntala we read how a poor girl's whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one of these " saints," for the trivial reason that, being absorbed in thoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to his personal comforts at once ; while Kausika's Rage illustrates the diabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes a king and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations. It is possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest and having no other companions, learned to love the animals that came to see them ; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos in general is merely a matter of superstition and not an outcome of sympathy. , He has not even a fellow- feeling for suffering human beings. Hot? far he was from realizing Christ's " blessed are the merciful," may be inferred from what the Abb 6 Dubois says : " The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his heart. He will see an unhappy being perish on the road, or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste ; and will not stir to help him to a drop of water, though it were to save his life." " To kill a cow," says the same writer (I., 176), "is a crime which the Hindoo laws punish with death ; " and these same EVOLUTION OF SYMPATHY 165 Hindoos treat women, especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd to suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be actuated by sympathy in their devout attitude toward some animals. Superstition is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person who kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive. In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally. What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such superstitions : " The enraged multitude did not wait for the slow process of law, but put the offender to death with their own hands." At the same time some animals " which were deemed divinities in one nome, were treated as nuisances and destroyed in others." (Kendrick, II., 1-21.) EVOLUTIOlf OF SYMPATHY If we study the evolution of human sympathy we find that it begins, not in reference to animals but to human beings. The first stage is a mother's feeling going out to her child. N"ext, the family as a whole is included, and then the tribe. An Australian kills, as a matter of course, everyone he comes across in the wilderness not belonging to his tribe. To the present day race hatred, jingoism, and religious differences obstruct the growth of cosmopolitan sympathy such as Christ demanded. His religion has done much, however, to widen the circle of sympathy and to make known its ravishing de- lights. The doctrine that it is more blessed to give than to receive is literally true for those who are of a sympathetic disposition. Parents enjoy the pleasures of their children as they never did their own egotistic delights. In various ways sympathy has continued to grow, and at the present day the most refined and tender men and women include animals within the range of their pity and affection. We organize societies for their protection, and we protest against the slaughter of birds that live on islands, thousands of miles away. Our imagination has become so sensitive and vivid that it gives us a keen pang to think of the happy lives of these birds as being ruthlessly cat short and their young left 166 ROMANTIC LOVE— SYMPATHY to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation. If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom Burton wrote in his Ttvo Trips to Gorilla Land, that " Cruelty seenis to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and in- flicting death "—we need no other argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic love, because that implies a capacity for the tenderest and subtlest sympathy. I would sooner believe a tiger capable of such love than a savage, for the tiger practises cruelty, unconsciously and accidentally while in quest of food, whereas the primitive man indulges in cruelty for cruelty's sake, and for the delight it gives him. We have here one more illustration of the change and growth of sentiments. Man's emotions develop as well as his reason- ing powers, and one might as well expect an Australian, who cannot count five, to solve a problem in trigonometry as to love a woman as we love her. AMOKOUS SYMPATHY In romantic love altruism reaches its climax. TurgeniefE did not exaggerate when he said that "it is in a man really in love as if his personality were eliminated." Genuine love makes a man shed egoism as a snake sheds its skin. His one thought is : " How can I make her happy and save her from grief " at whatever cost to his own comfort. Amorous sym- pathy implies a complete self-surrender, an exchange of per- sonalities : • My true love hath my heart, and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given, — Sidney. It ia the secret sympathy, The silver link, the silken tie, Which heart, to heart, and mind to mind, In body and in soul can bind. — Scott. To a woman who wishes to be loved truly and permanently, a sympathetic disposition is as essential as modesty, and more essential than beauty. The author of Love Affairs of Some DEIFICATION OF PERSONS 167 Famous Men has wittily remarked that " Love at first sight is easy enough ; what a girl wants is a man who can love her when he sees her every day." That, he might have added, is impossible unless she can enter into another's joys and sor- rows. Many a spark of love kindled at sight of a pretty face and bright eyes is extinguished after a short acquaintance which reveals a cold and selfish character. A man feels in- stinctively that a girl who is not a sympathetic sweetheart will not be a sympathetic wife and mother, so he turns his attention elsewhere. Selfishness in a man is perhaps a degree less offensive, because competition and the struggle for exist- ence necessarily foster it ; yet a man who does not merge his personality in that of his chosen girl is not truly in love, how- ever much he may be infatuated. There can be sympathy without love, but no love without sympathy. It is an essen- tial ingredient, an absolute test, of romantic love. IX. ADOEATIOK Silvius, in As You Like It, says that love is " all adora- tion," and in Ttoelfth Night, when Olivia asks : " How does he love me?" Viola answers : "With adorations." Borneo asks : " What shall I swear by ? " and Juliet replies : Do not 8wear at all ; Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, Which is the god of my idolatry, And I'll helieve thee. DBIFICATIOJT OF PEESOKS Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the " deification of persons," and that women adore as well as men. Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well, says of her love for Bertram : Thus, Indian-like Religioua in mine error, I adore The sun that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more. 168 ROMANTIC LOVE— ADORATION "Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dan- te, Rousseau, Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modern lover is like a sculptor who takes aii ordinary block of marble and carves a goddess out of it. His belief that his idol is a living goddess is, of course, an illusion, but ^he feeling is real, how- ever fantastic and romantic it may seem. He is so thoroughly convinced of the incomparable superiority of his chosen divin- ity that " it is marvellous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is in a panic when he thinks of it," as Charles Dudley Warner puts it. Onida speaks of " the graceful hypocrisies of courtship," and no doubt there are many such ; but in romantic love there is no hypocrisy ; its devotion and adoration are absolutely sincere. The romantic lover adores not only the girl herself but everything associated with her. This phase of love is poeti- cally delineated in Goethe's Werther : " To-day," Werther writes to his friend, " I could not go to see Lotta, being unavoidably detained by company. What was there to do ? I sent my valet to her, merely in order to have someone about me who had been near her. With what im- patience I expected him, with what Joy I saw him return ! I should have liked to seize him by the hand and kiss him, had I not been ashamed. " There is a legend of a Bononian stone which being placed in the sun absorbs his rays and emits them at night. In such a light I saw that valet. The knowledge that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, the buttons and the collar of his coat, made all these things valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand dollars, so happy was I in his presence. God forbid that you should laugh at this. William, are these things phantasms if they make us happy ? " Fielding wrote a poem on a half -penny which a young lady had given to a beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half- crown. Sir Richard Steele wrote to Miss Scurlock : " You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have worn. PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN 169 or I cannot live ; otherwise yon must expect that I'll kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your handker- chief." Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fair sex. The lover worships the very ground she trod on, and is enraptured at the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her. To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, in perpetual hyperbole : It's a year almost that I have not seen her ; Oh ! last summer green things were greener, Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer. — C. Q. Rossetti. PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT POE WOMEN The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being universal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345) : " Among ourselves woman-worship flour- ishes among the well-to-do, but is almost, if not entirely, absent among the peasantry." Still less would we expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor worship, which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky — or rather unlucky — if she was allowed to live at all. A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt for women — frequently coupled with maltreat- ment — exhibited by the lower races in all parts of the world. But as the attitude of Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be fully described in future chap- ters, we can limit ourselves here to a few sample cases taken 170 ROMANTIC LOVE— ADORATION at random.' Jacques and Storm relate (Ploss, II., 433) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to and fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored. If an Indian refuses to quarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains (VI. , 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of a warrior, as she is too far be- neath him. In Tahiti the head of a husband or father was sa- cred from a woman's touch. OfEerings to the gods would have been polluted if touched by a woman. In Siam the wife had to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband's, to remind her of her inferiority. No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maori chief. Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in any corner of the tent except her own ; after pitching the tent she was obliged to fumigate it before the men would enter. The Zulus regard their women " with haughty contempt." Among Mohammedans a woman has a definite value only in so far as she is related to a husband ; un- married she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her. (Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls by elders and priests is the insulting " Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive thee." " On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that she is an un- welcome guest in the family." (Eamabai Saravasti, 13.) William Jameson Eeid, who visited some of the unexplored regions of Northeastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness and misery of woman's lot among the Pa-Urgs : "Although, owing to the scarcity, a woman is a valuable commodity, she is treated with the utmost contempt, and her existence is infinitely worse than the very animals of her lord and master. Polyandry is generally practised, increasing the horror of her position, for she is required to be a slave to a number of masters, who treat her with the most rigorous harsh- ness and brutality. Prom the day of her birth until her death (few Pa-Urg women live to be fifty) her life is one protracted period of degradation. She is 'called upon to perform the 'A multitude of others may be found in an interesting aiticle on "Sexual Taboo " by Crawley in tlie Journal of the Anthropologiau Institute, xxvi. PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN 171 most menial and degrading of services and the entire manual labor of the community, it being considered base of a male to engage in other labor than that of warfare and the chase. . . . " When a child is to be born the mother is driven from the village in which she lives, and is compelled to take up her abode in some roadside hut or cave in the open country, a scanty supply of food, furnished by her husbands, being brought to her by the other women of the tribe. When the child is born the mother remains with it for one or two months, and then leaving it in a cave, returns to the village and in- forms her eldest husband of its birth and the place where she has left it. If the child is a male, some consideration is shown to her ; should it be a female, however, her lot is frightful, for aside from the severe beating to which she is subjected by her husband, she suffers the scorn and contumely of the rest of the tribe. If a male child, the husband goes to the cave and brings it back to the village ; if it is of the opposite sex he is left to his own volition ; sometimes he returns With the female infant ; as often he ignores it entirely and allows it to perish, or may dispose of it to some other man as a prospective wife." ' In Corea women are so little esteemed that they do not even receive separate names, and a husband considers it an act of condescension to speak to his wife. When a young man of the ruling classes marries, he spends three or four days with his bride, then returns to his concubine, " in order to prove that he does not care much for the bride." (Ploss, II., 434.) " The condition of Chinese women is most pitiable," writes the Abb6 Hue : "Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and accompany her to the tomb. Her birth is commonly regarded as a humilia- tion and a disgrace to the family — an evident sign of the malediction of heaven. If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is regarded and treated as a creature radically despic- able, and scarcely belonging to the human race." He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for the bride is to commit suicide. Even the Japanese, so highly civilized in some respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likening themselves to heaven and the women to earth. There are ten stations on the way up the ' New York Evening Post, January 21, 1899. 173 ROMANTIC LOVE— ADORATION sacred mount Fuji. Formerly no woman was allowed to climb above the eighth. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of the University of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his Things Jap- anese (274) in which he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the Kojihi he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women in ancient as in modern Japan. Some years afterward six of the chief literati of the old school translated this introduction into Japanese. They patted the author on the head for many things, but when they reached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrath exploded : " The subordination of women to men," so ran their com- mentary, "is an extremely correct custom. To think the contrary is to harbor European prejudice. . . . For the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand law of heaven and earth. To ignore this, and to talk of the con- trary as barbarous, is absurd." The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated by the men. Chamberlain says on another page, "has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any generous European heart. ... At the present moment the greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still her husband's drudge. She fetches and carries for him, bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth on his walks abroad, waits upon him" at meals, may be divorced at his good pleasure." This testimony regarding a nation vrhich in some things — especially lesthetic culture and general courteousness — sur- passes Europe and America, is of special value, as it shows that love, based on sympathy with women's joys and sorrows, and adoration of their peculiar qualities, is every- where the last flower of civilization, and not, as the senti- mentalists claim, the first. If even the advanced Japanese are unable to feel romantic love — for you cannot adore what you egotistically look down on — it is absurd to look for it among barbarians and savages, such as the Fuegians, who, in times of necessity, eat their old women, or the Australians, among whom not many women are allowed to die a natural HOMAGE TO PRIESTESSES 173 death, "they being generally despatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good food may not be lost."' There are some apparent exceptions to the universal con- tempt for females even among cannibals. Thus it is known that the Peruvian Casibos never eat women. It is natural to jump to the conclusion that this is due to respect for the female sex. It is, however, as Tschudi shows, assignable to exactly the opposite feeling : " All the South American Indians, who still remain under the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated to injure them. Among a few of tlie less rude nations this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a certain unconquerable con- tempt of females. With the anthropophagi the feeling ex- tends, fortunately, to their flesh, which is held to be poison- ous." The Caribs had a difiEerent reason for making it unlawful to eat women. " Those who were captured," says P. Martyr, " were kept for breeding, as we keep fowl, etc." Sir Samuel Baker relates (A. iV., 240), that among the Latookas it was considered a disgrace to kill a woman — not, however, because of any respect felt for the sex, but because of the scarcity and money value of women. HOMAGE TO PRIESTESSES Equally deceptive are all other apparent exceptions to the customary contempt for women. While the women of Fiji, Tonga, and other islands of the Pacific were excluded from all religious worship, and Papuan females were not even al- lowed to approach a temple, it is not uncommon among the inferior races for women to be priestesses. Bosman relates (363) that on the African Slave Coast the women who served as priestesses enjoyed absolute sway over their husbands, who were in the habit of serving them on their knees. This, however, was contrary to the general rule, wherefore it is obvious that the homage was not to the woman as such, but •Fitzroy, II., 183 ; TVotw. £!ihn. Soc, New Series, III., 848-88. 174 ROMANTIC LOVE— ADORATION to the priestess. The feeling inspired in such cases is, more- over, fear rather than respect; the prifestess among savages is a sorceress, usually an old woman whose charms have faded, and who has no other way of asserting herself than by assuming a pretence to supernatural powers and making her- self feared as a sorceress. Hysterical persons are believed by savages to be possessed of spirits, and as women are specially liable to hysteria and to hallucinations, it was natural tliat they should be held eligible for priestly duties. Consequently, if there was any respect involved here at all, it was for an infirmity, not for a virtue — a result of superstition, not of appreciation or admiration of special feminine qualities.^ KIKSHIP THROUGH FEMALES OKLT Dire confusion regarding woman's status has been created in many minds by three distinct ethnologic phenomena, which are, moreover, often confounded : (1) kinship and he- redity through females ; (3) matriarchy, or woman's rule in the family (domestic) ; (3) gynaicocracy, or woman's rule in the tribe (political). (1) It is a remarkable fact that among many tribes, espe- cially in Australia, America, and Africa, children are named after their mother, while rank and property, too, are often inherited in the female line of descent. Lafitau observed this custom among American. Indians more than a century ago, and in 1861 a Swiss jurist, Bachofen, published a book in which he tried to prove, with reference to this " kinship through mothers only," that it indicated that there was a time when women everywhere ruled over men. A study of ethnologic data shows, however, that this inference is abso- lutely unwarranted by the facts. In Australia, for instance, where children are most commonly named after their mother's clan, there is no trace of woman's rule over man, either in the present of the past. The man treats the woman as a master treats his slaves, and is complete master , of her children. > That moral infirmities, too, were capable of winning the respect of savages, may be seen in Carver's Travels in North America (245). KINSHIP THROUGH FEMALES ONLY 175 Cunow, an authority on Australian relationships, remarks (136) : " Nothing could be more perverse than to infer from the custom of reasoning kinship through females, that woman rules there, and that a father is not master of his children. On the contrary, the father regards himself everywhere, even in tribes with a female line of descent, as the real procreator. He is considered to be the one who plants the germ and the woman as merely the soil in which it grows. And as the wife belongs to him, so does the child that comes from her womb. Therefore he claims also those children of his wife concerning whom he knows or assumes that he did not beget them ; for they grew on his soil." Similarly with the American Indians. Grosse has devoted several pages (73-80) to show that with the tribes among which kinship through females prevails woman's position is not in the least better than with the others. Everywhere woman is bought, obliged to submit to polygamy, compelled to do the hardest and least honorable work, and often treated worse than a dog. The same is true of the African tribes among whom kinship in the female line prevails. If, therefore, kinship through mothers does not argue fe- male supremacy, how did that kinship arise ? Le Jeune offered a plausible explanation as long ago as 1632. In the Jesuit Relations (VI., 355), after describing the immorality of the Indians, he goes on to say : " As these people are well aware of this corruption, they prefer to take the children of their sisters as heirs, rather than their own, or than those of their brothers, calling in question the fidelity of their wives, and being unable to doubt that these nephews come from their own blood. Also among the Hurons — who are more licentious than our Montagnais, because they are better fed — it is not the child of a captain but his sister's son, who succeeds the father." The same explanation has been advanced by other writers and by the natives of other countries where kinship through females prevails ;i and it doubtless holds true in many cases. ' Garcia : Origin de los Indios de el Niievo Mbndo ; McLennan ; Ingham (Westermarok, 113) concerning the Bakongo; Giiaud-Teulon, 808, 209, con- cerning Nubians and other Ethiopians. 176 ROMANTIC LOVE— ADORATION In others the custom of naming children after their mothers is probably simply a result of the fact that a child is al- ways more closely associated with the mother than with the father. She brings it into the world, suckles it, and watches over it ; in the primitive times, even if promiscuity was not prevalent, marriages were of short duration and divorces frequent, wherefore the male parentage would be so con- stantly in doubt that the only feasible thing was to name the children after their mothers. For our purposes, fortunately, this knotty problem of the origin of kinship through females, which has given sociologists so much trouble,' does not need to be solved. "We are concerned solely with the question, " Does kinship in the female line indicate the supremacy of women, or their respectful treatment ? " and that question, as we have seen, must be answered with a most emphatic No. There is not a single fact '■ to bear out the theory that man's rule was ever preceded by a period when woman ruled. The lower we descend, the more absolute and cruelly selfish do we find man's rule over woman. The stronger sex every- where reduces the weaker to practical slavery and holds it in contempt. Primitive woman has not yet developed these qualities in which her peculiar strength lies, and if she had, the men would be too coarse to appreciate them. WOMAlf'S DOMESTIC KULE (3) As we ascend in the scale we find a few cases where women rule or at least share the rule with the men ; but these occur not among savages but with the lower and higher bar- barians, and at the same time they are, as Grosse remarks (161), " among; the scarcest curiosities of ethnology. " The Garos of Assam have women at the head of their clans. Dyak women are consulted in political matters and have equal rights with the men. Macassar women in Celebes also are consulted as regards public afEairs, and frequently ascend the throne. A few similar cases have been noted in Africa, where, e.g., the ' See Letoumean, 333-400 ; Weatermarok, 39-41, 96-113 ; Grosse, 11-18, 50-63, 75-78, 161-168, 167, 180. WOMAN'S POLITICAL RULE 177 princesses of the Ashantees domineer over their husbands ; but these apply only to the ruling class, and do not concern the sex as a whole. Some strange tales of masculine submis- sion in Nicaragua are told by Herrera. But the best-known instance is that of the Iroquois and Hurons. Their women, as Lafitau relates '(I., 71), owned the land and the crops, they decided upon peace or war, took charge of slaves, and made marriages. The Huron Wyandots had a political council consisting of four women. The Iroquois Seneca women could chase lazy husbands from the premises, and could even de- pose a chief. Yet these cases are not conclusive as to the real status of the women in the tribe. The facts cited are, as John Fiske remarks (Disc. Amer., I., 68), "not incompatible with the siibjection of women to extreme drudgery and ill-treat- ment.^' ' Charlevoix, one of the eye-witnesses to these excep- tional' privileges granted to some Indian women, declares ex- pressly that their domination was illusory ; that they were, at home, the slaves of their husbands ; that the men despised them thoroughly, and that the epithet " woman " was an in- sult.^ And Morgan, who made such a thorough study of the Iroquois, declares (332) that "the Indian regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man, and, from nature and habit, she actually considered herself to be so." The two honorable employments among Indians were war and hunting, and these were reserved for the men. Other employments were considered degrading and were therefore gallantly reserved for the women. WOMAN^S POLITICAL KULE Comanche Indians, who treated their squaws with especial contempt, nevertheless would not hesitate on occasion to sub- mit to the rule of a female chief (Bancroft, I., 509) ; and the same is true of, other tribes in America, Africa, etc. (Grosse, 163). In this respect, barbarians do not differ from civilized races ; queenship is a question of blood or family and tells us 'Charlevoix, V., 397-434; Letoumeau, 351. See also Mackenzie, V. Jr. M., 84, 87; Smith, Arai.c., 238 ; Bur. Mhnol, 1887, 468-70. 178 ROMANTIC LOVE— ADORATION nothing whatever ahout the status of women in general. As regards the "equal rights" of the Dyak women just referred to, if they really have them, it is not as women, but as men, that is, in so far as they have become like men. This we see from what Schwaner says (I., 161) of the tribes in the South- east : " The women are allowed great privileges and liberties. Not infrequently they rule at home and over whole tribes with manly power, incite to war, and often personally lead the men to battle." Honors paid to such viragoes are honors to masculinity, not to femininity. GREEK ESTIMATE OF WOMBS' Here again the transition from the barbarian to the Greek is easy and natural. The ancient Greek looked down on women as women. " One man," exclaims Iphigenia in Eu- ripides, "is worth more than ten thousand women." There were, of course, certain virtues that were esteemed in women, but these, as Becker has said, differed but little from those required of an obedient slave. It is only in so far as women displayed masculine qualities that they were held worthy of higher honor. The heroines of Plutarch's essay on " The Virtues of "Women " are women who are praised for patriotic, soldier-like qualities, and actions. Plato believed that men who were bad in this life would, on their next birth, be women. The elevation of women, he held, could be best ac- complished by bringing them up to be like men. But this matter will be discussed more fully in the chapter on Greece, as will that of the adulation which was paid to wanton women by Greek and Eoman poets, and which has been often mistaken for adoration, George Eliot speaks of " that ado- ration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself." No Greek ever felt a woman to be "greater and better than himself," wherefore true adoration — the deification of persons — was out of the question. But there was no reason why a Greek or Eoman . should not have indulged in servile flattery and hypocritical praise for the selfish purpose of securing the carnal favors MAN-WORSHIP AND CHRISTIANITY 179 of a mercenarily coy courtesan. He was capable of adulation but not of adoration, for one cannot adore a slave, a drudge or a wanton. The author of the Lover's Lexicon claims, in- deed, that " love can and does exist without respect," but that is false. Infatuation of the senses may exist without respe.ct, but refined, sentimental love is blighted by the discovery of impurity or vulgarity. Adoration is essential to true love, and adoration includes respect. MAN-WORSHIP AND CHRISTIANITY If we must, therefore, conclude that man in primitive and ancient times was unable to feel that love of which adoration is an essential ingredient, how is it with women ? From the earliest times, have they not been taught, with club and other- wise, to look up to man as a superior being, and did not this enable them to adore him with true love ? No, for primitive women, though they might fear or admire man for his superior power, were too coarse, obscene, ignorant, and degraded — being as a rule even lower than the men — to be able to share even a single ingredient of the refined love that we experience. At the same time it may be said (though it sounds sarcastic) that woman had a natural advantage over man in being gradually trained to an attitude of devotion. Just as the care of her in- fants taught her sympathy, so the daily inculcated duty of sac- rificing herself for her lord and master fostered the germs of adoration. Consequently we find at more advanced stages of civilization, like those represented by India, Greece, and Japan, that whenever we come across a story whose spirit approaches the modern idea of love, the embodiment of that love is nearly always a woman. Woman had been taught to worship man while he still wallowed in the mire of masculine selfishness and despised her as an inferior. And to the pres- ent day, though it is not considered decorous for young women to reveal their feelings till after marriage or engagement, they adore their chosen ones : For love's insinuating fire they fan With sweet ideas of a god like man. 180 ROMANTIC LOVE— GALLANTRY In this respect, as in so many others, woman has led civil- ization. Man, too, gradually learned to doff his selfishness, and to respect and adore women, but it took many centuries to accomplish the change, which was due largely to the influ- ence of Christ's teachings. As long as the aggressive mascu- line virtues alone were respected, feminine gentleness and pity could not but be despised as virtues of a lower grade, if virt- ues at all. But as war became less and less the sole or chief occupation of the best men, the feminine virtues, and those who exercised them, claimed and received a larger share of respect. , Christianity emphasized and honored the feminine virtues of patience, meekness, humility, compassion, gentleness, and thus helped to place women on a level with man, and in the noblest of moral qualities even ,above him. Mariol- atry, too, exerted a great influence. The worship of one immaculate woman gradually taught men to respect and adore other women, and as a matter of course, it was the lover who, found it easiest to get down on his knees before the girl he worshipped. X. UNSELFISH GALLANTEY, One day while lunching at an African f ondak, half way be- tween Tangier and Tetuan, I was led to moralize on the con- jugal superiority of Mohammedan roosters to Mohammedan men. Noticing a fine large cock, in the yard, I threw him a handful of bread-crumbs. He was all alone at thp moment and might have easily gobbled them all up. Instead of doing such a selfish thing, he loudly summoned his harem with that peculiar clucking sound which is as unmistakable to fowls as is the word dinner or the boom of a gong to us. In a few seconds .the henis had gathered, and disposed of the bread, leaving not a crumb to their gallant lord and master. I need not add that the Sultan of a human harem in Morocco would have behaved very differently under analogous circum- stances. UNGALLANT LOWER RACES OF MEN 181 THE GALLANT BOOSTER The dictionary makers derive the word gallant from all sorts of roots in divers languages, meaning gay, brave, fes- tive, proud, lascivious, and so on. Why not derive if from the La,tm gallus, rooster? A rooster combines in himself all the different meanings of the word gallant. He is showy in appearance, brave, daring, attentive to females, and, above all, chivalrous, that is, inclined to show disinterested cour- tesy to the weaker sex, as we have just seen. In this last re- spect, it is true, the rooster stands not alone. It is a trait of male animals in general to treat their females unselfishly in regard to feeding and otherwise. UNGALLANT LOWER RACES OF MEN If we now turn to human beings, we have to ascend many strata of civilization before we come across anything resem- bling the unselfish gallantry of the rooster. The Australian savage, when he has speared a kangaroo, makes his wife cook it, then selects the juiciest cuts for himself and the other men, leaving the bones to the women and dogs. Ascending to the much higher Polynesians and American Indians we still find that the women have to content them- selves with what the men leave. A Hawaiian even considers it a disgrace to eat at the same place as his wife, or with the same utensils. What Rowney says (173) of the N%as of India — " she does everything the husband will not, and he considers it effeminate to do anything but fight, hunt, and fish " — is true of the lower races in general. An African Kafiir, says Wood (73), would consider it beneath his dignity to as much as lift a basket of rice on the head of even his favorite wife ; he sits calmly on the ground and allows some woman to • help his busy wife. " One of my friends," he continues, " when rather new to KaflBrland, happened to look into a hut and there saw a stalwart Kaffir sitting and smoking his pipe, while the women were hard at work in the sun, build- 182 ROMANTIC LOVE— GALLANTRY ing huts, carrying timber, and performing all kinds of severe labor. Struck with a natural indignation at such behavior, he told the smoker to get up and work like a man. This idea was too much even for the native politeness of the Kaffir, who burst into a laugh at so absurd a notion. ' Women work,' said he, ' men sit in the house and smoke.' " MacDonald relates (in Africana, I., 35) that "a woman always kneels when she has occasion to talk to a man." Even queens must in some cases go on their knees before their husbands. (Ratzel, I., 354.) Caill6 gives similar testimony regarding the Waissulo, and Mungo Park (347) describes the return of one of his companions to the capital of Dentila, after an absence of three years : ''As soon as he had seated himself upon a mat, by the threshold of his door, a young woman (his intended bride) brought a little water in a calabash, and kneeling down be- fore him, desired him to wash his haiids ; when he had done this, the girl, with a tear of joy sparkling in her eyes, drank the water ; this being considered as the greatest, proof she could possibly give him of her fidelity and attachirient." An Eskimo, when building a house, looks on lazily while his women carry stones " almost heavy enough to break their backs." The ungallant men not only compel the women to be their drudges, but slyly create a sentiment that it is disgraceful for a man to assist them. Of the Patagonian Indians Palkner asserts that the women are so rigidly " obliged to perform their duty, that their husbands cannot help them on any occasion, or in the greatest distress, with- out incurring the highest ignominy," and this is the general feeling, of which other illustrations will be given in later chapters. Foolish sentimentalists have tried to excuse the Indians on the ground that they have no time to attend to anything but fighting and hunting. But they always make the squaws do the hard work, whether there be any war and hunting or not. A white American girl, accustomed to the gallant attentions of her lover, would not smile on the red Dacota suitor pf whom Eiggs writes (305) : " When the family are abed and asleep, he often visits her in her mother's tent, or he finds her out in the grove in the UNGALLANT LOWER RACES OF MEN 183 day time gathering fuel. She has the load of sticks made up, and when she kneels down to take it on her hack, possibly he takes her hand and helps her up and then walks home by her side. Such was the custom in the olden time." Still, there is a germ of gallantry here. The Dacota at least helps to load his human donkey, while the Kaffir re- fuses to do even that. Colonel James Smith, who had been adopted by the Ind- ians, relates (45) how one day he helped the squaws to hoe corn. They approved of it, but the old men afterward chid him for degrading himself by hoeing corn like a squaw. He slyly adds that, as he was never very fond of work, they had no occasion to scold him again. We read in Schoolcraft (V., 368) that among the Creeks, during courtship, the young man used to help the girl hoe the corn in her field, plant her beans and set poles for them to run upon. But this was not intended as an act of gallant assistance ; it had a symbolic meaning. The running up of the beans on the poles and the entwining of their vines was " thought emblematical of their approaching union and bondage." Morgan states expressly in his classical work on the Iroquois (333) that " no attempts by the unmarried to please or gratify each other by acts of personal attention were ever made." In other words the Ind- ians knew not gallantry in the sense of disinterested courtesy to the weaker sex — the gallantry which is an essential ingre- dient of romantic love. Germs of gallantry may perhaps be found in Borneo where, as St. John relates (I., 161), a young Dyak may help the girl he wants to marry in her farm work, carrying home her load of vegetables or wood, or make her presents of rings, a petti- coat, etc. But such a statement must be interpreted with caution. The yery fact that they make the women do the field work and carry the wood habitually, shows that the Dyaks are not gallant. Momentary favors for the sake of securing favors in return, or of arranging an ephemeral Bornean " marriage," are not acts of disinterested courtesy to the weaker sex. The Dyaks themselves clearly understand that 184 ROMANTIC LOVE— GALLANTRY such attentions are mere bids for favors. As a missionary cited by Ling Eoth (I., 131) remarks : " If a woman handed to a man betel-nut and sir ah to eat, or if a man paid her the smallest attention, such as we should term only common politeness, it would be suflScient to excuse a jealous husband for striking a man." It is the same in India. " The politeness, attention, and gallantry which the Europeans practise toward the ladies, although often proceeding from esteem and respect, are in- variably ascribed by the Hindoos to a different motive." (Du- bois, I., 371.) Here, as everywhere in former times, woman existed not for her own sake but for man^s convenience, comfort, and pleasure ; why, therefore, should he bother to do anything to please her ? In the Kamasoutram there is a chapter on the duties of a model wife, in which she is in- structed to do all the work not only at home but in garden, field, and stable. She must go to bed after her husband and get up before him. She must try to excel all other wives in faithfully serving her lord and master. She must not even allow the maid-servant to wash his feet, but must do it with her own hands. The Laws of Manu are full of such precepts, most of them amazingly ungallant. The horrible maltreat- ment of women in India, which it would be an unpardonable euphuism to call simply ungallant, will be dwelt on in a later chapter. It has been said a thousand times that the best measure of a nation's civilization is its treatment of women. It would be more accurate to say that kind, courteous treatment of women is the last and highest product of civilization. The Greeks and Hindoos had reached a high level of culture in many re- spects, yet, judged by their treatment of women, the Greeks were barbarians and the Hindoos incarnate fiends. Scholars are sometimes surprisingly reckless in their assumptions. Thus Hommel (I., 417) declares that woman must have held an honored position in Babylonia,' because in the ancient texts * How capable of honoring women the Babylonians were may be inferred from the testimony of Herodotus (I., oh. 199) that every woman had to sacrifice her chastity to strangers in the temple of Mylitta. EGYPTIAN LOVE 185 that have come down to us the words mother and wife always precede the words father and husband. Yet, as Dubois men- tions incidentally, the Brahmin texts also place the feminine word before the masculine, and the Brahmins treat women more cruelly than the lowest savages treat them. EGTPTIAK LOVE I have not been able to find evidence of a gallant, chival- rous, magnanimous attitude toward women in the records of any ancient nation, and as romantic love is inconceivable without such an attitude, and a constant interchange of kindnesses, we may infer from this alone that these nations were strangers to such love. Professor Ebers makes a spe- cial plea for the Egyptians. Noting the statements of He- rodotus and Diodorus regarding the greater degree of liber- ty enjoyed by their women as compared with the Greek, he bases thereon the inference that in their treatment of women the Egyptians were superior to all other nations of antiquity. Perhaps they were ; it is not claiming much. But Professor Kendrick notes (I., 46) that although it may be true that the Egyptian women went to market and carried on trades while the men remained at home working at the loom, this is capable of receiving quite a different interpretation from that given by Ebers. The Egyptians regarded work at the loom more as a matter of skill than the Greeks did ; and if they allowed the women to do the marketing, that may have been because they preferred to have them carry the heavy burdens and do the harder work, after the fashion of savages and barbarians. If the Egyptians ever did show any respect for women they have carefully wiped out all traces of it in modern life. To-day, " among the lower classes and in rural districts the wife is her husband's servant. She works while he smokes and gossips. But among the higher classes, too, the woman actually stands far below the man. He never chats with her, never communicates to her his affairs and cares. Even after death she does not rest by his side, but is separated from him 186 ROMANTIC LOVE— GALLANTRY by a wall." (Ploss, IL, 450.) Polygamy prevails, as in ancient times, and polygamy everywhere indicates a low position of woman. Ebers comments on the circumspection shown by the ancient Egyptians in drawing up their marriage contracts, adding that " in many cases there were even trial marriages " — a most amazing "even" in view of what he is trying to prove. A modern lover, as I have said before, would reject the very idea of such a trial marriage with the utmost scorn and indignation, because he feels certain that his love is eternal and unalterable. Time may show that he was mis- taken, but that does not affect his present feeling. That sublime confidence in the eternity of his passion is one of the hall-marks of romantic love. The Egyptian had it not. He not only sanctioned degrading trial marriages, but enacted a barbarous law which enabled a man to divorce any wife at pleasure by simply pronouncing the words " thou art expelled." In modern Egypt, says Lane (I., 247-51), there are many men who have had twenty, thirty, or more wives, and women who have had a dozen or more husbands. Some take a new wife every month. Thus the Egyptians are matrimonially on a level with the savage and barbarian North American Indians, Tasmanians, Samoans, Dyaks, Malayans, Tartars, many negro tribes, Arabs, etc. AKABIAK LOVE Arabia is commonly supposed to be the country in which chivalry originated. This belief seems to rest on the fact that the Arabs spared women in war. But the Australians did the same, and where women are saved only to be used as slaves or concubines we cannot speak of chivalry. The Arabs treated their own women well only when they were able to capture or buy slaves to do the hard work for them ; in other cases their wives were their slaves. To this day, when the family moves, the husband rides on the camel while the wife trudges along on foot, loaded down with kitchen utensils, bed- ding, and her child on top. If a woman happens to ride on a camel she must get off and walk if she meets a man, by way ARABIAN LOVE 187 of showing her respect for the superior sex. (Niebuhr, 50.) The birth of a daughter is regarded as a calamity, mitigated only by the fact that she will bring in some money as a bride. Marriage is often little more than a farce. Burckhardt knew Bedouins who, before they were iifty years old, had been married to more than fifty different women. Chavanne, in his book on the, Sahara (397-401), gives a pathetic picture of the fate of the Arab girls : " Usually wedded very young (the marriage of a youth of fourteen to a girl of eleven is nothing unusual), the girl finds in most cases, after five or six years, that her conjugal career is at an end. The husband tires of her and sends her back, without cogent reasons, to her parents. If there are no parents to return to, she abandons herself, in many cases, to the vice of prostitution." If not discarded, her fate is none the less deplorable.. " "While young she re- ceives much attention, but when her charms begin to fade she becomes the servant of her husband and of his new wife." Ohavanne gives a glowing description of the ravishing but short-lived beauty of the Arab girl ; also a specimen of the amorous songs addressed to her while she is young and pretty. She is compared to a gazelle ; to a palm whose fruits grow high up out of reach ; she is equal in value to all Tunis and Algiers, to all the ships on the ocean, to five hundred steeds and as many camels. Her throat is like a peach, her eyes wound like arrows. Exaggerations like these abound in the literature of the Arabs, and are often referred to as proof that they love as we do. In truth, they indicate nothing beyond selfish, amorous desires. The proof of unselfish affection lies not in words, however glowing and flattering, but in kind actions ; and the actions of the Arabs to- ward their women are d.isgustingly selfish, except during the few years that they are young and pretty enough to serve as toys. The Arabs, with all their fine talk, are practically on a level with the Samoyedes who, as we saw, ignore or maltreat their wives, "except on an occasional amorous evening " ; on a level with the Sioux Indian, of whom Mrs. Eastman remarks that a girl is to him an ob- 188 ROMANTIC LOVE— GALLANTRY ject of contempt and neglect from her birth to her grave, except during the brief period when he wants her for his wife and may have a doubt of his success. THE UNCHIVALEOUS GBBEKS A few pages back I cited the testimony of Morgan, who lived many years among the Indians and studied them with the intelligence of an expert ethnologist, that "no attempts by the unmarried to please or gratify each other by acts of per- sonal attention were ever made." From this we can, once more, make a natural transition from the aboriginal American to the ancient Greek. The Greek men, says the erudite Becker (III., 335), "were quite strangers to that considerate, self-sacrificing courtesy and those minute attentions to women which we commonly call gallantry." Greek literature and all that we know of Greek life, bear out this assertion fully. It is true the Alexandrian poets and their Eoman imitators fre- quently use the language of sentimental gallantry ; they de- clare themselves the slaves of their mistresses, <^xe eager to wear chains, to go through fire, to die for them, promising to take their love to the next world. But all these things are mere "words, words, words" — adulation the insincerity of which is exposed as soon as we examine the actions and the motives of these poets, of whom more will be said in a later chapter. Their flatteries are addressed invariably to hetairai ; they are conceived and written with the selfish desire to tickle the vanity of these wantons in the hope and expectation of receiving favors for which the poets, who were usually poor, were not able to pay in any other way. Thus these poets are below the Arabs, for these sons of the desert at least address their flatteries to the girls whom they are eager to marry, whereas the Greek and Eoman poets sought merely to beguile a class of women whose charms were for sale to anyone. One of these profligate men might cringe and wail and cajole, to gain the good will of a capricious courtesan, but he never dreamed of bending his knees to win the honest love of the maid he took to be his wife (that he might have male ofE- OVID'S SHAM GALLANTRY 189 spring). Roman love was not romantic, nor was Greek. It was frankly sensual, and the gallantry of the men was of a kind that made them erect golden images in public places to honor Phryne and other prostitutes. In a word, their gal- lantry was sham gallantry ; it was gallantry not in the sense of polite attentions to women, springing from unselfish cour- tesy and esteem, but in the sinister sense of profligacy and amorous intrigue. There were plenty of gallants, but no real gallantry. ovid's sham gallantry While it is undoubtedly true that Ovid exercised a greater influence on mediaeval bards, and through them on modern erotic writers, than any other ancient poet, and while I still maintain that he anticipated and depicted some of the imagina- tive phases of modem love (see my R. L. P. B., 90-93), a more careful study of the nature of gallantry has convinced me that I erred in finding the " morning dawn of romantic love " in the counsels regarding gallant behavior toward women given in the pages of Ovid. ' He does, indeed, advise a lover never to notice the faults of a woman whose favor he wishes to win, but to compliment her, on the contrary, on her face, her hair, her tapering fingers, her pretty foot ; to applaud at the circus whatever she applauds ; to adjust her cushion and put the footstool in its place ; to keep her cool by fanning her ; and at dinner, when she has put her lips to the wine-cup to seize the cup and put his lips to the same place. But when Ovid wrote this, nothing was farther from his mind than what we understand by gallantry — an eagerness to perform acts of disinterested courtesy and deference for the purpose of pleasing a respected or adored woman. His precepts are, on the contrary, grossly utilitarian, being intended not for a man who wishes to win the heart and hand of an honest girl, but for a libertine who has no money to buy the favors of a wanton, and therefore must rely on flatteries and obsequious fawning. 1 It gives me great pleasure to correct my error in this place. Not a few critics of mv first book censured me for underrating Roman advances in the re.. finements of love. As a matter of fact I overrated them. 190 ROMANTIC LOVE— GALLANTRY The poet declares expressly that a rich man will not need his Ars Amandi, but that it is written for the poor, who may be able to overcome the greed of the hetairai by tickling their vanity. He therefore teaches his readers how to deceive such a girl with false flattery and sham gallantry. The Koman poet uses the word domina, but this domina, nevertheless, is his mistress, not in the sense of one who dominates his heart and commands his respect and affection, but of a despised be- ing lower than a concubine, on whom he smiles only till he has beguiled her. It is the story of the cat and the mouse. MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN GALLANTRY How different this from the modern chivalry which in face of womanhood makes a gentleman even out of a rough Cali- fornia miner. Joaquin Miller relates how the presence of even an Indian girl — " a bud that in another summer would unfold itself wide to the sun," affected the men in one of the camps. Though she seldom spoke with the miners, yet the men who lived near her hut dressed more neatly than others, kept their beards in shape, and shirt-bosoms buttoned up when she passed by : " On her face, through the tint of brown, lay the blush and flush of maidenhood, the indescribable sacred something that makes a maiden holy to every man of a manly and chivalrous nature ; that makes a man utterly unselfish and perfectly con- tent to love and be silent, to worship at a distance, as turning to the holy shrines of Mecca, to be still and 'bide his time ; caring not to possess in the low, coarse way that characterizes your common love of to-day, but choosing rather to go to bat- tle for her — bearing her in his heart through many lands, through storms and death, with only a word of hope, a smile, a wave of the hand from a wall, a kiss, blown far, as he mounts his steed below and plunges into the night. That is love to live for. I say the knights of Spain, bloody as they were, were a noble and a splendid type of men in their day." ' ■ lAfe Among the Modocs (238). It must be borne in mind that Joaquin Mil- ler 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 80, for he was their friend, and married the girl referred to. But while the Indians themselves never entertain any chivalrous regard for women, they MEDIEVAL AND MODERN GALLANTRY 191 While the knights of Spain and other parts of mediaeval Europe doubtless professed sentiments of chivalry like those uttered by Joaquin Miller, there was as a rule nearly as much sham in their pretensions as in Ovid's rules for gallant con- duct. In the days of militant chivalry, in the midst of deeds of extravagant homage to individual ladies, women in general were as much despised and maltreated as at any other time. " The chivalrous spirit is above all things a class spirit," as Freeman wrote (V., 483) : " The good knight is bound to endless fantastic courtesies toward men, and still more to- ward women, of a certain rank ; he may treat all below that rank with any degree of scorn and cruelty." This is still very far removed from the modem ideal ; the knight may be considered to stand half-way between the boor and the gen- tleman : he is polite, at least, to some women, while the gen- tleman is polite to all, kind, gentle, sympathetic, without being any the less manly. Nevertheless there was an advan- tage in having some conception of gallantry, a determination and vow to protect widows and orphans, to respect and honor ladies. Though it was at first only a fashion, with all the extravagances and follies usual to fashions, it did much good by cheating an ideal for later generations to live up to. From this point of view even the quixotic pranks of the knights who fought duels in support of their challenge that no other lady equalled theirs in beauty, were not without a use. They helped to enforce the fashion of paying deference to women, and made it a point of honor, thus forcing many a boor to assume at least the outward semblance and conduct of a gentleman. The seed sown in this rough and stony soil has slowly grown, until it has developed into true civilization — a word of which the last and highest import is civility or disinterested devotion to the weak and unprotected, especially to women. are aoute 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, Califor- nia, an Indian oame to me and told me a pitiful tale about his '^sick squaw" in one of the neighboring camps. I gave mm 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 assured me he was " damned good Indian," and never drank. 192 ROMANTIC LOVE— GALLANTRY In our days chivalry includes compassion for animals too. I have never read of a more gallant soldier than that colonel who, as related in Our Animal Friends (May, 1899), while riding in a Western desert at the head of five hundred horse- men, suddenly made a slight detour — which all the men had to follow — because in the direct path a meadow lark was sit- ting on her nest, her soft brown eyes turned upward, watch- ing, wondering, fearing. It was a nobler deed than many of the most gallant actions in battle, for these are often done from selfish motives — ambition, the hope of promotion^while this deed was the outcome of pure unselfish sympathy. " Five hundred horses had been turned aside, and five hun- dred men, as they bent over the defenceless mother and her brood,' received a lesson in that broad humanity which is the essence of higher life." To this day there are plenty of ruffians — many of them in fine clothes — who are strangers to chivalrous ffeeliiigs toward defenceless women or animals — 'men who behave as gentlemen only under compulsion of public opinion. The encouraging thing is that public opinion has taken so strong a stand in favor of women ; that it has written Place aux Dames on its shield in such large letters. While the red Amferican squaw shared with the dogs the bones left by her contemptuous ungallant' husband, the white American woman is served first at table and gets the choicest morsels f she receives the window-seat in the cars, the lower berth in the sleeper ; she has precedence in society and wherever she is in her proper place ; and when a ship is about to sink, the captain, if neces- sary (which is seldom the case)> stands with drawn revolver prepared to shoot any man who would ungallantly get into a boat before all the women are saved. "AN INSULT TO WOMAK This change from the primitive selfishness described in the preceding pages, this voluntary yielding by man of the place of honor and of the right of the strongest, is little less than a miracle ; it is the grandest triumph of civilization. Yet there SUMMARY 193 are viragoes who have had the indecency to call gallantry an " insult to woman." There is indeed a kind of gallantry — the Ovidian — which is an insult to women ; but true masculine gallantry is woman's chief glory and conquest, indicating the transformation of the savage's scorn for woman's physical weakness into courteous deference to her as the nobler, more virtuous and refined sex. There are some selfish, sour, disap- pointed old maids, who, because of their lack of feminine traits, repel men and receive less than their share of gallant court- esy. But that is their own fault. Ninety-nine per cent, of all women have a happier lot to-day than at any previous time in history, and this change is due to the growth of the disin- terested courtesy and sympathy known as gallantry. At the same time the change is strikingly illustrated in the status of old maids themselves. No one now despises an unselfish woman simply because she prefers to remain single ; but for- merly old maids were looked on nearly everywhere with a contempt that reached its climax among the Southern Slavs, who, according to Krauss (Ploss, II., 491), treated them no better than mangy dogs. No one associated with them ; they were not tolerated in the spinning-room or at the dances ; they were ridiculed and derided ; were, in short, regarded as a dis- grace to the family. SUMMARY To sum up : among the lower races man habitually de- spises and maltreats woman, looking on her as a being made, not for her own sake, but for his comfort and pleasure. Gallantry is unknown. The Australian who fights for his family shows courage, not gallantry, for he is simply pro- tecting his private property, and does not otherwise show the slightest regard for his women. Nor does the early custom of serving for a wife imply gallantry ; for here the suitor serves the parents, not the maid ; he simply adopts a primitive way of paying for a bride. Sparing women in battle for the purpose of making concubines or slaves of them is not gallantry. One might as well call a farmer gal- lant because, when he kills the young roosters for broilers, he 194- ROMANTIC LOVE— GALLANTRY saves the young hens. He lets these live because he needs eggs. The motive in both cases is utilitarian and selfish. Ovidian gallantry does not deserve such a name, because it is nothing but false flattery for the selfish purpose of beguiling foolish women. Arabic flatteries are of a superior order be- cause sincere at the time being and addressed to girls whom the flatterer desires to marry. But this gallantry, too, is only skin deep. Its motives are sensual and selfish, for as soon as the girl's physical charm begins to fade she is con- temptuously discarded. Our modern gallantry toward women differs radically from all those attitudes in being unselfish. It is synonymous with true chivalry — disinterested devotion to those who, while phys- ically weaker, are considered superior morally and esthetically. It treats all women with polite deference, and does so not be- cause of a vow or a code, but because of the natural promptings of a kind, sympathetic disposition. It treats a woman not as a toper does a whiskey bottle, applying it to his lips as long as it can intoxicate him with pleasure and then throwing it away, but cherishes her for supersensual attributes that survive the ravages of time. To a lover, in particular, such gallantry is not a duty, but a natural impulse. He lies awake nights de- vising plans for pleasing the object of his devotion. His gal- lantry is an impulse to sacrifice himself for the beloved — an instinct so inbred by generations of practice that now even a child may manifest it. I remember how, when I was six or seven years old, I once ran out the school-house during re- cess to pick up some Missouri hailstones, while others, large as marbles, were falling about me, threatening to smash my skull. I gave the trophies to a dark-eyed girl of my age — not with a view to any possible reward, but simply because I loved her more than all the other girls combined p,nd wanted to please her. A STJEE TEST OP LOVE Black relates in his Things Chinese, that after the wed- ding ceremony "the bride tries hard ... to get a piece of her husband's dress under her when she sits down, for if she A SURE TEST OF LOVE 195 does, it will insure her having the upper hand of him, while he tries to prevent her and to do the same thing himself." Sim- ilar customs prevail in. other parts of the world, as among the Esthonians. (Schroeder, 234.) After the priest has united the couple they walk toward the wagon or sleigh, and in doing so each of the two tries to be first to step on the other's foot, because that will decide who is to rule at home. Imagine such petty selfishness, such a disgraceful lack of gallantry, on the very wedding-day ! In our own country, when we hear of a bride objecting to the word " obey" in the wedding cere- mony, we may feel absolutely sure that the marriage is not a love-match, at least as far as she is concerned. A girl truly in love with a man laughs at the word, because she feels as if she would rather be his slave than any other man's queen ; and as for the lover, the bride's promise to " obey" him seems mere folly, for he is determined she shall always remain the auto- cratic queen of his heart and actions. Conjugal disappoint- ments may modify that feeling, to be sure, but that does not alter the fact that while romantic love exists, one of its essential ingredients is an impulse of gallant devotion and deference on both sides — an impulse which on occasion rises to self-sacrifice, which is simply an extreme phase of gal- lantry. XI. ALTKUISTIC SELF-SACRIFICE •In the very olden time, if we may confide in the ingenious Frank Stockton, there lived a semi-barbaric king who devised a highly original way of administering justice, leaving the ac- cused man's fate practically in his own hands. There was an arena with the king's throne on one side and galleries for the people all around. On a signal by the king a door beneath him opened and the accused subject stepped out into the amphi- theatre. Directly opposite the throne were two doors, exactly alike, and side by side. The person on trial had to walk to those doors and open either of them. If he opened one, there sprang out a fierce tiger who immediately tore him to pieces ; if the other, there came forth a beautiful lady, to whom he 196 ROMANTIC LOVE— SELF-SACRIFICE was forthwith married. No one ever knew behind which of the doors was the tiger, so that the audience no more than the prisoner knew whether he was to be devoured or married. This semi-barbaric king had a daughter who fell in love with a handsome young courtier. When the king discovered this love-afEair he cast the youth into prison and had his realm searched for the fiercest of tigers. The day came when the prisoner had to decide his own fate in the arena by open- ing one of the doors. The princess, who was one of the spec- tators, had succeeded, with the aid of gold, in discovering the secret of the doors ; she knew from which the tiger, from which the lady, would issue. She knew, too, who the lady was behind the other door — one of the loveliest of the damsels of the court — one who had dared to raise her eyes to her loved one and had thereby aroused her fiercest jealousy. She had thought the matter over, and was prepared for action. The king gave the signal, and the courtier appeared. He had expected the princess to know on which side lay safety for him, nor was he wrong. To his quick and anxious glance at hei*, she replied by a slight, quick movement of her arm to the right. The youth turned, and without the slightest hesita- tion opened, the door on the right. Now, ." which came out of the opened door — the lady or the tiger ? " THE LADY AND THE TIGER With that question Stockton ends his story, and it is gener- ally supposed that he does not answer it. But he does, on the preceding page, in these words : " Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded, semi-barbaric princess, her soul at white heat beneath the combined fires of despair and jealousy. She had lost him, but who should have him ? " In these words the novelist hints plainly enough that the question was decided by a sort of dog-in-the-manger jealousy. If the prin- cess could not have him, certainly her hated rival should never enjoy his love. The tiger, we may be sure, was behind the door on the right. A GREEK LOVE-STORY 197 In allowing the tiger to devour the courtier, the princess showed that her love was of the primitive, barbarous tjrpe, being in reality self-love, not other-love. She "loved" the man not for his own sake, but only as a means of gratifying her desires. If he was lost to her, the tiger might as well dine on him. How differently an American girl would have acted, under , the impulse of romantic love ! Not for a moment could she have tolerated the thought of his dying, through her fault — the thought of his agony, his shrieks, his blood. She would have sacrificed her own happiness instead of her beloved's life. The lady would have come out of the door opened by him. Suppose that, overcome by selfish jealousy, she acted otherwise ; and suppose that an amphi- theatre full of cultured men and women witnessed her deed : would there not be a cry of horror, condemning her as worse than the tiger, as absolutely incapable of the feeling of true love ? And would not this cry of horror reveal on the part of the spectators an instinctive perception of the truth which this chapter, this whole book, is written to enforce, that voluntary self-sacrifice, where called for, is the supreme, the infallible, test of love ? A GREEK LOVE-STORY If we imagine the situation reversed — a man delivering his "beloved" into the clutches of a tiger rather than to the legitimate caresses of a rival — our horror at his loveless selfishness would be doubled. Yet this is the policy habit- ually followed by savages and barbarians. In later chapters instances will be given of such wooers killing coveted girls with their own spears as soon as they find that the rival is the winner. After what has been said about the absence of unselfish gallantry among the lower races it would, of course, be useless to look for instances of altruistic self-sacrifice for a woman's sake, since such sacrifice implies so much more than gallantry. As for the Greeks, in all my extensive reading I have come across only one author who seemingly appreciates the significance of self-sacrifice for a woman loved. Pausa- 198 ROMANTIC LOVE— SELF-SACRIFICE niaSj in his Description of Greece (Bk, VII., chap. 21), relates this love-story : "When Calydon still exisited there was among the priests of Dionysus one named Coresus, whom love made, without any fault of his own, the most wretched of mortals. He loved a girl Oallirrhoe, but as great as his love for her was her hatred of him. When all his pleadings and offerings of presents failed to change the girl's attitude, he at last prostrated himself before the image of Dionysus, imploring his help. The god granted the prayers of his priest, for suddenly the Oalydonians began to lose their senses, like drunkards, and to die in fits of madness. They appealed to the oracle of Dodona . . . which declared that the calamity was due to the wrath of the god Dionysus, and that it would not cease until Coresus had sacrificed to Dionysus either Oallirrhoe or anyone else willing to die for her. Now when the girl saw no way of escaping, she sought refuge with her former educators, but when they too refused to receive her, nothing remained for her but death. When all the preparations for the sacrifice had been made in accord- ance with the precepts of the oracle of Dodona, she was brought to the altar, adorned like an animal that is to be sacrificed ; Coresus, however, whose duty it was to offer the sacrifice, let love prevail in place of hate, and slew himself instead of Oallirrhoe, thus proving by his deed that he had been animated by the purest love. But when Oallirrhoe saw Coresus as a corpse, overcome by pity and repentance for her treatment of him, she went and di-owned herself in the fountain not far from the Calydonian harbor, which since that time is known as the fountain of Oallirrhoe." If a modern lover, desiring to possess a girl, got her into a predicament which culminated in the necessity of his either slaying her with his own hands or killing himself, and did not choose the latter alternative, we should regard him as more contemptible than the vilest assassin. To us self-sacrifice in such a case would seem not a test of love, nor even of hon- or so much as of common decency, and we should expect a man to submit to it even if his love of the poor girl had been a mere infatuation of the senses. However, in view of the con- tempt for women, and for love for women, prevalent among the Greeks in general, we may perhaps discover at least a gleam of better things in this legend of masculine self-sacrifice. PERSIAN LOVE 199 PEESIAlf LOVE A closer approximation to our ideal may be found in a story related by the Persian poet Saadi (358) : "There was a handsome and well-disposed young man, who was embarked in a vessel with a lovely damsel : I have read that, sailing on the mighty deep, they fell together into a whirlpool : When the pilot came to offer him assistance ; God forbid that he should perish in that distress ; he was answering, from the midst of that overwhelming vortex, Leave me and take the hand of my beloved ! The whole world admired him for this speech, which, as he was expiring, he was heard to make ; learn not the tale of love from that faithless wretch who can neglect his mistress when exposed to danger. In this manner ended the lives of those lovers ; listen to what has happened, that you may understand ; for Saadi knows the ways and forms of courtship, as well as the Tazi, or modern Arabic, is understood at Baghdad." How did this Persian poet get such a correct and modern notion about love into his head ? Obviously not from his ex- periences and observations at home, for the Persians, as the scholarly Dr. Polak observes in his classical work on them (I., 206), do not know love in our sense of the word. The love of which their poets sing has either a symbolical or an entirely carnal meaning. Girls are married off without any choice of their own at the early age of twelve or thirteen ; they are re- garded as capital and sold for cash, and children are often en- gaged in the cradle. When a Persian travels, he leaves his wife at home and enters into a temporary marriage with other women in the towns he visits. In rural districts if the traveller is a person of rank, the mercenary peasants eagerly offer their daughters for such " marriages." (Hellwald, 439.) Like the Greek poets the Persians show their contempt for women by always speaking of boy-favorites when their lan- guage rises above the coarsest sensuality. Public opinion re- garding Persian stories and poems has been led astray by the changes of sex and the expurgations made freely by transla- tors. Burton, whose version of the Tliousand and One Nights was suppressed in England, wrote {F. P., 36), that "about 200 ROMANTIC LOVE— SELF-SACRIFICE one-fifth is utterly unfit for translation, and the most san- guine Orientalist would not dare to render literally more than three-quarters of the remainder." Where, then, I repeat, did Saadi get that modern European idea of altruistic self-sacrifice as a test of love ? Evidently from Europe by way of Arabia. His own language indicates this — his suspicious boast of his knowledge of real love as of one who has just made a strange discovery, and his coupling it with the knowledge of Arabic. Now it is well known that ever since the ninth century the Persian mind had been brought into a contact with the Arabic which became more and more intimate. The Arabs had a habit of sacrificing their lives in chivalrous efEorts to save the life or honor of maidens whom the enemy endeavored to kidnap. The Arabs, on their part, were in close contact with the European minds, and as they helped to originate the chivalrous spirit in Eu- rope, so they must have been in turn influenced by the devel- opments of the troubadour spirit which culminated in such maxims as Montagnogout's declaration that " a true lover de- sires a thousand times more the happiness of his beloved than his own." As Saadi lived in the time of the troubadours — the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — it was easy for him to get a knowledge of the European " ways and forms of court- ship." In Persia itself there was no courtship or legitimate lovemaking, for the " lover " hardly ever had met his bride before the wedding-day. Nevertheless, if we may believe William Franklin,* a Persian woman might command a suitor to spend all day in front of her house reciting verses in praise of her beauty ; and H. C. Trumbull naively cites, as evidence that Orientals love just as we do, the following story : "Morier tells . . . of a large painting in a pleasure-house in Shiraz, illustrative of the treatment of a loyal lover by a heartless coquette, which is one of the popular -legends of Persia. Sheik Chenan, a Persian of the true faith, and a man of learning and consequence, fell in love with an Armenian lady of great beauty who would not marry him unless he changed • Magazin von Beisebeschreibungen, I. , 383. PERSIAN LOVE 201 his religion. To this he agreed. Still she would not marry him unless he would drink wine. This scruple also he yielded. She resisted still, unless he consented to eat pork. With this also he complied. Still she was coy, and refused to fulfil her engagement, unless he would be contented to drive swine before her. Even this condition he accepted. She then told him that she would not have him at all, and laughed at him for his pains. The picture represents the coquette at her window, laughing at Sheik Chenan as he is driving his pigs before her." This story suggests and may have been invented in imita- tion of the foolish and capricious tests to which mediaeval dames in Europe put their quixotic knights. Few of these knights, as I have said elsewhere {R. L. P. B., 100), "were so manly as the one in Schiller's ballad, who, after fetching his lady's glove from the lion's den, threw it in her face," to show how his feelings toward her had changed. If the Persian in Trumbull's story had been manly and refined enough to be capable of genuine love, his feelings toward a woman who could wantonly subject him to such persistent insults and de- gradation, would have turned into contempt. Ordinary sen- sual infatuation, on the other hand, would be quite strong enough and unprincipled enough to lead a man to sacrifice religion, honor, and self-respect, for a capricious woman. This kind of self-sacrifice is not a test of true love, for it is not altruistic. The sheik did not make his sacrifice to bene- fit the woman he coveted, but to benefit himself, as he saw no other way of gratifying his own selfish desires.* • The Rev. Isaac Malek Yonan tells us, in Ms 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 class could be in question in Trumbull's story, for the respectable women are, as Yonan says, not even permitted to talk loudly or free- ly m the presence of men. This clergyman is a native Persian, and the account he gives of his countrywomen, unbiassed 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, in- deed, 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 bis 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 de- 303 ROMANTIC LOVE— SELF-SACRIFICE HERO AND LEANDER Very great importance attaches to this distinction between selfish and altruistic self-sacrifice. The failure to make this distinction is perhaps more than anything else responsible for the current belief that romantic love was known to the ancients. Did not Leander risk and sacrifice his life for Hero, swimming to her at night across the stormy Hellespont ? Gentle reader, he did not. He risked his life for the purpose of continuing his illicit amours with a priestess of Venus in a lonely tower. As we shall see in the chapter devoted to G-reek romances, there is in the story told by .Musseus not a single trait rising above frank sensuality. In his eagerness to gratify his appe- tite, Leander risked Hero's life as well as his own. His swim- ming across the strait was, moreover, no more than any ani- mal would do to meet its mate on the other side of a river. It was a romantic thing to do, but it was no proof of roman- tic love. Bearing in mind what Westermarck says (134) — " With wild animals sexual desire is not less powerful as an incentive to strenuous exertion than hunger and thirst. In the rut-time, the males, even of the most cowardly species, engage in mortal combats " — we see that Hero's risking of death for the sake of his intrigue was not even a mark of exceptional courage ; and regarding the quality and nature of his " love" it tells us nothing whatever. THE ELEPHANT AND THE LOTOS In the Hindoo drama Malavika and Agnimitra, Kalidasa represents the king as seeking an interview with a new flame graded Oriental customs have led the Persians to the conclusion that " love has nothin°r to do with the matrimonial connection," the main purpose of marriage being " the convenience and pleasure of a deeenerate people" (34-114). So far this Persian clergyman. His conclusions are Dome out by. the.observa- tions 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 assured 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."' THE ELEPHANT AND THE LOTOS 203 of his. When his companion warns him that the queen might surprise them, the king answers : When the elephant sees the lotos leaves He fears no crocodile. Lotos leaves being the elephant's favorite food, these lines admirably sum up the Hindoo idea of risking life for " love " — cupboard love. But would the elephant risk his life to save the beautiful lotos flowers from destruction ? Foolish question ! Was not the lotos created to gratify the elephant's appetite just as beautiful women were created to subserve man's desires ? Fighting crocodiles for the sake of the sweet lotos is a characteristic of primitive " love " in all its various strata. " Nothing is more certain," writes M'Lean (135), " than that the enamoured Esquimau will risk life and limb in the pur- suit of his object." Women, he says, are the main cause of all quarrels among the Esquimaux ; and the same is true of the lower races in general. If an Australian waijts to run away with another man's wife, the thought of risking his life — and hers too — does not restrain him one moment. As- cending to the Greeks, we may cite Eobert Burton's summing up of one of their legends : " Thirteen proper young men lost their lives for that fair Hipodamia's sake, the daughter of Onomaus, King of Elis : when that hard condition was proposed of death or victory tin a race], they made no account of it, but courageously for ove died, till Pelops at last won her by a sleight." What is this but another version of the story of the lotos and the elephant ? The prize was great, and worth the risk. Men risk their lives daily for gold, and for objects infinitely less attractive to the senses and the selfish ambitions than a beautiful princess. In the following, which Burton quotes from Hcedus, the sensual and selfish basis of all such con- fronting of death for " love's " sake is laid bare to the bone : " What shall I say of the great dangers they undergo, single combats they undertake, how they will venture their lives, creep in at windows, gutters, climb over walls to come 204 ROMANTIC LOVE— SELF-SACRIFICE to their sweethearts, and if they be surprised, leap out at windows, cast themselves headlong down, bruising or break- ing their legs or arms, and sometimes losing life itself, as Calisto did for his lovely Melibcea ? " I have known rich young Americans and Europeans risk their lives over and over again in such "gallant" adventures, but if I had asked them if they loved these women, i.e., felt such a disinterested affection for them (like a mother's for her child) that they would have risked their lives to benefit them when there was nothing to gain for themselves — they would have laughed in my face. Whence we see how foolish it is to infer from such instances of "gallantry" and " self-sacrifice" that the ancients knew romantic love in our sense of the word. It is useless to point to passages like this (again from Bur- ton) : "Polienus, when his mistress Circe did but frown upon him, in Petronius, drew his sword, and bade her kill, stab, or whip him to death, he would strip himself naked and not resist." Such fine talk occurs in Tibullus and other poets of the time ; but where are the actions corresponding to it ? Where do we read of these Eomans and Greeks ever braving the crocodile for the sake of preserving the purity of the lotos herself ? Or of sparing a lotos belonging to an- other, but at their mercy ? Perseus himself, much vaunted for his chivalry, did not undertake to save the rock-chained Andromeda from the sea monster until he had extorted a promise that she should be his prize. Fine sort of chivalry, that! SUICIDE IS SELFISH One more species of pseudo-self-sacrifice remains to be con- sidered. When Hero finds Leander's dead body on the rocks she commits suicide. Is not this self-sacrifice for love's sake ? It is always so considered, and Eckstein, in his eagerness to prove that the ancient Greeks knew romantic love,' gives a list of six legendary suicides from hopeless or foiled love. The question of suicide is an interesting one and will be con- sidered in detail in the chapter on the American Indians, ' Magazinfiir d. Lit. des In- und Auslandes, June 30, 1888. SUICIDE IS SELFISH 205 who, like other savages, were addicted to it, in many cases for the most trivial reasons. In this place I will content my- self with noting that if Eckstein had taken the pains to peruse the four volumes of Kamdohr's Venus Urania (a formidable task, I admit), he would have found an author who more than a hundred years ago knew that suicide is no test of true love. There are indeed, he says (III., 46), plenty of old stories of self-sacrifice, but they are all of the kind where a man risks comfort and life to secure possession of a coveted body for his own enjoyment, or else where he takes his own life because he feels lonely after having failed to secure the desired union. These actions are no index of love, for they "may coexist with the crudest treatment" of the coveted woman. Very ambitious persons or misers may commit sui- cide after losing honor or wealth, and "a coarse negro, in face of the danger of losing his sweetheart, is capable of casting himself into the ocean with her, or of plunging his dagger into her breast and then into his own." All this is selfish. The only true index of love, Eamdohr continues, lies in the sacrifice of one's own happiness /or another's sake; in resigning one's self to separation from the beloved, or even to death, if that is necessary to secure her happiness or welfare. Of such self-sacrifice he declares he cannot find a single instance in the records and stories of the ancients ; nor can I. The suicide of Dido after her desertion by ^neas is often cited as proof of love, but Eamdohr insists (338) that, apart from the fact that " a woman really in love would not have pursued j32neas with curses," such an act as hers was the out- come of purely selfish despair, on a par with the suicide of a miser after the loss of his money. It is needless to add to this that Hero's suicide was likewise selfish ; for of what possible benefit was it to the dead Leander that she took her own life in a cowardly fit of despondency at having lost her chief source of delight ? Had she lost her life in an effort to save his, the case would have been different. Instances of women sacrificing themselves for men's sake abound in ancient literature, though I am not so sure that they 206 ROMANTIC LOVE— AFFECTION abounded in life, except under compulsion, as in the Hindoo suttee.^ As we shall see in the chapter on India, tales of fem- inine self-sacrifice were among the means craftily employed by men to fortify and gratify their selfishness. Still, in the long run, just as man's fierce "jealousy" helped to make women chaster than men, so the inculcation in women of self- sacrifice as a duty, gradually made them naturally inclined to that virtue — an inclination which was strengthened by inveterate, deep-rooted, maternal love. Thus it happened that self-sacrifice assumed rank in course of time as a spe- cifically feminine virtue ; so much so that -the German meta- physician Fichte could declare that "the woman's life should disappear in the man's without a remnant," and that this process is love. No doubt it is love, but love demands at the same time that the man's life should disappear in the woman's. It is interesting to note the sexual aspects of gallantry and self-sacrifice. Women are prevented by custom, etiquette, and inbred coyness from showing gallant attentions to men before marriage, whereas the impulse to sacrifice happiness or life for love's sake is at least as strong in them as in men, and of longer standing. If a girl of affectionate impulses on hearing that the man she loved — though he might not have proposed to her — lay wounded, or ill of yellow fever, in a hospital, threw away all reserve, coyness, and fear of violating decorum, and went to nurse him day and night, at imminent risk of her own life, all the world would applaud her, convinced that she had done a more feminine thing than if she had allowed coyness to suppress her sympathetic and self-sacrificing impulses. XII. AFFECTION A German poem printed in the Wunderhorn • vel&tes how a young man, after a long absence from home, returns and eagerly hastens to see his former sweetheart. He finds her ■ The philosophy of widow-burning will be explained under the head of Con- jugal Love. EROTIC ASSASSINS 207 standing in the doorway and informs her that her beauty pleases his heart as much as ever : Gott griiss dich, du Hiibsche, du Feine, Von Herzen gefallet du mir. To which she retorts : "What need is there of my pleasing you ? I got a husband long ago — a handsome man, well able to take care of me." Whereupon the disappointed lover draws his knife and stabs her through the heart. In his History of German Song (chap, v.), Edward Schure comments on this poem in the following amazing fashion : " How necessary yet how tragic is this answer with the knife to the heartless challenge of the former sweetheart ! How fatal and terrible is this sudden change of a passionate soul from ardent love to the wildest hatred ! We see him taking one step back, we see how he trembles, how the flush of rage suffuses his face, and how his love, offended, injured, and dragged in the dust, slakes its thirst with the blood of the faithless woman." EROTIC ASSASSINS It seems almost incredible that such a villanous sentiment should have been allowed to appear in a book without sending its author to prison. " Necessary " to murder a sweetheart because she has changed her mind during a man's long ab- sence ! The wildest anarchist plot never included a more diabolical idea. Brainless, selfish, impulsive young idiots are only too apt to act on that principle if their proposals are not accepted ; the papers contain cases nearly every week of poor girls murdered for refusing an unwelcome suitor ; but the world is beginning to understand that it is illogical and monstrous to apply the sacred word of love to the feeling which animates these cowardly assassins, whose only motives are selfish lust and a dog-in-the-manger jealousy. Love never "slakes its thirst "with the blood of a woman. Had that man really loved that woman, he would have been no more capable of murdering her than of murdering his father for disinheriting him. 308 ROMANTIC LOVE— AFFECTION Schure is by no means the only author who has thus con- founded love with murderous, Jealous lust. A most astound- ing instance occurs in Goethe's Werther — the story of a common servant who conceived a passion for a well-to-do widow. He lost his appetite, his sleep, forgot his errands ; an evil spirit pursued him. One day, finding her alone in the gar- ret, he made an improper proposal to her, and on her refus- ing he attempted violence, from which she was saved only through the timely arrival of her brother. In defending his conduct the servant, in a most ungallant, unmanly, and cow- ardly way, tried to fasten the guilt on the widow by saying that she had previously allowed him to take some liberties with her. He was of course promptly ejected from the house, and when subsequently another man was engaged to take his place, and began to pay his addresses to the widow, the discharged servant fell upon him and assassinated him. And this disgusting exhibition of murdel^ous lust and jeal- ousy leads Goethe to exclaim, rapturously : " This love, this fidelity (!), this passion, is thus seen to be no invention of the poets (!). It lives, it is to be found in its greatest purity (!) among that class of people whom we call uneducated and coarse." In view of the sensual and selfish attitude which Goethe held toward women all his life, it is perhaps not strange that he should have written the silly words just quoted. It was probably a guilty conscience, a desire to extenuate selfish indulgence at the expense of a poor girl's virtue and happi- ness, that led him to represent his hero, Werther, as using every possible efEort in court to secure the pardon of that erotomaniac who had first attempted rape and then finished up by assassinating his rival. If Werther's friend had murdered the widow herself, Goethe would have been logically bound to see in his act still stronger evidence of the "reality," "fidelity," and "puri- ty" of love among "people whom we call uneducated and coarse." And if Goethe had lived to read the Eev. W. "W. Gill's Savage Life in Polynesia, he might have found THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON 209 therein (118) a story of cannibal "love" still more calcu- lated to arouse his rapturous enthusiasm — " An ill-looking but brave warrior of the cannibal tribe of Euanae, named Vete, fell violently in love with a pretty girl named Tanuau, who repelled his advances and foolishly re- viled him for his ugliness. His only thought now was how to be revenged for this unpardonable insult. He could not kill her, as she wisely kept to the encampment of Mantara. After some months Tanuau sickened and died. The corpse was conveyed across the island to be let down the chasm of Raupa, the usual burial-place of her tribe." Vete chose this as the time for revenge. Arrangements were made to intercept the corpse secretly, and he had it carried away. It was too decomposed to be eaten, so they cut it in pieces and burned it — burning anything belonging to a person being the greatest injury one can inflict on a natiye. THE WISDOM OF SOLOMOif But what have all these disgusting stories to do with affec- tion, the subject of this chapter? Nothing whatever-^and that is why I have put them here — to show in a glaring light that what Goethe and Schure, and doubtless thousands of their readers accepted as love is not love, since there is no affection in it. A true patriot, a man who feels an affection for his country, lays down his life for it without a thought of personal advantage ; and if his country treats him ungratefully he does not turn traitor and assassin — ^like the German and Polynesian "lovers" we have just read about. A real lover is indeed overjoyed to have his affection returned ; but if it, is not reciprocated he is none the less affectionate, none the less ready to lay down his life for the, other, and, above all, he is utterly incapable of taking hers. What creates this differ- ence between lust and love is affection, and, so far at least as matetnal love is concerned, the nature of affection was known thousands of years ago. When two mothers came before King Solomon, each claiming the same child as her own, the king sent for a sword and said, "Divide the living child in- 210 ROMANTIC LOVE— AFFECTION two, and gire half to the one and half to the other." To this the false claimant agreed, but the real mother exclaimed, " my lord, give her the living child and in no wise slay it." Then the king knew that she was the child's mother and gave him to her. " And all Israel saw that the wisdom of God was in Solomon, to do judgment." If we ask why this infallible test of love was not applied to the sexual passion, the answer is that it would have failed, be- cause ancient love between the sexes was, as all the testimony collected in this book shows, too sensual and selfish to stand such a test. Yet it is obvious that if we to-day are to apply the word' love to the sexual relations, we must use the same test of disinterested affection that we use in the case of ma- ternal love or love of country ; and that love is not love be- fore affection is added to all the other ingredients heretofore considered. In that servant's "love" which so excited the wonder of Goethe, only three of the fourteen ingredients of love were present — individual preference, monopoly, and jeal- ousy — and those three, as we have seen, occur also in plain lust. Of the tender, altruistic, loving traits of love — sym- pathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection — there is not a trace. STUFF AND KOKSEKSE When a great poet can blunder so flagrantly in his diagnosis of love, we cannot wonder that minor writers should often be erratic. For instance, in The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (45-46), Captain J. D. Bourke exclaims : " So much stuff and nonsense has been written about the entire absence of affection from the Indian character, especially in the rela- tions between the sexes, that it affords me great pleasure to note this little incident " — namely, a scene between an Indian and a young squaw : " They had evidently only lately had a quarrel, for which each was heartily sorry. He approached, and was received with a disdain tempered with so much sweetness and affec- tion that he wilted at once, and, instead of boldly asserting himself, dared do nothing but timidly touch her hand. The SACRIFICES OF CANNIBAL HUSBANDS 211 touch, I imagine, was not disagreeable, because the girl's hand was soon firmly held in his, and he, with earnest warmth, was pouring into her ear words whose purport it was not difficult to conjecture." That the simplest kind of a sensual caress — squeezing a young woman's hand and whispering in her ear — should be accepted as evidence of affection is naive, to say the least, and need not be commented on after what has just been said about the true nature of affection and its altruistic test. Un- fortunately many travellers who came in contact with the lower races shared Bourke's crude conception of the nature of affection, and this has done much to mislead even expert anthropologists ; Westermarck, for instance, who is induced by such testimony to remark (358) that conjugal affection has among certain uncivilized peoples " reached a remarkably high degree of development." Among those whom he relies on as witnesses is Schweinfurth, who says of the man-eating African Niam-Niam that " they display an affection for their wives which is unparalleled among natives of so low a grade. . . . A husband will spare no sacrifice to redeem an im- prisoned wife" (I., 472). SACKIFICES OF CANinBAL HUSBAlfDS This looks like strong evidence, but when we examine the "facts the illusion vanishes. The Nubians, it appears, are given to stealing the wives of these Niam-Niam, to induce them to ransom them with ivory. A case occurred within Dr. Schweinfurth's own experience (II., 180-187). Two married women were stolen, and during the night " it was touching, through the moaning of the wind, to catch the lamentations of the Niam-Niam men bewailing the loss of their captured wives ; cannibals though they were, they were evidently capable of true conjugal affection. The Nubians remained quite unaffected by any of their cries, and never for a moment swerved from their purpose of recovering the ivory before they surrendered the women." Here we see what the expression that the Niam-Niam " spare no sacrifice 212 ROMANTIC LOVE— AFFECTION to redeem their imprisoned women " amounts to : the Nu- bians coiinted on it that they would rather part with their ivory than with their wives ! This, surely, involved no " sacrifice " ; it was simply a question of which the husbands preferred, the useless ivory or the useful women — desirable as drudges and concubines. Why should buying back a wife be evidence of affection any more than the buying of a bride, which is a general custom of Africans ? As for their howling over their lost wives, that was natural enough ; they would have howled over lost cows too — as our children cry if their milk is taken away when they are hungry. Actions which can be interpreted in such sensual and selfish terms can never be accepted as proof of true affection. That the captured wives, on their part, were not troubled by conjugal affection is evident from Schweinfurth's remark that they " were per- fectly composed and apparently quite indifferent." INCLINATIONS MISTAKEN FOR AFFECTION Let us take one more case. There are plenty of men who would like to kiss every pretty girl they see, and no one would be so foolish as to regard a kiss as proof of affection. Yet Lyon (another of the witnesses on whom Westermarck re- lies) accepts, with a naivete equalling Captain Bourke's, the rubbing together of noses, which among the Eskimos is an equivalent of our kissing, as a iriark of "affection."' In the case of unscientific travellers, such a loose use of words may perhaps be pardonable, but a specialist who writes a his- tory of marriage should not put the label of " affection " on everything that comes into his drag-net, as Westermarck does (pp. 358-59) ; a proceeding the less excusable because he himself admits, a few pages later (362), that affection is chiefly provoked by " intellectual, emotional, and moral quali- ties" which certainly could not be found among some of the races he refers to. I have investigated a number of the al- leged cases of conjugal "affection" in books of travel, and found invariably that some manifestation of sensual attach- ment was recklessly accepted as an indication of " affection." SELFISH LIKING AND ATTACHMENT 213 In part, it is true, the English language is to be blamed for this state of affairs. The word affection has been used to mean almost any disposition of the mind, including passion, lust, animosity, and a morbid state. But in good modern usage it means or implies an altruistic feeling of devotion which urges us to seek the welfare of another even at the ex- pense of our own. We call a mother affectionate because she willingly and eagerly sacrifices herself for her child, toils for it, loses sleep and food and health for its sake. If she merely cared for it [note the subtle double sense of " car- ing for "] because it is pretty and amusing, we might con- cede that she "liked" it, was "attached" to it, or "fond" of it ; but it would be incorrect to speak of affection. Lik- ing, attachment, and fondness differ from affection not only in degree but in kind ; they are selfish, while affection is un- selfish ; they occur among savages, while affection is peculiar to civilized persons and perhaps some animals. SELMSH LIKIKG AND ATTACHMENT Liking is the weakest kind of inclination toward another. It "never has the intensity of love." To say that I like a man is to indicate merely that he pleases me, gives me selfish pleasure — in some way or other. A man may say of a girl who pleases him by her looks, wit, vivacity, or sympathy, " I like her," though he may have known her only a few minutes ; while a girl who will rather die than give any sign of affection, may be quite willing to confess that she likes him, knowing that the latter means infinitely less and does not betray her ; that is, it merely indicates that he pleases her and not that she is particularly anxious to please him, as she would be if she loved him. Girls "like" candy, too, because it gives them pleasure, and can- nibals may like missionaries without having the least affec- tion for them. Attachment is stranger than liking, but it also springs from selfish interests and habits. It is apt to be similar to that gratitude which is "a lively sense of favors to come." Mrs. 214 ROMANTIC LOVE— AFFECTION Bishop (Isabella Bird) eloquently describes (II., 135-136) the attachment to her of a Persian horse, and incidentally suggests the philosophy of the matter in one sentence : "To him I am an embodiment of melons, cucumbers, grapes, pears, peaches, biscuits, and sugar, with a good deal of petting and ear-rub- bing thrown in." Cases' of attachment between husband and wife no doubt abound among savages, even when the man is usually contemptuous and rude in his treatment of the wife. The Niam-Niam husbands of Schweinf arth did not, as we saw, give any evidence of unselfish affection, but they were doubt- less attached to their wives, for obvious reasons. As for the women among the lower races, they are apt, like dogs, to cling to their master, no matter how much he may kick them about. They get from him food and shelter, and blind habit does the rest to attach them to his hearth. What habit and associa- tion can do is shown in the ease with which " happy families" of hostile animals can be reared. But the beasts of prey must be well fed ; a day or two of fasting would result in the lamb lying down inside the lion. The essential selfishness of at- tachment is shown also in the way a man becomes attached to his pipe or his home, etc. At the same time, personal at- tachment may prove the entering wedge of something higher. " The passing attachments of young people are seldom enti- tled to serious notice ; although sometimes they may ripen by long intercourse into a laudable and steady affection " (Crabb). SOOLISH FOKDNESS The word fondness is sometimes used in the sense of a ten- der, loving disposition ; yet there is nearly always an implica- tion of silly extravagance or unseemly demonstrativeness, and in the most accurate usage it means a foolish, doting indul- gence, without discriminating intelligence, or even common- sense. As Crabb puts it in his English Synonyms, "A fond parent does not rise above a fool." Everybody knows fathers and mothers whose fondness induces them to indulge all the appetites, desires, and whims of their children, thereby ruining their health and temper, making them greedy and selfish, and FOOLISH FONDNESS 215 laying the foundation for a wretched life for the children them- selves and all who are unfortunate enough to come into con- tact with them. This irrational fondness is what travellers and anthropologists have so often mistaken for genuine affec- tion in the cases of savages and barharians who were found to be fondling their babes, doting upon them, playing with them, and refusing to punish them for any naughtiness. But it is far from being affection, because it is not only foolish, but selfish. To some of my readers this may seem a strange accu- sation, but it is a fact recognized in the best literary usage, for, as CraBb remarks, "a person is fond, who caresses an ob- ject or makes it a source of pleasure to himself." Savages fondle their children because in doing so they please and amuse themselves. Their pranks entertain the fathers, and • as for the mothers, nature (natural selection) has implanted in them an unconscious instinct of race preservation which, recognizing the selfishness of primitive man, has brought it about that it gives the mother a special pleasure to suckle and fondle her infant. The essential selfishness of this fondness is revealed when there is a conflict betweeii the mother's comfort and the child's welfare. The horrible prevalence among many of the lower races, of infanticide — merely to save trouble — of which many examples are given in various parts of this book (see index) — shows not only how selfish, but how shallow, fondness is. There are thousands of mothers in our modern cities who have not risen above this condition. An Italian, Ferriani, has written a book on degenerate mothers (Madri Snaturate), and I have in my note-books a state- ment of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children referring to a record of 3,141 castes of proved cruelty in the one month of August, 1898 ; which would make at least 35,000 cases a year, in one city alone, or possibly double that number, for many cases are never found out, or else consist of mental torture which is worse than bodily maltreat- ment. Yet there can be no doubt that all, or nearly all, of these mothers were fond of their babies — i.e., fondled them at first, till the animal instinct implanted in them was over- come by the desire for personal comfort. 216 ROMANTIC LOVE— AFFECTION This animal instinct, given to them by nature, is no virtue, for it is unconscious. A tigress has it, but we do not call it a virtue in her any more than we call her cruelty to her prey a vice ; she is acting unconsciously in either case, knowing no distinction between good and evil. Fondness, in a word, is not an ethical virtue. In addition to all its enumerated short- comings, it is, moreover, transient- A dog mother will care for her young for a few months with the watchfulness and temporary ferocity implanted in her by natural selection, but after that she will abandon them and recognize them no more as her own. Sometimes this instinctive fondness' ceases with startling rapidity. I remember once in a California yard, how a hen flew in my face angrily because I had frightened her chicks. A few days later she deserted them, before they were really quite old enough to take care of themselves, and all my efforts to make her return and let them sleep again under her warm feathers failed. She even pecked at them viciously. Some of the lower savages similarly abandon their young as soon as they are able to get along, while those who care for them longer, d6 so not from afEection, but because sons are useful assistants in hunting and fighting, and daughters can be sold or traded ofE for new wives. That they do not keep them from afEection is proved by the fact that in all eases where any selfish advantage can be gained they marry them ofE without reference to their wishes or chances of happiness.'' UNSELFISH AFFECTIO]S" , While the fondness of savages, which has been so often mis- taken for afEection, is thus seen to be foolish, unconscious, selfish, shallow, and transient, true afEection is rational, con- scious, unselfish, deep, and enduring. Being rational, it looks not to the enjoyment or comfort of the moment, but to future 1 WiUoughby, in his article on Washington Indians, recognizes the predom- inance 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 vrhen he writes that " the savage knows little of the higher affection subsequently developed, which has a worthier pur- pose 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 UNSELFISH AFFECTION 217 and enduring welfare, and therefore does not hesitate to pun- ish folly or misdeeds in order to avert future illness or mis- fortune. Instead of being a mere instinctive impulse, liable to cease at any moment, like that of the California hen referred to, it is a conscious altruism, never faltering in its ethical sense of duty, utterly incapable of sacrificing another's comfort or well-being to its own. While fondness is found coexisting with cruelty and even with infanticide and cannibalism (as in those Australian mothers, who feed their children well and carry them when tired, but when a real test of altruism comes — during a famine — kill and eat them,' just as the men do their wives when they cease to be sensually attractive), affec- tion is horrified at the mere suggestion of such a thing. No man into whose love affection enters as an ingredient would ever injure his beloved merely to gratify himself. Crabb is utterly wrong when he writes that " love is more selfish in its nature than friendship ; in indulging another it seeks its own, and when this is not to be obtained, it will change into the contrary passion of hatred." This is a definition of lust, not of love — a definition of the passion as known to the Greek Euripides, of whose lovers Benecke says (53) : " If, or as soon as, they fail in achieving the gratification of their sensual desires, their ' love ' immediately turns to hate. The idea of devotion or self-sacrifice for the good of the beloved person, as distinct from one's own, is absolutely unknown. ' Love is irresistible,' they say, and, in obedience to its commands, they set down to reckon how they can satisfy themselves, at no matter what cost to the objects of their pas- sion." How different this unaffectionate " love " from the love of which our poets sing ! Shakspere knew that absorbing af- fection is an ingredient of loVe : Beatrice loves Benedick "with an enraged affection," which is "past the infinite of the "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 Bnssian to designate the different kinds and de- grees of what is vaguely called love, while otherwise making clear the differences between liking, attachment, fondness, and affection, does not sufficiently empha- size the most important distinction between them — the selfishness of the first three and the unselfish nature of affection. > Stanford- Wallace, Avstralama, 89. 218 ROMANTIC LOVE— MENTAL PURITY night." Rosalind does not know how many fathom deep she is in love : "It cannot be sounded ; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal." Dr. Abel has truly said that " affection is love tested and purified in the fire of the in- tellect. It appears when, after the veil of fancy has dropped, a beloved one is seen in the natural beauty with various human limitations, and is still found worthy of the warmest regards. It comes slowly, but it endures ; gives more than it takes and has a tinge of tender gratitude for a thousand kind actions and for the bestowal of enduring happiness. Accord- ing to English ideas, a deep affection, through whose clear mirror the gold of the old love shimmers visibly, should be the fulfilment of marriage." Of romantic love affection obviously could not become an ingredient till minds were cultured, women esteemed, men made altruistic, and opportunities were given for youths and maidens to become acquainted with each other's minds and characters before marriage ; as Dr. Abel says, affection " comes slowly — but it endures." The love of which affec- tion forms an ingredient can never change to hatred, can never have any murderous impulses, as Schur6 and Goethe believed. It survives time and sensual charms, as Shakspere knew : Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds. Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come ; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out ey'n to the edge of doom : — If this be error, and upon me proved ; I never writ nor no man- ever loved. XIII. MENTAL PURITY Romantic love has worked two astounding miracles. We have seen how, with the aid of five of its ingredients — sym- pathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, and affection — it has GERMAN TESTIMONY 219 overthrown the Goliath of selfishness. We shall now see how it has overcome another formidable foe of civilization — sen- sualism — by means of two other modern ingredients, one of which I will call mental purity (to distinguish it from bodily purity or chastity) and the other esthetic admiration of per- sonal beauty. GERMAN TESTIMONY Modern German literature contains many sincere tributes, in prose and verse, to the purity and nobility of true love and. its refining influence. The psychologist Horwicz refers briefly (38) to the way in which " love, growing up as a mighty passion from the substratum of sexual life, has, under the re- pressing influence of centuries of habits and customs, taken on an entirely new, supersensual, ethereal character, so that to a lover every thought of naturalia seems indelicate and improper." " I feel it deeply that love must -ennoble, not crush me," wrote the poet Korner ; and again, " Your sweet name was my talisman, which led me undefiled through youth's wild storms, amid the corruption of the times, and protected my inner sanctum." " God ! " wrote Beethoven, " let me at last find her who is destined to be mine, and who shall strengthen me in virtue." According to Dr. Abel, while love longs ardently to possess the beloved, to enjoy her presence and sympathy, it has also a more or less prominent mental trait which ennobles the passion and places it at the service of the ideal of its fancy. It is accompanied by an enthusiasm for the good and the beautiful in general, which comes to most people only during the brief period of love. "It is a temporary self -exaltation, purifying the desires and urging the lover to generous deeds." Des hochste Gliick hat keine Lieder, Der Liebe Lust ist still nnd mild ; Bin Kuss, ein Blicken hin und wieder, Und alle Sehnsucht ist gestillt. — Geibel. Schiller defined love as an eager "desire for another's happiness." "Love," he adds, "is the most beautiful 330 ROMANTIC LOVE— MENTAL PURITY phenomenon in all animated nature, the mightiest magnet in the spiritual world, the source of veneration and the sub- limest virtues." Even Goethe had moments when he ap- preciated the purity ^)f love, and he confutes his own coarse conception that was referred to in the last section when he makes Werther write : " She is sacred to me. All desire is silent in her presence." ^ The French Edward Schur6 exclaims, in his History of German Song: "What surprises us foreigners in the poems of this people is the unbounded faith in love, as the supreme power in the world, as the most beautiful and divine thing on earth, . . . the first and last word of creation, its only principle of life, because it alone can urge us to complete self-surrender." Schure's intimation that this respect for love is peculiar to the Germans is, of course, absurd, for it is found in the modern literature of .all civilized countries of Europe and America; as for instance in Michael Angelo's The might of one fair face sublimes my lore, For it hath weaned my heart from low desires. ENGLISH TESTIMONT English literature, particularly, has been saturated with this sentiment for several centuries. Love is " all purity," according to Shakspere's Silvius. Schlegel remarked that by the manner in which Shakspere handled the story of Romeo and Juliet, it has become "a glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul and gives to it its highest sublimity, and which elevates even the senses them- selves into soul ;" — which reminds one of Emerson's expres- sion that the body is "ensouled" through love. Steele declared that " Love is a passion of the mind {perhaps the noblest), which was planted in it by the same hand that created it ; " and of Lady Elizabeth Hastings he wrote that " to love her was a liberal education." In Steel's Lover (No. 5) we 'See also the lefeience to the "peculiar delicacy " of his lelations to LiU, in Bckermann, III., March 5, 1830. ENGLISH TESTIMONY 221 read : " During this emotion I am highly elated in my Being, and my every sentiment improved by the efiEects of that Pas- sion. ... I am more and more convinced that this Passion is in lowest minds the strongest Incentive that can move the Soul of Man to laudable Accomplishments." And in Ko. 29 : " Nothing can me7id the Heart better than an honorable Love, except Religion." Thomas Otway sang : O woman ! lovely woman ! Nature made thee To temper man : we had been brutes without you. There's in you all that we believe of heaven, Amazing brightness, purity, and truth, Eternal joy, and everlasting love. "Love taught him shame," said Dryden, and Spenser wrote a Hymn in Honor of Love, in which he declared that Such is the power of that sweet passion That it all sordid baseness doth expel, And the refined mind doth newly fashion Unto a fairer form, which now doth dwell In his high thought, that would itself excel. Leigh Hunt wrote : " My love has made me better and more desirous of improvement than I have been." Love, indeed, is light from heaven ; A spark of that immortal fire, With angels shared, by Allah given, To lift from earth our low desire. Devotion wafts the mind above, But heaven itself descends in love. — Byron. Why should we kill the lest of passions, love ? It aids the hero, bids ambition rise To nobler heights, inspires immortal deeds, Ev'n softens brutes, and adds a grace to virtue. — Thomson. Dr. Beddoe, author of the Browning Gyclopcedia, declares that " the passion of love, throughout Mr. Browning's works, is treated as the most sacred thing in the human soul." How Browning himself loved we know from one of his wife's 222 ROMANTIC LOVE— MENTAL PURITY letters, in which she relates how she tried to discourage his advances : " I showed him how he was throwing away into the ashes his best affections — how the common gifts of youth and cheerfulness were behind me — how I had not strength, even of heart, for the ordinary duties of life — everything I told him and showed him. ' Look at this — and this — and this,' throwing down all my disadvantages. To which he did not answer by a single compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose, and that I might be right or he might be right, he was not there to decide ; but that he loved me and should to his last hour. He said that the freshness of youth had passed with him also, and that he had studied the world out of books and seen many women, yet had never loved one until he had seen me. That he knew himself, and knew that, if ever so repulsed, he should love me to his last hour — it should be first and last." No poet understood better than Tennyson that purity is an ingredient of love : For indeed I know Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden passion for a maid, Not only to keep down the base in man^ But teach high thoughts and amiable words, And courtliness, and the desire of fame And love of truth, and all that makes a man. MAIDEN FANCIES Bryan Waller Proctor fell in love when he was only five years old : " My love," he wrote afterward, " had the fire of passion, but not the clay which drags it downward ; it par- took of the innocence of my years, while it etherealized me. " Such ethereal love too is the prerogative of a young maiden, whose imagination is immaculate, ignorant of impurity. Her feelings have the fragrancy, The freshness of young flowers. No, no, the utmost share Of my desire shall be, Only to kiss that air That lately kissM thee. PATHOLOGIC LOVE 323 In high school, when sentimental impulses first manifest themselves in a girl, she is more likely than not to transfer them to a girl. Her feelings, in these cases, are not merely those of a warm friendship, but they resemble the passionate, self-sacrificing attitude of romantic love. New York school- girls have a special slang phrase for this kind of love — they call it a " crush," to distinguish it from a " mash," which refers to an impression made on a man. A girl of seventeen told me one day how madly she was in love with another girl ■whose seat was near hers ; how she brought her flowers, wiped her pens, took care of her desk ; " but I don't believe she cares for me at all," she added, sadly. PATHOLOGIC LOVE Such love is usually as innocent as a butterfly's flirtation with a flower.' It has a pathologic phase, in some cases, which need not be discussed here. But I wish to call attention to the fact that even in abnormal states modern love pre- serves its purity. The most eminent authority on mental pathology, Professor Krafft-Ebing, says, concerning eroto- mania : " The kernel of the whole matter is the delusion of being singled out and loved by a person of the other sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social class. And it should be noted that the love felt by the patient toward this person is a romantic, ecstatic, but entirely 'Platonic' affection." I have among my notes a remarkable case, relating to that most awful of diseases that can befall a woman — nymphomania.^ The patient relates : " I have also noticed that when my af- fections are aroused, they counteract animal passion. I could ' Benan, in one of his short stories, describes a girl, Emma Kosilis, whose love, at sixteen, is as innocent as it is imconscions, and who is unable to distin- gmsh it from piety. Regarding the unconscious purity of woman's love see Moll, 3, and Paget, Clinical Lectures, which discuss the loss in women of in- stinctive sexual knowledge. Cf. Ribot, 251, and Morean, Psychologic Morbide, 364-278. Ribot is sceptical, because the ultimate goal is the possession of the beloved. But that has nothing to do with the question, for what he refers to is unconscious and instinctive. Here we are considering love as a conscious feel- ing and ideal, and as such it is as spotless and sinless as the most confirmed ascetic could wish it. = The case is described in the Medical Times, April 18, 1885. 234 ROMANTIC LOVE— MENTAL PURITY never love a man because he was a man. My tendency is to worship the good I find in friends. I feel just the same to- ward those of my own sex. If they show any regard for me, the touch of a hand has power to take away all morbid feel- ing." A MODERN SBNTIMEKT There are all sorts and conditions- of love. To those who have known only the primitive (sensual) sort, the conditions described in the foregoing pages will seem strange and fan- tastic if not fictitious^that is, the products of the writers' imaginations. Fantastic they are, no doubt, and romantic, but that they are real I can vouch for by my own experience whenever I was in love, which happened several times. "When I was a youth of seventeen I fell in love with a beauti- ful, black-eyed young woman, a Spanish-American of, Oali- fornian stock. She was married, and I am afraid she was amused at my mad infatuation. Did I try to flirt with her ? A smile, a glance of her eyes, was to me the seventh heaven beyond which there could be no other. I would not have dared to touch her hand, and the thought of kissing her was as much beyond my wildest flights of fancy as if she had been a real goddess. To me she was divine, utterly unapproach- able by mortal, Every day I used to sit in a lonely spot of the forest and weep ; and when she went away I felt as if the sun had gone out and all the world were plunged into eternal darkness. Such is romantic love — a supersensual feeling of crystalline purity from which all gross matter has .been distilled. But the love that includes this ingredient is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old, and not to be found among savages, barbarians, or Orientals. To them, as the perusal of past and later chapters must convince the reader, it is in- conceivable that a woman should serve any other than sensual and utilitarian purposes. The whole story is told in what Dodge says of the Indians, who, "animal-like, approach a woman only to make love to her " ; and of the squaws who do not dare even go with a beau to a dance, or go a short dis- PERSIANS, TURKS, AND HINDOOS 225 tance from camp, without taking precautions against rape — precautions without which they " would not be safe for an instant " (210, 313). PERSIANS, TURKS, AND HINDOOS We shall read later on of the obscene talk and sights that poison the minds of boys and girls among Indians, Polyne- sians, etc., from their infancy ; in which respect Orientals are not much better than Hurons and Botocudos. " The Persian child," writes Mrs. Bishop (I., 218), "from infancy is alto- gether interested in the topics of adults ; and as the conver- sation of both sexes is said by those who know them best to be without reticence or modesty, the purity which is one of the greatest charms of childhood is absolutely unknown.'' Of the Turks (at Bagdad) Ida Pfeiffer writes {L. J. R. W., 202-203) that she found it " very painful to notice the tone of the conversation that goes on in these harems and in the baths. Nothing can exceed the demureness of the women in public ; but when they come together in these places, they indemnify themselves thor- oughly for the restraint. While they were busy with their pipes and coffee, I took the opportunity to take a glance into • the neighboring apartments, and in a few minutes I saw enough to fill me at once with disgust and compassion for these poor creatures, whom idleness and ignorance have de- graded almost below the level of humanity. A visit to the women's baths left a no less melancholy impression. There were children of both sexes— girls, women, and elderly ma- trons. The poor children ! how should they in after life un- derstand what is meant by modesty and purity, when they are accustomed from their infancy to witness such scenes, and listen to such conversation ? " These Orientals are too coarse-fibred to appreciate the spot- less, peach-down purity which in our ideal is a maiden's su- preme charm. They do not care to prolong, even for a year what to us seems the sweetest, loveliest period of life, the time of artless, innocent maidenhood. They cannot admire a rose for its fragrant beauty, but must needs regard it as a thing 226 ROMANTIC LOVE— MENTAL PURITY to be picked at once and used to gi'atify their appetite. Nay, they cannot even wait till it is a full-blown rose, but must destroy the lovely bud. The " civilized " Hindoos, who are allowed legally to sacrifice girls to their lusts before the poor victims have reached the age of puberty, are really on a level with the African savages who indulge in the same practice. An unsophisticated reader of Kalidasa might find in the King's comparison of Sakuntala to " a flower that no one has smelt, a sprig that no one has plucked, a pearl that has not yet been pierced," a recognition of the charm of maiden purity. But there is a world-wide difference between this and the modern sentiment. The King's attitude, as the con- text shows, is simply that of an epicure who prefers his oys- ters fresh. The modern sentiment is embodied in Heine's exquisite lines : DU BI8T WIB EINB BLUME. E'en as a lovely flower So fair, so pure, thou art ; I gaze on thee and sadness Comes stealing o'er my heart. My hands I fain had folded Upon thy soft brown hair, Praying that God may keep thee So loTely, pure, and fair. — Trans, of Kate Freiligraih Kroeker, It is not surprising that this intensely modern poem should have been set to music — the most modern of all the arts — more frequently than any other verses ever written. To Ori- entals, to savages, to Greeks, it would be incomprehensible — as incomprehensible as Euskin's " there is no true conqueror of lust but love," or Tennyson's 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. To them the love between men and women seems not a pu- rifying, ennobling emotion, a stimulus to self-improvement and an impulse to do generous, unselfish deeds, but a mere animal passion, low and degrading. LOVE DESPISED IN JAPAN AND CHINA 227 LOVE DESPISED IK JAPAN AND CHIKA The Japanese have a little more regard for women than most Orientals, yet by them, too, love is regarded as a low passion — as, in fact, identical with lust. It is not considered respectable for young folks to arrange their own marriages on a basis of love. " Among the lower classes, indeed," says Kiichler,* " such direct unions are not unfrequent ; but they are' held in con- tempt, and are known as yago (meeting on a moor), a term of disrespect, showing the low opinion entertained of it." Professor Chamberlain writes, in his Things Japanese (285) : " One love marriage we have heard of, one in eighteen years ! But then both the young people had been brought up in America. Accordingly they took the reins in their own hands, to the great scandal of all their friends and rela- tions." On another page (308) he says : " According to the Confu- cian ethical code, which the Japanese adopted, a man's par- ents, his teacher, and his lord claim his life-long service, his wife standing on an immeasurably lower plane." ^ Ball, in his Things Chinese comments on the efforts made by China- men to suppress love-matchss as being immoral ; and the French author, L. A. Martin, says, in his book on Chinese morals (171) : " Chinese philosophers know nothing of Platonic love ; they speak of the relations between men and women with the greatest reserve, and we must attribute this to the low esteem in which they generally hold the fair sex ; in their illustra- tions of the disorders of love, it is almost always the woman on whom the blame of seduction is laid." ' Trans. Asiatic Soc. of Japan, 1885, p. 181. ' In the Journal des Ooncourts (V., 214-215) a young Japanese, with character- istic topsy-turviness, comments on the '" coarseness " of European ideas of love, which ne could understand only in his own coarse way. ' * Vous dites a une f emme, je tous aime ! Eh bien ! Chez nous, o^est comme si on disait : Madame, je vais coucher avec vous. Tout ce que nous osons dire Sl la dame que nous aimons, c'est que nous envious pres d'elle la place des canards mandarins. C'est messieurs, notre oiseau d'amour." 228 ROMANTIC LOVE— MENTAL PURITY GEEEK SCOEN FOR WOMAN-LOTE The Greeks were in the same boat. They did indeed distin, guish between two kinds of love, the sensual and the celestial- but — as we shall see in detail in the special chapter devoted to them — they applied the celestial kind only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love between men and women. Thatlove was considered impure and degrading, a humiliating aflfliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable to the friendship between men or the feelings that unite parents and children. This is the view taken in Plato's writings, in Xenophon's Sym- posium and everywhere. In Plutarch's Dialogue on Love, writ- ten five hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faint protest against the current notion that " there is no gust of friendship or heavenly ravishment of mind," in the love for women ; but this is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which is thus brutally expressed by one of the in- terlocutors in the same dialogue : " True love has nothing to do with women, and I assert that you who are passionately inclined toward women and maidens do not love any more than flies love milk or bees honey, or cooks the calves and birds whom they fatten in the dark. . . . The passion for women con- sists at the best in the gain of sensual pleasure and the en- joyment of bodily beauty." Another interlocutor sums up the Greek attitude in these words : "It behooves respectable women neither to love nor to be loved." Goethe had an aper9u of the absence of purity in Greek love when he wrote, in his Roman Elegies : In der heroischen Zeit, da Gotter und Gottinnen liebten. Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier. PBNETEATIVE TIEGISTITT The change in love from the barbarian and ancient attitude to the modern conception of it as a refining, purifying feeling is closely connected' with the growth of the altruistic ingre- dients of love — sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY 229 and especially adoration. It is one of the points where re- ligion and love meet. Mariolatry greatly afifected men's atti- tude toward women in general, including their notions about love. There is a curious passage in Burton worth citing here (III., 2) : " Christ himself, and the Virgin Mary, had most beautiful eyes, as amiable eyes as any persons, saith Baradius, that ever lived, yet withal so modest, so chaste, that whosoever looked on them was freed from that passion of burning lust, if we may believe Gerson and Bonaventure ; there was no such an- tidote against it as the Virgin Mary's face." Mediaeval theologians had a special name for this faculty — Penetrative Virginity — which McClintock and Strong's Gyclopmdia of Biblical Literature defines as " such an extraordinary or perfect gift of chastity, to which some have pretended that it overpowered those by whom they have been surrounded, and created in them an insensibility to the pleasures of the flesh. The Virgin Mary, according to some Romanists, was possessed of this gift, which made those who beheld her, notwithstanding her beauty, to have no senti- ments but such as were consistent with chastity." In the eyes of refined modern lovers, every spotless maiden has that gift of penetrative virginity. The beauty of her face, or the charm of her character, inspires in him an affection which is as pure, as chaste, as the love of flowers. But it was only very gradually and slowly that human beauty gained the power to inspire such a pure love ; the proof of which asser- tion is to be unfolded in our next section. XIV. ADMIRATION" OP PERSONAL BEAUTY " When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind," exclaimed Dryden ; and Romeo asks : Did my heart lore till now ? forswear it, sight ! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night. In full-fledged romantic love of the masculine type the admiration of a girl's personal beauty is no doubt the most 330 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY entrancing ingredient. But such love is rare even to-day, while in ordinary love-afEairs the sense of beauty does not play nearly so important a r61e as is commonly supposed. In woman's love, as everybody knows, the regard for masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient ; and a man's love, provided sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, afEection, and purity enter into it, may be of the genuine romantic type, even though he has no sense of beauty at all. And this is lucky for the prospects of love, since, even among the most civilized races to-day, the number of men and women who, while otherwise refined and estimable, have no real appreciation of beauty, personal or otherwise, is astonish- ingly large. darwik's unfortunate mistake This being true of the average man and woman among the most cultured races, we ought to be able to conclude, as a matter of course and without the necessity of argumentation, that the admiration of personal beauty has still less to do with the motives that lead a savage to marry this or that girl, or a savage girl to prefer this or that suitor. Strange to say, this simple corollary of the doctrine of evolution has been greatly obscured by Darwin himself, by his theory of sexual selection, which goes so far as to attribute the beauty of the male animals to the continued preference by the females of the more showy males, and the consequent hereditary trans- mission of their colors and other ornaments. When we bear in mind how unimportant a r61e the regard for personal beauty plays even among the females of the most advanced human beings, the idea that the females of the lower animals are guided in their pairing by minute subtle differences in the beau by of masculine animals seems positively comic. It is an idea such as could have emanated only from a mind as unes- thetic as Darwin's was. So far as animals are concerned, Alfred Russell Wallace completely demolished the theory of sexual selection,' after 'In his Tropical Nature^ Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selec- tion, and Darwinism. In S. L. P. B., 42-50, where I gave a summary of this DARWIN'S UNFORTUNATE MISTAKE 231 it had created a great deal of confusion in scientific literature. In regard to the lower races of man this confusion still con- tinues, and I therefore wish to demonstrate here, more con- clusively than I did in my first book (60, 61, 327-30), that among primitive men and women, too, the sense of beauty does not play the important rdle attributed to it in their love-afEairs. " The Influence of Beauty in determining the Marriages of Mankind " is one of the topics discussed in the Descent of Man. Darwin tries to show that, "especially" during the earlier period of our long history, the races of mankind were modified by the continued selection of men by women and women by men in accordance with their peculiar standards of beauty. He gives some of the numerous in- stances showing how savages " ornament " or mutilate their bodies ; adding : " The motives are various ; the men paint their bodies to make themselves appear terrible in battle ; certain mutilations are connected with religious rites, or they mark the age of puberty, or the rank of the man, or they serve to distinguish the tribes. Among savages the same fashions prevail for long periods, and thus mutilations, from whatever cause first made, soon come to be valued as distinc- tive marks. But self -adornment, vanity, and the admira- tion of others seem to le the commonest motives." Among those who were led astray by these views of Darwin is Westermarck, who declares (257, 172) that "in every country, in every race, beauty stimulates passion," and that " it seems to be beyond doubt that men and women began to ornament, mutilate, paint, and tattoo themselves chiefly in order to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex — that they might court successfully, or be courted" — an opinion in which Grosse follows him, in his interesting treat- ise on the Beginnings of Art (111, etc.), thereby marring his chapter on " Personal Decoration." In the following question, I suggested that the "typical colors" (the numerous cases where both sexes are brilliantly colored) for which Wallace could "assign no function or use," owe their existence to the need of a means of recognition by the sexes ; thus indicating how the love-affairs of animals may modify their appearance in a way quite different from that suggested by Darwin, and dispensing with his postulates of unproved female choice and problematic variations in esthetic Laste. 232 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY pages I shall show, on the contrary, that when we subject these primitive customs of " ornamentation " and mutilation to a critical examination we find in nearly every case that they are either not at all or only indirectly (not esthetically), con- nected with the relations of the sexes ; and that neither does personal beauty exist as a rule among savages, nor have they the esthetic sense to appreciate its exceptional occurrence. They nearly always paint, tattoo, decoratfe, or mutilate them- selves without the least reference to courtship or the desire to please the other sex. It is the easiest thing in the world to fill page after page — as Darwin, Westermarck, Grosse, and others have done — with the remarks of travellers regarding the ad- diction of savages to personal "ornamentation"; but this testimony rests, as we shall see, on the unwarranted assump- tions of superficial observers, who, ignorant of the real reasons why the lower races paint, tattoo, and otherwise " adorn " themselves, recklessly inferred that they did it to "make themselves beautiful." The more carefully the customs and traditions of these races ^re studied, the more obvious be- comes the non-esthetic and non-erotic origin of their personal " decorations." In my extensive researches, for every single fact that seemed to favor the sexual selection theory I have found a hundred against it ; and I have become more and more amazed at the extraordinary sang froid with which its advocates have ignored the countless facts that speak against it while boosting into prominence the very few that at first sight appear to support it. In the following pages I shall at- tempt to demolish the theory of sexual selection in reference to the lower races of man as Wallace demolished it in refer- ence to animals ; premising that the mass of cumulative evi- dence here presented is only a very small part of what might be adduced on my side. Let us consider the different motives for personal " decoration " in succession. WAR "DECORATIONS" 333 " DECOKATION " FOE PKOTECTION Many of the alleged personal " decorations " of inferior races are merely measures to protect themselTes against climate, insects, etc. The Maoris of New Zealand besmear themselves with grease and red ochre as a defence against the sand-flies.* The Andaman islanders plaster themselves with a mixture of lard and colored earth to protect their skins from heat and mosquitoes.'' Canadian Indians painted their faces in winter as a protection against frost-bite. In Patago- nia "both sexes smear their faces, and occasionally their bodies with paintj the Indians alleging as the reasons for using this cosmetic that it is a protection against the effects of the wind ; and I found from personal experience that it proved a complete preservative from excoriation or chapped skin." * C. Bock notes that in Sumatra rice powder is lavishly employed by many of the women, but " not with the object of preserving the complexion or reducing the color, but to prevent perspiration by closing the pores of the skin."^ Baumann says of the African Bakongo that many of their peculiar ways of arranging the hair " seem to be intended less as ornamental head-dresses than as a bolster for the burdens they carry on their heads ; ' and Squier says that the reason given by the Nicaraguans for flattening the heads of their children is that they may be better fitted in adult life to bear burdens.* WAR " DBCORATIOKS " Equally remote as the foregoing from all ideas of personal beauty or of courtship and the desire to inspire sexual pas- sion is the custom so widely prevalent of painting and other- wise " adorning " the body for war. The Australians di- ■Angas, n., 65. »Tylor, Anthr.,W7. ' Musters, 171 ; ef. Thomson, Through Masai Land, 89, where we read that woman^R coating of lampblack and castor-oil — her only dress — serves to prevent excessive perspiration in the day-time and ward off clulls at night. * C. Book, 37.5. > O. Baumann, Mitth. Anthr. Oes. , Wieu, 1887, 161. •Nicaragua, II., 345. 234 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY versely made use of red and yellow ochre, or of white pigment for war paint.* Caesar relates that the. ancient Britons stained themselves blue with woad to give themselves a more horrid aspect in war. "Among ourselves," as Tylor remarks, "the guise which was so terrific in the Red Indian warrior has come down to make the circus clown a pattern of folly. "^ Regarding Canadian Indians we read that "some may be seen with blue noses, but with cheeks and eyebrows black ; others mark forehead, nose, and cheeks with lines of various colors ; one would think he beheld so many hobgoblins. They believe that in colors of this description they are dread- ful to their enemies, and that otherwise their own line of battle will be concealed as by a veil ; finally, that it hardens the skin of the body, so that the cold of the winter is easily borne."* The Sioux Indians blackened their faces when they went on the warpath. They "highly prize personal bravery, and therefore constantly wear the marks of distinc- tion which they received for their exploits ; among these are, especially, tufts of human hair attached to the arms and legs, and feathers on their heads." ^ When Sioux warriors return from the warpath with scalps "the squaws as well as the men paint with vermilion a semicircle in front of each ear." ' North Carolina Indians when going to war painted their faces all over red, while those of South Carolina, according to DeBrahm, "painted their faces red in token of friend- ship and black in expression of warlike intentions. " Before charging the foe," says Dorsey, " the Osage warriors paint themselves anew. This is called the death paint." The Algonquins, on the day of departure for war, dressed in their best, coloring the hair red and painting their faces and bodies red and black. The Cherokees when going to war dyed their hair red and adorned it with feathers of various colors.^ Bancroft says (I., 105) that when a Thlinkit arms himself for war he paints his face and powders his hair a brilliant red. "He then ornaments his head with a white eagle feather as a token of stern, vindictive determination." ' Sturt, II., 103. = Tylor, 337. ' Jesuit Relations, I., 879. 4 Prince Wied, 149. » Belden, 145. « Mallery, 1888-89, 631-33. WAR "DECORATIONS" 235 John Adair wrote of the Chickasaws, in 1720, that they " read- ily know achievements in war by the bine marks over their breasts and arms, they being as legible as our alphabetical characters are to us "—which calls attention to a very fre- quent use of what are supposed to be ornaments as merely part of a language of signs. Irving remarks in Astoria, regarding the Arikara warriors, that " some had the stamp of a red hand across their mouths, a sign that they had drunk the life-blood of an enemy." In Schoolcraft we read (II., 58) that among the Dakotas on St. Peter's Kiver a red hand means that the wearer has been wounded by an enemy, while a black hand indicates " I have slain an enemy." The Hidatsa Indians wore eagle feathers " to denote acts of cour- age or success in war " ; and the Dakotas and others indi- cated by means of special spots or colored bars in their feath- ers or cuts in them, that the wearer had killed an enemy, or wounded one, or taken a scalp, or killed a woman, etc. A black feather denoted that an Ojibwa woman was killed. The marks on their blankets had similar meanings.* Peter Carder, an Englishman captive among the Brazilians, wrote : " This is to be noted, that how many men these savages doe 'kill, so many holes they will have in their visage, beginning first in the nether lippe, then in the cheekes, thirdly, in both their eye-browes, and lastly in their eares." ^ Of the Abipones we read that, " distrusting their courage, strength, and arms, they think that paint of various colors, feathers, shouting, trumpets, and other instruments of terror will forward their success."' Fancourt (314) says of the natives of Yucatan that " in their wars, and when they went to their sacrificial dances and festivals, they had their faces, arms, thighs, and legs painted and naked." In Fiji the men bore a hole through the nose and put in a couple of feathers, nine to twelve inches long, which spread out over each side of the face like immense mustaches. They do this "to give them- selves a fiercer appearance."* Waitz notes that in Tahiti mothers compressed the heads of their infant boys " to make > MaUery, 1883-83, 183. » Bourke, 497. ' Dobrizhoffer, II., 890. ■> Mariner, Chapter X. 336 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY their aspect more terrible and thus turn them into more for- midable warriors." The Tahitians, as Ellis informs us, "went to battle in their best clothes, sometimes perfumed with fragrant oil, and adorned with flowers/"' Of the wild tribes in Kondhistan, too, we read that " it is only, however, when they go out to battle . . . that they adorn themselves with all their finery." ^ AMULETS, CHAKMS, MEDICINES. The African tribes along the Congo wear on their bodies <'the horn, the hoof, the hair, the teeth, and the bones of all manner of quadrupeds ; the feathers, beaks, claws, skulls, and bones of birds ; the heads and skins of snakes ; the shells and fins of fishes, pieces of old iron, copper, wood, seeds of plants, and sometimes a mixture of all, or most of them, strung together." Unsophisticated travellers speak of these things as "ornaments" indicating the strange "sense of beauty" of these natives. In reality, they have nothing to do with the sense of beauty, but are merely a manifestation of savage superstition. In Tuckey's Zaire, from which the above cita- tion is made (375), they are properly classed as fetiches, and the information is added that in the choice of them the na- tives consult the fetich men. A picture is given in the book of one appendage to the dress " which the weaver considered an infallible charm against poison." Others are " considered as protection against the effects of thunder and lightning, against the attacks of the alligator, the hippopotamus, snakes, lions, tigers," etc., etc. Winstanley relates (II., 68) that in Abyssinia " the Mateb, or baptismal cord, is de rigueur, and worn when nothing else is. It formed the only clothing of the young at Seramba, but was frequently added to with amu- lets, sure safeguards against sorcery." Concerning the Bush- men, Mackenzie says : " Certain marks on the face, or bits of wood on his hair, or tied around his neck, are medicines or charms to be taken in sickness, or proximity to lions, or in other circumstances of danger."^ Bastian relates that in many ' Ellis, P. K., 1, 243. ' 3. Campbell, Wild Tribes of Khondistan. ' Mackenzie, Day Dawn, 67. AMULETS, CHARMS, MEDICINES 237 parts of Africa every infant is tattooed on the belly, to dedi- cate it thereby to a certain fetich.' The inland negroes mark all sorts of patterns on their skins, partly " to expel evil in- fluences."^ The Nicaraguans punctured and scarified their tongues because, as they explained to Oviedo, it would bring them luck in bargains. The Peruvians, says Cieza, pulled out three teeth of each jaw in children of very tender age be- cause that would be acceptable to the gods ; and Garcilassa notes that the Peruvians pulled out a hair of an eyebrow when making an offering. Jos. d'Acosta also describes how the Peruvians pulled out eyelashes and eyebrows and offered them to the deities. The natives of Yucatan, according to Fan- court, wore their hair long as "a sign of idolatry." ^ When Franklin relates that Chippewayan Indians " prize pictures very highly and esteem any they can get," we seem to have come across a genuine .esthetic sense, till we read that it-makes no difference how badly they are executed, and that they are valued "as efiicient charms."^ All Abipones of both sexes " pluck up the hair from the forehead to the crown of the head, so that the forepart of the head is bald almost for the space of two inches ; this baldness they . . . account a religious mark of their nation." ' The Point Barrow Eskimos believe that clipping their hair on the back of the head in a certain way "prevents snow-blindness in the spring." These Eskimos painted their faces when they went whaling, and the Kadiaks did so before any important undertaking, such as crossing a wide strait, chasing the sea-otter, etc.* In regard to the amulets or charms worn by Eskimos, Crantz says : " These powerful preventives consist in a bit of old wood hung around their necks, or a stone, or a bone, or a beak or claw of a bird, or else a leather strap tied round their forehead, breast, or arm."' Marcano says that " the Indians of French Guiana paint themselves in order to drive away the devil when they start on a journey or for war." ^ In his treatise on the religion • Bastian, Af. S., 76. ' Burton, Abeok. I., 106. ' Spencer, D. Soc, 27. < J. Franklin, P. S., 132. » Dobrizhoffer, 11., 17. ' Murdoch, 140. ' Crantz, I., 216. • MaUery, 1888-89, 631. 238 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY of the Dakotas, Lynd remarks : " Scarlet or red is the relig- ious color for sacrifices. . . . The use of paint, the Dakotas aver, was taught them by the gods. Unkteh taught the first medicine men how to paint themselves when they worshipped him and what colors to use. Takushkanshkan (the moving god) whispers to his favorites what colors to use. Heyoka hovers over them in dreams, and informs them how many streaks to employ upon their bodies and the tinge they must have. No ceremony of worship is complete without the wakan, or sacred application of paint." ^ By the Tasmanians " the bones of relatives were worn around the neck, less, per- haps, as ornaments than as charms." ^ The Ainos of Japan and the Pijians held that tattooing was a custom introduced by the gods. Fijian women believed " that to be tattooed is a passport to the other world, where it prevents them from being persecuted by their own sex." ^ An Australian custom ordained that every person must have the septum of the nose pierced and must wear in it a piece of bone, a reed, or the stalks of some grass. This was not done, however, with the object of adorning the person, but for superstitious reasons : " the old men used to predict to those who were averse to this mutilation all kinds of evil." The sinner, they said, would suffer in the next world by having to eat filth. " To avoid a punishment so horrible, each one gladly sub- mitted, and his or her nose was pierced accordingly." (Brough Smyth, 374.) Wilhelmi says that in the Northwest the men place in the head-band behind the ears pieces of wood deco- rated with very thin shavings and looking like plumes of white feathers. They do this " on occasions of rejoicings and when engaged in their mystic ceremonies." Nicaraguans trace the custom of fiattening the heads of children to instructions from the gods, and Pelew Islanders believed that to win eternal bliss the septum of the nose must be perforated, while Eskimo girls were induced to submit to having long stitches made with a needle and black thread on several parts of the face by the superstitious fear that if they refused they would, after death, « Lynd, II., 68. " Bonwick, 27. ' Wilkes, III., 355. MOURNING LANGUAGE 239 be turned into train tubs and placed under the lamps in heaven.' In order that the ghost of a Sioux Indian may travel the ghost road in safety, it is necessary for each Dakota during his life to be tattooed in the middle of the forehead or on the vrrists. If found without these, he is pushed from a cloud or cliff and falls back to this world. ^ In Australia, the Kurnai medicine men were supposed to be able to communicate with ghosts only when they had certain bones thrust through the nose.^ The American Anthropologist contains (July, 1889) a description of the various kinds of face-coloring to indicate degrees in the Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa. These Indians fre- quently tattooed temples, forehead, or cheeks of sufEerers from headache or toothache, in the belief that this would expel the demons who cause the pain. In Congo, scarifications are made on the back for therapeutic reasons ; and in Timor-Laut (Malay Archipelago), both sexes tattooed themselves " in im- itation of immense smallpox marks, in order to ward off that MOUENINR LANGUAGE Australian women of the Port Lincoln tribes paint a ring around each eye and a streak over the stomach, and men mark their breasts with stripes and paints in different pat- terns. An ignorant observer, or an advocate of the sexual selection theory, would infer that these "decorations" are resorted to for the purppse of ornamentation, to please indi- viduals of the opposite sex. But Wilhelmi, who understood the customs of these tribes, explains that these divers stripes and paints have a practical object, being used to " indicate the different degrees of relationship between a dead person and the mourners."' In South Australia widows in mourn- ing " shave their heads, cover them with a netting, and plaster ' Westermarok opines (170) that "such tales are not of mnch importance, as any usage practised from time immemorial may easily be ascribed to the com- mand of a god." On the contrary, such legends are of very great importance, since they snow how utterly foreign to the thought of these races was the purpose of '* decorating" themselves in these various ways ^*in order to make them- selves attractive to the opposite sex. " » Doraey, 486. = Fison and Howitt, 253 ; Frazer, 28. < MaUery, 1888-89, 395, 412, 417. » Wilhelmi, in Woods. 340 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY them with pipe-clay.^ A white band around the brow is also used as a badge of mourning.' Taplin says that the_Narrinyeri adorn the bodies of the dead with bright-red ochre, and that this is a wide-spread custom in Australia. A Dyeri, on being asked why he painted red and white spots on his skin, an- swered : " Suppose me no make-im, me tumble down too ; that one [the corpse] growl aloug-a-me." A further " orna- ment " of the women on these occasions consists in two white streaks on the arm to indicate that they have eaten some of the fat of the dead, according to their custom. (Smyth, I., 130.) In some districts the mourners paint themselves white on the death of a blood relation, and black when a relative by marriage dies. The corpse is often painted red. Bed is used too when boys are initiated into manhood, and with most tribes it is also the war-color. Hence it is not strange that they should undertake long journeys to secure fresh supplies of ochre : for war, mourning, and superstition are three of the strongest motives of savage activity. African Bushmen anoint the heads of the dead with a red powder mixed with melted fat. Hottentots, when mourning, shave their heads in furrows. Damaras wear a dark-colored skin-cap : a piece of leather round the neck, to which is attached a piece of ostrich egg-shell. Coast negroes bury the head of a family in his best clothes and ornaments, and Dahomans do the same.^ Schweinfurth says that *' according to the custom, which seems to belong to all Africa, as a sign of grief the Dinka wear a cord round the neck."* Mourning New Zealanders tie a red cloth round the head or wear headdresses of dark feathers. New Caledonians cut off their hair and blacken and oil their faces.* Hawaiians cut their hair in various forms, knock out a front tooth, cut the ears and tattoo a spot on the tongue.' The Mincopies use three coloring substances for painting their bodies ; and by the way they apply them they let it be known whether a person is ill or in mourning, or going to a festival."' In California the Yokaia widows make > Angas, I., 86. « Mitchell, I.„ 171. s Spencer, D. S., 31, 23 ; 18, 19. 'Schweinfurth, K A., I., 154. •Ellis, Raw., 146. 'Man, in Jour. Anthr. Inst., XII. INDICATIONS OF TRIBE OR RANK 241 an unguent with which they smear a white band two inches wiTie all around the edge of the hair.* Of the Yukon Indians of Alaska " some wore hoops of birch wood around the neck and waists, with various patterns of figures cut on them. These were said to be emblems of mourning for the dead." ' Among the Snanaimuq " the face of the deceased is painted with red and black paint. . . . After the death of hus- band or wife the survivor must paint his legs and his blanket red."' Numerous other instances may be found in Mallery, who remarks that "many objective modes of showing mourn- ing by styles of paint and markings are known, the signifi- cance of which are apparent when discovered in picto- graphs." * INDICATIOlirS OF TRIBE OE EASTK Among the customs which, in Darwin's opinion, show " how widely the different races of man differ in their taste for the beautiful," is that of moulding the skull of infants into various unnatural shapes, in some cases making the head " appear to us idiotic." One would think that before accept- ing such a monstrous custom as evidence of any kind of a sense of beauty, Darwin, and those who expressed the same opinion before and after him, would have inquired whether there is not some more rational way of accounting for the ad- miration of deformed heads by these races than by assuming that they approved of them for esthetic reasons. There is no difficulty in finding several non-esthetic reasons why pecul- iarly moulded skulls were approved of. The Nicaraguans, as I have already stated, believed that heads were moulded in order to make it easier to bear burdens, and the Peruvians also said they pressed the heads of children to make them healthier and able to do more work. Bat vanity — individual or tribal — and fashion were the principal motives. Accord- ing to Torquemada, the kings were the first who had their heads shaped, and afterward permission to follow their exam- ple was granted to others as a special favor. In their classical > Powers, 166. » Dall, 95. ' Boas, cited by Mallery, 584. < MaUery, 1888-89, 197, 633-639. 242 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY work on Peruvian antiquities (31-32) Eivero and Tschudi de- scribe the skulls they examined, including many varieties " artificially produced, and differing according to their respec- tive localities." " These irregularities were undoubtedly pro- duced by mechanical causes, and were considered as the dis- tinctive marlcs of families ; for in one Huaca [cemetery] will always be found the same form of crania ; while in another, near by, the forms are entirely different from those in the first." The custom of flattening the head was practised by various Indian tribes, especially in the Pacific States, and Bancroft (I., 180) says that, ''all seem to admire a flattened forehead as a sign of noble birth ; " and on p. 228, he remarks : " Failure properly to mould the cranium of her offspring gives the Chinook matron the reputation of a lazy and un- dutiful mother, and subjects the neglected children to the ridicule of their companions ; so despotic is fashion." The Arab races of Africa alter the shapes of their children's heads because they are jealous of their noble descent. (Bas- tian, D. M., II., 229.) "The genuine Turkish skull," says Tylor (^Anth., 240), " is of the broad Tatar form, while the natives of G-reece and Asia Minor have oval skulls, which gives the reason why at Constantinople it became the fashion to mould the babies'" skulls round, so that they grew up with the broad head of the conquering race. Eelics of such barbarism linger on in the midst of civilization, and not long ago a French physician surprised the world by the fact that nurses in ISTormandy were still giving the children's heads a sugar-loaf shape by ban- dages and a tight cap, while in Brittany they preferred to press it round." Knocking out some of the teeth, or filing them into cer- tain shapes, is another widely prevalent custom, for which it is inadmissible to invoke a monstrous and problematic esthetic taste as long as it can be accounted for on simpler and less disputable grounds, such as vanity, the desire for tribal distinction, or superstition. Holub found (II., 259), that in one of the Makololo tribes it was customary to break INDICATIONS OF TRIBE OR RANK 243 out the top incisor teeth, for the •reason that it is "only horses that eat with all their teeth, and that men ought not to eat like horses." In other cases it is not contempt for an- imals but respect for them that accounts for the knocking out of teeth. Thus Livingstone relates {L. Tr., II., 120), in speaking of a boy from Lomain6, that " the upper teeth ex- tracted seemed to say that the tribe have cattle. The knock- ing out of the teeth is in imitation of the animals they almost worship." The Batokas also give as their reason for knock- ing out their upper front teeth that they wish to be like oxen. Livingstone tells us {Zamb., 115), that the Manganja chip their teeth to resemble those of the cat or crocodile : which suggests totemism, or superstitious respect for an animal chosen as an emblem of a tribe. That the Australian custom of knocking out the upper front teeth at puberty is part of a religious ceremonial, and not the outcome of a desire to make the boys attractive to the girls, as Westermarck naively assumes (174, 172), is made certain by the details given in Mallery (1888-89, 513-514), including an excerpt from a man- uscript by A. W. Howitt, in which it is pointed out that the humming instrument kuamas, the bull-roarer, " has a sacred character with all the Australian tribes ; " and that there are marked on it "two notches, one at each end, representing the gap left in the upper jaw of the novice after his teeth have been knocked out during the rites." ^ But perhaps the commonest motive for altering the teeth is the desire to indicate tribal connections. " Various tribes," says Tylor (Anthr., 240), "grind their front teeth to points, or cut them away in angular patterns, so that in Africa and elsewhere a man's tribe is often known by the cut of his teeth." Peculiar arrangements of the hair also have misled unwary observers into fancying that they were made for beauty's sake and to attract the opposite sex, when in reality they were tribal marks or had other utilitarian purposes, serving as ele- ments in a language of signs, etc. Prazer, e.g., notes (27) that the turtle clan of the Omaha Indians cuts oif all the hair from a boy's head except six locks which hang down in > See also the remarks in Frazer's Totemitm, 36. 344 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY imitation of the legs, head, and tail of a turtle ; while the Buffalo clan arranges two locks of hair in imitation of horns. " Nearly all the Indian tribes," writes Mallery (419), " have peculiarities of the arrangement of the hair and of some article of apparel or accoutrement by which they can always be dis- tinguished." Heriot relates (394) that among the Indians "the fashion of trimming the hair varies in a great degree, and an enemy may by this means be discovered at a considerable dis- tance." ' ' The Pueblos generally, when accurate and particular in delineation [pictographs], designate the women of that tribe by a huge coil of hair over either ear. This custom prevails also among the Coyot^ro Apaches, the woman wearing the hair in coil to denote a virgin or an unmarried person, while the coil is absent in the case of a married woman." By the Mokis, maidenhood is indicated by wearing the hair as a disk on each side of the head. (Mallery, 331-33.) Similar usages on other continents might be cited. Besides these arbitrary modifications of the skull and the teeth, and the divers arrangements of the hair, there are various other ways in which the lower races indicate tribal connection, rank, or other conditions. Writing about negroes Burton says (Abeok., I., 106), that lines, welts, and all sorts of skin patterns are used, partly for superstitious reasons, partly to mark the different tribes and families. " A volume would not suffice to explain all the marks in detail." Of the Dahomans, Forbes says (I., 38), " that according to rank and wealth anklets and armlets of all metals, and necklaces of glass, coral, and Popse beads, are worn by both sexes." Liv- ingstone relates (Mis. Trav., 376) that the copper rings worn on their ankles by the chiefs of Londa were so large and heavy that they seriously inconvenienced them in walking. That this custom was entirely an outcome of vanity and emu- lation, and not a manifestation of the esthetics sense, is made clear by the further observations of Livingstone. Men who could not afford so many ofi these copper rings would still, he found, strut along as if they had them. "That is the way," he was informed, "in which they show off their lordship in these parts." Among the Mojave Indians "nose-jewels VAIN DESIRE TO ATTRACT ATTENTION 245 designate a man of wealth and rank/' and elaborate head- dresses of feathers are the insignia of the chiefs." ' Chain- plain says that among the Iroquois those who wore three large plumes were chiefs. Im Thurn says (305) that each of the Guiana tribes makes its feather head-dresses of special colors; and Martins has the following regarding the Brazilian Ind- ians : "Commonly all the members of a tribe, or a horde, or a family, agree to wear certain ornaments or signs as char- acteristic marks." Among these are various ornaments of feathers on the head, pieces of wood, stones, or shells, in the ears, the nose, and lips, and especially tattoo marks. VAIN DESIRE TO ATTRACT ATTENTION' Thus we see that an immense number of mutilations of the body and alleged " decorations " of it are not intended by these races as things of beauty, but have special meanings or nses in connection with protection, war, superstition, mourn- ing, or the desire to mark distinctions between the tribes, or degrees of rank within one tribe or horde. Usually the " ornamentations " are prescribed for all members of a tribe of the same sex, and their acceptance is rigidly enforced. At the same time there is scope for variety in the form of devia- tions or exaggerations, and these are resorted to by ambitious individuals to attract attention to their important selves, and thus to gratify vanity, which, in the realm of fashion, is a thing entirely apart from — and usually antagonistic to — the sense of beauty.^ At Australian dances various colors are used with the object of attracting attention. Especially fan- tastic are their " decorations " at the corroborees, when the bodies of the men are painted with white streaks that make them look like skeletons. Bulmer believed that their object was to " make themselves as terrible" as possible to the be- holders and not beautiful or attractive," while Grosse thinks (65) that as these dances usually take place by moonlight, 'Bxplor. and Sum. Mississippi River to Pacific Ocean. Senate Reports, WaBhington, 1856, III., 33. 'See the pages (386-91) on the "Fashion Fetish" in my Somantic Love and Personal Beauty. 246 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY the object of the stripes is to make the dancers more con- spicuous — two explanations which are not inconsistent with each other. Fry relates ' that the Khonds adorn their hair till they may be seen " intoxicated with vanity on its due decoration." Hearne (306) saw Indians who had a single lock of hair that " when let down would trail on the ground as they walked." Anderson expresses himself with scientific precision when he writes (136) that in Fiji the men " who like to attract the at' tention of the opposite sex, don their best plumage." The attention may be attracted by anything that is conspicuous, entirely apart from the question whether it be regarded as a thing of beauty or not. Bourne makes the very suggestive statement (69-70) that in Patagonia the beautiful plumage of the ostrich was not appreciated, but allowed to blow all over the country, while the natives adorned themselves with beads and cheap brass and copper trinkets. We may therefore as- sume that in those cases where feathers are used for " adorn- ment " it is not because their beauty is appreciated but be- cause custom has given them a special significance. In many cases they indicate that the wearer is a person of rank — chief or medicine man — as we saw in the preceding pages. We also saw that special marks in feathers among Dakotas indi- cated that the wearer had taken a human life, which, more than anything else, excites the admiration of savage women ; so that what fascinates them in such a case is not the feather itself but the deed it stands for. Panlitzschke informs us {E. N. 0. Afr., chap, ii.), that among the African Somali and Gallas every man who had killed someone, boastfully wore an ostrich feather on his head to call attention to his deed. The Dandkil wore these feathers for the same purpose, adding ivory rods in their ear-lobes and fasten- ing a bunch of white horsehair to their shield. A strip of red silk round the forehead served the same purpose. Lumholtz, describing a festival dance in Australia (237), says that some of the men hold in their mouths tufts of talegalla feathers " for the purpose of giving themselves a savage look." • Jour. Boy. As. Soc, 1860, 13. OBJECTS OF TATTOOING 247 By some Australians bunches of hawk's or eagle's feathers are worn " either when fighting or dancing, and also used as a fan" (Brough Smyth, I., 281-282), which suggests the thought that the fantastic head-dresses of feathers, etc., often seen in warm countries, may be worn as protection against the sun.* I doubt, too, whether the lower races are able to appreciate flowers esthetically as we do, apart from their fragrance, which endears them to some barbarians of the higher grades. Concerning Australian women we find it recorded by Brough Smyth (I., 270) that they seem to have no love of flowers, and do not use them to adorn their persons. A New Zealander explained his indifference to flowers by declaring that they were "not good to eat."' Other Polynesians were much given to wearing flowers on the head and body ; but whether this was for esthetic reasons seems to me doubtful on account of the revelations made by various missionaries and others. In Ellis, e.g. {P. R., I., 114), we read that in Tahiti the use of flowers in the hair, and fragrant oil, has been in a great degree discontinued, " partly from the connection of these ornaments with the evil practices to which they were formerly addicted." OBJECTS OF TATTOOIBTG So far tattooing has been mentioned only incidentally ; but as it is one of the most widely prevalent methods of primitive personal "decoration" a few pages must be de- voted to it in order to ascertain whether it is true that it is one of those ornamentations which, as Darwin would have us believe, help to determine the marriages of mankind, or, as Westermarck puts it, " men and women began to . . . tattoo themselves chiefly in order to make themselves attract- ive to the opposite sex — that they might court successfully, ' Feathers also serve varions other useful purposes to AaBtralians. An apron of emu feathers distinguishes females vrho are not yet matrons. (Smyth, I. , xl. ) Howitt says that iu Central Australia messengers sent to avenge a death are painted yellow and wear feathers on their head and in the girdle at the spine. (Mallery, 1888-89.433.) '> Related by Dieffenbaoh. Heriot even declares of the northern Indians (352) that "they assert that they Snd no odor agreeable but that of food." 348 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY or be courted." We shall find that, on the contrary, tattooing has had from the earliest recorded times more than a dozen practical purposes, and that its use as a stimulant of the passion of the opposite sex probably never occurred to a savage until it was suggested to him by a philosophizing visitor. Twenty-four centuries ago Herodotus not only noted that the Thracians had punctures on their skins, but indicated the reason for them : they are, he said, "a mark of nobility : to be without them is a testimony of mean descent."^ This use of skin disfigurements prevails among the lower races to the present day, and it is only one of many utilitarian and ■non-esthetic functions subserved by them. In his beauti- fully illustrated volume on Maori tattooing, Major-General -Eobley writes : " Native tradition has it that their first settlers used to mark their faces for battle with charcoal, and that the lines on the face thus made were the beginnings of the tattoo. To save the trouble of this constantly painting their warlike decollations on the face, the lines were made permanent. Hence arose the practice of carving the face and the body with dyed incisions. The Eev. Mr. Taylor . . . assumes that the chiefs being of a lighter race, and having to fight side by side with slaves of darker hues, darkened their faces in order to appear of the same race." TATTOOINS ON PACIFIC ISLANDS When Captain Cook visited New Zealand (1769) he was much interested in the tattooing of the Maoris, and noted that each tribe seemed to have a different custom in regard to it ; thus calling attention to one of its main functions as a nieans to distinguish the tribes from each other. He described the different patterns on divers parts of the body used by various tribes, and made the further important observation that "by adding to the tattooing they grow old and honorable at the same time." The old French navigator d'Urville found in ' For other referencea to ancient nations, Bee Joest in Zeitschr. fur Eth- nologie, 1888, 415. TATTOOING ON PACIFIC ISLANDS 249 the Maori tattooing an analogy to European heraldry, with this difference : that whereas the coat-of-arms attests the mer- its of ancestors, the Maori moJfo illustrates the merits of the persons decorated with it. It makes them, as Robley wittily says, " men of mark." One chief explained that a certain mark just over his nose was his name ; it served the purposes of a seal in signing documents. It has been suggested that the body of a warrior may have been tattooed for the sake of identification in case the head was separated from it ; for the Maoris carried on a regular trade in heads. Rutherford, who was held for a long time as a captive, said that only the great ones of the tribe were allowed to decorate the forehead, upper lip, and chin. Naturally such marks were " a source of pride " (a sign of rank), and "the chiefs were very pleased to show the tattooing on their bodies." To have an untattooed face was to be "a, poor nobody." Ellis (P R., III., 263) puts the matter graphically by saying the New Zealander's tattoo- ing answers the purpose of the particular stripe or color of the Highlander's plaid, marking the clan or tribe to which they belong, and is also said to be employed as "a means of enabling them to distinguish their enemies in battle." In his great work on Borneo (II., 83), Roth cites Brooke Low, who said that tattooing was a custom of recent introduc- tion : "I have seen a few women with small patterns on their breasts, but they were the exception to the rule and were not regarded with favor." Burns says that the Kayan men do not tattoo, but "many of the higher classes have small figures of stars, beasts, or birds on various parts of their body, chiefly the arms, distinctive of rank. The highest mark is that of having the back of the hands colored or tattooed, which is only conferred on the brave in battle." St. John says that " a man is supposed to tattoo one finger only, if he has been present when an enemy has been killed, bat tattoos hand and fingers if he has taken an enemy's head." Among the Ida'an a man makes a mark on his arm for each enemy slain. One man was seen with thirty-seven such stripes on the arm. A successful head-hunter is also allowed to " decorate " his ears with the canine teeth of a Bomean leopard. "In some 250 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY cases tatu marks appear to be used as a means of communica- ting a fact," writes Eoth (II., 291). Among the Kayan. it indicates rank. Slaughter of an enemy, or mere murder of a slave, are other reasons for tattooing. " A Murut, having run away from the enemy, was tatued on his back. So that we may justly conclude that tatuing among the natives of Borneo is one method of writing." Among the Dnsun the men that took heads generally had a tattoo mark for each one on the arm, and were looked upon as very brave, though their victim might have been only a woman or a child (159). In the fifth volume of Waitz-Gerland's Anthropologie (Pt. II., 64-67), a number of authors are cited testifying that in the Micronesian Archipelago the natives of each island had special kinds of tattoo marks on difEerent parts of the body, to distinguish them from others. These marks were named after the islands. The Micronesians themselves attached also a religious significance to these marks. The natives of Tobi believed that their island would be destroyed if the English visitors who came among them were not at once tattooed. Only those completely marked could enter the temple. The men were more tattooed than the women, who were regarded as inferiors. In the sixth volume of Waitz-Gerland (30-40) is gathered a large mass of evidence, all of which shows that on the Poly- nesian islands, too, tattooing was indulged in, not for aesthetic and amorous but for religious and practical reasons. In Tonga it was a mark of rank, not permitted to common peo- ple or to slaves. !N"ot to be tattooed was considered improper. In the Marquesas the older and more distinguished a man, the more he was tattooed. Married women were distinguished by having marks on the right hand and left foot. In some cases tattoo marks were used as signs to call to mind certain battles or festivals. A woman in Ponap6 had marks for all her successive husbands made on her arm — everything and anything, in fact, except the purpose of decorating for the sake of attracting the other sex. Gerland (33-40) makes out a very strong case for the religious origin of tattooing, which he aptly compares to our confirmation. TATTOOING IN AMERICA 251 In Samoa the principal motive of tattooing seems to have been licentiousness. It was prohibited by the chiefs on ac- count of the obscene practices always connected with it, and there is a legend of the incestuous designs of two divine brothers on their sister which was successful. " Tattooing thus originated among the gods and was first practised by the children of Taaroa, their principal deity. In imitation of their example, and for the accomplishment of the same pur- pose, it was practised among men." (Ellis, P. R., I., 262.) TATTOOING IN AMERICA On the American continent we find tattooing practised from north to south, from east to west, for the most diverse reasons, among which the desire to facilitate courtship is never even hinted at. The Eskimos, about the age of pu- berty, apply paint and tattooing to their faces, cut holes and insert plugs or labrets. The object of these disfigurements is indicated by Bancroft (I., 48) : " Different tribes, and differ- ent ranks of the same tribe, have each their peculiar form of tattooing." Moreover, "these operations are supposed to possess some significance other than that of mere ornament. Upon the occasion of piercing the lip, for instance, a re- ligious feast is given." John Murdoch relates (Mallery, 396) that the wife of an Eskimo chief had "a little mark tat- tooed in each corner of her mouth, which she said were ' whale marks,' indicating that she was the wife of a successful whale- man." Of the Kadiaks Bancroft says (72) : "The more the female chin is riddled with holes, the greater the respecta- bility." Among the Chippewayan Indians Mackenzie found (85) that both sexes had " blue or black bars, or from one to four straight lines, on their cheeks or foreheads to distinguish the tribe to which they belong." Swan writes (Mallery, 1882- 83, 67) that " the tattoo marks of the Haidas are heraldic designs or the family totem, or crests of the wearers, and are similar to the carvings depicted in the pillars and monuments around the homes of the chiefs." A Haida Indian remarked to Swan (69) : " If you were tattooed with the design of a swan, the Indians would know your family name." It is at 352 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY festivals and^magqiierade performances, says the same writer, that "the tatoo marks show "with the best effect, and the rank and family connection [are] known by the variety of design." Lafitau reports (IL, 43) regarding the Iroqnois and Algonquins that the designs which they have tattooed on their faces and bodies are employed as hieroglyphics, writing, and records, to indicate victories, etc. The designs tattooed on an Indian's face or body distinguish him, he adds, as we do a family by its armorial bearings. " In James's Long it is re- ported that the Omahas are often neatly tattooed. . . . The daughters of chiefs a;nd those of wealthy Indians gen- erally are denoted by a small round spot tattooed on the fore- head." (Mallery, 1888-89, 395.) Bossu says regarding the practice of tattooing by the Osages (in 1756) : " It is a kind of knighthobod to which they are only entitled by great actions." Blue marks tattooed upon the chin of a Mojave woman in- dicate that she is married. The Serrano Indians near Los Angeles had, as late as 1843, a custom of having special tattoo marks on themselves which were also made on trees to in- dicate the corner boundaries of patches of land. (Mallery, 1883-83, 64, 183.) In his book on the California Indians, Powers declares (109) that in the Mattoal tribe the men tattoo themselves ; in the others the women alone tattoo. The theory that the women are thus marked in order that the men may be able to recognize them and redeem them from captivity seems plausible for the reasons that these Indians are rent into a great number of divisions and that " the squaws almost never attempt any ornamental tattooing, but adhere closely to the plain regulation mark of the tribe." The Hupa Indians have discovered another practical use for body-marks. Nearly every man has ten lines tattooed across the inside of his left arm, and these lines serve as a measure- ment of shell-money. The same non-esthetic motives for tattooing prevail in South and Central America. In Agassiz's book on Brazil we read (318) concerning the Mundurucu Indians : " Major Coutinho tells us that the tattooing has nothing to do with individual taste, but that the pattern is appointed for both TATTOOING IN JAPAN 253 sexes, and is invariable throughout the trihe^ It is connected with their caste, the limits of which are yery precise, and with their religion." The tattooing "is also an indication of aris- tocracy ; a man who neglected this distinction would not be •respecte(i in his tribe." Concerning the Indians of Guiana we read in Im Thurn (195-96) that they have small distinct- ive tribal marks tattooed at the corners of the mouth or on the arms. Nearly all have " indelibly excised lines " which are " scars originally made for surgical, not ornamental pur- poses." " Some women .specially affect certain little figures, like Chinese characters, which looks as if some meaning were attached to them, but which the Indians are either unable or unwilling to explain." In Nicaragua, as Squire informs us (III., 341), the natives tattooed themselves to designate by special marks the tribes to which they belonged ; and as re- gards Yucatan, Landa writes (§ XXI.) that as tattooing was accompanied by much pain, they thought themselves the more gallant and strong the more they indulged in it ; and that those who omitted it were sneered at — which gives us still an- other motive for tattooing — the fear of being despised and ridiculed for not being in fashion. TATTOOING IN JAPAN Many more similar details might be given regarding the races of various parts of the world, but the limits of space forbid. But I cannot resist the temptation to add a citation from Professor Chamberlain's article on tattooing in his Things Japanese, because it admirably illustrates the di- versity of the motives that led to the practice. A Chinese trader, " early in the Christian era," Chamberlain tells us, "wrote that the men all tattoo their faces and ornament their bodies with designs, differences of rank being indicated by the position and size of the patterns." "But from the dawn of regular history," Chamberlain adds, " far down into the middle ages, tattooing seems to have been confined to criminals. It was used as branding was formerly in Europe, whence probably the contempt still felt 254 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY for tattooing by the Japanese upper classes. From con- demned desperadoes to bravoes at large is but a step. The swashbucklers of feudal times took to tattooing, apparently because some blood and thunder scene of adventure, engraven on their chest and limbs, helped to give them a terrific air when stripped for any reason of their clothes. Other classes* whose avocations led them to baring their bodies in public followed — the carpenters, for instance, and running grooms ; and the tradition remained of ornamenting almost the entire body and limbs with a hunting, theatrical, or other showy scene." Shortly after 1868 "the government made tattooing a penal offence." It will be noticed that in this account the fantastic notion that the custom was ever indulged in for the purpose of beau- tifying the body in order to attract the other sex is, as in all the other citations I have made, not even hinted at. The same is true in the summary made by Mallery of the seven- teen purposes of tattooing he found. No. 13 is, indeed, "to charm the other sex ; " but it is " magically," which is a very different thing from esthetically. I append the summary (418) : "1, to distinguish between free and slave, without reference to the tribe of the latter ; 2, to distinguish between a high and low status in the same tribe ; 3, as a certificate of bravery exhibited by supporting the ordeal of pain ; 4, as marks of personal prowess, particularly ; 5, as a record of achievements in war ; 6, to show religious symbols ; 7, as a therapeutic remedy for disease ; 8, as a prophylactic against disease ; 9, as a brand of disgrace ; 10, as a token of a woman's marriage, or, sometimes, 11, of her marriageable condition ; 12, identifi- cation of the person, not as a tribesman, but as an individual ; 13, to charm the other sex magically ; 14, to inspire fear in the enemy; 15, to magically render the skin impenetrable to weak- ness ; 16, to bring good fortune, and, 17, as the device of a secret society. SCAEIFICATION. Dark races, like the Africans and Australians, do not prac- tise tattooing, because the marks would not show conspic- uously on their black skins. They therefore resort to the process of raising scars by cutting the skin with flint or a ALLEGED TESTIMONY OF NATIVES 255 shell and then rubbing in earth, or the juice of certain plants, etc. The result is a permanent scar, and these scars are ar- ranged by the different tribes in different patterns, on divers parts of the body. In Queensland the lines, according to Lumholtz (177), " always denote a certain order of rank, and here it depends upon age. Boys under a certain age are not decorated ; but in time they receive a few cross-stripes upon their chests and stomachs. The number of stripes is grad- ually increased, and when the subjects have grown up, a half- moon-shaped line is cut around each nipple." The necessity for such distinctive marks on the body is particularly great among the Australians, because they are subdivided in the most complicated ways and have an elaborate code of sexual permissions and prohibitions. Therefore, as Frazer suggests (38), " a chief object of these initiation ceremonies was to teach the youths with whom they might or might not have connection, and to put them in possession of a visible lan- guage, ... by means of which they might be able to communicate their totems to, and to ascertain the totems of, strangers whose language they did not understand." In Africa, too, as we have seen, the scars are used as tribal names, and for other practical purposes. Holub (7) found that the Koranna of Central South Africa has three cuts on the chest. They confessed to him that they indicated a kind of free-masonry, insuring their being well received by Koran- na everywhere. On the Congo, scarifications are made on the back for therapeutic reasons, and on the face as tribal marks. (Mallery, 417 ; H. Ward, 136.) Bechuana priests make long scars on a warrior's thigh to indicate that he has slain an enemy in battle. (Lichtenstein, II., 331.) According to d'Albertis the people of New Guinea use some scars as a sign that they have travelled (I., 313). And so on, ad infinitum. ALLEGED TESTIMONY OF NATIVES In face of this imposing array of facts revealing the non- esthetic character of primitive personal " decorations," what have the advocates of the sexual selection theory to say ? 256 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY e Taking Westermarck as their most erudite and persuasive spokesman, we find him placing his reliance on four things : (1) the practical ignoring of the vast multitude of facts contra- dicting his theory ; (2) the alleged testimony of a few savages ; (3) the testimony of some of their visitors ; (4) the alleged fact that " the desire for self -decoration is strongest at the begin- ning of the age of puberty," the customs of ornamenting, mu- tilating, painting, and tattooing being " practised most zeal- ously at that period of life." Concerning (1) nothing more need be said, as the large number of decisive facts I have collected exposes and neutralizes that stratagem. The other three ar- guments must be briefly considered. A native of Lukunor being asked by Mertens what was the meaning of tattooing, answered : " It has the same object as your clothes ; that is, to please the women." In reply to the question why he wore his ornaments, an Australian answered Bulmer : " In order to look well and make himself agreeable to the women." (Brough Smyth, I., 275.) To one who has studied savages not only anthropologically ' but psychologi- cally, these stories have an obvious cock-and-bull aspect. A native of the Caroline Islands would have been as incapable of originating that philosophical comparison between the ob- ject of our clothes and of his tattooing as he would have been of writing Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. Human beings in his stage of evolution never consciously reflect on the reasons of things, and considerations of comparative psychol- ogy or esthetics are as much beyond his mental powers as problems in algebra or trigonometry. That such a sailor's yarn could be accepted seriously in an anthropologic treatise shows that anthropology is still in its cradle. The same is true of that Australian's alleged answer. The Australian is unequal to the mental effort of counting up to ten, and, like other savages, is easily fatigued by the simplest questions.* It is quite likely that Bulmer asked that native whether he ornamented himself " in order to look well and make himself agreeable to the women," and that the native answered "yes" merely to gratify him or to get rid of the troublesome ques- ' See, for instance, Spix and Martius, 384. MISLEADING TESTIMONY OF VISITORS 257 tion. The books of missionaries are full of such cases, and no end of confusion has been created in science by such false "facts." The answer given by that native is, moreover, utterly opposed to all the well-attested details I have given in the preceding pages regarding the real motives of Australians in " decorating " themselves ; and to those facts I may now add this crushing testimony from Brough Smyth (I., 270) : " The proper arrangement of their apparel, the ornamentation of their persons by painting, and attention to deportment, were important only when death struck down a warrior, when war was made, and when they assembled for a corroboree. In ordinary life little attention was given to the ornamenting of the person." MISLEADING TESTIMOKT OP VISITOKS " The Australians throughout the continent scar their persons, as Mr. Curr assures us, only as a means of decora- tion," writes Westermarck (169), and in the pages preceding and following he cites other evidence of the same sort, such as Carver's assertion that the Naudowessies paint their faces red and black, "which they esteem as greatly ornamental;" Tuckey's assumption that .the natives of the Congo file their teeth and raise scars on the skin for purposes of ornament and principally " with the idea of rendering themselves agree- able to the women ; " Eiedel's assertion, that in the Tenim- ber group the lads decorate their locks with leaves, flowers, and feathers, "only in order to please the women ;" Taylor's statement that in New Zealand it was the great ambition of the young to have fine tattooed faces, "both to render them- selves attractive to the ladies, and conspicuous in war," etc. Beginning with Curr, it must be conceded that he is one of the leading authorities on Australia, the author of a four- volume treatise on that country and its natives. Yet his tes- timony on the point in question happens to be as worthless as that of the most hasty globe-trotter, partly because he had evidently paid little attention to it, and partly also, I fancy, because of the fatal tendency of men of science to blunder as soon as they touch the domain of esthetics. What he really 258 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY wrote (II., 275) is that Chatfieid had informed him that scars were made by the natives on the right thigh " for the purpose of denoting the particular class to which they belong." This Curr doubts, "without further evidence," because it would conflict with the custom prevalent throughout the continent, " as far as known, which is to make these marks for orna- ment only." Now this is a pure assumption of Curr's, based on a preconceived notion, and contradicted by the specific evidence of a number of explorers who, as even Grosse is ob- liged to admit (75), " unanimously account for a part at least of the scars as tribal marks." ' If so eminent an authority as Curr can err so grievously, it is obvious that the testimony of other writers and casual ob- servers must be accepted with extreme caution. Europeans and Americans are so accustomed to regard personal deco- rations as attempts to beautify the appearance that when they see them in savages there is a natural disposition to attribute them to the same motive. They do not realize that they are dealing with a most subtle psychological question. The chief source of confusion lies in their failure to distinguish between what is admired as a thing of beauty as such and what pleases them for other reasons. As Professor Sully has pointed out in his Handhooh of Psychology (337) : " At the beginning of life there is no clear separation of whet is beautiful from what is simply pleasing to the individ- ual. As in the history of the race, so in that of tte individual, the sense of beauty slowly extricates itself from pleasurable consciousness in general, and differentiates itself from the sense of what is personally useful and agreeable." Bearing in mind this very important distinction between what is beautiful and what is merely pleasing because of its being useful and agreeable, we see at once that the words " decorative," " ornamental," " attractive," " handsome," etc., are constantly used by writers on this subject in a mis- ■ See e.g.. Byre, II., 333-335 ; Brough Smyth, I., XLI, 68, 295, II., 318 ; Rid- ley, KamUaroi, 140 ; Journ. Soy. Soc. N. S. W., 1883, 201 ; and the old au- thorities cited by Waitz-Gerland, VI., 740 ; cf. Frazer, 29. If Westermarck had been more anxioue to ascertain the truth than to prove a theory, would ha hare found it necesBary to ignore all this evidence, neglecting to refer even to Chatfieid in speaking of Curr ? MISI,EADING TESTIMONY OF VISITORS 259 leading and question-begging way. We can hardly blame a man like Harrington for writing (11) that among the natives of Botany Bay "scars are, by both sexes, deemed highly ornamental " ; bnt a scientific author who quotes such a sentence ought to be aware that the evidence did not justify Barrington in using any word but pleasing in place of " or- namental," because the latter implies and takes for granted the esthetic sense, the existence of which is the very thing to be proved; This remark applies generally to the evi- dence of this kind which Westermarck has so industriously collected, and which, on account of this undiscriminating, question-begging character, is entirely worthless. In all these cases the fact is overlooked that the " decorations " of one sex may be agreeable to the other for reasons that have nothing to do with the sense of beauty. Briefly summed up, Westermarck's theory is that in paint- ing, tattooing, and otherwise decorating his person, primitive man'9 original and conscious object was to beautify himself for the sake of gaining an advantage in courtship ; whereas my theory is that all these decorations originally subserved useful purposes alone, and that even where they subsequently may have served in some instances as means to please the women, this was not as things of beauty but indirectly and unintention- ally through their association with rank, wealth, distinction in -war, prowess, and manly qualities in general. When Dobriz- hoffer says (II., 12) that the Abipones, " more ambitious to be dreaded by their enemies than to be loved, to terrify than attract beholders, think the more they are scarred and sun- burnt, the handsomer they are," he illustrates glaringly the slovenly and question-begging use of terms to which I have just referred ; for, as his own reference to being- loved and to attracting beholders shows, he does not use the word " hand- some " in an esthetic sense, but as a synon3rme for what is pleasing or worthy of approval on other grounds. If the scars of these Indians do please the women it is not because they are considered beautiful, but because they are tokens of martial prowess. To a savage woman nothing is so useful as manly valor, and therefore nothing so agreeable as the signs 260 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY of it. In that respect the average woman's nature has not changed. The German high-school girl admires the scars in the face of a "corps-student," not, certainly, because she considers them beautiful, but because they stand for a dare- devil, masculine spirit which pleases her. When the Eev. K. Taylor wrote (321) that among the New Zealanders " to have fine tattooed faces was the great am- bition of the young, both to render themselves attractive to the ladies and conspicuous in war," he would have shown himself a better philosopher if he had written that by mak- ing themselves conspicuous in war with their tattooing they also make themselves attractive to the " ladies." That the sense of beauty i-s not concerned here becomes obvious when we include Kobley's testimony (28, 15) that a Maori chief's great object was to excite fear among enemies, for which purpose in the older days he " rendered his countenance as terrible. as possible with charcoal and red ochre"; while in more recent times, " not only to become more terrible in. war, when fighting was carried on at close quarters, but to appear more distinguished and attractive to the opposite sex, must certainly be included " among the objects of tattooing. It is hardly necessary to point out that if we accept the sexual selection theory this expert testimony lands us in insuperable difficulty ; for it is clearly impossible that on the same island, and in the same race, the painting and tattooing of the face- should have the efEect of terrifying the men and of appearing beautiful to the women. Bat if we discard the beauty theory and follow my suggestion, we have no difficulty whatever. Then we may grant that the facial daubs or skin mutilations may seem terrible or hideous to an enemy and yet please the women, because the women do not regard them as things of beauty, but as distinguishing marks of valiant warriors. By way of illustrating his maxim that " in every country, in every race, beauty stimulates passion," Westermarck cites (257) part of a sentence by Lumholtz (213) to the effect that Australian women take much notice of a man's face, particu- larly of the part about the eyes. He does not cite the rest of the sentence — " and they like to see a frank and open, or "DECORATION" AT AGE OF PUBERTY 261 perhaps, more correctly, a wild expression of countenance," which makes it clear to the reader that what stimulates the passion of these women is not the lines of beauty in the [never-washed] faces of these men, but the nnbeautiful aspect peculiar to a wild hunter, ferocious warrior, and intrepid de- fender of his home. Their admiration, in other words, is not esthetic, but instinctively utilitarian. " DECORATION " AT THE AGE OF PtTBEETY We come now to the principal argument of Westermarck — the alleged fact that in all parts of the world the desire for self-decoration is strongest at the beginning of the age of puberty, the customs of ornamenting, painting, mutilating, and tattooing the person being practised most zealously at that period. This argument is as futile as the others, for several reasons. In the first place, it is not true that in all parts of the world self-decoration is practised most zealously at that period. More frequently, perhaps, it is begun some years earlier, before any idea of courtship can have entered the heads of these children. The Congo cannibals begin the pro- cess of scarring the face at the age of four.' Dyak girls are tattooed at five." The Botocudos begin the mutilating of children's lips at the age of seven.' Eskimo girls are tat- tooed in their eighth year,* and on the Andaman Islands few children are allowed to pass their eighth year without scarifica- tion.^ The Damaras chip the teeth with a flint " when the children arc young."' The female Oraons are "all tattooed in childhood."' The Tahitians began tattooing at eight.' The Chnkchis of Siberia tattoo girls at nine ; ' and so on in various parts of the world. In the second place, of the di- vers personal " decorations " indulged in by the lower races it is only those that are intended to be of a permanent char- acter (tattooing, scarring, mutilating) that are made chiefly ■ H. Ward, 136. " Roth, II , 83. ' Martins, I., 321. ' Boas, Bur. Ethnol., 1884-88, 561. » Mann, Journ. Anthr. Soc, XIL, 333. • Galton, 148. 'Dalton, 251. ' Waitz-Gerland, VI., 30. •MaUery, 1888-89, 414. 262 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY (though by no means exclusively) * about or before the age of puberty. All the other methods of " decorating " described in the pre- ceding pages as being connected with the rites of war, supersti- tion, mourning, etc., are practised throughout life; and that they constitute by far the greater proportion of " ornamenta- tions " is evidenced by the citation I have already made, from Brough Smythjthat the ornamentation of their persons was con- sidered important by Australians only in connection with such ceremonies, and that "in ordinary life little attention was given to the ornamenting of the person"; to which much similar testimony might be added regarding other races ; such as Kane's (184), regarding the Chinooks : " Painting the face is not much practised among them, except on ex- traordinary occasions, such as the death of a relative, some solemn feast, or going on a war-party ; " or Morgan's (363), that the feather and war dances were "the chief occasions" when the Iroquois warrior "was desirous to appear in his best attire," etc. Again, even if it were true that "the desire for self -decora- tion is strongest at the beginning of the age of puberty," it does not by any means follow that this must be due to the desire to make one's self attractive to the opposite sex. What- ever their desire may be, the children have no choice in the matter. As Curr remarks regarding Australians (II., 51), " The male must commonly submit, without hope of escape, to have one or more of his teeth knocked out, to have the septum of his nose pierced, to have certain painful cuttings made in his skin, . . . before he is allowed the rights of manhood." There are, however, plenty of reasons why he should desire to be initiated. "What Turner writes regard- ing the Samoans has a general application : " Until a young man was tattooed, he was considered in his minority. He could not think of marriage, and he jras con- ' To take three cases in place of many : Carl Bock relates (67) that among some Bomeans tattooing is one of the privileges of matrimony and is not al- lowed to unmarried girls. D'Urville describes the tattooing of the wife of chief Tuao, who seemed to glory in the " new honor his wife was securing by these decorations." (Robley, 41. ) Among the Papuans of New Guinea tattooing the chest of females denotes that they are married. (Mallery, 411. ) "DECORATION" AT AGE OF PUBERTY 263 stantly exposed to taunts and ridicule, as being poor and of low birth, and as having no right to speak in the society of men. But as soon as he was tattooed he passed into his majority, and considered himself entitled to the respect and privileges of mature years. When a youth, therefore, reached the age of sixteen, he and his friends were all anxiety that he should be tattooed."* No one can read the accounts of the initiatory ceremonies of Australian and Indian boys (convenient summaries of which may be found in the sixth volume of Waitz-Gerland and in Southey's Brazil, III., 387-88) without becoming con- vinced that with them, as with the Samoans, etc., there was no thought of women or courtship. Indeed the very idea of such a thing involves an absurdity, for, since all the boys in each tribe were tattooed alike, what advantage could their marks have secured them ? If all men were equally rich, would any woman ever marry for money ? Westermarck ac- cepts (174) seriously the assertion of one writer that the rea- son why Australians knock out some of the teeth of the boys at puberty is because they know "that otherwise they would run the risk of being refused on account of ugliness." Now, apart from the childish supposition that Australian women could allow their amorous inclinations to depend on the pres- ence or absence of two front teeth, this assertion involves the assumption that these females can exercise the liberty of choice in the selection of a mate — an assumption which is contrary to the truth, since all the authorities on Australia agree on at least one point, which is that women have ab- solutely no choice in the selection of a husband, but have to submit in all cases to the dispositions made by their male relatives. These Australian women, moreover, perversely act in a manner utterly inconsistent with the theory of sexual selection. Since they do not choose, but are chosen, one would naturally expect, in accordance with that theory, that they would decorate themselves in order to "stimulate the passion " of the desirable men ; but they do no such thing. 1 It is eignifieant that Westermarck (179) though he refers to page 90 of Turner, ignores the passage I have just cited, though it occurs on the same page 364 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY While the men are apt to dress their hair carefully, the women " let their black locks grow as irregular and tangled as do the Fuegians " (Grosse, 87) ; and Bulmer says they " did little to improve their appearance ; " while such orna- ments as they had " were not much regarded by the men,'-' (Brough Smyth, L, 275.)' "DECOKATIOir AS A TEST OF COUKAGB One of the most important reasons why young savages ap- proaching puberty are eager to receive their " decorations " remains to be considered. Tattooing, scarring, and muti- lating 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 fortitude in bearing the pain connected with tattooing, etc., these young folks are thus able to win ad- miration, 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 of- ten 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." (Eoth, II., 80.) Here we have an illustration which explains in the most simple way why scars please both the men and the women, without making necessary the grotesque assump- tion that either sex 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 pass for men of courage. If one of them should 1 Australia is by no means the only country where the women are less dec- orated than the men. Various explanations have been offered, but none of them covers all the facts. The real reason becomes obvious if my view is accepted that the alleged ornaments of savages are not esthetic, but practical or utilita- rian. The women are usually allowed to share such things as badges of mourn- ing, amulets, and various devices that attract attention to wealth or rank ; but the religious rites, and the manifold decorations associated with military life — the chief occupation of these peoples — they are not allowed to share, and these, with the tribal marks, furnish, as we have seen, the occasion for the most di- verse and persistent "decorative " practices. MUTILATION, FASHION, AND EMULATION 265 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 DobrizhofEer (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 assured. Which of our heroes would think so cowardly a girl worthy to be his wife ? " Such courage, Dobrizhoffer explains further, is ad- mired 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 pain- ful operation with fortitude; for those of them who "are most pricked 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 disfigure- ments. 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 assertion that Eskimo mothers tattoo their daughters in early youth " for fear that 366 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY otherwise they would not get a hnsband." Had Grosse al- lowed 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 ob- ject to her filth. Yet we are asked to believe that an Eskimo could be so enamoured of the leauty of a few simple lines tat- tooed on a girl's dirty face that he would refuse to marry her unless she had them ! Like other champions of the sexual 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 illustration of it is to be found in China, where the girls of the upper classes 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 De- formity, assume " 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 be- cause they consider them beautiful — a delusion which Wes- termarck 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 fasci- nating men by a "beauty" to acquire which they have to un- dergo such horrible torture ; " but Dr. Strieker assures 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 ap- parent anomaly Westermarck assumes that the object of the concealment " is to excite through the unknown ! " To such fantastic nonsense does the doctrine of sexual selection MUTILATION, FASHION, AND EMULATION 267 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 pre- venting 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 foolish- ly conservative women were more eager to continue than the men. All accounts agree that the anti-foot-binding move- ment 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 v esthetic admiration and amorous passion 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 268 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY would be the poorer by hundreds of " false facts " and lu- dicrous inferences.* The ravages of fashion are aggravated by emulation, which has its sources in vanity and envy. This accounts for the ex- tremes 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 in- trinsic 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 chief's daughter who was very anxious to go to Europe. Being asked why, she replied that her great desire was to amass a large quantity of beads and then return to Tonga, " because in England beads are so common that no ■ The advocates of the sexual selection theory might have avoided many grotesque blunders had they possessed a sense of humor to counterbalance and control their erudition. The violent opposition of Madagascar women to King Radiima' s order that the men should have their hair cut, to which Wester- marck refers (174-75), surely finds in the proverbial stupid conservatism of bar- barous customs a simpler and more rational explanation than in his assumption that this riot illustrated "the important part played by the hair of the head as a stimulant of sexual passion ^' (to these coarse, masculine women, who had to be speared before they could be quieted). An argument which attributes to un- washed, vermin-covered savages a fanatic zeal for what they consider as beau- tiful, such as no civilized devotee of beauty would ever dream of, involves its own reductio ad dbxurdum by proving too much. Westermarck also cites (177) from a book on Brazil the story that if a young maiden of the Tapoyers "be marriageable, and yet not courted by any, the mother paints her with some red color about the eyes," and in accordance with his theory we are soberly expected to accept this red paint about the eyes as an effective " stimulant of sexual passion," in case of a- girl whose appearance otherwise did not tempt men to court her ! The obvious object of the paint was to indicate that the girl was in the market. In other words, it was part of that language of signs which had such a remarkable development among some of the uncivilized races (see Mallery's admirable treatises on Indian Pictographs, taking up hundreds of pages in two volumes of the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington). Belden relates (14.5) of the Plains Indmns that a warrior who is courting a squaw usually paints his eyes yellow or/blue, and the squaw paints hers red. He even knew squaws go through the painful operation of reddening the eyeballs, which he interprets as resulting from a desire to fascinate the men ; but it is much move likely that it had some special significance in the language of courtship, probably as a mark of courage in enduring pain, than that the inflamed eye itself was considered beautiful. Belden himself further points out that " a red stripe drawn horizontally from one eye to the other, means that the young warrior has seen a squaw he could love if she would reciprocate his attachment," and on p. 144 he explains that when a warrior smears his face with lampblack and then draws zigzags with his nails, it is a sign that he desires to be left alone, or is trapping, or melancholy, or in love." I had in- tended to give a special paragraph to Decorations as Parts of the Language of Signs, but desisted on reflecting that most of the foregoing facts relating to war, mourning, tribal, etc., decorations, really came under that head. BEAUTY VERSUS DECORATION 269 one would admire me for wearing them, and / should not have the pleasure of being envied." Bancroft (I., 128) says of the Kntchin 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 pat- terns." 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. Quantity rather than quality is aimed at." PEKSON'AL BEAUTY VERSUS PERSOKAL DECOEATIOlir Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced so far in this long chapter, assume 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 lustrous shells 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 in- fants 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 270 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY not serve the purpose of exciting the amorous passion and preference of the opposite sex, except non-esthetically and indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as mariis 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 sexual passion. This we should expect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure in bright baubles must long pre- cede 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. Gal ton told Darwin that he saw in one South African tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls, but they were not attractive to the na- tives. 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 infiicted by fashion, does not among these races act as a bar to mar- riage. "Beauty is of no estimation in either sex," we read regarding the Creeks in Schoolcraft (V., 372) : " 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 bur- den to the family or the tribe. Advocates of the sexual 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, BEAUTY VERSUS DECORATION 271 high cheek bones, thick lips, etc. — and dislike what we con- sider beautiful. But the likes of these races regarding per- sonal 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 dis- like 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 look- ing if they would only leave nature alone. Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeballs, has escaped the uglifying proc- ess. " Nothing is too absurd or hideous to please them," writes Cameron. The Eskimos afford a striking illustration 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 consid- erable skill and ingenuity in the decorations of their clothes, canoes, and weapons, they mutilate their personfe in various ways and allow them to be foul and malodorous with the filth of years. One of the most disgusting mutilations on rec- ord 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 pre- senting 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 273 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL' BEAUTY face with it " ; and a fourth gives a description of this "abominably revolting spectacle," which is too nauseating to quote. DE GUSTIBUS NOST EST DISPUTANDUM (?) "Abominably revolting," "hideous," "filthy," "disgust- ing," " 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, al- though 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 ot taste" ; Humboldt (III., 336) 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 Eaphael. This view, indeed, is generally held ; it is expressed in the old saw, De gustihus' non est disputandum. Now it is true that it is unwise to dispute about tastes conversationally ; but scien- tifically 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 exquisite- ly 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 Irish- man 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 coarse to detect the subtle and exqui- DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM 373 site bouquet of the French wine ? In both these examples we are concerned only with simple questions of sense percep- tion ; 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 Kuskin or a Titian, who have given their whole life to the study of beauty ! If an astronomer — to take another illustration — 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 near- ly 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 attitude in the matter affords painful proof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day that a steatopy- gous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because an African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-e5-ed harlot is beautiful because she pleases a drunken libertine. What makes the traditional attitude of scientific men in 274 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY this matter the less pardonable is that — as we haye seen — there is always a simple, practical explanation for the predi- lections of these savages, so that there is no necessity what- ever for assuming the existence of so paradoxical and impos- sible a thing as an esthetic admiration of these hideous deformities. Thus, in regard to the nauseating lip " orna- ments" 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 distinc- tion, we read, increase the size of their lip plug. LangsdorfE even saw women "of very high rank" with this "ornament" full five inches long and three broad ; Dixon says the muti- lation 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 DIET That savages can have no sense of personal beauty is further proved by their habitual indifEerence to personal cleanliness, the most elementary and imperative of esthetic requirements. When we read in McLean (TL, 153) that some Eskimo girls " might pass 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 passion, " we realize viv- idly that that passion is a coarse appetite 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 Colum- INDIFFERENCE TO DIRT 275 bia 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 breasts, their ill-shaped limbs, the awkwardness of their po- sitions, and ih.e 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 In- dian 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 Pata- gonians "are excessively filthy in their personal habits." (Bourne, 56.) The Mundrukus " are very dirty" (Markham, 172), etc. Of the Damara negroes, Anderson says (iV., 50) : " Dirt of- ten accumulates 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 associating 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 276 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY tribes of India are " the dirtier the farther we advance ; " elsewhere ' we read : "Both males and females, as a class, 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 butter) ; " 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 tra- dition." The Kalmucks are described as filthy, the Kamt- schadales as exceedingly so, etc. REASONS FOE 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 sec 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 acumen, 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 con- fusion of ideas is made apparent in the very next sentence, where he adds that the water in most of these ponds " stinky intolerably." That it is merely the desire for comfort and sport that induces the Polynesians to bathe so much is proved further by the attitude of the New Zealanders. Hawksworth declares (III., 451) that they " stink like Hot- tentots ; " and the reason lies in the colder climate which ' Trans. Eth. Soc, London, N. S., VII., 338; Journ. Asiatic Soc, Bengal, XXXV., Pt. II., 25. Spencer, D. S. CORPULENCE VERSUS BEAUTY 277 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 nasti- ness. (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 Japanese 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 " ex- tremely filthy in their persons and habits " — but " as a re- medial 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 mass of tangled locks and filth." ("Woods, 20, 85.) Sturt sums up his impressions by declaring (II., 126) : " Eeally, the loathsome condition and hideous countenances of the women would, I should imagine, have been a complete antidote to the sexual passion." COEPULBNCE VERSUS BEAUTY An instructive instance of the loose reasoning which pre- vails in the esthetic sphere is provided by the Rev. H. N. Hutchinson, in his Marriage Customs in Many Lands. After describing some of the customs of the Australians, he goes on to say : " One would think that such degraded creat- ures as these men are would be quite incapable of appreciat- ing female beauty, but that is not the case. Good-looking 278 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY girls are much admired and consequently frequently stolen away." As a matter of fact, beauty has nothing to do with the stealing of the women. The real motive is revealed in the following passage from Brough Smyth (79) : " A very fat woman presents such an attractive appear- ance to the eyes of the blacks that she is always liable to be stolen. However old and ugly she may be, she will be courted and petted and sought for by the warriors, who seldom hesitate to risk their lives if there is a chance for obtaining so great a prize." An Australian Shakspere obviously would have written " Fat provoketh thieves sooner than gold," instead of " beauty provoketh thieves." And the amended maxim applies to savages in general, as well as to barbarians and Orientals. In his Savage Life in Polynesia, the Kev. W. W. Gill remarks : " The great requisites for' a Polynesian beauty are- to be fat and as fair as their dusky skins will permit. To insure this, favorite children, whether boys or girls, were regularly fat- tened and imprisoned till nightfall when a little gentle exer- cise was permitted. If refractory, the guardian would whip the culprit for not eating more." ' American Indians do not differ in this respect from Australians and Polynesians. The horrible obesity of the squaws on the Pacific Coast used to inspire me with disgust, as a boy, and I could not understand how anyone could marry such fat abominations. Concerning the South American tribes, Humboldt says {Trav., I., 301) : "In several lan- guages of these countries, to express the beauty of a woman, they say that she is fat, and has a narrow forehead." FATTENING GIRLS FOE THE MAKRIAGB MARKET The population of Africa comprises hundreds of different peoples and tribes, the vast majority of whom make bulk and weight the chief criterion of a woman's charms. The ' In Fiji fatness is also " a mark of high rank, for these people can only imagine one reason for any person being thin and spare, namely, not having enough to eat." (W. J. Smythe, 166.) FATTENING GIRLS FOR THE MARKET 279 hideous deformity known as steatopyga, or hypertrophy of the buttocks, occurs among South African Bushman, Ko- ranna, and Hottentot women. Darwin says that Sir Andrew Smith " once saw a woman who was considered a beauty, and she was so immensely developed behind that when seated on level ground she could not rise, and had to push her- self along until she came to a slope. Some of the women in various negro tribes have the same peculiarity ; and according to Burton, the Somal men, * are said to choose their wives by ranging them in a line and by picking her out who projects farthest a tergo. Nothing can be more hateful to a negro than the opposite form." ' The notions of the Yornba negroes regarding female per- fection consist, according to Lander, in "the bulk, plump- ness, and rotundity of the object." Among the Karagu6, women were exempted from hard labor because the men were anxious to have them as fat as possible. To please the men, they ate enormous quantities of bananas and drank milk by the gallon. Three of Eumanika's wives were so fat that they could not go through an ordinary door, and when they walked they needed two men each to support them. Speke measured one of the much-admired African won- ders of obesity, who was unable to stand except on all fours. Eesult : around the arms, 1 foot 11 inches ; chest, 4 feet 4 inches ; thigh, 2 feet 7 inches ; calf, Ifoot 8 inches ; height, 5 feet 8 inches. " Meanwhile, the daughter, a lass of sixteen, sat stark- naked before us, sucking at a milk-pot, on which her father kept her at work by holding a rod in his hand ; for as fat- tening is the first duty of fashionable female life, it must be duly enforced by the rod if necessary. I got up a bit of flirtation with missy, and induced her to rise and shake hands with me. Her features were lovely, but her body was round as a ball." ' Yet Westermarck has the audacity to remark (259), that natural deformity and the onsymmetrioal shape of the body are " regarded by every race as un- favorable to personal appearance " ! 280 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY Speke also tells (370) of a girl who^ a mere child when the king died, -was such a favorite of his, that he left her twenty cows, in order that she might fatten upon milk after her na- tive fashion. OBIENTAL IDEALS Mungo Park declared that the Moorish women " seem to be brought np for no other purpose than that of ministering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious mas- ters. Voluptuousness is therefore considered as their chief accomplishment. ... . The Moors have singular ideas of feminine perfection. The gracefulness of figure and mo- tion, and a countenance enlivened by expression, are by no means essential points in their standard : With them cor- pulence and ieauiy seem to he terms nearly synonymous : A woman of even moderate pretensions must be one who cannot walk without a slave under each arm, to support her ; and a perfect beauty is a load for a camel. . . . Many of the young girls are compelled, by their mothers, to devour a great quantity of kouskous, and drink a large bowl of camel's milk every morning. ... I have seen a poor girl sit crying, with the bowl at her lips, for more than an hour ; and her mother, with a stick in her hand watching her all the while, and using the stick without mercy, whenever she observed that her daughter was not swallowing." A Somali love-song says : " You are beautiful and your limbs are fat ; but if you would drink camel's milk you would be still more beautiful." Nubian girls are especially fattened for their marriage by rubbing grease over them and stuffing them with polenta and goat milk. When the process is completed they are poetically likened to a hippo- potamus. In Egypt and India, where the climate naturally tends to make women thin, the fat ones are, as in Australia, the ideals of beauty, as their poets would make plain to us if it were not known otherwise. A Sanscrit poet declares proudly that his beloved is so borne down by the weight of her thighs and breasts that she cannot walk fast ; and in the songs of HaM there are numerous " sentiments " like that. The Arabian poet Amru declares rapturously that his fa- vorite beauty has thighs so delightfully exuberant that she THE CONCUPISCENCE THEORY OF BEAUTY 281 can scarcely enter the tent door. Another Arabian poet apostrophizes " the maid of Okaib, who has haunches like sand-hills, whence her body rises like a palm-tree." And regarding the references to personal appearance in the writ- ings of the ancient Hebrews, Eossbach remarks: "In all these descriptions human beauty is recognized in the luxuri- ous fulness of parts, not in their harmony and proportion. Spiritual expression in the sensual form is not adverted to " (338). Thus, from the Australian and the Indian to the Hebrew, the Arab, and the Hindoo, what pleases the men in women is not their beauty, but their voluptuous rotundity ; they care only for those sensual aspects which emphasize the difference between the sexes. The object of the modern wasp waist (in the minds of the class of females who, strange to say, are allowed by respectable women to set the fashion for them) is to grossly exaggerate the bust and the hips, and it is for the same reason that barbarian and Oriental girls are fattened for the marriage market. The appeal is to the appetite, not to the esthetic sense. THE CONCUPISCENCE THBOET OF BEAUTY In writing this I do not ignore the fact that many authors have held that personal beauty and sensuality are practically identical or indissolubly associated. The sober philosopher. Bain, gravely advances the opinion that, on the whole, per- sonal beauty turns, 1, upon qualities and appearances that heighten the expression of favor or good-will ; and, 2, upon qualities and appearances that suggest the endearing embrace. Eckstein expresses the same idea more coarsely by saying that " finding a thing beautiful is simply another way of ex- pressing the manifestation of the sexual appetite." But it remained for Mantegazza to give this view the most cynical expression : " We look at woman through the prism of de- sire, and she looks at us in the same way ; her beauty ap- pears to us the more perfect the more it arouses our sexual desires — that is, the more voluptuous enjoyment the posses- 283 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY sion of her promises us." He adds that for this reason a man of twenty finds nearly all women beautiful. Thus the beauty of a woman, in the opinion of these writers, consists in those physical qualities which arouse a man's concupiscence. I admit that this theory applies to savages and to Orientals ; the details given in the preceding pages prove that. It applies also, I must confess, to the majority of Europeans and Americans. I have paid special attention to this point in various countries and have noticed that a girl with a voluptuous though coarse figure and a plain face will attract much more masculine attention than a girl whose figure and face are artistically beautiful without being voluptuous. But this only helps to prove my main thesis — that the sense of personal beauty is one of the latest products of civilization, rare even at the present day. What I deny most emphatically is that the theory advocated by Bain, Eckstein, and Mantegazza applies to those persons who are so lucky as to have a sense of beauty. These fortunate individuals can admire the charms of a living beauty without any more concupiscence or thought of an endearing embrace than accompanies their contemplation of the Venus de Milo or a Madonna painted by Murillo ; and if they are in love with a particular girl their admiration of her beauty is su- perlatively free from carnal ingredients, as we saw in the section on Mental Purity. Since in such a question per- sonal evidence is of importance, I will add that, fortunately, I have been deeply in love several times in my life and can therefore testify that each time my admiration of the girl's beauty was as purely esthetic as if she had been a flower. In each case the mischief was begun by a pair of brown eyes. Byes, it is true, can be as wanton and as voluptuous as a plump figure. Powers notes (20) that some California Indian girls are pretty and have " large, voluptuous eyes." Such eyes are common among the lower races and Orientals ; but they are not the eyes which inspire romantic love. Lips, too, it might be said, invite kisses ; but a lover would con- sider it sacrilege to touch his idol's lips unchastely. Sav- UTILITY IS NOT BEAUTY 283 ages are strangers to kissing for the exactly opposite rea- son — that it is too refined a detail of sensuality to appeal to their coarse nerves. How far they are from being able to ap- preciate lips esthetically appears from the way in which they so often deform them. The mouth is peculiarly the index of mental and moral refinement, and a refined pair of lips can inspire as pure a love as the celestial beauty of innocent eyes. As for the other features, what is there to suggest las- civious thoughts in a clear complexion, an oval chin, ivory teeth, rosy cheeks, or in curved eyebrows, long, dark lashes, or flowing tresses ? Our admiration of these, and of a grace- ful gait, is as pure and esthetic — as purely esthetic — as our admiration of a sunset, a flower, a humming-bird, a lovely child. It has been truly said that a girl's marriage chances have been made or marred by the size or shape of her nose. What has the size or shape of a girl's nose to do with the "endearing embrace?" I'his question alone reduces the concupiscence theory ad absurdum. UTILITY IS NOT BEAUTY Almost as repulsive as the view which identifies the sense of personal beauty with concupiscence is that which would reduce it to a matter of coarse utility. Thus Eckstein, mis- led by Schopenhauer, holds that healthy teeth are beautiful for the reason that they guarantee the proper mastication of the food ; while small breasts are ugly because they do not promise suflBcient nourishment to the child that is to be born. This argument is refuted by the simple statement that our teeth, if they looked like rusty nails, might be even more useful than now, but could no longer be beautiful. As for women's breasts, if utility were the criterion, the most beau- tiful would be those of the African mothers who can throw them over their shoulders to suckle the infants on their backs without impeding their work. As a matter of fact, the love- liest breast is the virginal, which serves no use while it re- mains so. A dray horse is infinitely more useful to us than 284 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY an Arab racer, but is he as beautiful ? Tigers and snakes are anything but useful to the human race, but we consider their skins beautiful. A KBW SENSE EASILY LOST AGAIN No, the sense of personal beauty is neither a synonyme for libidinous desires nor is it based on utilitarian considerations. It is practically a new sense, born of mental refinement and imagination. It by no means scorns a slight touch of the voluptuous, so far as it does not exceed the limits of artistic taste and moral refinement — a well-rounded figure and "a face voluptuous, yet pure" — but it ii an entirely different thing from the predilection for fat and other coarse exaggerations of sexuality which inspire lust instead of love. This new sense is still, as I have said, rare everywhere ; and, like the other results of high and recent culture, it is easily obliterated. In his treatise on insanity Professor Krafft-Ebing shows that in degeneration of the brain the esthetic and moral qualities are among the first to disappear. It is the same with normal man when he descends into a lower sphere. ZoUer relates (III., 68) that when Europeans arrive in Africa they find the women so ugly they can hardly look at them without a feeling of repulsion. Gradually they become habituated to their sight, and finally they are glad to accept them as com- panions. Stanley has an eloquent passage on the same topic {H. I. F. L., 265) : " The eye that at first despised the unclassic face of the black woman of Africa soon loses its regard for fine lines and mellow pale color ; it finds itself ere long lingering wantonly over the inharmonious and heavy curves of a negroid form, and looking lovingly on the broad, unintellectual face, and into jet eyes that never flash with the dazzling love-light that makes poor humanity beautiful." The word I have italicized explains it all. The sense of personal beauty is displaced again by the concupiscence which had held its place in the early history of mankind. BEAUTIFYING INTELLIGENCE 285 MOBAL UGLINESS To realize fully what such a relapse, may mean, read what Galton says (123) of the Hottentots. They have " that peculiar set of features which is so characteristic of bad characters in England, and so general among prisoners that it is usually, I believe, known by the name of the ' felon- face ; ' I mean that they have prominent cheek-bones, bullet- shaped head, cowering but restless eyes, and heavy sensual lips, and added to this a shackling dress and manner." Of the Damaras Galton says (99) that " their features are often beautifully chiselled, though the expression in them is always coarse and disagreeable." And to quote Mungo Park on the Moors once more (158) : "I fancied that I discovered in the features of most of them a disposition toward cruelty and low cunning. . . . Prom the staring wildness of their eyes, a stranger would im- mediately set them down as a nation of lunatics. The treachery and malevolence of their character are manifested in their plundering excursions against the negro villages." BBAUTIFTIlfG INTELLIGENCE Galton's reference to the Damaras illustrates the well- known fact that, even where nature makes an efEort at chisel- ling beautiful features the result is a failure if there is no moral and intellectual culture to inspire them, and this puts the grave-stone on the Concupiscence Theory— for what have moral and intellectual culture to do with carnal desires ? A noble soul even possesses the magic power of transforming a plain face into a radiant vision of beauty, the emotion chang- ing not only the expression but the lines of the face. Goethe (Eckermann, 1824) and others have indeed maintained that intellect in a woman does not help a man to fall in love with her. This is true in so far as brains in a woman will not make a man fall in love with her if she is otherwise unat- tractive or unfeminine. But Goethe forgot that there is such a thing as hereditary intellectual culture incarnated in the 286 ROMANTIC LOVE— PERSONAL BEAUTY face. This, I maintain, makes np more than half of the personal beanty which makes a man fall in love. A girl with good features is twice as beautiful if she is morally pure and has a bright mind. Sometimes a face is accidentally moulded into such a regular beauty of form that it seems to mirror mental beauty too. A man may fall in love with such a face, but as soon as he finds out that it is inhabited by a stupid or coarse mind he will make haste to fall out again, unless his love was predominantly sensual. I remember once falling in love with a country girl at first sight ; her face and figure seemed to me extremely beautiful, except that hard work had enlarged and hardened her hands. But when I found that her intellect was as coarse as her hands, my ardor cooled at once. If intellect, as revealed in the face, in words, and in ac- tions, did not assist, in inspiring the amorous sentiment, it would be as easy to fall in love with a doll-faced, silly girl as with a woman of culture ; it would even be possible to fall in love with a statue or with a demented person. Let us imagine a belle who is thrown from a horse and has become insane from the shock. For a time her features will remain as regular, her figure as plump, as before ; but the mind will be gone, and with it everything that could make a man fall in love with her. Who has ever heard of a beautiful idiot, of anyone falling in love with an imbecile ? The vacant stare, the absence of intellect, make beauty and love alike impos- sible in such a case. THE STEASTGE GKEEK ATTITUDE The important corollary follows, from all this, that in coun- tries where women receive no education sensual love is the only kind men can feel toward them. Oriental women are of that kind, and so were the ancient Greeks. The Greeks are indeed renowned for their statuary, yet their attitude toward personal beauty was of a very peculiar kind. Their highest ideal was not the feminine but the masculine type, and ac- cordingly we find that it was toward men only that they DEFINITION OF LOVE 287 professed to feel a noble passion. The beauty of the women was regarded merely from a sensual point of view. Their respectable women were deliberately left without education, wherefore their charms can have been at best of a bodily kind and capable of inspiring love of body only. There is a prev- alent superstition that the Greeks of the day of Perikles had a class of intelligent women known as hetairai, who were capable of being true companions and inspirers of men ; but I shall show, in a later chapter, that the mentality of these women has been ludicrously exaggerated; they were coarse and obscene in their wit and conversation, and their morals were such that no man could have respected them, much less loved them with a pure affection ; while the men whom they are supposed to have inspired were in most cases volupt- naries of the most dissolute sort. A COMPOSITE AND VARIABLE SENTIMENT Our attempt to answer the question "What is romantic love," has taken up no fewer than two hundred and thirty- five pages, and even this answer is a mere preliminary sketch, the details of which will be supplied in the following chapters, chiefly, it is true, in a negative way, by showing what is not romantic love ; for the subject of this book is Primitive Love. DEFINITION OF LOVE Can love be defined in one sentence ? The Century Dic- tionary's definition, "which is as good as any, is : " Intimate personal affection between individuals of opposite sex capa- ble of intermarriage ; the emotional incentive to and normal basis of conjugal union." This is correct enough as far as it goes ; but how little it tells us of the nature of love ! I have tried repeatedly to condense the essential traits of romantic love into one brief definition, but have not succeeded. Per- haps the following will serve as an approximation. Love 388 ROMANTIC LOVE— A COMPOSITE SENTIMENT is an intense longing for the reciprocal afEection and jealously exclusive possession of a particular individual of the opposite sex ; a chaste, proud, ecstatic adoration of one who appears a paragon of personal beauty and otherwise immeasurably superior to all other persons ; an emotional state constantly hovering between doubt and hope, aggravated in the female heart by the fear of revealing her feelings too soon ; a self- forgetful impulse to share the tastes and feelings of the be- loved, and to go so far in affectionate and gallant devotion as to eagerly sacrifice, for the other's good, all comfort and life itself if necessary. These are the essential traits. But romantic love is altogether too complex and variable to be defined in one sentence ; and it is this complexity and variability that I wish to emphasize particularly. Eckermann once suggested to Goethe that no two cases of love are quite alike, and the poet agreed with him. They did not, however, expl9,in their seeming paradox, so diametrically opposed to the cur- rent notion that love is everywhere and always the same, in individuals as in nations ; nor could they have explained it unless they had analyzed love into its component elements as I have done in this volume. With the aid of this analysis it is easy to show how and why love has changed and grown, like other sentiments ; to explain how and why the love of a civilized white man must differ from that of an Australian or African savage, just as their faces differ. Since no two races look alike, and no two individuals in the same race, why shovild their loves be alike ? Is not love the heart of the soul and the face merely its mirror ? Love is varied through a thousand climatic, racial, family, and cultural peculiarities. It is varied through individual tastes and proclivities. In one case of love admiration of personal beauty may be the strongest ingredient, in another jealous monopoly, in a third self-sacrificing affection, and so on. The permutations and combinations are countless, and hence it is that love-stories are always fresh, since they can be endlessly varied. A lover's varied feelings in relation to the beloved become gradually blended into a sentiment which is a composite WHY CALLED ROMANTIC 289 photograph of all the emotions she has ever aroused in him. This has giyen rise to the delusion that love is a simple feeling.^ WHY CALLED KOMANTIC In the introductory chapter of this book I alluded briefly to my reasons for calling pure prematrimonial infatuation romantic love, giving some historic precedents for such a use of the word. We are now in a position to appreciate the peculiar appropriateness of the term. What is the dictionary definition of '"romantic"? "Pertaining to or resembling romance, or an ideal state of things ; partaking of the heroic, the marvellous, the supernatural, or the imaginative ; chi- merical, fanciful, extravagantly enthusiastic." Every one of these terms applies to love in the sense in which I use the word. Love is ideal, heroic, marvellous, imaginative, chi- merical, fanciful, extravagantly enthusiastic ; its hyperbolic adoration even gives it a supernatural tinge, for the adored girl seems more like an angel or a fairy than a common mor- tal. The lover's heroine is as fictitious as any heroine of romance ; he considers her the most beautiful and lovable person in the world, though to others she may seem ugly and ill-tempered. Thus love is called romantic, because it is so great a romancer, attributing to the beloved all sorts of per- fections which exist only in the lover's fancy. What could be more fantastic than a lover's stubborn preference for a particular individual and his conviction that no one ever loved so frantically as he does ? What more extravagant and unreasonable than his imperious desire to completely mo- nopolize her affection, sometimes guarding her jealously even from her girl friends or her nearest relatives ? What more romantic than the tortures and tragedies, the mixed emotions, 1 It is not strange that the human race should have had to wait so long for a complete analysis of love. It is not so very long ago since Newton showed that what was supposed to be a simple white light was really compounded of all the colors of the rainbow; or that Helmholtz analyzed sounds into their partial tones pf different pitch, which are combined in what seems to be a simple tone of this or that pitch. Similarly, I have shown that the pleasures of the tablcj which everybody supposes to be simple, gustatory sensations (matters of taste), are in reality compound odors. See my article on "The Gastronomic Value of Odors," in the Contemporary Meview, 1881. 290 ROMANTIC LOVE— A COMPOSITE SENTIMENT that doubt or jealousy gives rise to ? Does not a willing but coyly reserved maiden romance about her feelings ? What could be more fanciful and romantic than her shy reserve and coldness when she is longing to throw herself into the lover's arms ? Is not her proud belief that her lover — probably as comm"Dnplace and foolish a fellow as ever lived — is a hero or a genius a romantic exaggeration ? Is not the lover's purity of imagination, though real as a feelings a romantic illusion, since he craves ultimate possession of her and would be the unhappiest of mortals if she went to a nunnery, though she promised to love him always ? What could be more mar- vellous, more chimerical, than this temporary suppression of a strong appetite at the time when it would be supposed to manifest itself most irresistibly — this distilling of the finer emotions, leaving all the gross, material elements behind? Can you imagine anything more absurdly romantic than the gallant attentions of a man on his knees before a girl whom, with his stronger muscles, he could command as a slave ? Who but a romantic lover would obliterate his selfish ego in sympathetic devotion to another, trying to feel her feelings, forgetting his own ? Who but a romantic lover would sacri- fice his life in the effort to save or please another ? A mother would indeed do the same for her child ; but the child is of her own flesh and blood, whereas the beloved may have been a stranger until an hour ago. How romantic ! The appropriateness of the word romantic is still further emphasized by the consideration that, just as romantic art, romantic literature, and romantic music are a revolt against artificial rules and barriers to the free expression of feeling, so romantic love is a revolt against the obstacles to free matrimonial choice imposed by parental and social tyranny. Indeed, I can see only one objection to the use of the word — its frequent application to any strange or exciting in- cidents, whence some confusion may ensue. But the trouble is obviated by simply bearing in mind the distinction between romantic incidents and romantic feelings which I have summed up in the maxim that a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love. Nearly all the tales WHY CALLED ROMANTIC 291 brought together in this volume are romantic love-stories, but not one of them is a story of romantic love. In the end the antithesis will aid us in remembering the distinction. In place of " romantic " I might have used the word " sen- timental " ; but in the first place that word fails to indicate the essentially romantic nature of love, on which I have just dwelt ; and secondly, it also is liable to be misunderstood, because of its unfortunate association with the word senti- mentality, which is a very different thing from sentiment. The differences between sentiment, sentimentality, and sen- suality are indeed important enough to merit a brief chapter of elucidation. SENSUALITY, SENTIMENTALITY, AND SENTIMENT Feom beginnings not yet understood — though Haeckel-and others have speculated plausibly on the subject — there has been developed in animals and human beings an appetite which insures the perpetuation of the species as the appetite for food does that of the individual. Both these appetites pass through various degrees of development, from the utmost grossness to a high degree of refinement, from which, how- ever, relapses occur in many individuals. We read of Ind- ians tearing out the liver from living animals and devouring it raw and bloody ; of Eskimos eating the contents of a rein- deer's stomach as a vegetable dish ; and the books of explorers describe many scenes like the following from Baker's Ismailia (375) relating to the antics of negroes after killing a buffalo : " There was now an extraordinary scene over the carcass ; four hundred men scrambling over a mass of blood and en- trails, fighting and tearing with each other and cutting off pieces of flesh with their lance-heads, with which they es- caped as dogs may retreat with a bone." APPETITE AITD LONGING What aeons of culture lie between such a scene and a dinner party in Europe or America, with its refined, well-behaved guests, its table etiquette, its varied menu, its choice viands, skilfully cooked and blended so as to bring out the most diverse and delicate flavors, its esthetic features — fine linen and porcelains, silver and cut glass, flowers, lights — its bright conversation, and flow of wit. Yet there are writers who would have us believe that these Indians, Eskimos, and Africans,, who manifest their appetite for food in so disgust- ingly coarse a way, are in their love-affairs as sentimental and 393 APPETITE AND LONGING 293 aesthetic as we are ! In truth they are as gross, gluttonous, and selfish in the gratification of one appetite as in that of the other. To a savage a woman is not an object of chaste adoration and gallant devotion, but a mere bait for wanton lust ; and when his lust hath dined he kicks her away like a mangy dog till he is hungry again. In Ploss-Bartels * may be found an abundance of facts culled from various sources in all parts of the world, showing that the bestiality of many savaiges is not even restrained by the presence of spectators. At the phallic and bacchanalian festivals of ancient and Oriental nations all distinctions of rank and all family ties were forgotten in a carnival of lust. Licentious orgies are indeed carried on to this day in our own large cities ; but their participants are the criminal classes, and occasionally some foolish young men who would be very much ashamed to have their doings known ; whereas the orgies and phallic festivals of savages and barbarians are national or tribal in- stitutions, approved by custom, sanctioned by religion, and indulged in openly by every man and woman in the com- munity ; often regardless even of incest. More shockingly still are the grossness and diabolical self- ishness of the savage^s carnal appetite revealed by his habit of sacrificing young girls to it years before they have reached the age of puberty. Some details will be found in the chapters on Australia, Africa, and India. Here it may be noted — to indicate the wide prevalence of a custom which it would be unjust to animals to call bestial, because beasts never sink so low — that Borneans, as Schwaner notes, marry off girls from three to five; that in Egypt child-wives of seven or eight can be seen ; that Javanese girls may be mar- ried at seven ; that North American Indians often took brides of ten or eleven, while in Southern Australia girls were appropriated as early as seven. Hottentot girls were not spared after the age of seven, nor were Bushman girls, though they did not become mothers till ten or twelve years old ; while KaflBr girls married at eight, Somals at six to 1 II., 271-74. See also ZeitschHft fur Ethnologic, 1887, 31 ; Hellwald, 144. 394 SENSUALITY AND SENTIMENTALITY eight. The cause of these early marriages is not climatic, as some fancy, but simply, as Roberton has pointed out, the coarseness of the men. The list might be extended in- definitely. In Old Calabar sometimes, we read in Ploss, " a man who has already several wives may be seen with an in- fant of two or three weeks on his lap, caressing and kissing it as his wife. Wives of four to six years we found occasionally (in China, Guzuate, Ceylon, and Brazil) ; from seven to nine years on they are no longer rare, and the years from ten to twelve are a widely prevalent marriage age." The amorous savage betrays his inferiority to animals not only in his cruel maltreatment of girls before they have reached the age of puberty,' but in his ignorance, in most cases, of the simplest caresses and kisses for which we often find corresponding acts in birds and other animals. The nerves of primitive men are too coarse for such a delicate sensation as labial contact, and an embrace would leave them cold. An African approximation to a kiss is described by Baker (Ismailia, 472). He had liberated a number of female slaves, and presently, he says, " I found myself in the arms of a naked beauty, who kissed me almost to suffocation, and, with a most unpleasant embrace, licked both my eyes with her tongue." If we may venture an inference from Mr. A. H. Savage Lander's experience^ among the aboriginal Ainos of Yezo (Japan), one of the lowest of human races, we may conclude that, in the course of evolution, biting pre- ceded kissing. He had made the acquaintance of an Ainu maiden, the most lovely Ainu girl he had ever come across. They strolled together into the woods, and he sketched her picture. She clutched his hand tightly, and pressed it to her chest : " I would not have mentioned this small episode if her ways of flirting had not been so extraordinary and funny. Loving and biting went together with her. . . . As we sat on a stone in the semi-darkness she began by gently biting 1 Which even in tropical countries seldom comes before the eleventh or twelfth year. See the statistics in Ploss-Bartela, I., 269-70. ' Alone among the Hairy Ainu, 140-41. APPETITE AND LONGING 295 my fingers without hurting me, as affectionate dogs often do their masters ; she then bit my arm, then my shoulder, and when she had worked herself up into a passion she put her arms round my neck and bit my cheeks. It was undoubt- edly a curious way of making love, and when I had been bit- ten all over, and was pretty tired of the new sensation, we retired to our respective homes." Sensuality has had its own evolution quite apart and dis- tinct from that of love. The aincient Greeks and Romans, and the Orientals, especially the Hindoos, were familiar, thousands of years ago, with refinements and variations of lust beyond which the human imagination cannot go. Ac- cording to Burton, " Kornemannus in his book de linea amoris, makes five degrees of lust, out of Lucian belike, which he handles in five chapters, Visus, Colloquium, Con- victus, Oscula, Tactus — sight, conference, association, kisses, touch." All these degrees are abundantly illustrated in Burton, often in a way that would not bear quotation in a modern book intended for general reading. It is interesting to observe, furthermore, that among the higher barbarians and civilized races, lust has become to a certain extent mentalized through hereditary memory and association. Aristotle made a marvellous anticipation of modern scientific thought when he suggested that what made birds sing in spring was the memory of former seasons of love. In men as in animals, the pleasant experiences of love and marriage become gradually ingrained in the brain, and when a youth reaches the age for love-making the memory of ancestral amorous experiences courses through his nerves vaguely but strongly. He longs for something, he knows not what, and this mental longing is one of the earliest and strongest symptoms of love. But it characterizes all sorts of love ; it may accompany pure fancies of the sentimental lover, but it may also be a result of the lascivious imaginings and anticipations of sensualism. It does not, therefore, in itself prove the presence of romantic love ; a point on which I must place great emphasis, because certain primitive poems expressing a longing for an absent girl or man have 396 SENSUALITY AND SENTIMENTALITY been quoted as positive evidence of romantic love, when as a matter of fact there is nothing to prove that they may not have been inspired by mere sensual desires. I shall cite and comment on these poems in later chapters. Loss of sleep, loss of appetite, leanness, hollow eyes, groans, griefs, sadness, sighing, sobbing, alternating blushes and pallor, feverish or unequal pulse, suicidal impulses, are other symptoms occurring among such advanced nations as the Greeks and Hindoos and often accepted as evidence of true love; but since, like longing, they also accompany lust and other strong passions or violent emotions, they cannot be ac- cepted as reliable symptoms of romantic love. The only certain criteria of love are to be found in the manifestation of the altruistic factors — sympathy, gallantry, and self-sacri- ficing affection. Eomantic love is, as I have remarked be- fore, not merely an emotional phenomenon, but an active impulse. The true lover does not, like the sensualist and the sentimentalist, ululate his time away in dismal wailing about his bodily aches and tremors, woes and pallors, but lets his feelings expend themselves in multitudinous acts revealing his eagerness to immolate his personal pleasures on the altar of his idol. It must not be supposed that sensual love is necessarily coarse and obscene. An antique love-scene may in itself be proper and exquisitely poetic without rising to the sphere of romantic love ; as when Theocritus declares : " I ask not for the land of Pelops nor for talents of gold. But under this rock will I sing, holding you in my arms, looking at the flocks feeding together toward the Sicilian Sea." A pretty picture ; but what evidence is there in it of affection ? It is pleasant for a man to hold a girl in his arms while gazing at the Sicilian Sea, even though he does not love her any more than a thousand other girls. Even in Oriental literature, usually so gross and licentious, one may come across a charmingly poetic yet entirely sensual picture like the following fropi the Persian Gulistan (339). On a very hot day, when he was a young man, Saadi found the hot wind drying up the moisture of his mouth and melt- APPETITE AND LONGING 297 ing the marrow of his bones. Looking for a refuge and re- freshment, he beheld a moon-faced damsel of supreme loveli- ness in the shaded portico of a mansion : " She held in her hand a goblet of snow-cold water, into which she dropt some sugar, and tempered it with spirit of wine ; but I know not whether she scented it with attar, or sprinkled it with a few blossoms from her own rosy cheek. In short, I received the beVerage from her idol-fair hand : and having drunk it ofE, found myself restored to new life." Ward writes (115) that the following account of Sharuda, the daughter of Brumha, translated from the Shiva Purana, may serve as a just description of a perfect Hindoo beauty. This girl was of a yellow color ; had a nose like the flower of a secamum ; her legs were taper, like the plantain-tree ; her eyes large, like the principal leaf of the lotos ; her eyebrows extended to her ears ; her lips were red, like the young leaves of the mango-tree ; her face was like the full moon ; her voice like the sound of the cuckoo ; her throat was like that of a pigeon ; her loins narrow, like those of a lion ; her hair hung in curls down to her feet ; her teeth were like the seeds of the pomegranate ; and her gait like that of a drunken elephant or a goose. There is nothing coarse in this description, yet every detail is purely sensual, and so it is with the thousands of amorous rhapsodies of Hindoo, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other Eastern poets. Concerning the Persians, Dr. Polak remarks (I., 306) that the word Ischk (love) is always associated with the idea of carnality ( Was'l). Of the Arabs, Burckardt says that " the passion of love is indeed much talked of by the in- habitants of the towns ; but I doubt whether anything is meant by them more than the grossest animal desire." In his letters from the East the keen-eyed Count von Moltke notes that the Turk "passes over all the preliminary rig- marole of falling in love, paying court, languishing, revelling in ecstatic joy, as so vauch. faux frais, and goes straight to the point." 298 SENSUALITY AND SENTIMENTALITY WILES OF AN ORIENTAL GIKL But is the German field-marshal quite just to the Turk ? I have before me a passage which seems to indicate that these Orientals do know a thing or two about the " rigmarole of love-making." It is cited by Kremer ' from the Kit^b almo- waschd, a book treating of socig,! matters in Baghdad. Its author devotes a special chapter to the dangers lurking in female singers and musical slaves, in the course of which he says : "If one of these girls meets a rich young man, she sets about ensnaring him, makes eyes at him, invites him with gestures, sings for him . . . drinks the wine he left in his cup, throws kisses with her hands, till she has the poor fellow in her net and he is enamoured. . . . Then she sends messages to him and continues her crafty arts, lets him understand that she is losing sleep for love of him, is pining for him ; maybe she sends him a ring, or a lock of her hair, a paring of her nails, a splinter from her lute, or part of her toothbrush, or a piece of fragrant gum (chewed by her) as a substitute for a kiss, or a note written and folded with her own hands and tied with a string from her lute, with a tear- stain on it ; and finally sealed with GhAlija, her ring, on which some appropriate words are carved." Having captured ■ her victim, she makes him give her valuable presents till his purse is empty, whereupon she discards him. Was Count Moltke, then, wrong ? Have we here, after all, the sentimental symptoms of romantic love ? Let us apply the tests provided by our analysis of love — tests as reliable as those which chemists use to analyze fluids or gases. Did the Baghdad music-girl prefer that man to all other individuals ? Did she want to monopolize him jealously ? Oh, no ! any man, however old and ugly, would have suited her, provided he had plenty of money. Was she coy toward him ? Per- haps ; but not from a feeling of modesty and timidity in- spired by love, but to make him more ardent and ready to pay. Was she proud of his love ? She thought him a fool. Were her feelings toward him chaste and pure ? As chaste ' CulturgescMchte des Orients, IL , 109. WILES OF AN ORIENTAL GIRL 299 and pnre as hip. Did she sympathize with his pleasures and pains ? She dismissed him as soon as his purse was empty, and looked about for another victim. Were his presents the result of gallant impulses to please her, or merely advance payment for favors expected ? Would he have sacrificed his life to save her any more than she would hers to save him ? Did he respect her as an immaculate superior being, adore her as an angel from above — or look on her as an inferior, a slave in rank, a slave to passion ? The obvious moral of this immoral episode is that it is not permissible to infer the existence of anything higher than sensual love from the mere fact that certain romantic tricks are associated with the amorous dalliance of Orientals, or Greeks and Komans. Drinking from the same cup, throw- ing kisses, sending locks of hair or tear-stained letters, ad- justing a foot-stool, or fanning a heated brow, are no doubt romantic incidents, but they are no proof of romantic feeling for the reason that they are frequently associated with the most heartless and mercenary sensuality. The coquetry of the Baghdad girl is romantic, but there is no sentiment in it. Yet — and here we reach the most important aspect of that episode — there is an affectation of sentiment in that sending of locks, notes, and splinters from her lute ; and this affecta- tion of sentiment is designated by the word sentimentality. In the history of love sentimentality precedes sentiment ; and for a proper understanding of the history and psychology of love it is as important to distinguish sentimentality from sentiment as it is to differentiate love from lust. When Lowell wrote, " Let us be thankful that in every man's life there is a holiday of romance, an illumination of the senses by the soul, that makes him a poet while it lasts," he made a sad error in assuming that there is such a holiday of romance in every man's life ; millions never enjoy it ; but the words I have italicized — " an illumination of the senses by the soul " — are one of those flashes of inspiration which sometimes enable a poet to give a better description of a psychic process than professional philosophers have put forth. From one point of view the love sentiment may be called 300 SENTIMENTALITY AND SENTIMENT an illumination of tke senses by the soul. Elsewhere Lowell has given another admirable definition : " Sentiment is in- tellectualized emotion, emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals of thought." Excellent, too, is J. F. Clarke's definition : " Sentiment is nothing but thought blended with feeling ; thought inude affectionate, sympathetic, moral." The Century Dictionary throws further light on this word : " 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 senti- ment 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 appetites and from ideas of such sensations and appetites which is the common trait of the feelings we call senti- ments." It is hardly necessary to point out that in our Baghdad girl's love-affairs there is no " remoteness from sensations and appetites," no " illumination of the senses by the soul," no " intellectualized emotion," no " thought made aflection- . ate, 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 noblest thing in the world, sentimen- tality is its counterfeit, its caricature ; there is something theatrical, operatic, painted-and-powdered about it ; it dif- fers from sentiment as astrology differs from astronomy, al- chemy from chemistry, the sham from the real, hypocrisy from sincerity, artificial posing from natural grace, genuine affection from selfish attachment. RARITY OF TRUE LOVE 301 KABITT 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 Eoman 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 pas- sage from one of Krafft-Ebing's books (Psch. Sex., 9) : " Sen- timental 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 man- ifestations of this strongest of all feelings inspire in us sym- pathy, respect, awe, according to circumstances." Steele speaks in The Lover (33, No. -5) of the extraordinary skill of a poet in making a loose people "attend to a Passion which they never, or that very faintly, felt in their own Bos- oms." 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 civ- ilization only a small proportion of men and women are able to experience full-fledged romantic love, which seems to re- quire 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 multitudes : " 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 sexes. 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 passion which 303 SENTIMENTALITY AND SENTIMENT they read about so imich 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 be- lieved that Goethe was not capable of genuine love, and Grimm, too, thought that Goethe had never experienced a self-absorbing passion. Tolstoi must have been ever a stran- ger to genuine love, for to him it seems a degrading thing even in marriage. A siiggestive and frank confession may be found in the literary memoirs of Goncourt. ' 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 friend- ship, in patriotism, and that the intensity of this emotion is due entirely to the anticipation of carnal enjoyment. TurgeniefE 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 per- sonality, 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. Turgeuieff alone could have done that, but he lacks precisely the critical sense which we could have exercised in this mat- ter had we been in love after his fashion." The vast majority of the human race has not yet got be- yond the sensual stage of amorous evolution, or realized the dif- ference between sentimentality and sentiment. There is much food for thought in this sentence from Henry James's charm, ing essay on France's most poetic writer — Th^ophile Gantier : "It has seemed to me rather a painful exhibition of the prurience of the human mind that in most of the notices of ' Journal des Goncourt, Tome V., 338-29. RARITY OF TRUE LOVE 303 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." Eeaders are interested only in emotions with which they are familiar by experi- ence. 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 Eibot re- marks : 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 Hebrseus 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 Icetetia concomitante idea externce causes — a pleasare ac- companied by the thought of its external cause. MISTAKES EEGAEDING CONJUGAL LOVE Having distinguished romantic or sentimental love from sentimentality on one side and sensuality on the other, it re- mains to show how it differs from conjugal afEection. HOW EOMAIfTIC 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 ro- mantic love and conjugal afEection. Yet when I maintained in my first book that romantic love differs as widely from conjugal afEection 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 anticipated 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 noble 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 any- body 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 dis- tinction, and in a letter to me declared that he found con- 304 HOW ROMANTIC LOVE IS METAMORPHOSED 305 jugal 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 gradu- ally, 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 court- ing, they were so tender to each other and attentive." A husband may be, and should be, quite as tender, as at- tentive, 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 mo- nopoly of her love ; but this feeling has a proprietary tinge that was absent before. Jealousy, too, assumes a new aspect ; it may, temporarily, bring back the uncertainty of court- ship, but the emotion is colored by entirely different ideas : jealousy in a lover is a green-eyed monster gnawitig 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 manifesta- tion. 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 for- ward, while after marriage they are a nleasant duty, rising in some cases to heroic self-sacrifice. 306 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE 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 associations 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 differ- ent 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 Oowper 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 hus- band'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. WHY SAVAGES VALUE WIVES 307 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 nor- mal state it is all peace, contentment, happiness, while ro- mantic 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 assertion (359-60) that it is "impossible to believe that there ever was a time when con- jugal 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 308 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE babe against wild blasts 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 de- fend his wife, there is a tremendous logical skip not warranted by the situation. Instead of making such an assumption off- hand, 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 solu- tion 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 cus- tom 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 illus- 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 ly hearing 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 WHY SAVAGES VALUE WIVES 309 father and demands restitution of the cattle he had paid for her ; " and his demand has to be complied with. Lord Ran- dolph Churchill .(249) was informed by a native of Mashona- land 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 ex- ploration {Ism., 341) :" Girls are always purchased if re- quired 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 main- tain 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 Brit- ain — who do all his work and ask no wages." We need not assume a problematic affection to explain why such a man marries. But the savage's principal 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 Ind- ians, Buchanan remarks naively (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 in- advertently 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 appetite. 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. " While he was in the wigwam 310 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE he did not leave her a moment. With his own hands he adorned her with chains, and strings of teeth and pearls, and he found a special pleasure in combing her black, soft, silken hair. He gambolled with her like a child and rocked her on his knees, telling her stories. Of his other wives he de- manded the utmost respect in their treatment of his little one." This reference to the other wives ought to have opened Pajeken's eyes as to the silliness of speaking of the " touch- ing " tenderness of the Crow chief to his latest favorite. In a few years she was doomed to be discarded, like the others, in favor of a new victim of his carnal appetite. Affection is entirely out of the question in such cases. The Malayans of Sumatra have, as Carl Bock tells us (314), a local custom allowing a wife to marry again if her faithless spouse has deserted her for three months : " The early age at which marriage is contracted is an ob- stacle to any real affection between couples ; for girls to be wives at fourteen is a common occurrence ; indeed, that age may be put down as the average age of first marriage. The girls are then frequently good-looking, but hard work and the cares of maternity soon stamp their faces with the marks of age, and spoil their figures, and then the Malay husband forsakes his wife, if, indeed, he keeps her so long." Marriage with these people is, as Bock adds, a mere mat- ter of pounds, shillings, and pence. His servant had married a "grass-widow" of three months' desertion. But "before she had enjoyed her new title six weeks, a coolness sprang up between her and her husband. I inquired the reason, and she naively confessed that her husband had no more rupees to give her, and so she did not care for him any longer." Concerning Damara women Galton writes (197) : " They were extremely patient, though not feminine, ac- cording to our ideas : they had no strong affections either for spouse or children ; in fact, the spouse was changed almost weekly, and I seldom knew without inquiry who the pro tempore husband of each lady was at any particular time." Among the Singhalese, if a wife is sick and can no longer minister to her husband's comforts and pleasure he repudiates MOURNING TO ORDER 311 her. Bailey says * that this heartless desertion of a sick wife is " the worst trait in the Kandyan character, and the cool and nnconcemed manner in which they themselves allnde to it shows that it is as common as it is cruel." " How can a man be contented with one wife," exclaimed an Arab sheik to Sir Samuel Baker (If. T. A., 263). " It is ridiculous, absurd." And then he proceeded to explain why, in his opinion, monogamy is such an absurdity : " What is he to do when she becomes old ? When she is young, if very lovely, perhaps, he might be satisfied with her, but even the young must some day grow old, and the beautiful must fade. The man does not fade like a woman ; therefore, as he remains the same for many years, Nature has arranged that the man shall have young wives to replace the old ; does not the prophet allow it ? " He then pointed out what further advantage there was in having several wives : " This one carries water, that one grinds corn ; this makes the bread ; the last does not do much, as she is the youngest and my favorite ; and if they neglect their work they get a taste of this ! " shaking a long and tolerably thick stick. There you have the typical male polygamist with his rea- sons frankly stated — sensual gratification and utilitarianism. MOUEKIN'G TO ORDER One of the most gossipy and least critical of all writers on primitive man, Bonwick, declares (97), in describing Tas- manian funerals, that " the affectionate nature of women ap- peared on such melancholy occasions. . . . The women not only wept, but lacerated their bodies with sharp shells and stones, even burning their thighs with fire-sticks. . . . The hair cut ofE in grief was thrown upon the mound." Descriptions of the howling and tortures to which savages subject themselves as part of their funeral rites abound in works of travel, and although every school-boy knows that the deepest waters are silent, it is usually assumed that these • Tram. Mhn. Soc. N, S., H., 392. 313 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE howling antics betray ithe deep grief and affection of the mourners. Now I do not deny' that the lower races do feel grief at the loss^of a relative or friend ; it is one of the ear- liest emotions to develop, in mankind. What I object to in particular is the notion that the penances to which widows submit on the death, of their husbands indicate deep, and genuine conjugal affection. As a ma;tter of fact, these pen- ances are not voluntary but prescribed^, each widow, in a tribe being expected to indulge jn the same bowlings and muti- lations, so that this circumstance alone would make it im- possible to say whether her lamentations over her late spouse came under the head of affection, fondness, liking, or attach- ment, or whether they are associated with indifference or hatred. It is instructive to note that, in descriptions of mourning widows, the words " must "or " obliged to " near- ly always occur. Among the Mandans, we read in Catlin (I., 95), "in mourning, like the Crows and most other tribes, the women are obliged to crop their hair all off ; and the usu- al term of that condolence : is until the hair has grown , again to its former length." The locks of the men (who make them do this), " are of much greater importance," and only one or two can be spared. According to Schomburgk, on the death of her husband, an Arawak wife must cut her hair ; and until this has again grown to a certain length she cannot remarry. (Spencer, D. S., 20.) Among the Patagonians, " the widow, or widows, of the dead, are obliged to mourn and fast for a whole year after the death of their hus- bands." They must abstain from certain kinds of food, and must not wash their faces and hands for a whole year ; while " during the year of mourning they are forbidden to marry." (Falkner, 119.) The grief is all prescribed and regulated according to tribal fancy. The Brazilians " repeat the lamen- tation for the dead twice a day." (Spix and Martins, II., 350. ) The Comanches "mourn for the dead systematically and periodically with great noise and vehemence ; at which time the /emaZe relatives of the deceased scarify their arms and legs with sharp flints until the blood trickles from a thousand pores. The duration of these lamentations depends on the MOURNING TO ORDER 313 quality and estimation of the deceased ; varying from three to five or seven 'da;ys."' (Schoolcraft, I., 237.) James Adair says in his History of the American Indians (188), " They compel the widow to act the part- of the disconsolate dove, for the irreparable loss of her mate." In Dahomey, during mourning " the weeping relatives must fast and refrain from bathing," etc. (Burton, II., 164.) In the Transvaal, writes the missionary Posselt, " there are a num- ber of heathenish customs which the widows are obliged to observe. There is, first, the terrible lamentation for the dead. Secondly, the widows must allow themselves to be fumi- gated," etc. Concerning the Asiatic Turks Vamb^ry writes that the women are not allowed to attend the funeral, but "are oJZz^'ecZ meanwhile to remain in their tent, and, while lamenting incessantly, scratch their cheeks with their nails, i. e., mar their beauty." The widow must lament or sing dirges for a whole year, etc. Chippewa widows are obliged to fast and must not comb their hair for a year or wear any orna- ment. A Shushwap widow must not allow her shadow to fall on any one, and must bed her head on thorns. Bancroft notes (I., 731) that among the Mosquito Indians "the widow was bound to supply the grave of her husband with provi- sions for a year, after which she took up the bones and car- ried them with her for another year, at last placing them upon the roof of her house, and then only was she allowed to marry again." The widows of the Tolkotin Indians in Ore- gon were subjected to such maltreatment that some of them committed suicide to escape their sufferings. For nine days they were obliged to sleep beside the corpse and follow certain rules in regard to dressing and eating. If a widow neglected any of these, she was on the tenth day thrown on the funeral pile with the corpse and tossed about and scorched till she lost consciousness. Afterward she was obliged to perform the function of a slave to all the other women and children of the tribe. 1 > Rosa Cox, cited by Yarrow in his valuable article on Mortuary Customs of North American Indians, I, Report Bur. JSthnol., 1879-80. See also Ploss- Bartels, II., 507-13; Westermarck, 126-28; Letoumeau, Chap. XV., where many other cases are cited. 314 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE So far as I am aware, no previous writer on the subject has emphasized the obligatory character of all these perform- ances by widows. To me that seems by far the most impor- tant aspect of the question, as it shows that the widows were not prompted to these actions by affectionate grief or self- sacrificing impulses, but by the command of the men ; and if we bear in mind the superlative selfishness of these men we have no difficulty in comprehending that what makes them compel the women to do these penances is the desire to make them eager to care for the comfort and welfare of their husbands lest the latter die and they thus bring upon them- selves the discomforts and terrors of widowhood. Martins justly remarks that the great dependance of savage women makes them eager to please their husbands (121) ; and this eagerness would naturally be doubled by making widowhood forbidding. Bruhier wrote, in 1743, that in Corsica it was customary, in case a man died, for the women to fall upon his widow and give her a sound drubbing. This custom, he adds significantly, "prompted the women to take good care of their husbands." It is true that the widowers also in some cases subjected themselves to penance ; but usually they made it very much easier for themselves than for the widows. In his Lettres sur le Congo (152) Bdouard Dupont relates that a man who has lost his wife and wants to show grief shaves his head, blackens himself, stops work, and sits in front of his chimbeque several days. His neighbors meanwhile feed him [no fasting for Mm /], and at last a friend brings him a calabash of ma- lofar and tells him " stop mourning or you will die of starva- tion." " It does not happen often, " Dupont adds, " that the advice is not promptly followed." Selfish utilitarianism does not desert the savage even at the grave of his wife. An amusing illustration of the shallow- ness of aboriginal grief where it seems " truly touching " may be found in an article by the Eev. F. McFarlane on British New Guinea.* Scene : " A woman is being buried. The husband is lying by the side of the grave, apparently in * Trans. Ninth Internal. Oongr. of Orientalists, London, 1893, p. 781. MOURNING FOR ENTERTAINMENT 315 an agony of grief ; he sobs and cries as if his heart would break." Then he jumps into the grave and whispers into the ears of the corpse — what ? a last farewell ? Oh, no ! "He is asking the spirit of his wife to go with him when he goes fishing, and make him successful also when he goes hunting, or goes to battle," etc. ; his last request being, " And please don't be angry if I get another wife ! " The simple truth is that in their grief, as in everything else, savages are nothing but big children, crying one mo- ment, laughing the next. Whatever feelings they may have are shallow and without devotion. If the widows of Man- dans, Arawaks, Patagonians, etc., do not marry until a year after the death of their husband this is not on account of affectionate grief, but, as we have seen, because they are not allowed to. Where custom prescribes a different course, they follow that with the same docility. When a Kansas or Osage wife finds, on the return of a war-party, that she is a widow, she howls dismally, but forthwith seeks an avenger in the shape of a new husband. "After the death of a hus- band, the sooner a squaw marries again, the greater respect and regard she is considered to show for his memory." (Hunter, 246.) The Australian custom for women, es- pecially widows, is to mourn by scratching the face and branding the body. As for the grief itself, its quality may be inferred from the fact that these women sit day after day by the grave or platform, howling their monotonous dirge, but, as soon as they are allowed to pause for a meal they in- dulge in the merriest pranks. (K. E. Jung, 111.) MOURNING FOR ENTERTAINMENT In many cases the mourning of savages, instead of being an expression of affection and grief, appears to be simply a mode of gratifying their love of ceremonial and excitement. That is, they mourn for entertainment — I had almost said for fun ; and it is easy to see too, that vanity and superstition play their r61e here as in their "ornamenting" and every- thing else they do. By the Abipones " women are ap- 316 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE pointed to go forward on swift steeds to dig the grave, and honor the funeral with lamentations." (DobrizhofEer II., 267.) During the ceremony of making a skeleton of a body the Patagonians, as Palkner informs us (119), indulge in singing in a mournful tone of voice, and striking the ground, to frighten away the Valichus or Evil Beings. Some of the Indians also visit the relatives of the dead, indulging in antjcs which show that the whole thing is done for effect and pastime. "During this visit of condolence," Palkner conT tinues, " they ory, howl, and sing, in the most dismal man- ner ; straining out tears, andi pricking their arms and thighs with sharp thorns, to make them bleed. For this show of grief they are paid with, glass beads," etc. The Eev. W. Ellis writes that the Tahitians, when someone had died, " not only wailed in the loudest and most affecting tone, but tore their hair, rent their garments, and cut them- selves with shark's teeth or knives in a most shocking man- ner." That this was less an expression of genuine grief than a result of the barbarous love of excitement, follows from what he adds : that in a milder form, this loud wailing and cutting with shark^s teeth was "an expression of joy as well as of grief." {Pol. Res., 1., 527.) The same writer relates in his book on Hawaii (148) that when a chief or king died on that 'island, "the people ran to and fro without their clothes, appearing and acting more like demons than human beings ; every vice was practised and almost every species of crime perpetrated." J. T. Irving tells a characteristic story (336-27) of an Ind- ian girl whom he found one day lying on a grave singing a song " so despairing that it seemed to well out from a broken heart." A half-breed friend, who thoroughly understood the native customs, marred his illusion by informing him that he had heard the girl say to her mother that as she had nothing else to do, she believed she would go and take a bawl over her brother's grave. The brother had been dead five years ! The whole question of aboriginal mourning is patly summed up in a witty remark made by James Adair more THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDOW-BURNING 317 than a century ago (1775). He has seen Choctaw mourners, he declares (187), " pour out tears like fountains of water ; but after thus tiring themselves they might with perfect pro- priety have asked themselves, ' And who is dead ? ' " THE TKUTH ABOUT WIDOW-BUEKING Instructive, from several points of view, is an incident re- lated by McLean (I., 254-55) : A carrier Indian having been killed, his widow threw herself on the body, shrieking and tearing her hair. The other females " evinced all the exter- nal symptoms of extreme grief, chanting the death-song in a most lugubrious tone, the tears streaming down their cheeks, and beating their breasts ; " yet as soon as the rites were ended, these women " were seen as gay and cheerful as if they had returned from a wedding." The widow alone remained, being " obliged by custom" to mourn day and night. " The bodies were formerly burned ; the relatives of the deceased, as well as those of the widow, being present, all armed ; a funeral pile was erected, and the body placed upon it. The widow then set fire to the pile, and was compelled to stand by it, anointing her breast with the fat that oozed from the body, until the heat became insupportable ; when the wretch- ed creature, however, attempted to draw back, she was thrust forward by her husband's relatives at the point of their spears, and forced to endure the dreadful torture until either the body was reduced to ashes, or she herself almost scorched to death. Her relatives were present merely to preserve her life ; when no longer able to stand they dragged her away, and this intervention often led to bloody quar- rels." Obviously the compulsory mourning enforced in McLean's day was simply a mild survival of this former torture, which, in turn, was a survival of the still earlier practice of actually burning the widows alive, or otherwise killing them, which used to prevail in various parts of the world, as in India, among some Chinese aboriginal tribes, the old G-ermans, the Thracians and Scythians, some of the Greeks, the Lithua- 318 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE nians, the Basutos, the natives of Congo and other African countries, the inhabitants of New Zealand, the Solomon Isl- ands, New Hebrides, Fiji Islands, the Crees, Comanches, Caribs, and various other Indian tribes in California, Darien, Peru, etc.* Some writers have advanced the opinion that jealousy- prompted the men to compel their wives to follow them into death. But the most widely accepted opinion is that ex- pressed long ago by St. Boniface when he declared regarding the Wends that " they preserve their conjugal love with such ardent zeal that the wife refuses to survive her hus- band ; and she is especially admired among women who takes her own life in order to be burnt on the same pile with her master." This view is the fourth of the mistakes I have undertaken to demolish in this chapter. In the monumental work of Ploss and Bartels (II., 514), the opinion is advanced that the custom of slaughtering widows on the death of their husbands is the result of the grossly materialistic view the races in question hold in regard to a future world. It is supposed that a warrior will reap- pear with all his physical attributes and wants ; for which reason he is arranged in liis best clothes, his weapons are placed by his side, and often animals and slaves are slaugh- tered to be useful to him in his new existence. His principal servant and provider of home comforts, however, is his wife, wherefore she, too, is expected to follow him. 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 physica;! compul- sion or in consequence of a systematic course of moral repro- bation and social persecution which made death preferable to life. In Peru, for instance, where widows were not killed 1 Details and authorities in Ploss-Bartels, II., 514-17; Westermarck, 135-36 ; Letoumeau, Chap. XV. THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDOW-BURNING 319 against their will, but were allowed to choose between wid- owhood 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 them- selves 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, super- stition was called to aid to make the widows docile. In Fiji, for instance, to quote Westermarck's summing up (135) of sev- eral 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 be- come 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 Du- bois'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 illustrious victim of conjugal at- tachment," and is " considered in the light of a deity." On the way to the funeral pyre the accompanying multitude stretch out their hands toward her in token of admiration. They be- hold 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 com- pliment her on her heroism. (Sometimes drugs are adminis- tered 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 intimi- 320 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE date 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 hell to her, so that refusal is next to impossible. And this is the much-vaunted " conju- gal afEection and fidelity " of Hindoo widows ! FEMININE DEVOTION IK ANCIENT LITERATURE The practice of " voluntary " widow-burning is, as the foregoing shows, about as convincing proof of wifely devo- tion 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 com- fort and pleasure, here and hereafter. Now it is very in- structive to note that whenever there is a story of conjugal devotion in Oriental or ancient classical 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. 539) 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 mis- takes to be corrected in this chapter. These stories were written by men, selfish men, who intended them as lesions 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, Kausika'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 WIVES ESTEEMED AS MOTHERS ONLY 331 wish only to emphasize again the need of caution and suspicion iu 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 con- cubines. 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 superstitious rites which are deemed necessary for the salvation of the father's selfish old soul. Now the non-exist- ence or extreme rarity of conjugal attachment — not to speak of affection — is painfully indicated by the circumstance that wives were, among many races, valued (apart from grossly utili- tarian 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. 8., 30.) If a Greenlander's wife did not bear him any children he gen- erally took another one. (Cranz, I., 147.) Among the Mexi- can Aztecs divorce, even from a concubine, was not easy ; but in case of barrenness even the principal wife could be repudiated. (Bancroft, II., 363-65.) The ancient Greeks, Ro- mans, and Germans, the Chinese and Japanese, could divorce a wife on account of barrenness. For a Hindoo the laws of Mann 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 Ind- ian authoress Kamabai (15) : " Of the four vives of a certain 332 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE 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." An- other woman " had been notified by her husband that if she persisted in bearing daughters she should be superseded by another wife, have coarse clothes to wear, scanty food to eat," etc' WHY COKJUGAL PEECEDBS EOMAKTIO 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 prod- uct 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 sexes 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 suflBciently emphasize the fact that ■ For ma.ny other cases see refeiences in footnotes 3 and 4, Westermarck, 878. WHY CONJUGAL PRECEDES ROMANTIC LOVE 323 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 sexual 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 con- temporaries. Whether such a couple could really have ex- isted 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 circumstances. 0. 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 Cali- fornia (371), Powers writes : " An aged Achomaari lost his wife, to whom he had been married probably half a cen- tury, and he tarred his face in mourning for her as though he were a woman — an act totally unprecedented, and re- garded by the Indians as evincing an extraordinary affec- tion." St. John relates the following incident in his book on Borneo : " Ijan, a Balan chief, was bathing with his wife in the Lingga River, a place notorious for man-eating alligators, when Indra Lela, passing 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 ; 324 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE 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 Calif ornian, 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 wom- an 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 aban- don themselves to suicidal impulses, not only where there is occasion for real distress, but often on the most trivial pre- texts. 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 gen- uine 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 dis- guised. 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 asserted that sexual affection, or even the ap- pearance of it, was unknown to the Hovas of Madagascar, the Gold Coast, and Winnabah natives, the Kabyles, the Beni- Amer, the Ohittagong Hill Tribes, the Ponape islanders, the Eskimo, the Kutchin, the Iroquois, and North American Indians in general ; while on the next pages he cites approv- ingly authors who fancied they had discovered sexual affection among tribes some of whom (Australians, Andamanese, Bush- mans) 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 WHY CONJUGAL PRECEDES ROMANTIC LOVE 325 the writers, some accepting the rubbing of noses or other sexual caresses as evidence of "affection," while others take any acts indicating fondness, attachment, or a suicidal im- pulse 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 some- times, 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 describ- ing the simplest weeds or insects. Morgan, the great authority on the Iroquois^the most in- telligent of North American Indians — lived long enough among them to realize vaguely that there must be a difference between sexual 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 exclu- sively as a matter of physical necessity," he goes on to say ; " Affection after marriage would naturally spring up between the parties from association, from habit, and from mutual dependence ; but of that marvellous passion which originates in a higher development of the passions of the human heart, and is founded upon a cultivation of the affections between the sexes, they were entirely ignorant. In their tempera- ments they were below this passion 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 mar- 326 MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE riage. As a matter of fact we know that they treated their wives with a selfishness which is entirely incompatible with true affection. The Kev. 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 passage quoted, Morgan should have used the word attach- ment 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 impos- sible. 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 ador- ation is absolutely essential to romantic love. Before ro- mantic 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 EOMANTIC LOVE "When Shakspere wrote that " The course of true love never did run smooth " he had in mind individual cases of court- ship. 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, disheart- ened 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 Obsta- cles to Love ; my original plan for this book included a long chapter on this matter ; but partly to avoid repetition, partly to save space, I will condense my material to a few pages, considering briefly the following obstacles : I. Ignorance and stupidity. II. Coarseness and obscenity. III. War. IV. Cruelty. V. Masculine selfishness. VI. Contempt for wom- en. VII. Capture and sale of brides. VIII. Infant mar- riages. IX. Prevention of free choice. X. Separation of the sexes. XI. Sexual taboos. XII. Race aversion. XIII. Multiplicity of languages. XIV. Social barriers. XV. Re- ligious prejudice. I. IGKOKANCE 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 an- tiquity — the Greeks, Romans and Hebrews — were strangers to this feeling ; and in our times we have seen that such in- telligent persons as Tolstoi, Zola, Goncourt, Flaubert have been confessedly unable to experience real love such as Tur- 327 338 OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE geniefE 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 ro- mantic love is not necessary for the preservation of the race, but is merely a means for its improvement ; wherefore it de- veloped slowly, keeping pace with the growth of the intel- lectual powers of discrimination, the gradual refinement of the emotions, and the removal of diverse obstacles created by selfishness, coarseness, foolish taboos, and prejudices. A sav- age lives entirely in his senses, hence sensual love is the only kind he can know. His love is as coarse and simple as his music, which is little more than a monotonous rhythmic noise. Just as a man, unless he has musical culture, cannot under- stand a Schumann symphony, so, unless he has intellectual cult- ure, 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 Austra- lian cannot count above ten, and Galton says (132) that Da- maras 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 imag- ination, and imagination is the organ of romantic love ; without it there can be no sympathy, and without sympathy there can be no love. COARSENESS AND OBSCENITY 329 II. COARSENESS AND OBSCENITY Kissing and other caresses are, as we have seen, practices unknown to savages. Their nerves being too coarse to ap- preciate even the more refined forms of sensualism, it follows of necessity that they are too coarse to experience the subtle manifestations of imaginative sentimental love. Their na- tional addiction to obscene practices and conversation proves an insuperable obstacle to the growth of refined sexual feel- ings. 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 Eev. 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 licen- tiousness to its present function as chiefly a means of bring- ing young people together and providing innocent opportuni- ties for courtship ; two extremes differing as widely as the coarse drum accompaniment of a primitive dance from the sentimental melodies, soulful harmonies, and exquisite orches- tral colors of a Strauss waltz. A remark made by Taine on Burns suggests how even acquired coarseness in a mind natu- rally 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 re- mark, 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, un- kempt, ignorant, coarse, immoral — they would themselves have made haste to disavow their heroines and seek less mal- 330 OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE odorous " maidens " for embodiments of their exalted fancies of love.' Eichard 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." III. WAR Herbert Spencer has devoted some eloquent pages ^ to show- ing that along with chronic militancy there goes a brutal treatment of women, whereas industrial tribes are likely to treat their wives and daughters well. To militancy is due the disregard of women's claims shown in stealing or buying them ; the inequality of status between the sexes entailed by polygamy ; the use of women as laboring slaves, the life-and- death power over wife and child. To which we may add that war proves an obstacle to love, by fostering cruelty and smoth- ering sympathy, and all the other tender feelings ; by giving the coarsest masculine qualities of aggressiveness and brute prowess the aspect of cardinal virtues and causing the femi- nine virtues of gentleness, mercy, kindness, to be despised, and women themselves to be esteemed only in so far as they appropriate masculine qualities ; and by fostering rape and licentiousness in general. When Plutarch wrote that " the most warlike nations are the most addicted to love," he meant, of course, lust. In wars of the past no incentive to brutal courage proved so powerful as the promise that the soldiers might have the women of captured cities. " Plunder if you succeed, and paradise if you fall. Female captives in the one ease, celestial houris in the other " — such was, according to Burckhardt, the promise to their men given by Wahabi chiefs ' on the eve of battle. ' The poets and a certain class of novelists also like to dwell on the love-matchea among peasants as compared with commercial city marriages. As a matter of fact, in no class do sordid pecuniary matters play so great a rdle as among peas- ants. (^Gf.GioBse.P.d. F.,ie.) ' Princ. ofSoc, American Edition, pp. 756, 773, 784, 787. MASCULINE SELFISHNESS 331 IV. CRUELTY Love depends on sympathy, and sympathy is incompatible with cruelty. It has been maintained that the notorious cru- elty of the lower and war-like races is manifested only tow- ard enemies ; but this is an error. Some of the instances cited under " Sentimental Murder" and " Sympathy" show how often superstitious and utilitarian considerations smother all the family feelings. Three or four more illustrations may be added here. Burton says of the East Africans, that "when childhood is' past, the father and son become natural enemies, after the manner of wild beasts." The Bedouins are not com- pelled by law or custom to support their aged parents, and Burckhardt (156) came across such men whom their sons would have allowed to perish. Among the Somals it fre- quently occurs that an old father is simply driven away and exposed to distress and starvation. N"ay, incredible cases are related of fathers being sold as slaves, or killed. The African missionary, Moffat, one day came across an old woman who had been left to die within an enclosure. He asked her why she had been thus deserted, and she replied : "I am old, you see, and no longer able to serve them [her grown children]. "When they kill game, I am too feeble to aid in carrying home the flesh ; I am incapable of gathering wood to make fire, and I cannot carry their children on my back as I used to do." V. MASCULIKB SELFISHNESS The South American Chiquitos, as DobrizhofEer informs us (II., 364), used to kill the wife of a sick man, believing her to be the cause of his illness, and fancying that his recovery would follow her disappearance. Fijians have been known to kill and eat their wives, when they had no other use for them. Carl Bock (275) says of the Malays of Sumatra, that the men are extremely indolent and make the women their beasts of burden (as the lower races do in general). " I have," he says, " continually met a file of women car- rying loads of rice or coffee on their heads, while the men 333 OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE would follow, lazily lounging along, with a long stick in their hands, like shepherds driving a flock of sheep. . . . I have seen a man go into his house, where his wife was lying asleep on the bed, rudely awake her, and order her to lie on the floor, while he made himself comfortable on the cushions." But I need not add in this place any further instances to the hundreds given in other parts of this volume, revealing uncivilized man's disposition to regard woman as made for his convenience, both in this world and the next. Nor is it necessary to add that such an attitude is an insuperable obsta cle to love, which in its essence is altruistic. VI. CONTEMPT BOB WOMEN As late as the sixth century the Christian Provincial Coun- cil of Macon debated the question whether women have souls. I know of no early people, savage, barbarous, semi-civilized or civilized — from the Australian to the Greek — in which the men did not look down on the women as inferior beings. Now contempt is the exact opposite of adoration, and where it prevails there can of course be no romantic love.i VII. CAPTUKE AND SALE OF BEIDES In the Homeric poems we read much about young women who were captured and forced to become the concubines of the men who had slain their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Other brides are referred to as dA. Westermarck, 364-66, where many other striking cases of racial prejudice are given. 350 OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE We might suppose that the coarser races would be less cap- able of such ayersions than the half-civilized, but the cortnary is true. In Australia nearly every tribe is the deadly enemy of every other tribe, and according to Chapman a Bushman woman would consider herself degraded by intercourse with anyone not belonging to her tribe. " Savage nations," says Humboldt, in speaking of the Chaymas of New Andalusia, " are subdivided into an iniinity of tribes, which, bearing a cruel hatred toward each other, form no intermarriages, even when their languages spring from the same root, and when only a small arm of a river, or a group of hills, separates their habitation." Here there is no chance for Leanders to swim across the waters to meet their Heros. Poor Cupid ! Every- body and everything seems to be against him. XIII. MULTIPLICITY OF LANGUAGES Apart from racial prejudice there is the further obstacle of language. A man cannot court a girl and learn to love her sentimentally unless he can speak to her. Now Africa alone has 438 languages, besides a number of dialects. Dr. Finsch says (38) that on the Melanasian island of Tanua nearly every village has a dialect of its own which those of the next village cannot understand ; and this is a typical case. American Indians usually communicate with each other by means of a sign language. India has countless languages and dialects, and in Canton the Chinamen from various parts of the Empire have to converse with each other in "pidjin English." The Australians, who are perhaps all of one race, nevertheless have no end of different names for even so com- mon a thing as the omnipresent kangaroo.^ In Brazil, says von Martins, travellers often come across a language " used only by a few individuals connected with each other by rela- tionship, who are thus completely isolated, and can hold no communication with any of their other countrymen far or * For instance ; omal-win-yuk-un-der, illpoogee, loityo, kemoo, ipamoOf badjeerie, mongaroo, yowerda, yowada, yoorda, yooada, yongar, yunkera, wore, yowardoo, mailoo, yowdar, koolbirra, madooroo, oggra, arinya, oogara, angara, uggerra, bulka, yshuckuru, koongaroo, chookeroo, thaldara, kulla, etc. SOCIAL BARRIERS 351 near"; and how great was the confusion of tongues among other South American Indians may be inferred from the state- ment (Waitz, III., 355) that the Caribs were so mnch in the habit of capturing wives from different tribes and peoples that the men and women of each tribe never spoke the same language. Under such circumstances a wife might become at- tached to her husband as a captured, mute, and maltreated dog might to his master; but romantic love is as utterly out of the question as it is between master and dog. XIV. SOCIAL BAKRIERS Not content with hating one another cordially, the different races, peoples, and tribes have taken special pains at all times and everywhere to erect within their own limits a number of barriers against free choice and love. In France, Germany, and other European countries there is still a strong prejudice against marriages between nobles and commoners, though the commoner may be much nobler than the aristocrat in every- thing except the genealogical table. Civilization is gradually destroying this obstacle to love, which has done so much to promote immorality and has led to so many tragedies involv- ing a number of kings and princes, victims to the illusion that accident of birth is nobler than brains or refinement. But among the ancient civilized and mediaeval peoples the social barrier was as rigidly held up as the racial prejudices. Milman remarks, in his History of Latin Christianity (I., 499, 538), that among the ancient Romans " there conld be no marriages with slaves [though slaves, being captives, were not necessarily of a lower rank, but might be princesses]. . . . The Emperor Valentinian further defined low and abject persons who might not aspire to lawful union with freemen — actresses, daughters of ac- tresses, tavern-keepers, the daughters of tavern-keepers, pro- curers (leones) or gladiators, or those who had kept a public shop. . . . Till Roman citizenship had been imparted to the whole Roman Empire, it would not acknowledge marriage with barbarians to be more than a concubinage. Cleopatra was called only in scorn the wife of Antony. Berenice might 353 OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE not presume to be more than the mistress of Titus. The Christian world closed marriages again within still more and more jealous limits. Interdictory statutes declared marriages with Jews and heathens not only invalid but adulterous." " The Salic and Eipuarian law condemned the freeman guilty of this degradation [marrying a slave] to slavery ; where the union was between a free woman and a slave, that of the Lombards and of the Burgundians, condemned both parties to death ; but if her parents refused to put her to death, she became a slave of the crown. The Eipuarian law condemned the female delinquent to slavery ; but the woman had the alternative of killing her base-born husband. She was offered a distaff and a sword. If she chose the distaff she became a slave ; if a sword she struck it to the heart of her paramour and emancipated herself from her degrading con- nection." In medieeval Germany the line was so sharply drawn be- tween the social classes that for a long time slavery, or even death, was the punishment for a mixed marriage. In course of time this barbarous custom fell into disuse, but free choice continued to be discouraged by the law that if a man married a woman beneath him in rank, neither she nor her children were raised to his rank, and in case of his death she had no claim to the usual provisions legally made for widows. In India the caste prejudices are so strong and varied that they form almost insuperable barriers to free love-choice. "We find castes within castes," says Sir Monier Williams (153), " so that even the Brahmans are broken up and divided into numerous races, which again are subdivided into numer- ous tribes, families, or sub-castes," and all these, he adds, " do not intermarry." In Japan, until three decades ago, social barriers as to marriage were rigidly enforced, and in China, to this day, slaves, boatmen, actors, policemen, can marry women of their own class only. Nor are these difficulties eliminated at once as we descend the ladder of civilization. In Brazil, Central America, in the Polynesian and other Pa- cific Islands and elsewhere we find such barriers to free mar- riage, and among the Malayan Hovas of Madagascar even the slaves are subdivided into three classes, which do not inter- marry ! It ifi only among those peoples which are too low to RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE 353 be able to experience sentimental love anyway that this formidable obstacle of class prejudice vanishes, while race and tribal hatred remain in full force. XV. RELIGIOUS PEBJUDICE Among peoples sufficiently advanced to have dogmas, relig- ion has always proved a strong barrier in the way of the free bestowal of afEection. Not only have Mohammedans and Christians hated and shunned each other, but the different Christian sects for a long time detested and tabooed one an- other as cordially as they did the heathen and the Jews. TertuUian denounced the marriage of a Christian with a heathen as fornication, and Westermarck cites Jacobs's remark that " the folk-lore of Europe regarded the Jews as some- thing infra-human, and it would require an almost impossible amount of large toleration for a Christian maiden of the Middle Ages to regard union with a Jew as anything other than unnatural." There are various minor obstacles that might be dwelt on, but enough has been said to make it clear why romantic love was the last of the sentiments to be developed. Having considered the divers ingredients and different kinds of love and distinguished romantic love from sensual passion and sentimentality, as well as from conjugal affec- tion, we are now in a position to examine intelligently and in some detail a number of races in all parts of the world, by way of further corroborating and emphasizing the conclu- sions reached. SPECIMENS OF AFEICAN LOVE 'W'hat is the lowest of all human races ? The Bnshmen of South Afriba, say some ethnologists> while others urge the claims of the natives of Australia, the Veddahs of Ceylon, or the Fufegians of South America. As culture cannot he measured i^rith a yardstick, it is impossible tO arrive at any definite conclusion. For litferary and geographic reasons, which will Become apparent later on, I prefer to begih the search for traces of romantic love With the Bushmen of South Africa. And here we are at once confronted by the startling assertion of the explorer James Chapman, that there is "love in all their marriages." If this is true-^if there is love in all the marriages of what is one of the lowest human races— then I have been pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp in the preceding pages of this book, and it will be a waste of ink and paper to write another line. But is it true ? Let us first see what manner of mortals these Bushmen are, before subjecting Mr. Chapman's special testimony to a cross-exami- nation. The following facts are compiled from the most ap- proved authorities. BUSHMAlir QUALIFICATIONS FOE LOVE The eminent anatomist Pritsch, in his valuable work on the natives of South Africa (386-407), describes the Bush- men as being even in physical development far below the nor- mal standard. Their limbs are " horribly thin " in both sexes ; both women and men are "frightfully ugly," and so much alike that, although they go about almost naked, it is difficult to tell them apart. He thinks they are probably the abori- ginal inhabitants of Africa, scattered from the Cape to the Zam- besi, and perhaps beyond. They are filthy in their habits, and 354 BUSHMAN QUALIFICATIONS FOR LOVE 355 " washing the body is a proceeding unknown to them." When the French anatomist Cuvier examined a Bushman woman, he was reminded of an ape by her head, her ears, her moye- ments, and her way of pouting the lips. The language of the Bushmen has often been likened to the chattering of monkeys. According to Bleek, who has collected their tales, their language is of the lowest known type. Lichtenstein (II., 42) found the Bushman women like the men, "ugly in the extreme," adding that " they understand each other more by their gestures than by their speaking." "No one has a name peculiar to himself." Others have described them as having protuberant stomachs, prominent posteriors, hol- lowed -out backs, and "few ideas but those of vengeance and eating." They have only two numerals, everything beyond two being " much," and except in those directions where the struggle for life has sharpened their wits, their intellectual faculties in general are on a level with their mathematics. Their childish ignorance is illustrated by- a question which some of them seriously asked Chapman (I., 83) one day — whether his big wagons were not the mothers of the little ones with slender tires. How well their minds are otherwise adapted for such an intellectualized, refined, and esthetic feeling as love, may also be inferred from the following observations. Lichtenstein points out that while necessity has given them acute sight and hearing, " they might almost be supposed to have neither taste, smell, nor feeling ; no disgust is ever evinced by them at even the most nauseous kind of food, nor do they appear to have any feeling of even the most striking changes in the temperature of the atmosphere." " No meat," says Chap- man (I., 57)," in whatever state of decomposition, is ever dis- carded by Bushmen." They dispute carrion -with wolves and vultures. Rabbits they eat skins and all, and their menu is varied by all sorts of loathsome reptiles and insects. No other savages, says Lichtenstein, betray " so high a de- gree of brutal ferocity " as the Bushmen. They " kill their own children without remorse." The missionary Moffat says (57) that "when a mother dies whose infant is not able to 356 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE shift for itself J it is, without any ceremony, buried alive with the corpse of its mother." Kicherer, another missionary, says " there are instances of parents throwing their tender offspring to the hungry lion, who stands roaring before their cavern, refusing to depart till some peace-offering be made to him." He adds that after a quarrel between husband and wife the one beaten is apt to take revenge by killing their child ; and that, on various occasions, parents smother their children, cast them away in the desert, or bury them alive without remorse. Murder is an amusement, and is considered a praiseworthy act. Livingstone {M. T., 159) tells of a Bushman who thought his god would consider him a " clever fellow " because he had murdered a man, two women, and two children. When fathers and mothers become too old to' be of any use, or to take care of themselves, they are abandoned in the desert to be devoured alive by wild beasts. " I have often reasoned with the natives on this cruel practice," says the missionary Moffat (99) ; " in reply to which, they would only laugh." " It appears an awful exhibition of human de- pravity," he adds, " when children compel their parents to perish for want, or to be devoured by beasts of prey in a desert, /rom no other motive but sheer laziness." Kicherer says there are a few cases of "natural affection" sufficient to raise these creatures to " a level with the brute creation." Moffat, too, refers to exceptional cases of kindness, but the only instance he gives (112) describes their terror on finding he had drunk some water poisoned by them, and their glad- ness when he escaped — which terror and gladness were, how- ever, very probably inspired not by sympathy but by the idea of punishment at causing the death of a white man. Chap- man himself, the chosen champion of the Bushmen, relates (I., 67) how, having heard of Bushmen rescuing and carrying home some Makalolos whom they had found dying of thirst in the desert, he believed it at first ; but he adds : " Had I at that time possessed a sufficient knowledge of native character, I should not have been so credulous as to have listened to this report, for the idea of Bushmen carry- ing human beings whom they had found half dead out of a "LOVE IN ALL THEIR MARRIAGES" 357 desert implies an act of charity quite inconsistent with their natural disposition and habits." Barrow declares (269) that if Bushmen come across a Hotten- tot guarding his master's cattle, " not contented with put- ting him to immediate death, they torture him by every means of cruelty that their invention can frame, as drawing out his bowels, tearing off his nails, scalping, and other acts equally savage." They sometimes bury a victim up to the neck in the ground and thus leave him to be pecked to death by crows. " LOVE IK ALL THEIB MAKEIAGES " And yet — I say it once more — we are asked to believe there is "love in all the marriages" of these fiendish creatures — beings who, as Kicherer says, live in holes or caves, where they "lie close together like pigs in a sty" and of whom MofEat declares that with the exception of Pliny's Troglo- dites " no tribe or people are surely more brutish, ignorant, and miserable." Our amazement at Chapman's assertion in- creases when we examine his argument more closely. Here it is (I., 358-59) : "Although they haVe a plurality of wives, which they also obtain by purchase, there is still love in all their mar- riages, and courtship among them is a very formal and, in some respects, a rather punctilious affair. When a young Bushman falls in love, he sends his sister to ask permission to pay his addresses ; with becoming modesty the girl holds ofE in a playful, yet not scornful or repulsive manner if she likes him. The young man next sends his sister with a spear, or some other trifling article, which she leaves at the door of the girl's home. If this be not returned within the three or four days allowed for consideration, the Bushman takes it for granted that he is accepted, and gathering a number of his friends, he makes a grand hunt, generally killing an elephant or some other large animal and bringing the whole of the flesh to his intended father-in-law. The family now riot in an abundant supply. . . . After this the couple are proclaimed husband and wife, and the man goes to live with his father-in-law for a couple of winters. 358 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE killing game, and always laying the produce of the chase at his feet as a mark of respect, duty, and gratitude." It would take considerable ingenuity to condense into an equal number of lines a greater amount of ignorance and naivete than this passage includes. And yet a number of anthropologists have accepted this passage serenely as expert evidence that there is love in all the marriages of the lowest of African races. Peschel was misled by it ; Westermarck triumphantly puts it at the head of his cases intended to prove that "even very rude savages may have conjugal af- fection ;" Moll meekly accepts it as a fact (Lii. Sex., Bd. I., Pt. 2, 403) ; and it seems to have made an impression on Eatzel, and even on Fritsch. If these writers had taken the trouble to examine Chapman's qualifications for serving as a witness in anthropological questions, they would have saved themselves the humiliation of being thus duped. His very as- sertion that there is love in all Bushman marriages ought to have shown them what an untrustworthy witness he is ; for a more reckless and absurd statement surely was never penned by any globe-trotter. There is not now, and there never has been, a people among whom love could be found in all mar- riages, or half the marriages. In another place (I., 43) Chap- man gives still more striking evidence of his unfitness to serve as a witness. Speaking of the family of a Bamanwato chief, he says : " I was not aware of this practice of early marriages until the wife of an old man I had engaged here to accompany us, a child of about eight years of age, was pointed out to me, and in my ignorance I laughed outright, until my inter- preter explained the matrimonial usages of their people." Chapman's own editor was tempted by this exhibition of ig- norance to write the following footnote : " The author seems not to have been aware that such early marriages are common among the Hindoos." He might have added " and among most of the lower races." The ignorance which made Chapman " laugh outright " when he was confronted by one of the most elementary facts of anthropology, is responsible for his reckless assertions in •'LOVE IN ALL THEIR MARRIAGES" 359 the paragraph above quoted. It is an ignorant assumption on his part that it is the feelings of " respect, duty, and grat- itude " that make a Bushman provide his bride's father with game for a couple of winters. Such feelings are unknown to the Bushman's soul. Working for the bride's father is sim- ply his way (if he has no property to give) of paying for his wife — ^an illustration of the widespread custom of service. If polygamy and the custom of purchasing wives do not, as Chapman intimates, prevent love from entering into all Bushman marriages, then these aborigines must be construct- ed on an entirely different plan from other human beings, among whom we know that polygamy crushes monopoly of affection, while a marriage by purchase is a purse-affair, not a heart-affair — the girl going nearly always to the highest bidder. But Chapman's most serious error — the one on which he founded his theory that there is love in all Bushman mar- riages — lies in his assumption that the ceremony of sham capture indicates modesty and love, whereas, as we saw in the chapter on Coyness, it is a mere survival of capture, the most rufSanly way of securing a bride, in which her choice or feelings are absolutely disregarded, and which tells us nothing except that a man covets a woman and that she feigns resistance because custom, as taught by her parents, compels her to do so. Inasmuch as she must resist whether she likes the man or not, how could such sham " coyness " be a symptom of love ? Moreover, it appears that even this sham coyness is exceptional, since, as Burchell informs us (II., 59), it is only when a girl grows up to womanhood with- out having been betrothed — " which, however, seldom hap- pens" — that the female receives the man's attentions with such an ' ' affectation of great alarm and disinclination on her part." Burchell also informs us that a Bushman will take a second wife when the first one has become old, "not in years but in constitution ; " and Barrow discovered the same thing (I., 276) : "It appeared that it was customary for the elderly men to have two wives, one old and past child-bearing, the other young." Cluipman, too, relates that a Bushman will 360 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE often cast ofE his early wife and take a younger one, and as that does not prevent him from finding affection in their con- jugal unions, we are enabled from this to infer that "love " means to him not enduring sympathy or altruistic capacity and eagerness for self-sacrifice, but a selfish, transient fond- ness continuing only as long as a woman is young and can gratify a man's sexual appetite. That kind of love doubtless does exist in all Bushman marriages. Chapman further declares (II., 75) that these people lead " comparatively " chaste lives. I had supposed that, as an egg is either good or bad, so a man or woman is either chaste or unchaste. Other writers, who had no desire to whitewash savages, tell us not only "comparatively" but positively what Bushman morals are. A Bushman told Theophilus Hahn {Globus, XVIII., 132) that quarrels for the possession of women often lead to murder ; " neverthe- less, the lascivious fellow assured me it was a fine thing to appropriate the wives of others." Wake (I., 305) says they lend their wives to strangers, and Lichtenstein tells us (II., 48) that "the wife is not indissolubly united to the husband ; but when he gives her permission, she may go whither she will and associate with any other man." And again (42) : "Infidelity to the marriage compact is not considered a crime, it is scarcely regarded by the offended person. . . . They seem to have no idea of the distinction of girl, maiden, and wife ; they are all expressed by one word alone. I leave every reader to draw from this single circumstance his own inference with regard to the nature of love and every kind of moral feeling among them." ^ That this is not too severe a criticism is obvious from the fact that Lichtenstein, in judging savages, was rather apt to err on the side of leniency. The equally generous and ami- able missionary MofEat (174-75) censures him, for instance, for his favorable view of the Bechuanas, saying that he was not with them long enough to know their real character. Had he dwelt among them, accompanied them on journeys, ' See also Merenaky's Siid Afrika, 68. "LOVE IN ALL THEIR MARRIAGES" 361 and known them as he (Moffat) did, " he would not have attempted to revive the fabled delights and bliss of ignorance reported to exist in the abodes of heathenism." It is in comparison with these Bechuanas that Chapman calls the Bushmen moral, obviously confounding morality with licentiousness. Without having any moral principles at all, it is quite likely that the Bushmen are less licentious than their neighbors for the simple reason that they are less well-fed ; for as old Burton remarks, for the most part those are " aptest to love that are young and, lusty, live at ease, stall-fed, free from cares, like cattle in a rank pasture" — whereas the Bushmen are nearly always thin, half-starved denizens of the African deserts, enervated by constant fears, and so unmanly that " a single musket shot," says Lichten- stein, "will put a hundred to flight, and whoever rushes upon them with only a good stick in his hand has no reason to fear any resistance from ever so large a number." Such men are not apt to be heroes among women in any sense. Indeed, Galton says {T. S. A., 178), "I am sure that Bushmen are, generally speaking, henpecked. They always consult their wives. The Damaras do not." Chapman him- self, with unconscious humor, gives us (I., 391) a sample of the " love " which he found in " all Bushman marriages ; " his remarks confirming at the same time the truth I dwelt on in the chapter on Individual Preference, that among savages the sexes are less individualized than with us, the men being more effeminate, the women viragoes : " The passive and effeminate disposition of the men, of which we have had frequent reason to complain in the course of this narrative, was illustrated in the revel which accom- panied the parting feast, when the men allowed themselves to be beaten by the women, who, I am told, are in the constant habit of belaboring their devoted husbands, in order to keep them in proper subjection. On this occasion the men got broken heads at the hands of their gentle partners ; one had his nose, another his ear, nearly bitten off." Notwithstanding this affectionate "constant habit" of breaking their husbands' heads, the Bushman women have 363 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE not succeeded in teaching them even the rudiments of gal' lantry, " The woman is a beast of burden/' says Hahn ; " at the same time she is subjected to ill-treatment which not seldom leads to death." When camp is moved, the gallant husband carries his spear and quiver, the wife "does the rest," carrying the baby, the mat, the earthen cooking-pot, the ostrich shells, and a bundle of skins. If it happens, as it often does, that there is not enough to eat, the wife has to go hungry. In revenge she usually prepares her own food only, leaving him to do his own cooking. If a wife falls ill on the way to a new camping-place, she is left behind to perish. (Eatzel, I., 7.) In conclusion, and as a climax to my argument, I will quote the testimony of three missionaries who did not simply make a flying visit or two to the country of the Bushmen, as Chapman did, but lived among them. The Rev. R. Moffat (49) cites the missionary Kicherer, "whose circumstances while living among them afforded abundant opportunities of becom- ing intimately acquainted with their real condition," and who wrote that the Bushmen " are total strangers to domestic happiness. The men have several wives, but conjugal affec- tion is little known." This opinion is thus endorsed by Moffat, and a third missionary, the Rev. P. Fleming, wrote (167) that among Bushmen " conjugal affection seems totally unknown," and pre-matrimonial love is of course out of ques- tion in a region where girls are married as infants. The wife always has to work harder than the husband. If she becomes weak or ill she is unceremoniously left behind to starve. (Eatzel, I., 72.) FALSE FACTS REGABDING HOTTBKTOTS Darwin has well observed that a false argument is compara- tively harmless because subsequent discussion is sure to demol- ish it, whereas a false fact may perplex speculation for ages. Chapman's assertion that there is love in all Bushman mar- riages is one of these false facts, as our cross-examination has shown. In passing now to the neighbors of the Bushmen, FALSE FACTS REGARDING HOTTENTOTS 363 the Hottentots, let ns bear in mind the lesson taught. They called themselves Khoi-Khoin, "men of men," while Van Eiebeck's followers referred to them as " black stinking hounds." There is a prevalent impression that nearly all Africans are negroes. But the Hottentots are not negroes any more than are the Bushmen, or the KaflBrs, whom we shall consider next. Ethnologists are not agreed as to the re- lationship that exists between Bushmen and Hottentots, but it is certain that the latter represent a somewhat higher level of civilization. Yet, here again we must guard carefully against " false facts," especially in reference to the topic that interests us — the relations of the sexes. As late as 1896 the eminent American anthropologist, Dr. Brinton, had an article in Science (October 16th), in which he remarked that " one trait which we admire in Hottentots is their regard for wom- en." He was led into making this assertion by an article en- titled " Woman in Hottentot Poetry," which appeared in the German periodical Globus (Vol. 70, pp. 173-77). It was writ- ten by Dr. L. Jakobowski, and is quite as misleading as Chap- man's book. Its logic is most peculiar. The "writer first shows (to his own satisfaction) that the Hottentots treat their women somewhat better than other South Africans do, and from this " fact " he goes on to infer that they must have love- songs ! He admits, indeed, that (with a few exceptions, to be presently considered) we know nothing of these songs, but it "seems certain" that they must be sung at the erotic dances of the natives ; these, however, carefully conceal them from the missionaries, and as Jakobowski naively adds, to heed the missionaries "would be tantamount to giving up their old sensual dances." What facts does Jakobowski adduce in support of his asser- tion that Hottentots have a high regard for their women ? He says : " Without his wife's permission a Hottentot does not drink a drop of milk, and should he dare to do so, the women of his family will take away the cows and sheep and add them to their flocks. A girl has the right to punish her brother if he violates the laws of courtesy. The oldest sister may have 364 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE him chained and punished, and if a slave who is being casti- gated implores his master by the name of his (the master's) sister to desist, the blows must cease or else the master is bound to pay a fine to the sister who has been invoked." EFFEMIKATB MEN AND MASCULINE WOMEN" If all these statements were real facts — and we shall pres- ently see that they are not — they would prove no more than that the modern Hottentots, like their neighbors, the Bush- men, are hen-pecked. Barrow (I., 386) speaks of the " timid and pusillanimous mind which characterizes the Hottentots," and elsewhere (144) he says that their " impolitic custom of hording together in families, and of not marrying out of their own kraals, has, no doubt, tended to enervate this race of men, and reduced them to their present degenerated condi- tion, which is that of a languid, listless, phlegmatic people, in whom the prolific powers of nature seem to be almost ex- hausted.'' It does not, therefore, surprise us to be told (by Thunberg) that " it frequently happens that a woman mar- ries two husbands." And these women are anything but feminine and lovable. One of the champions of the Hotten- tots, Q'heophilus Hahn, says [Globus, XII., 304) of the Nama- qua women that they love to torture their slaves : " When they cudgel a slave one can easily read in their faces the in- fernal joy it gives them to witness the tortures of their vic- tims." He often saw women belaboring the naked back of a slave Tyith branches of the cruel acacia detinens, and finally rub salt or saltpetre into the wounds. I^Tapier (I., 59) says of the Hottentots, that " if the parents of a newly born child found him or her de trop, the poor little wretch was either mercilessly buried alive, or exposed in a thicket, there to be devoured by beasts of prey." While he had to take it for granted that there must be love- songs among these cruel Hottentots, Jakobowski had no trouble in finding songs of hate, of defiance, and revenge. Even these cannot be cited without omitting objectionable words. Here is one, properly expurgated : " Take this man away from me that he may be beaten and his mother weep over HOTTENTOT WOMAN "RULES AT HOME" 365 him and the worms eat him. . . . Let this man be brought before your counsel and cudgelled until not a shred of flesh remains on his . . . that the worms would care to eat ; for the reason that he has done me such a painful injury," etc. HOW THE HOTTENTOT WOMAN " RULES AT HOME " Jakobowski's assertion that a man's oldest sister may have him chained and punished is obviously a cock-and-bull story. It is diametrically opposed to what Peter Kolben says : " The eldest son has in a manner an absolute authority over all his brothers and sisters." "Among the Hottentots an eldest son may after his father's death retain his brothers and sisters in a sort of slavery." Kolben is now accepted as the leading authority on the aboriginal Hottentots, as he found them two centuries ago, before the missionaries had had time to influence their customs. What makes him the more un- impeachable as a witness in our case is that he is decidedly prejudiced in favor of the Hottentots.' What was the treat- ment of women by Hottentots as witnessed by Kolben ? Is it true .that, as Jakobowski asserts, the Hottentot woman rules at home ? Quite true ; most emphatically so. The husband, says Kolben (I., 252-55), after the hut is built, " has absolutely nothing more to do with the house and domes- tic affairs ; he turns the care for them over to his wife, who is obliged to procure provisions as well as she can and cook them. The husband devotes himself to drinking, eating, smoking, loafing, and sleeping, and takes no more concern about the affairs of his family than if he had none at all. If he goes out to fish or hunt, it is rather to amuse himself than to help his wife and children. . . . Even the care of his cattle the poor wife, despite all her other work, shares with him. The only thing she is not allowed to meddle with is the sale. This is a prerogative which constitutes the man's honor and which he would not allow anyone to take away from him with impunity." ■ As Pritsch says (306) : "Kolben found them most excellent specimens of mankind and inyested them with the most manifold virtues" (see also 812 and 328). A person thus biased is under suspicion when he praises, but not when he exposes shady sides. My page references are to the French edition of Kol- ben. The italics are mine. 866 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE . The wife, he goes on to say, has to cut the fire-wood and carry it to the house, gather roots and other food and prepare it for the whole family, milk the cows, and take care of the children. The older daughters help her, but need so much watching that they are only an additional care ; and all this ' time the husband " lies lazily on his back." " Such is the wretched life of the Hottentot woman," he sums up ; " she lives in a perpetual slavery." Nor is there any family life or companionship j they eat separately, and " the wife never sets foot in the husband's room, which is separated from the rest of the house ; she seldom enjoys his company. He com- mands as master, she obeys as slave, without ever complain- ing." "REGARD FOR WOMEK " " What we admire in Hottentots is their regard for Women." Here are some more illustrations of this loving "regard for women." The Kev. J. Philip (II., 207) says that the Namaqua women begged Moffat to remain with them, telling him that before he came " we were treated by the men as brutes, and worse than they treated brutes." While the men loafed they had to go and collect food, and if they returned unsuccessful, as was often the case, they were gen- erally beaten. They had to cook for the men and were not allowed a bite till they had finished their meal. " When they had eaten, we were obliged to retire from their presence to consume the offals given to us." When twins are born, says Kolben (304), there is great rejoicing if they are boys ; two fat buffaloes are killed, and all the neighbors invited to the feast; but if the twins are girls, two sheep only are killed . and there is no feast or rejoicing. If one of the twins is a girl she is invariably killed, buried alive, or ex;posed on a tree or in the bushes. When a boy has reached a certain age he is subjected to a peculiarly disgusting ceremony, and after that he may insult his mother with impunity whenever he chooses : " he may cudgel her, if he pleases, to suit his whim, without any danger of being called to an account for it. " Kolben says he often witnessed such insolence, which was even applauded CAPACITY FOR REFINED LOVE 367 as a sign of manliness and courage. " What barbarity ! " he exclaims. " It is a result of the contempt which these peo- ples feel for women." He used to remonstrate with them, but they could hardly restrain their impatience, and the only answer he could get was "it is the custom of the Hottentots, they have never done otherwise." AndersBon {Ngami, 332) says of the Namaqna Hottentots : " If a man becomes tired of his wife, he unceremoniously returns her to the parental roof, and however much she (or the parents) may object to so summary a proceeding, there is no remedy." In Kolben's time wives convicted of adultery were killed, while the men could do as they chose. In later times a lashing with a strap of rhinoceros hide was substituted for burning. Kolben thought that the serious punishment for adultery prevalent in his time argued that there must be love among the Hottentots, though he confessed he could see no signs of it. He was of course mistaken in his assump- tion, for, as was made clear in our chapter on Jealousy, mur- derous rage at an infringement on a man's conjugal prop- erty does not constitute or prove love, but exists entirely apart from it. CAPACITY EOR KEWlfED LOVE The injuriousness of " false facts " to science is illustrated by a remark which occurs in the great work on the natives of South Africa by Dr. Fritsch, who is justly regarded as one of the leading authorities on that subject. Speaking of the Hottentots (Namaqua) he says (351) that " whereas Tindall indicates sensuality and selfishness as two of their most prom- inent characteristics, Th. Hahn lauds their conjugal attach- ment independent of fleshly love." Here surely is unim- peachable evidence, for Theophilus Hahn, the son of a missionary, was born and bred among these peoples. But if we refer to the passage which Fritsch alluded to {Globus, XII., 306), we find that the reasons Hahn gives for believing that Hottentots are capable of something higher than carnal desires are that many of them, though rick enough to have a harem, content themselves with one wife, and that if a wife 368 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE dies before her husband, he very seldom marries again. Yet in the very next sentence Hahn mentions a native trait which sufficiently explains both these customs. " Brides," he says, " cost many oxen and sheep, and the men, as among other South African peoples, the Kaffirs, for instance, would rather have big herds of cattle than a good-looking wife." Apart from this explanation, I fail to see what necessary connection there is between a man's being content with one wife and his capacity for sentimental love, since his greed for cattle and his lack of physical stamina and appetite fully account for his monogamy. This matter must be judged from the Hottentot point of view, not from ours. It is well known that in regions where polygamy prevails a man who wishes to be kind to his wife does not content himself with her, but marries another, or several others, to share the hard work with her. These Hottentots have not enough consideration for their hard-worked wives to do even that. HOTTEKTOT COARSENESS The coarseness and obscenity of the Hottentots constitute further reasons for believing them incapable of refined love. Their eulogist, Kolben, himself was obliged to admit that they "find a peculiar pleasure in filth and stench" and "are in the matter of diet the filthiest people in the world." The women eat their own vermin, which swarm in their scant attire. Nor is decency the object for which they wear this scant dress — quite the reverse. Speaking of the male Hot- tentot's very simple dress, Barrow says (I., 154) that " if the real intent of it was the promotion of decency, it should seem that he has widely missed his aim, as it is certainly one of the most immodest objects, in such a situation as he places it, that could have been contrived." And concerning the little apron worn by the women he says : " Great pains seem to be taken by the women to attract notice toward this part of their persons. Large metal buttons ... or anything that makes a great show, are fastened to the borders of this apron." Kolben relates that when a Hottentot desires to FAT VERSUS SENTIMENT 369 marry a girl he goes with his father to the girl's father, who gives the answer after consulting with his wife. If the verdict is unfavorable "the gallant's love for the beauty is readily cured and he casts his eyes on another one." But a refusal is rarely given unless the girl is already promised to another. The girl, too, is consulted, but only nominally, for if she refuses she can retain her liberty only by an all-night strug- gle with her suitor in which she usually succumbs, after which she has to marry him whether she wishes to or not. Kolben gives other details of the marriage ceremony which are too filthy to be even hinted at here. FAT VERSUS SENTIMENT By persons who had lived many years among the Colonial Hottentots, Fritsch (328) was assured that these people, far from being the models of chastity Kolben tried to prove them, indulged in licentious festivals lasting several days, at which all restraints were cast aside. And this brings us back to our starting-point — Dr. Jakobowski's peculiar argument concern- ing the " love poems " which he feels sure must be sung at the erotic dances of the natives, though they are carefully con- cealed from the missionaries. If they were poems of senti- ment, the missionaries would not disapprove, and there would be no reason for concealing them ; but the foregoing remarks show clearly enough what kind of "love" they would be likely to sing about. If any doubt remained on the sub- ject the following delightful confession, which the eugolist Hahn makes in a moment of confidence, would settle the matter. To appreciate the passage, bear in mind that the Hottentots are the people among whom excessive posterior corpulence (steatopyga) is especially admired as the acme of physical attractions. Now Hahn says (335) : " The young girls drink whole cups of liquid fat, and for a good reason, the object being to attain a very rotund body by a fattening process, in order that Hymen may claim them as soon as possible. They do not grow sentimental and sick from love and jealousy, nor do they die from the anguish and 370 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE woes of love, as our women do, nor engage in love-intrigues,^ but they look at the whole matter in a very materialistic and sober way. Their sole love-affair is the fattening process, on the result of which, as with a pig, depends the girl's value and the demand for her." In this last sentence, which I have taken the liberty to italicize, lies the philosophy of African "love" in general, and I am glad to be able to declare it on snch unquestionable authority. What a Hottentot " regards " in a woman is Fat ; Sentiment is out of the question. When Hottentots are to- gether, says Kolben, " you never see them give tender kisses or cast loving glances at each other. Day and night, on every occasion, they are so cold and so indifferent to each other that you would not believe that they love each other or are married. If in a hut there were twenty Hottentots with their wives, it would be impossible to tell, either from their words or actions, which of them belonged together." SOUTH AFRICAN LOVE-POEMS As intimated on a preceding page, there are, among Dr. Jakobowski's examples of Hottentot lyrics' a few which may be vaguely included in the category of love-poems. " Where did you hear that I love you while you are unloving toward me ? " complained one Hottentot ; while another warned his friend : " That is the misfortune pursuing you that you love where you ought not to ! " A third declared. "I shall not cease to love however much they {i.e., the par- ents or guardians) may oppose me." A fourth addresses this song to a young girl : My lioness ! Are you afraid that I may bewitch you ? You milk the cow with fleshy hand. Bite me ! Pour out (the milk) for me ! My lioness ! Daughter of a great man ! > Gathered from Hahn's Tsuni and Kronlein's Wortchatz der Namaqua Hot- tentotten. KAFFIR MORALS 371 It is needless to say that in the first three of these aboriginal " lyrics" there is not the slightest indication that the "love" expressed rises above mere covetous desire of the senses ; and as for the fourth, what is there in it besides reference to the girFs fatness (fleshy hand), her utility in milking and serving the milk and her carnal bites ? Yet, in this frank avowal of masculine selfishness and sensuality Hahn finds " a certain refinement of sentiment " ! A HOTTEKTOT FLIRT Though a Hottentot belle's value in the marriage market is determined chiefly by the degree of her corpulence, girls of the higher families are not, it seems, devoid of other means of attracting the attention of men. At least I infer so from the following passage in Dalton's book {T. S. A., 104) relating to a certain chief : " He had a charming daughter, the greatest belle among the blacks that I had ever seen, and the most thorough -paced coquette. Her main piece of finery, and one that she flirted about in a most captivating manner, was a shell of the size of a penny-piece. She had fastened it to the end of a lock of front hair, which was of such length as to permit the shell to dangle to the precise level of her eyes. She had learned to move her head with so great precision as to throw the shell ' exactly over whichever eye she pleased, and the lady's win- ning grace consisted in this feat of bo-peep, first eclipsing an eye and languishing out of the other, and then with an ele- gant toss of the head reversing the proceedings." KAFFIR MORALS Our search for true love in Africa has thus far resulted in failure, the alleged discoveries of a few sanguine sentiment- alists having proved to be illusory. If we now turn to the KafiSrs, who share with the Hottentots the southern extremity of Africa, we find that here again we must above all things guard against " false facts." Westermarck (61), after citing Barrow (I. , 206) to the effect that ' ' a Kaffir woman is chaste and extremely modest," adds : "and Mr. Cousins informs me that 372 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE between their various feasts the Kaffirs, both men and women, have to live in strict continence, the penalty being banish- ment from the tribe if this law is broken." It would be in- teresting to know what Barrow means by "extremely modest " since he admits that that attribute " might be questioned. If, for instance, a young woman be asked whether she be married, not content with giving the simple negative, she throws open her cloak and displays her bosom ; and as most frequently she has no other covering beneath, she perhaps may discover at the same time, though unintentionally, more of her charms." But it is his assertion that " a Kaffir woman is chaste" that clashes most outrageously with all recorded facts and the tes- timony of the leading authorities, including many mission- aries. Dr. Fritsch says in the preface to his standard book on the natives of South Africa that the assertions of Barrow are to be accepted "with caution, or rather with suspicion." It is the absence of this caution and suspicion that has led Westermarck into so many erroneous conclusions. In the present instance, however, it is absolutely incomprehensible why he should have cited the one author who calls the Kaffirs chaste, ignoring the crushing weight of countless facts show- ing them to be extremely dissolute. It is worthy of note that testimony as to the chastity of '•wild races generally comes from mere travellers among them, ignorant of their language and intimate habits, whereas the -writings of those who have dwelt among them give one a very different idea. As the Eev. Mr. Holden remarks (187), those •who have " boasted of the chastity, purity, and innocence of heathen life " have not been " behind the scenes." Here, for instance, is Geo. McCall Theal, who lived among the Kaffir people twenty years, filling various positions among them, varying from a mission teacher to a border magistrate, and so well acquainted with their language that he was able to col- lect and print a volume on Kaffir Folic Lore. Like all writers who have made a specialty of a subject, he is naturally some- what biased in favor of it, and this gives still more weight to his words on negative points. Eegarding the question of chastity he says ; KAFFIR MORALS 373 " KaflSr ideas of some kinds of morality are very low. The custom is general for a married woman to have a lover who is not her husband, and little or no disgrace attaches to her on this account. The lover is generally subject to a fine of no great amount, and the husband may give the woman a beat- ing, but that finishes the penalty." The German missionary Neuhaus bears witness to the fact that (like the Bushmen and most other Africans) the Kafiirs are in one respect lower than the lowest beasts, inasmuch as for the sake of filthy lucre parents often marry off their daugh- ters before they have attained maturity. Girls of eight to ten are often given into the clutches of wealthy old men who are already supplied with a harem. Concerning girls in general, and widows, we are told that they can do whatever they please, and that they only ask their lovers not to be imprudent, as they do not wish to lose their liberty and assume maternal duties too soon if they can help it. Lichtenstein says (I., 364) that "a traveller remaining some time with a horde easily finds an unmarried young woman with whom he con- tracts the closest intimacy ; nay, it is not uncommon, as a mark of hospitality, to offer him one as a companion," and no wonder, for among these Kaffirs there is "no feeling of love in marriage " (161). The German missionary Alberti relates (97) that sometimes a Kaffir girl is offered to a man in marriage. Having assured himself of her health, he claims the further privilege of a night's acquaintance ; after which, if she pleases him, he proceeds to bargain for her permanent possession. Another competent and reliable observer, Stephen Kay, corresponding member of the South African Institution, who censures Barrow sharply for his incorrect remarks on Kaffir morals, says : " No man deems it any sin whatever to seduce his neigh- bor's wife : his only grounds of fear are the probability of de- tection, and the fine demanded by law in such cases. The females, accustomed from their youth up to this gross de- pravity of manners, neither manifest, nor apparently feel, any delicacy in stating and describing circumstances of the most shameful nature before an assemblage of men, whose language is often obscene beyond description " (105). " Fornication is 374 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE a common and crying sin. The women are well acquainted with the means of procuring miscarriage ; and those means are not unfrequently resorted to without bringing upon the offender any punishment or disgrace whatever. . . . When adultery is clearly proved the husband is generally fully satisfied with the fine usually levied upon the delin- quent. ... So degraded indeed are their views on sub- jects of this nature . . . that the man who has thus obtained six or eight head of cattle deems it a fortunate cir- cumstance rather than otherwise ; he at once renews his in- timacy with the seducer, and in the course of a few days becomes as friendly and familiar with him as ever " (141-42). " Whenever the Kafi&r monarch hears of a young woman possessed of more than ordinary beauty, and at all wittrn his reach, he unceremoniously sends for her or fetches her him- self. . . . Seldom or never does any young girl, residing in his immediate neighborhood, escape defilement after at- taining the age of puberty (165)." " Widows are constantly constrained to be the servants of sin" (177). " The following singular usage obtains universally . . . all conjugal intercourse is entirely suspended from the time of accouchement until the child be completely weaned, which seldom takes place before it is able to run about. Hence during the whole of that period, an illicit and clandestine in- tercourse with strangers is generally kept up by both parties, to the utter subversion of everything like attachment and connubial bliss. Something like affection is in some in- stances apparent for awhile, but it is generally of compara- tively short duration." Pritsch (95) describes a Kafiir custom called U'pundhlo which has only lately been abolished : " Once in awhile a troupe of young men was sent from the principal town to the surrounding country to capture all the unmarried girls they could get hold of and carry them away forcibly. These girls had to serve for awhile as concubines of strangers visit- ing the court. After a few days they were allowed to go and their places were taken by other girls captured in the same way." Before the Kaffirs came under the influence of civili- zation, this custom gave no special offence ; " and why should it ? " adds Fritsch, " since with the Kaffirs marriageable girls are morally free and their purity seems a matter of no special significance." When boys reach the age of puberty, he KAFFIR MORALS 375 says (109), they are circnmcised ; " thereupon, while they are in the transition stage between boyhood and manhood, they are almost entirely independent of all laws, especially in their sexual relations, so that they are allowed to take possession with impunity of any unmarried women they choose." The Kaffirs also indulge in obscene dances and feasts. Warner says (97) that at the ceremony of circumcision virtue is pol- luted while yet in its embryo. " A really pure girl is un- known among the raw Kaffirs," writes Hoi. " All demoraln sense of purity and shame is lost." While superstition for- bids the marrying of first cousins as incestuous, real " incest in its worst forms" — between mother and sons — prevails. At the ceremony called Ntonjane the young girls " are de- graded and polluted at the very threshold of womanhood, and every spark of virtuous feeling annihilated " (197, 207, 185). " Immorality," says Fritsch (113), " is too deeply rooted in African blood to make it difficult to find an occasion for in- dulging in it ; wherefore the custom of celebrating puberty, harmless in itself, is made the occasion for lascivious prac- tices ; the unmarried girls choose companions with whom they cohabit as long as the festival lasts . . . usually three or four days." After giving other details, Fritsch thus sums up the situation : " These diverse facts make it clear that with these tribes (Ama-Xosa) woman stands, if not mor- ally, at least judicially, little above cattle, and consequently it is impossible to speak of family life in one sense of the word." V In his Nursery Tales of the Zulus (255) Callaway gives an account, in the native language as well as in the English, of the license indulged in at Kaffir puberty festivals. Young men assemble from all quarters. The maidens have a "girl- king " to whom the men are obliged to give a present be- fore they are allowed to enter the hut chosen for the meeting. " The young people remain alone and sport after their own fancies in every way." " It is a day of filthiness in which everything may be done according to the heart's desire of those who gather around the umgongo." The Rev. J. Mac- Donald, a man of scientific attainments, gives a detailed 376 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE account of the incredibly obscene ceremonies to which the girls of the Zulu-Kaffirs are subjected, and the licentious yet Malthusian conduct of the young folks in general who " sep- arate into pairs and sleep in puris naturalihus, for that is strictly ordained by custom." The father of a girl thus treat- ed feels honored on receiving a present from her partner.' INDIVIDUAL PEEFEBEKCE FOE — COWS The utter indifference of the Kaffirs to chastity and their licentiousness, approved and even prescribed by national cus- tom, were not the only obstacle to the growth of sentiments rising above mere sensuality. Commercialism was another fatal obstacle. I have already quoted Hahn's testimony that a Kaffir " would rather have big herds of cattle than a good- looking wife." Dohne asserts (Shooter, 88) that "a Kaffir loves his cattle more than his daughter," and Kay (111) "tells us that "he is scarcely ever seen shedding tears, excepting when the chief lays violent hands upon some part of his horned family ; -this pierces him to the heart and produces more real grief than would be evinced over the. loss of wife and child." On another pa^e (85) he says that in time of war the poor women fall into the enemy's hands, because " their husbands afford them no assistance or protection whatever. The preservation of the cattle constitutes the grand object of their solicitude ; and with these, which are trained for the purpose, they run at an astonishing rate, leaving both wives and children to take their chances." Such being the Kaffir's relative estimation of cows and women, we might infer that in matrimonial arrangements bovine interests were much more regarded than any possible > The detaUs given by the Rev. J. MaoDonald (Jovrnal Anthrop. Soc, XX., 1S90, 116-18) cannot possibly be cited here. Our argument is quite strong enough without them. Westermarck devotes ten pages to an attempt to prove that immorality is not characteristic of uncivilized races in general. He leads off with that preposterous statement of Barrow that *' a Kaffir woman is chaste and extremely modest ; " and most of his other instances are based on equally flimsy evidence. I shall recur to the subject repeatedly. It is hardly necessary to call the reader^s attention to the unconscious humor of the assertion of Westermurck's friend Cousins that " between their various feasts the Kaffirs have to live in strict continence " — which is a good deal like saying of a toper that " between drinks he is strictly sober." BARGAINING FOR BRIDES 377 sentimental considerations ; and this we find to be the case. Barrow (149) tells us that " the females being considered as the property of their par- ents, are always disposed of by sale. The common price of a wife is an ox or a couple of cows. Love with them is a very confined passion, taking but little hold on the mind. When an offer is made for the purchase of a daughter, she feels little inclination to refuse ; she considers herself as an article at market, and is neither surprised, nor unhappy, nor inter- ested, on being told that she is about to be disposed of. There is no previous courtship, no exchange of fine senti- ments, no nice feelings, no attentions to catch the affections and to attach the heart. ^ BARGAINING FOB BRIDES The Rev. L. Grout says in his Zululand (166) : " So long as the government allows the custom called uku- loboUsha, the selling of women in marriage for cattle, just so long the richer and so, for the most part, the older and the already married man will be found, too often, the successful suitor — not indeed at the feet of the maiden, for she is al- lowed little or no right to a voice as to whom she shall marry, but at the hands of her heathen proprietor, who, in his de- gradation, looks less at the affections and preferences of his daughter than at the surest. way of filling his kraal with cattle, and thus providing for buying another wife or two." So purely commercial is the transaction that if a wife proves very fruitful and healthy, a demand for more cattle is made on her husband (165). Should she be feeble or barren he may send her back to her father and demand compensation. A favorite way is to retain a wife as a slave and go on marry- ing other girls as fast as the man's means allow. Theal says (313) that if a wife has no children the husband has a right to return her to her parents and if she has a marriageable sister, take her in exchange. But the acme of commercial- ism is reached in a Zulu marriage ceremony described by ' It may seem inconsistent to condemn Barrow on one page as unreliable and then quote him approvingly on another. But in the first case his assertion was utterly opposed to the unanimous testimony of those who knew the Kaffirs best, while in this instance -his remarks are in perfect accordance with what we would expect under the circumstances and with the testimony of the standard authorities. 378 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE Shooter. At the wedding the matrons belonging to the bride- groom's party tell the bride that too many cows have been given for her ; that she is rather plain than otherwise, and will never be able to do a married woman's work, and that altogether it is very kind of the bridegroom to condescend to marry her. Then the bride's friends have their innings. They condole with her parents on the very inadequate num- ber of cows paid for her, the loveliest girl in the village ; de- clare that the husband is quite unworthy of her, and ought to be ashamed for driving such a hard bargain with her parents. Leslie's assertion (194) that it is "a, mistake to imagine that a girl is sold by her father in the same manner and with the same authority with which he would dispose of a cow," is contradicted by the concurrent testimony of the leading authorities; Some of these have already been cited. The reliable Fritsch says (112) of the Ama-Xosa branch : " It is characteristic that as a rule the inclination of the girl to be married is never consulted, but that her nearest male rela- tives select a husband for her to whom she is unceremo- niously sent. They choose, of course, a man who can pay." If she is a useful girl he is not likely to refuse the offer, yet he bargains to get her as cheaply as possible (though he knows that a Kaffir girl's chief pride is the knowledge that many heads of cattle were paid for her). Eegarding the Ama-Zulu, Fritsch says (141-43) that the women are slaves and a wife is regarded as so much invested capital. " If she falls ill, or remains childless, so that the man does not get his money's worth, he often returns her to her father and asks his cattle back." Older and less attractive women are sometimes married off on credit, or to be paid for in instal- ments. " In all this," Fritsch sums up, " there is certainly little of poetry and romance, but it cannot be denied that under the influence of European residents an improvement has been effected in some quarters." He himself saw at Natal a young couple who "showed a certain interest in each other," such as one expects of married persons ; but in parts untouched by European influence, he adds, true conjugal devotion is an unusual thing. AMOROUS PREFERENCES 379 AMOROUS PEEFERESTCES It is probably owing to such European influences that Theal (309) found that although a woman is not legally sup- posed to be consulted in the choice of a husband, in point of fact " matches arising from mutual love are not uncommon. In such cases, if any diflBculties are arranged by the guar- dians oji either side, the young people do not scruple to run away together." The word "love" in this passage is of course used in that vague sense which indicates nothing but a preference of one man or woman to others. That a Kaffir girl should prefer a young man to an old suitor to the point of running away with him is to be expected, even if there is nothing more than a merely sensual attachment. The ques- tion how far there are any amorous preferences among 'Kaffirs is at interesting one. From the fact that they prefer their cows to their wives in moments of danger, we infer that though they might also like one girl better than another, Buch preference would be apt to prove rather weak ; and this inference is borne out by some remarks of the German mis- sionary Alberti which I will translate : ." The sentiment of tender and chaste love is as unknown to the Kaffir as that respect which is founded on agreement and moral worth. The need of mutual aid in domestic life, combined with the natural instinct for the propagation of the species, alone seem to occasion a union of young men and women which afterward gains permanence through ha- bitual intercourse and a community of interests." " It is true that the young man commonly seeks to gain the favor of the girl he likes before he applies to her parents, in which case, if his suit is accepted, the supreme favor is at once granted him by the girl ; but inasmuch as he does not need her good will necessarily, the parental consent being sufficient to secure possession of her, he shows little zeal, and his peace of mind is not in the least disturbed by a pos- sible refusal. Altogether, he is much less solicitous about gaining her predilection than about getting her for the low- est possible price." Alberti was evidently a thinker as well as a careful observ- er. His lucid remarks gives us a deep insight into primitive 380 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE conditions when love had hardly yet begun to germinate. What a worldwide difference between this languid KaflBr wooer, hardly caring whether he gets this girl or another, and the modern lover who thinks life not worth living, un- less he can gain the love of his chosen one. In all the lit- erature on the subject, I have been able to find only one case of stubborn preference among Kaffirs. Neuhaus knew a young man who refused for two years to marry the girl chosen for him by his father, and iinally succeeded in having his way with another girl whom he preferred. As a matter of course, strong aversion is more frequently manifested than decided preference, especially in the case of girls who are compelled to marry old men. Neuhaus* saw a Zulu girl whose hands had been nearly burned off by her tormentors ; he knew of two girls who committed suicide, one just before, the other just after, an enforced marriage. Grout (l67) speaks of the "various kinds of torture resorted to by the father and friends of a girl to compel her to marry contrary to her choice." One girl, who had fled to his house for ref- uge, told him repeatedly that if delivered into the hands of her tormentors " she would be cruelly beaten as soon as they were out of sight and be subjected to every possible abuse, till she should comply with the wishes of her proprietor." ZULU GIRLS NOT COT "Where men are so deficient in sentiment and manly in- stincts that one young woman seems to them about as good as another, it is hardly strange that the women too should lack those qualities of delicacy, gentleness, and modesty which make the weaker sex adorable. The description of the bloody duels often fought by Kaffir women given by the British missionary Beste (Ploss, II., 421) indicates a decided- ly Amazonian disposition. But the most suggestive trait of Kaffir women is the lack of feminine coyness in their matri- monial preliminaries. According to Gardiner (97), " it is not regarded as a matter either of etiquette or of delicacy > Vid. Mantegazza, Geschlechtsverhdltnisse des Mettschen, 313. CHARMS AND POEMS 381 from which side the proposal of marriage may proceed — the overture is as often made by the women as the men." "Courtship," says Shooter (50), " does not always begin with the men." Sometimes the girl's father proposes for her ; and when a young woman does not receive an early proposal, her father or brother go from kraal to kraal and offer her till a bidder is found. Callaway (60) relates that when a young Zulu woman is ready to be married she goes to the kraal of the bridegroom, to stand there. She remains with- out speaking, but they understand her. If they " acknowl- edge " her, a goat is killed and she is entertained. If they do not like her, they give her a burning piece of firewood, to intimate that there is no fire in that kraal to warm herself by ; she must go and kindle a fire for herself. ' CHAEMS AND POEMS Though in all this there is considerable romance, there is no evidence of romantic love. But how about love-charms, poems, and stories? According to Grout (171), love-charms are not unknown in Zululand. They are made of certain herbs or barks, reduced to a powder, and sent by the hand of some unsuspected friend to be given in a pinch of snuff, de- posited in the dress, or sprinkled upon the person of the party whose favor is to be won. But love-powders argue a very materialistic way of regarding love and tell us nothing about sentiments. A hint at something more poetic is given by the Rev. J. Tyler (61), who relates that flowers are often seen on Zulu head^, and that one of them, the " love-making posy," is said to foster "love." Unfortunately that is all the infor- mation he gives us on this particular point, and the further details supplied by him (120-33) dash all hopes of finding traces of sentiment. The husband " eats alone," and when ' From an article in the Humanitarian, March, 1897, it appears that this " leap-year " custom still prevails among Zulas; but the dawn of civilization has introduced a modification to the effect that when the girl is refused, a pres- ent is usually given her " to ease her feelings." At least that is the way Miss Colenso puts it. Wood (80) relates a story of a Kaffir girl who persistently wooed a young chief who did not want her ; she had to be removed- by force and even beaten, but kept returning until, to save further bother, the chief bought her. 382 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE the wife brings him a drink of home-made beer "she must first sip to show there is no ' death in the pot.' " While he guzzles beer, loafs, smokes, and gossips, she has to do all the work at home as well as in the field, carrying her child on her back and returning in the evening with a bundle of fire- wood on her head. " In the winter the natives assemble almost daily for drinking and dancing, and these orgies are accompanied by the vilest obscenities and evil practices." As regards poems Wallaschek remarks (6) that " the Kaf- fir in his poetry only recognizes a threefold subject : war, cattle, and excessive adulation of his ruler." One Kaffir love- poem, or rather marriage-poem, I have been able to find (Shooter, 236), and it is delightfully characteristic : We tell you to dig well, Come, girl of ours, Bring food and eat it ; Fetch fire-wood And don't be lazy. A KAFFIR LOTE-STOET Among the twenty-one tales collected in Theal's Kaffir Folk Lore there is one which approximates what we call a love- story. As it takes up six pages of his book it cannot be quoted entire, but in the following condensed version I have retained every detail that is pertinent to our inquiry. It is entitled The Story of Mhulukazi. There was once a man who had two wives ; one of them had no children, wherefore he did not love her. * The other one had one daughter, who was very black, and several chil- dren besides, but they were all crows. The barren wife was very downcast and often wept all day. One day two doves perching near her asked why she cried. When they had heard her story they told her to bring two earthen jars. Then they scratched her knees until the blood flowed, and put it into the jars. Every day they came and told her to look in the jars, till one day she found in them two beautiful children, a boy and a girl. They grew up in her hut, for she lived apart from her husband, and he knew nothing of their existence. A KAFFIR LOVE-STORY 383 When they were big, they went to the river one day to fetch water. On the way they met some young men, among whom was Broad Breast, a chief's son who was looking for a pretty girl to be his wife. The men asked for a drink and the boy gave them all some water, but the young chief would take it only from the girl. He was very much smitten with her beauty, and watched her to see where she lived. He then went home to his father and asked for cattle with which to marry her. The chief, being rich, gave him many fine cattle, and with these the young man went to the husband of the girl's mother and said : "I want to marry your daughter." So the girl who was very black was told to come, but the young chief said : "That is not the one I want; the one I saw was lighter in color and much prettier." The father re- plied : " I have no other children but crows." But Broad Breast persisted, and finally the servant-girl told the father about the other daughter. In the evening he went to his neglected wife's hut and to his great joy saw the boy and his sister. He remained all night and it was agreed that the young chief should have the girl. When Broad Breast saw her he said : " This is the girl I meant." So he gave the cattle to the father and married the girl, whose name was Mbulukazi. To appease the jealousy of the very black girl's mother he also married that girl, and each of them received from her father an ox, with which they went to their new home. But the young chief did not care for the very black girl and gave her an old rickety hut to live in while Mbulukazi had a very nice new house. This made the other girl jealous, and she plotted revenge, which she carried out one day by pushing her rival over the edge of a rock, so that she fell into the river and was drowned. The corpse was, however, found by her favorite ox, who licked her till her life came back, and as soon as she was strong once more she told what had happened. When the young chief heard the story he was angry with the dark wife and said to her : " G-o home to your father ; I never wanted you at all ; it was your mother who brought you to me." So she had to go away in sorrow and Mbulukazi remained the great wife of the chief. In this interesting story there are two suspicious details. Theal says he has taken care in his collection not to give a single sentence that did not come from native sources. He calls attention, however, to the fact that tens of thousands of 384 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE Kaffirs have adopted the religion of Europeans and have ac- cepted ideas from their teachers, wherefore " it will surprise no one to learn that these tales are already undergoing great changes among a very large section of the natives on the bor- der." I suspect that the touch of sentiment in the place where the young chief will accept a drink from the girl's hand alone is such a case of European influence, and so, in all probability is the preference for alight complexion implied in the tale ; for Shooter (p. 1) tells us expressly that to be told that he is light-colored "would be esteemed a very poor compliment by a Kaffir." The following passage, which occurs in another of Theal's stories (107), shows how unceremonious Kaffir " courtship " is in relation to the girl's wishes. " Hlakanyana met a girl herding some goats. "He said : 'Where are the boys of your village, that the goats' are herded by a girl ? ' "The girl answered : 'There are no boys in the village.' "He went to the father of the girl and said : 'You must give me your daughter to be my concubine, and I will herd the goats.' " The father of the girl agreed to that. Then Hlakanyana went with the goats, and every day he killed one and ate it till all were done." LOWER THAN BEASTS If we now leave the degraded and licentious Kaffirs, going northward in Eastern Africa, into the region of the lakes — N"yassa, Victoria Nyanza and Albert Nyanza— embracing British Central, German East, and British East Africa, we are doonied to disappointment if we expect to find conditions more favorable to the growth of refined romantic or con- jugal love. We shall not only discover no evidence of what is vaguely called Platonic love, but we shall find men ignor- ing even Plato's injunction {Laws, VIII., 840) that they should not be lower than beasts, which do not mate till they have reached the age of maturity. H. H. Johnston, in his recent work on British Central Africa, gives some startling revelations of aboriginal depravity. As these regions have LOWER THAN BEASTS 386 been known a few years only, the universality of this de- pravity disproves most emphatically the ridiculous notion that savages are naturally pure in their conduct and owe their degradation to intercourse with corrupt white men. Johnston (409) says : " A medical missionary who was at work for some time on the west coast of Lake Nyassa gave me information regarding the depravity prevalent among the young boys in the Atonga tribe of a character not even to be described in obscure Latin. These statements might be applied with almost equal exacti- tude to boys and girls in many other parts of Africa. As regards the little girls, over nearly the whole of British Cen- tral Africa, chastity before puberty is an unknown condi- tion. . . . Before a girl becomes a woman (that is to say, .before she is able to conceive), it is a matter of absolute in- difference what she does, and scarcely any girl remains a vir- gin after about five years of age." Girls are often betrothed at birth, or even before, and "when four or five years old are placed at the mercy of the de- graded husbands. Capture is another method of getting a wife, and Johnston's description of this custom indicates that individual preference is as weak as we have found it among Kaffirs : " The women as a rule make no very great resistance on these occasions. It is almost like playing a game. A woman is surprised as she goes to get water at the stream, or when she is on her way to or from the plantation. The man has only got to show her she is cornered and that escape is not easy or pleasant and she submits to be carried off. Of course there are cases where the woman takes the first opportunity of running back to her first husband if her captor treats her badly, and again she may be really attached to her first husband and make every effort to return to him for that rea- son. But as a general rule they seem to accept very cheer- fully these abrupt changes in their matrimonial existence." In a footnote he adds: "The Rev. Duff Macdonald, a competent authority on Yao manners and customs, says in his book Africana : ' I was told . . . that a native man would not pass a solitary woman, and that her refusal of 386 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE him would be so contrary to cnstom that he might kill her.' Of course this would apply only to females that are not en- gaged." COLONIES OF FEBE LOVERS Of the Taveita forest region Johnston says : "After mar- riage the greatest laxity of manners is allowed among the women, who often court their lovers under their husband's gaze ; provided the lover pays, no objection is raised to his addresses." And regarding the Masai (415) : " The Masai men rarely marry until they are twenty-five nor the women until twenty. But both sexes, avant de se ranger, lead a very dissolute life before marriage, the young warriors and unmarried girls living together in free love." The fullest account of the Masai and their neighbors we owe to Thomson. With the M-teita marriage is entirely a question of cows. " There is a very great disproportion between the sexes, the female predominating greatly, and yet very few of the young men are able to marry for want of the proper number of cows — a state of afEairs which not unfrequently leads to marriage with sisters, though this practice is highly reprobated." Of the Wa-taveta, Thomson says (113) : "Conjugal fidelity is unknown, and certainly not expected , on either side ; they might almost be described as colonies of free lovers." As for life among the- Masai warriors, he says (431) that it " was promiscuous in a remarkable degree. They may in- deed be proclaimed as a colony of free lovers. Curiously enough the sweetheart system was largely in vogue ; though no one confined his or her attentions to one only. Each girl in fact had several sweethearts, and what is still stranger, this seemed to give rise to no jealousies. The most perfect equality prevailed between the Ditto and Elmoran, and in their savage circumstances it was really pleasant to see how common it was for a young girl to wander about the camp with her arm round the waist of a stalwart warrior." ' 'Ignorant sentimentalists who have often argued that the absence of il- legitimate offspring argues moral purity will do well to ponder what Thomson says on page 580, and compare with it the remarks of the Rev. J. Macdonald, who lived twelve years among the tribes between Cape Colony and Natal, re- garding their use of herbB. {Journal Anthrop. Soc, XIX., 364.) See also Johnston (413). A LESSON IN GALLANTRY 387 A LESSON IN GALLANTKT Crossing the waters of the Victoria Nyanza we come to Uganda, a region which has been entertainingly described by Speke. One day, he tells us (379), he was crossing a swamp with the king and his wives : " The bridge was broken, as a matter of course ; and the logs which composed it, lying concealed beneath the water, were toed successively by the leading men, that those who fol- lowed should not be tripped up by them. This favor the King did for me, and I in return for the women behind ; they had never been favored in their lives with such gallantry and therefore could not refrain from laughing." He after- ward helped the girls over a brook. The king noticed it, but instead of upbraiding me, passed it off as a joke, and run- ning up to the Kamraviona, gave him a poke in the ribs and whispered what he had seen, as if it had been a secret. ' Woh, woh ! ' says the Kamraviona, ' what wonders will hap- pen next ? ' " There is perhaps no part of Africa where such an act of gallantry would not have been laughed at as an absurd prank. In Eastern Central Africa " when a woman meets any man on the path, the etiquette is for her to go off the path, to kneel, and clasp her hands to the ' lords of creation ' as they pass. Even if a female possesses male slaves of her own she observes the custom when she meets them on the public high- way. A woman always kneels when she has occasion to talk to a man " (Macdonald, I., 129). " It is interesting to meet a couple returning from a journey for firewood," says the same writer (137). " The man goes first, carrying his gun, bow and arrows, while the woman carries the invariable bun- dle of firewood on her head." He used to amuse such parties by taking the wife's load and putting it on the husband, tell- ing him, ' This is the custom in our country.' " The wife has to do not only all the domestic but all the hard field work, and the only thing the lazy husband does in return is to mend her clothes. That constitutes her " rights ; " neglect of it is a cause for divorce ! Burton notes the absence of chivalrous ideas among the Somals {F. F., 132), adding that " on first 388 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE entering the nuptial hut, the bridegroom dr^ws forth his horsewhip and inflicts memorable chastisement upon the fair person of his bride, with the view of taming any lurking pro- pensity to shrewishness." Among the natives of Massua, on the eighth of the month of Ashur, " boys are allowed," says Munzinger, " to mercilessly whip any girl they may meet — a liberty of which they make use in anything but a senti- mental way. As the girls naturally hide themselves in their ■houses on this day, the boys disguise themselves as beggars, or use some other ruse to get them out," Adults sometimes take part in this gallant sport. But let us return to Uganda. The Queen of Uganda offered Speke the choice between two of her daughters as a wife. The girls were brought and made to squat in front of him. They had never seen him. " The elder, who was in the prime of youth and beauty, very large of limb, dark in color, cried considerably ; whilst the younger one . . . laughed as if she thought the change in her destiny very good fun." He had been advised that when the marriage came off he was to chain the girl two or three days, until she became used to him, else, from mere fright, she might run away. A high official also bestowed on him a favor which throws light on the treatment of Uganda women. He had his women come in, made them strip to the waist, and asked Speke what he thought of them. He assured him he had paid him an unusual compliment, the Uganda men being very jealous of one another, so much so that anyone would be killed if found staring upon a woman, even in the highways. Speke asked him what use he had for so many women, to which he replied, " None whatever ; the King gives them to us to keep up our rank, sometimes as many as one hundred together, and we either turn them into wives, or make servants of them, as we please." IfOT A PARTICLE OF ROMANCE The northeastern boundary of Uganda is formed by the waters of the lake whose name Sir Samuel Baker chose for the title of one of his fascinating books on African travel, the ' NO LOVE AMONG NEGROES 389 Albert N'yanza. Baker was a keen observer and he had abundant experience on which to base the following conclu- sions (148) : "There is no such thing as love in these countries, the feeling is not understood, nor does it exist in the shape in which we understand it. Everything is practical, without a particle of romance. Women are so far appreciated as they are valuable animals. They grind the corn, fetch the water, gather firewood, cement the floors, cook the food, and propa- gate the race ; but they are mere servants, and as such are valuable. ... A savage holds to his cows and to his women, but especially to his cows. In a razzia fight he will seldom stand for the sake of his wives, but when he does fight it is to save his cattle." The sentimentalist's heart will throb with a flutter of hope when he reads in the same book (240) that among the La,- tookas it is considered a disgrace to kill a woman in war. Have these men that respect for women which makes roman- tic love possible ? Alas, no ! They spare them because women are scarce and have a money value, a female being worth from five to ten cows, according to her age and appear- ance. It would therefore be a waste of money to kill them. I may as well add here what Baker says elsewhere {Ismailia, 501) by way of explaining why there is no insanity in Central Africa : there are " no hearts to break with overwhelming love." Where coarseness is bliss, 'twere folly to be refined. NO LOVE AMONG NEGROES Let us now cross Central Africa into the Congo region on the Western side, returning afterward to the East for a bird's- eye view of the Abyssinians, the Somali, and their neighbors. In his book Angola and the River Congo (133-34) Monteiro says that negroes sjiow less tenderness and' love than some animals : " In all the long years I have been in Africa I have never seen a negro manifest the least tenderness for or to a negress. . . . I have never seen a negro put his arm round a woman's waist or give or receive any caress whatever that 390 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE would indicate the slightest loving regard or affection on either side. They have no words or expressions in their lan- guage indicative of affection or love. Their passion is purely of an animal description, unaccompanied by the least sympa- thetic affections of love or endearment." * In other words, these negroes not only do not show any tenderness, affection, sympathy, in their sexual relations, they are too coarse even to appreciate the more subtle manifesta- tions of sensual passion which we call caresses. Jealousy, too, Monteiro says, hardly exists. In case of adultery ^' the fine is generally a pig, and rum or other drink, with which a feast is celebrated by all parties. The woman is not pun- ished in any way, nor does any disgrace attach to her con- duct." As a matter of course, where all these sentiments are lacking, admiration of personal beauty cannot exist. " Prom their utter want of love and appreciation of female beauty or charms they are quite satisfied and content with any woman possessing even the greatest amount of hideous ugliness with which nature has so bountifully provided them." A QUEER STORY Thus we find the African mind differing from ours as widely as a picture seen directly with the eyes differs from one reflected in a concave mirror. This is vividly illustrated by a quaint story recorded in the Folk Tales of Angola {Memoirs of Amer. Folk Lore Sac, Vol. I., 1894, 235-39), of which the following is a condensed version : An elderly man had an only child, a daughter. This daughter, a number of men wanted her. But whenever a suitor came, her father demanded of him a living deer ; and * To what almoBt incredible lengths sentimental defenders of savages will go, may be seen in an editorial article with which the London Daily News of Aug- ust 4, 1887, honored my first book. I was informed Iftierein that " savages are not strangers to love in the most delicate and noble form of the passion. . . . The wrong conclusion must not be drawn from Monteiro's remark, ' I have never seen a negro put his arm around a negro's waist. ' It is the uneducated classes who may be seen to exhibit in the parks those harmless endearments which negroes have too much good taste to practise before the public." To one who knows the African savage as he is, suchan assertion is worth a whole volume of Punch, A QUEER STORY 391 then they all gave np, saying, " The living deer, we cannot get it." One day two men came, each asking for the daughter. The father answered as usual, " He who brings me the living deer ; the same, I will give him my daughter." The two men made up their minds to hunt for the living deer in the forest. They came across one and pursued it ; but one of them soon got tired and said to himself : " That woman will destroy my life. Shall I suffer distress because of a woman ? If I bring her home, if she dies, would I seek another ? I will not run again to catch a living deer. I never saw it, that a girl was wooed with a living deer." And he gave up the chase. The other man persevered and caught the deer. When he approached with it, his companion said, " Priend, the deer, didst thou catch it indeed ? " Then the other : "I caught it. The girl delights me much. Eather I would sleep in forest, than to fail to catch it." Then they returned to the father and brought him the deer. But the father called four old men, told them what had happened, and asked them to choose a son-in-law for him among the two hunters. Being questioned by the aged men, the successful hunter said : " My comrade pursued and gave up ; I, your daughter charmed me much, even to the heart, and I pursued the deer till it gave in. . . . My comrade he came only to accompany me." Then the other was asked why he gave up the chase, if he wanted the girl, and he replied : " I never saw that they wooed a girl with a deer. . . . When I saw the great running I said, ' No, that woman will cost my life. Women are plentiful,' and I sat down to await my comrade." Then the aged men : " Thou who gavest up catching the deer, thou art our son-in-law. This gentleman who caught the deer, he may go with it ; he may eat it or he may sell it, for he is a man of great heart. If he wants to kill he kills at once ; he does not listen to one who scolds him, or gives him advice. Our daughter, if we gave her to him, and she did wrong, when he would beat her he would not hear (one) who entreats for her. We do not want him ; let him go. This gentleman who gave up the deer, he is our son-in-law ; be- cause, our daughter, when she does wrong, when we come to pacify him, he will listen to us. Although he were in great anger, when he sees us, his anger will cease. He is our good son-in-law, whom we have chosen." 393 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE SUICIDES According to Livingstone, in Angola suicide is sometimes committed by a girl if it is predicted to her that she will never have any children, which would be a great disgrace. A writer in the Globus (Vol. 69, p. 358) sums up the observa- tions of the medical missionary, G. Liengme, on suicides among the peoples of Africa. The most frequent cause is a family quarrel. Sometimes a girl commits suicide rather than marry a man whom she detests, "whereas on the other hand suicide from unhappy love seems to be unknown." In another number of the Globus (70 : 100), how- ever, I find mention of a negro who killed himself because he could not get the girl he wanted. This, of course, does not of itself suffice to prove the existence of true love, for we know that lust may be as maddening and as obstinate as love itself ; moreover, as we shall see in the chapter on American Indians, suicide does not argue strong feelings, but a weak in- tellect. Savages are apt to kill themselves, as we shall see, on the slightest and most trivial provocation. POETIC LOVE OJT THE COlfGO In his entertaining book on the Congo, H. H. Johnston says (423) of the races living along the upper part of that river : " They are decidedly amorous in disposition, but there is a certain poetry in their feelings which ennobles their love above the mere sexual lust of the negro." If this is true, it is one of the most important discoveries ever made by an African explorer, one on which we should expect the author to dwell at great length. What does he tell us about the Congo tribes ? " The women," he says of the Ba-Kongo, " have little regard for their virtue, either before or after marriage, and but for the jealousy of the men there would be promiscuous intercourse between the sexes." These women, he says, rate it as especially honorable to be a white man's mistress : POETIC LOVE ON THE CONGO 393 " Moreover, though the men evince some marital jealousy among themselves, they are far from displaying anything hut satisfaction when a European is induced to accept the loan of a wife, either as an act of hospitality or in consideration of some small payment. Unmarried girls they are more chary of oflEering, as their value in the market is greater ; but it may be truly said that among these people womanly chastity is unknown and a woman's honor is measured by the price she costs." These remarks, it is true, refer to the ijower Congo, and it is only of the upper river that Johnston predicates the poetic features which ennoble love. Stanley Pool being accepted by him as the dividing line, we may there perhaps begin our search for romantic love. One day, the author relates, rain had driven him to a hut on the shore of the Pool, where there was a family with two marriageable daughters. The father " was most anxious I should become his son-in-law, 'moyen- nant ' several ' longs ' of cloth. Seeing my hesitation, he mis- took it for scorn and hastened to point out the manifold charms of his girls, whilst these damsels waxed hotly indignant at my coldness. Then another inspiration seized their father — perhaps I liked a maturer style of beauty, and his wife, by no means an uncomely person, was dragged forward while her husband explained with the most expressive gestures, put- ting his outspread hands before his eyes and affecting to look another way, that, again with the simple intermediary of a little cloth, he would remain perfectly unconscious of what- ever amatory passages might occur between us." Evidently the poetry of love had not drifted down as far as the Pool. Let us therefore see what Johnston has to say of the Upper Congo (423) : " Husbands are fond of their own wives, as well as of ihose of other people. " " Marriage is a mere question of purchase, and is attended by no rejoicings or spe- cial ceremony. A man procures as many wives as possible, partly because they labor for him and also because soon after one wife becomes with child she leaves him for two or three years until her baby is weaned." Apart from these facts Johnston gives us no hint as to what he understands by affec- 394 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE tion except what the following sentence allows ns to infer (429) : " The attachment between these dogs and their African masters is deep and fully reciprocated. They are considered very dainty eating by the natives, and are indeed such a lux- ury that by an unwritten law only the superior sex — the men — are allowed to partake of roasted dog." The amusing italics are mine. If Johnston really found traces of poetic, ennobling love in this region, surely so startling a novelty in West Africa would have called for a full " bill of particulars,'' which would have been of infinitely greater scientific value than the details he gives regarding unchastity, infidelity, commercialism, separa- tion from wives and contempt for women, which are so com- mon throughout the continent as to call for no special no- tice. Evidently his ideas regarding "poetic love" were as hazy as those of some other writers quoted in this chapter, and we have once more been led on by the mirage of a " false fact."i In 1891 the Swedish explorer Westermarck published a book describing his adventures among the cannibal tribes of the Upper Congo. I have not seen the book, but the Eev. James Johnston, in summing up its contents, says (193) : "A man can sell wife and children according to his own depraved pleasure. Women are the slave drudges, the men spending their hours in eating, drinking, and sleeping. Cannibalism in its worst features prevails. Young women are prized as special delicacies, particularly girls' ears pre- pared in palm oil, and, in order to make the flesh more pala- table, the luckless victims are kept in water up to their necks for three or four days before they are slaughtered and served as food." BLACK LOVE IN KAMBEUN From the banks of the Congo to Kamerun is not a very far cry as distances go in Africa. Kamerun is under the German flag, and a German writer, Hugo Zoller, has described life in that colony with the eyes of a shrewd observer. What he says ' Westermarck (358), as usual, accepts Johnston's statement about poetic love on the Congo as gospel truth, without examining it critically. BLACK LOVE IN KAMERUN 395 about the negro's capacity for love shows deep psychological insight (III., 68-70) : "Europeans residing in Africa who have married a negro woman declare unanimously that there is no such thing there as love and fidelity in the European sense. It happens with infinitely greater frequency that a European falls in love with his black companion than she with him ; or rather the latter does not happen at all. A hundred times I have listened to discussions of this topic in many different places, but I have never heard of a single case of a genuine full-blooded negress falling in love with a white man. . . . The stupidest European peasant girl is, in comparison with an African prin- cess, still an ideally endowed being." ZoUer adds that in all his African experiences he never found a negress of whom he should have been willing to as- sume that she would sacrifice herself for a man she was at- tached to. On another page he says : " A negro woman does not fall in love in the same sense as a European, not even as the least civilized peasant girl. Love, in our sense of the word, is a product of our culture belong- ing to a higher stage in the development of latent faculties than the negro race has reached. Not only is the negro a stranger to the diverse intellectual and sentimental qualities which we denote by the name of love : nay, even in a purely bodily sense it may be asserted that his nervous system is not only less sensitive, but less well-developed. The negro loves as he eats and drinks. . . . And just as little as a black epicure have I ever been able to discover a negro who could rise to the imaginative phases of amorous dalliance. A negro . . . may buy dozens upon dozens of wives without ever being drawn by an overpowering feeling to any one of them. Love is, among the blacks, as much a matter of money as the palm oil or ivory trade. The black man buys his wife when she is still a child ; when she reaches the age at which our maidens go to their first ball, her nervous system, which never was particularly sensitive anyway, is completely blunted, so that she takes it as a matter of course to be sold again and again as a piece of property. One hears often enough of a ' woman palaver,' which is regarded exactly like a ' goat pa- laver,' as a damage to property, but one never, positively never, hears of a love-affair. The negress never has a sweetheart,. 396 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE either in her youngest days or after her so-called marriage. She is regarded, and regards herself, as a piece of property and a beast of burden; A SLATE COAST LOVE-STORY Travelling a short distance northwest from Kamerun we reach the Slave Coast of West Africa, to which A. B. Ellis has devoted two interesting books, including chapters in the folk- lore of the Yoruba and Ewe-speaking peoples of this region. Among the tales recorded are two which illustrate African ideas regarding love. I copy the first verbatim from Ellis's book on the Yornba (269-70) : "There was a young maiden named Buje, the slender, whom all the men wanted. The rich wanted her, but she refused. Chiefs wanted her, and she refused. The King wanted her, and she still refused. " Tortoise came to the King anfl said to him, ' She whom you all want and cannot get, I will get. I will have her, I.' And the King said, ' If you succeed in having her, I will divide my palace into two halves and will give you one-half.' " One day Buje, the slender, took an earthen pot and went to fetch water. Tortoise, seeing this, took his hoe, and cleared the path that led to the spring. He found a snake in the grass, and killed it. Then he put the snake in the mid- dle of the path. " When Buje, the slender, had filled her pot, she came back. She saw the snake in the path, and called out, ' Hi ! hi ! Come and kill this snake.' " Tortoise ran up with his cutlass in his hand. He struck at the snake and wounded himself in the leg. " Then he cried out, ' Buje the slender, has killed me. I was cutting the bush, I was clearing the path for her. She called to me to kill the snake, but I have wounded myself in the leg. Buje, the slender, Buje, the slender, take me upon your back and hold me close.' " He cried this many times, and at last Buje, the slender, took Tortoise and put him on her back. And then he slipped his legs down over her hips. . . . "Next day, as soon as it was light. Tortoise went to the King. He said, ' Did I not tell you I should have Buje, the slender ? Call all the people of the town to assemble on the fifth day, and you will hear what I have to say.' THE MAIDEN WHO ALWAYS REFUSED 397 " When it was the fifth day, the King sent out his crier to call all the people together. The people came. Tortoise cried ont, 'Everybody wanted Buje, the slender, and Bnje refused everybody, but I have had her.' "The King sent a messenger, with his stick, to summon Buje, the slender. When she came the King said, ' We have heard that Tortoise is your husband ; is it so ? ' " Buje, the slender, was ashamed, and could not answer. She covered her head with her cloth, and ran away into the bush. " And there she was changed into the plant called Buje." THE MAIDEN" WHO ALWAYS REFUSED Robert Hartmanu (480) describes the Yoruba people as vivacious and intelligent. But the details given by Ellis (154) regarding the peculiar functions of bridesmaids, and the as- sertion that " virginity in a bride is only of paramount im- portance when the girl has been betrothed in childhood," explain sufficiently why we must not look for sentimental features in a Yoruba love-story. The most noticeable thing in the above tale is the girl's power to refuse chiefs and even the King. In Ellis's book on the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast, there is also a love-story (271) concerning a " Maiden who always refused." It has a moral which seems to indicate masculine disapproval of such a feminine privi- lege. The following is a condensed version : There was a beautiful girl whose parents were rich. Men came to marry her, but she always said "Not yet." Men continued to come, but she said " My shape is good, my skin is good, therefore I shall stay ;" and she stayed. STow the leopard, in the leopard's place, hears this. He turns himself to resemble man. He takes a musical instru- ment in his hand and makes himself a fine young man. His shape is good. Then he goes to the parents of the maiden and says, " I look strong and manly, but I do not look stronger than I love." Then the father says, " Who looks strong takes ;" and the young man says, "I am ready." The young man comes in the house. His shape pleases the young girl. They give him to eat and they give him to drink. Then the young man asks the maiden if she is ready to go, and the maiden says she is ready to go. Her parents give her two female slaves to take along, and goats, sheep, and fowls. 398 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE Ere long, as they travel along the road, the husband says, " I am hungry." He eats the fowls, but is still hungry : he eats the goats and sheep and is hungry still. The two slaves next fall a victim to his voracity, and then he says, " I am hungry." Then the wife weeps and cries aloud and throws herself on the ground. Immediately the leopard, having resumed his own shape, makes a leap toward her. But there is a hun- ter concealed in the bush ; he has witnessed the scene ; he aims his gun and kills the leopard on the leap. Then he cuts ofE his tail and takes the young woman home. " This is the way of young women," the tale concludes. " The young men come to ask ; the young women meet them, and continue to refuse — again, again, again — and so the wild animals turn themselves into men and carry them ofE." AFRICAN STORY-BOOKS While the main object of this discussion is to show that Africans are incapable of feeling sentimental love, I have taken the greatest pains to discover such traces of more re- fined feelings as may exist. These one might expect to find particularly in the collections of African tales such as Calla- way's Nursery Tales of the Zulus, Theal's Kaffir Folk Lore, the Folk Lore of Angola, Stanley's My Dark Companions and their Stories, Koelle's African Native Literature, Jacottet's Contes Populaires des Bassoutos. All that I have been able to find in these books and others bearing on our topic is included in this chapter — and how very little it is ! Love, even of the sensual kind, seems to be almost entirely ignored by these dusky story-tellers in favor of a hundred other subjects — in striking contrast to our own literature, in which love is the ruling passion. I have before me another interesting collec- tion of South and North African stories and fables — Bleek's Reinecke Fuchs in Afrika. Its author had unusual facilities for collecting them, having been curator of Sir Gr. Grey's li- brary at Cape Town, which includes a fine collection of Af- rican manuscripts. In Bleek's book there are forty -four South African, chiefly Hottentot, fables and tales, and thirty-nine relating to North Africans. Yet among these eighty-three tales there are only three that come under the head of love- TAMBA AND THE PRINCESS 399 stories. As they take up eight pages, I can give only a con- densed version of them, taking care, however, to omit no es- sential feature.! THE FIVE SUIT0E8 Four handsome youths tried to win a beautiful girl living in the same town. While they were quarrelling among them- selves a youth came from another town, lifted the girl on his horse and galloped away with her. The father followed in pursuit on his camel, entered the youth's house, and brought back the girl. One day the father called together all the men of his tribe. The girl stepped among them and said, " Whoever of you can ride on my father's camel without falling off, may have me as wife." Dressed in their best finery, the young men tried, one after another, but were all thrown. Among them sat the stranger youth, wrapped only in a mat. Turning toward him the girl said, " Let the stranger make a trial." 'I^he men demurred, but the stranger got on the camel, rode about the party three times safely, and when he passed the girl for the fourth time he snatched her up and rode away with her hastily. Quickly the father mounted his fleet horse and followed the fugitives. He gained on them until his horse's head touched the camel's tail. At that moment the youth reached his home, jumped ofE the camel and carried the bride into the house. He closed the door so violently that one foot of the pursuing horse caught between the posts. The father drew it out with difficulty and returned to the four disappointed suitors. TAMBA AND THE PEIKCESS A king had a beautiful daughter and many desired to marry her. But all failed, because none could answer the King^s question : " What is enclosed in my amulet ? " Un- dismayed by the failure of men of wealth and rank, Tamba, ' Bleek credits these tales to Schon's Orammar of the Hausa Language, Sohlenker's Collection of I'emne Traditions, and Kolle's African Native Litera- ture, where the original Bornu text may be found. 400 SPECIMENS OF ; AFRICAN LOVE who lived far in the Bast and had nothing to boast of, made up his mind to win the princess. His friends laughed at him but he started out on his trip, taking with him some chickens, a goat, rice, rice-straw, millet-seed, and palm-oil. He met in succession a hungry porcupine, an alligator, a horned viper, and some ants, of all of whom he made friends by feeding them the things he had taken along. He reserved some of the rice, and when he arrived at the King's court he gave it to a hungry servant who in turn told him the secret of the amulet. So when he was asked what the amulet con- tained, he replied : " Hair clipped from the King's, head when he was a child ; a piece of the calabash from which he first drank milk ; and the tooth of the first snake he killed." This answer angered the King's minister, and Tamba was put in chains. He was subjected to various tests which he overcame with the aid of the animals he had fed on his trip. But again he was fettered and even lashed. One day the King wanted to bathe, so he sent his four wives to fetch water. A young girl accompanying them saw how all of them were bitten by a horned viper and ran back to tell the news. The wives were brought back unconscious, and no one could help them. The King then thought of Tamba, who was brought before him. Tamba administered an antidote which the viper he had fed had given him, the wives recovered, the wicked minister was beheaded and Tam- ba was rewarded with the hand of the princess. THE SEWING MATCH The third tale is herewith translated verbatim : " There was a man who had a most beautiful daughter, the favorite of all the young men of the place ; two, especially, tried to win her regard. One day these two came together and begged her to choose one of them. The young girl called her father ; when the young men had told him that they were suing for his daughter's hand, he requested them to come there the next day, when he would set them a task and the one who got through with it first should have the girl. " Meanwhile the father bought in the market a piece of cloth and cut it up for two garments. Now when the two PROVERBS ABOUT WOMEN 401 rivals appeared the next morning he gave to each the mate- rials for a garment and told them to sew them together, promising his daughter to the one who should get done first. The daughter he ordered to thread the needles for both the men. " Now the girl knew very well which of the two young men she would rather have for a husband ; to him, therefore, she always handed needles with short threads, while the other was always supplied with long threads. Noon came and neither of them had finished his garment. After awhile, however, the one who always got the short threads finished his task. "The father was then summoned and the young man showed him the garment ; whereupon the father said : ' You. are a quick worker and will therefore surely be able to support your wife. Take my daughter as your wife and always do your work rapidly, then you will always have food for your- self and your wife.' " Thus did the young man win his beloved by means of her cunning. Joyfully he led her home as his wife." BALING OUT THE BROOK This tale reveals the existence of individual preference, but does not hint at any other ingredient of love, while the father's promise of the girl to the fastest worker shows a to- tal indifference to what that preference might be. In the fol- lowing tale (also from Koelle) the girl again is not consulted. " A certain man had a most beautiful daughter who was beset by many suitors. But as soon as they were told that the sole condition on which they could obtain her was to bale out a brook with a ground-nut shell (which is about half the size of a walnut shell), they always walked away in disap- pointment. However, at last one took heart of grace, and began the task. He obtained the beauty ; for the father said, ' Earn ago tsurti baditsia tsido — ^he who undertakes what- ever he says, will do it.' " PROVERBS ABOUT WOMEN The last two tales I have cited were gathered among the Bornu people in the Soudan. In Burton's Wit and Wisdom from West Africa we find a few proverbs about women that 402 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE are current in the same . region. " If a woman spe9,ks two words, take one and leave the other." " Whatever be thy in- timacy, never give thy heart to a woman." "If thou givest thy heart to a woman, she will kill thee." "If a man tells his secrets to his wife, she will bring him into the way of Satan." " A woman never brings a man into the right way." " Men who listen to what women say, are counted as women." It is significant that in the four hundred and fifty- five pages of Burton's book, which includes over four hundred proverbs and tales, there are only half a dozen brief references to women, and those are sneers. AFRICAN AMAZONS As I have had occasion to remark before, African women lack the finer feminine qualities, both bodily and mental, wherefore even if an African man were able to feel sentimen- tal love he could not find an object to bestow it on. An in- cident related by Du Chaillu {Ashango Land, 187) illus- trates the martial side of African femininity. A married man named Mayolo had called another man's wife toward him. His own wife, hearing of this, got jealous, told him the other must be his sweetheart, and rushed out to seek her rival. A battle ensued : "Women's fights in this country always begin by their Growing off their dengui — that is, stripping themselves en- .,:rely naked. The challenger having thus denuded herself, her enemy showed pluck and answered the challenge by promptly doing the same ; so that the two elegant figures immediately went at it literally tooth and nail, for they fought like cats, and between the rounds reviled each other in language the most filthy that could possibly be uttered. Mayolo being asleep in his house, and no one seeming ready to interfere, I went myself and separated the two furies." In Dahomey, as everybody knows, the bellicose possibilities of the African woman have been utilized in forming bands of Amazons which are described as " the flower of the army." They are made up of female captives and other women, wear special uniforms, and in battle are credited with even greater WHERE WOMAN COMMANDS 403 ferocity than the men, These women are Amazons not of their own accord but by order of the king. But in other parts of Africa there is reason to believe that bands of self- constituted female warriors have existed at various times. Diodorus Siculas, who lived in the time of Julius Caesar, says that on the western coast of Libya (Africa) there used to live a people governed by women, who carried on wars and the government, the men being obliged to do domestic work and take care of the children. In our time Livingstone found in the villages of the Bechuanas and Banyas that men were often badly treated by the women, and the eminent German anthropologist Bastian says {S. S., 178) that in " the Soudan the power of the women banded together for mutual protection is so great that men are often put under ban and obliged to emigrate." Mungo Park described the curious bugaboo {mumho-jumbo) by means of which the Mandingo negroes used to keep their rebellious women in subjection. According to Bastian, associations for keeping women in subjection are common among men along the whole African West Coast. The women, too, have their associations, and at their meetings compare notes on the meanness and cruelty of their husbands. Now it is easy to conceive that among tribes where many of the men have been killed off in wars the women, being in a great majority, may, for a time at least, turn the tables on the men, assume their weapons and make them realize how it feels to be the " inferior sex." For this reason Bastian sees no occasion to share the modern disppsition to regard all the Amazon legends as myths. WHEKE WOMAN COMMANDS If we now return from the West Coast to Eastern Africa we find on the northern confines of Abyssinia a strange case of the subjection of men, which Munzinger has described in his Ostafrikanische Sfudien (375-338). The Beni Amer are a tribe of Mohammedan shepherds among whom " the sexes seem to have exchanged r61es, the women being more mascu- line in their work.'' Property is legally held in common. 404 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE wherefore the men rarely dare to do anything without consult- ing their wives. In return for this submission they are treated with the utmost contempt : " For every angry word that the husband utters he is com- pelled to pay a fine, and perhaps spend a whole rainy night outdoors till he has promised to give his weaker half a camel and a cow. Thus the wife acquires a property of her own, which the husband never is allowed to touch ; many women have in this way ruined their husbands and then left them. The women have much esprit de corps ; if one of them has ground for complaint, all the others come to her aid. . . . Of course the man is always found in the wrong ; the whole village is in a turmoil. This esprit de corps demands that every woman, whether she loves her husband or not, must conceal her love and treat hinj con+emptuously. It is consid- ered disgraceful for her to show her love to her husband. This contempt for men goes so far that if a wife laments the death of her husband who has died without issue, her com- panions taunt her. . . . One often hears women abuse their husbands or other men in the most obscene language, even on the street, and the men do not dare to make the least retort." " The wife can at any time return to her mother's house, and remain there months, sending word to her husband that he may come to her if he cares for her." NO CHANCE FOE ROMANTIC LOVE The causes of this singular effeminacy of the men and masculinity of the women are not indicated by Munzinger ; but so much is clear that, although the tables are turned, Cupid is again left in the cold. Nor is there any romance in the courtship which leads to such hen-pecked conjugal life: " The children are often married very early, and engaged earlier still. The bridegroom goes with his companions to fetch his bride ; but after having talked with her parents he returns without having seen her. The bride thereafter re- mains another whole year with her parents. After its expira- tion the bridegroom sends women and a camel to bring her to his home ; she is taken away with her tent, but the bridal escort is often fooled by the substitution in the bride's place of another girl, who allows herself to be taken along, carefully PASTORAL LOVE 405 veiled, and after the village has heen left behind betrays her- self and runs away." These Beni Amer are of course far superior in culture to the Bushmen, Hottentots, Kafl&rs, and West Coast peoples we have been considering so far, having long been in contact with Oriental influences. It is therefore as strange as it is instructive to note that as soon as a race becomes civilized enough to feel a kind of love exalted above mere sensuality, special pains are taken to interpose fresh obstacles, as in the above case, where it is good form to suppress all affection, and where a young man may not see his bride even after en- gagement. This last custom seems to be of common occur- rence in this part of Africa. Munzinger (387) says of the Kunama : "As among the border peoples engagements are often made at a very early age, after which time bride and bridegroom avoid each other ; " and again (147) concerning the region of Massua, on the Eed Sea : " Prom the day of the engagement the young man is obliged to carefully avoid the bride and her mother. The desire to see her after the engagement is considered very improper, and often leads to a breaking-up of the affair. If the youth meets the girl accidentally, she veils her face and her friends surround her to cover her from the bridegroom's sight." PASTORAL LOVE These attachments are so shallow that if the fortune-teller who is always consulted gives an unfavorable forecast, the engagement is forthwith broken off. It is instructive to note further that the rigid separation of a man from his betrothed serves merely to stifle legitimate love ; its object cannot be to prevent improper intimacies, for before engagement the girls enjoy perfect liberty to do what they please, and after en- gagement they may converse with anyone except the lover. As Parkyns (II., 41) tells us, he is never allowed to see his intended wife even for a moment, unless he can bribe some female friend to arrange it so he can get a peep at her by concealing himself ; but if the girl discovers him she covers 406 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE her face, screams, runs away, and hides. This " coyness " is a pure sham. In reality the Abyssinian girl is anything but coy. Munzinger thus describes her character : " The shepherd girls in the neighborhood of Massua always earn some money by carrying water and provisions to the city. The youngest girls are sent there heedlessly, and are often cheated out of more than their money, and therefore they do not usually make the best of wives, being coquettish and very eager for money. The refinements of innocence must not be sought for in this country ; they are incompatible with the simple arrangement of the houses and the unrestrained free- dom of conversation. No one objects to this, a family's only anxiety being that the girl should not lose the semblance of virginity. . . . If a child is born it is mercilessly killed by the girl's grandmother." Sentimental admirers of what they suppose to be genuine " pastoral love poetry" will find further food for thought in the following Abyssinian picture from Parkyns (II., 40) : " The boys are turned out wild to look after the sheep and cattle ; and the girls from early childhood are sent to fetch water from the well or brook, first in a gourd, and afterward in a jar proportioned to their strength. These occupations are not conducive to the morality of either sex. If the well be far from the village, the girls usually form parties to go thither, and amuse themselves on the road by singing senti- mental or love songs, which not unfrequently verge upon the obscene, and indulge in conversation of a similar description ; while, during their halt at the well for an hour or so, they en- gage in romps of all kinds, in which parties of the other sex frequently join. This early license lays the foundation for the most corrupt habits, when at a later period they are sent to the woods to collect fuel." James Bruce, one of the earliest Europeans to visit the Abys- sinians, describes them as living practically in a state of pro- miscuity, divorce being so frequent that he once saw a woman surrounded by seven former husbands, and there being hardly any difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy. Another old writer, Eev. S. Gobat, describes the Abyssinians as light- minded, having nothing constant but inconstancy itself. A more recent writer, J. Hotten (133-35), explains, in the fol- PASTORAL LOVE 407 lowing sentence, a fact which has often misled unwary ob- servers : " Females are rarely gross or immodest outwardly, seeing that they need in no way be ashamed of the freest in- tercourse with the other sex." " Kape is venial, and adultery regards only the husband." The Christian Abyssinians are in this respect no better than the others, regarding lewd con- duct with indifference. But the most startling exhibition of Abyssinian grossness is given by the Habab and Mensa con- cerning whom Munzinger says (150), that whenever a girl decides to give herself up to a dissolute life " a public festival is arranged, cows are butchered and a night is spent amid song and dances." The four volumes of Combes and Tamisier on Abyssinia give a vivid idea of the utter absence of sexual morality in that country. With an intelligence rare among explorers they distinguish, between love of the senses and love of the heart, and declare that the latter is not to be found in this country. " Abyssinian women love everybody for money and no one gratis." They do not even suspect the possibility of any other kind of love, and the only distinction they make is that a man who pleases them pays less. "But what one never finds with anyone in Abyssinia is that refined and pure sentiment which gives so much charm to love in Europe. Here the heart is seldom touched ; tender words are often spoken, but they are banal and rarely sincere ; never do these people experience those extraordinary emotions of which the very remembrance agitates us a long time, those celestial feel- ings which convert an iatheist into a believer. In this country love has all its existence in a moment, having neither a past nor a future." The authors go so far as to doubt a story they heard of a girl who was said to have committed suicide to escape a hated suitor forced on her ; but there is nothing im- probable in this, as we know that a strong aversion may exist even where there is no capacity for true love, and the former by no means implies the latter. Jealousy, they found further, "is practically unknown in Abyssinia." "If jealousy is manifested occasionally by women we must not deceive our- selves regarding the nature of this feeling ; when an Abys- 408 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE sinienne envies the love another inspires she is jealouB only of the comfort which that love may insure for the other " (11. , Chap. v.). ABYSSINIAN BEAUTY AND FLIRTATION Abyssinian women are not defiicient in a certain sensual kind of beauty. Their fine figures, large black eyes, and white teeth have been admired by many travellers. But Parkyns (II., 5) avers that " though flowers of beauty no- where bloom with more luxuriance than in Ethiopia, yet, alas ! there shines on them no mental sun." They make use of their eyes to great advantage— but not to express soul-love. What flirtation in this part of the world consists in, may be inferred from Donaldson Smith's amusing account (245, 270) of a young Boran girl who asked permission to accompany his caravan, offering to cook, bring wood, etc. She was provided with a piece of white sheeting for a dress, but when tired from marching, being unused to so much clothing, she threw the whole thing aside and walked about naked. Her name was Ola. Some time afterward one of the native guides began to make love to Ola : " I oversaw the two flirting and was highly amused at the manner in which they went about it. It consisted almost entirely in tickling and pinching, each sally being accompanied by roars of laughter. They never kissed, as such a thing is unknown in Africa. '' GALLA COAESENESS South of Abyssinia there are three peoples — the Galla, Somali, and Harari — among some of whom, if we may believe ■Dr. Paulitschke, the germs of true love are to be found. Let us briefly examine them in turn, with Paulitschke's ar- guments. Hartmann (401) assigns to the Gallas a high rank among African races, and Paulitschke (B. z. E., 51-56) describes them as more intelligent than the Somali, but also more licentious. Boys marry at sixteen to eighteen, girls at twelve to sixteen. The women are compelled to SOMALI LOVE-AFFAIRS 409 do most of the hard work ; wives are often badly treated, and when their husbands get tired of them they send them away. Good friends lend each other their wives, and they also lend them to guests. If a man kills his wife no one minds it. Few Schoa girls are virgins when they marry {Eth. N. Afr., 195), and the married women are easily led from the path of virtue by small presents. In other parts girls take a pride in preserving their purity, but atone for it by a dissolute life after marriage. Brides are subjected to an obscene examination, and if not found pure are sup- posed to be legally disqualified from marriage. To avoid the disgrace, the parents bribe the bridegroom to keep the secret, and to assert the bride's innocence. A curious detail of Galla courtship consists in the precautions the parents of rich youths have to take to protect them from designing poor girls and their mothers. Often, when the parents of a rich youth are averse to the match, the coy bride goes to their hut, jumps over the surrounding hedge, and remains there endur- ing the family's abuse until they finally accept her. To pre- vent such an invasion — a sort of inverted capture, in which the woman is the aggressor — the parents of rich sons build very high hedges round their houses to keep out girls ! Not infrequently, boys and girls are married when only six or eight years old, and forthwith live together as husband and wife. SOMALI LOVE-AFPAIES It is among the neighbors of these Gallas that Paulitschke (30) fancied he discovered the existence of refined love : " Adult youths and maidens have occasion, especially while tending the cattle, to form attachments. These are of an idealized nature, because the young folks are brought up in a remarkably chaste and serious manner. The father is proud of his blooming daughter and guards her like a treasure. . . , In my opinion, marriages among the Western Somals are mostly based on cordial mutual affection. A young man renders homage to his beloved in song. ' Thou art beautiful,' he sings, ' thy limbs are plump, if thou wouldst drink cam- el's milk thou wert more beautiful still.' The girl, on her 410 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE part, gives expression to her longing for the absent lover in this melancholy song : ' The camel needs good grazing, and dislikes to leave it. My beloved has left the country. On account of the children of Sahdl (the lover's family), my heart is always so heavy. Others throw themselves into the ocean, but I perish from grief. Could I but find the be- loved.'" What evidence of "idealized" love is there in these poems ? The girl expresses longing for an absent man, and longing, as we have seen, characterizes all kinds of love from the highest to the lowest. It is one of the selfish ingredients of love, and is therefore evidence of self-love, not of other- love. As for the lover's poem, what is it but the grossest sen- sualism, the usual African apotheosis of fat ? Imagine an American lover saying to a girl, " You are beautiful for you are plump, but you would be more beautiful still if you ate more pork and beans " — would she regard this as evidence of refined love, or would she turn her back and never speak to him again ? Anthropologists are sometimes strangely naive. We have just seen what kind of " attachments" are formed by African youths and girls while tending cattle ; Burton adds to the evidence {F. F., 130) by telling us that among the Somali " the bride, as usual in the East, is rarely consulted, but frequent tete-a-tetes at the well and in the bush when tending cattle effectually obviate this inconvenience." "At the wells," says Donaldson Smith (15), "you will see both sexes bathing together, with little regard for decency." They are indeed lower than brutes in their impulses, for the only way parents can save their infant girls from being maltreated is by the practice of infibulation, to which, as Paulitschke him- self tells us, the girls are subjected at the early age of four, or even three ; yet, even this, he likewise informs us, is not always effectual. As for the father's great pride in his daughter, and his guarding her like a treasure, that is, by the concurrent testi- mony of the authorities, not a token of affection or a regard for virtue, but a purely commercial matter. Paulitschke himself says (30) that while the mother is devoted to her SOMALI LOVE-AFFAIRS 411 child, " the father pays no attention to it." On the follow- ing page he adds : " The more well-to-do the father is, and the more beautiful his daughter, the longer he seeks to keep her under the paternal roof, for the purpose of securing a bigger price for her through the competition of suitors." Of the "Western Somali tribes at Zayla, Captain J. S. King says ' that when a man has fixed his choice on a girl he pays her father $100 to $800. After that " the proposer is entitled (on. payment of $5 each time) to private interviews with his fiancee to enable him by a closer inspection to judge better of her personal charms. But it frequently happens that the young man squanders all his money on these ' interviews ' before paying the dafa agreed upon. The girl then (at her parents' instigation) breaks off the match, and her father, when expostulated with, replies that he will not force his daughter's inclinations. Hence arise innumerable breach-of-promise-of-marriage suits, in which the man is invariably the plaintiff. I have known in- stances of a girl being betrothed to three or four different men in about a year's time, their father receiving a certain amount of dafa from each suitor." ' Donaldson Smith remarks (13) that Somali women "are re- garded merely as goods and chattels. In a conversation with one of my boys he told me that he only owned five camels, but that he had a sister from whom he expected to get much money when he sold her in marriage." The gross commer- cialism of Somali love-affairs is further illustrated by the Ogaden custom (Paulitschke, E. N. A., 199) of pouring strong perfumes over the bride in order to stimulate the ardor of the suitor and make him willing to pay more for her — a trick which is often successful. How, under such circum- stances, Somal marriages can be " mostly based on cordial mutual affection " is a mystery for Dr. Paulitschke to ex- plain. Burton proved himself a keener observer and psychol- ogist when he wrote {F. F., 122), " The Somal knows none of the exaggerated and chivalrous ideas by which passion be- > Folk Lore Journal, London, 1888, 119-22. ' Compare this with what I said on page 340 about the behaTior of girls in the New Britain Group. 412 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE comes refined afEection among the Arab Bedouins and the sons of civilization." I may add what this writer says regard- ing Somal poetry : " The subjects are frequently pastoral ; the lover, for instance, invites his mistress to walk with him toward the well in Lahelo, the Arcadia of the land ; he com- pares her legs to the tall, straight Libi tree, and imprecates the direst cnrses on her head if she refuses to drink with him the milk of his favorite camel." ARABIC INFLUENCES The Harari, neighbors of the Somals, are another people among whom Paulitschke fancied that he discovered signs of idealized love {B. E. A. 8., 70). Their youthful attach- ments, he says, are intense and noble, and in proof of this he translates two of their poems on the beauty of a bride. I. " I tell thee this only : thy face is like silk, Aisa ; I say it again, I tell thee nothing but that. Thou art slender as a lance-shaft ; thy father and thy mother are Arabs ; they all are Arabs ; I tell thee this only." II. " Thy form is like a burning lamp, Aisa ; I love thee. When thou art at the side of Abrahim, thou burnest him with the light of thy beauty. To-morrow I shall see thee again." , In a third (freely trans- lated and printed in the appendix of the same volume) occur these lines : " The honey is already taken out and I come with it. The milk is already drawn and I bring it. And now thou art the pure honey, and now thou art the fresh milk. The gathered honey is very sweet, and therefore it was drunk to thy health. Thine eyes are black, dyed with Kabul. The fresh milk is very sweet and therefore it was drunk to thy health. I have seen Sina — oh, how sweet was Sina. . . . Thine eyes are like the full moon, and thy body is fragrant as the fragrance of rose-water. And she lives in the garden of her father and the garments on her body become fragrant as basil. . . . And thou art like a king's garden in which all per- fumes are united." It is easy to note Arabic influences in these poems. The Harari are largely Arabic ; their very language is being ab- TOUAREG CHIVALRY 413 sorbed in the Arabic ; yet I cannot find in these poems the least evidence of amorous idealism or "noble" sentiment. To have a lover compare a girl's face to silk, her form to a lance-shaft or a burning lamp, her eyes to the full moon, may be an imaginative sort of sensualism, but it is purely sensual nevertheless. If an American lover told a girl, " I bought some delicious candy and ate it, thinking of you ; I ordered a glass of sweet soda-water and drank it to your health" — would she regard that as evidence of "noble" love, or of any kind of love at all, except a kind of cupboard love ? No, not even here, where Arabian influences prevail, do we come across the germs of true love. It is the same all over Africa. Nowhere do we find indications that men admire other things in women except, at most, voluptuous eyes and plump figures ; nowhere do the men perform unselfish acts of gal- lantry and self-sacrifice ; nowhere exhibit sympathy with their females, who, far from being goddesses, are not even companions, but simply drudges and slaves to lust. A whole volume would be required to demonstrate that this holds true of all parts of Africa ; but the present chapter is already too long and I must close with a brief reference to the Berbers of Algeria (Kabyles) to show that at the northern extremity of Africa, as at the southern, the eastern, the western, love spells lust. Here, too, man is lower than animals. Ca- mille Sabatier, who was a justice of the peace at Tizi-Ouzan, speaks 'of "la brutaliie du male qui, souvent mime chez les Kabyles, n'attend pas la nubilite pour deflorer la jeune en- fant." The girls, he adds, " detest their husbands with all their heart. Love is almost always unknown to them — I mean by love that ensemble of refined sentiments, which, among civilized peoples, ennoble the sexual appetite." TOUAREG CHIVALRY A guileless reader of Chavanne's book on the Sahara is apt to get the impression that there is, after all, an oasis in the ' Bevue d' Anihropologie, 1883. 414 SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE ' desert of African lovelessness and contempt for women, Touareg women, we are told therein (308-10), are allowed to dispose of their hands and to eat with the men, certain dishes being reserved for them, others (including tea and coffee) for the men. In the evening the women assemble and improvise songs while the men sit around in their best attire. The women write mottoes on the men's shields, and the men carve their chosen one's name in the rocks and sing her praises. The situation has been compared to mediaeval chiv- alry. But when we examine it more critically than the biassed Chavanne did, we find, using his own data, more of Africa than appeared to be there at first sight. The woman, we are informed, owes the husband obedience, and he can di- vorce her at pleasure. When a woman talks to a man she veils her face " as a sign of respect." And when the men travel, they are accompanied by those of their female slaves who are young and pretty. Their morals are farther charac- terized by the fact that descent is in the female line, which is usually dne to uncertain paternity. The women are ugly and mascnline, and Chavanne does not mention a single fact or act which proves that they experience snpersensual, altruistic love. So far as the position of Touareg women is superior to that of other Africans, it is due to the fact that slaves are kept to do the hard work and to certain European and Chris- tian influences and the institution of theoretical monogamy. Possibly the germs of a better sort' of love may exist among them, as they may among the Bedouins ; they must make a beginning somewhere. AS AFEICAK lOVE-LETTEE T. J. Hutchinson declares that the gentle god of love is unknown in the majority of African kingdoms : " It in fact seems to be crawling into life only in one or two places where our language is the established one." He prints a quaint love-letter addressed by a Liberian native to his colored sweet- heart. The substance of the letter, it is true, is purely ego- AN AFRICAN LOVE-LETTER 415 tistic ; it might be summed up in the words, " Oh, how I wish yon were here to make me happy." Yet it opens np vistas of future possibilities. I cite it verbatim : " My Dear Miss, — I take my pen in hand to Embrac you of my health, I was very sick this morning but know I am better but I hope it may find you in a state of Enjoying good health and so is your Relation. Oh my dear Miss what would I give if I could see thy lovely Face this precious minnit miss you had promis me to tell me something, and I like you to let you know I am very anxious to know what it is give my Respect to the young mens But to the young ladys espe- cially I am long to see you miss if I don't see you shortly surely I must die I shut my mouth to hold my breath Miss don't yon cry my little pretty turtle dove I wont you to write to me, shall I go Bound or shall I go free or shall I love a pretty girl a she don't love me give my Respect all enquiring Friend Truly Your respectfully, "J H "Nothing more to say miss." ABOEIGINAL AUSTEALIAl^ LOVE The founders of the Australian race, Curr believes, were Africans, and may have arrived in one canoe. The distance from Africa to Australia is, however, great, and there are in- numerable details of structure, color, custom, myth, imple- ments, language, etc., which have led the latest authorities to conclude that the Australian race was formed gradually by a mixture of Papuans, Malayans, and Dravidians of Cen- tral India.' Topinard has given reasons for believing that there are two distinct races in Australia. However that may be, there are certainly great differences in the customs of the natives. As regards the relations of the sexes, luckily, these differences are not so great as in some other respects, where- fore it is possible to give a tolerably accurate bird's-eye view of the Australians as a whole from this point of view. PBESONAL CHARMS OP AUSTRALIAN'S Once in awhile, in the narrative of those who have trav- elled or sojourned among Australians, one comes across a ref- erence to the symmetrical form, soft skin, red 'lips, and white teeth of a young Australian girl. Mitchell in his wanderings saw several girls with beautiful features and figures. Of one of these, who seemed to be the most influential person in camp, he says (I., 266) : " She was now all animation, and her finely shaped mouth, beautiful teeth, and well-formed person appeared to great advantage as she hung over us both, ad- dressing me vehemently," etc. Of two other girls the same writer says (II., 93) : " The youngest was the handsomest female I had ever seen • See an elaborate discussion of this question by the Rev. John Mathew in the Journal of the Royal Society of N. S. Wales, Vol. XXIII., 335-449. 416 PERSONAL CHARMS OF AUSTRALIANS 417 amongst the natives. She was so far from black that the red color was very apparent in her cheeks. She sat before me in a corner of the group, nearly in the attitude of Mr. Bailey's fine statue of Eve at the fountain, and apparently equally un- conscious that she was naked. As I looked upon her for a moment, while deeply regretting the fate of her mother, the chief, who stood by, and whose baud had been more than once laid upon my cap, as if to feel whether it were proof against the blow of a waddy, begged me to accept of her in exchange for a tomahawk ! " Eyre, another famous early traveller, writes on this topic (II., 207-208). " Occasionally, though rarely, I have met with females in the bloom of youth, whose well-proportioned limbs and sym- metry of figure might have formed a model for the sculptor's chisel. In personal appearance the females are, except in early youth, very far inferior to the men. When young, however, they are not uninteresting. The jet-black eyes, shaded by their long dark lashes, and the delicate and scarcely formed features of incipient womanhood give a soft and pleas- ing expression to a countenance that might often be called good-looking — occasionally pretty. " " Occasionally, though rarely," and then only for a few years, is an Australian woman attractive from our point of view. As a rule she is very much the reverse — dirty, thin- limbed, course-featured, ungainly in every way ; ' and Eyre tells us why this is so. The extremities of the women, he says, are more attenuated than those of the men ; probably because " like most other savages, the Australian looks upon his wife as a slave," makes her undergo great privations and do all the hard work, such as bringing in wood and water, tending the children, carrying all the movable property while on the march, often even her husband's weapons : " In wet weather she attends to all the outside work, whilst her lord and master is snugly seated at the fire. If ' See, e.g., the hideous pictures of Australian women enclosed in 6. W. Eari's The Papuans. Spencer and Gillen's admirable volume also contains pictures of " young women " who look twice their age. After the age of twenty, the authors write, the face becomes wrinkled, the breasts pendulous, the whole body shrivelled. At fifty they reach " a stage of ugliness which baffled descrip- tion "(46, 40). 418 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE there is a scarcity of food, she has to endure the pangs of hunger, often, perhaps, in addition to ill-treatment and abuse. No wonder, then, that the females, and especially the younger ones (for it is then they are exposed to the greatest hardships), are not so fully or so roundly developed in person as the men." The rule that races admire those personal characteristics which climate and circumstances have impressed on them is not borne out among Australians. An arid soil and a desic- cating climate make them thin as a race, but they do not ad- mire thinness. "Long-legged," "thin-legged," are favorite terms of abuse among them, and Grey once heard a native sing scornfully Oh, what a leg, You kangaroo-footed churl t Nor is it beauty, in our sense of the word, that attracts them, but fat, as in Africa and the Orient. I have previously quoted Brough Smyth's assertion that an Australian woman, however old and ugly, is in constant danger of being stolen if she is fat. That women have the same standard of " taste," appears from the statement of H. B. A. Meyer (189), that the principal reason why the men anoint themselves with grease and ochre is that it makes them look fat and "gives them an air of importance in the eyes of the women, for they admire a fat man however ugly." But whereas these men admire a fat woman for sensual reasons, the women's preference is based on utilitarian motives. Low as their reasoning powers are, they are shrewd enough to reflect that a man who is in good condition proves thereby that he is " somebody " — that he can hunt and will be able to bring home some meat for his wife too. This interpretation is borne out by what was said on a previous page (278) about one of the reasons why corpulence is valued in Fiji, and also by an amusing incident related by the eminent Australian explorer George Grey (II., 93). He had reproached his native guide with not knowing anything, when the guide replied : " I know nothing ! I know how to keep myself fat ; the CRUEL TREATMENT OF WOMEN 419 young ■women look at me and say, ' Imbat is very handsome, he is fat ' — they will look at you and say, ' He not good — long legs — what do yon know ? Where is your fat ? What for do you know so much, if you can't keep fat ? " CEUEL TKBATMBXT OF WOMEN Eyre was no doubt right in his suggestion that the inferior- ity of Australian women to the men in personal appearance was due to the privations and hardships to which the women were subjected. Much as the men admire fat in a woman, they are either too ignorant, or too selfish otherwise, to allow them to grow fat in idleness. Women in Australia never ex- ist for their own sake but solely for the convenience of the men. "The man," says the Eev. H. E. A. Meyer (11), " regarding them more as slaves than in any other light, em- ploys them in every possible way to his own advantage." " The wives were the absolute property of the husband," says the Eev. G. Taplin (XVII. to XXXVII.), "and were given away, exchanged, or lent, as their owners saw fit." "The poor creatures . . . are always seen to a disadvantage, being , . . the slaves of their husbands and of the tribes." " The women in all cases came badly off when they depended upon what the men of the tribes chose to give them." " The woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest offence or de- reliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddy or a yam-stick, and not unfrequently speared. The records of the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances of blacks being tried for murdering their lubras. The woman's life is of no account if her husband chooses to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circum- stances. In times of scarcity of food, she is the last to be fed and the last considered in any way. That many of them die in consequence cannot be a matter of wonder. . . . The condition of the women has no influence over their treat- ment, and a pregnant female is dealt with and is expected to do as much as if she were in perfect health. . . . The condition of the native women is wretched and miserable in 430 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE the extreme ; in fact, in no savage nation of which there is any record can it he any worse." And again (p. 72) : " The men think nothing of thrashing their wives, knocking them on the head, and inflicting frightful gashes ; but they never beat the boys. And the sons treat their mothers very badly. Very often mere lads will not hesitate to strike and throw stones at them." " Women," says Eyre (333), " are frequently beaten about the head with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences." There is hardly one, he says, that has not some frightful scars on the body; and he saw one who "appeared to have been almost riddled with spear-wounds." " Does a native meet a woman in the woods and violate her, he is not the one to feel the vengeance of the husband, but the poor victim whom he has abused" (387). "Women surprised by strange blacks are always abused and often massacred " (Curr, I., 108). "A black hates intensely those of his own race with whom he is unacquainted, always excepting the females. To one of these he will become attached if he succeeds in carrying one off ; otherwise he will kill the women out of mere savageness and hatred of their husbands" (86). "Whenever they can, blacks in their wild state never neglect to massacre all male strangers who fall into their power. Females are ravished, and often slain afterward if they cannot be conveniently carried off." The natives of Victoria " often break to pieces their six-feet-long sticks on the heads of the women " (Waitz, VI., 775). " In the case of a man killing his own gin [wife], he has to deliver up one of his own sisters for his late wife's friends to put to death" (W. E. Epth, 141). After a war, when peace is patched up, it sometimes happens that " the weaker party give some nets and women to make matters up" (Ourr, II., 477). In the same volume (331) we find a realistic picture of masculine selfishness at home : " When the mosquitoes are bad, the men construct with forked sticks driven into the ground rude bedsteads, on which they sleep, a fire being made underneath to keep off with its smoke the troublesome insects. No bedsteads. CRUEL TREATMENT OF WOMEN 421 however, fall to the share of the women, whose business it is to keep the fires burning whilst their lords sleep." Concerning woman in the lower Murray tribes, Bulmer says' that "on the journey her lord would coolly walk along with merely his war implements, weighing only a few pounds, while his wife was carrying perhaps sixty pounds." The lives of the women "are rated as of the less value than those of the men." " Their corpses are often thrown to dogs for food " (Waitz, VI., 775). "These poor creatures," says Wilkinson of the South Australian women (323), " are in an abject state, and are only treated with about the same consideration as the dogs that accompany them ; they are ob- liged to give any food that may be desired to the men, and sit and see them eat it, considering themselves amply repaid if they are rewarded by having a piece of gizzle, or any other leavings, pitched to them." J. S. Wood (71) relates this characteristic story : "A native servant was late in keeping his appointment with his master, and, on inquiry, it was elicited that he had just quarrelled with one of his wives, and had speared her through the body. On being rebuked by his master, he turned off the matter with a laugh, merely remarking that white men had only one wife, whereas he had two, and did not mind losing one till he could buy another." Sturt, who made two exploring expeditions (1829-1831), wrote (II., 55) that the men oblige their women to procure, their own food, or they " throw to them over their shoulders the bones they have already picked, with a nonchalance that is extremely amusing." The women are also excluded from religious ceremonies ; many of the best things to eat are taboo to them ; and the cruel contempt of the men pursues them even after death. The men ai-e buried with ceremony (Curr, I., 89), but "as the women and children are held to be very inferior to the men whilst alive, and their spirits are but little feared after death, they are interred with but scant ceremony . . . the women alone wailing." Thus they 1 Royal Oeogr. Soc of Australasia, 1887, Vol. V., 29. 422 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE show their contempt even for the ghosts of women, though they are so afraid of other ghosts that they never leave camp in the dark or have a nocturnal dance except by moonlight or with big fires ! WERE SAVAGES COEKUPTED BY WHITES ? Such is the Australian's treatment of woman — a treatment so selfish, so inconsistent with the altruistic traits and im- pulses of romantic love — sympathy, gallantry, and self-sacri- ficing affection, not to speak of adoration — that it alone proves him incapable of so refined a sentiment. If any doubt remained, it would be removed by his utter inability to rise above the sensual sphere. The Australian is absolutely im- moral and incredibly licentious. Here, however, we are con- fronted by a spectre with which the sentimentalists try to frighten the searchers for truth, and which must therefore be exorcised first. They grant the wantonness of savages, but declare that it is " due chiefiy to the influence of civil- ization." This is one of the favorite subterfuges of Wester- marck, who resorts to it again and again. In reference to the Australians he cites what Edward Stephens wrote regarding the former inhabitants of the Adelaide Plains : " Those who speak of the natives as a naturally degraded race, either do not speak from experience, or they judge them by what they have become when the abuse of intoxi- cants and contact with the most wicked of the white race have begun their deadly work. As a rule to which there are no exceptions, if a tribe of blacks is found away from the white settlement,' the more vicious of the white men are most anxious to make the acquaintance of the natives, and that, too, solely for purposes of immorality. ... I saw the natives and was much with them before those dreadful im- moralities were well known . . . and I say it fearlessly, that nearly all their evils they owed to' the white man's im- morality and to the white man's drink." Now the first question a conscientious truth-seeker feels in- clined to ask regarding this " fearless " Stephens who thus boldly accuses of ignorance all those who hold that the Aus- ABORIGINAL HORRORS 433 tralian race was degraded before it came in contact with, whites, is, ""Who is he and what are his qualifications for serv- ing as a witness in this matter ? " He is, or was, a simple- minded settler, kindly no doubt, who for some inscrutable reason was allowed to contribute a paper to the Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales (Vol. XXXIII.). His qualifications for appearing as an expert in Australian anthro- pology may be inferred from various remarks in his paper. He naively tells a story about a native who killed an opos- sum, and after eating the meat, threw the intestines to his wife. " Ten years before that," he adds, " that same man would have treated his wife as himself." Yet we have just seen that all the explorers, in all parts of the country, found that the natives who had never seen a white man treated their women like slaves and dogs. ABOKIGINAL HOEEOES If the savage learned his wantonness from the whites, did he get all his other vicious habits from the same source ? We know on the best authorities that the disgusting practice of cannibalism prevailed extensively among the natives. " They eat the young men when they die, and the young women if they are fat " (Curr, III., 147). Lumholtz entitled his book on Australia Among Cannibals. The Eev. Gr. Taplin says (XV.) : " Among the Dieyerie tribe cannibalism is the universal practice, and all who die are indiscriminately devoured . . . the mother eats the flesh of her children, and the children that of their mother," etc. " If a man had a fat wife," says the same writer (2), " he was always partic- ularly careful not to leave her unprotected, lest she might be seized by prowling cannibals." Among the wilder tribes few women are allowed to die a natural death, " they being generally despatched ere they be.^ome old and emaciated, that so much good food may not be lost."' Would the "fear- less" Stephens say that the natives learned these practices from the whites ? Would he say they learned from the • Trans. Ethn. Soc, New Ser., IIL, 248, 388 ; cited by Spencer, J). S., 36. 434 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE whites the " universal custom ... to slay every unpro- tected male stranger met with " (Curr, I., 133) ? "Infanticide is very common^ and appears to be practised solely to get rid of the trouble of rearing children," wrote Eyre (II., 324). Curr (I., 76) heard that " some tribes within the area of the Central Division cut off the nipples of the females' breasts, in some instances, for the purpose of render- ing their rearing of children impossible." On the Mitchell Eiver, " children were killed for the most trivial offences, such as for accidentally breaking a weapon as they trotted about the camp " (Curr, II., 403). Twins are destroyed in South Australia, says Leigh (159), and if the mother dies "they throw the living infant into the grave, while infanticide is an every-day occurrence." Curr (I., 70) believes that the aver- age number of children borne by each woman was six, the max- imum ten ; but of all these only two boys and one girl as a rule were kept, "the rest were destroyed immediately after birth," as we destroy litters of puppies. Sometimes the in- fants were smothered over a fire (Waitz, VI., 779), and de- formed children were always killed. Taplin (13) writes that before his colony was established among them infanticide was very prevalent among the natives. " One intelligent woman said she thought that if the Europeans had waited a few more years they would have found the country without in- habitants." Strangulation, a blow of the waddy, or filling the ears with red hot embers, were the favorite ways of killing their own babies. Did the whites teach the angelic savages all these diabolical customs ? If so, they must have taught them customs in- vented for the occasion, since they are not practised by whites in any part of the world. But perhaps Stephens would have been willing to waive this point. Sentimentalists are usually more or less willing to concede that savages are devils in most things if we will only admit in return that they are angels in their sexual relations. For instance, if we may believe Stephens, no nun was ever more modest than the native Aus- tralian woman. Once, he says, he was asked to visit a poor old blaeji woman in the last stages of consumption : NAKED AND NOT ASHAMED 425 " Her case was hopeless, and when she was in almost the last agony of mortal dissolution I was astounded at her ef- forts at concealment, indicative of extreme modesty. As I drew her opossum rug over her poor emaciated body the look of gratitude which came from her dying eyes told me in language more eloquent than words that beneath that dark and dying exterior there was a soul which in a few hours angels would delight to honor," The poor woman was probably cold and glad to be covered ; if she had any modesty regarding exposure of the body she could have learned it from no one but the dreadful, degraded whites, for the Australian himself is an utter stranger to such a feeling. On this point the explorers and students of the natives are unanimous. Both men and women went absolutely naked except in those regions where the climate was cold. NAKED AND NOT ASHAMED " They are as innocent of shame as the animals of the for- est," says E. Palmer ; and J. Bonwick writes : " Nakedness is no shame with them. As a French writer once remarked to a lady, 'With a pair of gloves you could clothe six men.'" Even ornaments are worn by the men only : " females are content with their natural charms." W. E. Eoth, in his standard work on the Queensland natives, says that " with both sexes the privates are only covered on special public oc- casions, or when in close proximity to white settlements." With the Warburton River tribe (Curr, II., 18) "the women go quite naked, and the men have only a belt made of human hair round the waist from which a fringe spun of hair of rats hangs in front." Sturt wrote (I., 106): "The men are much better looking than the women ; both go perfectly naked." At the dances a covering of feathers or leaves is sometimes worn by the women, but is removed as soon as the dance is over. Narrinyeri girls, says Taplin (15), "wear a sort of apron of fringe, called Kaininggi, until they bear their first child. If they have no children it is taken from them and 436 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE burned by their husbands while they are asleep." Meyer (189) says the same of the Encounter Bay tribe, and similar customs prevailed at Port Jackson and many other places. Summing up the observations of Cook, Turnbull, Cunning- ham, Tench, Hunter, and others. Waltz remarks (VI., 737) : " In the region of Sydney, too, the natives used to be entirely nude, and as late as 1816 men would go about the streets of Paramatta and Sydney naked, despite many prohibitions and attempts to clothe them, which always failed"— so ingrained was the absence of shame in the native mind. Jackman, the " Australian Captive," an Englishman who spent seventeen months among the natives, describes them as being " as nude as Adam and Eve" (99). "The Australians' utter lack of modesty is remarkable," writes F. Miiller (307) ; "it reveals itself in the way in which their clothes are worn. While an attempt is made to cover the upper, especially the back part of the body, the private parts are often left uncovered." One early explorer, Sturt (II., 136), found the natives of the interior, without exception, "in a complete state of nu- dity." The still earlier Grovernor Philipps (1787) found that the in- habitants of New South Wales had no idea that one part of the body ought to be covered more than any other. Captain Flinders, who saw much of Australia in 1795, speaks in one place (I., 66) of "the short skin cloak which is of kangaroo, and worn over the shoulders, leaving the rest of the body naked." This was in New South Wales. At Keppel Bay (II., 30) he writes: "These people ... go entirely naked ; " and so on at other points of the continent touched on his voyage. In Dawson (61) we read : " They were per- fectly naked, as they always are." Nor has the Australian in his native state changed in the century or more since whites have known him. In the latest book on Central Australia (1899) by Spencer and Gillen we read (17) that to this day a native woman " with nothing on except an ancient straw hat and an old pair of boots is perfectly happy." IS CIVILIZATION DEMORALIZING? 427 IS CIVILIZATION DEMORALIZING? The reader is now in a position to judge of the reliability of the " fearless" Stephens as a witness, and of the blind bias of the anthropologist who uses him as such. It surely ought not to be necessary to proVe that races among whom cannibalism, infanticide, wife enslavement and murder, and other hideous crimes are rampant as unreproved national cus- toms, could not possibly be refined and moral in their sexual relations, which ofEer the greatest of all temptations to unre- strained selfishness. Yet Stephens tells us in his article that before the advent of the whites these people were chaste, and "conjugal infidelity was almost if not entirely unknown;" while Westermarck (61, 64, 65) classes the Australians with those savages " among whom sexual intercourse out of wed- lock is of rare occurrence." On page 70 he declares that " in a savage condition of life . . . there is compara- tively little reason for illegitimate relations ; " and on page 539, in summing up his doctrines, he asserts that " we have some reason to believe that irregular connections between the sexes have, on the whole, exhibited a tendency to increase along with the progress of civilization." The refutation of this libel on civilization — which is widely believed — is one of the main objects of the following pages — is, in fact, one of the main objects of this whole volume. There are a few cities iii Southern Europe, where the rate of illegitimacy equals, and in one or two cases slightly ex- ceeds, the legitimate births ; but that is owing to the fact that betrayed girls from the country nearly always go to the cities to find a refuge and hide their shame. Taking the countries as a whole we find that even Scotland, which has always had a somewhat unsavory reputation in this respect, had, in 1897, only 6.98 per cent, of illegitimate births — say seven in a hundred ; the highest rate since 1855 having been 10.3. There are, of course, besides this, cases of uncertain paternity, but their number is comparatively small, and it certainly is much larger in the less civilized countries of Europe than in 438 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE the more civilized. Taking the five or six most advanced countries of Europe and America, it is safe to say that the paternity is certain in ninety cases out of a hundred. If we now look at the Australians as described by eye-witnesses since the earliest exploring tours, we find a state of afEairs which makes paternity uncertain in all cases without excep- tion, and also a complete indifference on the subject. ABOEIGINAL WAKTONNESS One of the first explorers of the desert interior was Eyre (1839). His experiences— covering ten years — led him to speak (378) of " the illicit and almost unlimited intercourse between the sexes." " Marriage is not looked upon as any pledge of chastity ; indeed, no such virtue is recognized " (319). " Many of the native dances are of a grossly licentious character." Men rarely get married before they are twenty- five, but that does not mean that they are continent. From their thirteenth year they have promiscuous intercourse with girls who abandon themselves at the age of ten, though they rarely become mothers before they are sixteen.* Another early explorer of the interior (1839), T. L. Mitchell, gives this glimpse of aboriginal morality (I., 133) ; " The natives ... in return for our former disinter- ested kindness, persisted in their endeavors to introduce us very particularly to their women. They ordered them to come up, divested of their cloaks and bags, and placed them before us. Most of the men appeared to possess two, the pair in general consisting of a fat plump gin and one much younger. Each man placed himself before his gins, and bowing forward with a shrug, the hands and arms being thrown back pointing to each gin, as if to say. Take which you please. The females, on their part, evinced no appre- hension, but seemed to regard us as beings of a race so differ- ' He adds in a foot-note (320) : "Foeminse sese per totam psene vitam prosti- tuunt. Apud pluriznas tribuB juventutem utriusque Bexus sine discrimine con- cumbere in usu est. Si juvenis forte iudigeuorum coetum quendam in castris' manentem adveniat ubi qusevis sit puella innupta, mos est nocte reniente et cubaatibua omnibus, illam ex looo exsnrgere et juvenem accedentem cum illo per noctem manere unde in sedem propriam ,ante diem redit. Cui femina est, earn amicis libenter prsebet." ABORIGINAL WANTONNESS 429 ent, withont the slightest indication of either fear, aversion, or sarprise. Their looks were rather expressive of a ready acquiescence in the proffered kindness of the men, and •when at length they brought a sable nymph vis-a-vis to Mr. White, I could preserve my gravity no longer, and throwing the spears aside, I ordered the bullock-drivers to proceed." George Grey, who, during his two exploring expeditions into Northwestern and Western Australia, likewise came in contact with the " uncontaminated " natives, found that, though "a spear through the calf of the leg is the least punishment that awaits" a faithless wife if detected, and sometimes the death-penalty is inflicted, yet "the younger women were much addicted to intrigue" (I., ^31, 253), as indeed they appear to be throughout the continent, as we shall see presently. Of all Australian institutions none is more characteristic than the corrobborees or nocturnal dances which are held at intervals by the various tribes all over the continent, and were of course held centuries before a white man was ever seen on the continent ; and no white man in his wildest nightmare ever dreamt of such scenes as are enacted at them. They are given preferably by moonlight, are apt to last all night, and are often attended by the most obscene and licentious prac- tices. The corrobboree, says Curr (I., 93), was undoubtedly " often an occasion of licentiousness and atrocity " ; flghts, even wars, ensue, "and almost invariably as the result of outrages on women." The songs heard at these revels are sometimes harmless and the dances not indecent, says the Kev. G. Taplin (37), "but at other times the songs will con- sist of the vilest obscenity. I have seen dances which were the most disgusting displays of obscene gesture possible to be imagined, and although I stood in the dark alone, and no- body knew I was there, I felt ashamed to look upon such abominations. . . . The dances of the women are very immodest and lewd." John Mathew (in Curr, III., 168) testifies regarding the corrobborees of the Mary River tribes that " the representations were rarely free from obscenity, and on 430 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE some occasions indecent gestures were the main parts of the action. I have seen a structure formed of huge forked sticks placed upright in the ground, the forks upward, with sap- lings reaching from fork to fork, and boughs laid over all. This building was part of the machinery for a corrobboree, at a certain stage of which the males, who were located on the roof, rushed down among the females, who were underneath, and handled them licentiously." ' LOWER THAN BRUTES The lowest depth of aboriginal degradation remains to be sounded. Like most of the Africans, Australians are lower than animals inasmuch as they often do not wait till girls have reached the age of puberty. Meyer (190) says of the Narrinyeri : " They are given in marriage at a very early age (ten or twelve years)." Lindsay Cranford' testifies regard- ing five South Australian tribes that "at puberty no girl, with- out exception, is a virgin." With the Paroo Kiver tribes " the girls became wives whilst mere children, and mothers at fourteen " (Curr, II., 183). Of other tribes Curr's corre- spondents write (107) : " Girls become wives at from eight to fourteen years." " One often sees a child of eight the wife of a man of fifty." " Girls are promised to men in infancy, become wives at about ten years of age, and mothers at four- teen or fifteen " (342). The Birria tribe waits a few years longer, but atones for this by a resort to another crime : " Males and females are married at from fourteen to sixteen, but are not allowed to rear children until they get to be about thirty years of age ; hence infanticide is general." The mis- sionary 0. W. Schiirmann says of the Port Lincoln tribe (233) : ■ p. Miiller (212-13) gives the details of West Australian corrobborees which are too obscene to be cited here. See also the testimony in Hellwald (134-35) based on the observations of Oldfield, Kdler, M'Combie, etc., and a number of other authorities cited by Waitz-Gerland, VI., 754-55. Curr says (I., 128) that at the corrobborees men of different tribes lend their wives to each other. ■'Journal Anthrop. Inst.. XXIV., 169. See also Waitz. VI., 774; Macgilli- vray, II. , 8 ; Hasskarl, 82. They have a peculiar rattle with mystic sculpturing, and Eyre says that its sound libertatem coeundi juventuti esse turn concessam omnibus indicat. Maclennan (287) cites G. S. Lang, who cites the fact that the old men get most of the young women. Connubium profecto valde est liberum. Conjuges, pnellse, puellulm cum adolesceutibus venantur. Pretium corporis poene nullius est. Vendunt se vel columbss vel canis vel piscis pretio. Inter Anglos et aborigines nihil distat. INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY 431 " Notwithstanding the early marriage of females, I have not observed that they have children at an earlier age than is common among Europeans.' Of York district tribes we are told (I., 343) that "girls are betrothed shortly after birth, and brutalities are practised on them while mere children." Of the Kojonub tribe (348) : " Girls are promised in marriage soon after birth, and given over to their husbands at about nine years of age." Of the Natingero tribe (380) : " The girls go to live with their husbands at from seven to ten years, and suffer dreadfully from intercourse." Of the Yircla Meen- ing tribe (403) : " Females become wives at ten and mothers at twelve years of age." "Mr. J. M. Davis and others of repute declare, as a result of long acquaintance with Austra- lian savages, that the girls were made use of for promiscu- ous intercourse when they were only nine or ten years old." (Sutherland, I., 113.) It is needless to continue this painful catalogue. INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY Eyre's assertion regarding chastity, that "no such virtue is recognized," has already been quoted, and is borne out by testimony of many other writers. In the Dieyerie tribe " each married woman is permitted a paramour." (Curr, II., 46.) Taplin says of the Narrinyeri (16, 18) that boys are not al- lowed to ma-rry until their beard has grown a certain length ; " but they are allowed the abomijiable privilege of promiscu- ous intercourse with the younger portion of the other sex." A.W. Howitt describes* a strange kind of group marriage prevalent among the Dieri and kindred tribes, the various couples being allotted to each other by the council of elder men without themselves being consulted as to their prefer- ences. During the ensuing festivities, however, "there is for about four hours a general license in camp as regards " the couples thus "married." Meyer (191) says of the En counter Bay tribes that if a man from another tribe arrives having anything which a native desires to purchase, " he per- > Journal Anthrop. Inst., XX., 53. 432 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE haps makes a bargain to pay by letting him have one of his wives for a longer or shorter period." Angas (I., 93) refers to the custom of lending wives. In Victoria the natives have a special name for the custom of lending one of their wives to young men who have none. Sometimes they are thus lent for a month at a time.' As we shall presently see, one reason why Australian men marry is to have the means of making friends by lending their wives to others. The custom of allowing friends to share the husband's privileges was also widely prevalent. In New South Wales and about Eiverinaj says Brough Smyth (II., 316), " in any instance where the abduction [of a woman] has taken place by a party of men for the benefit of some one individual, each of the members of the party claims, as a right, a privilege which the intended husband has no power to refuse." Curr informs us (I., 138) that if a woman resist her husband's orders to give herself up to an- other man she is " either speared or cruelly beaten." Fison (303) believes that the lending of wives to visitors was looked on not as a favor but a duty — a right which the visitor could claim ; and Howitt showed that in the native gesture lan- guage there was a special sign for this custom — "a peculiar folding of the hands," indicating " either a request or an offer, according as it is used by the guest or the host." Con- cerning Queensland tribes Eoth says (182) : " If an aboriginal requires a woman temporarily for venery he either borrows a wife from her husband for a night or two in exchange for boomerangs, a shield, food, etc., or else vio- lates the female when unprotected, when away from the camp out in the bush. In the former case the husband looks upon the matter as a point of honor to oblige his friend, the great- est compliment that can be paid him, provided that permis- sion is previously asked. On the other hand, were he to refuse he has the fear hanging over him that the petitioner might get a death-bone pointed at him — and so, after all, his apparent courtesy may be only Hobson's choice. In the latter ' Revue d'Anthropologie, 1883, p. 376. 'A. W. Howitt, Jdur. Anthr. Inst., XX., 60^1. Fison and Ho-witt, 389; Smithsonian Reports, 1883, p. 67. Details aie given which cannot be repro- duced here. Boys participate in these orgies. USELESS PRECAUTIONS 433 case, if a married woman, and she tells her husband, she gets a hammering, and should she disclose the delinquent, there will probably be a fight, and hence she usually keeps her mouth shut ; if a single woman, or of any pasdomatronym other than his own, no one troubles himself about the matter. On the other hand, death by the spear or club is the punish- ment invariably inflicted by the camp council collectively for criminally assaulting any blood relative, group-sister (i.e., a female member of the same paedomatronym) or young woman that has not yet been initiated into the first degree." The last sentence would indicate that these tribes are not so indifferent to chastity as the other natives ; but the infor- mation given by Roth (who for three years was surgeon- general to the Boulia, Oloncnrry and Normanton hospitals) dispels such an illusion most radically.' USELESS PRECAUTIONS In Central Australia, says H. Kempe,' " there is no sepa- ration of the sexes in social life ; in the daily camp routine as well as at festivals all the natives mingle as they choose." Curr asserts (I., 109) that " in most tribes a woman is not al- lowed to converse or have any relations whatever with any adult male, save her husband. Even with a grown-up brother she is almost forbidden to exchange a word." Grey (II., 255) found that at dances the females sat in groups apart and the young men were never allowed to approach them and not permitted to hold converse with any one except their mother or sisters. " On no occasion," he adds, " is a strange native allowed to approach the fire of the married." " The young men and boys of ten years of age and upward are obliged to sleep in their portion of the encampment." From such testimony one might infer that female chastity ' The details given by Both are too disgusting for reproduction here. They vie with the loaithsome practices of the Kaffirs and the most debauched Roman emperors, while some of them are so vile that it seems as if they could have been suggested only by the diseased brain of an erotomaniac. The most de- graded white criminal that ever took up his abode among savages would turn away from them with horror and nausea, yet we are asked to believe that the savages learned all their vices from the whites ! ' MUtheil. des Ver. fur Erdkunde au Halle, 1883, 54. 434 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE is successfully guarded ; but the writers quoted themselves take care to dispel that illusion. Grey tells us that (in spite of these arrangements) "the young females are much ad- dicted to intrigue ; " and again (348) : " Should a female be possessed of considerable personal attractions, the first years of her life must necessarily be very unhappy. In her early infancy she is betrothed to some man, even at this period advanced in years, and by whom, as she approaches the age of puberty, she is watched with a degree of vigilance and care, which increases in proportion to the disparity of years between them ; it is probably from this circumstance that so many of them are addicted to intrigues, in which if they are detected by their husbands, death or a spear through some portion of the body is their certain fate." And Curr shows in the following (109) how far the at- tempts at seclusion are from succeeding in enforcing chastity : " Notwithstanding the savage jealousy, varied ly occasional degrading complaisance on the part of the husband, there is more or less intrigue in every camp ; and the husband usually assumes that his wife has been unfaithful to him whenever there has been an opportunity for criminality, ... In some tribes the husband will frequently prostitute his wife to his brother ; otherwise rnore commonly to strangers visit- ing his tribe than to his own people, and in this way our exploring parties have been troubled with proposals of the sort." Apart from the other facts here given, the words I have italicized above would alone show that what makes an Austra- lian in some instances guard his females is not a regard for chastity, or jealousy in our sense of the word, but simply a desire to preserve his movable property — a slave and concu- bine who, if young or fat, is very liable to be stolen or, on account of the bad treatment she receives from her old mas- ter, to run away with a younger man.' , ' Westermarck overlooks these vital facts when he calmly assumes (64, 65) that the guarding of girls, or punishment of intruders, argues a regard for chastity. His entire ignoring or the superabundant and unimpeachable testi- mony proving the contrary is extraordinary, to put it mildly. Dawson's asser- tion (.'53) that "illegitimacy is rare" and the mother severely punished, which Westermarck cites (65), is as foolish as most of the gossip printed by that utterly untrustworthy writer. As the details given in these pages regarding SURVIVALS OF PROMISCUITY 435 If any further evidence were needed on this head it would be supplied by the authoritative statement of J. D. Wood ' that "In fact, chastity as a virtue is absolutely unknown amongst all the tribes of which there are records. The buy- ing, taking, or stealing of a wife is not at all influenced by considerations of antecedent purity on the part of the woman. A man wants a wife and he obtains one somehow. She is his slave and there the matter ends." SURVIVALS OF PEOMISCUITT Since this chapter was written a new book on Australia has appeared which bears out the views here taken so admirably that I must insert a brief reference to its contents. It is Spencer and Gillen's The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), and relates to nine tribes over whom Baldwin Spencer had been placed as special magistrate and sub-protector for some years, during which he had excellent opportunities to study their customs. The authors tell us (62, 63) that "In the Urabunna tribe every woman is the special Nupa of one particular man, but at the same time he has no exclu- sive right to her, as she is the Piraungaru of certain other men who also have the right of access to her. . . . There is no such thing as one man having the exclusive right to one woman. . . . Individual marriage does not exist either in name or in practice in the Urabunna tribe." " Oc- casionally, but rarely, it happens that a man attempts to pre- vent his wife's Piraungaru from having access to her, but this leads to a fight, and the husband is looked upon as churl- ish. When visiting distant groups where, in all likelihood, the husband has no Piraungaru, it is customary for other licentiousnesB before marriage and wife-lending after it show, there is no pos- sible way of proving illegitimacy unless tlie child has a white father. In that case it is killed ; but that is nothing remarkable, as the Australians kill most of their children anyway. That a regard for chastity or fidelity has nothing to do with these actions is proved by the fact cited from Curr (I., 110) by Wester- marck himself (on another page — 131 — of course !) that "husbands display much less jealousy of white men than of those of their own color," and that they will more commonly prostitute their wives to strangers visiting the tribe than to their own people. I have no doubt that the simple reason of this is that the whites are better able to pay, in rum and trinkets. ■ South Australia, Adelaide, 1894, p. 403. The part author, part editor of this valuable book is not to be confounded with J. S. Wood, the compiler of the Natural History of Man. 436 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE men of his own class to offer him the loan of one or more of their Nupa women, and a man, besides lending a woman over whom he has the first right, will also lend his Piraungaru." In the Arnnta tribe there is a restriction of a particular woman to a particular man, " or rather, a man has an exclu- sive right to one special woman, though he may of his own free will lend her to other men," provided they stand in a certain artificial relation to her (74). However (92) : " Whilst under ordinary circumstances in the Arunta and other tribes one man is only allowed to have marital relations with women of a particular class, there are customs which allow at certain times of a man having such relations with women to whom at other times he would not on any account be allowed to have access. We find, indeed, that this holds true in the case of all the nine different tribes with the mar- riage customs of which we _ are acquainted, and in which a woman becomes the private property of one man." In the southern Arunta, after a certain ceremony has been performed, the bride is brought back to camp and given to her special Unawa. " That night he lends her to one or two men who are unawa to her, and afterward she belongs to him exclusively." At this time when a woman is being, so to speak, handed over to one particular individual, special individuals with whom at ordinary times she may have no intercourse, have the right of access to her. Such customs our authors interpret plausibly as partial promis- cuity pointing to a time when still greater laxity prevailed — suggesting rudimentary organs in animals (96). Among some tribes at corrobboree time, every day two or three women are told off and become the property of all the men on the corrobboree grounds, excepting fathers, brothers, or sons. Thus there are three stages of individual owner- ship in women : In the first, whilst the man has exclusive right to a woman, he can and does lend her to certain other men ; in the second there is a wider relation in regard to particular men at the time of marriage ; and in the third a still wider relation to all men except the nearest relatives, at corrobboree time. Only in the first of these cases can we ABORIGINAL DEPRAVITY 437 properly speak of wife "lending"; in the other cases the individuals have no choice and cannot withhold their con- sent, the matter being of a public or tribal nature. As re- gards the corrobborees, it is supposed to be the duty of every man at different times to send his wife to the ground, and the most striking feature in regard to it is that the first man who has access to her is the very one to whom, under normal conditions, she is most strictly taboo, her Mura. [All women whose daughters are eligible as wives are mura to a man.] Old and young men alike must give up their wives on these occasions. " It is a custom of ancient date which is sanctioned by public opinion, and to the performance of which neither men nor women concerned offer any opposition " (98). ABOKIGINAL DEPEAVITT These revelations of Spencer and Gillen, taken in connec- tion with the abundant evidence I have cited from the works of edrly explorers as to the utter depravity of the aboriginal Australian when first seen by white men, will make it impos- sible hereafter for anyone whose reasoning powers exceed a native Australian's to maintain that it was the whites who cor- rupted these savages. It takes an exceptionally shrewd white man even to unravel the customs of voluntary or obligatory wife sharing or lending which prevail in all parts of Australia, and which must have required not only hundreds but thou- sands of years to assume their present extraordinarily com- plex aspect ; customs which form part and parcel of the very life of Australians and which represent the lowest depths of sexual depravity, since they are utterly incompatible with chastity, fidelity, legitimacy, or anything else we understand by sexual morality. In some cases, no doubt, contact with the low whites and their liquor aggravated these evils by fos- tering professional prostitution and making men even more ready than before to treat their wives as merchandise. Lum- holtz, who lived several years among these savages, makes this admission (345), but at the same time he is obliged to join all the other witnesses in declaring that apart from this 438 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE '• there is not much to be said of the morals of the blacks, for I am sorry to say they have none." On a previous page (43) I cited Sutherland's summary of a report of the House of Commons (1844, 350 pages), which shows that the Australian native, as found by the first white visitors, manifested " an absolute incapacity to form even a rudimentary notion of chastity." The same writer, who was born and brought up in Australia, says (I., 121) : " In almost every case the father or husband will dispose of the girl's virtue for a small price. When white men came they found these habits prevailing. The overwhelming testimony proves it absurd to say that they demoralized the unsophisticated savages." And again (I., 186), " It is untrue that in sexual license the savage has ever anything to learn. In almost every tribe there are pol- lutions deeper than any I have thought it necessary to men- tion, and all that the lower fringe of civilized men can do to harm the uncivilized is to stoop to the level of the latter, in- stead of teaching them a better way." * THE QUESTION Or PROMISCUITY As regards the promiscuity question, Spencer and Gillen's observations go far to confirm some of the seemingly fantastic speculations regarding " a thousand miles of wives," and so on, contained in the volume of Pison and Howitt, ^ and to make it probable that unregulated intercourse was the state of primitive man at a stage of evolution earlier than any known to us now. Since the appearance of Westermarck's History of Human Marriage it has become the fashion to re- ' See also the account he gives (I., 180) of the report as to aboriginal morals made in the early days of Victoria by a commission of fourteen settlers, mission- aries, and protectors of the aborigines. The explorer Sturt (I., 316) even found that the natives became indignant if the whites rejected their addresses. ' See also a very important paper on this subject by Howitt in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. XX., 1890, demonstrating that "in Aus- tralia at the present day group marriage does exist in a well-marked form, which is evidently only the modified survival of a still more complete social commun- ism " (104). Regarding the manner in which group marriage ^adually passed into individual proprietorship, a suggestive hint may be found in this sentence from Brough Smyth (II., 316) : When women are carried off from another tribe, " they are common property till they are gradually annexed by the best war- riors of the tribe." THE QUESTION OF PROMISCUITY 439 gard the theory of promiscuity as disproved. Alfred Eussell Wallace, in his preface to this book, expresses his opinion that "independent thinkers " will agree with its author on most of the points wherein he takes issue with his famous pre- decessors, including Spencer, Morgan, Lubbock, and others. Ernst Grosse, in a volume which the president of the German Anthropological Society pronounced " epoch-making " — Die Formen der Familie — refers (43) to Westermarck's "very thorough refutation " of this theory, which he stigmatizes as one of the blunders of the unfledged science of sociology which it will be best to forget as soon as possible ; adding that " Westermarck's best weapons were, however, forged by Starcke." In a question like this, however, two independent observers are worth more than two hundred " independent thinkers." Spencer and Gillen are eye-witnesses, and they inform us re- peatedly (100, 105, 108, 111) that "Westermarck's objections to the theory of promiscuity do not stand the test of facts and that none of his hypotheses explains away the customs which point to a former prevalence of promiscuity. They have ab- solutely disproved his assertion (539) that " it is certainly not among the lowest peoples that sexual relations most nearly approach promiscuity." Cunow, who, as Grosse admits (50), has written the most thorough and authentic monograph on the complicated family relationship of Australia, devotes two pages (122-23) to exposing some of Westermarck's argu- ments, which, as he shows, " border on the comic." I myself have in this chapter, as well as in those on Africans, Ameri- can Indians, South Sea Islanders, etc., revealed the comic- ality of the assertion that there is in a savage condition of life " comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations," which forms one of the main props of Westermarck's anti-promis- cuity theory ; and I have also reduced ad absurdum his sys- tematic overrating of savages in the matter of liberty of choice, esthetic taste and capacity for afEection which re- sulted from his pet theory and marred his whole book.' > In my mind the strongest argument agamst Westennarck's views as regards promiscnity is that all ms tributary theories, so to speak, which I have had 440 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE It is interesting to note that Darwin {D. M., Ch. XX.) con> eluded from the facts known to him that " almost promis- cuous intercourse or very loose intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world : " and the only thing that seemed to deter him from believing in absolutely pro- miscuous intercourse was the "strength of the feeling of jealousy." Had he lived to understand the true nature of savage jealousy explained in this volume and to read the revelations of Spencer and Gillen, that difficulty would have vanished. On this point, too, their remarks are of great im- portance, fully bearing out the view set forth in my chapter on jealousy. They declare (99) that they did not find sexual jealousy specially developed : " For a man to have unlawful intercourse with any woman arouses a feeling which is due not so much to jealousy as to the fact that the delinquent has infringed a tribal custom. If the intercourse has been with a woman who belongs to the class from which his wife comes, then he is called atna nylkna (which, literally translated, is vulva thief) ; if with one with whom it is unlawful for him to have intercourse, then he is called iturka, the most opprobrious term in the Arunta language. In the one case he has merely stolen prop- erty,, in the other he has offended against tribal law." Jealousy, they sum up, " is indeed a factor which need not be taken into serious account in regard to the question of sexual relations amongst the Central Australian tribes." The customs described by these authors show, moreover, that these savages do not allow jealousy to stand in the loay of sexual communism, a man who refuses to share his wife being considered churlish, in one class of cases, while in an- other no choice is allowed him, the matter being arranged by occasion to examine in this volume have proved so utterly inconsistent with facta. The question of promiscuity itself I cannot examine in detail here, as it hardly comes within the scope of this book. . In view of the confusion Wester- marck has already created in recent scientific literature by his specious plead- ing, I need not apologize for the frequency of my polemics against him. His imposing erudition and his cleverness in juggling with facts by ignoring those that do not please him (as, e. a., in case of the morality of the Kaflflrs and Aus- traUans, and the " liberty of choice" of their women) make him a serious obsta- cle to the investigation of the truth regarding man's sexual history, wherefore it is necessary to expose his errors promptly and thoroughly. WHY DO AUSTRALIANS MARRY? 441 the tribe. This point has not heretofore heen sufficiently emphasized. It knocks away one of the strongest props of the anti-promiscnity theory, and it is supported by the re- marks of Howitt,' who, after explaining how, among the Dieri, couples are chosen by headmen without consulting their wishes, — new allotments being made at each circumcision cere- mony — and how the dance is followed by a general license, goes on to relate that all these matters are carefully arranged so as to prevent jealousy. Sometimes this passion breaks out nevertheless, leading to bloody quarrels ; but the main point is that systematic efEorts are made to suppress jealousy : " No jealous feeling is allowed to be shown during this time under penalty of strangling." "Whence we may fairly infer that under more primitive conditions the individual was al- lowed still less right to assert jealous claims of individual Australian jealousy presents some other interesting aspects, but we shall be better able to appreciate them if we first con- sider why a native ever puts himself into a position where jealous watchfulness of private property is called for. WHY DO AUSTRALIANS MAKBT ? Since chastity among the young of both sexes is not held of any account, and since the young girls, who are married to men four or five times their age, are always ready for an intrigue with a young bachelor, why does an Australian ever marry ? He does not marry for love, for, as this whole chapter proves, he is incapable of such a sentiment. His appetites need not urge him to marry, since there are so many ways of appeasing them outside of matrimony. He does not marry to enjoy a monopoly of a woman's favors, since he is ready to share them with others. "Why then does he marry ? One reason may be that, as the men get older (they seldom marry before they are twenty-five or even thirty), they have less relish for the dan- gers connected with woman-stealing and intrigues. A sec- > Jburn. Anthrop. Inst, 1890, 53. 442 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE ond reason is indicated in Howitt's explanation {Jour. Anthr. Inst., XX., 58), that it is an advantage to an Australian to liave as many wives as possiWe, as they work and hunt for him, and "he also obtains great influence in the tribe by lending them his Piraurus occasionally, and receiving presents from the young men." The main reason, howevet, why an Australian marries is in order that he may have a drudge. I have previously cited Eyre's statement that the natives " value a wife principally as a slave ; in fact, when asked why they are anxious to obtain wives, their usual reply is, that they may get wood, water, and food for them, and carry whatever property they possess." H. Kempe {loc. cit., 55) says that "if there are plenty of girls they are married as early as possible (at the age of eight to ten), as far as possible to one and the same man, for as it is the duty of the women to provide food, a man who has sev- eral wives can enjoy his leisure the more thoroughly." And Lindsay Cranford testifies {Jour. Anthrop. Inst., XXIV., 181) regarding the Victoria River natives that, " after about thirty years of age a man is allowed to have as many women as he likes, and the older he gets the younger the girls are that he gets, probably to work and get food for him, for in their wild state the man is too proud to do anything except carry a woomera and spear." Under these circumstances it is needless to say that there is not a trace of romance connected with an Australian mar- riage. After a man has secured his girl, she quietly submits and goes with him as his wife and drudge, to build his camp, gather firewood, fetch water, niake nets, clear away grass, dig roots, fish for mussels, be his baggage mule on journeys, etc. (Brough Smyth, 84) ; and Eyre (XL, 319) thus completes the picture. There is, he says, no marriage ceremony : " In those cases where I have witnessed the giving away of a wife, the woman was simply ordered by the nearest male relative in whose disposal she was, to take up her ' rocko,' the bag in which a female carries the effects of her husband, and go to the man's camp to whom she had been given." CURIOSITIES OF JEALOUSY 443 CURIOSITIES OF JEALOUSY Thus the woman becomes the man's slave — ^his property in every sense of the word. No matter how he obtained her — by capture, elopement, or exchange for another woman — she is his own, as much as his spear or his boomerang. " The husband is the absolute owner of the wife," saysCurr(I., 109). To cite Eyre once more (318) : " JTives are considered the absolute property of the husband, and can be given away, or exchanged, or lent, according to his caprice. A husband is denominated in the Adelaide dialect, Yongarra, Martanya (the owner or proprietor of a wife)." A whole chapter in sociology is sometimes summed up in a word, as we see in this case. Another instance is the word gramma, concerning which we read in Lumholtz (136) : " The robbery of women, who also among these savages are regarded as a man's most valuable property, is both the gross- est and the most common theft ; for it is the usual way of getting a wife. Hence woman is the chief cause of disputes. Inchastity, which is called gramma, i.e., to steal, also falls under the head of theft." Here we have a simple and concise explanation of Austra- lian jealousy. The native knows jealousy in its crudest form — that of mere animal rage at being prevented by a rival from taking immediate possession of the object of his desire. He knows also the jealousy of property — i.e., revenge for in- fringement on it. Of this it is needless to give examples. But he knows not true jealousy — i.e., anxious concern for his wife's chastity and fidelity, since he is always ready to barter these things for a trifle. Proofs of this have already been adduced in abundance. Here is another authoritative state- ment by the missionary Schiirmann, who writes (223) : " The loose practices of the aborigines, with regard to the sanctity of matrimony, form the worst trait in their character ; al- though the men are capable of fierce jealousy if their wives transgress unknown to them, yet they frequently send them 444 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE out to other parties, or exchange with a friend for a night ; and, as for near relatives, such as brothers, it may almost be said that they have their wives in common." An incident related by W. H. Leigh (153) shows in a start- ling way that among the Australians jealousy means nothing more than a desire for revenge because of infringement on property rights : " A chief discovered that one of his wives had been sinning, and called a council, at which it was decided that the crim- inal should be sacrificed, or the adulterous chief give a victim to appease the wrathful husband. This was agreed to and he gave one of Ms wives, who was immediately escorted to the side of the river . . . and there the ceremony was preluded by a war-song, and the enraged chief rushed upon the innocent and unfortunate victim — bent down her head upon, her chest, whilst another thrust the pointed bone of a kangaroo under her left rib, and drove it upwards into her heart. The shrieks of the poor wretch brought down to the spot many colonists, who arrived in time only to see the con- clusion of the horrid spectacle. After they had buried the bone in her body they took their glass-pointed spears and tore her entrails out, and finally fractured her skull with their waddies. This barbarous method of wreaking vengeance is common among them."^ The men being indifferent to female chastity, it would be vain to expect true jealousy on the part of the women. The men are entirely unrestrained in their appetites unless they interfere with other men's property rights, and in a com- munity where polygamy prevails the jealousy which is based in a monopoly of affection has little chance to flourish. Taplin says (101) that "a wife amongst the heathen aborigines has no objection to her husband taking another spouse, provided she is younger than herself, but if he brings home one older than herself there is apt to be ' Would our friend Stephens be fearless enough to claim that this custom also was taught the natives by the degraded whites ? Apart from the diabolical cruelty to a woman of which no white mian except a maniac would ever be indi- TiduaUy guilty — whereas this is a tribal custom — note the unutterable masculine selfishness of this " jealousy," which, while indifferent to chastity and fidelity, per se, punishes by proxy, leaving the real culprit untouched and happy at having not only had his intrigue but a chance to get rid of an undesired wife ! CURIOSITIES OF JEALOUSY 445 trouble, as the senior wife is " mistress of the camp," and in such a case the first wife is apt to run away. Vanity and envy, or the desire to be the favorite, thus appear to be the principal ingredients in an Australian woman's jealousy. Meyer (191) says of the Encounter Bay tribe : " If a man has several girls at his disposal, he speedily obtains several wives, who, however, very seldom agree well with each other, but are continually quarreling, each endeavoring to be the favorite." This, it will be observed, is the jealousy two pet dogs will feel of each other, and is utterly different from mod- ern conjugal or lover's jealousy, which is chiefly based on an ardent regard for chastity and unswerving fidelity. In this phase jealousy is a noble and useful passion, helping to main- tain the purity of the family ; whereas, in the phase that prevails among savages it is utterly selfish and brutal. Pal- mer says * that " a new woman would always be beaten by the other wife, and a good deal would depend on the fighting powers of the former whether she kept her position or not." "Among the Kalkadoon," writes Eoth (141), " where a man may have three, four, or even five gins, the discarded ones will often, through jealousy, fight with her whom they con- sider more favored. On such occasions they may often resort to stone-throwing, or even use fire-sticks and stone- knives with which to mutilate the genitals." Lumholtz says (213) the black women "often have bitter quarrels about men whom they love and are anxious to marry. If the husband is unfaithful, the wife frequently becomes greatly enraged." George Grey (II., 312-14) gives an amusing sketch of an aboriginal scene of conjugal bliss. Weerang, an old man, has four wives, the last of whom, just added to the harem, gets all his attention. This excites the anger of one of the older ones, who reproaches the husband with having stolen her, an unwilling bride, from another and better man. " May the sorcerer," she adds, "bite and tear her whom you have now taken to your bed. Here am I, rebuking young men who ^Jour. Anthr. Itist., XIL, 383. 446 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE dare to look at me, while she, your favorite, replete with arts and wiles, dishonors you." This last insinuation is too much for the young favorite, who retorts by calling her a liar and declaring that she has often seen her exchanging nods and winks with her paramour. The rival's answer is a blow with her stick. A general engagement follows, which the old man finally ends by beating several of the wives severely about the head with a hammer.' PUGN-ACIOUS FEMALES Jealousy is capable of converting even civilized women into fiends ; all the more these bush women, who have few oppor- tunities for cultivating the gentler feminine qualities. In- deed, so maBculine are these women that were it not for wom- an's natural inferiority in strength their tyrants might find it hard to subdue them. Bulmer says'* that "as a rule both husband and wife had fearful tempers ; there was no bearing and forbearing. When they quarrelled it was a matter of the strongest conquering, for neither would give in." De- scribing a native fight over some trifling cause Taplin says (71) : " Women were dancing about naked, casting dust in the air, hurling obscene language at their enemies, and en- couraging their friends. It was a perfect tempest of rage." * Grey might have made a valuable contribution to the comparative psychology of passion by noting down the chant of the rivals in their own words. Instead of that, for literary effect, he oast them into European metre and rhyme, with various expressions, like '^ bless " and " caress," which of course are utterly be- yond an Australian's mental horizon. This absurd procedure, which has made so many documents of travellers valueless for scientific purposes, is like filling an ethnological museum with pictures of Australians, Africans, etc^ all clothed in swallow-tail coats and silk hats. Cf. Grosse (B. A., 336), and Semon (324). Real Australian " poems" are like the following : " The peas the white man eats— I wish I had some, 1 wish I had some." Or this: " The kangaroo ran very fast But I ran faster ; The kangaroo was fat ; I ate him." ' Soy. Oeogr. Soc. of Australasia, VoL V., 39. PUGNACIOUS FEMALES 447 Roth says of the Queensland natives that the women fight like men, with thick, heavy fighting poles, four feet long. "One of the combatants, with her hands between her knees, supposing that only one stick is available, ducks her head slightly — almost in the position of a school-boy playing leap-frog, and waits for her adversary's blow, which she re- ceives on the top of her head. The attitudes are now reversed, and the one just attacked is now the attacking party. Blow for blow is thus alternated until one of them gives in, which is generally the case after three or four hits. Great animal pluck is sometimes displayed. . . . Should a woman ever put up her hand or a stick, etc., to ward a blow, she would be regarded in the light of a coward " (141). " At Genorminston, the women coming up to join a fray give a sort of war-whoop ; they will jump np in the air, and as their feet, a little apart, touch the ground, they knock up the dust and sand with the fighting-pole, etc., held between their legs, very like one's early reminiscences in the picture- books of a witch riding a broom-stick." " The ferocity of the women when excited exceeds that of the men," Grey informs us (II., 314) ; " they deal dreadful blows at one another," etc. For some unexplained reason — possibly a vague sense of fair play which in time may lead to the beginnings of gal- lantry — there is one occasion, an initiation ceremonial, at which women are allowed to have their innings while the men are dancing. On this occasion, says Roth (176), " each woman can exercise her right of punishing any man who may have ill-treated, abused, or hammered her, and for whom she may have waited months or perhaps years to chas- tise ; for, as each pair appear around the corner at the en- trance exposed to her view, the woman and any of her female friends may take a fighting-pole and belabor the particular culprit to their heart's content, the delinquent not being al- lowed to retaliate in any way whatsoever — the only 6ccasion in the whole of her life when the woman can take the law into her own hands without fear or favor." 448 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE WIFE STEALING This last assertion is not strictly accurate. There are other occasions when women take the law into their hands, especially when men try to steal them, an every-day occur- rence, at least in former times. Thus W. H. Leigh writes of the South Australians (152) : " Their manner of courtship is one which would not be popular among English ladies. If a chief, or any other in- diyidual, be smitten by a female of a different tribe, he en- deavors to waylay her ; and if she be surprised in any quiet place, the ambushed lover rushes upon her, beats her about the head with his waddy till she becomes senseless, when she is dragged in triumph to his hut. It sometimes happens, however, that she has a thick skull, and resents his blows, when a battle ensues, and not unfrequently ends in the dis- comfiture of the Adonis." Similarly G. B. Wilkinson describes how the young men go, usually in groups of two or three, to capture brides of hostile tribes. They lurk about in concealment till they see that the women are alone, when they pounce upon them and, either by persuasion or blows, take away those they want ; whereupon they try to regain their own tribe before pursuit can be attempted. " This stealing of wives is one cause of the frequent wars that take place amongst the natives." Barrington's History of New South Wales is adorned with the picture of a big naked man having beside him, on her back, a beautifully formed naked girl whom he is dragging away by one arm. The monster, we read in the text, has come upon her unawares, clubbed her on the head and other parts of the body, " then snatching up one of her arms, he drags her, streaming with blood from her wounds, through the woods, over stones, rocks, hills, and logs, with all the vio- lence and determination of a savage," etc. Ourr (I., 237) objects to this picture as a gross exaggeration. He also de- clares (I. , 108) that it is only on rare occasions that a wife is captured from another tribe and carried off, and that at pres- ent woman-stealing is not encouraged, as it is apt to involve WIFE STEALING 449 a whole tribe in war for one man's sake. From older writers, however, one gets the impression that wife-stealing was a common custom. Howitt (351) remarks concerning the "wild white man" William Buckley, who lived many years among the natives, and whose adventures were written up by John Morgan, that at first sight his statements " seem to record merely a series of duels and battles about women who were stolen, speared, and slaughtered ; " and Brough Smyth (77) quotes John Bulmer, who says that among the Gippsland natives " sometimes a man who has no sister [to swap] will, in des- peration, steal a wife ; but this is invariably a cause of blood- shed. Should a woman object to go with her husband, violence would be used. I have seen a man drag away a woman by the hair of her head. Often a club is used until the poor creature is frightened into submission." In South Australia there is a special expression for bride- stealing — Milla mangkondi, or force-marriage. (Bonwick, 65.) Mitchell (I., 307) also observed that the possession of the women " seems to be associated with all their ideas of fighting." The same impression is conveyed by the writings of Salvado, Wilkes, and others — Sturt, e.g., who wrote (II., 383) that the abduction of a married or unmarried woman was a frequent cause of quarrel. Mitchell (I. , 330) relates that when some whites told a native that they had killed a native of another tribe, his first thought and only remark was, " Stupid white fellows I Why did you not bring away the gins (women) ? " It is unfortunate for a woman to possess the kind of " beauty" Australians admire for, as Grey says (II., 231), " The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for beauty is generally one continued series of captivity to different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wanderings in strange families, of rapid fiights, of bad treatment from other fema^s amongst whom she is brought a stranger by her captor ; and rarely do you see a form of unusual grace and elegance but it is marked and scarred by the furrows of old wounds ; and many a female thus wanders several hundred miles from the home of her infancy." 450 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE It is not only from other and hostile tribes that these men forcibly appropriate girls or married women. Among the Hunter Eiver tribes (Curr, III., 353), " men renowned as war- riors frequently attacked their inferiors in strength and took their wives from them." The Queensland natives, we are told by Narcisse Peltier, who lived among them seventeen years, " not unfrequently fight with spears for the possession of a woman " (Spencer, P- S., I., 601). Lumholtz says (184) that " the majority of the young men wait a long time before they get wives, partly for the reason that they have not the courage to fight the requisite duel for one with an older man." On another page (212) he relates : " Near Herbert Vale I had the good fortune to be able to witness a marriage among the blacks. A camp of na- tives was just at the point of breaking up, when an old man suddenly approached a woman, seized her by the wrist of her left hand and shouted Yongul ngipa ! — that is. This one belongs to me (literally ' one I '). She resisted with feet and hands, and cried, but he dragged her ofE, though she made resistance during the whole time and cried at the top of her voice. For a mile away we could hear her shrieks. . . . But the women always make resistance, for they do not like to leave their tribe, and in many instances they have the best of reasons for kicking their lovers. If a man thinks he is strong enough, he will take hold of any woman's hand and utter his yongul ngipa. If a woman is good-looking, all the men want her, and the one who is most influential, or who is the strongest, is accordingly generally the victor." SWAPPING GIELS It is obvious that when women are forcibly appropriated at home or stolen from other tribes, their inclination or choice is not consulted. A man wants a woman and she is seized, nolens volens, whether married or single. If she gets a man she likes, it is a mere accident, not likely to occur often. The same is true of another form of Australian " courtship " which may be called swapping girls, and which is far the most common way of getting a wife. Curr, after forty years' experience with native affairs, wrote (I., 107) that " the Aug' SWAPPING GIRLS 451 tralian male almost invariably obtains his wife or wives, either as the survivor of a married brother, or in exchange for his sisters or daughters." The Eev. H. E. A. Meyer says (10) that the marriage ceremony " may with great propriety be considered an exchange, for no man can obtain a wife un- less he can promise to give his sister or other relative in ex- change. . . . Should the father be living he may give his daughter away, but generally she is the gift of the brother . . . the girls have no choice in the matter, and fre- quently the parties have never seen each other before. , . . If a man has several girls at his disposal, he speedily obtains several wives." Eyre (II., 318) declares that " the females, especially the young ones, are kept principally among the old men, who barter away their daughters, sisters, or nieces, in exchange for wives for themselves or their sons." Grey (II., 230) says the same thing in difEerent words : " The old men manage to keep the females a good deal amongst them- selves, giving their daughters to one another, and the more female children they have, the greater chance have they of getting another wife, by this sort of exchange." Brough Smyth thus sums up (II. , 84) the information on this subject he obtained from divers sources . A yam-stick is given to a gfrl when she reaches the age of marriage ; with this she drives away any young man she does not fancy, for a mere "no " would not keep him at bay. " The women never ini- tiate matches ; " these are generally arranged between two young men who have sisters to exchange. " The young woman's opinion is not asked." When the young man is ready to " propose " to the girl he has bartered his sister for, he walks up to her equipped as for war — ready to parry her " love-taps " if she feels inclined that way. " After a little fencing between the pair the woman, if she has no serious ob- jections to the man, quietly submits." If she has " serious objections," what happens ? , The same writer tells us graph- ically (76) : " By what mode soever a man procures a bride, it is very seldom an occasion of rejoicing by the female. The males engross the privilege of disposing of their female relatives, 452 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE and it often happens that an old man of sixty or seventy will add to his domestic circle a young girl of ten or twelve years of age. ... A man having a daughter of thirteen or fourteen years of age arranges with some elderly person for the disposal of her, and when all are agreed, she is brought out of the miam-miam, and told that her husband wants her. Perhaps she has never seen him, or seen him but to loathe him. The father carries a spear and waddy, or a tomahawk, and anticipating resistance, is thus prepared for it. The poor girl, sobbing and sighing, and uttering words of complaint, claims pity from those who will show none. If she resists the mandates of her father, he strikes her with his spear ; if she rebels and screams, the blows are repeated; and if- she attempts to run away, a stroke on the head from the waddy or tomahawk quiets her. . . . Seizing the bride by the hair the stern father drags her to the home prepared for her by her new owner. ... If she attempts^ to abscond, the bridegroom does not hesitate to strike her savagely on the head with his waddy ; and the bridal screams and yells make the night hideous. ... If she is still determined to escape and makes the attempt, the father will at last spear her in the leg or foot, to prevent her from running." No more than girls are widows allowed the liberty of choice. Sometimes they are disposed of by being exchanged for young women of another tribe and have to marry the men chosen for them (95). "When wives are from thirty- five to forty years of age, they are frequently cast off by their husbands, or are given to the younger men in exchange for their sisters or near relatives, if such are at their disposal " (Eyre, II., 323). "In the Murray tribes "a widow could not marry any one she chose. She was the property of her husband's family, hence she must marry her husband's brother or near relative ; and even if he had a wife she must become No. 2 or 3." THE PHILOSOPHY OF ELOPBMEKTS The evidence, in short, is unanimously to the effect that the Australian girl has absolutely no liberty of choice. Yet the astonishing Westermarck, ignoring, more suo, the over- whelming number of facts against him, endeavors in two THE PHILOSOPHY OF ELOPEMENTS 453 places (217, 223) to convey the impression to his readers that she does largely enjoy the freedom of choice, placing his sole reliance in two assertions hy Howitt and Mathew.' Howitt says that among the Kurnai, women are allowed free choice, and Mathew " asserts that, with varying details, marriage by mutual consent will be found among other tribes, also, though it is not completed except by means of a runaway match." Now Hewitt's assertion is contradicted by Curr, who, in addition to his own forty years of experience among the natives had the systematized notes of a large number of correspondents to base his conclusions on. He says (I., 108) that "in no instance, unless Mr. Hewitt's account of the Kurnai be correct, which I doubt, has the female any voice in the selection of a husband." He might have added that Hewitt's remark is contradicted in his own book, where we are told that among the Kurnai elopement is the rule. Strange to say, it seems to have occurred neither to Howitt, nor to Westermarck, nor to Mathew that elopement proves the absence of choice, for if there were liberty of choice the couple would not be obliged to run away. Nor is this all. The facts prove that marriage by actual elopement ^ is of rare oc- currence ; that " marriage " based on such elopement is near- ly always adulterous (with another man's wife) and of brief duration — a mere intrigue, in fact ; that the guilty couple are severely punished, if not killed outright ; and that every- thing that is possible is done to prevent or frustrate elope- ' The reason why Westermarck is so eager to prove liberty of choice on the part of Australian women is because he has set himself the hopeless task of proving that the lower we go the more liberty womari has, and that " under more primitive conditions she was even more free in that respect than she is now amongst most of the lower races." " As man in the earliest times," he asserts (383), " had no reason ... to retain his full-grown daughter, she might go away a;nd marry at her pleasure." Quite the contrary ; an Australian, than whom we know no more ^' primitive " man, had every reason for not allowing her to go away and marry whom she pleasedl He looked on his daughter, as we have seen, chiefly as a desirable piece of property to exchange for some other man's daughter or sister. ■^ As distinguished from the more common sham elopement, at which the par- ents are consulted as usual. In the Kunandaburi tribe, for instance, as Howitt himself tells us (jour. Anthr. Inst., XX., 6U-B1) the suitor asks p'-rmission of the girl's parents to take her away. ^^ She resists all she can. biting and screaming, while the other women look on laughing." The whole thing is ob- viously a custom ordered by the parents, and tells ns nothing regarding the presence or absence of choice. See the remarks on stuun capture in my chapter on Coyness (185). . 454 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE ments based on individual preference or liking. On "the first of these points Curr gives us the most comprehensive and reliable information (I., 108) : "Within the tribe, lovers occasionally abscond to some corner of the tribal territory, but they are soon overtaken, the female cruelly beaten, or wounded with a spear, the man in most cases remaining unpunished. Very seldom are men allowed to retain as wives their partners in these escapades. Though I have been acquainted with many tribes, and heard matters of the sort talked over in several of them, I never knew hut three instances of permanent runaway matches ; two in which men obtained as wives women already married in the tribe, and one case in which the woman was a stranger." William Jackman, who was held as a captive by the natives for seventeen months, tells a similar story. Elopements, he says (174), are usually with wives. The couple escape to a distant tribe and remain a few months — rarely more than seven or eight, so far as he observed ; then the faithless wife is returned to her husband and the elopers are punished more or less severely. "At times," we read in Spencer and Gillen (556, 558), " the eloping couple are at once followed up and then, if caught, the woman is, if not killed on the spot, at all events treated in such a way that any further attempt at elopement on her part is not likely to take place." Some- times the husband seems glad to have got rid of his wife, for when the elopers return to camp he first has his revenge by cutting the legs and body of both and then he cries " You keep altogether, I throw away, I throw away." It is instructive to note with what ingenuity the natives seek to prevent matches based on mutual inclination. Tap- lin says (11) of the Narrinyeri that "a young woman who goes away with a man and lives with him as his wife without the consent of her relatives is regarded as very little better than a prostitute." Among these same Narrinyeri, says Gason, " it is considered disgraceful for a woman to take a husband who has given no other woman for her." (Bonwick, 245.) The deliberate animosity against free choice is empha- sized by a statement in Brough Smyth (79), that if the owner THE PHILOSOPHY OF ELOPEMENTS 455 of an eloping female suspects that she favored the man she eloped with, "he will not hesitate to maim or kill her." She must have no choice or preference of her own, under any cir- cumstances. It must be remembered, too, that even an actual elopement by no means proves that the woman is following a special inclination. She may be merely anxious to get away from a cruel or superannuated husband. In such cases the woman may take the initiative. Dawson (65) once said to a native, " You should not have carried Mary away from her husband" ; to which the man replied, "Bael (not) dat, massa;- Mary come me. Dat husband wurry bad man : he waddy (beat) Mary. Mary no like it, so it leabe it. Dat fellow no good, massa." Obviously, Australian elopement not only gives no indication of romantic feelings, but even as an incident it is apt to be prosaic or cruel rather than romantic, as our elopements are. In many cases it is hard to distinguish from brutal capture, as we may infer from an incident related, by Curr (108-9). He was sleeping at a station on the Lachlan. " During the night I was awoke by the scream of a woman, and a general yell from the men in the camp. Not knowing what could be the matter, I seized a weapon, jumped out of bed, and rushed outside. There I found a young married woman standing by her fire, trembling all over, with a barbed spear through her thigh. As for the men, they were rushing about, here and there, in an excited state, with their spears in their hands. The woman's story was soon told. She had gone to the river, not fifty yards off, for water ; the Darling black had stolen after her, and proposed to her to elope with him, and, on her declining to do so, had speared her and taken to his heels." A pathetic instance of the cruel treatment to which the natives subject girls who venture to have inclinations of their own was communicated by W. E. Stanbridge to Brough Smyth (80). The scene is a little dell among undulating grassy plains. In the lower part of the dell a limpid spring bursts forth. " On one side of this dell, and nearest to the spring at the 456 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE foot of it, lies a young woman, about seventeen years of age, ' sobbing and partly supported by her mother, in the midst of wailing, weeping, women ; she has been twice speared in ihe right breast with a jagged hand-spear by her brother, and is supposed to.be dying." CHAEMIM^G A WOMAN BY MAGIC Besides the three ways already mentioned of securing a wife — elopement, which is rare ; capture, which is rarer still, and Tuelcha mura, in which a girl is assigned to a man before she is born, and while her prospective mother is still a girl herself-^ by far the commonest arrangement — there is a fourth, ch|irm- ing by magic. Of this, too, Spencer and Gillen have given the best description (541-44). When a man, they tell us, wants to charm a woman belonging \p a distant tribe he takes a churinga, or sacred stick, and goes with some friends into the bush, where " all night long the men keep up a low singing of Quabara songs, together with the chanting of amorous phrases of invi- tation addressed to the woman. At daylight the man stands up alone and swings the churinga, causing it first to strike the ground as he whirls it round and round and makes it hum. His friends remain silent, and the sound of the hum- ming is carried to the ears of the far-distant woman, and has the power of compelling affection and of causing her sooner or later to comply with the summons. Not long ago, at Alice Springs, a man called some of his friends together and per- formed the ceremony, and in a very short time the desired woman, who was on this occasion a widow, came in from Glen Helen, about fifty miles to the west of Alice Springs, and the two are now man and wife." The woman in this case need not be a widow, however. Another man's wife will do just as well, and if her owner comes armed to stop proceedings, the friends of the charmer stand by him. Another method of obtaining a wife by magic is by means of a charmed chilara, or head-band of opossum fur. The man charms it in secret by singing over it.' Then he places CHARMING A WOMAN BY MAGIC 457 it on his head and wears it about the camp so that the wom- an can see it. Her attention is drawn to it, and she be- comes violently attached to the man, or, as the natives say, " her internal organs shake with eagerness." Here> again, it makes no difference whether the woman be married or not. Still another way of charming a woman is by means of a certain shell ornament, which a man ties to his waist-belt at a corrobboree after having charmed it.^ " While he is danc- ing the woman whom he wishes to attract alone sees the light- ning flashes on the Lonka-lonka, and all at once her internal organs shake with emotion. If possible she will creep into his camp that night or take the earliest opportunity to run away with him." Here, at last, we have come across a method which " allows of the breaking through of the hard and fast rule which for the most part obtains, and according to which the woman be- longs to the man to whom she has been betrothed, probably before her birth." Yet these cases are rare exceptions, for, as the authors inform us, "the woman naturally runs some risk, as, if caught in the act of eloping, she would be severely punished, if not put to death ; " and again : these cases are not of frequent occurrence, for they depend on the woman's consent, and she knows that if caught she will in all proba- bility be killed, or at least very roughly handled. Hence she is "not very easily charmed away from her original pos- sessor." Moreover, even these adulterous elopements seldom lead to anything more than a temporary liaison, as we have seen, and it would be comic to speak of a " liberty of choice " in cases where such a choice can be exercised only at the risk of being killed on the spot. > The reader will note that here are some additional objects usually sup- posed to be " ornamental,^" but which, as in all the cases examined in the chapter on Personal Beauty, are seen on close examination to serve other than esthetic purposes. The6e are intended to charm the women, not, however, as things of beauty, but by their magic qualities and by attracting their attention. 458 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE OTHEK OBSTACLES TO LOVE Looking back over the groniid traversed in this chapter, we see that Cupid is thwarted in Australia not only by the nat- ural stupidity, coarseness, and sensuality of the natives, but by a number of artifica,l obstacles which seem to have been devised with almost diabolical ingenuity for the express pur- pose of stifling the germs of love. The selfish, systematic, and deliberate siippression of free choice is only one of these ob- stacles. There are two others almost equally fatal to love — the habit of marrying young girls to men old enongh to be their fathers or grandfathers, and the complicated marriage taboos. We have already seen that as a rule the old men appropriate the young girls, the younger men not being allowed to marry till they are twenty-five or thirty, and even then being com- pelled to take an old man's cast-ofE wife of thirty-five or forty summers. "It is usual," says Ourr (I., 110), to see old men with mere girls as wives, and men in the prime of life married to widows. . . . Women have very fre- quently two husbands during their life-time, the first older and the second younger than themselves. . . . There are always many bachelors in every tribe."' Not to speak of love, this arrangement makes it difficult even for animal passion to manifest itself except in an adulterous or illegiti- mate manner. " At present," we learn from Spencer and Gillen (104, 558), " by far the most common method of getting a wife is by means of an arrangement made between brothers or fathers of the respective men and women whereby a particular woman is assigned to a particular man." This most usual method of getting a wife is also the most extraordinary. Suppose one man has a son, another a daughter, generally both of tender age. Now it would be bad enough to be- troth these two without their consent and before they are ' With his usual conscientious regard for facts Westermarck declares (70) that in a savage condition of life "every full-grown man marries as soon as possible." MARRIAGE TABOOS AND "INCEST" 459 old enough to have any real choice. But the Australian way is infinitely worse. It is arranged that the girl in the case shall be, by and by, not the boy's wife, but his mother-in- law ; that is, the boy is to wed her daughter. In other words, he must wait not only till she is old enough to marry but till her daughter is old enough to marry ! And this is "by far the most common method " ! MABEIAGE TABOOS AND "INCEST." The marriage taboos are no less artificial, absurd, and fatal to free choice and love. An Australian is not only forbidden to marry a girl who is closely related to him by blood — some- times the prohibition extends to first, second, and even third cousins— but he must not think of such a thing as marrying a woman having his family name or belonging to certain tribes or clans — his own, his mother's or grandmother's, his neigh- bor's, or one speaking his dialect, etc. The result is more disastrous than one unfamiliar with Australian relation- ships would imagine ; for these relationships are so compli- cated that to unravel them takes, in the words of Howitt (59), " a patience compared with which that of Job is furi- ous irritability." These prohibitions are not to be trifled with. They extend even to war captives. If a couple disregard them and elope, they are followed by the indignant relatives in hot pursuit and, if taken, severely punished, perhaps even put to death. (Howitt, 300, 66.) Of the Kamilaroi the same writer says : " Should a man persist in keeping a woman who is denied to him by their laws, the penalty is that he should be driven out from the society of his friends and quite ignored. If that does not cure his fondness for the woman, his male relatives follow him and kill him, as a disgrace to their tribe, and the female relatives of the woman kill her for the same reason." It is a mystery to anthropologists how these marriage ta- boos, these notions of real or fancied incest, could have ever arisen. Ourr (I., 336) remarks pointedly that "most per- 460 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE sons who havfe any practical knowledge of our savages will, I think, bear me out when I assert that, whatever their ob- jections to consanguineous marriages may be, they have no more idea of the advantages of this or that sort of breeding, or of any laws of Nature bearing on the question, than they have of difEerential calculus. " ^ Whatever may have been the origin of these prohibitions, it is obvious that, as I have said, they acted as obstacles to love ; and what is more, in many cases they seem to have impeded legitimate marriage only, without interfering with licentious indulgence. Eoth (67) cites O'Donnell to the ef- fect that with the Kunandaburi tribe the jus primcB noctis is allowed all the men present at the camp without regard to class or kin. He also cites Beveridge, who had lived twenty- three years in contact with the Eiverina tribes and who as- sured him that, apart from marrying, there was no restriction on intercourse. In his book on South Australia J. D. Wood says (403) : " The fact that marriage does not take place be- tween members of the same tribe, or is forbidden amongst them, does not at all include the idea that chastity is observed within the same limits." Brough Smyth (II., 93) refers to -the fact that secret violations of the rule against fornication within the forbidden classes were not punished. Bonwick (62) cites the Eev. C. Wilhelmi on the Port Lincoln customs; " There are no instances of two Karraris or two Matteris hav- ing been married together ; and yet connections of a less vir- tuous character, which take place between members of the same caste, do not appear to be considered incestuous." Similar testimony is adduced by Waitz-Gerland (VI., 776), and others. ' We are occasionally warned not to underrate the intelligence of the aboriginal Australian. Asa matter of fact, there is more danger of its ' being overrated. Thus it was long believed that what was known as the " terrible rite " (flnditur usque ad urethram rnembruni virile — see Curr I., 53, 78 — was practised as a check to population ; but surgeon-general Roth (179) has exploded this idea, and made it seem probable that this rite is merely a senseless counterpart of cer- tain useless mutilations Inflicted on females. AFFECTION FOR WOMEN AND DOGS 461 AFFECTION FOK WOMEN AKD DOGS There is a strange class of men who always stand with a brush in hand ready to whitewash any degraded creature, be he the devil himself. For want of a better name they are called sentimentalists, and they are among men what the mor^ bid females who bring bouquets and sympathy to fiendish murderers are among women. The Australian, unutterably degraded, particularly in his sexual relations, as the foregoing pages show him to be, has had his champions of the type of the "fearless" Stephens. There is another class of writers who create confusion by their reckless use of words. Thus the Kev. G. Taplin asserts (12) that he has " known as well- matched and loving couples amongst the aborigines " as he has amongst Europeans. What does he mean by loving couples ? What, in his opinion, are the symptoms of affec- tion ? With amusing naivet6 he reveals his ideas on the subject in a passage (11) which he quotes approvingly from H. E. A. Meyer to the effect that if a young bride pleases her husband, " he shows his affection by frequently rubbing her with grease to improve her personal appearance, and with the idea that it will make her grow rapidly and be- come fat." If such selfish love of obesity for sensual pur- poses merits the name of affection, I cheerfully grant that Australians are capable of affection to an unlimited degree. Taplin, furthermore, admits that " as wives got old, they were often cast off by their husbands, or given to young men in exchange for their sisters or other relations at their dis- posal " (XXXI.) ; and again (131) : "From childhood to old age the gratification of appetite and passion is the sole pur- pose of life to the savage. He seeks to extract the utmost sweetness from mere animal pleasures, and consequently his nature becomes embruted." Taplin does not mention a single act of conjugal devotion or self-sacrifice, such as con- stitutes the sole criterion of affection. Nor in the hundreds of books and articles on Australia that I have read have I come across a single instance of this kind. On the subject of 462 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE the cruel treatment of women all the observers are eloquent ; had they seen any altruistic actions, would they have failed to make a record of them ? The Australian's attachment to his wife is evidently a good deal like his love of- his dog. Gason (359) tells us that the dogs, of which every camp has from six to twenty, are gen- erally a mangy lot, but " the natives are very fond of them. . . . If a white man wants to offend a native let him beat his dog. I have seen women crying over a dog, when bitten by snakes, as if over their own children." The dogs are very useful to them, helping them to find snakes, rats, and other animals for food. Yet, when mealtime comes, "the dog, notwithstanding its services and their affection for it, fares very badly, receiving nothing but the bones." " Hence the dog is always in very low condition." Another writer ' with a better developed sense of humor, says that " It may be doubted whether the man does not value his dog, when alive, quite as much as he does his woman, and think of both quite as often and lovingly after he has eaten them." As for the women, they are little better than the men. What Mitchell says of them (I., 307) is characteristic. After a fight, he says, the women " do not always follow their fugi- tive husbands from the field, but frequently go over, as a matter of course, to the victors, even with young children on their backs ; and thus it was, probably, that after we had made the lower tribes sensible of our superiority, that the three gins followed our party, beseeching us to take them with us." The following from Grey (II., 330) gives us an idea of ■prif ely afEection and fidelity : " The women have generally some favorite amongst the young men, always looking forward to be his wife at the death of her husband." How utterly be- yond the Australian horizon was the idea of common decency, not to speak of such a holy thing as afEection, is revealed by a cruel custom described by Howitt (344) : " The Kurnai and the Brajerak were not intermarrying tribes, unless by capture, and in this case each man took the woman whose husband he had been the first to spear." It would of course 1 Tram. Eth. Soc, New Ser., III., 348. AFFECTION FOR WOMEN AND DOGS 463 be absurd to suppose the widows in such cases capable of suf- fering as our women would under such circumstances. They are quite as callous and cruel as the men. Evidence is given in the Jackman book (149) that, like Indian women, they torture prisoners of war, breaking toes, fingers, and arms, digging out the eyes and filling the sockets with hot sand, etc. " Husbands rarely show much affection for their wives," wrote Eyre (II., 214). " After a long absence I have seen natives, upon their return, go to their camp, exhibiting the most stoical indifference, never taking the least notice of their wives." Elsewhere (331) he says, with reference to the fact that marriage is not regarded as any pledge of chastity, which is not recognized as a virtue : " But little real affection con- sequently exists between husbands and wives, and younger men value a wife principally for her services as a slave." And in a Latin footnote, in which he describes the licentious cus- toms of promiscuous intercourse and the harsh treatment of women, he adds (320), " It is easy to understand that there can hardly be much love among husbands and wives." He also gives this particular instance of conjugal indifference and cruelty. In 1842 the wife of a native in Adelaide, a girl of about eighteen, was confined and recovered slowly. Before she was well the tribe removed from the locality. The hus- band preferred accompanying them, and left his wife to die unattended. William Jackman, the Englishman who lived seventeen months as a captive among the natives, says (118) that "wife-killing, among the aborigines of Australia, is fre- quent and elicits neither surprise nor any sort of animadver- sion." By way of illustrating this remark he relates how, one day, he returned with a native from an unsuccessful hunt. The native's twelve-year-old wife had caught an opossum, roasted it, and, impelled by hunger, had begun to eat it in- stead of saving it for her master — an atrocious crime. For fifteen minutes the husband sat in silent rage which his feat- ures betrayed. Presently he jumped up with the air of a de- mon, " scooped his two hands full of embers and burning sand, and fiung the whole into the face and bosom of the naked 464 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE object of his vengeance ; for I must repeat that none of the latives wear any clothing, and that she was sitting there as nude as when she was born. The devil of his nature thus fairly aroused, he sprang for hiS spear. It transfixed • his frantic but irresisting victim. She fell dead. . . .. Save by the women of the tribe, the affair was scarcely noticed." A HOKBIBIB CUSTOM Suppose this yonn^ wife had saved the opossum for her hns band. He would then have eaten it and, in accordance with their universal custom, have thrown her the bones to share with the dog. After that he might have rubbed her with grease and indulged .in sensual caresses. Would that have proved his capacity for affection ? Would you call a mother affectionate who fondled her child, but allowed it to starve while she gratified her own appetite ? The only sure test of affection lies in disinterested actions of self-sacrifice ; and even actions may sometimes mislead us. Thus several au- thors have been led into absurdly erroneous conclusions by a horrible custom prevalent among the natives, and thus de- scribed by Curr (I., 89) : "In some cases a woman is ob- liged by custom to roll up the remains of her deceased child in a variety of rags, making them into a package, which she carries about with her for several months, and at length buries. On it she lays her head at night, and the odor is so horrible that it pervades the whole camp, and not unfrequently costs the mother her life." Angas (I., 75) refers to this custom and exclaims, rapturously, " Oh ! how strong is a mother's love when even the offensive and putrid clay can be thus worshipped for the spirit that once was its tenant "(! !). Arigas was an uneducated scribbler, but what shall we say on find- ing his sentimental view accepted by the professional German anthropologists, Gerland (VI., 780) and Jung (109) ? Anyone familiar with Australian life must suspect at once that this custom is simply one of the horrible modes of punishment devised for women. Curr says the woman is "obliged iy cus- tom " to carry her dead child, and he adds ; " I believe that this practice is insisted on when a young mother loses her ROMANTIC AFFLICTION 465 first born, as the death of the child is thought to have come about by carelessness." To suppose that Australian mothers who usually kill all but two of their six or more children could be capable of such an act for sentimental reasons is to show a logical faculty on a par with the Australian's own. This point has already been discussed, but a further instance related by Dr. Moorehouse (J. D. "Wood, 390), will bring the matter home : " A female just born was thus about to be destroyed for the benefit of a boy about four years old, whom the mother was nourishing, while the father was standing by, ready to commit the deed. Through the kindness of a lady to whom the circumstances became known, and our joint interference, this one life was saved, and the child was properly attended to by the mother, although she at first urged the necessity of its death as strenuously as the father." '*In other parts of the country," Wood adds, " the women do the horrible work themselves. They are not content with destroying the life of the infants, but they eat them." ROMANTIC AFFLICTIOIir Here, as in several of the alleged cases of African sentimen- tality, we see the great need of caution and detective sagacity in interpreting facts. To take another instance : Wester- marck (503), in his search for cases of romantic attachment and absorbing passion among savages, fancies he has -come across one in Australia, for he tells us that " even the rude Australian girl sings in a strain of romantic affliction — 'l never shall see my darling agaia' " As a matter of fact this line has no more to do with the " true monogamous instinct, the absorbing passion for one," than with Julius Caesar. Eyre relates (310, 70) that when Miago, the first native who ever quitted Perth, was taken away on the Beagle in 1838, his mother sang during his absence : Whither does that lone ship wander, My young son I shall never see again. 466 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE Grosse, who often sides with Westermarck, here parts com- pany with him, being convinced that " what is called love in Australia . . . is no spiritual affection, biit a sensual passion, which is quickly cooled in: the enjoyment. ... The only examples of sympathetic lyrics that have been found in Australia are mourning songs, and even they relate only to relatives by blood and tribal affinity" (B. A., 244).! A LOCK OF HAIR A more subtle problem than those so far considered is pre- sented by a courtship custom described by Bulmer (Brough Smyth, 82-84). The natives are very superstitious in regard to their hair. They carefully destroy any that has been cut off and would be greatly frightened to know it had fallen into another person's hands, as that wotild place their health and life in jeopardy at the other's will. Yet a girl who has a lover will not hesitate to give him' a lock of her hair. It seems impossible to deny that this is a touch of true sentiment, of romantic love ; and Bulmer accordingly calls this lock of hair a " token of affection." But is it a token of affection ? The sequel will show. In due course of time the couple elope ; in the black of the night they take to the bush. Great excite- ment prevails in camp when they are found missing. They are called " long-legged," " thin-legged," " squint-eyed," or " big-headed." Search is made, the pair are 'tracked and caught, and both are cruelly beaten. They make a promise not to repeat the offence, but do not keep it ; another elope- ment follows, with more beatings. At last the girl becomes afraid to elope again. She alters her tactics, feigns a severe illness, and the parents are alarmed. Then she remembers that her lover has a lock of her hair. He is made to confess, and another fight follows. He is half killed, but after that he is allowed to keep the girl. ' Gerland (VI., 756) makes the same mistake here as Westermarck. He also refers to Petermann's Mittheilungen for another case of "romantic love." . On consulting that periodical (1856, 451) I find that the proof of such love lay in the circumstance that in the quarrels so common in Australian camps, wives would not hesitate to join in and help their husbands ! TWO NATIVE STORIES 467 Thus we see that the lock, instead of being a " token of affection," as Bulmer would have ns believe, and as it would be in our community, is not even a sentimental sign of the girl's confidence in her lover, but merely a detail of a foolish custom and stupid superstition. TWO NATIVE STORIES As a matter of course Australian folk-lore, too, shows no traces of the existence of love. The nearest approach to such a thing I have been able to find is a quaint story about a man who wanted two wives and of how he got them. It is taken from Mrs. K. Langloh Parker's Australian Legendary Tales and the substance of it is as follows : Wurrunnah, after a long day's hunting, came back to the camp tired and hungry. His mother had nothing for him to eat and no one else would give him anything. He flew into a rage and said : "I will go into a far country and live with strangers ; my people would starve me." He went away and after divers strange adventures with a blind man and emus, who were really black fellows, he came to a camp where there was no one but seven young girls. They were friendly, gave him food, and allowed him to camp there during the night. They told him their name was Meamei and their tribe in a far country to which they would soon return. The next day Wurrunnah went away as if leaving for good ; but he determined to hide near and watch what they did, and if he could get a chance he would steal a wife from among them. He was tired of travelling alone. He saw them all start out with their yam-sticks in hand. Following them he saw them stop by the nests of some flying ants and unearth the ants. Then they sat down, threw their yam-sticks aside, and ate the ants, which are esteemed a great delicacy. While they were eating Wurrunnah sneaked up to their yam-sticks and stole two of tUem. When the girls had eaten all they wanted only five of them could find their sticks ; so those five started off, expecting that the other two would soon find their sticks and follow them. The two girls hunted all around the ants' nests, but could find no sticks. At last, when their backs were turned toward him, Wurrunnah crept out and stuck the lost yam -sticks near together in the ground ; then he slipped back to his hiding- 46;8 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE place. When the two girls turned round, there in front of them they saw their sticks. With a cry of joyful surprise they ran to them and caught hold of them to pull them out of the ground, in which they were firmly stuck. As they were doing so, out from his hiding-place jumped Wurrunnah. He seized both girls round their waists, holding them tightly. They struggled and screamed, but to no purpose. There was none near to hear them, and the more they struggled the tighter Wurrunnah held them. Finding their screams and struggles in vain they quietened at length, and then Wurrunnah told them not to be afraid, he would take care of them. He was lonely, he said, and wanted two wives. They must come quietly with him and he would be good tp them. But they must do as he told them. If they were not quiet he would swiftly quieten them with his moorillah. But if they would come quietly with him he would be good to them. Seeing that resistance was useless the two young girls complied with his wish, and travelled quietly on with him. They told him that some day their tribe would come and steal them back again ; to avoid which he travelled quickly on and on still farther hoping to elude pursuit. Some weeks passed and he told his wives to go and get some bark from two pine-trees near by. They declared if they did so he would never see them again. But he answered " Talk not so foolishly ; if you ran away soon should I catch you and, catching you, would beat you hard. So talk no more." They went and began to cut the bark from the trees. As they did so each felt that her tree was rising higher out of the ground and bearing her upward with it. Higher and higher grew the pine-trees and up with them went the giris until at last the tops touched the sky. Wurrunnah called after them, but they listened not. Then they heard the voices of their five sisters, who from the sky stretched forth their hands and drew the two others in to live with them in the sky, and there you may see the seven sisters together. We know them as the Pleiades, but the black fellows call them the Meamei. A few rather improper tales regarding the sun and moon are recorded in Woods's Native Tribes by Meyer, who thus sums up two of them (200) ; the other being too obscene for citation here : The sun they consider to be a female, who, when she sets, passes the dwelling-places of the dead. As she approaches the men assemble and divide into two bodies, leaving a HARRINGTON'S LOVE-STORY 469 road for her to pass between them ; they invite her to stay with them, which she can only do for a short time, as she must be ready for her journey for the next day. For favors granted to some one among them she receives a present of red kangaroo skin ; and therefore in the morning, when she rises, appears in a red dress. The moon is also a woman, and not particularly chaste. She stays a long time with the men, and from the effects of her intercourse with them, she becomes very thin and wastes away to a mere skeleton. When in this state, Nnrrundnri orders her to be driven away. She flies, and is secreted for some time, but is employed all the time in seeking roots which are so nourishing that in a short time she appears again, and fills out and becomes fat rapidly. Here we see how even such sublime and poetic phenomena as sun and moon are to the aboriginal mind only symbols of their coarse, sensual lives : the heavenly bodies are concubines of the men, welcomed when fat, driven away when thin. That puts the substance of Australian love in a nutshell. BAEEINGTON S lOVE-STOKT In the absence of aboriginal love-stories let us amuse our- selves by examining critically a few more of the alleged cases of romantic love discovered by Europeans. The erudite German anthropologist Gerland expresses his belief (VI., 755) that notwithstanding the degradation of the Australians "cases of true romantic love occur among them," and he refers for an instance to Barrington (I., 37). On consulting Barrington I find the following incident related as a sample of " genuine love in all its purity." I condense the unessen- tial parts : A young man of twenty-three, belonging to a tribe near Paramatta, was living in a cave with two sisters, one of four- teen, the other of twenty. One day when he returned from his kangaroo hunt he could not find the girls. Thinking they had gone to fetch water or roots for supper, he sat down till a rain-storm drove him into the cave, where he stumbled over the prostrate form of the younger sister. She was lying in a pool of blood, but presently regained consciousness and 470 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE told him that a man had come to carry o£E her sister, after beating her on the head. She had seized the sister's arm to hold her back when the brute knocked her over with his club and dragged off the sister. It was too late to take revenge that day, but next morning the two set out for the tribe to which the girl-robber be- longed. As they approached the camp, Barrington contin- ues, ■" he saw the sister of the very savage who had stolen his sister ; she was leaving her tribe to pick some sticks for a fire (this was indeed a fine opportunity for revenge) ; so making his sister hide hetself, he flew to the young woman and lifted up his club to bring her to the ground, and thus satisfy his revenge. The victim trembled, yet, knowing his power, she stood with all the fortitude she could ; lifting up her eyes, they came in contact with his and such was the enchanting beauty of her form (!) that he stood an instant motionless to gaze on it (!). The poor thing saw this and dropped on her knees (!) to im- plore his pity, but before she could speak, his revenge soft- ened into love (!) ; he threw down his club, and clasping her in his arms (!) vowed eternal constancy (!!!); his pity gained her love ( !), thus each procured a mutual return. Then call- ing his sister, she would have executed her revenge, but for her brother, who told her she was now his wife. On my hero asking after his sister, his new wife said she was very ill, but would soon be better ; and she excused her brother (!) be- cause the means he had taken were the customary one of procuring a wife ( ! !) ; ' but you,' said she, ' have more white heart ' (meaning he was more like the .English), 'you no beat me ; me love you ; you love me ; me love your sisters ; your sisters love me ; my brother no good man.' This artless ad- dress won both their hearts, and now all three live in one hut which I enabled them to make comfortable within half a mile of my own house." Barrington concludes with these words : " This little anec- dote I have given as the young man related it to me and per- haps I have lost much of its simplicity." It is very much to be feared that he has. I have marked with exclamation points the most absurdly impossible parts of the tale as ideal- ized and embellished by Barrington. The Australian never told him that he "gazed motionless " on the "enchanting. RISKING LIFE FOR A WOMAN 471 beauty " of the girl's form or that his " revenge softened into love ; " he never clasped her in his arms, nor " vowed eter- nal constancy," The girl never dreamt of saying that his pity gained her love, or of excusing her brother for doing what all Australian men do. These sentimental touches are gratuitous additions of Barrington ; native Australians do not even clasp each other in their arms, and they are as in- capable of vowing eternal constancy as of comparing Her- bert Spencer's philosophy with Schopenhauer's. Yet on the strength of such dime novel rubbish an anthropologist assures us that savages are capable of feeling pure romantic love ! The kernel of truth in the above tale reducae itself to this, that the young man whose sister was stolen intended to take revenge by killing the abductor, but that on seeing his sister he concluded to marry her. These savages, as we have seen, always act thus, killing the enemy's women only when unable to carry them ofE. EISKING LIFE FOR A WOMAK Lumholtz relates the following story to show that " these blacks also may be greatly overcome by the sentiment of love " (213) : " A ' civilized ' black man entered a station on Georgina Eiver and carried off a woman who belonged to a young black man at the station. She loved her paramour and was glad to get away from the station ; but the whites desired to keep her for their black servant, as he could not be made to stay without her, and they brought her back, threatening to shoot the stranger if he came again. Heedless of the threat, he afterward made a second attempt to elope with his beloved, but the white men pursued the couple and shot the poor fellow." If Lumholtz had reflected for a moment on the difference between love as a sentiment and love as an appetite, he would have realized the error of using the expression " the senti- ment of love " in connection with such a story of adulterous kidnapping, in which there is absolutely nothing to indicate whether the kidnapper coveted the other man's wife for any 472 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE bther than the most carnal reasons. It is not nnnsnal for an Australian to risk his life in stealing a woman. He does that CTery time he captures one from another tribe. In men who have so little imaginative faculty as these, the possibility of being killed has no more deterrent efEect than it has in two dogs or stags fighting for a female. We must not judge such indifference to deadly consequences from our point of view. GEKSTABCKiER'S LOVE-STOBT Gerstaecker, a German traveller, who traversed a part of Australia^ has a tale of aboriginal love which also bears the earmarks of fiction. On his whole trip, he says, in his 514- page volume devoted to Australia, he heard of only one case of genuine love. A young man of the Bamares tribe took a fancy to a girl of the Kengmutkos. She was also pleased with him and he eloped with her at night, taking her to his hunt- ing-ground on the river. The tribe heard of his escapade and ordered him to return the girl to her home. He obeyed, but two weeks later eloped with her again. He was repri- manded and informed that if it happened again he would be killed. For the present he escaped punishment personally, but was ordered to cudgel the gi^l and then send her back home. He obeyed again ; the girl fell down before him and he rained hard blows on her head and shoulders till the elders themselves interceded and cried enough. The girl was chased away and the lover remained alone. For two days he refused to join in the hunting or diversions of his companions. On the third day he ascended an eminence whence the Murray Valley can be seen. In the distance he saw two columns of smoke ; they had been maintained for him all this time by his girl. He took his spear and opossum coat and hastened toward the columns of smoke. He was about to commit his third 6fEence, which meant certain death, yet on he went and found the girl. Her wounds were not yet 'healed, but she hastened to meet him and put her head on his bosom. This tale is open to the same criticism as Lumholtz's. The LOCAL COLOR IN COURTSHIP 473 man risks his life, not for another, but to secure what he covets. It is a romantic love-story, but there is no indication anywhere of romantic love, while some of the details are fictitiously embellished. An Australian girl does not put Jier head on her lover's bosom, nor could she camp alone and keep up two columns of smoke for several days without being discovered and kidnapped. The story is evidently one of an ordinary elopement, embellished by European fancy. ^ LOCAL COLOR IN COURTSHIP There is some quaint local color in Australian c(tartship, but usually blows play too important a role to make their procedure acceptable to anyone with a less waddy-proof skull than an Australian. Spencer and Gillen relate (556) that in cases of charming, the initiative is sometimes taken by the woman, " who can, of course, imagine that she has been charmed, and then find a willing aider and abettor in the man whose vanity is flattered by this response to his magic power, which he can soon persuade himself that he did really exercise ; besides which, an extra wife has its advantages in the way of procuring food and saving him trouble, while, if his other women object, the matter is one which does not hurt him, for it can easily be settled once and for all by a stand-up fight between the women and the rout of the loser." Quaintly Australian are the following details of Kurnai courtship given by Howitt : " Sometimes it might happen that the young men were backward. Perhaps there might be several young girls who ought to be married, and the women had then to take the matter in hand when some eligible young men were at camp. They consulted, and some went out in the forest and with sticks killed some of the little birds, the yeerung. These they brought back to the camp and casually showed them to some of the men ; then there was an uproar. The men were ' Surgeon-General Roth of Queensland does not indulge in any illusions re- garding love in Australia. He uses quotation marks when he speaks of a man beiuf; in " love " C180)i i^Qd iu another place he speaks of the native vroman " Whose love, such as it is," etc. He evidently realizes that Australian lovers are only *^ lewd fellows of the baser sort. " 474 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE very angry. The yeerungs, their brothers, had been killed ! The young men got sticks ; the girls took sticks also, and they attacked each other. Heavy blows were struck, heads were broken, and blood flowed, but no one stopped them. . . . " Perhaps this fight might last a quarter of an hour, then they separated. Some even might be left on the ground in- sensible. Even the men and women who were married joined in the free fight. The next day the young men, the brewit, went, and in their turn killed some of the women's ' sisters,' the birds djeetgiin, and the consequence was that on the following day there was a worse fight than before. It was perhaps a week or two before the wounds and bruises were healed. By and by, some day one of the eligible young men met one of the marriageable young women ; he looked at her, and said ' Djeetgiin ! ' She said ' Yeerung ! What does the yeerung eat ? ' The reply was, ' He eats so-and-so,' mention- ing kangaroo, opossum, or emu, or some other game. Then they laughed, and she ran ofi with him without telling anyone." LOVE-LETTERS Apart from magic and birds Australian lovers appear not to have been without means of communicating with one an- other. Howitt says that if a Kurnai girl took a fancy to a man she might send him a secret message asking, " Will you find me some food ? " And this was understood to be a pro- posal — a rather unsentimental and utilitarian proposal, it must be confessed. According to one of the correspondents of Curr (IIL, 176) the natives along the Mary Eiver even made use of a kind of love-letters which, he says, " were peculiar." " When the writer was once travelling with a black boy the latter produced from the lining of his hat a bit of twig about an inch long and having three notches cut on it. The black boy explained that he was a dJiomka (messenger), that the central notch represented himself, and the other notches, one the youth sending the message, the other the girl for whom it was intended. It meant, in the words of Dickens, ' Barkis is willin'.' The dhomka sewed up the love-symbol in the lining of his hat, carried it for months without divulging his secret to his sable friends, and finally delivered it safely. This practice appeared to be well-known, and was probably common." LOVE-LETTERS 475 Snch a "love-letter," consisting of three notches cut in a twig, symbolically sums up this whole chapter. The differ- ence between this bnshman's twig and the love-letter of a civilized modern suitor is no greater than the difference be- tween aboriginal Australian "love" and genuine romantic love. ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC Between' the northern extremity of Australia and the southern extremity of New Guinea, about ninety miles wide, lies Torres Strait, discovered by a Spaniard in 1606, and not visited again by whites till Captain Cook sailed through in 1770. This strait has been called a " labyrinth of islands, rocks, and coral reefs," so complicated and dangerous that Torres, the original discoverer, required two months to get through. WHERE WOMEN PROPOSE The larger islands in this strait are of special interest to stu- dents of the phenomena of love and marriage, for on them it is not only permissible but obligatory for women to propose to the men. Needless to say that the inhabitants of these islands, though so near Queensland, are not Australians. They are Melanesians, but their customs are insular and unique. Curr (I., 279) says of them that they are " with one exception, of the Papuan type, frizzle-haired people who cultivate the soil, use the bow and arrow and not the spear, and, nn-Austra- lian-like, treat their women with some consideration." Luckily the customs of these islanders have been carefully and intelligently studied by Professor A. C. Haddon, who published an entertaining account of them in a periodical to which one usually looks for instruction rather than amuse- ment.i Professor Haddon combines the two. On the island of Tud, he tells us, when boys undergo the ordeal of initia- tion into manhood, one of the lessons taught them is : " You no like girl first ; if you do, girl laugh and call you woman." When a girl likes a man, she tells his sister and gives her a ' Journcd of the Anthrop. Inst., 1889. 476 WHERE WOMEN PROPOSE 477 ring of string. On the first suitable opportunity the sister says to her brother : "Brother, I have some good news for you. A woman loves you." He asks who it is, and, if will- ing to go on with the affair, tells his sister to ask the girl to keep an appointment with him in some spot in the bush. On receipt of the message the enamoured girl informs her par- ents that she is going into the bush to get some wood, or food, or some such excuse. At the appointed time the man meets her ; and they sit down and yarn, without any fond- ling. The ensuing dialogue is given by Haddon in the actual ■words which Maino, chief of Tnd, used r " Opening the conversation, the man says, ' You like me proper ? ' " 'Yes,' she replies, ' I like you proper with my heart in- side. Eye along my heart see yon — you my man.' "Unwilling to rashly give himself away, he asks, 'How you like me ? ' " ' I like your leg — yon got fine body — your skin good — I like you altogether,' replies the girl. " After matters have proceeded satisfactorily the girl, anx- ious to clench the matter, asks when they are to be married. The man says, ' To-morrow, if you like.' " Then they go home and inform their relatives. There is a mock fight and everything is settled." On the island of Mabuiag, after a girl has sent an interme- diary to bring a string to the man she covets, she follows this np by sending him food, again and again. But he "lies low " a month or two before he ventures to eat any of this food, because he has been warned by his mother that if he takes it he will "get an eruption all over his face." Finally, he concludes she means business, so he consults the big men of the village and marries her. If a man danced well, he found favor in the sight of these island damsels. His being married did not prevent a girl from proposing. Of course she took good care not to make the advances through one of the other wives — that might have caused trouble ! — but in the usual way. On this island the men never made the first advances toward matrimony. Had- don tells a story of a native girl who wanted to marry a Loy- 478 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC alty Islander, a cook, who was loafing on the mission premises. He did not enconrage her advances, but finally agreed to meet her in the bush, where, according to his version of the story, he finally refused her. She, however, accused him of trying to " steal "her. This led to a big palaver before the chief, at which the verdict was that the cook was innocent and that the girl had trumped up the charge' in order to force the marriage. If a man and a girl began to keep company, he was branded on the back with a, charcoal, while her mark was cut into the skin (because " she asked the man"). It was expected they would marry, but if they did not nothing could be done. If it was the 'man who was unwilling, the girl's father told the other men of the place, and they gave him a sound thrashing. Kefusing a girl was thus a serious matter on these islands ! The missionaries, Haddon was informed, " discountenance the native custom of the women proposing to the men, although there is^ not the least objection to it from a moral or social ppiut of view ; quite the reverse. So the white man's fashion is being introduced. As an illustra- tion of the present mixed condition of affairs, I found that a girl who wants a certain man Writes him a letter, often on a slate, and he replies in a similar manner." On the island of Tud it often happened that the girl who was first enamoured of a youth at his initiation, and who first asked him in marriage, was one who ''like too many men." The lad, being on his guard, might get rid of her attentions by playing a trick on her, making a bogus appointment with her in the bush, and then informing the elder men, who would appear in his place at the trysting-place, to the girl's mortification. Various details given in the chapter on Australia indicated that if the women on that big island did not propose, as a rule, it was not from coyness but because the selfishness of the men and their arrangements made it impossible in most cases. On these neighboring islands the women could pro- pose ; yet the cause of love, of course, did not gain anything from such an arrangement, which could serve only to stimu- late licentiousness. WHERE WOMEN PROPOSE 479 Haddon gathered the impression that " chastity before marriage was unknown, free intercourse not being considered wrong ; it was merely 'fashion along we folk.'" Their excuse was the same as Adam's : " Woman, he steal ; man, how can hehelpit?"! Nocturnal courtship was in vogue : " Decorum was ob- served. Thus I was told in Tud a girl, before going to sleep, would tie a string round her foot and pass it under the thatched wall of the house. In the middle of the night her lover would come, pull the string, and so awaken the girl, who would then join him. As the chief of Mabuiag said, ' What can the father do ; if she wants the man how can he stop her ?'" On Muralug Island the custom is somewhat different. There, after the girl has sent her grass-ring to the man she wants, "if he is willing to proceed in the matter, he goes to the rendezvous in the bush and, not unnaturally, takes every ad- vantage of the situation. Every night afterwards he goes to the girl's house and steals away before daybreak. At length someone informs the girl's father that a man is sleeping with his daughter. The father communicates with the girl, and she tells her lover that her father wants to see him^' To see what sort of man he is ? ' The father then says, ' You like my daughter, she like you, you may have her.' The details are then arranged." Sometimes, if a girl was too free with her favors to the men, the other women cut a mark down her back, to make her feel ashamed. Yet she had no difficulty on this account in sub- sequently finding a husband. Besides the existence of " free love," there are other cus- toms arguing the absence of sentiment in these insular affairs I Macgillivray says (IL, 8) that the females of the Torres Islands are in most cases betrothed in infancy. " When the man thinks proper he takes his wife to live with him without any further ceremony, but before this she has prob- ably had promiscuous intercourse with the young men, such, if conducted with a moderate degree of secrecy, not being considered as an offence. . . . Oc- casionally there are instances of strong mutual attachment and courtship, when, if the damsel is not betrothed, a small present made to the father is 8u£Scient to procure his consent ; at the Prince of Wales Islands a knife or a glass is con- sidered as a sufficient price for the hand of a ' fair lady,' and are the articles mostly used for that purpose." I cite this passage chiefly because it is another one of those to which Gerland refers as evidence of genuine romantic love ! 480 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC of the heart. Infanticide was frequently resorted to, the babes being buried alive in the sand, for no other reason than" to save the trouble of taking care of them. After marriage, in spite of the fact that the girl did the proposing, she be- comes the man's property ; so much so that if she should of- fend him, he may kill her and no harm will come to him. If her sister comes to remonstrate, he can kill her too, and if he has two wives and they quarrel, he can kill both. In that love-scene reported by Maine, the chief of Tud, the girl gives us her " sentimental " reasons why she loves him : because he has a fine leg and body, and a good skin. The "ro- mance " of the situation is further aggravated when we read that, as in Australia, swapping sisters is the usual way of get- ting a wife, and that if a man has no sister to exchange he must pay for his wife with a canoe, a knife, or a glass bottle. Chief Maino himself told Haddon that he gave for his wife seven pieces of calico, one dozen shirts, one dozen singlets, one dozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen toma- hawks, besides tobacco, fish-lines and hooks and pearl shells. He finished his enumeration by exclaiming " By golly, he too dear ! " How did these islanders ever come to indulge in the custom, so inconsistent with their general attitude toward women, of allowing them to propose ? The only hint at an explanation I have been able to find is contained in. the f ol- lowing citation from Haddon : " If an unmarried woman desired a man she accosted him, but the man did not ask the woman (at least, so I was in- formed), for if she refused him he would feel ashamed, and maybe brain her with a stone club, and so ' he would kill her for nothing. ' " BORKEAN' CAGED GIELS The islands of the Pacific Ocean and adjacent waters are al- most innumerable. To give an account of the love-affairs customary on all of them would require a large volume by itself. In the present work it is not possible to do more than select a few of the islands, as samples, preference being given CHARMS OF DYAK WOMEN 481 to those that show at least some traces of feelings rising above mere sensualism. One of the largest and best known of these islands is Borneo, and of its inhabitants the Dyaks are of special interest from oar point of view. Their customs have been observed and described by St. John, Low, Bock, H. Ling Roth and others.' In some parts of Dutch Borneo the cruel custom prevails of locking up a girl when she is eight to ten years old in a small, dark apartment of the house, which she is not allowed to leave for about seven years. She spends her time making mats and doing other handiwork, but is not allowed to see anyone — not even of her own family — except a female slave. When she is free from her prison she appears bleached a light yellow, as though made out of wax, and totters along on small, thin feet — which the natives consider especially attractive. CHARMS OF DYAK WOMEN' Dyak girls are not subjected to any such restraints, and in some respects they enjoy more liberty than is good for them. As usual among the lower races, they have to do most of the hard work. " It is a sad sight," says Low (75), " to see the Dyak girls, some but nine or ten years of age, carrying water up the mount in bamboos, their bodies bent nearly double, and groaning under the weight of their burden." Lieutenant Marryat found that the mountain Dyak girls, if not beauti- ful, had some beautiful points — good eyes, teeth, and hair, besides good manners, and they " knew how to make use of their eyes." Denison (cited by Roth, I., 46) remarks that " Some of the girls showed signs of good looks, but hard work, poor feeding, and intermarriage and early marriage soon told their tale, and rapidly converted them into ugly, dirty, diseased old hags, and this at an age when they are barely more than young women." They marry sometimes as early as the age of thirteen, and in general they are inferior ' I am indebted for many of the following facts to H. Ling Roth's splendid compilation and monograph entitled The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo. London, 1896. 482 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC in looks to the men. Marryat thought he saw " something wicked in their dark furtive glances," while Earl found the faces of Dyak women generally extremely interesting, largely on account of " the soft expression given by their long eye- lashes, and by the habit of keeping the eyes half closed." " Their general conversation is not wanting in wit," says Brooke (I., 110), "■ and considerable acuteness of perception is evinced, but often accompanied by improper and indecent language, of which they are unaware when giving utterance to it. Their acts, however, fortunately evince more regard for modesty than their words." Grant, in describing his tour . among the Land Dyaks, remarks (97) : " It has been men- tioned once or twice that we found the women bathing at the village well. Although, generally speaking, no lack of proper modesty is shown, certainly rather an Adam and Eve like idea of the same is displayed on such occasions by these simple people." DTAK MOEALS Concerning the sexual morality of the Dyaks, opinions of observers differ somewhat. St. John (I., 53) observes that " the Sea Dyak women are modest and yet unchaste, love warmly and yet divorce easily, but are generally faithful to their husbands when married." It is agreed that the morality of the Land Dyaks is superior to that of the Sea Dyaks ; yet with them, " as among the Sea Dyaks, the young people have almost unrestrained intercourse ; but, if a girl prove with child a marriage immediately takes place, the bridegroom making the richest presents he can to her relatives" (I., 113). " There is no strict law," says Mundy (II., 2), " to bind the conduct of young married people of either sex, and parents are more or less indifferent on those points, ac- cording to their individual ideas of right and wrong. It is supposed that every young Dyak woman will eventually suit herself with a husband, and it is considered no disgrace to be on terms of intimacy with the youth of her fancy till she has the opportunity of selecting a suitable helpmate ; and as the un- married ladies attach much importance to bravery, they are always desirous of securing the affections of a renowned war- NOCTURNAL COURTSHIP 483 rior. Lax, however, as this code may appear before marriage, it would seem to be suflSciently stringent after the matri- monial. . One wife only is allowed, and infidelity is punished by fine oji both sides — inconstancy on the part of the hus- band being esteemed equally as bad as in the female. The breach of the marriage vows, however, appears to be infre- quent, though they allow that, during the time of war, more license is given." NOCTUENAL COURTSHIP Brooke Low relates that the Sea Dyak girls receive their male visitors at night. " They sleep apart from their parents, sometimes in the same room, but more often in the loft. The young men are not invited to sleep with them unless they are old friends, but they may sit with them and chat, and if they get to be fond of each other after a short acquaintance, and wish to make a match of it, they are united in marriage, if the par- ents on either side have no objections to ofEer. It is in fact the only way open to the man and woman to become ac- quainted with each other, as privacy during the daytime is out of the question in a Dyak village." The same method of courtship prevails amon^ the Land Dyaks. Some queer details are given by St. John, Crossland and Leggatt (Roth, 110). About nine or ten o'clock at night the lover goes on tiptoe to the mosquito curtains of his be- loved, gently awakens her and offers her some prepared betel- nut. If she accepts it, he is happy, for it means that his suit is prospering, but if she refuses it and says " Be good enough to blow up the fire," it means that he is dismissed. Sometimes their discourse is carried on through the medium of a sort of Jew's-harp, one handing it to the other, asking questions and returning answers. The lover remains until daybreak. After the consent of the girl and her parents has been obtained, one more ordeal remains ; the bridal couple have to run the gauntlet of the mischievous village boys, who stand ready with sooted hands to begrime their faces and bodies ; and generally they succeed so well that bride and groom present the appearance of negroes. Elopements also occur in cases where parental consent is 484 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC ■withheld. Brooke Low thus describes an old ciastom which permits a man to carry off a girl : " She will meet him by arrangement at the water-side and step into his boat with a paddle in her hand, and both will pull away as fast as they can. If pursued he will stop every now and then to deposit some article of value on the bank, such as a gun, a jar, or a tavor for the acceptance of her fam- ily, and when he has exhausted his resources he will leave his own sword. When the pursuers observe this they will cease to follow, knowing he is cleared out. As soon as he reaches his own village He tidies up the house and spreads the mats, and when his pursuers arrive he gives them food to eat and toddy to drink, and sends them home satisfied. In the meanwhile he is left in possession of his wife." HEAD HUKTEBS A-WOOING In one of the introductory chapters of this volume a brief account was given of the Dyak head-hunters. Eeference was made to the fact that the more heads a man has cut off, the more he is respected. He cannot marry until he has killed a man, woman, or child, and brought home the head as a trophy, an^ cases are known of men having to wait two years before they could procure the skull necessary to soften the heart of the gentle beloved. " From all accounts," says Roth (II., 163), " there can be little doubt that one of the chief incentives to getting heads is the desire to please the women. . . . Mrs. McDougall relates an old Sakaran legend which says that the daughter of their great ancestor, who resides in heaven near the great Evening Star, refused to marry until her betrothed brought her a present worth her acceptance. The man went into the jungle and killed a deer, which he presented to her ; but the fair lady turned away in disdain. He went again and returned with a mias, the great monkey [sic] who haunts the forest ; but this present was not more to her taste. Then, in a fit of despair, the lover went abroad, and killed the first man that he met, and throwing his vic- tim's head at the maiden's feet, he exclaimed at the cruelty she had made him guilty of ; but to his surprise, she smiled, and said that now he had discovered the only gift worthy of herself." HEAD HUNTERS A-WOOING 485 Roth cites a correspondent who says : "At this moment there are two Dyaks in the Knching jail who acknowledge that they took the heads of two innocent Chinese with no other object in view when doing so than to secure the pseado affections of women, who refused to marry them until they had thus proved themselves to be men." Here is what a sweet Dyak maiden said to a young man who asked for her hand and heart : " Why don't yon go to the Saribus Fort and there take the head of Bakir (the Dyak chief), or even that of Tuan Hassan (Mr. Watson), and then I will deign to think of your desires with some degree of interest." Says Captain Mundy (II., 232) : " No aristocratic youth dare venture to pay his addresses to a Dyak demoiselle unless he throws at the blushing maid- en's feet a netful of skulls ! In some districts it is customary for the young lady to desire her lover to cut a thick bamboo from the neighboring jungle, and when in possession of this instrument, she carefully arranges the cadeau d'amour on the floor, and by repeated blows beats the heads into fragments, which, when thus pounded, are scraped up and cast into the river ; at the same time she throws herself into the arms of the enraptured youth, and so commences the honeymoon." Another account of Dyak courtship (Roth, II., 166) repre- sents a young warrior returning from a head-hunting expedi- tion and, on meeting his beloved, holding in each hand one of the captured heads by the hair. She takes one of the heads, whereupon they dance round each other with the most extravagant gestures, amidst the applause of the Rajah and his people. The next step is a feast, at which the young couple eat together. When this is over, they have to take ofE whatever clothes they have on and sit naked on the ground while some of the old women throw over them handfuls of paddy and repeat a prayer that they may prove as fruitful as that grain. " The warrior can, take away any inferior man's wife at pleasure, and is thanked for so doing. A chief who. has twenty heads in his possession will do the same with an- other who may have only ten, and upwards to the Rajah's family, who can take any woman at pleasure." 486 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC FICKLE AND SHALLOW PASSION Though the Dyaks may be somewhat less coarse than those Australians who make a captured woman marry the man who killed her husband, an almost equal callousness of feeling is revea;led by J. Dalton's statement that the women taken on the head-hunting expedition " soon became attached to the conquerors " — resembling, in this respect, the Australian woman who, of her own accord, deserts to an enemy who has vanquished her husband. Cases of frantic amorous infatua- tion occur, as a matter of course. Brooke (II., 106) relates the story of a girl of seventeen who, for the sake of an ugly, deformed, and degraded workman, left her home, dressed as a man, and in a small broken canoe made a trip of eighty miles to join her lover. In olden times death would have been the penalty for such an act; but she, being a "New Woman " in her tribe, exclaimed, " If I fell in love with a wild beast, no one should prevent me marrying it." In this Eastern clime, Brooke declares, " love is like the sun's rays in warmth." He might have added that it is as fickle and tran- sient as the sun's warmth ; every passing cloud chills it. The shallow nature of Dyak attachment is indicated by their ephemeral unions and universal addiction to divorce. " Among the Upper Sarawak Dyaks divorce is very frequent, owing to the great extent of adultery," says Haughton (Roth, I., 136) ; and St. John remarks : " One can scarcely meet with a middle-aged Dayak who has not had two, and often three or more wives. I have heard of a girl of seventeen or eighteen years who had already had three husbands. Repudiation, which is generally done by the man or woman running away to the house of a near relation, takes place for the slightest cause — personal dislike or disap- pointments, a sudden quarrel, bad dreams, discontent with their partners' powers of labor or their industry, or, in fact, any excuse which will help to give force to the expression, ' I do not want to live with him, or her, any longer.'" " Many men and women have married seven or eight times before they find the partner with whom they desire to spend the rest of their lives." DYAK LOVE SONGS 487 " When a couple are newly-married, if a deer or a gazelle, or a moose-deer utters a cry at night near the house in which the pair are living, it is an omen of ill — they must separate, or the death of one would ensue. This might be a great trial to an European lover ; the Dayaks, however, take the matter very philosophically. "Mr. Chalmers mentions to me the case of a young Penin- jau man who was divorced from his wife on the third day after marriage. The previous night a deer had uttered its warning cry, and separate they must. The morning of the divorce he chanced to go into the ' Head House,' and there sat the bridegroom contentedly at work. " ' Why are you here ? ' he was asked, as the ' Head House ' is frequented by bachelors and boys only ; ' What news of your new wife?' " 'I' have no wife, we were separated this morning because the deer cried last night.' " ' Are you sorry ?' " ' Very sorry.' " ' What are you doing with that brass wire ?' " ' Making perik ' — the brass chain-work which the women wear round their waists — ' for a young woman whom I want to get for my new wife.'" (I., 165-67 ; 55.) Such is the love of Dyaks. Marriage among them, says the same keen observer, " is a business of partnership for the purpose of having children, dividing labor, and, by means of their offspring, providing for their old age ; " and Brooke Low remarks that " intercourse before marriage is strictly to as- certain that the marriage will be fruitful, as the Dyaks want children." In other words, apart from sensual purposes, the women are not desired and cherished for their own sakes, but only for utilitarian reasons, as a means to an end. Whence we conclude that, high as the Dyaks stand above Australians and many Africans, they are still far from the goal of genuine affection. Their feelings are only skin deep. DYAK LOVE-SONGS Dyaks are not without their love-songs. " I am the tender shoot of the drooping libau with its fragrant scent." " I am the comb of the champion fighting-cock that never runs 488 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC away." " I am the hawk flying down the Kanyau Eiver, com- ing after the fine feathered fowl." " I am the crocodile from the mouth of the Lingga, coming repeatedly for the striped flower of the rose-apple." Eoth (L, 119-21) cites forty-flve of these verses, mostly expressive of such selflsh boasting and vanity. Not one of them expresses a feeling of tenderness or admiration of a beloved person, not to speak of altruistic feelings. THE GIKL WITH THE CLEAN EACE Is a Dyak capable of admiring personal beauty ? Some of the girls have fine figures and pretty faces ; but there is no evidence that any but the voluptuous (non-esthetic) qualities of the figure are appreciated, and as for the faces, if the men really applreciated beauty as we do, they would first of all things insist that the girls must keep their faces clean. An amusing experiment made by St. John with some Ida'an girls (I., 339) is suggestive from this point of view : " We selected one who had the dirtiest face — and it was dif&cult to select where all were dirty — and asked her to glance at herself in a looking-glass. She did so, and passed it round to the others ; we then asked which they thought looked best, cleanliness or dirt : this was received with a uni- versal giggle. "We had brought with us several dozen cheap looking- glasses, so we told Iseiom, the daughter of Li Moung, our host, that, if she would go and wash her face we would give her one. She treated the offer with scorn, tossed her head, and went into her father's room. But aljout half an hour afterwards, we saw her come into the house and try to mix quietly with the crowd ; but it was of no use, her companions soon noticed she had a clean face, and pushed her to the front to be inspected. She blushingly received her looking-glass and ran away, amid the laughter of the crowd." The example had a great effect, however, and before even- ing nine of the girls had received looking-glasses.* 1 The Ida'an are the aboriginal population ; in dress, habitations, manners, and customs they are essentially the same as the Dyaks in geneiaL FIJIAN REFINEMENTS 489 FIJIAK REFINEMENTS In the chapter on Personal Beauty I endeavored to show that if savages who live near the sea or river are clean, it is not owing to their love of cleanliness, hut to an accident, bathing being resorted to by them as an antidote to heat, or as a sport. This applies particularly to the Melanesian and Polynesian inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, whose chief pastimes are swimming and surf riding, Thomas Williams, in his authoritative work on Fiji and the Fijians, makes some remarks which entirely bear out my views : " Too much has been said about the cleanliness of the natives. The lower classes are often very dirty. . . . They . . . seldom hesitate to sink both cleanliness and dignity in what they call comfort " (117). We are therefore not surprised to read on another page (97) that " of admiring emotion, produced by the contemplation of beauty, these people seem incapable ; while they remain unmoved by the wondrous loveliness with which they are everywhere surrounded. . . . The mind of the Fijian has hitherto seemed utterly unconscious of any inspiration of beauty, and his imagination has grovelled in the most vulgar earthliness." Sentimentalists have therefore erred in ascribing to the Fi- jian cannibals cleanliness as a virtue. They have erred also in regard to several other alleged refinements they discovered among these tribes. One of these is the custom prohibiting a father from cohabiting with his wife until the child is weaned. This has been supposed to indicate a kind regard for the welfare and health of mother and child. But when we examine the facts we find that far from being a proof of superior morality, this custom reveals the immorality of the husband, and makes an assassin of the wife. Read what Williams has to say (154) : " Nandi, one of whose wives was pregnant, left her to dwell with a second. The forsaken one awaited his return some months, and at last the child dis- appeared. This practice seemed to be universal on Vanua Levu — quite a matter of course — so that few women could be 490 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC found who had not in some way been murderers. The ex- tent of infanticide in some parts of this island reaches nearer to two-thirds than half." Williams further informs us (117) that " husbands are as frequently away from their wives as they are with them, since it is thought not well for a man to sleep regularly at home." He does not comment on this, but Seeman (191) and Wester- marck (151) interpret the custom as indicating Fijian "ideas of delicacy in married life," which, after what has just been said, is decidedly amusing. If Fijians really were capable of considering it indelicate to spend the night under the same roof with their wives, it would indicate their indelicacy, not their delicacy. The utterly unprincipled men doubtless had their reasons for preferring to stay away from home, and prob- ably their great contempt for women also had something to do with the custom. HOW CABTNIBALS TEEAT WOMEK In Fiji, says Crawley (235), women are kept away from participation in worship. " Dogs are excluded from some temples, women from all." In many parts of the group woman is treated, according to Williams, " as a beast of burden, not exempt from any kind of labor, and forbidden to enter any temple ; certain kinds of food she may eat only by sufferance, and that after her husband has finished. In youth she is the victim of lust, and in old age, of brutality." Girls are be- trothed and married as children without consulting their choice. " I have seen an old man of sixty living with two wives both under fifteen years of age." Such of the young women as are acquainted with foreign ways envy the favored women who wed "the man to whom their spirit flies." Women are regarded as the property of the men, and as an incentive to bravery they are "promised to such as shall, by their prowess, render themselves deserving." They are used for paying war-debts and other accounts ; for instance, " the people submitted to their chiefs and capitulated, offering two ■women, a basket of earth, whales' teeth, and mats, to buy HOW CANNIBALS TREAT WOMEN 491 the reconciliation of the Eewans." " A chief of Nandy, in Viti Levu, was very desirous to hare a musket which an American captain had shown him. The price of the coveted piece was two hogs. The chief had only one ; but he sent on board with it a young woman as an equivalent." At wed- dings the prayer is that the bride may " bring forth male chil- dren " ; and when the son is born, one of the first lessons taught him is " to strike his mother, lest he should grow up to be a coward." When a husband died, it was the national custom to murder his wife, often his mother too, to be his companions. To kill a defenceless woman was an honorable deed. " I once asked a man why he was called Koroi. ' Be- cause,^ he replied, ' I, with several other men, found some women and children in a cave, drew them out and clubbed them and was then consecrated.' " So far have sympathy and gallantry progressed in Fiji. " Many examples might be given of most dastardly cruelty, where women and even unoffending children were abom- inably slain." " I have labored to make the murderers of females ashamed of themselves ; and have heard their cow- ardly cruelty defended by the assertion that such victims were doubly good — because they ate well, and because of the dis- tress it caused their husbands and friends." " Cannibalism does not confine itself to one sex." " The heart, the thigh, and the arm above the elbow, are considered the greatest dainties." One of these monsters, whom Williams knew, sent his wife to fetch wood and collect leaves to line the oven. When she had cheerfully and unsuspectingly obeyed his orders, he killed her, put her in the oven, and ate her. There had been no quarrel ; he was simply hungering for a dainty morsel. Even after death the women are subjected to barbarous treatment. "One of the corpses was that of an old man of seventy, another of a fine young woman of eighteen. . . . All were dragged about and subjected to abuse too horrible and disgusting to be described." ' < The above details are culled from Williams, pp. 145, 144, 38, 345, 148, 152, 43, 114, 179, 180, 344. The editor declares, in a foot-note (182), that he has re- pressed or softened some of the more horrible details in Williams's account. 492 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC FIJIAN MODESTY AND CHASTITY With these facts in mind the reader is able to appreciate the humor of the suggestion that it is " ideas of delicacy " that prevent Fijian husbands from spending their nights at home. Equally amusing is the. blunder of Wilkes, who tells us (III., 356) that " though almost naked, these natives have a great idea of modesty, and consider it extremely indelicate to expose the whole person. If either a man or woman should be discovered without the ' maro ' or ' liku,* they would prob- ably be killed." Williams, the great authority on Fijians, says that " Commodore Wilkes's account of Fijian marriages seems to be compounded of Oriental notions and Ovalan yarns " (147). Having been a mere globe-trotter, it is natural that he should have erred in his interpretation of Fijian cus- toms, but it is unpardonable in anthropologists to accept such conclusions without examination. As a matter of fact, the scant Fijian attire has nothing to do with modesty ; quite the contrary. Williams says ( 147) " that young unmarried women wear a liku little more than a hand's breadth in depth, which does not meet at the hips by several inches ; " and Seeman writes (168) that Fijian girls " wore nothing but a girdle of hibiscus fibres, about six inches wide, dyed black, red, yellow, white, or brown, and put on in such a coquettish way that one thought it must come off every moment." Westermarck, with whom for once we can agree, justly observes (190) that such a costume " is far from being in harmony with our ideas of modesty," and that its real purpose is to attract attention. As elsewhere among such peoples the matter is strictly reg- ulated by fashion. "Both sexes," says Williams (143), "go unclad until the tenth year and some beyond that. Chiefs' children are kept longest without dress." Any deviation from a local custom, however ludicrous that custom may be, seems to barbarians punishable and preposterous. Thus, a Fijian priest whose sole attire consisted in a loin-cloth {masi) exclaimed on hearing of the gods of the naked New Hebri- deans : " Not possessed of masi and pretend to have gods ! " EMOTIONAL CURIOSITIES 493 The alleged chastity of Fijians is as illusive as their modesty. Girls who had been betrothed as infants were carefully guarded, and adultery savagely punished by clubbing or strangling ; but, as I made clear in the chapter on jealousy, such vindict- ive punishment does not indicate a regard for chastity, but is merely revenge for infringement on property rights. The national custom permitting a man whose conjugal property had been molested to retaliate by subjecting the culprit's wife to the same treatment in itself indicates an utter absence of the notion of chastity as a virtue. Like the Papuan, Melanesian, and Polynesian inhabitants of the Pacific Islands in general, the Fijians were utterly licentious. Young women, says Williams (145) are the victims of man's lust ; " all the evils of the most licentious sensuality are found among this people. In the case of the chiefs, these are fully carried out, and the vulgar follow as far as their means will allow. But here, even at the risk of making the picture incomplete, there may not be given a faithful representation " (115). When a band of warriors returns victorious, they are met by the women ; but " the words of the women's song may not be translated ; nor are the obscene gestures of their dance, in which the young virgins are compelled to take part, or the foul insults offered to the corpses of the slain, fit to be described. . . . On these occasions the ordinary social restrictions are destroyed, and the unbridled and indiscriminate indulgence of every evil lust and passion completes the scene of abomination" (43). Yet, "voluntary breach of the marriage contract is rare in comparison with that which is enforced, as, for in- stance, when the chief gives up the women of a town to a company of visitors or warriors. Compliance with this man- date is compulsory, but should the woman conceal it from her husband, she would be severely punished " (147). EMOTIONAL CURIOSITIES When Williams adds to the last sentence that "fear pre- vents unfaithfulness more than affection, though I believe that instances of the latter are numerous," we must not allow 494 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC ourselves to be deceived by a word. Fijian " affection " is a thing quite different from the altruistic feeling we mean by the word. It may in a wife assume the form of a blind attachment, like that of a dog to a cruel master, but is not likely to go beyond that, since even the most primitive love between parents and children is confessedly shallow, tran- sient, or entirely absent. Williams (154, 142) " noticed cases beyond number where natural affection was wanting on both sides ; " two- thirds of the offspring are killed, " such children as are allowed to live are treated with a foolish fondness " — and fondness is, as we have seen, not an altruistic but an egoistic feeling. In writing about Fijian friendships our author says (117) : "The high attainments which constitute friendship are known to very few. . . . Full-grown men, it is true, will walk about together, hand in hand, with boyish kindliness, or meet with hugs and embraces ; but their love, though specious, is hardly real." Obviously the keen-eyed missionary here had in mind the distinction between senti- mentality and sentiment. Sentimentality of a most extraor- dinary kind is also found in the attitude of sons toward par- ents. A Fijian considered it a mark of affection to club an aged parent, (157), and Williams has seen the breast of a fero- cious savage heave and swell with strong emotion on bidding a temporary farewell to his aged father, whom he afterward strangled (117). Such are the emotions of barbarians — shallow, fickle, capricious — as different from our affection as a brook which dries up after every shower is from the deep and steady current of a river which dispenses its beneficent waters even in a drought. FIJIAN LOVE-POEMS In his article on Fijian poetry, referred to in the chapter on Coyness, Sir Arthur Gordon informs us that among the "sentimental" class of poems "there are not a few which are licentious, and many more which, though not open to that reproach, are coarse and indecent in their plain-spoken- ness." Others of the love-songs, he declares, have "a ring of FIJIAN LOVE-POEMS 495 true feeling very tinlike what is usually found in similar Polynesian compositions, and which may be searched for in vain in Gill's Songs of the Pacific." These songs, he adds, "more nearly resemble European love-songs than any with which I am acquainted among other semi-savage races ; " and he finds in them " a ring of true passion as if of love arising not from mere animal instinct but intelligent association." I for my part cannot find in them even a hint at supersensual altruistic sentiment. To give the reader a chance to judge for himself I cite the following : He. — I seek my lady in the house when the breeze blows, I say to her, " Arrange the house, unfold the mats, bring the pillows, sit down and let us talk together." I say " Why do you provoke me ? Be sure men despise coquetry such as yours, though they disguise from you the scorn they feel. Nay, be not angry; grant me to hold thy fairly tattooed hand. I am distracted with love. I would fain weep if I could move thee to tears." She. — You are cruel, my love, and perverse. To think thus much of an idle jest. The setting sun bids all repose. Night is nigh. II I lay till dawn of day, peacefully asleep, But when the sun rose, I rose too and ran without. I hastily gathered the sweetest flowers I could find, shaking them from the branches. I came near the dwelling of my love with my sweet scented burden. As I came near she saw me, and called playfully, " What birds are you flying here so early ? " " I am a handsome youth and not a bird," I replied, ♦' But like a bird I am mateless and forlorn " She took a garland of flowers off her neck and gave it to me I in return gave her my comb ; I threw it to her and ah me ! it strikes her face! " What rough bark of a tree are you made from ?" she cries. And so saying she turned and went away in anger. 496 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC III In tlie mountain war of 1876 there was in the native force on the government side a handsome lad of the name of Naloko, much admired by the ladies. One day, all the camp and the village of Nasauthoko were found singing this song, which someone had composed : The wind blows over the great mountain of Magondro, It blows among the rocks of Magondro. The same wind plays in and raises the yellow locks of Naloko. Thou lovest me, Naloko, and to thee I am devoted, Shouldst thou forsake me, sleep would forever forsake me. Shouldst thou enfold another in thine arms, All food would be to me as the bitter root of the via. The world to me would become utterly joyless Without thee, my handsome, slender-waisted, Strong-shouldered, pillar-necked lad." SERENADES AND PKOPOSALS At the time when Williams studied the Pijians, their poetry consisted of dirges, serenades, wake-songs, war-songs, and hymns for the dance (99). Of love-songs addressed to in- dividuals he says nothing. The serenades do not come under that head, since, as he says (140), they are practised at night "h J companies of men and women " — which takes all the romance out of them. One detail of the romance of courtship had, however, been introduced even in his time, through European influence. "Popping the question" is, he says, of recent date, " and though for the most part done by the men, yet the women do not hesitate to adopt the same course when so inclined." No violent individual pref- erence seems to be shown. The following is a specimen of a man's proposal. Simioni Wang Eavou, wishing to bring the woman he wanted to a decision, remarked to her, in the hearing of sev- eral other persons : " I do not wish to have you because yon are a good-looking woman ; that you are not. But a woman is like a necklace ' SUICIDES AND BACHELORS 497 of flowers — pleasant to the eye and grateful to the smell : but such a necklace does not long continue attractive ; beau- tiful as it is one day, the next it fades and loses its scent. Yet a pretty necklace tempts one to ask for it, but, if refused no one will often repeat his request. If you love me, I love you ; but if not, neither do I love you : let it be a settled thing " (150). SUICIDES AND BACHELORS Hearts are not likely to be broken by a refusal Under such circumstances, which bears out Williams's remark (148) that no distinctive preference is apparent among these men and women. Under such circumstances it may appear strange that some widowers should commit suicide upon the death of a wife, as Seeman assures us they do (193). Does not this in- dicate deep feeling ? Not in a savage. In all countries suicide is usually a sigu of a weak intellect rather than of strong feelings, and especially is this the case among the lower races, where both men and women are a[)t to commit suicide in a moment of excitement, often for tlie most trivial cause, as we shall see in the next chapter. Williams tells us (106) of a chief on Thithia who was addressed disrespectfully by a younger brother and who, rather than live to have the insult made the topic of common talk, loaded his musket, placed the muzzle at his breast, and pushing the trigger with his toe, shot himself through the heart. He knew a similar case on Vanua Levu. " Pride and anger combined often lead to self-destruction. . . .' The most common method of suicide in Fiji is by jumping over a precipice. This is, among the women, the fashiotiable way of destroying themselves ; but they some- times resort to the rope. Of deadly poisons they are ignor- ant, and drowning would be a difficult thing ; for from in- fancy they learn to be almost as much at home in the water as on dry land." In his book on the Melanesians Codrington says (343) that " a wife jealous of her husband, or in any way incensed at him, would in former times throw herself from a cliff or tree, swim out to sea, hang or strangle herself, stab herself with 498 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC an arrow, or thrust one down her throat ; and a man jealous or quarrelling with his wife would do the like ; but now it is easy to go off with another's wile or husband in a labor ves- sel to Queensland or Fiji." There is one class of men in Fiji who are not likely to commit suicide. They are the bachelors, who, though they are scorned and frowned on in this life, must look forward to a worse fate after death. There is a special god, named Nangganangga — ''the bitter hater of bachelors" — who watches for their souls, and so untiring is his watch, as Will- iams was informed (206), that no unwedded spirit has ever reached the Elysium of Fiji. Sly bachelors sometimes try to dodge him by stealing around the edge of a certain reef at low tide ; but he is up to their tricks, seizes them and dashes them to pieces on the large black stone, just as one shatters rotten fire-wood. SAMOAKT TRAITS Cruel and degraded as the Fijians are, they mark a consid- erable advance over the Australian savages. A further ad- vance is to be noted as :we come to the Samoans. Cannibal- ism was indulged in occasionally in more remote times, but not, as in Fiji, owing to a relish for human flesh, but merely as a climax of hatred and revenge. To speak of roasting a Samoan chief is a deadly insult and a cause for war (Turner, 108). Sympathy was a feeling known to Samoans ; their treatment of the sick was invariably humane (141). And whereas in Australia, Borneo, and Fiji, it is just as, honor- able to slay a female as a male, Samoans consider it cowardly to kill a woman (196). Nor do they practise infanticide ; but this abstinence is counterbalanced by the fact that the custom of destroying infants before birth prevailed to a mel- ancholy extent (79). Yet here as everywhere we discover that the sexual refine- ment on which the capacity for supersensual love depends comes last of the virtues. The Eev. George Turner, who had forty years of experience among the Polynesians, writes (125) that at their dances "all kinds of obscenity in looks. SAMOAN TRAITS 499 language, and gesture prevailed ; and often they danced and revelled till daylight." The universal custom of tattooing was connected with immoral practices (90). During the wedding ceremonies of chiefs the friends of the bride " took up stones and beat themselves until their heads were bruised and bleeding. The ceremony to prove her virginity which preceded this burst of feeling will not bear the light of de- scription. . . . Night dances and the attendant immor- alities wound up the ceremonies." The same obscene cere- monies, he adds, were gone through, and this custom, he thinks, had some influence in cultivating chastity, especially among young women of rank who feared the disgrace and beating that was the lot of faithless brides. Presents were also given to those who had preserved their virtue ; but the result of these efEorts is thus summed up by Turner (91) : " Chastity was ostensibly cultivated by both sexes ; but it was more a name than a reality. Prom their childhood their ears were familiar with the most obscene conversation ; and as a whole family, to some extent, herded together, immorality was the natural and prevalent consequence. There were ex- ceptions, especially among the daughters of persons of rank ; but they were the exceptions, not the rule. Adultery, too, was sadly prevalent, although often severely punished by pri- vate revenge." When a chief took a wife, the bride's uncle or other rel- ative had to give up a daughter at the same time to be his concubine ; to refuse this, would have been to displease the household god. A girl's consent was a matter of secondary importance : " She had to agree if her parents were in favor of the match." Many marriages were made chiefly for the sake of the attendant festivities, the bride being compelled to go whether or not she was willing. In this way a chief might in a short time get together a harem of a dozen wives ; but most of them remained with him only a short time : " If the marriages had been contracted merely for the sake of the property and festivities of the occasion, the wife was not likely to be more than a few days or weeks with her hus- band." 500 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC COURTSHIP PANTOMIME Elopements occur iil Samoa in some cases where parental consent is refused. A vivid description of the pantomimic courtship preceding an elopement has been given by Kubary {Globus, 1885). A young warrior is surrounded by a bevy of girls. Though Unarmed, he makes various gestures as if spearing or clubbing an enemy, for which the girls cheet him. He then selects one, who at first seems Coyly unwilling, and begins a dance with her. She endeavors to look indifferent and forbiddiilg, while he, with longing looks and words, tries to Win her regard. Presently, yielding to his solicitations, she smiles, and opens her arms for him. But he, foolishly, stops to reproach her for holding him off so long. He shakes his head, rolls his eyes, and lo ! when he gets ready to grasp her at last, she eludes him again, with a mocking laugh. It is now his turn to be perverse. Eevenge is in his mind and mien. All his looks and gestures indicate contempt and malice, and he keeps turning his back to her. She can- not endure this long ; his scorn overcomes her pride, and when he changes his attitude and once more begins to en- treat, she at last allows him to seize her and they dance wildly. When finally the company separates for the evening meal, one may hear the Word toro whispered. It means " cane,'' and indicates a nocturnal rendezvous iti the cane- field, where lovers are safe from observation. They find each other by imitating the owl's sound, which excites no sus- picion. When they have Inet, the girl says : " You know that my parents hate you ; nothing remains but awenga." Awenga means flight ; three nights later they elope in a canoe to some small island, where they remaifa for a few weeks till the excite- ment over their disappearance has subsided in the village and their parents are ready to pardon them. TWO SAMOAN LOVE-STORIES 501 TWO SAMOAK LOVE-STORIES Turner devotes six pages (98-104) to two Samoan love- stories. One of them illustrates the devotion of a wife and her husband's ingratitude and faithlessness, as the following summary will show : There was a youth called Siati, noted for his singing. A serenading god came along, threw down a challenge, and promised him his fair daughter if he was the better singer. They sang and Siati beat the god. Then he rode on a shark to the god's home and the shark told him to go to the bath- ing-place, where he would find the god's daughters. The girls had Just left the place when Siati arrived, but one of them had forgotten her comb and came back to get it. " Siati," said she, " however have you come here ? " " I've come to seek the song-god and get his daughter to wife." "My father," said she, "is more of a god than man — eat nothing he hands you, never sit on a high seat lest death should follow, and now let us unite." « The god did not like his son-in-law and tried various ways to destroy him, but his wife Puapae always helped him out of the scrape, one time even making him cut her into two and throw her into the sea to be eaten by a fish and find a ring the god had lost and asked him to get. She was afterward cast ashore with the ring ; but Siati had not even kept awake, and she scolded him for it. To save his life, she svib- sequently performed several other miracles, in one of which her father and sister were drowned in the sea. Then she said to Siati : " My father and sister are dead, and all on account of my love to you ; you may go now and visit your family and friends while I remain here, but see that you do not behave unseemly." He went, visited his friends, and forgot Puapae. He tried to marry again, but Puapae came and stood on the other side. The chief called out, "Which is your wife, Siati ?" " The one on the right side." Puapae then broke silence with, "Ah, Siati, you have forgotten all I did for you ; " and oif she went. Siati remembered it all, darted after her crying, and then fell down dead. Apart from the amusing " suddenness " of the proposal and the marriage, this tale is of interest as indicating that among the lower races woman has — as many observations in- dicate — a greater capacity for conjugal attachment than man. 502 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC The courtship scene cited above indicates . an instinctive knowledge of the strategic value of coyness and feigned dis- pleasure. The following story, which I condense from the versified form in which Turner gives it, would seem to be a sort of masculine warning to women against the danger and folly of excessive coyness, so inconvenient to the men : Once there were two sisters, Sinaleuuna and Sinaeteva, who wished they had a brother. Their wish was gratified ; a boy was born to their parents, but they brought him up apart, and the sisters never saw him till one day, when he had grown up, he was sent to them with some food. The girls were struck with his beauty. Afterwards they sat down and filled into a bamboo bottle the liquid shadow of their brother. A report had come to them of Sina, a Fijian girl who was so beautiful that all the swells were running after her. Hearing this, and being anxious to get a wife for their brother, they dressed up and went to Fiji, intending to tell Sina about their brother. But Sina was haughty ; she slighted the sisters and treated them shamefully. .She had heard of the beauty of the young man, whose name was Maluafiti {" Shade of Fiji "), and longed for his coming, but did not know that these were his sisters. The slighted girls got angry and went to the water when Sina was taking her bath. From the bottle they threw out on the water the shadow of their brother. Sina looked at the shadow and was struck with its beauty. " That is my hus- band," she said, " wherever I can find him." She called out to the villagers for all the handsome young men to come and find out of whom the figure in the water was the image. But the shadow was more beautiful than any of these young men and it wheeled round and round in the water whenever Maluafiti, in his own land, turned about. All this time the sisters were weeping and exclaiming : " Oh, Maluafiti ! rise up, it is day ; Your shadow prolongs our ill-treatment. Maluafiti, come and talk with her face to face, Instead of that image in the water. " Sina had listened, and now she knew it was the shadow of Maluafiti. " These are his sisters too," she thought, " and I have been ill-using them ; forgive me, I've done wrong." But the ladies were angry still. Maluafiti came in his canoe CHARMS OF SOUTH SEA ISLANDERS 503 to court Lady Sina, and also to fetch his sisters. When they told him of their treatment he flew into an implacable rage. Sina longed to get him ; he was her heart's desire and long she had waited for him. But Maluafiti frowned and would return to his island, and ofE he went with his sisters. Sina cried and screamed, and determined to follow swimming. The sisters pleaded to save and to bring her, but Maluafiti relented not and Sina died in the ocean. PEKSONAL CHAEMS OF SOUTH SEA ISLAKDERS " Falling in love " with a person of the other sex on the mere report of his or her beauty is a very familiar motive in the literature of Oriental and medieeval nations in particular. It is, therefore, interesting to find such a motive in the Sa- nioan story just cited. In my view, as previously explained, beauty, among the lower races, means any kind of attractive- ness, sensual more frequently than esthetic. The South Sea Islanders have been, credited with considerable personal charms, although it is now conceded that the early voyagers (to whom, after an absence from shore of several months, almost any female must have seemed a Helen) greatly exaggerated their beauty. Captain Cook kept a level head. He found Tongan wom- en less distinguished from the men by their features than by their forms, while in the case of Hawaiians even the fig- ures were remarkably similar (II., 144, 246). In Tahitian women he saw " all those delicate characteristics which dis- tinguish them from the men in other countries." The Ha- waiians, though far from being ugly, are "neither remarka- ble for a beautiful shape, nor for striking features" (246). The indolent, open-air, amphibious life led by the South Sea Islanders was favorable to the development of fine bodies. Cook saw among the Tongans " some absolutely perfect mod- els of the human figure." But fine feathers do not make fine birds. The nobler phases of love are not inspired by fine figures so much as by beautiful and refined faces. Polyne- sian and j\Ielanesian features are usually coarse and sensual. Hugo Zoller says that " the most beautiful Samoan woman 504 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC would stand comparison at best with a pretty German peasant girl ; " and from my own observations at Honolulu, and a study of many photographs, I conclude that what he says applies to the Pacific Islanders in general. Edward Keeves, in his recent volume on Brown Men and Women (17-32), speaks of "that fraud — the beautiful brown woman." He found her a "dream of beauty and refinement" only in the eyes of poets and romancers ; in reality they were malodorous and vulgar. " All South Sea Island women are very much the same." " To compare the prettiest Tongan, Samoan, Tahi- tian, or even Rotuman, to the plainest and most simply edu- cated Irish, Erench, or Colonial girl that has been decently brought up is an insult to one's intelligence." Wilkes (II., t'2) hesitated to speak of the Tahitian females because he could not discover their much-vaunted beauty : "I did not see among them a single woman whom I could call handsome. They have, indeed, a ,soft sleepiness about the eyes, which may be fascinating to some, but I should rather ascribe the celebrity their charms have obtained among navigators to their cheerfulness and gaiety. Their figures are bad, and the greater part of them are parrot-toed." TAHITIANS AND THEIK WHITE TISITOES Tongan girls are referred to in Reeves's book as " bundles of blubber." It is not necessary to refer once more to the fact that "blubber" is the criterion and ideal of "beauty" arpong the Pacific Islanders, as among barbarians in general. Consequently their love canjiot have been ennobled by urry of the refined, esthetic, intellectual, and moral qualities which are enibodied in a refined face and a daintily modelled figure. Coarsest of all the Polynesians were the Tahitians; yet even here efforts have been made ' to convey the impression that they owed their licentious practices to the influence of white visitors. The grain of truth in this assertion lies in the undoubted fact that the whites, with their rum and trinkets and diseases, aggravated the evil ; but their contribu- I See Westermacck, 67, anil footnotes on that page. TAHITIANS AND THEIR WHITE VISITORS 505 tion was but a drop in the ocean of iniquity wliich existed iiges before these islands were discovered by whites. Tahi- tian traditions trace their vilest practices back to the earliest times known. (Ellis, I., 183.) The first European navigators found the same vices which later visitors deplored. Bougain- ville, who tarried at Tahiti in 1767, called the island Nouvelle CythSre, on account of the general immorality of the natives. Cook, when he visited the island in the following year, de- clined to make his journal " the place for exhibiting a view of licentious manners which could only serve to disgust " his readers (212). Hawkesworth relates (II., 206) that the Tahi- tians offered sisters and daughters to strangers, while breaches of conjugal fidelity are punished only by a few hard words or a slight beating : " Among other diversions there is a dance called Timorodee, which is performed by young girls, whenever eight or ten of tliem can be collected together, consisting of motions and gestures beyond imagination wanton, in the practice of which they are brought up from their earliest childhood, accompa- nied by words which, if it were possible, would more exjjlic- itly convey the same ideas." "But there is a scale in disso- lute sensuality, which these people have ascended, wholly unknown to every other nation whose manners have been recorded from the beginning of the world to the present hour, and which no imagination could possibly conceive." This is the testimony of the earliest explorers who saw the natives before whites could have possibly corrupted them.* The later missionaries found no change for the better. Cap- tain Cook already referred to the Areois who made a business of depravity (220). " So agreeable," he wrote, " is this licen- tious plan of life to their disposition, that the most beautiful of both sexes thus commonly spend their youthful days, habituated to the practice of enormities which would disgrace the most savage tribes." Ellis, who lived several years on this ' If sentimentalists were gifted with a sense of humor it would have occurred to them how ludicrous and illogical it is to suppose that savag^es and barba- rians, the world over, should in each instance have been converted by a few whites from angels to monsters of depravity with such amazing sudfienness. We know, on the contrary, that in no respect are these races so stubbornly tenacious of old customs as in their sexual relations. 506 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC island, declares that they were noted for their humor and their jests, but the jests " were in general low and immoral to a disgusting degree. . . . Awfully dark, indeed, was their moral character, and notwithstanding the apparent mildness of their disposi- tion, and the cheerful vivacity of their conversation, no por- tion of the human race was ever, perhaps, sunk lower in brutal licentiousness and moral degradation than this isolated peo- ple "(87). He also describes the Areois (I., 185-89) as "privileged libertines," who travelled from place to place giving improper dances and exhibitions, " addicted to every kind of licentious- ness," and " spreading a moral contagion throughout society." Yet they were "held in the greatest respect "by all classes of the population. They had their own gods, who were " mon- sters in vice,'' and " patronized every evil practice perpetrated during such seasons of public festivity." Did the white sailors also give the Tahitians their idea of Tahitian dances, and professional Areois, and corrupt gods ? Did they teach them customs which Hawkesworth, himself a sailor, and accustomed to scenes of low life, said " no imagi- nation could-possibly conceive ? " Did the European whites teach these natives to regard men as ra (sacred) and women as noa (common) ? Did they teach them all those other cus- toms and atrocities which the following paragraphs reveal ? HEARTLESS TKEATMElfT OF WOMEN It can be shown that quite apart from their sensuality, the Tahitians were too coarse and selfish to be able to entertain any of those refined sentiments of love which the sentimen- talists would have us believe prevailed before the advent of the white man. Love is often compared to a flower ; but love cannot, like a flower, grow on a dunghill. It requires a pure, chaste soul, and it requires the fostering sunshine of sympathy and adoration. To a Tahitian a woman was merely a toy to amuse him. He liked her as he liked his food and drink, or HEARTLESS TREATMENT OF WOMEN 507 his cool plnnge into the waves, for the reason that she pleased his senses. He could not feel sentimental love for her, since, tar from adoring her, he did not even respect or well-treat her. Ellis (I., 109) relates that " The men were allowed to eat the flesh of the pig, and of fowls, and a variety of fish, cocoanuts, and plantains, and whatever was presented as an offering to the gods ; these the females, on pain of death, were forbidden to touch, as it was supposed they would pollute them. The- fires at which the men's food was cooked were also sacred, and were forbidden to be used by the females. The baskets in which their pro- vision was kept, and the hoiise in which the men ate, were also sacred, and prohibited to the females under the same cruel penalty. Hence the inferior food, both for wives, daughters, etc,, was cooked at separate fires, deposited in distinct baskets, and eaten in lonely solitude by the females, in little huts erected for the purpose." Not content with this, when one man wished to abuse an- other in a particularly offensive way he would use some expression referring to this degraded condition of the women, such as " mayst thou be baked as food for thy mother." Young children were deliberately taught to disregard their mother, the father encouraging them in their insults and vio- lence (205). Cook (230) found that Tahitian women were often treated with a degree of harshness, or rather " brutal- ity," which one would scarcely suppose a man would bestow on an object for whom he had the least affection. Nothing, however, is more common than " to see the men beat them without mercy" (II., 220). They killed more female than male infants, because, as they said, the females were useless for war, the fisheries, or the service of the temple. For the sick they had no sympathy ; at times they murdered them or buried them alive. (Ellis, I., 340 ; II., 281.) In battle they gave no quarter, even to women or children. (Hawkesworth, II., 244.) " Every horrid torture was practised. The females ex- perienced brutality and murder, and the tenderest infants were perhaps transfixed to the mother's heart by a ruthless weapon — caught up by ruffian hands, and dashed against the rocks or the trees — or wantonly thrown up into the air, and 508 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC caught on the point of the warrior's spear, where it writhed in agony, and died, . . . some having two or three in- fants hanging on the spear they bore across their shoulders" (I., 235-36). The bodies of females slain in w£|,r were treated with " a degree of brutality as inconceivable as it was de- testable." TWO STOHIES OF TAHITIAN IH^FATUATION "While ferocity, cruelty, habitual, wantonness and general coarseness are fatal obstacles to sentimental love, they may be accompanied, as we have seen, by the violent sensual infatu- ation which is so often mistaken for love. Unsuccessful Ta- hitian suitors have been known to commit suicide under the influence of revenge and despair, as is stated by Ellis (I., 309), who also notes two instances of violent individual preference. The chief of Eimeo, twenty years old, of a mild disposition, became attached to a Huahine girl and tendered proposals of marriage. She was a niece of the principal roatira in the isl- and, but though her family was willing, she declined all his pi'oposals. He discontinued his ordinary occupations, and repaired to the habitation of the individual whose favor he was so anxious to obtain. Here he appeared subject to the deepest melancholy, and from morning to night, day after day, he attended his mistress, performing humiliating offices with apparent satisfaction. His disappointment finally became the topic of general conversation. At length the girl was induced to accept him. They were publicly married and lived very comfortably together for a few months, when the wife died. In the other instance the girl was the lover and the man un- willing. A belle of Huahine became exceedingly fond of the so- ciety of a young man who was temporarily staying on the island and living in the same house. It was soon intimated to him that she wished to become his companion for life. The intima- tion, however, was disregarded by the young man, who ex- pressed his intention to prosecute his voyage. The young woman became unhappy, and made no secret of the cause of her distress. She was assiduous in redoubling her efforts to please the individual whose affection she was desirous to re- CAPTAIN COOK ON TAHITIAN LOVE 509 tain. At this period Ellis never saw him either in the house of his friend or wallfing abroad without the young woman by his side. Finding the object of lier attachment, who was probably about eighteen years of age, unmoved by her atten- tions, she not only became exceedingly unhappy, but declared that if she continued to receive the same indifference and neglect, she would either strangle or drown herself. Her friends now interfered, using their endeavors with the young man. He relented, returned the attentions he had received, and the two were married. Their happiness, however, was of short duration. The attachment Which had been so ardent in the bosom of the young woman before marriage was super- seded by a dislike as powerful, and though he seemed not un- kind to her, she not only treated him with insult but finally left him. " The marriage tie," says Ellis (I., 213), "was probably one of the weakest and most brittle that existed among them ; neither party felt themselves bound to abide by it any longer than it suited their convenience. The slightest cause was often sufficient to occasion or justify the separation." CAPTAIN COOK ON TAHITIAN LOVE It has been said of Captain Cook that his maps and topo- graphical observations are characterized by remarkable ac- curacy. The same may be said in general of his observations reffardinar the natives of the islands he visited more than a century ago. He, too, noted some cases of strong personal preference among Tahitians, but this did not mislead him into attributing to them a capacity for true love : " I have seen several instances where the women have preferred per- sonal beauty to interest, though I must own that, even in these cases, they seem scarcely susceptible of those delicate sentiments that are the result of mutual affection ; and I believe that there is less Platonic love in Otaheite than in any other country." Not that Captain Cook was infallible. When he came across the Tonga group he gave it the name of " Friendly Isl- 510 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC ands," because of the apparently amicable disposition of the natives toward him ; but, as a matter of fact, their intention was to massacre him and his crew and take the two ships — a plan which would have been put in execution if the chiefs had not had a dispute as to the exact mode and time of making the assault.' Cook was pleased with the appearance and the ways of these islanders ; they seemed kind, and he was struck at seeing " hundreds of truly European faces ^' among them. He went so far as to declare that it was utterly wrong to call them savages, "for a more civilized people does not exist under the sun." He did not stay with them long enough to discover that they were morally not far above the other South Sea Islanders. WERE THE TONGAIfS CIVILIZED ? Mariner, who lived among the Tongans four years, and whose adventures and observations were afterward recorded by Martin, gives information which indicates that Cook was wrong when he said that a more civilized people does not exist under the sun. " Theft, revenge, rape and murder," Mariner attests '(XL, 140), "under many circumstances are not held to be crimes." It is considered the duty of married women to remain true to their husbands and this. Mariner thinks, is generally done. Unmarried women "may bestow their favors upon whomsoever they please, without any op- probrium " (165). Divorced women, like the unmarried, may admit temporary lovers without the least reproach or secresy. " When a woman is taken prisoner (in war) she generally has to submit ; but this is a thing of course, and considered neither an outrage nor dishonor ; the only dis- honor being to be a prisoner and consequently a sort of ser- vant to the conqueror. Eape, though always considered an outrage, is not looked upon as a crime unless the woman be of such rank as to claim respect from the perpetrator " (166). Many of their expressions, when angry, are " too indelicate to mention." "Conversation is often intermingled with al- ' See Mariner (Martin) : Introduction and Chap. XVI. WERE THE TONGANS CIVILIZED? 511 lusions, even when women are present, which could not be allowed in any decent society in England." Two-thirds of the women "are married and are soon divorced, and are married again perhaps three, four, or five times in their lives." " No man is understood to be bound to conjugal fidelity ; it is no reproach to him to intermix his amours." " Neither have they any word expressive of chastity except nofo mow, remaining fixed or faithful, and which in this sense is only applied to a married woman to signify her fidelity to her husband." Even the married women of the lower classes had to yield to the wishes of the chiefs, who did not hesitate to shoot a resisting husband. (Waitz-Grerland, VI., 184.) While these details show that Captain Cook overrated the civilization of the Tongans, there are other facts indicating that they were in some respects superior to other Polyne- sians, at any rate. The women are capable of blushing, and they are reproached if they change their lovers too often. They seem to have a dawning sense of the value of chastity and of woman's claims to consideration. In Mariner's de- scription (I., 130) of a chief's wedding occurs this sentence : " The dancing being over, one of the old matabooles (nobles) addressed the company, making a moral discourse on the subject of chastity — advising the young men to respect, in all cases, the wives of their neighbors, and never to take liberties even with an unmarried woman against her free consent." The wives of chiefs must not go about without attendants. Mariner says, somewhat naively, that when a man has an amour, he keeps it secret from his wife, " not out of any fear or apprehension, but because it is unnecessary to excite her jealousy, and make her perhaps unhappy ; for it must be said, to the honor of the men, that they consult in no small degree, and in no few respects, the happiness and comfort of their wives." If Mariner tells the truth, it must be said in this respect that the Tongans are superior to all other peoples we have so far considered in this book. Though the husband's authority at home is absolute, and though one girl in every three is betrothed in her infancy, men do not, he says, make slaves or 512 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC drudges of their wiTOS, or sell their daughters, two out of every three girls being allowed to choose their own husbands — " fearly and often." The men do most of the hard work, even to the cooking. " In Tonga," says Seemann (337)j " the women have been treated from time immemorial with all the consideration diemanded by their weaker and more delicate constitution, iiot being allowed to perform any hard work.'' Cook also found (IL, 149) that the province allotted to the men was " far more laborious and extensive than that of the women," whose employments were cshiefly sUch as may be ex- ecuted in the house. LOVE OF SCENEBT If we may rely on Mariner there is still another point in which the Tongans appear to be far above other Polynesians, and barbarians in general. He would have ns believe that while they seldom sing about love or war, they evince a remarkable love of nature (I., 293). He declares that they sometimes as- cend a certain rock to ''enjoy the sublime beauty of the sur- rounding Scenery,^' or to reflect on the deeds of their ances- tors. He cites a specimen of their songs, which, he says, is often sung by them ; it is without rhymes or regular meas- ure, and is given in a sort of recitative beginning with this highly poetic passage : " Whilst we were talking of Vavdoo foSa Licoo, the women Said to us, let ns repair to the back of the island to contem- plate the settitig sun : there let us listen to the warbling of the birds and the cooing of the wood-pigeon. We will gather flowers . . . and partake of refreshments ... we will then bathe in the sea and . . . anoint our skins in the sun with sweet-scented oil, and will plait in wreaths the flowers gathered at MatdiOto. And now, as we stand motion- less on the eminence over Ana Mdnoo, the whistling of the wind among the branches of the lofty toa shall fill us with a pleasing melancholy ; or our minds shall be seized with as- tonishment as we behold the roaring surf below, endeavoring but in vain to tear away the firm rocks. Oh ! how much happier shall we be thus employed, than when engaged in the troublesome and insipid affairs of life." A CANNIBAL BARGAIN 513 Inasmuch as Mariner did not take notes on the spot, but . relied on his memory after an absence of several years, it is to be feared that the above passage may not be unadulterated Tongan. The rest of the song has a certain Biblical tone and style in a few of the sentences which arouse the suspicion (remember Ossian !) that a missionary may have edited, if not composed, this song. However that may be, the remainder of it gives us several pretty glimpses of Tongan amorous customs and may therefore be cited, omitting a few irrelevant sentences : " Alas ! how destructive is war ! — Behold ! how it has rendered the land productive of weeds, and opened untimely graves for departed heroes ! Our chiefs can now no longer enjoy the sweet pleasure of wandering alone by moonlight in search of their mistresses : but let us banish sorrow from our hearts : since we are at war, we must think and act like the natives of Fiji, who first taught us this destructive art. Let us therefore enjoy the present time, for to-morrow perhap:; or the next day we may die. We will dress ourselves witli old coola, and put bands of white tappa round our waists ; we will plait thick wreaths of jiale for our heads, and pre- pare strings of liooni for our necks, that their wliitenessmay show off the color of our skins. Mark how the uncultivated spectators are profuse of their applause ! — But now the dance is over : let us remain here to-night, and feast and be cheerful, and to-morrow we will depart for the Mooa. How troublesome are the young men, begging for our wreaths of flowers, while they say in their flattery, ' See how charming these young girls look coming from Licoo ! — how beautiful are their skins, diffusing around a fragrance like the flowery precipice of Mataloco : ' Let us also visit Licoo ; we will de- part to-morrow." A CANN'IBAL BAR6AIK This story intimates, what may be true, that the Fijians first taught the Tongans the art of war, and if the Tongans were not originally a warlike people, we would have in that significant fact alone an explanation of much of their su- periority to other Pacific islanders. The Fijians also ap- pear to have taught them cannibalism, to which, however, they never became so addicted as their teachers. Mariner 514 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC (I., 110-111) tells a story of two girls who, in a time of scarcity, agreed to play a certain game with two young men on these conditions : if the girls won, they were to divide a yam belonging to them and give half to the men ; if the two men won they were still to have their share of the yam, but they were to go and kill a man and give half his body to the girls. The men won and promptly proceeded to carry out their part of the contract. Concealing themselves near a fortress, they soon saw a man who came to fill his cocoanut shells with water. They rushed on him with their clubs, brought the body home at the risk of their lives, divided it and gave the young women the promised half. THE HANDSOME CHIEFS To Captain Cook the muscular Tongan men conveyed the suggestion of strength rather than of beauty. They have, however, a legend which indicates that they had a high opinion of their personal appearance. It is related by Mariner (II., 129-34). The god Langai dwelt in heaven with his two daughters. One day, as he was going to attend a meeting of the gods, he warned the daughters not to go to Tonga to gratify their curiosity to see the handsome chiefs there. But hardly had he gone when they made up their minds to do that very thing. " Let us go to Tonga," they said to each other ; "there our celestial beauty will be appreciated more than here where all the women are beautiful." So they went to Tonga and, arm in arm, appeared before the feasting *iobles, who were astounded at their beauty and all wanted the girls. Soon the nobles came to blows, and the din of battle was so great that it reached the ears of the gods. Langai was de- spatched to bring back and punish the girls. When he ar- rived, one of them had already fallen a victim to 'the contend- ing chiefs. The other he seized, tore off her head, and threw it into the sea, where it was transformed into a turtle. HONEYMOON IN A CAVE 515 HONEYMOON. IN A CAVE On the west coast of the Tongan Island of Hoonga there is a peculiar cave, the entrance to which is several feet beneath the surface of the sea, even at low water. It was first dis- covered by a young chief, while diving after a turtle. He told no one about it, and luckily, as we shall see. He was secretly enamoured of a beautiful young girl, the daughter of a certain chief, but as she was betrothed to another man, he dared not tell her of his love. The governor of the islands was a cruel tyrant, whose misdeeds at last incited this girl's father to plot an insurrection. The plot unfortunately was discovered and the chief with all his relatives, including the beautiful girl, condemned to be taken out to sea in a canoe and drowned. No time was to be lost. The lover hastened to the girl, in- ' formed her of her danger, confessed his love, and begged her to come with him to a place of safety. Soon her con- senting hand was clasped in his ; the shades of evening fa- vored their escape ; while the woods afforded her concealment until her lover had brought a canoe to a lonely part of the beach. In this they speedily embarked, and as he paddled her across the smooth water he related his discovery of the cavern destined to be her asylum till an opportunity offered of conveying her to the Fiji Islands. When they arrived at the rock he jumped into the water, and she followed close after ; they rose into the cavern, safe from all possibility of discovery, unless he should be watched. In the morning he returned to Vavaoo to bring her mats to lie on, and gnatoo (prepared bark of mulberry-tree) for a change of dress. He gave her as much of his time as pru- dence allowed, and meanwhile pleaded his tale of love, to which she was not deaf ; and when she confessed that she, too, had long regarded him with a favorable eye (but a sense of duty had caused her to smother her growing fondness), his measure of happiness was full. This cave was a very nice place for a honeymoon, but 516 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC hardly for a permanent residence. So the young chief con- trived a way of getting her out of the cavernous prison. He told his inferior chiefs that he wanted them to take their fam- ilies and go with him to Fiji. A large canoe was sdon got ready, and as they embarked he was asked if he would not take a Tongan wife with him. He replied. No I but that he should probably find one by the way. They thought this a joke, but when they came to the spot where the cave was, he asked them to wait while he went into the sea to fetch his wife. As he dived, they began to suspect he was insane, and as he did not soon reappear they feared he had been devoured by a shark. While they were deliberating what to do, all at once, to their great surprise, he rose to the surface and brought into the canoe a beautiful young woman who, they all supposed, had been drowned with her family. The chief now told the 'story of the cave, and they proceeded to Fiji, where they lived some years, until the cruel governor of Tonga -died, where- upon they returned to that island. A HAWAIIAN CAVE-STOET In an interesting book called The, Legends and Myths of Hawaii, by King Kalakaua, there is a tale called " Kaala, the Flower of Lanai ; A Story of the Spouting Cave of Pali- kaholo," which also involves the use of a submarine cave, but has a tragic ending. It takes the King fifteen pages to tell it, but the following condensed version retains all the details of the original that relate directly to love : Beneath a bold rocky bluff on the coast of Lanai there is a cave whose only entrance is through the vortex of a whirl- pool. Its floor gradually rises from the water, and is the home of crabs, polypi, sting-rays, and other noisome creatures of the deep, who find here temporary safety from their larger foes. It was a dangerous experiment to dive into this cuve. One of the few who had done it was Oponui, a minor chief of Lanai Island. He had a daughter named Kaala, a girl of fif- teen, who was so beautiful that her admirers were counted by the hundreds. A HAWAIIAN CAVE-STORY 517 It so happened that the great monarch Kamehameha I. paid a visit to Lanai about this time (near the close of the eighteenth century). He was received with enthusiasm, and among those who brought offerings of flowers was the fair Kaala. As she scattered the flowers she was seen by Kaaialii, one of the King's faVbrite lieutenants. "He was of chiefly blood and bearing, with sinewy limbs and a handsome face, and when he stopped to look into the eyes of Kaala and tell her that she was beautiful, she thought the words, although they had been frequently spoken to her by others, had never sounded so sweetly to her before. He asked her for a simple flower and she twined a lei for his neck. He asked her for a smile, and she looked up into his face and gave him her heart." After they had seen each other a few. times the lieutenant went to his chief and said : " I love the beautiful Kaala, daughter of Oponui. Give her to me for a wife." ' "The girl is not mine to give," replied the King. "We must be just. I will send for her father. Come to-morrow." Oponui was not pleased when he was brought before the King and heard his request. He had once, in war, narrowly escaped death at the hand of Kaaialii and now felt that lie would rather feed his daughter to the sharks than give her to the man who had sought his life. Still, as it would have been unwise to openly oppose the King's wishes, he pretend- ed to regard the proposal with favor, but regretted that his daughter was already promised to another man. He was, however, willing, he added, to let the girl go to the victor in a contest with bare hands between the two suitors. The rival suitor was Mailou, a huge, muscular savage known as the " bone breaker." Kaala hated and feared liirn and had taken every occasion to avoid him ; but as her father was anxious to secure so strong an ally, his desire finally had prevailed against her aversion. Kaaialii was less muscular than his rival, but he had superior cunning, and thus it happened that in the fierce contest which followed he tripped up the "bone-breaker," seized his hair as he fell, placed his knees against his back, and broke his spine. Breaking away from her disappointed father Kaala sprang through the crowd and threw herself into the victor's arms. The king placed their hands together .and said : " You have won her nobly. She is now your wife. ' Take her with yon." But Oponui's wrath was greater thaijief ore, and he plotted 518 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC revenge. On the morning after the marriage he visited Kaala and told her that her mother was dangerously ill at Mahana and wanted to see her before she died. The daughter fol- lowed him, though her husband had some misgivings. Ar- riving at the seashore, the father told her, with a wild glare in his eyes, that he had made up his mind to hide her down among the gods of the sea until the hated Kaaialii had left the island, when he would bring her home again. She screamed and tried to escape, but he gathered the struggling girl in his arms and j umped with her into the circling waters above the Spouting Oave. Sinking a fathom or so, they were sucked upward into the cave, where he placed her just above the reach of the water among the crabs and eels, with scarcely light enough to see them. He offered to take her back if she would promise to accept the love of the chief of Olowalu and allow Kaaialii to see her in the embrace of another. But she declared she would sooner perish in the cave. Having warned her that if she attempted to escape she would surely be dashed against the rocks and become the food of the sharks, he re- turned to the shore. Kaaialii awaited his wife's return with his heart aching for her warm embrace. He I'ecalled the sullen look of Oponui, and panic seized him. He climbed a hill to watch for her return and his heart beat with joy when he saw a girl returning toward him. He thought it was Kaala, but it was Ua, the friend of Kaala and almost her equal in beauty. Ua told him that his wife had not been seen at her mother's, and as her father had been seen taking her through the forest, it was feared she would not be allowed to return. With an exclamation of rage Kaaialii started down toward the coast. Here he ran across Oponui and tried to seize him by the throat ; but Oponui escaped and ran into a temple, where he was safe from an attack. In a paroxysm of rage and disappointment Kaaialii threw himself upon the ground cursing the tahu that barred him from his enemy. His friends took him to his hut, where Ua sought to soothe and comfort him. But he talked and thought alone of Kaala, and after partaking hastily of food, started out to find her. Of every one he met he inquired for Kaala, and called her name in the deep valleys and at the hilltops. Near the sacred spring of Kealia he met a white-haired priest who took pity on him and told him where Kaala had been hidden. " The place is dark and her heart is full of terror. Hasten to her, but tarry not, or she will be the food of the creatures of the sea." A HAWAIIAN CAVE-STORY 519 Thanking the priest, Kaaialii hastened to the bluff. With the words " Kaala, I come ! " he sprang into the whirlpool and disappeared. The current sucked him up and suddenly he found himself in a chilly cave, feeling his way on the slimy floor by the dim light. Suddenly a low moan reached his ear. It was the voice of Kaala. She was lying near him, her limbs bruised with fruitless attempts to leave the cave, and no longer strong enough to drive away the crabs that were feeding upon her quivering flesh. He lifted her up and bore her toward the light. She opened her eyes and whispered, "1 am dying, but lam happy, for you are here." He told her he would save her, but she made no response, and when he put his hand on her heart he found she was dead. For hours he held her in his arms. At length he was aroused by the splashing of water. He looked up and there was Ua, the gentle and beautiful friend of Kaala, and behind hei' the King Kamehameha. Kaaialii rose and pointed to the body before him. " I see," said the King, softly, " the girl is dead. She could have no better burial-place. Come, Kaaialii, let us leave it." But Kaaialii did not move. For the first time in his life he refused to obey his King. " What ! would you remain here ? " said the monarch. " Would you throw your life away for a girl ? There are others as fair. Here is TJa ; she shall be your wife, and I will give you the valley of Palawai. Come, let us leave at once lest some angry god close the entrance against us ! " " Great chief," replied Kaaialii, " you have always been kind and generous to me, and never more so than now. But hear me ; my life and strength are gone. Kaala was my life, and she is dead. How can I live without her ? You are my chief. You have asked me to leave this place and live. It is the first request of yours I have ever disobeyed. It shall be the last ! " Then seizing a stone, with a swift, strong blow he crushed in brow and brain, and fell dead upon the body of Kaala. A wail of anguish went up from Ua. Kamehameha spoke not, moved not. Long he gazed upon the bodies before him ; and his eye was moist and his strong lips quivered as, turning away at last, he said : " He loved her indeed ! " Wrapped in kapa, the bodies were laid side by side and left in the cavern ; and there to-day may be seen the bones of Kaala, the flower of Lanai, and of Kaaialii, her "'knightly lover, by such as dare seek the passage to them through the whirlpool of Palikaholo. 530 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC IS THIS ROMANTIC LOVE ? These two Polynesian cave-stories are of interest from sev- eral points of view. In Waitz-Gerland (VI., 135), the Ton- gan tale is referred to as " a very romantic love-story," and if the author had known the Hawaiian story he would have had even more reason to call it romantic. But is either of these tales a story of romantic love ? Is there evidence in them of anything but strong selfish passion or eagerness to possess one of the other sex ? Is there any trace of the higher phases of love — of unselfish attachment, sympathy, adoration, as of a superior being, purity, gallantry, self-sacrifice ? Not one. The Hawaiian Kaaialii does indeed smash his own skull when he finds his bride is dead. But that is a very different thing from sacrificing himself to save or please her. We have seen, too, on how slight a provocation these islanders will com- mit suicide, an act which proves a weak intellect rather than strong feeling. A man capable of feeling true love would have brains enough to restrain himself from committing such a silly and useless act in a fit of disappointment. There is every reason to believe, moreover, that these stories have been embroidered by the narrators. In the vast majority of cases the men who have had an opportunity to note down primitive love-stories unfortunately did not hesi- tate to disguise their native flavor with European sauce in order to make them more palatable to the general public. This makes them interesting stories, made realistic by the use of local color, but utterly mars them for the scien- tific epicure who often relishes most what is caviare to the general. Take that Hawaiian story. It is supposed to be told by King Kalakaua himself. At least, the book of Legend and Myths has " By His Hawaiian Majesty " on the title page. Beneath those words we read that the book was edited by the Hon. E. M. Daggett ; and in the preface acknowledgment is made to as many as eight persons " for material in the compilation of many of the legends embraced in this volume." Thus there are ten cooks, and the ques- VAGARIES OF HAWAIIAN FONDNESS 521 tion arises, " did they carefully and conscientiously tell these stories exactly as related to them by aboriginal Hawaiians, free from missionary influences, or did they flavor the brotli with European condiments 'f " To this question no answer is given in the book, but there is plenty of evidence that either the King himself, in order to make his people as much like ours as possible, or his foreign assistants, embellished them with sentimental details. To take only two significant points : it sounds very sentimental to be told that the girl Ua, after Kaaialii had jumped into the vortex " wailed upon the winds a requiem of love and grief," but a native Hawaiian has no more notion of the word requiem than he has of a syllogism. Then again, the Story is full of expressions like this : " His heart beat with joy, for he thought she was Kaala j " or "He asked her for a smile and she gave him her heart." Such phrases mislead not only the general reader but careless an- thropologists into the belief that the lower races feel and ex- press their love just as we do. As a matter of fact, Polyne- sians do not attribute feelings to the heart. Ellis (II,, 311), could not even make them understand what he was talking about when he tried to explain to them our ideas regarding the heart as a seat of moral feeling. The fact that our usage in this respect is a mere convention, not based on physiologi- cal facts, makes it all the more reprehensible to falsify psy- chology by adorning aboriginal tales with the borrowed plumes and phrases of civilization. VAGARIES OF HAVfAIIAN FONDNESS It is quite possible that the events related in the cave- story did occur ; but a Hawaiian, untouched by missionary influences, would have told them very differently. It is very much more likely, however, that if a Hawaiian had found himself in the predicament of Kaaialii, he would have sym- pathized with the king's contemptuous speech : " What ! would you throw your life away for a girl ? There are others as fair. Here is Ua ; she shall be your wife." This would have been much more in accordance with what observers have 523 ISLAND LOVE ON TiIe PACIFIC told us of Hawaiian "heart-affairs." "The marriage tie is loose," says Ellis (IV., 315), "and the husband can dismiss his wife on any occasion." " The loves of the Hawaiians are usually ephemeral," says " Haole," the author of Sandwich Island Notes (267). The widow seldom or never plants a solitary flower over the grave of her lord. She may once visit the mound that marks the repose of his ashes, but never again, unless by accident. It not unfrequently happens that a second husband is selected while the remains of the first are being conveyed to his " long home." Hawaiian women seem more attached to pigs and puppies than to their hus- bands or even their children. The writer just quoted says whole volumes might be written concerning the " silly af- fection" of the women for animals. They carry them in their bosoms, and do not hesitate to suckle them. It is one of their duties to drive pigs to the market, and one day " Haole " came across a group of native women who had taken off their only garments and soaked them in water to cool their dear five hundred-pounder, while others were fan- ning him ! As late as 1881 Isabella Bird wrote (313) that " the crime of infanticide, which formerly prevailed to a hor- rible extent, has long been extinct ; but the love of pleasure and the dislike of trouble which partially actuated it are ap- parently still stronger among the women than the maternal instinct, and they do not take the trouble necessary to rear infants. ... I have nowhere seen such tenderness lav- ished upon infants as upon the pet dogs that the women carry about with them." HAWAIIAIT MOEALS Hawaiians did not treat women as brutally as Pijians do ; yet how far they were from respecting, not to speak of adoring, them, is obvious from the contemptuous and selfish taboos which forbade women, on penalty of death, to eat any of the best and commonest articles of food, such as bananas, co- coanuts, pork, turtle ; or refused them permission to eat with their lords and masters, or to share in divine worship, because their touch would pollute the offerings to the gods. HAWAIIAN MORALS 523 The grossness of the Hawaiian erotic taste is indicated by " Haol6's " reference (123) to " the immense corpulency of some of the old Hawaiian queens, a feature which, in those days, was deemed the ne plus ultra of female beauty." In- cest was permitted to the chiefs, and the people vied with their rulers in the grossest sensuality. " Nearly every night, with the gathering darkness, crowds would retire to some favorite spot, where, amid every species of sensual indulgence, they would revel until the morning twilight" (412). "In Hawaii, whether the woman was married or single, she would have been thought very churlish and boorish if she refused any favor asked by a male friend of the family," says E. Tre- gear ; * and in Dibble's History of the Sandwich Islands (126-27) we read : " For husbands to interchange wives, or for wives to inter- change husbands, was a common act of friendship, and per- sons who would not do this were not considered on good terms of sociability. For a man or a woman to refuse a solicitation for illicit intercourse was considered an act of meanness, and so thoroughly was this sentiment wrought into their minds that, even to the present day, they seem not to rid themselves of the feeling of meanness in making a refusal." The Hawaiian word for marriage is hoao, meaning "trial." It was also customary for a married woman to have an ac- knowledged lover known as punula. The word hula hula is familiar the world over as the name of an improper dance, but it is nothing to what it used to be. The famous cave Niholua was consecrated to it. In past generations ' ' warriors came here to revel with their paramours. The Tarta- rean gloom was slightly relieved by torches ingeniously formed of strings of the candle-nut. Beneath this rugged roof, and amid this darkness — their faces strangely reflecting the feeble torch-light — and divested of every particle of apparel, they promiscuously united in dancing the AwZa hula (the licentious dance). . . . Wives were exchanged, and so were concu- bines ; fathers despoiled their own daughters, and brothers deemed it no crime to perpetrate incest." ijour. Anthr. Inst., 1889, p. 104 524 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC Waitz-Gerland (VI., 459) cite Wise as attesting that "in 1848 the inissiouaries gave up a girls' school, because it was impossible to preserve the virtue of their pupils," and Steen Bill wrote that in 1846 seventy per cent, of all the crimes punished were of a lewd character, and that on the whole island there was not a chaste girl of eleven years of age. Isa- bella Bird wrote (169) that "the Hawaiian women have no notions of virtue as we understand it, and if there is to be any future for this race it must come through a higher morality." THE HELEliT OF HAWAII As there was practically no difference between married and unmarried women in Hawaii, it is not strange that cases of abduction of wives should have occurred. The following story, related in Kalakaua's book, probably suffered no great change at the hands of the recorder. I give a condensed ver- sion of it : In the twelfth century, the close of the second era of mi- gration from Tahiti and Samoa, there lived a girl named Hina, noted as the most beautiful maiden on the islands. She married the chief Hakalanileo, and had two children by him. Reports of her beauty had excited the fancy of'Kau- peepee, the chief of Haupu. He went to test the reports with his own eyes, and saw that they were not exaggerated. So he hovered around the coast of Hilo watching for a chance to abduct her. It came at last. One day, after sunset, when the moon was shining, Hina repaired to the beach with her women to take a bath. A signal was given — it is thought by the first wife of Hina's husband — and, not long after, a light but heavily manned canoe dashed through the surf and shot in among the bathers. The women screamed and started for the shore. Suddenly a man leaped from the canoe into the water. There was a brief struggle, a stifled scream, a sharp word of command, and a moment later Kaupeepee was again in the canoe with the nude and frantic Hina in his arms. The boatmen lost no time to start ; they rowed all night and in the morning reach Haupu. Hina had been wrapped in folds of soft Jcapa, and she spent the night sobbing, not knowing what was to become of her. When shore was reached she was borne to the captor's fortress INTERCEPTED LOVE-LETTERS 535 and given an apartment provided- with every luxury. She fell asleep from fatigue, and when she awoke and realized where she was it was not without a certain feeling of pride that she reflected that her beauty had led the famous and mighty Kaupeepee to abduct her. After partaking of a hearty breakfast, she sent for him and he came promptly. "What can I do for you ?" he asked. " Liberate me !" was her answer. " Eeturn me to my cliil- dren!" "Impossible!" was the firm reply. "Then kill me," she exclaimed. Tlie chief now told her how he had left home specially to see her, and found her the most beautiful woman in Hawaii. He had risked his life to get her. " You are my prisoner," he said, " but not more than I am yours. You shall leave Haupu only when its walls shall have been battered down and I lie dead am»ng the ruins." Hina saw that resistance was useless. He had soothed her with flattery ; he was a great noble ; he was gentle though brave. " How strangely pleasant are his words and voice," she said to lierself. " No one ever spoke so to me before. I could have listened longer." After that she hearkened for his footsteps and soon accepted him as her lover and spouse. For seventeen years she remained a willing prisoner. In tlie meantime her two sons by her fii-st husband had grown up ; they ascertained where their mother was, demanded her release, and on refusal waged a terrible war which at last ended in the death of Kaupeepee and the destruction of his walls. INTERCEPTED LOVE-LETTEES The Rev. H. T. Cheever prints in his book on the Sand- wich Islands (226-28) a few amusing specimens of the love- letters exchanged between the native lads of the Lahainaluna Seminary and certain lasses of Lahaina. The following ones were intercepted by the missionaries. The first was penned by a girl : " Love to you, who speakest sweetly, whom I did kiss. My warm affections go out to you with your love. My mind is oppressed in consequenee of not having seen you these times. Much affection for thee dwelling there where the snn causeth tlie head to ache. Pity for thee in returning to your house, destitute as you supposed. I and she went to the place where we had sat in the meeting-house, and said she. Let us weep. So we two wept for you, and we conversed about you. 526 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC " We went to bathe in the bread-fruit yard ; the wind blew softly from Lahainaluna, and your image came down with it. We wept for you. Thou only art our food when we are hun- gry. We are satisfied with your love. " It is better to conceal this ; and lest dogs should prowl after it, and it should be found out, when you have read this letter, tear it up." The next letter is from one of the boys to a girl : " Love to thee, thou daughter of the Pandanus of Lanahuli. Thou hina hina, which declarest the divisions of the winds.' Thou cloudless sun of the noon. Thou most precious of the daughters of the earth. Thou beauty of the clear nights of Lehua. Thou refreshing fountain of Keipi. Love to thee, Pomare, thou royal womali of the Pacific here. Thou art glorious with ribbons flying gracefully in the gentle breeze of Puna. Where art thou, my beloved, who art anointed with the fragrance of glory ? Much love to thee, who dost draw out my soul as thou dwellest in the shady bread-fruits of La- haina. thou who art joined to my affection, who art knit to me in the hot days of Lahainaluna ! " Hark ! When I returned great was my love. I was overwhelmed with love like one drowning. When I lay down to sleep I could not sleep ; my mind floated after thee. Like the strong south wind of Lahaina, such is the strength of my love to thee, when it comes. Hear me ; at the time the bell rings for meeting, on Wednesday, great was my love to you. I dropped my hoe and ran away from my work. I se- cretly ran to the stream of water, and there I wept for my love to thee. Hearken, my love resembles the cold water far inland. Forsake not thou this our love. Keep it quietly, as I do keep it quietly here." Here is another from one of the students in the missionary school : " Love to thee, by reason of whom my heart sleeps not night nor day, all the days of my dwelling here. thou beautiful one, for whom my love shall never cease. Here also is this — at the time I heard you were going to Waihekee, I was enveloped in great love. And when I had heard you had really gone, great was my rfigret for you, and exceeding great my love. My appearance was like a sick person who cannot answer when spoken to. I would not go down to the ' Supposed to mean a beautiful flower that grows on the tope of the mountains, where sea and land breezes meet. INTERCEPTED LOVE-LETTERS 527 sea again, because I supposed you had not returned. I feared lest I should see all the places where you and I conversed to- gether, and walked together, and I should fall in the streets on account of the greatness of my love to you. I however did go down, and I was continually longing with love to you. Your father said to me. Won't you eat with us ? I refused, saying I was full. But the truth was I had eaten nothing. My great love to you, that was the thing which could alone satisfy me. Presently, however, I went to the place of K , and there I heard you had arrived. I was a little refreshed by hearing this. But my eyes still hung down. I longed to see you, but could not find you, though I waited till dark. Now, while I am writing, my tears are dropping down for you ; now my tears are my friends, and my affection to you, thou who wilt forever be loved. Here, also is this : con- sent thou to my desire, and write me, that I may know your love. My love to you is great, thou splendid flower of Lana- kahula." Cheever seems to accept these letters as proof that love is universal, and everywhere the same. He overlooks several important considerations. Were these letters penned by na- tives or by half-castes, with foreign blood in their veins and inherited capacities of feeling ? Unless we know that, no sci- entific deduction is allowable. These natives are very imita- tive. They learn our music easily and rapidly, and with the art of writing and reading they readily acquire our amorous phrases. A certain Biblical tone, suggesting the Canticles, is noticeable. The word " heart " is used in a way foreign to Polynesian thought, and apart from these details, is there anything in these letters that goes beyond selfish longing and craving for enjoyment ? Is there anything in them that may not be summed up in the language of appetite : "Thou art very desirable — I desire thee — I grieve, and weep, and refuse to eat, because I cannot possess thee now ? " Such longing, so intense and fiery ^ that it seems as if all the waters of the ocean could not quench it, constitutes a phase of all amorous passion, from the lowest up to the highest. Philosophers have, indeed, disputed as to which is the more violent and ir- • According to Erskine (50) when a Samoan felt a violent passion for another he would brand liis arm, to symbolize his ardor. (Waitz-Gerland, VI., 125.) 538 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC repressible, animal passion or sentimental love. Schopen- hauer believed the latter, Lichtenberg the former. ^ MAORIS OP NEW ZEALAND Hawaii has brought us quite near the coast of America, whose red men will form the subject of our next chapter. But, before passing on to the Indians, we must once more re- turn to the neighborhood of Australia, to the island of New Zealand, which offers some points of great interest to a stu- dent of love and a collector of love-stories. We have seen that the islands of Torres Straits, north of Australia, have natives and customs utterly unlike those of Australia. We shall now see that south of Australia, too, there is an island (or rather two islands), whose inhabitants are utterly un-Aus- tralian in manners and customs, as well as in origin. The Maoris (that is, natives) of New Zealand have traditions that their ancestors came from Hawaii (Hawaiki), disputes about land having induced them to emigrate. They may have done so by way of other islands, on some of their large canoes, aided by the trade winds.^ The Maoris are certainly Polynesians, and they resemble Hawaiians and Tongans in many respects. Their ferocity and cannibalism put them on a level with Fi- jians, making them a terror to navigators, while in some other respects they appear to have been somewhat superior to most of their Polynesian cousins, the Tongans excepted. The Maoris and Tongans best bear out Waitz-Gerland's assertion that " the Polynesians rank intellectually considerably higher than all other uncivilized peoples." The same authorities are charmed by the romantic love-stories of the Maoris, and they certainly are charming and romantic. Sir George Grey's Polynesian Mythology contains four of these stories, of which I will give condensed versions, taking care, as usual, to pre- serve all pertinent details and intimations of higher qualities. ' See Schopenhauer's GesprUche (Grisebach), 1898, p. 40, and the essay on love, in Lichtenberg's AusgewahUe Schriften (Reclam). Lichtenberg seems, indeed, to have doubted whether anything else than sensual love actually exists. < It is said that, under favorable circumstances, a distance of 3,U0O ^llleB might thus be covered in a month. THE MAIDEN OF ROTORUA 529 THE MAIDEN OF ROTORUA There was a girl of high rank named Hine-Moa. She was of rare beauty, and was so prized by her family that they would not betroth her to anyone. Such fame attended her beauty and rank that many of the men wanted her ; among them a chief named Tutanekai and his elder brothers. Tutanekai had built an elevated balcony where, with his friend Tiki, he used to play the horn and the pipe at night. On calm nights the music was wafted to the village and reached the ears of the beautiful Hine-Moa, whose heart was gladdened by it, and who said to herself, "Ah, that is the music of Tutanekai which I hear." She and Tutanekai had met each other on those occasions when all the people of Kotorua come together. In those great assemblies they had often glanced each at the other, to the heart of each of them the other appeared pleasing, and worthy of love, so that in the breast of each there grew up a secret passion for the other. Nevertheless, Tutanekai could not tell whether he might venture to approach Hine-Moa to take her hand, to see would she press his in return, because, said he, " Perhaps I may be by no means agreeable to her ; " on the other hand, Hine-Moa's heart said to her, " If you send one of your female friends to tell him of your love, perchance he will not be pleased with you." However, after they had thus met for many, many days, and had long fondly glanced at each other, Tutanekai sent a messenger to Hine-Moa, to tell of his love ; and when Hine-Moa had seen the messenger, she said, " Eh-hu ! have we then each loved alike ? " Some time after this, a dispute arose among the brothers as to which of them the girl loved. Each one claimed that he had pressed the hand of Hine-Moa and that she had pressed his in return. But the elder brothers sneered at Tutanekai's claims (for he was an illegitimate son), saying, " Do you think she would take any notice of such a low- born fellow as you ? " But in reality Tutanekai had already arranged for an elopement with the girl, and when she asked, " What shall be the sign by which I shall know that I should then run to you ? " he said to her, " A trumpet will be heard sounding every night, it will be I who sound it, beloved — paddle then your canoe to that place." Now always about the middle of the night Tutanekai and his friend went up into their balcony and played. Hine- Moa heard them and vastly desired to paddle over in her 530 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC canoe ; but her friends, suspecting something, had all the canoes on the shore of the lake. At last, one evening, she again heard the horn of Tutanekai, and the young and beautiful chieftainess felt as if an earthquake shook her to make her go to the beloved of her heart. At last she thought, perhaps I might be able to swim across. So she took six large, dry, empty gourds as floats, lest she should sink in the water, threw off her clothes, and plunged into the water. It was dark, and her only guide was the sound of her lover's music. Whenever her limbs became tired she rested, the gourds keeping her afloat. At last she reached the island on which her lover dwelt. Near the shore there was a hot spring, into which she plunged, partly to warm her trembling body, and partly also, perhaps, from modesty, at the thoughts of meeting Tutanekai. Whilst the maiden was thus warming herself in the hot spring, Tutanekai happened to feel thirsty and sent his ser- vant to fetch him a calabash of water. The servant came to dip it from the lake near where the girl was hiding. She called out to him in a gruff voice, like that of a man, asking him for some to drink, and he gave her the calabash, which she purposely threw down and broke. The servant went back for another calabash and again she broke it in the same way. The servant returned and told his master that a man in the hot spring had broken all his calabashes. " How did the rascal dare to break my calabashes ? " exclaimed the young man. " Why, 1 shall die of rage." He threw on some clothes, seized his club, and hurried to the hot spring, calling out " Where's that fellow who broke my calabashes ? " And Hine-Moa knew the voice, and the sound of it was that of the beloved of her heart ; and she hid herself under the overhanging rocks of the hot spring ; but her hiding was hardly a real hiding, but rather a bashful concealing of herself from Tutanekai, that he might not find her at once, but only after trouble and careful searching for her ; so he went feeling about along the banks of the hot spring, searching everywhere, whilst she lay coyly hid under the ledges of the rock, peeping out, wondering when she would be found. At last he caught hold of a hand, and cried out "Hollo, who's this?" And Hine-Moa answered, " It's I, Tutanekai ; " And he said, "But who are you ? — ■who's I ? " Then she spoke louder and said, " It's I, 'tis Hine-Moa." And he said " Ho ! ho ! ho ! can such in very truth be the case ? Let us two then go to the house." And she answered, " Yes ;" and she rose up in the water as beau- THE MAN ON THE TREE 531 tifal as the wild white hawk, and stepped upon the edge of the bath as the shy white crane ; and he threw garments over her and took her, and they proceeded to his house, and re- posed there ; and thenceforth, according to the ancient laws of the Maori, they were man and wife. THE MAN OK THE TREE A young man named Maru-tuahu left home in quest of his father, who had abandoned his mother before the son was born because he had been unjustly accused of stealing sweet potatoes from another chief. Maru-tuahu took along a slave, and they carried with them a spear for killing birds for food on the journey through the forest. One morning, after they had been on the way a month, he happened to be up in a forest tree when two young girls, daughters of a chief, came along. They saw the slave sitting at the root of the tree, and sportively contested with each other whose slave he should be. All this time Maru-tuahu was peeping down at the two girls from the top of the tree ; and they asked the slave, saying, "Where is your master ?" He answered, "I have no master but him." Then the girls looked about, and there was a cloak lying on the ground, and a heap of dead birds , and they kept on asking, " Where is he ? " but it was not long before a flock of Tuis settled on the tree where Maru- tuahu was sitting ; he speared at them and struck one of the birds, which made the tree ring with its cries ; the girls heard it, and looking up, the youngest saw the young chief sitting in the top boughs of the tree ; and she at once called up to him, " Ah ! you shall be my husband ; " but the eld- est sister exclaimed, " You shall be mine," and they began jesting and disputing between themselves which should have him for a husband, for he was a very handsome young man. Then the two girls called up to him to come down from the tree, and down he came, and dropped upon the ground, and pressed his nose against the nose of each of the young girls. They then asked him to come to their village with them; to which he consented, but said, "You two go on ahead, and leave me and my slave, and we will follow you presently;" and the girls said, "Very well, do you come after us." Maru-tuahu then told his slave to make a pres- ent to the girls of the food they had collected, and he gave them two bark baskets of pigeons, preserved in their own fat, and they went off to their village with these. 532 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC As soon as the girls were gone, Maru-tualm went to a stream, washed his hair, and combed it carefully^ tied it in a knot,, and stuck fifty red Kaka feathers and other plumes in his head, till he looked as handsome as the large-erested cor- morant. The young girls soon came back from the village to meet their so-called husband, and when they saw him in his new head-dress and attired in a chief's cloak they felt deeply in love with him and they said, " Oome along to our father's village with us." On the way they found out from the slave that his master was the far-famed Maru-tuahu, and they replied : " Dear, dear, we had not the least idea that it Was he." Then they ran off to tell his father (for this was the place where his father had gone and married again) that he was coming. The son was warmly welcomed. All the young girls ran outside, waved the corners of their cloaks and cried out, "Welcome, welcome, make haste." Then there was a great feast, at which ten dogs were eaten. But all this time the two girls were quarrelling with each other as to which of them should have the young chief for a husband. The elder girl was plain, but thought her- self pretty, and could not see the least reason why he should ba frightened at her ; but Maru-tuahu did not like her on account of her plainness, and her pretty sister kept him as her husband. LOVE IN A FOETEESS A chief named Eangirarunga had a daughter so celebrated for her beauty that the fame of it had reached all parts of these islands. A young hero named Takarangi also heard of her beauty, and it may be that his heart sometimes dwelt long on the thoughts of such loveliness. They belonged to differ- ent tribes, and war broke out between them, during which the fortress of the girl's father was besieged. Soon the in- habitants were near dying from want of food and water. At last the old chief Eangirarunga, overcome by thirst, stood on the top of the defences and cried out to the enemy : " I pray you to give me one drop of water." Some were willing, and got calabashes of water, but others were angry thereat and broke them in their hands. The old chief then appealed to the leader of the enemy, who was Takarangi, and asked him if he could calm the wrath of these fierce men. Takarangi replied : " This arm of mine is one which no dog dares to bite." But what he was really thinking was, " That dying old man is the father of Eau-mahora, of that lovely maid. Ah, how should I, grieve if one so young and innocent should STRATAGEM OF AN ELOPEMENT 533 die tormented with the want of water." Then he filled a calabash with fresh cool water, and the fierce warriors looked on in wonder and silence while he carried it to the old man and his daughter. They drank, both of th^n, and Taka- rangi gazed eagerly at the young girl, and she too looked eagerly at Takarangi ; long time gazed they each one at the other ; and as the warriors of the army of Takarangi looked on, lo, he had climbed up and was sitting at the young maiden's side ; and they said, amongst themselves, "0 com- rades, our lord Takarangi loves war, but one would think he likes Bau-mahora almost as well." At last a sudden thought struck the heart of the aged chief ; so he said to his daughter, " my child, would it be pleasing to you to have this young chief for a husband ? " And the young girl said, "I like him." Then the old man consented that his daughter should be given as a bride to Takarangi, and he took her as his wifa Thence was that war brought to an end, and the army of Takarangi dispersed. STRATAGEM OF AN ELOPEMENT Two tribes had long been at war, but as neither gained a permanent victory peace was at last concluded. Then one day the chief Te Ponga, with some of his followers, ap- proached the fortress of their former enemies. They were warmly welcomed, ovens were heated, food cooked, served in baskets and distributed. But the visitors did not eat much, in order that their waists might be slim when they stood up in the ranks of the dancers, and that they might look as slight as if their waists were almost severed in two. As soon as it began to get dark the villagers danced, and whilst they sprang nimbly about, Puhihuia, the young daughter of the village chief, watched them till her time came to enter the ranks. She performed her part beautifully ; her full-orbed eyes seemed clear and brilliant as the full moon rising in the horizon, and while the strangers looked at the young girl they all were quite overpowered with her beauty ; and Te Ponga, their young chief, felt his heart grow wild with emotion when he saw so much loveliness before him. Then up sprang the strangers to dance in their turn. Te Ponga waited his opportunity, ^nd when the time came, danced so beautifully that the people of the village were sur- prised at his agility and grace, and as for the young girl, Puhihuia, her heart conceived a warm passion for Te Ponga. When the dance was concluded, everyone, overcome with 534 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC weariness, went to sleep — all except Te Ponga, who lay toss- ing from side to side, unable to sleep, from his great love for the maiden, and devising scheme after scheme by which he might have an opportunity of conversing with her alone. At last he decided to carry out a plan suggested by his ser- vant. The next night, when he had retired in the chief's house, he called this servant to fetch him some water ; but the servant, following out the plot, had concealed himself and refused to respond. Then the chief said to his daughter, " My child, run and fetch some water for our guest." The maiden rose, and taking a calabash, went off to fetch some water, and no sooner did Te Ponga see her start off than he too arose and went out, feigning to be angry with his slave and going to give him a beating ; but as soon as he was out of the house he went straight off after the girl. He did not well know the path to the well, but was guided by the voice of the maiden, who sang merrily as she went along. When she arrived at the fountain she heard someone behind her, and turning suddenly around she beheld the young chief. Astonished, she asked, "What can have brought you here ? " He answered, " I came here for a draught of water." But the girl replied, " Ha, indeed ! Did not I come here to draw water for you ? Could not you have remained at my father's house until I brought the water rfor you ? " Then Te Ponga answered, " You are the water that I thirsted for." And as the maiden listened to his words, she thought within herself, " He, then, has fallen in love with me," and she sat down, and he placed himself by her side, and they conversed together, and to each of them the words of the other seemed most pleasant and engaging. Before they separated they arranged a time when they might escape together, and then they returned to the village. When the time came for Te Ponga to leave his host he di- rected some dozen men of his to go to the landing-place in the harbor, prepare one large canoe in which he and his followers might escape, and then to take the other canoes and cut the lashings which made the top sides fast to the hulls. The next morning he announced that he must return to his own country. The chief and his men accompanied him part of the way to the harbor. Puhihuia and the other girls had stolen a little way along the road, laughing and joking with the visitors. The chief, seeing his daughter going on after he had turned back, called out, "Children, children, come back here !" Then the other girls stopped and ran back toward the village, but as to Puhihuia, her heart beat but to STRATAGEM OF AN ELOPEMENT 535 the one thought of escaping with her beloved Te Ponga. So she began to run. Te Ponga and his men joined in the swift flight, and as soon as they had reached the water they Jumped into their canoe, seized their paddles and shot away, swift as a dart from a string. When the pursuing villagers arrived at the beach they laid hold of another canoe, but found that the lashings of all had been cut, so that pursuit was impossi- ble. Thus the party that had come to make peace returned joyfully to their own country, with the enemy's young chief- tainess, while their foes stood like fools upon the shore, stamping with rage and threatening them in vain. These stories are undoubtedly romantic ; but again I ask, are they stories of romantic love ? There is romance and quaint local color in the feat of the girl who, reversing the story of Hero and Leander, swam over to her lover ; in the wooing of the two girls proposing to an unseen man up a tree ; in the action of the chief who saved the beautiful girl and her father from dying of thirst, and acted so that his men came to the conclusion he must love her "almost as well" as war ; in the slyly planned elopement of Te Ponga. But there is nothing to indicate the quality of the love — to show an " illu- mination of the senses by the soul," or a single altruistic trait. Even such touches of egoistic sentimentality as the phrase "To the heart of each of them the other appeared pleasing and worthy, so that in the breast of each there grew up a se- cret passion for the other ; " and again, " he felt his heart grow wild with emotion, when he saw so much loveliness be- fore him," are quite certainly a product of Grey's fancy, for Polynesians, as we have seen, do not speak of the " heart " in that sense, and such a word as " emotions " is entirely beyond their powers of abstraction and conception. Grey tells us that he collected different portions of his legends from differ- ent natives, in very distant parts of the country, at long in- tervals, and afterward rearranged and rewrote them. In this way he succeeded in giving us some interesting legends, but a phonographic record of the fragments related to him, with- out any embroidering of " heart-affairs," " wild emotions," and other adornments of modern novels, would have rendered them infinitely more valuable to students of the evolution of 536 ISLAND LOVE ON THE P^CIFJC emotions. It is a great pity that so few of the recorders of aboriginal tales followed this principle ; and it is strange that such neatly polished, arranged, and modernized tales as these should have been accepted so long as illustrations of primitive love.' IJAORI LOVE-POEMS Besides their stories of love, the Maoris of New Zealand also have poems, some accompanied with (often obscene) pan- tomimes, others without accompaniment. Shortland (146- 55), Taylor (310), a,nd others h*ve collected and translated some of these poem,s, of which the following are the best, Taylor cites this one : The tears gush from my eyes, My eyelashes are wet with tears ; But stay, my tears, within. Lest you should be called mine. Alas ! I am betrothed (literally, my hands are bound) ; It is for Te Maunee That my love devours me. But I may weep indeed, Belored one, for thee. Like Tiniran's lament For his favorite pet Tutunui Which was slain by Ngae. Alas! Shortland gives these specimens of the songs that are fre- quently accompanied by immodest gestures of the body. S.ome of them are "not sufficiently decent to b^r translat- ing." The one marked (4) is interesting as an attempt at hyp^j-bole. Your body is at Waitemata, But your spirit came hither And aroused me from my sleep. ' There is much reason to suspect, too, that Grey expurgated and white- washed these tales. See, on this subject, the remarks to be made in the next chapter regarding the Indian love-stories of Schoolcraft, bearii^g in mind that foljrnesians are, If possible, even more licentious and foul-mouthed than Indi^DA- MAORI LOVE-POEMS 537 (4) Tawera is the bright star Of the morning. Not lees beautiful is the Jewel of my heart. (5) The sun is setting in his cave, Touching as he descends (the Land) where dwells my mate, He who is whirled away To southern seas. More ntilitarian are (6) and (7), in which a woman asks " Who will marry a man too lazy to till the ground for food ? " And a man wants to know " Who will marry a woman too lazy to weave garments ?" Very unlover-like is the fol- lowing : I don't like the habits of woman. When she goes out — She Kwikuis She Kodkoas She chatters The very ground is terrified, And the rats run away. Just so. More poetic are the waiata, which are snng without the aid of any action. The following ode was composed by a young woman forsaken by her lover : Look where the mist Hangs over Pukehina. There is the path ' By which went my love. Turn back again hither, That may be poured out Tears from my eyes. It was not I who first spoke of love, you it was who made advances to me When I was but a little thing. Therefore was my heart made wild. This i» my farewell of love to thee. 538 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC A young woman, who had been carried away prisoner from Tuhua, gives vent to her longing in these lines : "My regret is not to be expressed. Tears like a spring gush from my eyes. I wonder whatever is Te Kaiuku [her lover] doing : he who deserted me. Now I climb upon the ridge of Mount Parahaki ; from whence is clear the view of the island Tuhua. t see with regret the lofty Taumo, where dwells Tangiteruru. If I were there, the shark's tooth would hang from my ear. How fine, how beautiful, should I look. But see whose ship is that tacking ? Is it yours ? Hu ! you husband of Pohiwa, sailing away on the tide to Europe. " Torn ! pray give me some of your fine things ; for beautiful are the clothes of the sea-god. " Enough of this. I must return to my rags, and to my nothing-at-all." In this case the loss of her finery seems to trouble the girl a good deal more than the loss of her lover. In another ode cited by Shortland a deserted girl, after referring to her tear- ful eyes, winds up with the light-hearted Now that you are absent in your native land, The day of regret will, perhaps, end. There is a suggestion of Sappho in the last of these odes I shall cite : " Love does not torment forever. It came on me like the fire which rages sometimes at Hukanai. If this (beloved) one is near me, do not suppose, Kiri, that my sleep is sweet. I lie awake the live-long night, for love to prey on me in secret. " It shall never be confessed) lest it be heard of by all. The only evidence shall be seen on my cheeks. "The plain which extends to Tauwhare : that path I trod that I might enter the house of Eawhirawhwi. Don't be angry with me, madam [addressed to Eawhirawhwi's wife] ; I am only a stranger. For you there is the body (of your husband). For me there remains only the shadow of desire." "In the last two lines," writes Shortland, "the poetess coolly requests the wife of the person for whom she acknowl- edges an unlawful passion not to be angry with her, because ' she — the lawful wife — has always possession of the person of THE WOOING-HOUSE 539 her husband ; while hers is only an empty, Platonic sort of love.' This is rather a favorite sentiment, and is not unfre- quently introduced similarly into love-songs of this descrip- tion." THE WOOING-HOUSE It is noticeable that these love-poems are all by females, and most frequently by deserted females. This does not speak well for the gallantry or constancy of the men. Per- haps they lacked those qualities to offset the feminine lack of coyness. In the first of our Maori stories the maiden swims to the man, who calmly awaits her, playing his horn. In the second, a man is simultaneously proposed to by two girls, be- fore he has time to come off his perch on the tree. This arouses a suspicion. which is confirmed by E. Tregear's revela- tions regarding Maori courtship {Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 1889) : " The girl generally began the courting. I have often seen the pretty little love-letter fall at the feet of a lover — it was a little bit of flax made into a sort of half-knot — ' yes ' was made by pulling the knot tight — ' no ' by leaving the matrimonial noose alone. Now, I am sorry to say, it is often thrown as an invitation for love-making of an improper char- acter. Sometimes in the Whare-Matoro (the wooing-house), a building in which the young of both sexes assemble for play, songs, dances, etc., there would be at stated times a meeting ; when the fires burned low a girl would stand up in the dark and say, ' I love So-and-so, I want him for my husband.' If he coughed (sign of assent), or said ' yes ' it was well ; if only dead silence, she covered her head with her robe and was ashamed. This was not often, as she generally had managed to ascertain (either by her own inquiry or by sending a girl friend) if the proposal was acceptable. On the other hand, sometimes a mother would attend and say ' I want So-and-so for my son.' If not acceptable there was general mocking, and she was told to let the young people have their house (the wooing-house) to themselves. Sometimes, if the unbetrothed pair had not secured the consent of the parents, a late suitor would appear on the scene, and the poor girl got almost hauled to death between them all. One would get a leg, an- other an arm, another the hair, etc. Girls have been injured for life in these disputes, or even murdered by the losing party." 54:0 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC LIBEBTT OF CHOICE AND BESPECT FOK WOHBN The assertion that "the girl generally began the courting" must not mislead us into supposing that Maori women were free, as a rule, to marry the husbands of their choice. As Tre- gear's own remarks indicate, the advances were either of an improper character, or the girl had made sure beforehand that there "was no impediment in the way of her proposal. The Maori proverb that as the fastidious Kahawai fish selects the hook which pleases it best, so a woman chooses a man out of many (on the strength of which alone Westermarck, 217, claims liberty of choice for Maori women) must also refer to such liaisons before marriage, for all the facts indicate that the original Maori customs allowed women no choice what- ever in regard to marriage. Here the brother's consent had to be obtained, as Shortland remarks (118). Many of the girls were betrothed in infancy, and many others mai-ried at an age — twelve to thirteen — when the word choice could have had no rational meaning. Tregear informs us that if a couple had not been betrothed as children, everyone in the tribe claimed a right to interfere, and the only way the couple could get their own way was by eloping. Darwin was in- formed by Man tell " that until recently almost every girl in New Zealand who was pretty or promised to be pretty was tapu to some chief ; " and we further read that " when a chief desires to take to himself a wife, he fixes his attention upon her, and takes her, if need be, by force, without consulting her feelings and wishes or those of anyone else." This is confirmed by William Brown, in his book on the aborigines. But the most graphic and harrowing description of Maori maltreatment of women is given by the Eev. R. Taylor : " The ancient and most general way of obtaining a wife was for the gentleman- to summon his friends and make a reg- ular taua, or fight, to carry off the lady by force, and often- times with great violence. ... If the girl had eloped with someone on whom she had placed her affection, then her father and brother would refuse their consent," and fight to get her back. " The unfortunate female, thus placed be-, RESPECT FOR WOMEN 541 tween two contending parties, would soon be divested of ev- ery rag of clothing, and would then be seized by her head, hair, or limbs," her "cries and shrieks would be unheeded by her savage friends. In this way the poor creature was often nearly torn to pieces. These savage contests some- times ended in the strongest party bearing ofE in triumph the naked person of the bride. In some cases, after a long season of suffering, she recovered, to be given to a person for whom she had no affection, in others to die within a few hours or days from the injuries which she had received. But it was not uncommon for the weaker party, when they found they could not prevail, for one of them to put an end to the contest by suddenly plunging his spear into the woman's bosom to hinder her from becoming the property of an- other." After giving this account on page 163 of the Maori's " ancient and most general way" of obtaining a wife^- which puts him below the most ferocious brutes, since those at least spare their females — the same writer informs us on page 338 that " there are few races who treat their women with more deference than the Maori ! " If that is so, it can only be due to the influence of the whites, since all the testimony indicates that the unadulterated Maori — with whom alone we are here concerned — did not treat them "with great respect," nor pay any deference to them whatever. The cruel method of capture described above was so general that, as Taylor him- self tells us, the native term for courtship was he aru aru, literally, a following or pursuing after ; and there was also a special expression for this struggling of two suitors for a girl — he puna rua. As for their " great respect " for women, they do not allow them to eat with the men. A chief, says Angas (II., 110), "will sometimes permit his favorite wife to eat with him, though not out of the same dish." Ellis relates (III., 253) that New Zealanders are "addicted to the greatest vices that stain the human character — treachery, cannibalism, infanticide, and murder." The women caught in battle, as well as the men, were, he says, enslaved or eaten. " Sometimes they chopped off the legs and arms and other- wise mangled the body before they put the victim to death." Concubines had to do service as household drudges. A man 543 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC on dying would bequeath his wives to his brother. No land was bequeathed to female children. The real Maori feeling toward women is brought out in the answer given to a sister who went to her brothers to ask for a share of the lands of the family • " Why, you're only a slave to blow up your hus- band's fire." (Shortland, 119, 355-58.) MAORI MORALS AlTD CAPACITY FOR LOVE When Hawkesworth visited New Zealand with Captain Cookj he one day came accidentally across some women who were fishing, and who had thrown off their last garments. When they saw him they were as confused and distressed' as Diana and her nymphs ; they hid among the rocks and crouched down in the sea until they had made and put on girdles of seaweeds (456). "There are instances," writes William Brown (36-37), "of women committing suicide from its being said that they had been seen naked. A chief's wife took her own life because she had been hung up by the heels and beaten in the presence of the whole tribe." Shall we conclude from this that the Maoris were genuine- ly modest and perhaps capable of that delicacy in regard to- sexual matters which is. a prerequisite of sentimental love ?' What is modesty ? The Century Dictionary says it is " de- corous feeling or behavior ; purity or delicacy of thought or manner ; reserve proceeding from pure or chaste character ; " and the Encycloprndic Dictionary defines it as "chastity; purity of manners ; decency ; freedom from lewdness or un- chastity." Now, Maori modesty, if such it maybe called, was only skin deep. Living in a colder climate than other Poly- nesians, it became customary among them to wear more clothing ; and what custom prescribes must be obeyed to the letter among all these peoples, be the ordained dress merely a loin cloth or a necklace, or a cover for the back only, or full dress. It does not argue true modesty on the part of a Maori ■ woman to cover those parts of her body which custom orders her to cover, any more than it argues true modesty on the part of an Oriental barbarian to cover her face only, on meeting a MAORI MORALS AND CAPACITY FOR LOVE 543 man, leaving the rest of her body exposed. Nor does suicide prove anything, since it is known that the lower races in- dulge in self-slaughter for as trivial causes as they do in the slaughter of others. True modesty, as defined above, is not a Maori characteristic. The evidence on this point is too abundant to quote in full. Shortland (126-27) describes in detail all of the ceremonies which were in former days the pastimes of the New Zealand- ers, and which accompanied the singing of their haka or " love-songs," to which reference has already been made. In the front were seated three elderly ladies and behind them in rows, eight or ten in a row, and five or six ranks deep, sat " the lest born young belles of the town," who supplied the poem and the music for the haka pantomime : " The haka is not a modest exhibition, but the reverse ; and, on this occasion, two of the old ladies who stood in front . . accompanied the music by movements of the arms and body, their postures being often disgustingly lascivious. However, they suited the taste of the audience, who rewarded the performers at such times with the applause they desired. . . . It was altogether as ungodly a scene as can well be imagined." The same author, who lived among the natives several years, says (120) that " before marriage the greatest license is per- mitted to young females. The more admirers they can at- tract and the greater their reputation for intrigue, the fairer is their chance of making an advantageous match." William Brown writes (35) that "among the Maoris chastity is not deemed one of the virtues ; and a lady before marriage may be as liberal of her favors as she pleased without incurring censure." "As a rule,^' writes E. Tregear in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (1889), " the girls had great license in the way of lovers. I don't think the young woman knew when she was a virgin, for she had love-affairs with the boys from the cradle. This does not apply, of course, to every individual case — some girls are born proud, and either kept to one sweetheart or had none, but this was rare." After marriage a woman was expected to remain faithful to 544 ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC her husband, but of course not from any regard for chastity, but because she was his private property. Like so many other uncivilized races the Maori saw no impropriety in lend- ing his wife to a friend. (Tregear, 104.) The faces of Maori women were always wet with red ochre and oil. Both sexes anointed their hair (which was vermin- infested) with rancid shark's oil, so that they were as dis- agreeable to the smell as Hottentots. (Hawkesworth, 451-53.) They were cannibals, not from necessity, but for the love of human flesh, though they did not, like the Australians, eat their own relatives. Food, says Thompson (I., 160), affected them " as it does wild beasts." They practised infanticide, killed cripples, abandoned the sick — in a word, they dis- played a coarseness, a lack of delicacy, in sexual and other matters, which makes it simply absurd to suppose they could have loved as we love, with our altruistic feeling of sympathy and affection. William Brown says (38) that mothers showed none of that doting fondness for their children common else- where, and that they suckled pigs and pups with "affection." " Should a husband quarrel with his wife, she would not hesitate to kill her children, merely to annoy him" (41). " They are totally devoid of natural affection." The men "appear to care little for their wives," apparently from "a want of that sympathy between the sexes which is the source of the delicate attentions paid by the male to the female in most civilized countries. In my own experience I have seen only one instance where there was any perceptible attach- ment between husband and wife. To all appearance they behave to each other as if they were not at all related ; and it not infrequently happens that they sleep in different places before the termination of the first Week of their marriage." Thus even in the romantic isles of the Pacific we seek in vain for true love. Let us now see whether the vast conti- nent of North and South America will bring us any nearer to our goal. HOW AMEEICAN INDIANS LOVE " On the subject of love no persons have been less under- stood than the Indians," wrote Thomas Ashe in 1806 (271). " It is said of them that they have no affection, and that the intercourse of the sexes is sustained by a brutal passion re- mote from tenderness and sensibility. This is one of the many gross errors which have been propagated to calumniate these innocent people." Waitz remarks (III., 102) : " How much alike human nature is everywhere is evinced by the remarkable circumstance that notwithstanding the degrada- tion of woman, cases of romantic love are not even very rare" among Indians. " Their languages," writes Professor Brinton (E. P., 54), "supply us with evidence that the senti- ment of love was awake among them, and this is corroborated by the incidents we learn of their domestic life. . . . Some of the songs and stories of this race seem to reveal even a capability for romantic love such as would do credit to a modern novel. This is the more astonishing, as in the Afri- can and Mongolian races this ethereal sentiment is practically absent, the idealism of passion being something foreign to those varieties of man." The Indians, says Catlin {N. A. I., I., 121), "are not in the least behind us in conjugal, in filial, and in paternal affection." In the preface to Mrs. Eastman's Life and Legend of the Sioux, Mrs. Kirkman exclaims that " in spite of all that renders gross and mechanical their or- dinary mode of marrying and giving in marriage, instances are not rare among them of love as true, as fiery, and as fatal as that of the most exalted hero of romance." Let us listen to a few of the tales of Indian love, as recorded by School- craft.' 1 Consideiations of space compel me here, as in other cases, to condense the stories ; but I conscientiously and purposely retain all the sentimental passages and expressions. 645 546 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE THE BED LOVEB Many years ago there lived a Chippewa warrior on the banks of Lake Superior. His name was Wawanosh and he was renewed for his ancestry and personal bravery. He had an only daughter, eighteen years old, celebrated for her gentle virtues, her slender form, her full beaming hazel eyes, and her dark and flowing hair. Her hand was sought by a young man of humble parentage, but a tall commanding form, a manly step, and an eye beaming with the tropical fires of love and youth. These were sufficient to attract the favor- able notice of the daughter, but did not satisfy the father, who sternly informed the young man that before he could hope to mingle his humble blood with that of so renowned a warrior he would have to go and make a name for himself by enduring fatigue in the campaigns against enemies, by tak- ing scalps, and proving himself a successful hunter. The intimidated lover departed, resolved to do a deed that should render him worthy of the daughter of Wawanosh, or die in the attempt. In a few days he succeeded in getting together a band of young men all eager, like himself, to dis- tinguish themselves in battle. Armed with bow and quiver, and ornamented with war-paint and feathers, they had their war-dance, which was continued for two days and nights. Before leaving with his companions the leader sought an in- terview with the daughter of Wawanosh. He disclosed to her his firm intention never to return unless he could establish his name as a warrior. He told her of the pangs he had felt at her father's implied imputation of effeminacy and coward- ice. He averred that he never could be happy, either with or without her, until he had proved to the whole tribe the strength of his heart, which is the Indian term fpr courage. He repeated his protestations of inviolable attachment, whicn she returned, and, pledging vows of mutual fidelity, they parted. She never saw him again. A warrior brought home the tidings that he had received a fatal arrow in his breast after distinguishing himself by the most heroic bravery. From that moment the young girl never smiled again. She pined away by day and by night. Deaf to entreaty and reproach, she would seek a sequestered spot, where she would sit under a shady tree, and sing her mournful laments for hours together. A small, beautiful bird, of a kind she had never seen, sat on her tree every day, singing until dark. Her fond imagina- tion soon led her to suppose it was the spirit of her lover, and THE FOAM WOMAN 547 her visits were repeated with greater frequency. She passed her time in fasting and singing her plaintive songs. Thus she pined away, until the death she so fervently desired came to her relief. After her death the bird was never more seen, and it became a popular opinion that this mysterious bird had flown away with Ler spirit. But bitter tears of regret fell in the lodge of Wawanosh. Too late he regretted his false pride and his harsh treatment of the noble youth. THE FOAM WOMAN There once lived an Ottawa woman on the shores of Lake Michigan who had a daughter as beautiful as she was modest and discreet. She was so handsome that her mpther feared she would be carried o£E, and, to prevent it, she put her in a box on the lake, which was tied by a long string to a stake on the shore. Every morning the mother pulled the box ashore, and combed her daughter's long, shining hair, gave her food, and then put her out again on the lake. One day a handsome young man chanced to come to the spot at the moment she was receiving her morning's atten- tions from her mother. He was struck with her beauty and immediately went home and told his feelings to his uncle, who was a great chief and a powerful magician. The uncle told him to go to the mother's lodge, sit down in a modest manner, and, without saying a word, thinh what he wanted, and he would be understood and answered. He did so ; but the mother's answer was : " Give you my daughter ? No, indeed, my daughter shall never marry you." This pride and haughtiness angered the uncle and the spirits of the lake, who raised a great storm on the water. The tossing waves broke the string, and the box with the girl floated off through the straits to Lake Huron. It was there cast on shore and found by an old spirit who took the beautiful girl to his lodge and married lier. The mother, when she found her daughter gone, raised loud cries, and continued her lamentations for a long time. At last, after two or three years, the spirits had pity on her and raised another storm, greater even than the first. When the water rose and encroached on the lodge where the daughter lived, she leaped into the box, and the waves carried her back to her mother's lodge. The mother was overjoyed, but when she opened the box she found that her daughter's beauty had almost all departed. However, she still loved her because she was her daughter, and she now thought of the young man 54:8 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE who had made her the offer of marriage. She sent a formal message to him, but he had changed his mind, for he knew that she had been the wife of another. "/ marry your daughter ? " said he ; " your daughter ! No, indeed ! I shall never marry her." THE HUMPBACK MAGICIAN Bokwewa and his brother lived in a secluded part of the country. They were considered as Mauitoes who had as- sumed mortal shapes. Bokwewa was a humpback, but had the gifts of a magician, while the brother was more like the present race of beings. One day the brother said to the humpback that he was going away to visit the habitations of men, and procure a wife. He travelled alone a long time. At length he came to a deserted camp, where he saw a corpse on a scaffold. He took it down and found it was the body of a beautiful young woman. " She shall be my wife," he ex- claimed. He took her and carried her home on his back. " Brother," he exclaimed, " cannot you restore her life ? Oh ! do me that favor." The humpback said he would try, and, after performing various ceremonies, succeeded in restoring her to life. They lived very happily for some time. But one day when the humpback was home alone with the woman, her husband having gone out to hunt, a powerful Manito came and car- ried her off, though Bokwewa used all his strength to save her. When the brother returned and heard what had happened he would not taste food for several days. Sometimes he would fall to weeping for a long time, and appear almost beside himself. At last he said he would go in search of her. His brother, finding that he could not dissuade him, cautioned him against the dangers of the road ; he must pass by the large grape-vine and the frog's eggs that he would come across. But the young husband heeded not his advice. He started out on his journey and when he found the grapes and the frog's eggs he ate them. At length he came to the tribe into which his wife had been stolen. Throngs of men and women, gaily dressed, came out to meet him. As he had eaten of the grapes and frog's eggs — snares laid for him — he was soon overcome by their flatteries and pleasures, and he was not long afterward seen beating corn with their women (the strongest proof of effeminacy). THE BUFFALO KING 549 although his wife, for whom he had mourned so much, was in that Indian metropolis. Meanwhile Bokwewa waited patiently for his brother, but when he did not return he set out in search of him. He avoided the allurements along the road and when he came among the luxurious people of the South he wept on seeing his brother beating corn with the women. He waited till the stolen wife came down to the river to draw water for her new husband, the Manito. He changed himself into a hair- snake, was scooped up in her bucket, and drunk by the Man- ito, who soon after was dead. Then the humpback resumed his human shape and tried to reclaim his" brother ; but the brother was so taken up with the pleasures and dissipations into which he had fallen that he refused to give them up. Finding he was past reclaiming, Bokwewa left him and dis- appeared forever. THE BUFFALO KING Aggodagauda was an Indian who lived in the forest. Though he had accidentally lost the use of one of his two legs he was a famous hunter. But he had a great enemy in the king of buffaloes, who frequently passed over the plain with the force of a tempest. The chief object of the wily buffalo was to carry off Aggodagauda's daughter, who was very beautiful. To prevent, this Aggodagauda had built a log cabin, and it was only on the roof of this that he permit- ted his daughter to take the open air and disport herself. Now her hair was so long that when she untied it the raven locks hung dovm to the ground. One day, when her father was off on a hunt, she went out on top of the house and sat combing her long and beautiful hair, on the eaves of the lodge, when the buffalo king, com- ing suddenly by, caught her glossy hair, and winding it about his horns, tossed her onto his shoulders and carried her to his village. Here he paid every attention to gain her affec- tions, but all to no purpose, for she sat pensively and discon- solate in the lodge among the other females, and scarcely ever spoke, and took no part in the domestic cares of her lover the king. He, on the contrary, did everything he could think of to please her and ivin her affections. He told the others in his lodge to give her everything she wanted, and to be careful not to displease her. They set before her the choicest food. They gave her the seat of honor in the lodge. The king himself went out hunting to obtain the most dainty bits of meat. And not content with these proofs of his at- 550 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE tachment Tie fasted himself, and would often take his flute and sit near the lodge indulging his mind in repeating a few pensive notes : My sweetheart, My sweetheart, Ah me! When I think of you. When I think of you, Ah me ! How I love you, How I love you, Ah me ! Do not hate me, Do not hate me, Ah me I In the meantime Aggodagauda had returned from his hunt, and finding his daughter gone, determined to recover her. During her flight her long hair had caught on the branches and broken them, and it was by following these broken twigs that he tracked her. When he came to the king's lodge it was evening. He cautiously peeped in and saw his daughter sitting disconsolately. She caught his eye, and, in order to meet him, said to the king, " Give me a dip- per, I will go and get you a drink of water." Delighted with this token of submission, the king allowed her to go to the river. There she met her father and escaped with him. THE HAUNTED GKOVE Leelinau was the favorite daughter of an Odjibwa hunter, living on the shore of Lake Superior. From her earliest youth she was observed to be pensive and timid, and to spend much of her time in solitude and fasting. Whenever she could leave her father's lodge she would fly to the remote haunts and recesses of the woods, or sit upon some high prom- ontory of rock overhanging the lake. But her favorite place was a forest of pines known as the Sacred Grove. It was sup- posed to be inhabited by a class of fairies who love romantic scenes. This spot Leelinau visited often, gathering on the way strange flowers or plants to bring home. It was there that she fasted, supplicated, and strolled. The effect of these visits was to make the girl melancholy and dissatisfied with the realities of life. She did not care to play with the other young people. -Nor did she favor the plan of her parents to marry her to a man much her senior in years, but a reputed chief. No attention was paid to her THE GIRL AND THE SCALP 55i disinclination, and the man was informed that his ofEer had been favorably received. The day for the marriage was fixed and the guests invited. The girl had told her parents that she would never consent to the match. On the evening preceding the day fixed for her marriage she dressed herself in her best garments and put on all her ornaments. Then she told her parents she was go- ing to meet her little lover, the chieftain of the green plume, who was waiting for her at the Spirit Grove. Supposing she was going to act some harmless freak, they let her go. When she did not return at sunset alarm was felt ; with lighted torches the gloomy pine forest was searched, but no trace of the girl was ever found, and the parents mourned the loss of a daughter whose inclinations they h^d, in the end, too vio- lently thwarted. THE CURL AND THE" SCALP About the middle of the seventeenth century there lived on the shores of Lake Ontario a Wyandot girl so beautiful that she had for suitors nearly all the young men of her tribe ; but while she rejected none, neither did she favor any one in particular. To prevent her from falling to someone not in their tribe the suitors held a meeting and concluded that their claims should be withdrawn and the war chief urged to woo her. He objected on account of the disparity of years, but was finally persuaded to make his advances. His practice had been confined rather to the use of stone-headed arrows than love-darts, and his dexterity in the management of hearts dis- played rather in making bloody incisions than tender impres- sions. But after he had painted and arrayed himself as for battle and otherwise adorned his person, he paid court to her, and a few days later was accepted on condition that he would pledge his word as a warrior to do what she should ask of him. When his pledge had been given she told him to bring her the scalp of a certain Seneca chief whom she hated. He begged her to reflect that this chief was his bosom friend, whose confidence it would be an infamy to betray. But she told him either to redeem his pledge or be proclaimed for a lying dog, and then left him. Goaded into fury, the Wyandot chief blackened his face and rushed ofE to the Seneca village, where he tomahawked his friend and rushed out of the lodge with his scalp. A moment later the mournful scalp-whoop of the Senecas was resounding through the village. The Wyandot camp was attacked, and after a deadly combat of three days the Senecas triumphed. 553 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE avenging the murder of their chief by the death of his assail- ant as well as of the miserable girl who had caused the tragedy. The war thus begun lasted more than thirty years. A CHIPPEWA LOVE-SONG In 11152 great exertions were made by the French Indian Department under General Montcalm to bring a body of Ind- ians into the valley of the lower St. Lawrence, and invitations for this purpose reached the utmost shores of Lake Superior. In one of the canoes from that quarter, which was left on the way down at the mouth of the Utawas, was a Chippewa girl named Paigwaineoshe, or the White Eagle. While the party awaited there the result of events at Quebec she formed an attachment for a young Algonquin belonging to a French mission. This attachment was mutual, and gave rise to a song of which the following is a prose translation : I. Ah me ! When I think of him — when I think of him — my sweetheart, my Algonquin. II. As I embarked to return, he put the white wampum around my neck — a pledge of troth, my sweetheart, my Al- gonquin. III. I shall go with you, he said, to your native country — I shall go with you, my sweetheart — my Algonquin. IV. Alas ! I replied — my native country is far, far away — my sweetheart, my Algonquin. V. When I looked back again — where we parted, he was still looking after me, my sweetheart, my Algonquin. VI. He was still standing on a fallen tree — that had fallen into the water, my sweetheart, my Algonquin. VII. Alas ! When I think of him — when I think of him — It is when I think of him, my Algonquin. HOW "INDIAN STORIES ARE WRITTEN Here we have seven love-stories as romantic as you please and full of sentimental touches. Do they not disprove my theory that uncivilized races are incapable of feeling senti- mental love .'' Some think they do, and Waitz is not the only anthropologist who has accepted such stories as proof that human nature, as far as love is concerned, is the same un- der all circumstances. The above tales are taken from the HOW "INDIAN STORIES" ARE WRITTEN 553 books of a man who spent mucli of his life among Indians and issued a number of works about them, one of which, in six volumes, was published under the auspices of the United States Government. This expert — Henry R. Schoolcraft — was member of so many learned societies that it takes twelve lines of small type to print them all. Moreover, he expressly assures us ' that " the value of these traditionary stories ap- pears to depend very much upon their being left, as nearly as possible, in their original forms of thought and expression," the obvious inference being an assurance that he has so left them ; and he adds that in the collection and translation of these stories he enjoyed the great advantages of seventeen years' life as executive officer for the tribes, and a knowledge of their languages. And now, having given the enemy's battle-ship every pos- sible advantage, the reader will allow me to bring on my little torpedo-boat. In the first place Schoolcraft mentions (.4. R., I., 56) twelve persons, six of them women, who helped him collect and interpret the material of the tales united in his volumes ; but he does not tell us whether all or any of these collectors acted on the principle that these stories could claim absolutely no scientific value unless they were verbatim re- ports of aboriginal tales, without any additions and sentimen- tal embroideries by the compilers. This omission alone is fatal to the whole collection, reducing it to the value of a mere fairy book for the entertainment of children, and allow- ing us to make no inferences from it regarding the quality and expression of an Indian's love. Schoolcraft stands convicted by his own action. When I read his tales for the first time I came across numerous sen- tences and sentiments which I knew from my own experience among Indians were utterly foreign to Indian modes of thought and feeling, and which they could no more have uttered than they could have penned Longfellow's Hiawatha, or the essays of Emerson. In the stories of " The Red ' Algic Researches, 1839, 1., 43. Prom this work the first five of the above Btoiies are taken, the others being from the same author's Oneota (54-57 ; 15- 16). The stories in Algic Researches were reprinted in 1856 under the title The Myth of Hiawatha and Other Oral Legends. 554 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE Lover," " The Buffalo King," and " The Haunted Grove," » I have italicized a few of these suspicions passages. To take the last-named tale first, it is absurd to speak of Indian "fairies who love romantic scenes," or of a girl romantically sitting on a rocky promontory," or " gathering strange flowers ; " for Indians have no conception of the romantic side of nature — of scenery for its own sake. To them a tree is simply a grouse perch, or a source of fire-wood ; a lake, a fish-pond, a mountain, the dreaded abode of evil spirits. In the tale of the " Buffalo King" we read of the chief doing a number of things to win the affection of the refractory bride — telling the others not to displease her, giving her " the seat of honor," and going so far as to fast himself, whereas in real life, under such circumstances, he would have, curtly clubbed the stolen bride into submission. In the tale of the " Bed Lover " the girl is admired for her " slender form," whereas a real Indian values a woman in proportion to her weight and rotuiidity. Indians do not make " protes- tations of inviolable attachment," or " pledge vows of mutual fidelity," like the lovers of our fashionable novels. As Charles A. Leland remarks of the same race of Indians (85), "When an Indian seeks a wife, he or his mutual friend makes no great ado about it, but utters two words which tell the whole story." But there is no need of citing other authors, for Schoolcraft, as I have just intimated, stands convicted by his own action. In the second edition of his Algic Researches, which appeared after an interval of seventeen years and re- ceived the title of The Myth of Hiawatha and other Oral Le- gends of the North American Indians, he seemed to remem- ber what he wrote in the preface of the first regarding these stories, " that in the original there is no attempt at orna- ment," so he removed nearly all of the romantic embroider- ies, like those I have italicized and commented on, and also relegated the majority of his ludicrously sentimental inter- ' I have taken the liberty of giving to most of the stories cited more attrac- tive titles than Schoolcraft gave them. He himself changed some of the titles in his later edition. ' In another of these tales {A. R. , II., 165-80) Schoolcraft refers to a girl who went astray jn the woods " while admiring the scenery." REALITY VERSUS ROMANCE 555 spereed poems to the appendix. In the preface to Hiawatha, he refers in connection with some of these verses to "the poetic use of aboriginal ideas." Now, a man has a perfect right to make snch "poetic use" of "aboriginal ideas," but not when he has led his readers to believe that he is telling these stories "as nearly as possible in their original forms of thought and expression." It is very much as if Edward MacDowell had published the several movements of his Indian Suite as being, not only in their ideas, but in their (modern European) harmonies and orchestration, a faithful transcript of aboriginal Indian music. Schoolcraft's proced- ure, in other words, amounts to a sort of Ossianic mystifi- cation ; and unfortunately he has had not a few imitators, to the confusion of comparative psychologists and students of the evolution of love. It is a great pity that Schoolcraft, with his valuable oppor- tunities for ethnological research, should not have added a critical attitude and a habit of accuracy to his great industry. The historian Parkman, a model observer and scholar, de- scribed Schoolcraft's volumes on the Indian Tribes of the United States as " a singularly crude and illiterate produc- tion, stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page of a striking unfitness for historical or scientific inquiry." ' KBALITT VEESUS KOMANCB A few of the tales I have cited are not marred by super- added sentimental adornments, but all of them are open to suspicion from still another point of view. They are invari- ably so proper and pure that they might be read to Sunday- school classes. Since one-half of Schoolcraft's assistants in the compilation of this material were women, this might have been expected, and if the collection had been issued as a Fairy Book it would have been a matter of course. But they were issued as accurate " oral legends " of wild Indians, ■ Schoolcraft's volumes include, however, a number of reliable and valuable articles on various Indian tribes by other writers. These are often referred to in anthropological treatises, including the present volume. 556 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE and from the point of view of the student of the history of love the most important question to ask was, " Are Indian stories in reality as pure and refined in tone as these speci- mens would lead us to suspect ?" I will answer that question by citing the words of one of the warmest champions of the Indians, the eminent American anthropologist. Professor D. G. Brinton {M. JST. W., 160) : " Anyone who has listened to Indian tales, not as they are recorded in books, but as they are told by the camp-fire, will bear witness to the abounding obscenity they deal in. That the same vulgarity shows itself in their arts and life, no genuine observer need doubt." And in a footnote he gives this extremely interesting information : " The late George Gibbs will be acknowledged as an authority here. He was at the time of his death preparing a Latin translation of the tales he had collected, as they were too erotic to print in English. He wrote me, 'Schoolcraft's legends are emasculated to a degree that they become no longer Indian.' " No longer Indian, indeed ! And these doctored stories, artfully sentimentalized at one end and expurgated at the other, are advanced as proofs that a savage Indian's love is just as refined as that of a civilized Christian ! What Indian stories really are, the reader, if he can stomach such things, may find out for himself by consulting the marvellously copi- ous and almost phonographically accurate collection of native tales which another of our most eminent anthropologists, Dr. Franz Boas, has printed.' And it must be borne in mind that these stories are not the secret gossip of vulgar men alone by themselves, but are national tales with which chil- dren of both sexes become familiar from their earliest years. As Colonel Dodge remarks (213) : it is customary for as many as a dozen persons of both sexes to live in one room, hence there is an entire lack of privacy, either in word or act. " It is a wonder," says Powers (271), " that children ' In the Zeitschrift fiir Hthnologie, 1891 , especially pages 546, 554, 555, 556, 557, 558, 559, 567-69, 640, 643 ; in the vol. for 1893 : pages 36, 42, 44, 324, 330, 340, 386, 392, 434, 447; and in the Tol. for 1894 : 283, 303, 304. It is impossible even to hint here at the details of these stories. Some are licen- tious, others merely filthy. Powers, in his great work on the California Indians (348), refers to "the unspeakable obscenity of their legends." DECEPTIVE MODESTY 557 grow up with any virtue whatever, for the conversation of their elders in their presence is often of the filthiest descrip- tion." "One thing seems to me more than intolerable," wrote the French missionary Le Jeune in 1632 {Jesuit Rela- tions, v., 169). " It is their living together promiscuously, girls, women, men, and boys, in a smoky hole. And the more progress one makes in the knowledge of the language, the more vile things one hears. ... I did not think that the mouth of the savage was so foul as I notice it is every day," Elsewhere (VI., 263) the same missionary says : " Their lips are constantly foul with these obscenities ; and it is the same with the little children. . . . The older women go almost naked, the girls and young women are very modestly clad; but, among themselves, their language has the foul odor of the sewers." Of the Pennsylvania Indians Colonel James Smith (who had lived among them as a captive) wrote (140) : " The squaws are generally very immodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young men to the blush." DECEPTIVE MODESTY The late Dr. Brinton shot wide off the mark when he wrote {E. and P., 59) that even among the lower races the sentiment of modesty " is never absent." With some American Indians, as in the races of other parts of the world, there is often not even the appearance of modesty. Many of the Southern Indians in North America and others in Central and South America wear no clothes at all, and their actions are as un- restrained as those of animals.' The tribes that do wear clothes sometimes present to shallow or biassed observers the appearance of modesty. To the Mandan women Catlin (I., 93, 96) attributes " excessive modesty of demeanor." " It was > Bhrenreich says (^Zeitschr. fur Ethnol.. 1887, 31) that among the Botocudos cohsbitatio coram familia et vicinibus exagitur ; and of the Machacares Indians Feldner tella us (II., 143. 148) that even the children behave lewdly in presence of everybody. Parentes rident, appellunt eos canes, et usqne ad silvam agunt. Some extremely important and instructive revelations are made in von den Steinen's classic work on Brazil (19.5-99), but they cannot be cited here. The author concludes that " a feeling of modesty is decidedly absent among the unclothed Indians." 558 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE customary for hundreds of girls and women to go bathing and swimming in the Missouri every morning, while a quarter of a mile back on a terrace stood several sentinels with bows and arrows in hand to protect the bathing-place from men or boys, who had their own swimming-place elsewhere." This, however, tells us more about the immorality of the men and their anxiety to guard their property than about the char- acter of the women. On that point we are enlightened by Maximilian Prinz zu Wied, who found that these women were anything but prudes, having often two or three lovers at a time, while infidelity was seldom punished (I., 531). Accord- ing to Gatschet (183) Creek women also " were assigned a bathing-place in the river currents at some distance below the men ; " but that this, too, was a mere curiosity of pseudo- modesty becomes obvious when we read in Schoolcraft (V., 373) that among these Indians "the sexes indulge their pro- pensities with each other promiscuously, unrestrained by law or custom, and without secrecy or shame. ■" Powers, too, re- lates (55) that among the Californian Yurok "the sexes bathe apart, and the women do not go into the sea without some garment on." But Powers was not a man to be misled by specious appearances. He fully understood the philosophy of the matter, as the following shows (413) : " Ifotwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary by false friends and weak maundering philanthropists, the California Indians are a grossly licentious race. None more so, perhaps. There is no word in all their language that I have examined which has the meaning of ' mercenary prostitute,' because such a creature is unknown to them ; but among the unmarried of both sexes there is very little or no restraint ; and this freedom is so much a matter of course that there is no reproach attaching to it ; so that their young women are notable for their modest and innocent demeanor. This very modesty of outward deportment has deceived the hasty glance of many travellers. But what their conduct really is is shown by the Argus-eyed surveillance to which women are subjected. If a married woman is seen even walking in the forest with another man than her husband she is chastised by him. A repetition of the ofEence is generally punished with speedy death. Brotkers and sisters scrupulously avoid living alone WERE INDIANS CORRUPTED BY WHITES? 559 together. A mother-in-law is never allowed to live with her son-in-law. To the Indian's mind the opportunity of evil implies the commission of it." WEBB INDIAKS COEEUPTED BY WHITES ? Having disposed of the modesty fallacy, let us examine once more, and for the last time, the doctrine that savages owe their degradation to the whites. In the admirable preface to his book on the Jesuit mis- sionaries in Canada, Parkman writes concerning the Hurons (XXXIV.) : "Lafitan, whose book appeared in 1724, says that the nation was corrupt in his time, but that this was a degen- eracy from their ancient manners. La Potherie and Charle- voix make a similar statement. Megapolensis, however, in 1644 says that they were then exceedingly debauched ; and Greenhalgh, in 1677, gives ample evidence of a shameless li- cense. One of their most earnest advocates of the present day admits that the passion of love among them had no other than an animal existence (Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 323). There is clear proof that the tribes of the South were equally corrupt. (See Lawson's Carolina, 34, and other early writers.)" Another most earnest advocate of the Indians, Dr. Brin- ton, writes (if. N. W., 159) that promiscuous licentiousness was frequently connected with the religious ceremonies of the Indians : " Miscellaneous congress very often terminated their dances and festivals. Such orgies were of common occurrence among the Algoukins and Iroquois at a very early date, and are often mentioned in the Jesuit Relations ; Venagas de- scribes them as frequent among the tribes of Lower Califor- nia, and Oviedo refers to certain festivals of the Nicaraguans, during which the women of all ranks extended to whosoever wished just such privileges as the matrons of ancient Baby- lon, that mother of harlots and all abominations, used to grant even to slaves and strangers in the temple of Melitta as one of the duties of religion." In Part I. (140-42) of the Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States,^ A. ' Published in the Papers of the American Archceological Institute, III. 560 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE P. Bandelier^ the leading authority on the Indians of the Southwest, writes regarding the Pueblos (one of the most advanced of all American tribes) : "Chastity was an act of penitence ; to be chaste signified to do penance. Still, after a woman had once become linked to a man by the performance of certain simple rites it was unsafe for her to be caught trespassing, and her accomplice also sufEered a penalty. But there was the utmost liberty, even license, as toward girls. Intercourse was almost pro- miscuous with members of the tribe. Toward outsiders the strictest abstinence was observed, and this fact, which has long been overlooked or misunderstood, explains the pre- vailing idea that before the coming of the white man the Indians were both chaste and moral, while the contrary is the truth." Lewis and Clarke travelled a century ago among Indians that had never been visited by whites. Their observations regarding immoral practices and the means used to obviate the consequences bear out the above testimony. M'Lean (II., 59, 120) also ridicules the idea that Indians were cor- rupted by the whites. But the most conclusive proof of aboriginal depravity is that supplied by the discoverers of America, including Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. Co- lumbus on his fourth voyage touched the mainland going down near Brazil. In Cariay, he writes,* the enchanters " sent me immediately two girls very showily dressed. The elder could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both .exhibited so much immodesty tliat more could not be expected from public women." On an- other page (30) he writes : "The habits of these Caribbees are brutal;" adding that in their attacks on neighboring islands they carry off as many women as they can, using them as concubines. "These women also say that the Carib- bees use them with such cruelty as would scarcely be be- lieved ; and that they eat the children which they bear to them." Brazil was visited in 1501 by Amerigo Vespucci. The ac- ' Works, in Hakluyt Soc. Publ., London, 1847, II., 193. WERE INDIANS CORRUPTED BY WHITES? 561 count he gives of the dissolute practices of the natives, who certainly had never set eye on a white man, is so plain spoken that it cannot be, quoted here in full. " Tliey are not very j^ealous,"' he says, " and are immoderately libidinous, and the womeu much more so than the men, so that, for decency I omit to telT you the . . . They are so void of affection and cruel that if they be angry with their husbands they . . . and they slay an infinite number of creatures by that means. . . . The greatest sign of friendship which they can show yt>u is that they give you their wives and their daughters " and fee^l' '" highly honored " if they are accepted. " They eat all' their enemies whom they kill or capture, as well females as males." " Their other barbarous customs aje such that expresfflon, is too weak for the reality." The ineradicable perverseness of some minds is amusingly illustrated by Southey, in his History of Brazil. After refer- ring tO/ Amerigo Vespucci's statements regarding the laseiv- ions practices of the aboriginals, he exclaims, in a footnote' i " This; ia false ! Man has, never yet been discoveiEed in simeibi a state of depravity ! " What the navigators wrote regarding the cannibalism and cruelty of these savages he accepts as a matter of coarse ; but to doubt their immaculate purity is high treason ! The attitude of the, sentimentalists in this matter isi not only silly and ridiculous, but positively patha- logical. As their number is great, and seems to be growing (under the influence of such wri-fiers as Catlin, Helen Hunt Jackson, Brinton, Westermarck, etc.), it ja necessary, in the interest of the truth, to paint the Indian as he really was until contact with the whites (missionaries and others) improved him somewhat.^ • What Parkman says regarding ffie cruelty of the Indians perhaps applies also to their sexual morality, though to a lass extent. Is speaking of the early missionary intercourse with the Indians he remarks (Jes. in Can.^ 319); "In the wars of the next oentuiy we do not often find these exaispHes of ^aiboiie atrocity with which the earlier aimaln were crowded. The savage burned his enemies alive still, it is true, but he rarely ate them ; neither did he torraent them with tha samedelibfflr&tion and persistswry. H4 was a sanage ttJH, but, not so often a devil. The improvement was not great, but it was aistmct : and it seems to have taken place wherever Indian tribes' were in close relaitioiis with any respectable conununn^ of white men." 56^ HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE THE NOBLE RED MAK Beginning with the Californians, their utter lack of moral sense has already been described. They were no worse than the other Pacific coast tribes in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. George Gibbs, the leading authority on the Indians of Western Oregon and Washington, says re- garding them (I., 197-200) : " Prostitution is almost universal. An Indian, perhaps, will not let his favorite wife, but he looks upon his others, his sisters, daughters, female relatives, and slaves, as a legiti- mate source of profit. . . . Cohabitation of unmarried females among their own people brings no disgrace if unac- companied with child-birth, which they take care to prevent. This commences at a very early age, perhaps ten or twelve years." " Chastity is not considered a virtue by the Chinook wom- en," says Koss (92), " and their amorous propensities know no bounds. All classes, from the highest to the lowest, indulge in coarse sensuality and shameless profligacy. Even the chief would boast of obtaining a paltry toy or trifle in return for the prostitution of his virgin daughter." Lewis and Clarke (1814) found that among the Chinooks, " as, indeed, among all Ind- ians " they became acquainted with on their perilous pioneer trips through the Western wilds, prostitution of females was not considered criminal or improper (439). Such revelations, illustrating not individual cases of de- pravity, but a whole people's attitude, show how utterly hope- less it is to expect refined and pure love of these Indians. Gibbs did not give himself up to any illusions on this subject. " A strong sensual attachment often undoubtedly exists," he wrote (198), " which leads to marriage, and instances are not rare of young women destroying themselves on the death of a lover ; but where the idea of chastity is so entirely want- ing in both sexes, this cannot deserve the name of love, or it is at best of a temporary duration." The italics are mine. In common with several other high authorities who lived many years among the Indians (as we shall, see at the end of this THE NOBLE RED MAN 563 chapter) Gibbs clearly realized the difference between red love and white love — between sensual and sentimental at- tachments, and failed to find the latter among the American savages. British Columbian capacity for sexual delicacy and refined love is sufficiently indicated by the reference on a preceding page (556) to the stories collected by Dr. Boas. Turning northeastward we find M'Lean, who spent twenty-five years among the Hudson's Bay natives, declaring of the Beaver Ind- ians (Chippewayans) that " the unmarried youth, of both sexes, are generally under no restraint whatever," and that " the lewdness of the Carrier [Taculli] Indians cannot pos- sibly be carried to a greater excess." M'Lean, too, after ob- serving these northern Indians for a quarter of a century, came to the conclusion that " the tender passion seems un- known to the savage breast." " The Hurons are lascivious," wrote Le Jeune (whom I have already quoted), in 1633 ; and Parkman says {J. N. A., .XXXIV.) : "A practice also prevailed of temporary or ex- perimental marriage, lasting a day, a week, or more. . . . An attractive and enterprising damsel might, and often did, make twenty such marriages before her final establishing." Kegarding the Sioux, that shrewd observer. Burton, wrote ( G. of S., 116) : " If the mother takes any care of her daughter's virtue, it is only out of regard to its market value." The Sioux, or Dakotas, are indeed, sometimes lower than animals, for, as S. E. Riggs pointed out, in a govern- ment publication {U. 8. Oeogr. and Geol. Soc, Vol. IX.), " Girls are sometimes taken very young, before they are of marriageable age, which generally happens with a man who has a wife already.'' " The marriageable age," he adds, " is from fourteen years old and upward." Even the Mandans, so highly landed by Catlin, sometimes brutally dispose of girls at the age of eleven, as do other tribes (Comanches, etc.). Of the Chippewas, Ottawas, and Winnebagoes we read in H. Trumbull's History of the Indian Wars (168) : " It ap- pears to have been a very prevalent custom with the Indians of this country, before they became acquainted with the Eu- 564 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE ropeans, to compliment strangers with, their wives ; " and " the Indian women in general are amorous, and before mar- riage not less esteemed for gratifying their passions." Of the New York Indians J. Buchanan wrote (II., 104) : " thait it is no oflence far their married women to associate with another man, provided she acquaint her husband or some near rela- tion therewith, but if not, it is sometimes piuBishable with death." Of the Comanches it is said (Schoolcraft, V., 683) that while " the men are grossly licentious, treating female captives in a most cruel and barbarous manner," upon their women " thay enforce rigid chastity ;" but this is, as usual, a mere question of masculine property, for on the next page we read that they lend their wives ; and Fossey {Mexique, 463)' says : " Les Comanches obligent le prisonnier blanc, dont ils ont admire le valeur dans le combat, i s'unir a lenrs femmes pour perp6tuer sa race." Concerning the Kick- apoo, Kansas, and Osage Indians we are informed by Hunter (30,3), who lived among them, that " a female may become a parent out of wedlock without loss of reputation, or diminish- . ing her chances for a subsequent matrimonial alliance, so that her paramour is of respectable standing." Maximilian Prinz zn Weid found that the Blackfeet, though they horribly mu- tilated wives for secret intrigues [violation of property right], offered these wives as well as their daughters for a bottle of whiskey. "Some very young girls are offered" (I., 531). " The Navajo women are very loose, and do not look upon fornication as a crime." " The most unfortunate thing which can befall a captive woman is to be claimed by two persons. In this case she is either shot or delivered up for indiscrimi- nate violence " (Bancroft, I., 514). Colonel li. I. Dodge writes of the Indians of the plains (304) : " For an unmarried Ind- ian girl, to be found away from her lodge alone is to invite outrage, consequently she is never sent out to cut and bring wood, nor to take care of the stock." He speaks of the " Ind- ian men who, animal-like, approach; a female only to make love to her," and to whom the idea of continence is unknown! (310). Among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes " no unmarried woman considers herself dressed to meet her beau at night, to THE NOBLE RED MAN 565 go to a dance or other gathering, nnlees she has tied her lower limbs with a rope. . . . Custom has made this an almost perfect protection against the brnts^ity of the men. Withont it she would not be safe for an instant, and even with it, an unmarried girl is not safe if found alone a-way from the immediate protection of the lodge" (213). A brother does not protect his sister from insult, nor avenge outrage (230). " Nature has no nobler specimen of man than the Indian," wrote Catlin, the sentimentalist, who is often cited as an authority. To proceed: "Prostitution is the rule among the (Yuma) women, not the exception." The Colorado Biver Indians " barter and sell their women into prostitu- tion, with hardly an exception." (Bancroft, I., 514.) In his Antiquities of the Southern Indians, C. C. Jonfis says of the Creeks, Cfaerokees, Musoogulges, etc. (69) : " Comparatively little virtue existed among the unmarried women. Their chances of marriage were not diminished, but rather aug- mented, by the fact that they had been great favorites, pro- vided they had avoided conception during their years of general pleasure." The wife "was deterred, by fear of public punishment, from the commission of indiscretions." " The unmarried women among the Natchez were unusually unchaste," says McCuIloh (165). This damning list might be continued for the Central and South American Indians. We should find that the Mosquito Indians often did not wait for puberty (Bancroft, I., 739) ; that, according to Martins, Oviedo, and Navarette, " in Cuba, Nicaragua,' and among the Caribs and Tupis, the bride yielded herself first to another, lest her husband should come to some ill-luck by exercising a priority of possession. . . . This jus primcB noctis was exercised by the priests " (Brinton, M. iV. W., 155) ; that the Waraus give girls to medicine men in return for professional services (Brett, 320) ; that the Guaranis lend their wives and daughters for a drink (Beich, 435) ; that among Brazilian tribes the jus prima noctis is ' HerreTa relates (IIL,340) that Nicaiaguan fathers used to send out their daughters to roam the country and earn a mturiage portion in a shameful way. 566 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE often enjoyed by the chief {Journ. Roy.Q. S., II., 198); that in Guiana " chastity is. not considered an indispensable virtue among the unmarried women" (Dalton, I., 80) ; that the Patagonians often pawned and sold their wives and daughters for brandy (Falkner, 97) ; that their licentiousness is equal to their cruelty (Bourne, 56-57), etc., etc. APPABENT 3!XCEPTI0NS A critical student will not be able,.! think, to find any exceptions to this rule of Indian depravity among tribes untouched by missionary influences. Westermarck, indeed, -refers (65) with satisfaction to Hearne's assertion (311) that the northern Indians he visited carefully guarded the young people. Had he consulted page 129 of the same writer he would have seen that this does not indicate a regard for chastity, as a virtue, but is merely a result of their habit of re- garding women as property, to which Franklin, speaking of -these same Indians, refers (287) ; for as Hearne remarks in the place alluded to, "it is a very common custom among the men of this country to exchange a night's lodging with each other's wives." An equal lack of insight is shown by Wester- marck, when he professes to find female chastity among the Apaches. For this assertion he relies on Bancroft, who does indeed say (I., 514) that " all authorities agree that the Apache women, both before and after marriage, are remark- ably pure." Yet he himself adds that the Apaches will lend their wives to each other.* If the women are otherwise chaste, it is not from a regard for purity, but from fear of their cruel husbands and masters. United States Boundary Commissioner, Bartlett, has enlightened us on this point. " The atrocities inflicted upon an Apache woman taken in adultery baffle all description," he writes, " and the females whom they capture from their enemies are invariably doomed to the most infamous treatment." Thus they are like other Indians — the Comanches, for instance, concerning whom we ' See also the lemarks oi Dr. W. J. Hoffmann regarding the dances of the Ooyotero Apaches, U. S. Oeol. and Geogr. Survey, Colorado, 1876, 464. APPARENT EXCEPTIONS 567 read in Schoolcraft (V., 683) that "the men are grossly licentious, treating female captives in a most cruel and bar- barous manner ; but they enforce rigid chastity upon their women." Among the Modocs a wife who violated her husband's prop- erty rights in her "chastity," was disembowelled in public, as Bancroft informs us (I., 350). No wonder that, as he adds, " adultery, being attended with so much danger, is compar- atively rare, but among the unmarried, who have nothing to fear, a gross licentiousness prevails." The Peruvian sun virgins are often supposed to indicate a regard for purity ; but in reality the temples in which these girls were reared and guarded were nothing but nurseries for providing a choice assortment of concubines for the licentious Incas and their friends. (Torqnemada, IX., 16.)' "In the earlier times of Peru the union of the sexes was voluntary, unregulated, and accompanied by barbarous usages : many of which even at the present day exist among the uncivilized nations of South America." (Tschudi's Antiquities, 184 ; McCulloh, 379.) Of the Mexicans, too, it has been erro- neously said that they valued purity ; but Bandelier has col- lected facts from the old Spanish writers, in summing which up he says : "This almost establishes promiscuity among the ancient Mexicans, as a preliminary to formal marriage." Oddly enough, the crime of adultery with a married woman was considered one against a cluster of kindred, and not against the husband ; for if he caught the culprits in fla- grante delictu and killed the wife, he lost his own life ! Another source of error regarding exceptional virtue in an Indian trihe lies in the fact that in some few cases female captives were spared. This was due, however, not to a chiv- alrous regard for female virtue, but to superstition. James 'Pizarro says (Relaeion, 266) that "the virgins of the sun feigned to pre- serve virginity and to be chaste. In this they lied, as they cohabited with the servants and guards of the Sun, who were numerous." Regarding Peruvians in general Pizarro (1570) and Cieza (Travels, 1,532-40) agree that parents did not care about the conduct of their daughters, and Cieza speaks of the promiscuity at festivals. Brinton (if Jf. W., 149) is obliged to admit that " tliere is a de- cided indecency in the remains of ancient American art, especially in Peru, and great lubricity in many ceremonies." 568 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE Adair ^-elates of the Ghok^tali (l.<64) that . even a aertaiii chiet noted for his crvkdtj " did not attempt the virtue of his female captives lest ^as hfi told one of them) ' it should ofEpnd the Indian's go4 ; ' though at the same time Ms pleasures were heightened in proportion to the ghr^ieks and groans from prisoners of both sexes while ttegr were under his torture. Although the Choktah a,re iifeidinopg, yet I have known them to tak« severaJ fe»»,ale prisoner? withopt peering the least violence to their virtne, till the time of purgatiojj was expired ; then some of them forced their captives, notwithstanding their pressing entreat- ies and. tears.'' Parkman, tpo, w»s jeonyinced (Jes, iv, Pan., XXXJV.) that thp remarkable forbearance observed by some tribes was the r.epiult of superstition ; and he adds : '^ T& make the .Jodiau a hero frf romance is mere nonsense." lUTIMIDATIlfG CALiyOKinA SQUAWg Bssides the atrocious punishments inflicted on women who forgot their r61e as private property, some of the Indians had othei" ways of intimidating them, while reserving for them- selves the right to do as they pleased, Power? relates (l$6.-6l) that, among the California Indians in general, " there is scarcely such an attribute known as virtue or chas- tity in either sex before marriage. Up to the time when they enter matrimony most of the young women are a kind otfennnes ineomprises, the common property of the tribe; and after they have once taken on themselves the marriage cpygnant; simple as it ig, they are guarded with a Turkish jealousy, for even the married women are not such models as Mrs. Fo*d. . . . The one great burden of the harangues delivered by the venerable peace^ehief on solemn occasions is the necessity and excellence ot female virtue ; all the terrors of sapfiBstitious sanction and the direst threats of the great prophet are levelled at unchastity, and all the most dreadful calamities and pains of a future state are hnng suspended over the heads of those whp are persistently lascivious. AU the deyipes that savage cunning can invent,, all the myste' rious masquerading horrors of devilrraising, all the secret GOING A-CALUMETING 569 eoFoeriee, the iiig^Unl apparituMia and bogbears, 'vrhich can be supposed effectual in terrijEying ■women into virtue and preventing smock treason, are resorted to by tie Porno lead- ers." Among these Porno Indians, and Californian tribes almost ■universally (406), there existed secret societies -whose simple purpose was to conjure tip iufemal terrors and render each other assistance in keeping their wom^n in «nhg'ection. A special meeting-house was confitructed fox this purpose, in which these secret women-tamers held a grand devil-dance once in seven years, twenty or thirty men daubing them- selves with barbaric pajnt and putting vessels of pitch on their heads. At night they rushed down from the mountains with these vessels of pitch flaming on their heads, and mak- ing ft terrible noise. The squaws fled for dear life ; hun- dreds of them clang sereaming and fainting to their valorous protectors. Then the chief took a rattlesnake from which the fangs had been extracted, brandished it into the faces of the shuddering women, and threatened them with dire things if they did not live lives of chastity, industry, and obedi- ence, uatil some of the terrified squawe shrieked aloud and fell swooning upon the gronnd- GOING A-CAIUMBTING We are now in a position to appreciate th« unintentional bnmor of Ashe's indignant outcry, cited at the begmning of this chapter, against those who calumniate these innocent people " by denying that there is anything but ' brutal pas- sion' in their love-affairs. He admits, indeed, that "no ex- pressions of endearment or tenderness ever escape the Indian sexes toward each other," as all observers have remarked, but olaims that this reserve is merely a compliance with a political and religious law which " stigmatizes youth wasting their time in female dalliance, except when covered with the veil of night and beyond the prying eye of man." Were a man to speak to a squaw of love in the daytime, be adds, she would run away from him or disdain him. He then pro- 570 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE ceeds, with astounding naiTete, to describe the nocturnal love-making of " these innocent people." The Indians leave their doors open day and night, and the lovers take advan- tage of this vehen they go a-courting, or " a-calumeting," as it is called. " A young man lights his calumet, enters the cabin of his mistress, and gently presents it to her. If she extinguishes it she admits him to her arms ; but if she suffer it to burn unnoticed he softly retires with a disappointed and throbbing heart, knowing that while there was light she never could consent to his wishes. This spirit of nocturnal amour and intrigue is attended by one dreadful practice : the girls drink the juice of a certain herb which prevents conception and often renders them barren through life. They have recourse to this to avoid the shame of having a child — a circumstance in which alone the disgrace of their conduct consists, and which would be thought a thing so heinous as to deprive them for- ever of respect and religious marriage rites. The crime is in the discovery." " I never saw gallantry conducted with more refinement than I did during my stay with the Shawnee nation." In brief, Ashe's idea of " refined " love consists in promis- cuous immorality carefully concealed ! " On the subject of love," he sums up with an injured air, " no persons have been less understood than the Indians." Yet this writer is cited seriously as a witness by Westermarck and others ! In view of the foregoing facts every candid reader must admit that to an Indian an expression like " Love hath weaned my heart from low desires," or Werther's " She is sacred to me ; all desire is silent in her presence," would be as incomprehensible as Hegel's metaphysics ; that, in other words, mental purity, one of the most essential and charac- teristic ingredients of romantic love, is always absent in the Indian's infatuation. The late Professor Brinton tried to come to the rescue by declaring {E. A., 397) that " delicacy of sentiment bears no sort of constant relation to culture. Every man . . . can name among his acquaintances men of unusual culture who are coarse voluptuaries and others of the humblest education who have the delicacy of a refined SQUAWS AND PERSONAL BEAUTY 571 woman. So it is with families, and so it is with tribes." Is it ? That is the point to be proved. I myself have pointed out that among nations, as among individuals, intellectual culture alone does not insure a capacity for true love, because that also implies emotional and esthetic culture. Now in our civilized communities there are all sorts of individuals, many coarse, a few refined, while some civilized races, too, are more refined than others. To prove his point Dr. Brin- ton would have had to show that among the Indians, too, there are tribes and individuals who are morally and estheti- cally refined ; and this he failed to do ; wherefore his argu- ment is futile. Diligent and patient search has not rerealed to me a single exception to the rule of depravity above described, though I admit the possibility that among the Indians who have been for generations under missionary con- trol such exceptions might be found. But we are here con- sidering the wild Indian and not the missionary's garden plant. SQUAWS AND PERSONAL BEAUTY An excellent test of the Indian's capacity for refined amor- ous feeling may be found in his attitude toward personal beauty. Does- he admire real beauty, and does it decide his choice of a mate ? That there are good-looking girls among some Indian tribes cannot be denied, though they are ex- ceptional. Among the thousands of squaws I have seen on the Pacific Slope, from Mexico to Alaska, I can recall only one whom I could call really beautiful. She was a pupil at a Sitka Indian school, spoke English well, and I suspect had some white blood in her. Joaquin Miller, who married a Modoc girl and is given to romancing and idealizing, relates (227) how "the brown-eyed girls danced, gay and beautiful, half-nude, in their rich black hair and flowing robes." Herbert Walsh,^ speaking of the girls at a Navajo Indian school, writes that " among them was one little girl of strik- ing beauty, with fine, dark eyes, regularly and delicately > Indian Rights Assoc, Philadelphia, 1885. 572 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE modelled features, and a most "winniiig expression, Notiring could be more attractive than the unconscious grace of this child of nature." I can find no indication, however, that the Indians ever admire such exceptional beauty, and plen- ty of evidence that what they admire is not beautiful " These Indians are far from being conn«iaseurs in beauty," wrote Mrs. Eastman (105) of the Dakotas. Dobrizhoffer eayB and provided her parents were satis- fied with the payment he ofEered, matters were settled with- out regard to the girl's wishes. To avoid needless friction it was sometimes deemed wise to first gain the girl's good-will ; but this was a matter of secondary importance. " It is true," says Smith in his book on the Indians of Chili (214), " that the Araucanian girl is not regularly put up for sale and bar- tered for, like the Oriental houris ; but she is none the less an article of merchandise, to be paid for by him who would aspire to her hand. She has no more freedom in the choice of her husband than has the Circassian slave." " Marriage with the North Californians," says Bancroft (I., 349), " is essentially a matter of business. The young brave must not hope to win his bride by feats of arms or softer wooing, but must buy her of her father like any other chattel, and pay the price at once, or resign in favor of a richer man. The inclinations of the girl are in nowise consulted ; no matter where her affections are placed, she goes to the high- est bidder. The purchase effected, the successful suitor leads his blushing property to his hut and she becomes his wife without further ceremony. Wherever this system of wife- purchase obtains the rich old men almost absorb the youth and beauty of the tribe, while the younger and poorer men must content themselves with old and ugly wives. Hence THE GIRL MARKET 597 their eagerness for that wealth which will enable them to throw away their old wives and buy new ones." ' A favorable soil for the growth of romantic and conjugal love ! The Omahas have a proverb that an old man cannot win a girl, he can only win her parents ; nevertheless if the old man has the ponies he gets the girl. The Indians insist on their rights, too. Powers tells (318) of a California (Nishinam) girl who loathed the man that had a claim on her. She took refuge with a kind old widow, who deceived the pursuers. When the deception was discovered, the noble warriors drew their arrows and shot the widow to deatli in the middle of the village amid general approval. I myself once saw a poor Arizona girl who had taken refuge with a white family. When I saw the man to whom she had been sold — a dirty old tramp whom a decent person would not want in the same tribe, much less in the same wigwam — I did not wonder she hated him ; but he had paid for her and she was ultimately obliged to live with him. Of the Mandans, Catlin says (I., 119) that wives "are most- ly treated for with the father, as in all instances they ai-e regu- larly bought and sold." Beldeu relates (32) how he married a Sioux girl. One evening his Indian friend Frombe came to his lodge and said he would take him to see his sweetheart. " I followed him and we went out of the village to where some girls were watching the Indian boys play at ball. Point- ing to a good-looking Indian girl, Frombe said : ' That is Washtella.' " ' Is she a good squaw ? ' I inquired. " ' Very,' he replied. " ' But perhaps she will not want to marry me,' I said. '•' ' She has no choice,' he answered, laughing. " ' But her parents,' I interposed, ' will they like this kind of proceeding ? ' " ' The presents you are expected to make them will be more acceptable than the girl,' he answered." ' How California marriages were made in the good old times we may see from the account in Hakluyt's Collection of Early Voyages, 1810, III, 513: " If any man had a daughter to marry he went where the people kept, and said, I have a daughter to marry, is there any man here that wonld have her ? And if there were any that would have her, he answered that he would have her, and so the marriage was made." 598 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE And when full moon came the two were married. Blackfeet girls, according to Grinnell (316), "had very little choice in the selection of a husband.. If a girl was told she had to marry a certain man, she had to obey. She might cry, but her father's will was law, and she might be beaten or even killed by him if she did not do as she was ordered." Concerning the Missasaguas of Ontario; Chamberlain writes (145), that in former times, " when a chief desired to marry, he caused all the marriageable girls in the village to come to? gether and dance before him. By a mark which he placed on the clothes of the one he had chosen her parents knew she had been the favored one." Of the Nascopie girls, M'Lean says (127) that " their sentiments are never consulted." The Pueblos, who treat their women exceptionally well, nevertheless get their wives by purchase. With the Niiva- jos " courtship is simple and brief ; the wooer pays for his bride and takes her home." (Bancroft, I., 511.) Among the Columbia Eiver Indians, " to give a wife away without a price is in the highest degree disgraceful to her family." (Bancroft, I., 376.) " The Pawnees," says Catlin,' " marry and unmarry at pleasure. Their daughters are held as legitimate merchan- dise. . . . The women, as a rule, accept the situation with the apathy of the race." Of the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and other Plains Indians, Dodge says (216) that girls ai'c regarded as Taluable property to be sold to the highest bidder, in later times by preference to a white man, though it is known that he will probably soon abandon his wife. In Oregon and Washington " wives, particularly the later ones, are often sold or traded off. ... A man sends his wife away, or sells her, at his will." (Gibbs, 199.) OTHEK WATS OF THWARTING FREE CHOICI! Besides this commercialism, which was so prevalent that, as Dr. Brinton says {A. R., 48), "in America marriage was usually by purchase," there were various other obstacles to free choice. "In a number of tribes," as the same cham- ^ Smithsonian Sep., 18S5, Pt. II., p. 71. WAYS OF THWARTING FREE CHOICE 599 pion of the ludiaa remarks, "the purchase of the eldest daughter gave a man a right to buy all the younger daughters as they reached nubile age." Concerning the Blackfeet — who were among the most advanced Indians — Grinnell says (317) that " all the younger sisters of a man's wife were regarded as his potential wives. If he was not dis- posed to riiarry them, they could not be disposed of to any other man without his consent." "When a man dies his wives become the potential wives of his brother." "In the old days, it was a very poor man who did not have three wives. Many had six, eight, and some more than a dozen." Morgan refers {A. S. , 432) to forty tribes where sisters were disposed of in bunches ; and in all such cases liberty of choice is of course out of the question. Indeed the wide prevalence of so utterly barb&rous and selfish a custom shows us vividly how far from the Indian's mind in general was the thought of sei'iousiJy consulting the choice of girls. Furthermore, to continue Dr. Brinton's enumeration, " the selection of a wife was often regarded as a concern of the gens rather than of the individual. Among the Hurons, for instance, the old women of the gens selected the wives for the young men, and united them with painful uniformity to women several years their senior." " Thus," writes Morgan (L. of /., 330), "it often happened that the young warrior at twenty-five was married to a woman of forty, and oftentimes a widow ; while the widower at sixty was joined to a maiden of twenty." Besides these obstacles to free choice there are several others not referred to by Dr. Brinton, the most important being the custom of wrestling for a wife, and of infant betrothal or very early marriage. According to a passage in Hearne (104) cited on a previous occasion, and corroborated by W. H. Hooper and J. Kichardson, it has always been the custom of northern Indians to wrestle for the women they want, the strongest one carrying off the prize, and a weak man being " seldom per- mitted to keep a wife that a stronger man thinks worth his no- tice." It is needless to say that this custom, which " prevails throughout all their tribes," puts the woman's freedom of 600 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE choice out of question as completely as if slie were a slave sold in the market. Richardson says (II., 24) that " the be- reaved husband meets his loss with the resignation which cus- tom prescribes in such a case, and seeks his revenge by taking the wife of another man weaker than himself." Duels or fights for women also occurred in California, Mexico, Para- guay, Brazil and other countries.' Among the Comanches " the parents exercise full control in giving their daughters in marriage," and they are fre- quently married before the age of puberty. (Schoolcraft, II., 132.) Concerning the customs of early betrothal and mar- riage enough has been said in preceding pages. It prevailed widely among the Indians and, of course, utterly frustrated all possibility of choice. In fact, apart from this custom, Indian marriage, being in the vast majority of cases with girls under fifteen,^ made choice, in any rational sense of the word, entirely out of the question. CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICAN EXAMPLES It has long been fashionable among historians to attribute to certain Indians of Central and South America a very high degree of culture. This tendency has received a check in these critical days.^ We have seen that morally the Mexi- cans, Central Americans, and Peruvians were hardly above other Indians. In the matter of allowing females to choose their mates we likewise find them on the same low level. In Guatemala even the men were obliged to accept wives selected for them by their parents, and Nicaraguan parents usually ar- ranged the matches. In Peru the Incas fixed the conditions under which matrimony might take place as follows : " The bridegroom and bride must be of the same town or tribe, and of the same class or position ; the former must be somewhat ■ Schoolcraft, IV., 334 ; Powers, 331 ; Waitz, IV., 133; Azara ( Voyages), II., 9i; von Martins, 1,412, 509. ^ A table relating to sixty-five North American Indian girls given in Ploss, I. , 47G, shows that all but eight of them had their first child before the end of the fifteenth year ; the largest number (eighteen), having it in the fourteenth. ■'See John Piske's Discovery of America, I, 31, and E. J. Payne's History oj the New World. CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICAN EXAMPLES 601 less than twenty-four years of age, the latter eighteen. The consent of the parents and chiefs of the tribes was indispen- sible." (Tschudi, 184.) Unless the consent of the parents had been obtained tlie marriage was considered invalid and the children illegitimate. (Garcilasso de la Vega, L, 207.) As regards the Jlexicans, Bandelier shows (612, 620) that the posi- tion of woman was " little better than that of a costly animal," and he cites evidence indicating that as late as 1555 it was ordained at a connle that since it is customary among the Indians "not to marry without permission of their princi- pals . . . and the marriage among free persons is not as free as it should be," etc. As for the other Indians of the Southern Continent it is needless to add that they too are habitually guided by the thought that daughters exist for the purpose of enriching their parents. To the instances previously cited I may add what Schomburgk says in his book on Guiana — that if the girl to whom the parents betroth their son is too young to marry, they give him meanwhile a widow or an older unmar- ried woman to live with. This woman, after his marriage, becomes his servant. Musters declares (186) that among the Tehuelches (Patagonians) " marriages are always those of inclination." But Falkner's story is quite different (124) : " As many of these marriages are compulsive on the side of the woman, they are frequently frustrated. The contumacy of the woman sometimes tires out the patience of the man, who then turns her away, or sells her to the person on whom she has fixed her affections." Westermarck fancies he has a case on his side in Tierra del Fuego, where, " according to Lieutenant Bove, the eagerness with which young women seek for husbands is surprising, but even more surprising is the fact that they nearly always attain their ends." More careful study of the pages of the writer referred to ' and a moment's unbiassed reflection would have made it clear to Westermarck that there is no question here either of choice or of marriage in our sense of the words. The " husbands " the girls hunted ' Giaoomo Bove, /Vita^oMia. CJl Ploss, T., 476; G/oftas, 18S3, 158. Hyades's Mission Ucientiflque du Cap Horn, VII., 377. 603 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE for were boys of fourteen to sixteen^ and the girls themselves began at twelve to thirteen years of age, or five years before they became mothers, and Fuegian marriage " is not regarded as complete until the woman has become a mother," as Wes- termarck knew (23, 138). In reality the conduct of these girls was nothing but wantonness, in which the men, as a mat- ter of course, acquiesced. The missionaries were greatly scandalized at the state of affairs, but their efforts to improve it were strongly resented by the natives.*, -WHY ISTDIANS ELOPE With the Abipones of Paraguay " it frequently happens," according to Dobrizhoffer (307), " that the girl rescinds what has been settled and agreed upon ietween the parents and the bridegroom, obstinately rejecting the very mention of mar- riage. Many girls, through fear of being compelled to marry, have concealed themselves in the recesses of the woods or lakes ; seeming to dread the assaults of tigers less than the un- tried nuptials." The italics are mine ; they make it obvious that the choice of the girls is not taken into account and that they can escape parental tyranny only by running awiiy. Among the Indians in general it often happens that merely to escape a hated suitor a girl elopes with another man. Such cases are usually referred to as love-matches, but all they indicate is a (comparative) preference, while proving that there was no liberty of choice. A girl whose parents try to force her on a much-married warrior four or five times her age must be only too glad to run away with any young man who comes along, love or no love.^ In the chapter on Australia I commented on Westermarck's topsy-turvy disposition to look upon elopements as indica- tions of the liberty of choice. He repeats the same error in ' Equally inconclusive is Westermarck's reference (21G) to what Azara says regarding the Guanas. Azara expressly informs us that, as summed up by Darwin (i). M., Chap. XIX.) among the Guanas "the men rarely marry till twenty years old or more, as before that age they cannot conquer their rivals." Where girls are literally wrestled for, they have, of course, no choice. 2 Keating says (II., 153) that among the Chippewas " where the antipathy is great, one or the other elopes from the lodge." WHY INDIANS ELOPE 603 his references to Indians. "It is indeed," he says, "com- mon in America for a girl to ran away from a bridegroom forced upon her by the pare^its, whilst, if they refuse to give their daughter to a suitor whom she loves, the couple elope. Thus, among the Dakotas, as we are told by Mr. Prescott, ' there are many matches made by elopement, much to the cha- grin of the parents.'" The italics again indicate that denial of choice is the custom, while the elopement indicates the same thing, for if there were liberty of choice there would be no need of eloping. Moreover, an Indian elopement does not at all indicate a romantic preference on the part of an elop- ing couple. If we examine the matter carefully we find that an Indian elopement is usually a very prosaic affair indeed. A young man likes a girl and wishes to marry her; but she has no choice, as her father insists on a number of ponies or blankets in payment for her which the suitor may not have ; therefore the two run away. In other words, an Indian elopement is a purely commercial transaction, and one of a very shady character too, being nothing less than a desire to avoid paying the usual price for a girl. It is in fact a kind of theft, an injustice to the parents ; for while paying for a bride may be evidence of savagery, it is the custom among Indians, and parents naturally resent its violation, though ultimately they may forgive the elopers. Dodge relates (202) that among the Indians of the great plains parents pre- fer a rich suitor, though he may have several wives already. If the daughter prefers another man the only thing to do is to elope. This is not easy, for a careful watch is kept on suspicious cases. But the girl may manage to step out while the family is asleep. The lover has two ponies in readiness, and off they speed. If overtaken by the pursuers the man is liable to be killed. If not, the elopers return after a few weeks and all is forgiven. Such elopements. Dodge adds, are frequent in the reservations where young men are poor and cannot afford ponies. Moreover, the concentration of large numbers of Indians of different bands and tribes on the res- ervations has increased the opportunities of acquaintance and love-making among the young people. 604 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE In an article on Love-Songs among the Omaha Indians,* Miss Alice Fletcher calls attention to the fact that the indi- vidual is little considered in comparison with the tribal organization : " Marriage was therefore an affair of the gentes, and not the free union of a man and woman as we understand the relation;" But side by side with the formal marriage sanctioned by the tribe grew up the custom of secret courtship and elopement ; so the saying among the Omahas is : " An old man buys his wife ; a young man steals his." Dorsey says (260) : " Should a man get angry because his single daughter, sister, or niece has eloped, the other Omahas would talk about him saying, ' That man is angry on account of the elopement of his daughter.' They would ridicule him for his behavior." Other Indians take the matter much more seriously. When a Blackfoot girl elopes her parents feel very bitter against the man. " The girl has been stolen. The union is no mar- riage at all. The old people are ashamed and disgraced for their daughter. Until the father has been pacified by satis- factory payments, there is no marriage.'' (Grinnell, 215.) The Nez Perces so bitterly resent elopements that they consider the bride in such a case as a prostitute and her parents may seize upon the man's property. (Bancroft, I., 276.) Indian elopements, I repeat, are nothing but attempts to dodge payment for a bride, and therefore do not afford the least evidence of exalted sentiments, i.e., of romantic love, however romantic they may be as incidents. Eead, for in- stance, what Mrs. Eastman writes (103) regarding the Sioux : " When a young man is unable to purchase the girl he loves best, or if her parents are unwilling she should marry him, if he have gained the heart of the maiden he is safe. They appoint a time and place to meet ; take whatever will be necessary for their journey. . . . Sometimes they merely go to the next village to return the- next day. But if they fancy a bridal tour, away they go several hi^ndred miles, with the grass for their pillow, the canopy of heaven for their curtains, and the bright stars to watch over them. When ' Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropologists, 1894, 153-57. SUICIDE AND LOVE 605 they return home the bride goes at once to chopping wood, and the groom to smoking." What does such a romantic incident tell us regarding the nature of the elopers' feelings — whether they are refined and sentimental or purely sensual and frivolous ? Nothing what- ever. But the last sentence of Mrs. Eastman's description — photographed from life — indicates the fibsence of at least four of the most elementary and important ingredients of romantic love. If he adored his bride, if he sympathized with her feelings, if he felt the faintest impulse toward gallantry or sacrifice of his selfish comforts, he would not allow her to chop wood while he loafed and smoked. Moreover, if he had an appreciation of personal beauty he would not permit his wife to sacrifice hers before she is out of her teens by making her do all the hard work. But why should he care ? Since all his marriage customs are on a commercial basis, why should he not discard a wife of thirty and take two new ones of fifteen each ? SUICIDE AND LOVE Having thus disposed of elopements, let us examine an- other phenomenon which has always been a mainstay of those who would fain make out that in matters of love there is no difference between us and savages. Waitz (III., 102) accepts stories of suicide as evidence of genuine romantic love, and A¥estermarck follows his example (358, 530), while Catlin (II., 143) mentions a rock called Lover's Leap, "from the summit of which, it is said, a beautiful Indian girl, the daughter of a chief, threw herself off, in presence of her tribe, some fifty years ago, and dashed herself to pieces, to avoid being married to a man whom her father had decided to be her husband, and whom she would not marry." Keating has a story which he tells with all the operatic embellishments indulged in by his guide (I., 280). Eeduced to its simplest terms, the tale, as he gives it, is as follows : In a village of the tribe of Wapasha there lived a girl named Winona. She became attached to a young hunter 606 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE who wished to marry her, but her parents refused their con- sent, having intended her for a prominent warrior. Winona would not listen to the warrior's addresses and told her parents she preferred the hunter, who would always be with her, to the warrior, who would be constantly away on martial ex- ploits. The parents paid no attention to her remonstrances and fixed the day for her wedding to the man of their choice. While all were busy with the prejiarations, she climbed the rock overhanging the river. Having reached the summit, she made a speech full of reproaches to her family, and then sang her dirge. The wind wafted her words and song to her family, who had rushed to the foot of the rock. They im- plored her to come down, promising at last that she should not be forced to marry. Some tried to climb the rock, but before they could reach her she threw herself down the preci- pice and fell a corpse at the feet of her friends. Mrs. Eastman also relates the story of Winona's leap (65- 70). "The incident is well known," she writes. "Almost everyone has read it a dozen times, and always differently told." It is needless to say that a story told in a dozen differ- ent ways and embellished by half-breed guides and white col- lectors of legends has no value as scientific evidence.^ But even if we grant that the incidents happened just as related, there is nothing to indicate the presence of exalted sentiments. The girl preferred the hunter because he would be more fre- quently with her than the warrior (one of the versions says she wanted to wed " the successful hunter ") ^ — which leaves us in doubt as to the utilitarian or sentimental quality of her attachment. Apparently she was not very eager to marry the hunter, for had she been, why did she refuse to live when they told her she would not be forced to marry the warrior 't But the most important consideration is that she did not commit suicide for love at all, but from aversion — to escape being married to a man she disliked. Aversion is usually the ' Laurence Oliphant realized the absurdity of attributing such tales to Ind- ians, assigning to them feelings and motives like our own. He kindly supplies some further details, insisting that the girl was told to "return and all would be forgiven;" that the ^'fast young Sioux hunter" whom Winona wanted to many ( "her heart could never be another's"), had " no means of his own." He is believed to have been *' utterly disconsolate at the time," and "subsequently to have married an heiress." See the amusing satire in his Minnesota, 387-89. »S. R. Biggs in IT.S. Geogr. and Oeol. Soc, IX., 206. SUICIDE AND LOVE 607 motive which leads Indian women to what are called " sui- cides for love." As G-riggs remarks {I. c.) : " Sometimes it happens that a young man wants a girl, and her friends are also quite willing, while she alone is unwilling. The purchase-bundle is desired by lier friends, and hence compulsion is resorted to. The girl yields and goes to be his slave, or she holds out stoutly, sometimes taking her own life as the alternative. Several cases of the kind have come to the personal knowledge of the writer." Not long ago I read in the Paris Figaro a learned article on suicide in which the assertion was made that, as is well known, savages never take their own lives. W. W. Westcott, in his otherwise excellent book on suicide, which is based on over a hundi'ed works relating to his subject, makes the same astounding assertion. I have shown in preceding pages that many Africans and Polynesians commit suicide, and I may now add that Indians seem still more addicted to this idiotic practice. Sometimes, indeed, they have cause for it. I have already cited the words of Belden that suicide is very common among Indian women, and that " considering the treatment they receive, it is a wonder there is not more of it." Keating says (II., 172) that " among the women suicide is far more frequent [than among men], and is the result of jealousy, or of disappointments in love ; sometimes extreme grief at the loss of a child will lead to it." "Not a season passes away," writes Mrs. Eastman (169), " but we hear of some Dacotah girl who puts an end to her life in consequence of jealousy, or from the fear of being forced to marry some one she dislikes. A short time ago a very young girl hung herself rather than become the wife of a man who was al- ready the husband of one of her sisters." It cannot be denied that in some of these cases (which might be multiplied indefinitely) there is a strong provocation to self-murder. But as a rule suicide among Indians, as among other savages and barbarians, and among civilized races, is not proof of strong feeling, but of a weak intellect. The Chippewas themselves hold it to be a foolish thing (Keating, II., 168) ; and among the Indians in general it was usually 608 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE resorted to for the most trivial causes. " The very frequent suicides committed [by Creeks] in consequence of the most trifling disappointment or quarrel between men and women are not the result of grief, but of savage and unbounded re- venge." (Schoolcraft, V., 273.) Krauss (233) found that sui- cide was frequent among the Alaskan Thiinket Indians. Men sometimes resorted to it when they saw no other way of secur- ing revenge, for a person who causes a suicide is fined and pun- ished as if he were a murderer. One woman cut her throat because a shahman accused her of having by sorcery caused another one's illness. A favorite mode of committing suicide is to go out into the sea, cast away oar and rudder, and de- liver themselves to wind and waves. Sometimes they change their mind. A man, whose face had been all scratched up by his angry wife, left home to end his life ; but after spending the night with a trader he concluded to go home and make up the quarrel. Mrs. Eastman (48) tells of an old squaw who wanted to hang herself because she was angry with her son ; but when, " after having doubled the strap four times to prevent its breaking, she found herself choking, her cour- age gave way — she yelled frightfully." They cut her down and in an hour or two she was quite well again. Anotlier squaw, aged ninety, attempted .to hang herself because the men would-not allow her to go with a war-party. Her ob- ject in wanting to go was to have the pleasure of mutilating the corpses of enemies ! Keating says that Sank men some- times kill themselves because they are envious of the power of others. Neill (85) records the cases of a Dakota wife who hanged herself because her husband had flogged her for hid- ing his whiskey ; of a woman who hanged herself because her son-in-law refused to give her whiskey ; of an old woman who flew into a passion and committed suicide because her pet granddaughter had been whipped by her father. If a storm in a tea-kettle is accepted as a true storm, then we may infer from these suicides the existence of deep feel- ing and profound despair. As a matter of fact, a savage's feelings are no deeper than a tea-kettle, and for that very reason they boil up and overflow more readily than if they SUICIDE AND LOVE 609 were deeper. Loskiel tells us (74-75), that Delaware Indians, both men and women, have committed suicide on discover- ing that their spouse was unfaithful ; these are the same Indians among whom husbands used to abandon their wives wlien they had babes, and wives their husbands when there were no more presents to receive. Yet even if we ad- mitted such feelings to have been deep, suicide would not prove the existence of genuine affection. Heckewelder re- ports instances of Indians who took their own lives because the girls they loved and were engaged to jilted them and married other men. Was the love which led to these suicides mere sensual passion or was it refined sentiment, devoted af- fection 'i There is notliiiig to tell us, and the inference from everything we know about Indians is that it was purely sensual. Gibbs, who understood Indian nature thorouglily, took this view when he wrote (198) that among the Indians of Oregon and Washington "a strong sensual attachment" not rarely leads young women to destroy themselves on the death of a lover. And the writer who refers in Schoolcraft (V., 272) to the frequent suicides among the Creeks declares that genuine love is unknown to any of them. Had the young men referred to by Heckewelder lost their lives in try- ing to save the lives of the girls in question, it might be per- missible to infer the existence of affection , but no Indian has ever been known to commit such an act. If a savage commits suicide he does it like everything else, for selfish reasons — as an antidote to distress — and selfishness is the very negation of love. The distinguished psychologist. Dr. Mauds- ley, has well said that "any poor creature from the gutter can put an end to him- self ; there is no nobility in the act and no great amount of courage required for it. It is a deed rather of cowardice shirking duty, generated in a monstrous feeling of self, and accomplished in the most sinful, because wicked, ignorance." In itself, no doubt, a suicide is apt to be extremely " ro- mantic.'' A complete dime-novel is condensed in a few re- marks which Squier makes' anent a quaint Nicai'aguan cus ' Trails. Amer. Ethiiol. Snr., Vol. Ill , Pt. I. 610 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE torn. Poor girls, he says, would often get their marriage portion by having amours with several young men. Having collected enough for a "dowry," the girl would assemble all her lovers and ask them to build a house for her and the one she intended to choose for a husband. She then selected the one she liked best, and the others had their pains and their past for their love. Sometimes it happened that one of the discarded lovers committed suicide from grief. In that case the special honor was in store for him of being eaten up by his former rivals and colleagues. The bride also, I presume, partook of the feast^ — at least after the men had had all they wanted. LOVE-CHAEMS Indians indulge not' only in elopements and suicide, but in the use of love-charms — powders, potions, and incantations. Inasmuch as the distinguished anthropologist Waitz mentions (III., 102) the use of such charms among the things which show that " genuine romantic love is not rare among Indians," it behooves us to investigate the matter. The ancient Peruvians had, according to Tschudi,' a special class of medicine men whose business it was " to bring lovers together. For this purpose they prepared talismans made from roots or feathers, which were introduced, secretly if possible, into the clothes or bed of those whose in- clination was to be won. Sometimes hairs of the persons whose love was to be won were used, or else highly colored birds from the forest, or their feathers only. They also sold to the lovers a so-called Kuyanarumi (a stone to cause love) of which they said it could be found only in places that had been struck by lightning. They were mostly black agates with white veins and were called Sonko apatsinakux (mutual heart-carriers). These Runatsinkix (human-being-uniters) also prepared infallible and irresistible love-potions. " Among North American Indians the Ojibways or Chippa- was appear to have been especially addicted to the use of love- powders. Keating writes (II., 163) : ■ Denkschriften der Sais'erl. -Akad. d. Wissensch. in Wien, Bd. XXXIX., S, 214. i,-^ LOVE-CHARMS 611 " There are but few young men or women among the Chip- pewas who have not compositions of this kind, to promote love in those in whom they feel an interest. These are generally powders of different colors ; sometimes they insert them into punctures made in the heart of the little images which they procure for this purpose. They address the images by the names of those whom they suppose them to represent, bid- ding them to requite their affection. Married women are like- wise provided with powders, which they rub over the heart of their husbands while asleep, in order to secure themselves against any infidelity." Hoffman says ' of these same powders that they are held in great honor, and that their composition is a deep secret which is revealed to others only in return for high compensation. Nootka maidens sometimes sprinkle love-powders into the food intended for their lovers, and await their coming. The Menomini^ have a charm called takosdwos, " the powder that causes people to love one another." It is composed of ver- milion and mica laminae, ground very fine and put into a thimble which is carried suspended from the neck or from some part of the wearing apparel. It is also necessary to secure from the one whose inclination is to be won a hair, a nail-paring, or a small scrap of clothing, which must also be put into the thimble. The Kev. Peter Jones says (155) that the Ojibway Indians have a charm made of red ochre and other ingredients, with which they paint their faces, believing it to possess a power so irresistible as to cause the object of their desire to love them. But the moment this medicine is taken away, and tlie charm withdrawn, the person who before was almost frantic with love hates with a perfect hatred. The Sioux also have great faith in spells. "A lover will take gum," says Mrs. Eastman, " and, after putting some medicine in it, will induce the girl of his choice to chew it, or put it in her way so that she will take it up of her own accord." Burton thought (160) that an Indian woman " will ad- minister 'squaw medicine,' a love philter, to her husband, ^Report of Bureau of Mlinol., Wash., 1898. "Ibid., 1896, Pt. I., p. 154. 612 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE but rather for the purpose of retaining his protection than his love." Quite romantic are all these things, no doubt ; but I fail to see that they throw any light whatever on the problem whether Indians can love sentimentally. Waitz refers par- ticularly to the Chippewa custom of putting powders into the images of coveted persons as a symptom of "romantic love/' forgetting that a superstitious fool may resort to such a procedure to evoke any kind of love, sensual or sentimental, and that unless there are other and more specific symptoms there is nothing to indicate the quality of the lover's feelings or the ethical character of his desires. CURIOSITIES OF COURTSHIP Some of the Indian courtship customs are quite romantic ; perhaps we may find evidence of romantic love in this direc- tion. Those of the Apaches have been already referred to. Pawnee courtship is thus described by Grinnell.' " The young man took his stand at some convenient point where he was likely to see the young woman and waited for her appearance. Favorite places for waiting were near the trail which led down to the river or to the spot usually re- sorted to for gathering wood. The lover, wrapped in his robe or blanket, which coverfed his whole person except his eyes, waited here for the girl, and as she made her appearance stepped up to her and threw his blanket about her, holding her in his arms. If she was favorably inclined to him she made no resistance, and they might stand there concealed by the blanket, which entirely covered them, talking to one another for hours. If she did not favor him she would at once free herself from his embrace and go away." This blanket-courtship, as it might be called, also prevailed among the Indians of the great plains described by Colonel Dodge (193-333). The lover, wrapped in a blanket, ap- proaches the girl's lodge and sits before it. Though in plain view of everybody, it is etiquette not to see a lover under sweh circumstances. After more or less delay the girl may give ' American Anthropolpgist^ IV. , 87§i CURIOSITIES OF COURTSHIP 613 signs and come out, but not until she has taken certain pre- cautious against the Indian's " romantic " love which have been already referred to. He seizes her and carries her off a little distance. At first they sit under two blankets, but later on one suffices. Thus they remain as long as they please, and no one disturbs them. If there is more than one suitor the girl cries out if seized by the wrong one, who at once lets go. In these cases it may seem as if the girl had her own choice. But it does not at all follow that because she favors a certain suitor she will be allowed to marry him. If her father pre- fers another she will have to take him, unless her lover is ready to risk an elopement. The Piutes of the Pacific slope, like some eastern Indians, appear to have indulged in a form of nocturnal courtship strikingly resembling that of the Dyaks of Borneo. The Indian woman (Sarah W. Hopkins) who wrote Life Among the Pmtes declares that the lover never speaks to his chosen one, " but endeavors to attract her attention by showing his horsemanship, etc. As he knows that she sleeps next to her grandmother in the lodge, he enters in full dress after the family has retired for the night, and seats himself at her feet. If slie is not awake, her grandmother wakes her. He does not even speak to the young woman or grandmother, but when the young woman wishes him to go away, she rises and goes and lies down by the side of her mother. He then leaves as silently as he came in. This goes on sometimes for a year or longer if the young woman has not made up her mind. She is never forced by her parents to marry against her wishes." Courtship among the Nishinam Indians of California is thus described by Powers (317) : " The Nishinam may be said to set up and dissolve the con- jugal estate almost as easily as do the brute beasts. No stipu- lated payment is made for tlie wife. A man seeking to become a son-in-law is bound to cater {ye-lin) or make pres- ents to the family, which is to say, he will come along some day with a deer on his shoulder, perhaps fling it oS on the grouud before the wigwam, and go his way without a single 614 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE word being spoken. Some days later he may bring along a brace of hare or a ham of grizzly-bear meat, or some fish, or a string of hd-wok [shell money]. He continues to make these presents for awhile, and if he is not acceptable to the girl and her parents they return him an equivalent for each present (to return his gift would be grossly insulting) ; but if he finds favor in her eyes they are quietly appropriated, and in due course of time he comes and leads her away, or comes to live at her house." Belden remarks (301) that a Sioux seldom gets the girl he wants to marry to love him. He simply buys her of her par- ents, and as for the girl, after being informed that she has been sold " she immediately packs up her little keepsakes and trinkets, and without exhibiting any emotion, such as is com- mon to white girls, leaves her home, and goes to the lodge of her master," where she is henceforth his wife and " willing slave." Among the Blackfoot Indians, too, there was appar- ently no form of courtship, and young men seldom spoke to girls unless they were relatives. (Grinnell, 316.) It was a common thing among these Indians for a youth and a girl not to know about each other until they were informed of their impending marriage. The Araucanian maidens of Chili are disposed of with even less ceremony. In the choice of husbands, as we have seen, they have no more freedom than a Circassian slave. Our in- formant (E. R. Smith, 314) adds, however, that attachments do sometimes spring up, and, though the lovers have little opportunity to communicate freely, they resort occasionally to amatory songs, tender glances, and other tricks which lovers understand. " Matrimony may follow, but such a preliminary courtship is by no means considered necessary." When a man wants a girl he calls on her father with his friends. While the friends talk with the parent, he seizes the bride "by the hair or by the heel, as may be most con- venient, and drags her along the ground to the open door. Once fairly outside, he springs to the saddle, still firmly grasping his screaming captive, whom he pulls up over the horse's back, and yelling forth a whoop of triumph, he starts off at full gallop. . , . Gaining the woods, the lover CURIOSITIES OF COURTSHIP 615 dashes into the tangled thickets, while the friends consider- ately pause upon the outskirts until the screams of the bride have died away." A day or two later the couple emerge from the forest and without further ceremony live as man and wife. This is the usual way ; but sometimes " a man meets a girl in the fields alone, and far away from home ; a sudden desire to better his solitary condition seizes him, and without further ado he rides up, lays violent hands upon the damsel and carries her off. Again, at their feasts and merrymakings (in which the women are kept somewhat aloof from the men), a young man may be smitten with a sudden passion, or be emboldened by wine to express a long slumbering preference for a dusky maid ; his sighs and amor- ous glances will perhaps be returned, and rushing among the unsuspecting females, he will bear away the object of his choice while yet she is in the melting mood. When such an attempt is foreseen the unmarried girls form a ring around their companion, and endeavor to shield her ; but the lover and his friends, by well-directed attacks, at length succeed in breaking through the magic circle, and drag away the damsel in triumph ; perhaps, in the excitement of the game, some of her defenders too may share her fate." A Patagotiian courtship is amusingly described by Bourne (91). The chief of the tribe that held him a captive several months would not allow anyone to marry without his con- sent. In his opinion " no Indian who was not an accom- plished rogue — particularly in the horse-stealing line — an ex- pert hunter, able to provide plenty of meat and grease, was fit to have a wife on any conditions." One day a suitor appeared for the hand of the chief's own daughter, a quasi- widow, but the chief repulsed him because he had no horses. As a last resort the suitor appealed to the young woman her- self, promising, if she favored him, that he would give her plenty of grease. This grease argument she was unable to resist, so she entreated her father to give his consent. At this he broke out in a towering passion, threw cradle and other chattels out of the door and ordered her to follow at once. The girl's mother now interceded, whereupon " seizing her by the hair, he hurled her violently to the ground and beat her with his clenched fists till I thought he would break 616 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE etery bone in her body." The next morning, however^ he went to the lodge of the newly married couple^ made up, and they returned, bag and baggage, to his tent. Grease appears to play a role in the courtship of northern Indians too. Leland relates (40) that the Algonquins make sausages from the entrails of bears by simply turning them inside out, the fat which clings to the outside of the entrails filling them when they are thus turned. These sausages, dried and smoked, are considered a great delicacy. The girls show their love by casting a string of them round the neck of the favored youth. PANTOMIMIC LOVE-MAKING It is noticeable in the foregoing accounts that courtship and even proposal are apt to be by pantomime, without any spoken words. The young Piute who visits his girl while she is in bed with her grandmother " does not speak to her." The Nishinam hunter leaves his presents and they are ac- cepted " without a word being spoken ;" and the Apaches, as we Saw, " pop the question " with stones or ponies. Why this silent courtship ? Obviously because the Indian is not used to playing so humble a rdle as that of Suitor to so in- ferior a being as a woman. He feels awkward, and has noth- ing to say. As Burton has remarked (C. S., 144), " in savage and semi-barbarous societies the separation of the sexes is the general rule, because, as they have no ideas in common, each prefers the society of its own." " Between the sexes," wrote Morgan (332) " there was but little sociality, as this term is understood in polished society. Such a thing as formal visiting was en- tirely unknown. When the unmarried of opposite sexes were casually brought together there was little or no con- versation between them. No attempts by the unmarried to please or gratify each other by acts of personal attention were ever made. At the season of councils and religious festivals there was more of actual intercourse and sociality than at any other time ; but this was confined to the dance and was in itself limited." MUSIC IN INDIAN COURTSHIP 617 HONEYMOON It is needless to say that where there is no mental inter- course there can be no choice and union of souls, but only of bodies ; that is, there can be no sentimental love. The honeymoon, where there is one,' is in this respect no better than the period of courtship. Parkman gives this realistic sketch from life among the Ogallalla Indians (0. T., ch. XL): " The happy pair had just entered upon the honeymoon. They would stretch a buffalo robe upon poles, so as to pro- tect them from the fierce rays of the sun, and, spreading beneath this rough canopy a luxuriant couch of furs, would sit affectionately side by side for half a day, though I could not discover that much conversation passed between them. Probably they had nothing to say ; for an Indian's supply of topics is far from being copious." MUSIC IN INDIAN COURTSHIP Inasmuch as music is said to begin where words end, we might expect it to play a r61e in the taciturn courtship of Indians. One of the maidens described by Mrs. Eastman (85) "had many lovers, who wore themselves out playing the flute, to as little purpose as they braided their hair and painted their faces." Gila Indians court and pop the ques- tion with their flutes, according to the description by Ban- croft (I., 549) : " When a young man sees a girl whom he desires for a wife he first endeavors to gain the good-will of the parents ; this accomplished, he proceeds to serenade his lady-love, and will often sit for hours, day after day, near her house playing on his flute. Should the girl not appear, it is a sign that she rejects him ; but if, on the other hand, she comes out to meet him, he knows that his suit is accepted, and he takes her to his house. No marriage ceremony is performed." * The Chippewas have bridal canoes which they fill with Btoves to last a be- trothed pair for a month'B exctirBioa, this being the only marriage ceremony. (Kane, 20.) 618 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE In Chili, among the Araucanians, every lover carries with him an amatory Jew's-harp, which is played almost entirely by inhaling. According to Smith " they have ways of expressing various emotions by differ- ent modes of playing, all of which the Araucanian damsels seem fully to appreciate, although I must confess that I could not. " The lover usually seats himself at a distance from the object of his passion, and gives vent to his feeling in doleful sounds, indicating the maiden of his choice by slyly gestur- ing, winking, and rolling his eyes toward her. This style of courtship is certainly sentimental and might be recommended to some more civilized lovers who always lose the use of their tongues at the very time it is most needed." "Sentimental" in one sense of the word, but not in the sense in which it is used in this book. There is nothing in winking, rolling the eyes, and playing the Jew's-harp, either by inhalation or exhalation, to indicate whether the youth's feelings toward the girl are reiiiied, sympathetic, and devoted, or whether he merely longs for an amorous intrigue. That these Indian lovers may convey definite ideas to the minds of the girls is quite possible. Even birds have their love-calls, and savages in all parts of the world use " leading motives " a la Wagner, i.e., musical phrases with a definite meaning.^ Chippewayan medicine men make use of music-boards adorned with drawings which recall special magic forniulai to their minds. On one of these (Schoolcraft, V., 648) there is the figure of a young man in the frenzy of love. His head is adorned with feathers, and he has a drum in hand which he beats while crying to his absent love : "Hear my drum ! Though you be at the uttermost parts of the earth, hear my drum ! " " The flageolet is the musical instrument of young men and is principally used in love-afEairs to attract the attention of the maiden and reveal the presence of the lover," says Miss Alice Fletcher, who has written some entertaining and valu- ' Army bugle calls, telling the soldiers what to do, are "leading motives." See my article on "The Utility of Music," Forum, May, 1898; or Wallas- chek's Primitive Music. INDIAN LOVE-POEMS 619 able treatises on Indian music and love-songs. ' Mirrors, too, are used to attract the attention of girls, as appears from a charmirjg idyl sketched by Miss Fletcher, which I will repro- duce here, somewhat condensed. One day, while dwelling with the Omahas, Miss Fletcher was wandering in quest of spring flowers near a creeli when she was arrested by a sudden flash of light among the branches. "Some young man is near," she thought, "signalling with his mirror to a friend or sweetheart." She had hardly seen a young fellow who did not carry a looking-glass dangling at his side. The flashing signal was soon followed by the wild cadences of a flute. In a few moments the girls came in sight, with merry faces, chatting gayly. Each one carried a bucket. Down the hill, on the other side of the brook, ad- vanced two young men, their gay blankets hanging from one shoulder. The girls dipped their pails in the stream and turned to leave when one of the young men jumped across the creek and confronted one of the girls, her companion walking away some distance. The lovers stood three feet apart, she with downcast face, he evidently pleading his cause to not unwilling ears. By and by she drew from her belt a package containing a necklace, which she gave to the young man, who took it shyly from her hands. A moment later the ,girl had joined lier friend, and the man recrossed the brook, where he and his friend flung tliemselves -on the grass and examined the necklace. Tlien they rose to go. Again the flute was heard gradually dying away in the distance. INDIAN LOVE-POEMS As it is not customary for an Indian to call at the lodge where a girl lives, about the only chance an Omaha has to woo is at the creek where the girl fetches water, as in the above idyl. Hence courting is always done in secret, the girls never telling the elders, though they may compare notes with each other. " Generally an honorable courtship ends in a more or less speedy elopement and marriage, but there are men and women who prefer dalliance, and it is this class that furnishes the heroes and heroines of the Wa-oo-wa-an." These ' A Study of Omaha Indian Afiisic (14, 15, 44, 53). Cambridge, 1893; Jour- nal Anter.' Folklore, 1889 (219-26); Memoirs JiUern. Vu7i.gr. Anlhrop., 1894 (153-57). 630 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE Wa-oo-wa-aai, br woman songs, are a sort of ballad relating the experiences of young men and women. " They are sung by young men when in each other's company, and are seldom overheard by women, almost never by women of high char- acter ;" they "belong to that season in a man's career when ' wild oats ' are said to be sown." Some of them are vulgar, others humorous. "They are in no sense love-songs; they have nothing to do with courtship, and are reserved for the exclusive audience of men." " The true love-song, called by the Omahas Bethae wa-an ... is sung generally in the early morning, when the lover is keeping his tryst and watch- ing for the maiden to emerge from the tent and go to the spring. They belong to the secret courtship, and are some- times called Me-the-g'thun wa-an — courting songs." "The few words in these songs convey the one poetic sentiment : ' With the day I come to you ; ■" or ' Behold me as the day dawns.' Few unprejudiced listeners," the writer adds," will fail to recognize in the Bethae wa-an, or love-songs, tlie emo- tion and the sentiment that prompts a man to woo the woman of his choice." Miss Fletcher is easily satisfied. For my part I cannot see in a tune, however rapturously sung or fluted,* or in the words " with the day I come to you " and the like any sign of real sentiment or the faintest symptom differentiating the two kinds of love. Moreover, as Miss Fletcher herself remarks ; " The Omahas as a tribe have ceased to exist. The young men and women are being educated in English speech, and imbned with English thought ; their di- rective emotion will hereafter take the lines of our artistic forms." Even if traces of sexual sentiment were to be found among Indians like the Omahas, who have been subjected for some generations to civilizing influences, they would allow no inference as to the love-affairs of the real, wild Indian. Miss Fletcher makes the same error as Professor Fillmore, who assisted her in writing A Study of Omaha Indian Music. He took the wild Indian tunes and harnessed them to modern German harmonies — a procedure as unscientific as it would be unhistoric to make Cicero record his speeches in a phono- graph. Miss Fletcher takes simple Indian songs and reads / INDIAN LOVE-POEMS 621 into them the feelings of a New York or Boston woman. The following is an instance. A girl sings to a warrior (I give only Miss Fletcher's translation, omitting the Indian words) ; " War ; when you returned ; die ; you caused me; go when you did ; God ; I appealed ; standing." This literal version our author explains and translate? freely, as follows : " No. 83 is the confession of a woman to tlie man she loves, that he had conquered her heart before he had achieved a valorous reputation. The song opens upon the scene. Tlie warrior had returned victorious and passed through tlie rites of the Tent of War, so he is entitled to wear his honors pub- licly ; the woman tells him how, when he started on the war-path, she went up on the hill and standing there cried to Wa-kan-da to grant him success. He who had now won that success had even then vanquished her heart, 'had caused her to die ' to all else but the thought of him " ( ! ) Another instance of this emotional embroidery may be found on pages 15-17 of the same treatise. What makes this procedure the more inexplicable is that both these songs are classed by Miss Fletcher among the Wa-oo-wa-an or " woman songs," concerning which she 'has told us that " they are in no sense love-songs," and that usually they are. not even the effusions of a woman's own feelings, but the compositions of frivolous and vain young men put into the mouth of wanton women. The honorable secret courtships were never talked of or sung about. liegarding the musical and poetic features of Dakota court- ship, S. R. Riggs has this to say (209) : "A boy begins to feel the drawing of the other sex and, like the ancient Roman boys, he exercises liis ingenuity in making a ' cotanke,' or rude pipe, from the bone of a swan's wing, or from some species of wood, and with that he begins to call to his lady-love, on the night air. Having gained attention by his flute, he may sing this : Stealthily, secretly, see me, Stealthily, secretly, see me, Stealthily, secretly, see me, Lo ! thee I tenderly regard ; Stealthily, secretly, see me. 623 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE Or he may oommend his good qualities as a hunter by sing- ing this song : Cling fast to me, and you'll ever haye plenty, Cling fast to me, and you'll ever haye plenty, OUng fast to me. . . . "A Dacota girl soon learns to adorn her fingers with rings, her ears with tin dangles, her neck with beads. Perhaps an admirer gives her a ring, singing : Wear this, I say ; Wear this, I say ; Wear this, I say ; This little finger ring, Wear this, I say." For traces of real amorous sentiment one would naturally look to the poems of the semi-civilized Mexicans and Peruvi- ans of the South rather than to the savage and barbarous Indians of the North. Dr. Brinton {E. of A., 297) has found the Mexican songs the most delicate. He quotes two Aztec love-poems, the first being from the lips of an Indian girl : I know not whether thou hast been absent : I. lie down with thee, I rise up with thee, In my dreams thou art with me. If my ear-drop trembles in my ears, I know it is thou moving within my heart. The second, from the same language, is thus rendered : On a certain mountain side. Where they pluck flowers, I saw a pretty maiden. Who plucked from me my heart, Whither thou goest. There go I. Dr. Brinton also quotes the following poem of the North- ern Kioways as " a song of true love in the ordinary sense : " I sat and wept on the hillside, 1 wept till the darkness fell ; I wept for a maiden afar off, A maiden who loves me well. INDIAN LOVE-POEMS 623 The moons are passing, and some moon, I shall see ray home long-lost, And of all the greetings that meet me, My maiden's will gladden me most. " The poetry of the Indians is the poetry of naked thought. They have neither rhyme nor metre to adorn it/' says School- craft (Oneota, 14). The preceding poem has both ; what guarantee is there that the translator has not embellished the substance of it as he did its form ? Yet, granting he did not embroider the substance, we know that weeping and long- ing for an absent one are symptoms of sensual as well as of sentimental love, and cannot, therefore, be accepted as a cri- terion. As for the Mexican and other poems cited, they give evidence of a desire to be near the beloved, and of the all-ab- sorbing power of passion (monopoly) which likewise are char- acteristic of both kinds of love. Of the true criteria of love, the altruistic sentiments of gallantry, self-sacrifice, sympathy, adoration, there is no sign in any of these poems. Dr. Brin- ton admits, too, that such poems as the above are rare among the North American Indians anywhere. " Most of their chants in relation to the other sex are erotic, not emotional ; and this holds equally true of those which in some tribes on certain occasions are addressed by the women to the men." Powers says (235) that the Wintun of California have a special dance and celebration when a girl reaches the age of puberty. The songs sung on this occasion " sometimes are grossly licentious." Evidences of this sort might be supplied by the page.' ' ' Dr. Biinton published in 1886 an interesting pamphlet entitled The Concep- tion of Love in. Some American Languages, which was afterward reprinted in his Essays of an Americanist. It forms the philological basis for his assertion, already quoted, that the languages of the Algonquins of North America, the M ah- nas of Mexico, the Mayas of Yucatan, the Quichas of Peru, and the Tupis and Guaranis of Brazil '* supply us with evidence that the sentiment of love was awake among them." I have read this learned paper half a dozen times, and have come to the conclusion that it proves exactly the contrary. I. In the Algonldn, as I gather from the professor's explanations, there is one form of the word "love " from which are derived the expressions " to tie," " to fasten," " and also some of the coarsest words to express the sexual relation." For the feebler " sentiment " of merely liking a person there is a word meaning ** he or it seems good to j/ie." Expressions relating to the highest form of love. 624 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE An interesting collection of erotic songs sung by the Kla- math Indians of Southern Oregon has been made by A. S. "that which embraces all men and all beings" are derived from a root indica- tive of ■■' what gives joy.''' The italics are mine. I can find here no indication of altruistic sentiment, but quite the reverse. II. It was among the Mexicans that Dr. Bdnton found the "delicate" po- ems. Yet he informs us that they had '*only one word ... to express every variety of love, human and divine, carnal and chaste, between men and between the sexes." ' This being the case, how are we ever to know which kiud of love a Mexican poem refers to ? Dr. Brinton himself feels that one must not credit the Aztecs " with finer feelings than they deserve; " and with reference to a certain mythic conception he adds, '* I gravely doubt that they felt the shafts of the tender passion, with any such susceptibility as to employ this metaphor." Moreover, as he informs us, the Mexican root of the word is not derived from the primary meaning of the root, but from a secondary and later signification. "This hints ominously," he says, '"at the probability that the ancient tongue had for a long time no word at all to express this, the highest and noblest emotion of the human heart, and that consequently this emotion itself liad not risen to consciousness in the national mind." In its later development the capacity of the language for emotional expression was greatly enlarged. Was this before the European missionaries appeared on the scene ? Mission- aries, it is important to remember, had a good deal to do vith the development of the language, as Well as the birth of the nobler conceptions and emotions among the lower races. Many fatal blunders in comparative psychology and 60ci(»logy can be traced to the ignoring of this fact. III. Dr. Otto Stoll, in his work Ziir Ethnograithie der Rep. Guatemala, de- clares that the Cakchiquel Indians of that country ""are strangers to the mere conception of that kind of love which is expressed by the Latin verb amai-e." Logoh. the Guatemalan word for love, also means "to buy," and according to StoU the only other word in the pure original tongue for the passion of love is «A, to want, to desire. Dr. Brinton finds it used also in the sense of " to like," "to love" [in what way ?J, But the best he can do is to " think that ' to buy ' and 'to love' may be construed as developments of the same idea of prizing highly .'" which tells us nothing regarding altniism. All that we know about the customs of Guatemalans points to the conclusion that Dr. Stoll was right in declaring that they had no notion of true love. IV. Of the Peruvian expressions relating to love in the comprehensive sense of the word, Dr. Brinton specifies five. Of one of them, munay^ there were» according to Dr. Anchorena, nearly six hundred combinations. It meant originally "merely a sense of want, an appetite, and the accompanying desire to satisfy it." In songs composed in the nineteenth century ccuyay^ which originally meant pity, is preferred to munay as the most appropriate term for the love between the sexes. The blind, unreasoning, absorbing passion is expressed by huaylluiii^ which is nearly always confined to sexual Jove, and " conveys the idea oJT the sentiment showing it'elf in action bt those sweet signs and marks of devotion wliich are so highly prized by the loving heart." The verb lluylbiij (literally to be soft or tender, a Journal of Amer. Folklore, 1S88, 230-26. 'Internal. Arehiu.fur Mhnogr., Supplement zu Bd. IX. 1896, pp. 1-6. MORE LOVE-STORIES 627 Yl ! Yawa, wish I could alight from the heights, from the heights of the air right next to my true love , haigia, hayla. Yl ! Yawa, wish I could sit among the clouds and fly with them to my true love. Yi ! Yawa, I am downcast on account of my true love. Yl ! Yawa, I cry for pain on account of my true love, my dear. Dr. Boas confesses that this song is somewhat freely trans- lated. The more's the pity. An expression like "my true love," surely is utterly un-Indian. 2. Anama ! Indeed my strong-hearted, my dear. Anama ! Indeed, my strong hearted, my dear. Anama ! Indeed my truth toward my dear. Not pretend 1 1 know having master my dear. Not pretend 1 1 know for whom I am gathering property, my dear. Not pretend 1 1 know for \. lioui I am gathering blankets, my dear. 3. Like pain of tire runs down my body my love to you, my dear I Like pain runs down my body my love to you, my dear. Just as sickness is my love to you, my dear. Just as a boil pains me my love to you, my dear. Just as a fire burns me my love to you, my dear. I am thinking of what you said to me I am thinking of the love you bear me. 1 am afraid of your love, my dear. O pain ! O pam ! Oh, where is my true love going, my dear? Oh, they say she will be taken away far from here. She will leave me, my true love, my dear. My body feels numb on account of what I have said, my true love, my dear. Good-by, my true love, my dear.' MORE LOVE-STORIES Apart from "free traiislations " and embellishments, the great difficulty with poems like these, taken down at the present day, is that one never knows, though they may be told by a pure Indian, how far they may have been influenced by the half-breeds or the missionaries who have been with ' These lines by their fervid eroticism quite suggest the existence of a mascu- line Indian Sappho. See the comments on Sappho in the chapter on Greek love. 628 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE these Indians, in some cases for many generations. The same is true of not a few of the stories attributed to Indians. Powers had heard among other " Indian" tales one of a lover's leap, and another of a Mono maiden who loved an Awani hrave and was imprisoned by her cruel father in a cave until she perished. " But," says Powers (368), " neither Choko nor an^ other Indian could give me any information touching them, and Choko dismissed them all with the con- temptuous remark, ' White man too much lie. ' " I have shown in this chapter how large is the number of white men who " too much lie " in attributing to Indians stories, thoughts, and feelings, which no Indian ever dreamt of.' The genuine traditional literature of the Indians consists, as Powers remarks (408), almost entirely of petty fables about animals, and there is an almost total lack of human legends. Some there are, and a few of them are quite pretty. Powers relates one (299) which may well be Indian, the only suspicious feature being the reference to a "beautiful" cloud (for Ind- ians know only the utility, not the charm, of nature). " One day, as the sun was setting, Kiunaddissi's daughter went out and saw a beautiful red cloud, the most lovely cloud ever seen, resting like a bar along the horizon, stretching southward. She cried out to her father, ' father, come and see this beautiful [bright ?] cloud !' He did so. , . . Next day the daughter took a basket and went out into the plain to gather clover to eat. While picking the clover she found a very pretty arrow, trimmed with yellow-ham- mer's feathers. After gazing at it awhile in wonder she turned to look at her basket, and there beside it stood a man who was called Yang-wi'-a-kan-uh (Red Cloud) who was ' Such a procedure does well enough if the object is to amuse idle readers ; and when a writer confesses, as Cornelius Mathews did m the Indian Fairy Book^ that he bestowed on the stories " such changes as similar legends most in vogue in other countries have received to adapt them to the comprehension and sympathy of general readers,'^ no harm is done. But for scientific purposes it is necessary to sift down all alleged Indian stories and poems to the solid bed-rock of facts. It is significant that in the stories collected by men of science and recorded literally in anthropological journals all romantic and sentimental features are conspicuously absent, being often replaced by the Indian's abounding obscenity. Rand's Legend' of the Aficmacs and Grinnell's Blackfool Lodge Tales are on the whole free from the errors of Schoolcraft and his followers. It ought to be obvious to every collector of aboriginal folk-lore that Indian tales, like the Indians themselves, are infinitely more interesting in war paint and buffalo robes than in " boiled shirts " and " store-clothes." MORE LOVE-STORIES 629 none other than the cloud she had seen the day before. He was so bright and resplendent to look upon that she was abashed ; she modestly hung down her head and uttered not a word. But he said to her, ' I am not a stranger. You saw me last night ; you see me every night when the sun is setting. I love you ; you love me ; look at me ; be not afraid.' Then she said, 'If you love me, take and eat this basket of grass- seed pinole.' He touched the basket and in an instant all the pinole vanished in the air, going no man knows whither. Thereupon the girl fell away in a swoon, and lay a consider- able time there upon the ground. But when the man re- turned to her behold she had given birth to a son. And the girl was abashed, and would not look in his face, but she was full of joy because of her new-born son." The Indian's anthropomorphic way of looking at nature (instead of the esthetic or scientific, both of which are as much beyond his mental capacity as the faculty for senti- mental love) is also illustrated by the following Dakota tale, showing how two girls got married.' " There were two women lying out of doors and looking up to the shining stars. One of them said to the other, 'I wisli that very large and bright shining star was my hus- band.' The other said, ' I wish that star that shines so brightly were my husband.' Thereupon they both were im- mediately taken up. They found themselves in a beautiful country, which was full of twin flowers. They found that the star which shone most brightly was a large man, while the other was only a young man. So they each had a hus- band, and one became with child." Fear and superstition are, as we know, among the obstacles which prevent an Indian from appreciating the beauties of nature. The story of the Yurok siren, as related by Powers (59), illustrates this point : " There is a certain tract of country on the north side of the Klamath River which nothing can induce an Indian to enter. They say that there is a beautiful squaw living there whose fascinations are fatal. When an Indian sees her he straightway falls desperately in love. She decoys him farther and farther into the forest, until at last she climbs a tree and ' U. S. Oeogr. and Oeol. Survey of Racky Mt. Region, IX., 90. 630 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE the man follows. She now changes into a panther and kills him ; then, resuming her proper form, she cuts off his head and places it in a basket. She is now, they say, a thousand years old, and has an Indian's head for every ye^r of her life." Such tales as these may well have originated in an Indian's imagination. Their local color is correct and charming, and they do not attribute to a savage notions and emotions foreign to his mind and customs. " WHITE MAST TOO MUCH LIE " It is otherwise with a class of Indian tales of which School- craft's are samples, and a few more of which may here be referred to. With the unquestioning trust of a child the learned Waitz accepts as a specimen of genuine romantic love a story ' of an Indian maiden who, when an arrow was aimed at her lover's heart, sprang before him and received the barbed shaft in her own heart ; and another of a Creek Indian who jumped into a cataract with the girl he loved, meeting death with her when he found he could not escape the tomahawk of the pursuers. The solid facts of the first story will be hinted at presently in speaking of Pocahontas ; and as for the second story it is, reduced to Indian realism, simply an incident of an elopement and pursuit such as may have easily happened, though the motive of the elopement was nothing more than the usual desire to avoid paying for the girl. Such sentences as "she loved him with an inten- sity of passion that only the noblest souls know," and " they vowed eternal love ; they vowed to live and die with each other," ought to have opened Waltz's eyes to the fact that he was not reading an actual Indian story, but a story senti- mentalized and embellished in the cheapest modern dime- novel style. The only thing such stories tell us is that "white man too much lie." White woman, too, is not always above suspicion. Mrs. Eastman assures us that she got her Sioux legends from ' Related in G. White's Historical Collection of Georgia, 571. "WHITE MAN TOO MUCH LIE" 631 the Indians themselves. One of these stories is entitled "The Track Maker" (122-23). During an interval of peace between the Chippewas and Dakotas, she relates, a party of Chippewas visited a camp of the Dakotas. A young Dakota warrior fell in love with a girl included in the Chippewa party. " Though he would have died to save her from sorrow, yet he knew that she could never be his wife," for the tribes were ever at war. Here Mrs. Eastman, with the recklessness of a newspaper reporter, puts into an Ind- ian's head a sentiment which no Indian ever dreamt of. All the facts cited in this chapter prove this, and, moreover, the sequel of her own story proves it. After exchanging vows of love (!) with the Dakotan brave, the girl departed with her Chippewa friends. Shortly afterward two Dakotas were murdered. The Chippewas were suspected, and a party of warriors at once broke up in pursuit of the innocent and un- suspecting party. The girl, whose name was Flying Shadow, saw her lover among the pursuers, who had already com- menced to slaughter and scalp the other women, though the maidens clasped their hands in a " vain appeal to the merci- less wretches, who see neither beauty nor grace when rage and revenge are in their hearts." Throwing herself in his arms she cried, " Save me ! save me ! Do not let them slay me before your eyes ; make me your prisoner ! You said that you loved me, spare my life ! " He did spare her life ; he simply touched her with his spear, then passed on, and a I moment later the girl was slain and scalped by his compan- ions. And why did the gallant and self-sacrificing lover touch her with his spear before he left her to be murdered ? Because touching an enemy — male or female — with his spear entitles the noble red man to wear a feather of honor as if he had taken a scalp ! Yet he " would have died to save her from sorrow " ! An Indian^s capacity for self-sacrifice is also revealed in a favorite Blackfoot tale recorded by Grriunell (39-42). A squaw was picking berries in a place rendered dangerous by the proximity of the enemy. Suddenly her husband, who was on guard, saw a war party approaching. Signalling to 632 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE the squaw, they mounted their horses and took to flight. The wife's horse, not being a good one, soon tired out and the husband had to take her on his. But this was too much of a load even for his powerful animal. The enemy gained on them constantly. Presently he said to his wife: "Get off. The enemy will not kill you. You are too young and pretty. Some one of them will take you, and I will get a big party of our people and rescue you." But the woman cried "No, no, I will die here with you." " Crazy person," cried the man, and with a quick jerk he threw the woman off and escaped. Having reached the lodge safely, he paint- ed himself black and " walked all through the camp crying." Poor fellow ! How he loved his wife ! The Indian, as Catlin truly remarked, "is not in the least behind us in conjugal affection." The only difference — a trifling one to be sure — is that a white man, under such circumstances, would have spilt his last drop of blood in defence of his wife's life and her honor. THE STOKT OF POCAHONTAS The rescue of John Smith by Pocahontas is commonly held to prove that the young Indian girl, smitten with sudden love for the white man, risked her life for him. This fanci- ful notion has however, been irreparably damaged by John Fiske {0. V., I., 102-111). It is true that " the Indians de- bated together, and presently two big stones were placed be- fore the chiefs, and Smith was dragged thither and his head laid upon them ; " and that " even while warriors were stand- ing with clubs in hand, to beat his brains out, the chief's young daughter Pocahontas rushed up and embraced him, where- upon her father spared his life." It is true also that Smith himself thought and wrote that " Pocahontas hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save " his. But she did no such thing. Smith simply was ignorant of Indian customs : "From the Indian point of view there was nothing ro- mantic or extraordinary in such a rescue : it was simply a not uncommon matter of business. The romance with which VERDICT: NO ROMANTIC LOVE 633 readers have always invested it is the outcome of a miscon- ception no less complete than that which led tlie fair dames of London to make obeisance to the tawny Pocahontas as to a princess of imperial lineage. Time and again it used to happen that when a prisoner was about to be slaughtered some one of the dusky assemblage, moved by pity or admira- tion or some unexplained freak, would interpose in behalf of the victim ; and as a rule such interposition was heeded. Many a poor wretch, already tied to the fatal tree and be- numbed with unspeakable terror, while the firebrands were heating for his torment, has been rescued fi'om the jaws of death and adopted as brother or lover by some laughing young squaw, or as a son by some grg,ve wrinkled warrior. In such cases the new-comer was allowed entire freedom and treated like one of the tribe. . . . Pocahontas, therefore, did not hazard the beating out of her own brains, though the rescued stranger, looking with civilized eyes, would naturally see it in that light. Her brains were perfectly safe. This thirteen-year-old squaw liked the handsome prisoner, claimed him, and got him, according to custom." VERDICT : NO ROMANTIC LOVE In the hundreds of genuine Indian tales collected by Boas I have not discovered a trace of sentiment, or even of senti- mentality. The notion that there is any refinement of pas- sion or morality in the sexual relations of the American abo- rigines has been fostered chiefly by the stories and poems of the whites — generally such as had only a superficial acquaint- ance with the red men. " The less we see and know of real Indians," wrote G. E. Ellis (111), "the easier will it be to make and read poems about them." General Custer com- ments on Cooper's false estimate of Indian character, which has misled so many. " Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet with him in his native village, on the warpath, and when raiding upon our frontier settlements and lines of travel, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the 'noble red man'" (12). The great explorer Stanley did not see as much of the Amer- 634 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE ican savage as of the African, yet he had no difficulty in tak- ing the American's correct measure. In his Early Travels and Adventures (41-43), he pokes fun at the romantic ideas that poets and novelists have given about Indian maidens and their loves, and then tells, in unadorned terms what he saw with his own eyes — Indian girls with " coarse . black hair, low foreheads, blazing coal-black eyes, faces of a dirty, greasy color " — and the Indian young man whose romance of wooing is comprised in the question, " How much is she worth ? ' " One of the keenest and most careful observers of Indian life, the naturalist Bates, after living several years among the natives of Brazil, wrote concerning them (293) : " Their phlegmatic, apathetic temperament ; coldness of desire and deadness of feeling ; want of curiosity and slow, ness of intellect, make the Amazonian Indians very uninter- esting companions anywhere. Their imagination is of a dull- gloomy quality, and they seemed never to be stirred by the emotions — love, pity, admiration, fear, wonder, joy, enthu- siasm. These are characteristics of. the whole race." In Schoolcraft (V., 372) we read regarding the Creeks that " the refined passion of love is unknown to any of them, although they apply the word love to rum or anything else they wish to be possessed of." A capital definition of Indian love ! I iiave already quoted the opinion of the eminent exr pert George Gibbs that the attachment existing among the Indians of Oregon and Washington, though it is sometimes so strong as to lead to suicide, is too sensual to deserve the name of love. Another eminent traveller, Keating, says (II., 158) concerning the Chippewas : " We are not disposed to believe that there is frequently among the Chippewas an inclination entirely destitute of sensual considerations and partaking of the nature of a sentiment ; such may exist in a few instances, but in their state of society it appears almost impossible that it should be a common occurrence." M'Lean, after living for twenty-five years among Indians, says, in writing of the Nas- copies (II., 127) : " Considering the manner in which their women are treated it can scarcely be supposed that their courtships are much influenced by sentiments of love ; in VERDICT: NO ROMANTIC LOVE 635 fact, the tender passion seems unknown to the savage breast." From his observations of Canadian Indians Heriot came to the conclusion (324) that " The passion of love is of too deli- cate a nature to admit of divided affections, and its real in- fluence can scarcely be felt in a society where polygamy is tolerated." And again (331) : "The passion of love, feeble unless aided by imagination, is of a nature too refined to ac- quire a great degree of influence over the mind of savages." He thinks that their mode of life deadens even the physical ardor for the sex, but adds that the females appear to be "much more sensible of tender impressions." Even School- craft admits implicitly that Indian love cannot have been sentimental and esthetic, but only sensual, when he says {Travels, etc., 331) that Indian women are "without either mental resources or personal beauty." But the most valuable and weighty evidence on this point is supplied by Lewis A. Morgan in his classical book. The League of the Iroquois (320-35). He was an adopted member of the Senecas, among whom he spent nearly forty years of his life, thus having unequalled opportunities for observation and study. He was moreover a man of scien- tific training and a thinker, whose contributions to some branches of anthropology are of exceptional value. His bias, moreover, is rather in favor of the Indians than against them, which doubles the weight of his testimony. This testi- mony has already been cited in part, but in summing up the subject I will repeat it with more detail. He tells us that marriage among these Indians "was not founded on the affec- tions . . . but was regulated exclusively as a matter of physical necessity." The match was made by the mothers, and " not the least singular feature of the transaction was the entire ignorance in which the parties remained of the pending negotiations ; the first intimation they received being the announcement of their marriage without, perhaps, ever having known or seen each other. Eemonstrance or objections on their part was never attempted ; they received each other as the gift of their parents." There was no visiting or court- ing, little or no conversation between the unmarried, no at- 636 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE tempts were made to please each other, and the man regarded the woman as his inferior and servant. The result of such a state of affairs is summed up by Morgan in this memorable passage : " From the nature of the marriage institution among the Iroquois it follows that the passion of love was entirely un- known among them. AfEections after marriage would natur- ally spring up between the parties from association, from habit, and from mutual dependence ; but of that marvellous passion which originates in a higher development of the pas- sions of the human heart and is founded upon the cultiva- tion of the affections between the sexes they were entirely igno- rant. In their temperaments they were below this passion in its simplest forms. Attachments between individuals, or the cultivation of each other's affections before marriage, was en- tirely unknown ; so also were promises of marriage." Morgan regrets that his remarks '•' may perhaps divest the mind of some pleasing impressions" created by novelists and poets concerning the attachments which spring up in the bosom of Indian society ; but these, he adds, ai'e " entirely inconsistent with the marriage institution as it existed among them, and with the facts of their social history.'" I may add that another careful observer who had lived among the Ind- ians, Parkman, cites Morgan's remarks as to their incapacity for love with approval. There is one more important conclusion to be drawn from Morgan's evidence. The Iroquois were among the most ad- vanced of all Indians. " In intelligence," says Brinton {A- li., 83), " their position must be placed among the highest." As early as the middle of the fifteenth century the great chief Hiawatha completed the famous political league of the Iro- quois. The women, though regarded as inferiors, had more power and authority than among most other Indians. Mor- gan speaks of the " unparallelled generosity" of the Iroquois, of their love of truth, their strict adherence to the faith of treaties, their ignorance of theft, their severe punishment for the infrequent crimes and offences that occurred among them. The account he gives of their various festivals, their elo- quence, their devout religious feeling and gratitude to the THE UNLOVING ESKIMO 637 Great Spirit for favors received, the thanks addressed to the earth, the rivers, the useful herbs, the moving wind which banishes disease, the sun, moon, and stars for the light they give, shows them to be far superior to most of the red men. And yet they were '' below the passion of love in its simplest forms." Thus we see once more that refinement of sexual feeling, far from being, as the sentimentalists would have us believe, shared with us by the lowest savages, is in reality one of the latest products of civilization — if not the very latest. THE UNLOVING ESKIMO Throughout this chapter no reference has been made to the Eskimos, who are popularly considered a race apart from the Indians. The best authorities now believe that they are a strictly American race, whose primal home was to the south of the Hudson Bay, whence they spread northward to Labra- dor, Greenland, and Alaska.' I have reserved them for sep- arate consideration because they admirably illustrate the grand truth just formulated, that a race may have made considera- ble progress in some directions and yet be quite below the sentiment of love. Westermarck's opinion (516) that the Eskimos are " a rather advanced race " is borne out by the testimony of those who have known them well. They are de- scribed as singularly cheerful and good-natured among them- selves. Hall says " their memory is remarkably good, and their intellectual powers, in all that relates to their native land, its inhabitants, its coasts, and interior parts, is of a surpris- ingly high order " (I., 138). But what is of particular interest is the great aptitude Eskimos seem to show for art, and their fondness for poetry and music. King * says that " the art of carving is universally practised " by them, and he speaks ol their models of men, animals, and utensils as "executed in a masterly style." Brinton indeed says they have a more artis- tic eye for picture-writing than any Indian race north of ' See Brinfcon's The American Ra e, 59-67, for an excellent summary of our present knowledge of the Eskimos (on the favorable side). « Journal Blhnol, Soc, L, a99. 638 HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE Mexico. They enliven their long winter nights with imagi- native tales, music, and song. Their poets are held in high honor, and it is said they get their notion of the music of verse by sleeping by the sound of running water, that they may catch its mysterious notes. Yet when we look at the Eskimos from another point of view we find them horribly and bestially iinsesthetic. Cranz speaks of " their filthy clothes swarming with vermin." They make their oil by chewing seal blubber and spurting the liquid into a vessel. " A kettle is seldom washed except the dogs chance to lick it clean." Mothers wash children's faces by licking them all over.' Such utter lack of delicacy prepares us for the statement that the Eskimos are equally coarse in other respects, notably in their treatment of women and their sexual feelings. It would be a stigma upon an Eskimo's character, says Cranz (I., 154), "if he so much as drew a seal out of the water." Having performed the pleasantly exciting part of killing it, he leaves all the drudgery and hard work of hauling, butcher- ing, cooking, tanning, shoe-making, etc., to the women. They build the houses, too, while the men look on with the greatest insensibility, not stirring a finger to assist them in carrying the heavy stones. Girls are often " engaged" as soon as born, nor are those who grow up free allowed to marry according to their own preference. " When friendly exhortations are un- availing she is compelled by force, and even blows, to receive her husband." (Cranz, I., 146.) They consider children troublesome, and the race is dying out. Women are not al- lowed to eat of the first seal of the season. The sick are left to take care of themselves. (Hall, II., 332, 1., 103.) In years of scarcity widows " are rejected from the community, and hover about the encampments like starving wolves . . . until hunger and cold terminate their wretched existence." (M'Lean, II., 143.) Men and women alike are without any sense of modesty ; in their warm hovels both sexes divest themselves of nearly all their clothing. ISTor, although they fight and punish jealousy, have they any regard for chastity ' Cranz, 1., 155, 134; Hall, H., 87, I., 187; Hearue, 161. THE UNLOVING ESKIMO 639 per se. Lending a wife or daughter to a guest is a recognized dutj' of hospitality. Young couples live together on trial. When the husband is away hunting or fishing the wife has her intrigues, and often adultery is committed sans gene on either side. Unnatural vices are indulged in without secre- cy, and altogether the picture is one of utter depravity and coarseness.' Under such circumstances we hardly needed the specific assurance of Rink, who collected and published a volume of Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, and who says that " never is much room given in this poetry to the almost uni- versal feeling of love." He refers, of course, to any kind of love, and he puts it very mildly. Not only is there no trace of altruistic affection in any of these tales and tradi- tions, but the few erotic stories recorded {e.g., pp. 236-37) are too coarse to be cited or summarized here. Hall, too, concluded that "love — if it come at all — comes after mar- riage." He also informs us (II., 313) that there "generally exists between husband and wife a steady but not very de- monstrative affection ;" but here he evidently wrongs the Eskimos; for, as he himself remarks (126), they "always summarily punish their wives for any real or imaginary of- fence. They seize the first thing at hand — a stone, knife, hatchet, or spear — and throw it at the offending woman, just as they would at their dogs." What could be more " demon- strative" than such " steady affection ?" ' Hall, Narrat. of Second Arctic Exp., 102 ; Cranz, I., 207-13 (German ed.) ; Letourneau, E. d. M., 72. INDIA— WILD TEIBES AND TEMPLE GIELS IiTDiA, it has been aptly said, " forms a great museum of races in which we can study man from his lowest to his high- est stages of culture." It is this multiplicity of races and their lack of patriotic co-operation that explains the conquest of the hundreds of millions of India by the tens of millions of England. Obviously it would be impossible to make any gen- eral assertion regarding love that would apply equally to the 10,000,000 educated Brahmans, who consider themselves little inferior to gods, the 9,000,000 outcasts who are esteemed and treated infinitely worse than animals, and the 17,000,000 of the aboriginal tribes who are comparable in position and cult- ure to our American Indians. Nevertheless, we can get an approximately correct composite portrait of love in India by making two groups and studying first, the aboriginal tribes, and then the more or less civilized Hindoos (using this word in the most comprehensive sense), with their peculiar cus- toms, laws, poetic literature, and bayaderes, or temple girls. In Bengal and Assam alone, which form but a small corner of this vast country, the aborigines are divided into nearly sixty distinct races, differing from each other in various ways, as American tribes do. They have not been described by as many and as careful observers as our American Indians have, but the writings of Lewin, Galton, Eowney, Man, Shortt, Watson and Kaye, and others supply sufficient data to enable us to understand the nature of their amorous feelings. " WHOLE TRACTS OF FEELING UNKNOWN TO THEM " Lewin gives us the interesting information (345-4?) that with the Chittagong hill-tribes "women enjoy perfect free- dom of action ; they go unveiled, they would seem to have 640 PRACTICAL PROMISCUITY 641 equal rights of heritage with men, while their power of select- ing their own husband is to the full as free as that of our own English maidens." Moreover, " in these hills the crime of infidelity among wives is almost unknown ; so also harlots :ind courtesans are held in abhorrence amongst them." On reading these lines our hopes are raised that at last we may have come upon a soil favorable to the growth of true love. But Lewin's further remarks dispel that illusion : "In marriage, with us, a perfect world springs up at the word, of tenderness, of fellowship, trust, and self-devotion. With them it is a mere animal and convenient connectionfor procreating their species and getting their dinner coolied. They have no idea of tenderness, nor of the chivalrous devo- tion that prompted the old Galilean fisherman when he said ' Give ye honor unto the woman as to the weaker vessel.' . . . The best of them will refuse to carry a burden if there be a wife, mother, or sister near at hand to perform the task." " There are whole tracts of mind, and thought, and feeling, which are unknown to them." PRACTICAL PEOMISCUITT One of the most important details of my theory is that while there can be no romantic love without opportunity for genuine courtship and free choice, nevertheless the existence of such opportunity and choice does not guarantee the pres- ence of love unless the other conditions for its growth — gen- eral refinement and altruistic impulses — coexist with them. Among the Ohittagong hill-tribes these conditions — consti- tuting "whole tracts of mind, and thought, and feeling" — do not coexist with the liberty of choice, hence it is useless to look for love in our sense of the word. Moreover, when we further read in Lewin that the reason why there are no har- lots is that they " are rendered unnecessary by the freedom of intercourse indulged in and allowed to both sexes before marriage," we see that what at first seemed a virtue is really a mark of lower degradation. Some of the oldest legislators, like Zoroaster and Solon, already recognized the truth that it was far better to sacrifice a few women to the demon of 642 INDIA— WILD TRIBES immorality than to expose them all to contamination. The wild tribes of India in general have not yet arrived at that point of view. In their indifference to chastity they rank with the lowest savages, and usually there is a great deal of promiscnous indulgence before a mate is chosen for a union of endurance. Among the Oraons, as Dal ton tells us (348), " liaisons between boys and girls of the same village seldom end in marriage ; " and he gives strange details regarding the conduct of the young people which may not be cited here, and in which the natives see " no impropriety." Eegarding the Butias Eowney says (142) : " The marriage tie is so loose thart chastity is quite unknown amongst them. The husbands are indifferent to the honor of their wives, and the wives do not care to preserve that which has no value attached to it. . . . The intercourse of the sexes is, in fact, promiscuous." Of the Lepchas Kowney says (139) that " chastity in adult girls previous to marriage is neither to be met with nor cared for." Of the Mishmees he says (163) : "Wives are not ex- pected to be chaste, and are not thought worse off when oth- erwise," and of the Kookies (186) : " All the women of a village, married or unmarried, are available to the chief at his will, and no stigma attaches to those who are favored by him." In some tribes wives are freely exchanged. Dalton says of the Butan (98) that "the intercourse between the sexes is practically promiscuous." Ehyongtha girls indulge in pro- miscuous intercourse with several lovers before marriage. (Lewin, 121.) With the Kurmuba, "no such ceremony as marriage exists." They " live together like the brute crea- tion." (W. R. King, 44.) My theory that in practice, at any rate, if not in form, promiscuity was the original state of affairs among savages, in India as elsewhere, is supported by the foregoing facts, and also by what various writers have told us regarding the licen- tious festivals indulged in by these wild tribes of India. " It would appear," says Dalton (300), "that most of the hill- tribes found it necessary to promote marriage by stimulating intercourse between the sexes at particular seasons of the year. . . . At one of the Kandh festivals held in November all "MARVELLOUSLY PRETTY AND ROMANTIC" 643 the lads and lasses assemble for a spree, and a bachelor has then the privilege of making off with any unmarried girl whom he can induce to go with him, subject to a subsequent ar- rangement with the parents of the maiden." Dalton gives a vivid description of these festivals as practised by the Hos in January, when the granaries are full of wheat and the natives " full of deviltry : " " They have a strange notion that at this period men and women are so overcharged with vicious propensities, that it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the person to let off steam by allowing, for a time, full vent to the passions. The festival therefore becomes a saturnale, during which servants forget their duties to their masters, children their reverence for parents, even their respect for women, and women all notions of modesty, delicacy, and gentleness ; they become raging bacchantes. . . . " The Ho population of the village forming the environs of Chaibasa are at other seasons quiet and reserved in manner, and in their demeanor toward women gentle and decorous ; even in the flirtations I have spoken of they never transcend the bounds of decency. The girls, though full of spirits and somewhat saucy, have innate notions of propriety that make them modest in demeanor, though devoid of all prudery. . . . Since their adoption of clothing they are careful to drape themselves decently as well as gracefully, but they throw all this aside during the Mdgh feast. Their natures appear to undergo a temporary change. Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross language, and parents their chil- dren ; men and women become almost like animals in the in- dulgence of their amorous propensities. They enact all that was ever portrayed by prurient artists in a bacchanalian festival or pandean orgy ; and as the light of the sun they adore and the presence of numerous spectators seem to be no restraint on their indulgence, it cannot be expected that chastity is preserved when the shades of night fall on such a scene of licentiousness and debauchery." "MARVELLOUSLY PRETTY AND ROMANTIC" \ !N'or are these festivals of rare occurrence. They last three or four days and are held at the different villages at different dates, so the inhabitants of each may take part in " a long 644 INDIA— WILD TRIBES succession of these orgies." When Dalton declares (206) re- garding these coarse and dissolute Hos, who thus spend a part of each year in " a long succession of orgies," in which their own wives and daughters participate, that they are nevertheless capable of the higher emotions — though he ad- mits they have no words for them — he merely proves that long intercourse with such savages blunted his own sensibil- ities, or what is more probable — that he himself never un- derstood the real nature of the higher emotions — those " tracts of feeling" which Lewin found missing among the hill-tribes. We are confirmed in this suspicion by noticing Dalton's ecstatic delight over the immoral courtship cus- toms of the Bhuiyas, which he found " marvellously pretty and romantic " and describes as follows : "In each village there is, as with the Oraons, an open space for a dancing ground, called by the Bhuiyas the Dar- bar ; and near it the bachelors' hall . . . here the young men must all sleep at night, and here the drums are kept. Some villages have a ' Dhangarin bdssa,' or house for maid- ens, which, strange to say, they are allowed to occupy with- out anyone to look after them. They appear to have very great liberty, and slips of morality, as long as they are con- fined to the tribe, are not much heeded. Whenever the young men of the village go to the Darbar and beat the drums the young girls join them there, and they spend their evenings dancing and enjoying themselves without any inter- ference on the part of the elders. " The more exciting and exhilarating occasions are when the young men of one village proceed to visit the maidens of another village, or when the maidens return the call. The yonng men provide themselves with presents for the girls, generally consisting of combs for the hair and sweets, and going straight to the Darbar of the village they visit, they procTaim their arrival loudly by beating their drums and tambourines. The girls of that village immediately join them. Their male relations and neighbors must keep en- tirely out of view, leaving the field clear for the guests. The offerings of the visitors are now gallantly presented and gra- ciously accepted and the girls at once set to work to prepare a dinner for their beaux, and after the meal they dance and sing and flirt all night together, and the morning dawns on more than one pair of pledged lovers. Then the girls, if the LIBERTY OF CHOICE 645 young men have conducted themselves to their satisfaction, make ready the morning meal for themselves and their guests ; after which the latter rise to depart, and still dan- cing and playing on the drums, move out of the village fol- lowed by the girls, who escort them to the boundary. This is generally a rock-broken stream with wooded banks ; here they halt, the girls on one side, the lads on the other, and to the accompaniment of the babbling brook sing to each other in true bucolic style. The song on these occasions is to a certain extent improvised, and is a pleasant mixture of rail- lery and love-making. . . " The song ended, the girls go down on their knees, and bowing to the ground respectfully salute the young men, who gravely and formally return the compliment, and they part. " The visit is soon returned by the girls. They are received by the young men in their Darbar and entertained, and the girls of the receiving village must not be seen. . . . "They have certainly more wit, more romance, and more poetry in their composition than is usually found among the country folk in India." HBEETT OF CHOICE All this may indeed be " marvellously pretty and roman- tic," but I fail to see the least indication of the " higher emotions." Nor can I find them in some further interesting remarks regarding the Hos made by the same author (102- 93). Thirty years ago, he s,ays, a girl of the better class cost forty or fifty head of cattle. Result — a decrease in the num- ber of marriages and an increase of immoral intimacies. Sometimes a girl runs away with her lover, but the objection to this is that elopements are not considered respectable. " It is certainly not from any yearning for celibacy that the marriage of Singbhum maidens is so long postponed. The girls will tell you frankly that they do all they can to please the young men, and I have often heard them pathet- ically bewailing their want of success. They make them- selves as attractive as they can, flirt in the most demonstra- tive manner, and are not too coy to receive in public attentions from those they admire. Tliey may be often seen in well- assorted pairs returning from market with arms interlaced. 646 INDIA— WILD TRIBES and looking at each other as lovingly as if they were so many groups of Cupids and Psyches, but with all this the ' men will not propose.' Tell a maiden you think her nice-looking, she is sure to reply ' Oh, yes ! I am, but what is the use of it, the young men of my acquaintance don't see it.'" Here we note a frankly commercial view of marriage, with- out any reference to "higher emotions." In this tribe, too, the girls are not allowed the liberty of choice. Indeed, when we examine this point we find that Westermarck is wrong, as usual, in assigning such a privilege to the girls of most of these tribes. He himself is obliged to admit (224) that "in many of the uncivilized tribes of India parents are in the habit of betrothing their sons. . . . The paternal authority ap- proaches the patria potestas of the ancient Aryan nations." The Kisans, Mundas, Santals, Marias, Mishmis, Bhils, and Yoonthalin Karens are tribes among whom fathers thus re- serve the right of selecting wives for their sons ; and it is obvious that in all such cases daughters have still less choice than sons. Colonel Macpherson throws light on this point when he says of the Kandhs : " The parents obtain the wives of their sons during their boyhood, as very valuable domestic servants, and their selections are avowedly made with a view to utility in this character." ' Rowney reports (103) that the Khond boys are married at the age of ten and twelve to girls of fifteen to sixteen ; and among the Eeddies it is even cus- tomary to marry boys of five or six years to women of sixteen to twenty. The ' ' wife," however, lives with an uncle or relation, who begets children for the boy-husband. When the boy grows up his "wife " is perhaps too old for him, so he in turn takes possession of some other boy's " wife " ' The young folks are obviously in the habit of obeying implicitly, for as Dalton says (133) of the Kisans, " There is no instance on record of a youth or maiden objecting to the arrangement made for them." With the Savaras, Boad Kandhs, Hos, and Kaupuis, the prevalence of elopements shows that the girls •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." "Shorttin Tram. Ethnol. Soc, N. S., VII., 464.' SCALPS AND FIELD-MICE 647 are not allowed their own choice. Lepcha marriages are often made on credit, and are breakable if the payment bar- gained for is not made to the parent within the specified time. (Rowney, 139.)* SCALPS AND FIELD-MICE While among the Nagas, as already stated, the women must do all the hard work, they have one privilege : tribal custom allows them to refuse a suitor until he has put in their hands a human skull or scalp ; and the gentle maidens make rigorous use of this privilege — so much so that in con- sequence of the difi&culty of securing these "gory tokens of love " marriages are contracted late in life. The head need not be that of an enemy : " A skull may be acquired by the blackest treachery, but so long as the victim was not a mem- ber of the clan," says Dalton (39), " it is accepted as a chiv- alrous offering of a true knight to his lady." Dalton gives another and less grewsome instance of "chivalry" occurring among the Oraons (253). " A young man shows his inclination for a girl thus : He sticks flowers in the mass of her back-hair, and if she sub- sequently return the compliment, it is concluded that she desires a continuance of iis attention. The next step may ' For our purposes it is needless to continue this list ; but I may add that of the very few tribes Westermarok 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 observa- tion (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 eu- phemistically 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 Insinfj again the large " tracts of mind, and thought, and feeling " we have acquired since our ancestor.^, who came from India, were in such a degraded state as these neighbors of theirs. 648 INDIA— WILD TRIBES be an ofEering to his lady-love of some nicely grilled field- mice, ■which the Oraons declare to be the most delicate of food. Tender looks and squeezes whilst both are engaged in the dance are not much thought of. They are regarded merely as the result of emotions naturally arising from pleasant contiguity and exciting strains ; but when it comes to flowers and field-mice, matters look serious." A TOPSY-TUEVY CUSTOM Coyness as well as primitive gallantry has its amusing phases among these wild tribes. The following description seems so much like an extravaganza that the reader may sus- pect it to be an abstract of a story by Frank Stockton or a libretto by Gilbert ; but it is a serious page from Dalton's Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (63-64). It relates to the Garos, who are thus described : " The women are on the whole the most unlovely of the sex, but I was struck with the pretty, plump, nude figures, the merry musical voices and good-humored countenances of the Garos girls. Their sole garment is a piece of cloth less than a foot in breadth that just meets round the loins, and in order that it may not re- strain the limbs it is only fastened where it meets under the hip at the upper corners." But if they have not much to boast of in the way of dress, these girls enjoy a privilege rare in India or elsewhere of making the first advances. " As there is no restriction on innocent intercourse, the boys and girls freely mixing together in the labors of the field and other pursuits, an amorous young lady has ample opportu- nity of declaring her partiality, and it is her privileged duty to speak first. . . . The maiden coyly tells the youth to whom she is about to surrender herself that she has prepared a spot in some quiet and secluded valley to which she invites him. ... In two or three days they return to the village and their union is then publicly proclaimed and solemnized. Any infringement of the rule which declares that the initia- tive shall in such cases rest with the girl is summarily and severely punished." For a man to make the advances would be an insult not only to the girl but to the whole tribe, resulting in fines. But let us hear the rest of the topsy-turvy story. PAHARIA lads and lasses 649 " The marriage ceremony chiefly consists of dancing, sing- ing, and feasting. Tlie bride is taken down to the nearest stream and bathed, and the party next proceeds to the house of the bridegroom, who pretends to be unwilling and runs Mway, but is caught and subjected to a similar ablution, and then taken, in spite of the resistance and-ihe counterfeited grief and lamentation of his parents, to the bride's house." It is true that this inversion of the usual process of pro- posing and acting a comedy of sham coyness occurs only in the case of the poor girls, the wealthy ones being betrothed by their parents in infancy ; but it would be interesting to learn the origin of this quaint custom from someone who has had a chance to study this tribe. Probably the girl's poverty fur- nishes the key. The whole thing seems like a practical joke raised to the dignity of an institution. The perversion of all ordinary rules is consistently carried out in this, too, that " if the old people refuse they can be beaten into compli- ance ! " That the loss of female coyness is not a gain to the cause of love or of virtue is self-evident. PAHAEIA LADS AND LASSES Thus, once more, we are baffled in our attempts to find genuine romantic love. Of its fourteen ingredients the altru- istic ones are missing entirely. What Dalton writes (348) re- garding the Oraons, " Dhiimkliria lads are no doubt great flirts, but each has a special favorite among the young girls of his acquaintance, and the girls well know to whose tonch and pressure in the dance each maiden's heart is especially responsive," will not mislead any reader of this book, who will know that it indicates merely individual preference, which goes with all sorts of love, and is moreover, character- istically shallow here ; for, as Dalton has told us, these village flirtations " seldom end in marriage." The other ingredients that primitive love shares with romantic love — monopoly, jealousy, coyness, etc., are also, as we saw, weak among the wild tribes of India. Westermarck (503) indeed fancied he had discovered the occurrence among them of " the absorb- ing passion for one," " Colonel Dalton," he says, "repre- 650 INDIA— WILD TRIBES sents the Paharia lads and lasses as forming very romantic attachments ; 'if separated only for an hour/ he says, 'they are miserable.'" In reality Dalton does not "represent them " thus ; he says " they are represented ; " that is, he gives his information at second-hand, without naming his authority, who, to judge by some of his remarks, was appar- ently a facetious globe-trotter. It is of course possible that these young folks are much attached to each other. Even sheep are "miserable if separated only for an hour;" they bleat pathetically and are disconsolate, though there is no question of an " absorbing passion for one." What kind of love unites these Paharia lads and lasses may be inferred from the further information given in Dalton's book that " they work together, go to market together, eat together, and sleep together ; " while indiscretions are atoned for by shedding the blood of an animal, whereupon all is forgiven ! In other words, where Westermarck found " the absorbing passion for one," a critical student can see nothing but a vulgar case of reprehensible free lust. And yet, though we have found no indications of true love, I can see reasons for Dalton's exclamation, " It is singular that in matters of the affections the feelings of these semi- savages should be more in unison with the sentiments and customs of the highly organized western nations than with the methodical and unromantic heart-schooling of their Aryan fellow-countrymen." Whether these wild tribes are really more like ourselves in their amorous customs than the more or less civilized Hindoos to whom we now turn our attention, the reader will be able to decide for himself after- finishing this chapter, CHILD MURDER AND CHILD MARRIAGE Twenty years ago there were in India five million more men than women, and there has been no change in that re- spect. The chief cause of this disparity is the habitual slaughter of girl babies. The unwelcome babes are killed with opium pills or exposed to wild beasts. The Pandita Ramabai MONSTROUS PARENTAL SELFISHNESS 651 Sarasvati, in her agonizing book, Tlie High Caste Hindu Woman, writes with bitter sarcasm, that " even the wild ani- mals are so intelligent and of such refined taste that they mock at British law and almost always steal girls to satisfy their hunger." " The census of 1870 revealed the curious fact that three hundred children were stolen in one year by wolves from within the city of Umritzar, all the children being girls." Hindoo females who escape the opium pills and the wolves seldom have occasion to congratulate themselves therefor. Usually a fate worse than death awaits them. Long before they are old enough, physically or mentally, to marry, they are either delivered bodily or betrothed to men old enough to be their grandfathers. A great many girls are married liter- ally in the cradle, says the authoress just quoted (31). "JProm five to eleven years is the usual period for this marriage among the Brahmans all over India." Manu made twenty- four the minimum age for men to marry, but "popular cus- tom defies the law. Boys of ten and twelve are now doomed to be married to girls of seven to eight years of age." This early marriage system is " at least five hundred years older than the Christian era." As superstitions custom compels poor par- ents to marry off their daughters by a given age " it very frequently happens that girls of eight or nine are given to men of sixty or seventy, or to men utterly unworthy of the maidens."' MONSTROUS PARENTAL SELFISHNESS In an article on "Child Marriages in Bengal,"^ D. N. Singha explains the superstition to which so many millions of poor girls are thus ruthlessly sacrificed. " It is," he sa3's, ' statistics have sliown that twenty-eight per cent, of the females were mar- ried before their fourth year. The ancient Sutras ordained the age of six to seven the best for girls to marry, and declared that a fc^her who waits till his daughter is twelve years old must go to hell. 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 p tiable 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.'" 'Journal of Nat. Indian Assoc, 1881, 543-49. 652 INDIA— WIVES AND WIDOWS "a well-nigh universal conviction anaOng Hindoos that every man's soul goes to a hell called Poot, no matter how good he may have been. Nothing but a son's fidelity can release or deliver him from it, hence all Hindoos are driven to seek marriage as early as possible to make sure of a son." "A son, the fruit of marriage, saves him from perdition, so that the one purpose of marriage is to leave a son behind him."' A daughter's son may take his son's place: hence the eagerness to marry off the girls young. In other words, in order to save themselves from a hell hereafter the brutal fathers drive their poor little daughters to a hell on earth. And what is worse, public opinion compels them to act in this cruel manner ; for, as the same writer informs us, the man who suffers his daugliter to remain unmarried till she is thirteen or fourteen years old is " subjected to endless annoyances, beset with stinging remarks, unpleasant whisper- ings and slanderous gossip. No orthodox Hindoo will allow his son to accept the hand of such a grown-up girl." How preventive of all possibility of free choice or love such a cus- tom is may be inferred from another brief extract from the same article : " The superstitious notion of a Hindoo parent that it is a sin not to give his daughter in marriage before she ceases to to be a child impels him urgently to get her a husband before slie has passed her ninth or tenth year. He sends out to match-makers and spares no pains to discover a bridegroom in some family of rank equal or superior to his own. Having found a boy . . . he endeavors to secure him by entreaty or by large offers of money or jewels." The Pundita Eamabai Sarasvati (22) gives some further grewsome details which would seem like the inventions of a burlesque writer were they not attested by such unbiassed authority. " Religions enjoin that every girl must be given in marriage ; the neglect of this duty means for the father un- pardonable sin, public ridicule, and caste excommunication." ' The roots of this superstition, 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." HOW HINDOO GIRLS ARE DISPOSED OF 653 But in the higher castes the cost of a marriage is at least $200, wherefore if a man has several daughters his ruin is almost cer- tain. Female infanticide is often the result; but even if the girls are allowed to grow up there is a way for the father to es- cape. There is a special high class of Brahmans who make it their business to marry these girls. They go up and down the land marrying ten, twenty, sometimes as many as one hun- dred and fifty of them, receiving presents from the bride's par- ents and immediately thereafter bidding good-by to her, going home never to see their " wife " again. The parents have now done their duty ; they have escaped religious and social ostra- cism at the expense, it is true, of their daughters, who remain at home to make themselves useful. • These poor girls can never marry again, and whether or not they become moral out- casts, their life is ruined ; but that, to a Hindoo, is a trifling matter ; girls, in his opinion, were not created for their own sake, but for the pleasure, comfort, and salvation of man. HOW HINDOO GIKLS ARE DISPOSED OF In some parts of India the infant girls are merely subjected to an " irrevocable betrothal " for the time being, while in others they fall at once into the clutches of their degraded husbands.' In either case they have absolutely no choice in the selection of a life-partner. As Dubois remarks {!., 198) : " In negotiating marriage the inclinations of the future spouses are never attended to. Indeed, it would be ridicu- lous to consult girls of that age ; and, accordingly, the choice devolves entirely upon the parents." " The ceremony of the ' bhanwar,' or circuit of the pole or branch, is," says Dalton (14:8), " observed in most Hindu marriages. ... Its origin is curious. As a Hindu bridegroom of the upper classes has no opportunity of trotting out his intended previ- ' Dr. S. Armstrong-HopkinB writes in her recent volume Within the Purdah (51-53) : "A few years ago the English Government passed a law to the effect t'lat no bride should go to the bouse of her mother-in-law before she anived 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 J treated little women patients of five, six, seven, eight, nine years, who were at that time living with their husbands." 654 INDIA— WIVES AND WIDOWS OTIS to marriage, and she is equally in the dark regarding the paces of her lord, the two are made to walk around the post a certain number of times to prove that they are sound in limb." Even the accidental coincidence of the choice of a husband with the girl's own preference — should any such exist — is ren- dered impossible by a superstitious custom which demands that a horoscope must in all cases be taken to see if the signs are propitious, as Eamabai Sarasvati informs us (35), adding that if the signs are not propitious another girl is chosen. Sometimes a dozen are thus rejected, and the number may rise to three hundred before superstition is satisfied and a suita- ble match is found ! ' The same writer gives the following pathetic instance of the frivolous way in which the girls are disposed of. A father is bathing in the river ; a stranger comes in, the father asks him to what caste he belongs, and finding that all right, offers him his nine-year-old daughter. The stranger accepts, marries the child the next day, and carries her to his home nine hundred miles away. These poor child brides, she says, are often delighted to get married, be- cause they are promised a ride on an elephant ! But the most extraordinary revelation made by this doctor is contained in the following paragraph which, I again beg the reader to remember, was not written by a humorous globe- trotter or by the librettist of Pinafore, but by a native Hindoo woman who is bitterly in earnest, a woman who left her country to study the condition of women in England and America, and who then returned to devote her life to the at- tempt to better the dreadful fate of her country-women : " As it is absurd to assume that girls should be allowed to choose their future husbands, in their infancy, this is done for them by their parents or guardians. In the northern part of this country the family iarber is generally employed to select the boys and girls to be married, it being considered too humiliating and mean an act on the part of the parents and guardians to go out and seek their future daughters and sons-in-law." HINDOOS FAR BELOW BRUTES 655 HINDOOS FAK BELOW BRUTES A more complete disregard of the real object of marriage and of the existence of love could hardly be found among clams and oysters. In their sexual relations the civilized Hindoos are, indeed, far beneath the lowest of animals. Young animals are never prevented by their parents from mating according to their choice ; they never unite till they have reached maturity ; they use their procreative instinct only for the purpose for which it was designed, whereas the Hindoos — like their wild neighbors — indulge in a perpetual carnival of lust ; they never kill their offspring, and they never maltreat their females as the Hindoos do.^ On this last point some more details must be given : " The Hindu is supposed to be, of all creatures on earth, the most generous, the most kind-hearted, the most gentle, the most sympathetic, and the most unselfish. After living for nearly seven years in India, I must tell you that the re- verse of this is true. ... It has been said that among the many languages spoken by the people of Hindustan there is no such word as home, in the sense in which we understand it ; that among the languages spoken there is no such word as love, in the sense in which we know it. I cannot vouch for the truth of this, as I am not acquainted with the lan- guages of India, but I do know that among all the heathen people of that country there is no such place as home, as we understand it ; there is no such sentiment as love, as we feel it." The writer of the above is Dr. Salem Armstrong-Hopkins, who, during her long connection with the Woman's Hospital of Hyderabad, Sindh, had the best of opportunities for ob- serving the natives of all classes, both at the hospital and in their homes, t6 which she was often summoned. In her book Within the Eurdah she throws light on the popular delusion that Hindoos must be kind to each other since they are kind • If Darwin had dwelt on such facts in his Descent of Man, and contrasted man's vileness with the devotioi sympathy, and self-sacriiice shown by birds and other animals, he would have aroused less indignation among his ignorant contempuranes. In these respects it was the animals who had cause to resent his theory. 656 INDIA— WIVES AND WIDOWS to animals. In Bombay there is even a hospital for diseased and aged animals : but that is a result of religious supersti- tion, not of real sympathy, for the same Brahman who is afraid to briiig a curse upon his soul by killing an animal "will beat his domestic animals most cruelly, and starve and torture them in many ways, thus exhibiting his lack of kind- ness." And the women fare infinitely worse than the animals. The wealthiest are perpetually confined in rooms without table or chairs, without a carpet on the mud floor or picture on the mud walls — and this in a country where fabulous sums are spent on fine architecture. All girl babies are neglected, or dosed with opium if they cry ; the mother's milk — which an animal would give to them — being reserved for their brothers, though these brothers be already several years old.. Unless a girl is married before her twelfth year she is considered a disgrace to the family, is stripped of all her finery and com- pelled to do the drudgery of her father's household, receiving " kicks and abuses from any and all its members, and often upon the slightest provocation. Should she fall ill, no phy- sician is consulted and no effort is made to restore her health or to prolong life." "The expression of utter hopelessness, despair, and niisery" on such a girl's face "beggars descrip- tion." Nor are matters any better for those who get married. Not only are they bestowed in infancy on any male — from an in- fant boy to an old man with many wives — whom the fatlier can secure^ — but the daughter-in-law becomes "a drudge and slave in her husband's home." One of her tasks is to grind wheat between two great stones. " This is very arduous labor, and the slight little women sometimes faint away while en- gaged in the task " , yet by a satanic refinement of cruelty they are compelled to sing a grinding song while the work lasts and never stop, on penalty of being beaten. And though they prepare ail the food for the family and serve the others, 'Dr. Eyder 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 pres- ence ; but if he claims her she must go. There la no other form of slavery equal to It on the face of the earth." CONTEMPT IN PLACE OF LOVE 657 they get only what is left — which often is nothing at all, and many literally starve to death. No wonder these poor creat- ures — be they little girls or women — all wear " the same look of hopeless despair and wretchedness," making an impression on the mind more pitiable than any disease. The writer had among her patients some who tried by the most agonizing of deaths — voluntary starvation — to escape their misery. COKTEMPT IN PLACE OF LOVE No one can read these revelations without agreeing with the writer that " the Hindu is of all people the most cowardly and the most cruel," and that he cannot know what real love of any kind is. The Abb6 Dubois, who lived many years among the Hindoos, wearing their clothes and adopting their customs so far as they did not conflict with his Christian con- science, wrote (L, 51) that "the affection and attachment between brothers and sisters, never very ardent, almost en- tirely disappears as soon as they are married. After that event, they scarcely ever meet, unless it be to quarrel." Ramabai Sarasvati thinks that loving couples can be found in India, but Dubois, applying the European standard, de- clared (I., 31, 302-303) : "During the long period of my ob- servation of them and their habits, I am not sure that I have ever seen two Hindu marriages that closely united the hearts by a true and inviolable attachment." The husband thinks his wife "entitled to no attentions, and never pays her any, even in familiar intercourse." He looks on her " merely as his servant, and never as his companion." " We have said enough of women in a country where they are considei'ed as scarcely forming a part of the human species." And Ram- abai herself confesses (44) that at home " men and women have almost nothing in common." "The women's court is situated at the back of the houses, where darkness reigns perpetually." Even after the second ceremony the young couple seldom meet and talk. " Being cutoff from the chief means of forming attachment, the young couple are almost strangers, and in many cases ... a feeling kindred to 658 INDIA— WIVES AND WIDOWS hatred takes root between them." There is "no such thing as the family hav:ing pleasant times together." Dr. Ryder thinks that for " one kind husband there are one hundred thousand cruel ones," and she gives the follow- ing illustration among others : " A rich husband (merchant caste) brought his wife to me for treatment. He said she was sixteen, and they had been married eight years. ' She was good wife, do everything he want, wait on him and eight brothers, carry water up three flights of stairs on her head ; now, what will you cure her for ? She suffer much. I not pay too much money. When it cost too much I let her die. I don't care. I got plenty wives. When you cure her for ten shilling I get her done, but I not pay more.' I explained to him that her medicines would cost more than that amount, and he left, saying, ' I don't care. Let her die. I can have plenty wives. I like better a new wife.' " ^ Though the lawgiver Manu wrote " where women are hon- ored there the gods are pleased," he was one of the hun- dreds of Sanscrit writers, who, as Eamabai Sarasvati re- lates, " have done their best to make woman a hateful being in the world's eye." Manu speaks of their " natural heartlessness," their " impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, and bad conduct." Though mothers are more hon- ored than othe'r women, yet even they are declared to be " as impure as falsehood itself." " I have never read any sacred book in Sanscrit literature without meeting this kind of hateful sentiment about women. . . . Profane literature is by no means less severe or more respectful toward wom- en." The wife is the husband's property and classed by Manu with " cows, mares, female camels, slave girls, buffalo cows, she goats, and ewes." A man may abandon his wife if he finds her blemished or diseased, while she must not even ' 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 sexual exasperation was the sole apparent reason in both instaiices. Compared with the terrible evils of child marriage, widow crema- tion is of mfinitely mferior magnitude." WIDOWS AND THEIR TORMENTORS 659 show disrespect to a husband who is diseased, addicted to evil passions, or a drunkard. If she does she shall be de- serted for three months and deprived of her ornaments and furniture.' Even British rule has not been able to improve the condition of woman, for the British Government is bound by treaties not to interfere with social and i-eligious customs ; hence many pathetic cases are witnessed in the courts of un- willing girls handed over, in accordance with national custom, to the loathed husbands selected for them. " The gods and justice always favor the men." " Many women put an end to their earthly sufferings by committing suicide." WIDOWS AND THEIR TORMENTORS If anything can cast a ray of comfort into the wretched life of a Hindoo maiden or wife it is the thought that, after all, she is much better ofE than if she were a widow — though, to be sure, she runs every risk of becoming one ere she is old enough to be considered marriageable in any country where women are regarded as human beings. In considering the treatment of Hindoo widows we reach the climax of • Manu's remark that "where women are honored there the gods are pleased " is one of those expressions of unconscious humor which naturally escaped him, but should not hatve 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 Bumell 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 ac- cording 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 hor 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 hus- band must always be worshipped like agod 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 " (2^7). Quite in the spirit of these ordinances of the great Manu are the directions for wives given in the Pndinn 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 god, 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 in- terfere, must always keep her eyes on her master, ready to receive his com- mands ; she must never be gloomy or discontented in his presence ; and though he abuse or even beat her she must returu only meek and soothing words. 660 INDIA—WIVES AND WIDOWS inhuman cruelty — a cruelty far exceeding that practised by American Indians toward female prisoners, because more pro- longed and involving mental as well as physical agonies. In I88I there were in British India alone 20,930,000 wid- ows, 669,000 of whom were under nineteen, and 78,976 under nine years of age.' Now a widow's life is naturally apt to be one of hardship because she has lost her protector and bread-winner ; but in India the tragedy of her fate is deep- ened a thousandfold by the diabolical ill-treatment of which she is made the innocent victim. A widow who has borne sons or who is aged is somewhat less despised than the child widow ; on her falls the worst abuse and hatred of the com- munity, though she be as innocent of any crime as an angel. In the eyes of a Hindoo the mere fact of being a widow is a crime — the crime of surviving her husband, though he may have been seventy and the wife seven. All women love their soft glossy hair ; and a Hindoo woman, says Kamabai Sarasvati (82), " thinks it worse than death to lose her hair " ; yet " among the Brahmans of Deccan the heads of all widows must be shaved regularly every fort- night." "Shaved head" is a term of derision everywhere applied to th^ widows. All their ornaments are taken from them and they are excluded from every ceremony of joy. The name "rand" given to a widow "is the same that is borne by a Nautch girl or a harlot." One poor woman wrote to a missionary : "0 great Lord, our name is written with drunkards, wHh lunatics, with imbeciles, with the very animals ; as they are not responsible, we are not. Criminals confined in jails for life are happier than we." Another of these widows wrote :^ "While our husbands live we are their slaves, when they die we are still worse off." The husband's funeral, she says, may last all day in a broiling sun, and while the others are refreshed, she alone is denied ' In Calcutta nearly one-half the females— 42,834 out of 98,627— were widows. In India in general one-iifth of the women (or, excluding the Mohammedan^, one-third) are widows. » Journal of the Mational Indian Atsoc, 1881, 624-30. WIDOWS AND THEIR TORMENTORS 661 food and water. After returning she is reviled by her own relatives. Her mother says: "Unhappy creature! I can't bear the thought of anyone so vile. I wish she had never been born." Her mother-in-law says : " The horned viper ! She has bitten my son and killed him, and now he is dead, and she, useless creature, is left behind." It is impossible for her to escape this fate by marrying again. The bare men- tion of remarriage by a widow, though she be only eight or nine years old, would be regarded, says Dubois (I., 191), " as the greatest of insults." Should she marry again " she would be hunted out of society, and no decent person would venture at any time to have the slightest intercourse with her." Attempts have been made in recent times by liberal- minded men to marry widows; but they were subjected to so much odium and persecution therefor that they were driven to suicide. When a widow dies her corpse is disposed of with hardly any ceremony. Should a widow try to escape her fate the only alternatives are suicide or a life of shame. To a Hindoo widow, says Eamabai Sarasvati, death is "a thousand times more welcome than her miserable existence.'' It is for this reason that the suttee or " voluntary " burning of widows on the husband's funeral pyre — the climax of inhuman atrocity — lost some of its horrors to the victims until the moment of agony arrived. I have already (p. 317) refuted the absUrd whim that this voluntary death of Hindoo widows was a proof of their conjugal devotion. It was proof, on the contrary, of the unutterably cruel selfishness of the male Hindoos, who actually forged a text to make the suttee seem a religious duty — a forgery which during two thousand years caused the death of countless innocent women. Best was told that the real cause of widow-burning was a desire on the part of the men to put an end to the frequent murders of husbands by their cruelly treated wives (Eeich, 312). HoWever that may be, the suttee in all probability was due to the shrewd calcu- lation that the fear of being burned alive, or being more despised and abused than the lowest outcasts, would make women more eager to follow obediently the code which makes 663 INDIA— WIVES AND WIDOWS of them abject slaves of their husbands, living only for them and never having a thought or a, care for themselves. HINDOO DEPRAVITY Since, as Ward attests (116), the young widows "without exception, become abandoned women," it is obvious that one reason why the priests were so anxious to prevent them from marrying again was to insure an abundant supply of victims for their immoral purposes. The hypocritical Brahmans were not only themselves notorious libertines, but they shrewdly calculated that the simplest way to win the favor and secure control of the Indian populace was by pandering to their sensual appetites and supplying abundant opportunities and excuses for their gratification — making these opportunities, in fact, part and parcel of their religious ceremonies. Their temples and their sacred carts which traversed the streets were decorated with obscene pictures of a peculiarly dis- gusting kind,' which were freely exposed to the gaze of old and young of both sexes ; their temples were little more than nurseries for the rearing of bayaderes, a special class of " sacred prostitutes ; " while scenes of promiscuous de- bauchery sometimes formed part of the religious ceremony, usually under some hypocritical pretext. It would be unjust, however, to make the Brahman priests entirely responsible for Hindoo depravity. It has indeed been maintained that there was a time when the Hindoos were free from all the vices which now afflict them ; but that is one of the silly myths of ignorant dreamers, on a level with the notion that savages were corrupted by whites. One of the oldest Hindoo documents, the Mahabharata, gives us the na- tive traditions concerning these "good old times" in two sentences : " Though in their youthful innocence the women abandoned their husbands, they were guilty of no offence ; for such was the rule in early times." " Just as cattle are situated, so are human beings, too, within their respective castes" which suggests a state of promiscuity as decided as »Plosa-Baitels,I., 385-87; Lamairesse, 18, 95, XX., etc. HINDOO DEPRAVITY 663 that which prevailed in Australia. Civilization did not teach the Hindoos love — ^for that comes last — but merely the re- finements of lust, such as even the Greeks and Romans hardly knew. Ovid's Ars Amandi is a model of purity com- pared with the Hindoo "Art of Love," the Edmasutram {or Kama Soutra) of Vatsyayana, which is nothing less than a handbook for libertines, of which it would be impossible even to print the table of contents. Whereas the translator of Ovid into a modern language need not omit more than a page of the text, the German translator of the Kdmasutram, Dr. Richard Schmidt, who did his work in behalf of the Kgl. Akademie der Wissenschaf ten zu Berlin, felt it incumbent on him to turn more than fifty pages out of four hundred and seventy into Latin. Yet the author of this book, who lived about two thousand years ago, recommends that every one, including young girls, should study it. In India, as his French translator, Lamairesse, writes, "everything is done to awaken carnal desires even in young children of both sexes." The natural result is that, as the same writer remarks (186) : " Les categories des femmes faciles sont si nombreuses qn'elles doivent comprendre presque toutes les personnes du sexe. Aussi un ministre protestant ecrivait-il au milieu de tio- tre si^cle qu'il n'existait presque point de femmes vertueuses dans I'Inde." The Rev. William Ward wrote (162) in 1834 : " It is a fact which greatly perplexes many of the well-in- formed Hindus, that notwithstanding the wives of Europeans are seen in so many mixed companies, they remain chaste ; while their wives, though continually secluded, watched, and veiled, are so notoriously corrupt. I recollect the observation of a gentleman who had lived nearly twenty years in Bengal, whose opinions on such a subject demanded the highest re- gard, that the infidelity of the Hindu women was so great that he scarcely thought there was a single instance of a wife who had been always faithful to her husband."' ' Here again we must guard against the naive error of benevolent observers of confounding chastity with an assumption of modest behavior. In describing the streets of Delhi Ida Pfeiffer says (/;. 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 fasliion even for bayaderes to preserve an appearance of great propriety in public. 664 INDIA— TEMPLE GIRLS TEMPLE GIRLS The Brahman priests, who certainly knew their people well, had so little fa-ith in their virtue that they would not accept a girl to be brought up for temple service if she was over five years old. She had to be not only pure but physi- cally flawless and sound in health. Yet her purity was not valued as a virtue, but as an article of commerce. The Brah- mans utilized the charms of these girls for the purpose of supporting the temples with tlieir sinful lives, their gains being taken from them as " offerings to the gods." As soon as a girl was old enough she was put up at auction and sold to the highest bidder. If she was specially attractive the bids would sometimes reach fabulous sums, it being a point of honor and eager rivalry among Rajahs and other wealthy men, young and old, to become the possessors of bayadere debutantes. Temporarily only, of course, for these girls were never allowed to marry. While they were connected with the temple they could give themselves to anyone they chose, the only condition being that they must never re- fuse a Brahman (Jacolliot, l(J9-76). The bayaderes, says Dubois, call themselves Deva-dasi, servants or slaves of the gods, " but they are known to the public by the coarser name of strumpets." They are, next to the sacrificers, the most im- portant persons about the temples. While the poor widows who had been respectably married are deprived of all orna- ments and joys of life, these wantons are decked with fine clothes, fiowers, and jewelry ; and gold is showered upon them. The bayadere Vasantasena is described by the poet Ciidraka as always wearing a hundred gold ornaments, living in her own palace, which has eight luxurious courts, and on one occasion refusing an unwelcome suitor though he sent 100,000 gold pieces. Bayaderes are supposed to be originally descendants of the apsaras, or dancing girls of the god Indra, the Hindoo Jupi- ter. In reality they are recruited from various castes, some parents making it a point to offer their third daughter to the Brahmans. Bands of the bayaderes are engaged by the best AN INDIAN ASPASIA 665 fiimilies to provide (lancing and music, especially at weddings. To have dealings with bayaderes is not only in good form, but is a meritorious thing, since it helps to support the temples. And yet, when one of these girls dies she is not cremated in the same place as other women, and her ashes are scattered to the winds. In some provinces of Bengal, Jacolliot says, she is only half burnt, and the body then thrown to the jackals and vultures. The temple of Sunnat had as many as five hundred of these priestesses of Venus, and a Rajah has been known to enter- tain as many as two thousand of them. Bayaderes, or Naiitch girls, as they are often called in a general way, are of many grades. The lowest go about the country in bands, while the highest may rise to the rank and dignity of an Aspasia. To the former class belong those referred to by Lowrie (148) — a band of twenty girls, all unveiled and dressed in their richest finery, who wanted to dance for his party and were greatly disappointed when refused. Most of them were very young — about ten or eleven years old." Their course is brief ; they soon lose their charms, are discarded, and end their lives as beggars. A-N INDIAN ASPASIA A famous representative of the superior class of bayaderes is the heroine of King ^udnika's drama just referred to — Va- santasena. She has amassed immense wealth — the description of her palace takes up several pages — and is one of the best known personages in town, yet that does not prevent her from being spoken of repeatedly as " a noble woman, the jewel of the city."* She is, indeed, represented as differing in her love from other bayaderes, and, as she herself remarks, " a bayadere is not reprehensible in the eyes of the world if she gives her heart to a poor man." She sees the Brah- ' Pp. 143 and 160 of Kellnei's edition of this drama (Reolam). The extent to which indifference to chastity 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 tiie lady who hel ) office as the chief of courtesans ; " and that the same condition prevails in British India to this day in a town in i^orth Cauara (Balfour, Cyclop, of India, II., 873). 666 INDIA— TEMPLE GIRLS man Tscharudatta in the temple garden of Kama, the god of love, and forthwith falls in love with him, as he does with her, though he is married. One afternoon she is accosted in the street by a relative of the king, who annoys her with his unwelcome attentions. She takes refuge in her lover's house and, on the pretext that she has been pursued on account of her ornaments, leaves her jewelry in his charge. The jewels are stolen during the night, and this mishap leads to a series of others which finally culminate in Tscharudatta being led out to execution for the alleged murder of Va- santasena. At the last moment Vasantasena, who had been strangled by the king's relative, but has been revived, appears on the scene, and her lover's life is saved, as well as his honor. The royal author of this drama, who has been called the Shakspere of India, probably lived in one of the first cen- turies of the Christian era. His play may in a certain sense be regarded as a predecessor of Manon Lescaut and Camille, inasmuch as an attempt is made in it to ascribe to the hero- ine a delicacy of feeling to which women of her class are naturally strangers. She hesitates to make advances to Tscharudatta, and at first wonders whether it would be proper to remain in his house. See informs her pursuer that "love is won by noble character, not by importunate ad- vances." Tscharudatta says of her : " There is a proverb that 'money makes love — the treasurer has the treasure.' But no ! she certainly cannot be won with treasures." She is in fact represented throughout as being difEerent from the typ- ical bayaderes, who are thus described by one of the characters : " For money they laugh or weep ; they win a man's con- fidence but do not give him theirs. Therefore a respectable man ought to keep bayaderes like flowers of a cemetery, three steps away from him. It is also said : changeable like waves of the sea, like clouds in a sunset, glowing only a moment — so are women. As soon as they have plundered a man they throw him away like a dye-rag that has been squeezed dry. This saying, too, is pertinent : just as no lotos grows on a mountain top, no mule draws a horse's load, no scattered barley grows up as rice ; so no wanton ever becomes a re- spectable woman." AN INDIAN ASPASIA 667 Vasantasena, however, does become a respectable woman. In the last scene the king confers on her a veil, whereby the stain on her birth and life is wiped away and she becomes Tscharndatta's legitimate second wife. But how about the first wife ? Her actions show how widely in India conjugal love may differ from what we know as such, by the absence of monopoly and jealousy. When she first hears of the theft of Vasantasena's jewels in her hus- band's house she is greatly distressed at the impending loss of his good name, but is not in the least disturbed by the dis- covery that she has a rival. On the contrary, she takes a string of pearls that remains from her dowry, and sends it to her husband to be given to Vasantasena as an equivalent for her lost jewels. Vasantasena, on her part, is equally free from jealousy. Without knowing whence they came, she after- ward sends the pearls to her lover's wife with these words addressed to her servants : " Take these pearls and give them to my sister, Tscharndatta's wife, the honorable woman, and say to her : ' Conquered by Tscharndatta's excellence, I have become also your slave. Therefore use this string of pearls as a necklace.'" The wife returned the pearls with the message : " My master and husband has made you a present of these pearls. It would therefore be improper for me to accept them ; my master and husband is my special jewel. This I beg you to consider." And, in the final scenes, the wife shows her great love for her husband by hastening to get ready for the funeral pyre to be burnt alive with his corpse. And when, after expressing her joy at his rescue and kissing him, she turns and sees Vasantasena, she exclaims ; " this happiness ! How do you do, my sister ?" Vasantasena re- plies : " Now I am happy," and the two embrace ! The translator of Qiidraka's play notes in the preface that there is a curious lack of ardor in the expression of Tscharn- datta's love for Vasantasena, and he naively — though quite in the Hindoo spirit — explains this as showing that this superior person (who is a model of altruistic self-sacrifice in every re- spect), "remains untouched by coarse outbursts -of sensual passion." The only time he warms up is when he hears that 668 INDIA— TEMPLE GIRLS the bayadere prefers him to her wealthy persecutor ; he then exclaims, " Oh, how this girl deserves to be worshipped like a goddess." Vasantasena is much the more ardent of the two. It is she who goes forth to seek him, repeatedly, dressed in purple and pearls, as custom prescribes to a girl who goes to meet her lover. It is she who exclaims : " The clouds may rain, thunder, or send forth lightning : women who go to meet their lovers heed neither heat nor cold." And again : " may the clouds tower on high, may night come on, may the rain fall in torrents, I heed them not. Alas, my heart looks only toward the lover." It is she who is so absent- minded, thinking of him, that her maid suspects her passion ; she who, when a royal suitor is suggested to her, exclaims, " 'Tis love I crave to bestow, not homage." SYMPTOMS OF FEMININE LOVE This portrayal of the girl as the chief lover is quite the cus- tom in Hindoo literature, and doubtless mirrors life as it was and is. Like a dog that fawns on an indifferent or cruel mas- ter, these women of India were sometimes attached to their self- ish lovers and husbands. They had been trained from their childhood to be sympathetic, altruistic, devoted, self-sacrific- ing, and were thus much better prepared than the men for the germs of amorous sentiment, which can grow only in such a soil of self-denial. Hence it is that Hindoo love-poems are usually of the feminine gender. i This is notably the case with the Saptacatakam of Hala, an anthology of seven hundred Prakrit verses made from a countless number of love-poems that are intended to be sung — " songs," says Albrecht Weber, " such as the girls of India, especially perhaps the bayaderes or temple girls may have been in the habit of singing." ' Some ' Hala's date is somewhat uncertain, but he flourished between the third and fourth centuries A. D. Frofessoi: Weber's translation of his seven hundred poems, with the professor's comments, takes up no fewer than l,0!i3 pages of the Abhandhmgen fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vols. V. and VH. I have selected all those which throw light on the Hindoo conception of love, and trans- lated them carefully from Weber's version. Hala's anthology served as proto- type, about the twelfth century, to a similar collection of arya verses, the erotic Saptacati of Goovardhana, also seven hundred in number, but written in Sanskrit. Of these I have not been able to find a version in a language that 1 can read, but the other collection is copious and varied enough to cover all the phases of Hin- SYMPTOMS OF FEMININE LOVE 669 of these indicate a strong individual preference and monopoly of attachment : No. 40 : " Her heart is dear to her as being your abode, her eyes because she saw you with them, her body because it has become thin owing to your absence." No. 43 : " The burning (grief) of separation is (said to be) made more endurable by hope. But, mother, if my beloved is away from me even in the same village, it is worse than death to me." No. 57 : " Heedless of the other youths, she roams about, transgressing the rules of propriety, casting her glances in (all) directions of the world for your sake, child." No. 93 : " That momentary glimpse of him whom, oh, my aunt, I constantly long to see, has (touched) quenched my thirst (as little) as a drink taken in a dream." No. 185 : " She has not sent me. You have no relations with her. What concern of ours is it therefore ? Well, she dies in her separation from you." No. 302 : " No matter how often I repeat to my mistress the message you confided to me, she replies ' I did not hear ' (what you said), and thus makes me repeat it a hundred times." No. 203 : " As she looked at you, filled with the might of her self-betraying love, so she then, in order to conceal it, looked also at the other persons." No. 234 : "Although all (my) possessions were consumed in the village fire, yet is (my) heart rejoiced, (when it was put out) he took the bucket as it passed from hand to hand (from ray hand)." No. 299 : " She stares, without having an object, gives vent to long sighs, laughs into vacant space, mutters unintelligi- ble words — surely she must bear something in her heart." No. 302 : " ' Do give her to the one she carries in her heart. Do you not see, aunt, that she is pining away ?' 'No one , rests in my heart' [literally ; whence could come in my heart resting ?] — thus speaking, the girl fell into a swoon." No. 345 . " If it is not your beloved, my friend, how is it that at the mention of his name your face glows like a lotos bud opened by the sun's rays .'' " doo 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 emo- tions. " 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 Bebhila 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 rendez- vous, how it assuages the grief of separation, and augments the delights of the lovers! ' ( Vasantasena^ Act HI., 2.) 670 INDIA— TEMPLE GIRLS No. 368 : " Like illness without a doctor — like living with relatives if one is poor, like the sight of an enemy's prosper- ity — so difficult is it to endure separation from you/' No. 378 : " Whatever you do, whatever you say, and wher- ever you turn your eyes, the day is not long enough for her efforts to imitate you. No. 440 : " . . . She, whose every limb was bathed in perspiration, at the mere mention of his name." No. 453 : " My friend ! tell me honestly, I ask you : do the bracelets of all women become larger when the lover is far away ? " No. 531 : "In whichever direction I look I see you before me, as il painted there. The whole firmament brings before me as it were a series of pictures of you." No. 650 : " From him proceed all discourses, all are about him, end with him. Is there then, my aunt, but one young man in all this village ? " While these poems may have been sung mostly by baya- deres, there are others which obviously give expression to the legitimate feelings of married women. This is especially true of the large number which voice the sorrows of women at the absence of their husbands after the rains have set in. The rainy season is in India looked on as the season of love, and separation from the lover at this time is particularly be- wailed, all the more as the rains soon make the roads im- passable. No. 29 : " To-day, when, alone, I recalled the Joys we had formerly shared, the thunder of the new clouds' sounded to me like the death-drum (that accompanies culprits to the place of execution)." No. 47 : " The young wife of the man who has got ready for his journey roams, after his departure, from house to house, trying to get the secret for preserving life from wives who have learned how to endure separation from their beloved." No. 227 : " In putting down the lamp the wife of the wan- derer turns her face aside, fearing that the stream of tears that falls at the thought of the beloved might drop on it." No. 501 : " When the voyager, on taking leave, saw his wife turn pale, he was overcome by grief and unable to go." No. 623 : " The wanderer's wife does indeed protect her little son by interposing her head to catch the rain water dripping from the eaves, but fails to notice (in her grief over her absent one) that he is wetted by her tears." SYMPTOMS OF FEMININE LOVE 671 These twenty-one poems are the best samples of everything contained in Hdla's anthology illustrating the serious side of love among the bayaderes and married women of India. Care- ful perusal of them must convince the reader that there is nothing in them revealing the altruistic phases of love. There is much ardent longing for the selfish gratification which the presence of a lover would give ; deep grief at his absence ; indications that a certain man could afford her much more pleasure by his presence than others — and that is all. When a girl wails that she is dying because her lover is absent she is really thinking of her own pleasure rather than his. None of these poems expresses the sentiment, " Oh, that I could do something to make him happy ! " These women are indeed taught axiA forced to sacrifice themselves for their husbands, but when it comes to spontaneous utterances, like these songs, we look in vain for evidence of pure, devoted, high-minded, romantic love. The more frivolous side of Oriental love is, on the other hand, abundantly illustrated in Hdla's poems, as the following samples show : No. 40 : "0 you pitiless man ! Yon who are afraid of your wife and difficult to catch sight of ! You who resemble (in bitterness) a nimba worm — and yet who are the delight of the village women ! For does not the (whole) village grow thin (longing) for you ? " No. 44 : "The sweetheart will not fail to come back into his heart even though he caress another girl, whether he see in her the same charms or not." No. 83 : " This young farmer, beautiful girl, though he already has a beautiful wife, has nevertheless become so reduced that his own jealous wife has consented to deliver this message to you." The last two poems hint at, the ease with which feminine jealousy is suppressed in India, of which we have had some instances before and shall have others presently. Coyness seems to be not much more developed, at least among those who need it most : No. 465 : " By being kind to him again at first sight you deprived yourself, you foolish girl, of many pleasures — his prostration at your feet and his eager robbing of a kiss." 672 INDIA— TEMPLE GIRLS No. 45 : " Since youth (rolls on) like the rapids of a river, the days speed away and the nights cannot be checked — my daughter ! what means this accursed, proud reserve ?" No. 139 : "On the pretext that the descent to the Goda (river) is difficult, she threw herself in his arms. And he clasped her tightly without thereby incurring any reproach.'' (See also No. 108.) No. 121 : " Thopgh disconsolate at the death of her rela- tives, the captive girl looked lovirigly upon the young kid- napper, because he appeared to her to be a perfect (hero). Who can remain sulky in the face of virtues ? Such love as these women felt is fickl« and transient : No. 340 : " Through being out of sight, my child, in course of time the love dwindles away even of those who were firmly joined in tender union, as water runs from the hollow of the hand." No. 106 : " heart that, like a long piece of wood which is being carried down the rapids of a small stream is caught at every place, your fate is nevertheless to be burnt by some one ! " No. 80 : " By being out of sight love goes away ; by seeing too often it goes away ; also by the gossip of malicious per- sons it goes away ; yes, it also goes away by itself." " If the bee, eager to sip, always seeks the juices of new growths, this is the fault of the sapless flowers, not of the bee." Where love is merely sensual and shallow lovers' quarrels do not fan the flame, but put it out : " Love which, once dissolved, is united again, after un- pleasant things have been revealed, tastes flat, like water that has been boiled," The commercial element is conspicuous in this kind of love ; it cannot persist without a succession of presents : No. 67 : " When the festival is over nothing gives pleas- ure. So also with the fnll moon late in the morning — and of love, which at last becomes insipid — and with gratifica- tion, that does not manifest itself in the form of presents." The illicit, impure aspect of Oriental love is hinted at in many of the poems collected by Hdla. There are frequent allusions to rendezvous in temples, which are so quiet that SYMPTOMS OF MASCULINE LOVE 673 the pigeons are scared by the footsteps of the lovers ; or in the high grain of the harvest fields ; or on the river banks, so deserted that the monkeys there fill their paunches with mus- tard leaves undisturbed. No. 190 • " When he comes what shall I do ? What shall I say and what will come of this ? Her heart beats as,- with these thoughts, the girl goes out on her first rendezvous." (Of. also Nos. 223 and 49L) No. 628 : ''0 summer time ! you who give good opportu- nities for rendezvous by drying the small ditches and cover- ing the trees with a dense abundance of leaves ! you test-plate of the gold of love-happiness, you must not fade away yet for a long time." No. 553 : "Aunt, why don't you remove the parrot from this bed-chamber ? He betrays all the caressing words to others." Hindoo poets have the faculty, vi^hich they share with the Japanese, of bringing a whole scene or episode vividly before the eyes with a sentence or two, as all the foregoing selections show. Sometimes a whole story is thus condensed, as in the following : " ' Master ! He came to implore our protection. Save him ! ' thus speaking, she very slyly hastened to turn over her paramour to her suddenly entering husband." (See also No. 305 and Hitopadesa, p. 88.) SYAIPTOMS OF MASCULINE LOVE Since Hindoo women, in spite of their altruistic training, are prevented by their lack of culture or virtue (the domestic virtuous women have no culture and the cultured bayaderes have no virtue) from rising to the heights of sentimental love, it would be hopeless to expect the amazingly selfish, unsympathetic and cruel men to do so, despite their intellec- tual culture. Among all the seven hundred poems culled by Uilla there are only two or three which even hint at the higher phases of love in masculine bosoms. Inasmuch as No. 383 tells us that even "the male elephant, though tor- mented by great hunger, thinking of his beloved wife, allows 674 INDIA— TEMPLE GIRLS the juicy lotos-stalk to wither in his trunk," one could hard- ly expect of man less than the sentiment expressed iu No. 576 : " He who has a faithful love considers himself contented even in misfortune, whereas without his love he is unhappy though he possess the earth." Another poem indicating that Hindoo men may share with women a strong feeling of amorous monopolism is No. 498 : " He regards only her countenance, and she, too'', is quite intoxicated at sight of him. Both of them, satisfied with one another, act as if in the whole world there were no other women or men.'' But as a rule the men are depicted as being fickle, even more so than the women. A frequent complaint of the girls is that the men forget whom they happen to be caressing and call them by another girl's name. More frequent still are the complaints of neglect or desertion. One of these. No. 46, suggests the praises of night sung in the mediseval legend of Tristan and Isolde : " To-morrow morning, my beloved, the hard-hearted goes away — so people say. sacred night ! do lengthen so that there will be no morning for him." At first sight the most surprising and important of Hala's seven hundred poems seems to be No. 567 : " Only over me, the iron-hearted, thunder, cloud, and with all your might ; be sure that you^o not kill my poor one with the hanging locks." Here, for once, we have the idea of self-sacrifice — only the idea, it is true, and not the act ; but it indicates a very exceptional and exalted state for a Hindoo even to think of such a thing. The self-reproach of "iron-hearted" tells us, however, that the man has been behaving selfishly and cruelly toward his sweetheart or wife, and is feeling sorry for a moment. In such moments a Hindoo not infrequently be- comes human, especially if he expects new favors of the mal- treated woman, which she is only too willing to grant : No. 85 : " While with the breath of his mouth he cooled one of my hands, swollen from the effect of his blow, I put the other one laughingly around his neck." No. 191 : " By untangling the hair of her prostrate lover from the notches of her spangles in which" it had been caught, she shows him that her heart has ceased to be sulky." SYMPTOMS OF MASCULINE LOVE 676 References to such prostrations to secure forgiveness for inconstancy or cruelty are frequent in Hindoo poems and dramas, and it is needless to say that they are a very differ- ent thing from the disinterested prostrations and homage of modern gallantry. True gallantry being one of the altruistic ingredients of love, it would be useless to seek for it among the Hindoos. Not so with hyperbole, which being simply a magnifying of one's own sensations and an expression of ex- travagant feeling of any kind, forms, as we know, a phase of sensual as well as of sentimental love. The eager desire for a girl's favor makes her breath and all her attributes seem deli- cious not only to man but to inanimate things. The following, with the finishing touches applied by the German translator, approaches modern poetic sentiment more closely than any other of Hdla's songs : No. 13 : "0 you who are skilled in cooking ! Do not be angry (that the fire fails to burn). The fire does not burn, smokes only, in order to drink in (long) the breath of (your) mouth, perfumed like red patela blossoms." In the use of hyperbole it is very difficult to avoid the step from the sublime to the ridiculous. The author of No. 153 had a happy thought when he sang that his beloved was so perfect a beauty that no one had ever been able to see her whole body because the eye refused to leave whatever part it first alighted on. This pretty notion is turned into uncon- scious burlesque by the author of No. 274, who complains, "How can I describe her from whose limbs the eyes that see them cannot tear themselves away, like a weak cow from the mud she is sticking in." Hardly less grotesque to our Western taste is the favorite boast (No. 211 et passim) that the moon is making vain efforts to shine as brightly as the beloved's face. It is easier for us to sympathize with the Hindoo poets when they express their raptures over the eyes or locks of their beloved : No. 470 : " Other beauties too have in their faces beautiful wide black eyes, with long lashes, but they cannot cast such glances as you do." 676 INblA— TEMPLE GIRLS No. 77 : "I think of het countenance with hef locks float- ing loosely about it as she shook her head when I seized het lip — like unto a lotos i!ower surrounded by a swarm of (black) bees attracted by its fragrance." Yet even these two ]*eferences to personal beauty are not purely esthetic, and in all the others the sensual aspect is more emphasized : No. 556 : " The btoWn girl's hair, which had succeeded in touching hei* hips. Weeps drops of Water, as it were, now that she comes out of the bath, as if from fear of now being tied up again." No. 128 : "As by a miracle, as by a treasure, as in heaven, as a kingdom, as a drink of ambrosia, was I affected when I (first) saw her without any clothing." No. 473 : "For the sake of the dark-eyed girls whose hips and thighs are visible through their wet dresses when they bathe in the afternoon, does Kama [the god of love] wield his bow." Again and again the poets express their raptures over exag- gerated busts and hips, often in disgustingly coarse com- parisons — lines which cannot be quoted here.' LYEIOS AKD DRAMAS In his History of Indian Literature (209), Weber says that " the erotic lyric comtnences for us with certain of the poems attributed to Kalidasa." " The later Kavyas are to bo ranked With the erotic poems rather than with the epic. In general this love-poetty is of the most unbridled and ex- tra vd,garltly sensual description ; yet examples of deep and truly romantic tenderness are not wanting." Inasmuch as he attributes the same qualities to some of the Ildla poerhs in ' I'he disadvantage of arguin}; against the believers in primitive, Oriental, and ahcient amorous sentlmdat is that isome of tiie strongest evidence ag&,inst tliera cannot be cited in a book intended for general reading Professor Weber de- clares lii his iHtroductloh to Mala'^ anthnldgy that these poetns takf^ ild through all phases of sentimental love {innigen Liebeslebenn) to the most licentious sit i- ations. He is mistaken, as I have shown, in regard to the sentiment, but tiiere can be no doubt about the licentiousness. Numbers 5, 33, fi2, 63, 65, 71, 7"i, 107, 115, 139, 161, 200, 223, 237, 241, 242, 300, 305, 336, 338, 356, 364, 36», 455, 483, 4'.ll, 62S. 637, depict or suggest improper scenes, while 61, 913, 815, 243, !i78, 337, 476, fiflO are frankly obscene. Lower an I liiglier things are mixed in these poems with a naivete that shows the absence pf any idea of refinement. THE STORY OF SAKUNTALA 677 which we have been unable to find them, it is obvious that his conception of "deep and truly romantic tenderness" is different from ours, and it is useless to quarrel about words, ihila's collection, being an anthology of the best love-songs of many poets, is much more representative and valuable than if the verses were all by the same poet. If Hindoo bards and bayaderes had a capacity for true altruistic love-sentiment, these seven hundred songs could hardly have failed to reveal it. But to make doubly sure that we are not misrepresenting a phase of the history of civilization, let us examine the Hin- doo dramas most noted as love-stories, especially those of Kalidasa, whose Sahuntala in particular was triumphantly held up by some of my critics as a refutation of my theory that none of the ancient civilized nations knew romantic love. I shall first briefly summarize the love-stories told in these dramas, and then point out what they reveal in regard to the Hindoo conception of love as based, presumably, on their ex- periences. I. THE STOET OF SAKUNTALA Once upon a time there lived on the banks of the Gautaraj River a hermit named Kau9ika. He was of royal blood and liad made so much progress with his saintly exercises of pen- itence that he was on the point of being able to defy the laws of Nature, and the gods themselves began to fear his power. To deprive him of it they sent down a beautiful apsara (ce- lestial bayadere) to temjat him. He could not resist her charms, and broke his vows. A daughter was born who re- ceived the name of Sakuntala, and was given in charge of another saint, named Kanva, who brought her up lovingly as if she had been his own daughter. She has grown up to be a maiden of more than human beauty, when one day she is seen by the king, who, while hunting, has strayed within the sa- cred precincts while the saint is away on a holy errand. He is at once fasciiiated by her beauty — a beauty, as he says to himself, such as is seldom found in royal chambers^a wild vine more lovely than any garden-plant — and she, too, confesses to her companions that since she has seen him she is over- come by a feeling which seems out of place in this abode of penitence. The king cannot bear the idea of returning to hig palace. 678 INDIA— DRAMAS but encamps near the grove of the penitents. He fears that he may not be able to win the girl's love, and she is tortured by the same doubt regarding him. " Did Brahma first paint her and then infuse life into her, or did he in his spirit fash- ion her out of a number of spirits ? " he exclaims. He wonders what excuse he can have for lingering in the grove. His companion suggests gathering the tithe, but the king retorts : " What I get for protecting her is to be esteemed higher than piles of jewels." He now feels an aversion to hunting. " I would not be able to shoot this arrow at the gazelles who have lived with her, and who taught the beloved to gaze so inno- cently." He grows thin from loss of sleep. Unable to keep his feelings locked up in his bosom, he reveals them to his companion, the jester, but afterward, fearing he might tell his wives about this love-affair, he says to him : "Of course there is no truth in the notion that I coveted this girl Sak- untiila. Just think ! how could we suit one another, a girl who knows nothing of love and has grown up perfectly wild with the young gazelles ? No, my friend, you must not take a joke seriously." But all the time he grows thinner from longing — so thin that his bracelet, whose jewels have lost all their lustre from his tears, falls constantly from his arm and has to be replaced. In the meantime Sakuntala, without lacking the reserve and timidity proper to the girls of penitents, has done several things that encouraged the king to hope. While she avoided looking straight at him (as etiquette prescribed), there was a loving expression on her face, and once, when about to go away with her companions, she pretended that her foot had been cut by a blade of kusagrass — but it was merely an ex- cuse for turning her face. Thus, while her love is not frankly discovered, it is not covered either. She doubts whether the king loves her, and her agony throws her into a feverish state which her companions try in vain to allay by fanning her with lotos leaves. The king is convinced that the sun's heat alone could not have affected her thus. He sees that she has grown emaciated and seems ill. "Her cheeks," he says, " have grown thin, her bosom^has lost its firm tension, her body has grown attenuated, her shoulders stoop, and pale is her face. Tortured by love, the girl presents an aspect as pitiable as it is lovable ; she resembles the vine Madhavi when it is blighted by the hot breath of a leaf-desiccating wind." He is watching her, unseen himself, as she reclines in an arbor with her friends, who are fanning her. He hears her say : "Since the hour when he came before my eyes . . . the royal sage, ah, since that hour I have become as you see THE STORY OF SAKUNTALA 679 me — from longing for him ; " and he wonders, " how could she fear to have any difficulty in winning her lover ? " " The little hairs on her cheek reveal her passion by becoming erect," he adds as he sees her writing something with her nails on a lotos leaf. She reads to her companions what she has written : " Your heart I know not ; me love burns day and night, you cruel one, because I think of you alone." ' Encouraged by this confession, the king steps from his place of concealment and exclaims : " Slender girl, the glowing heat of love only bums you, but me it consumes, and incessant is the great tort- ure." Sakuntala tries to rise, but is too weak, and the king bids her dispense with ceremony. While he expresses his hap- piness at having found his love reciprocated, one of the com- panions mutters something about "Kings having many loves," and Sakuntala herself exclaims : " Why do you detain the royal sage ? He is quite unhappy because he is separated from his wives at court." But the king protests that though he has many women at court, his heart belongs to no other but her. Left alone with Sakuntala, he exclaims : " Be not alarmed ! For am not I, who brings you adoring homage, at your side ? Sliall I fan you with the cooling petals of these water-lilies ? Or shall I place your lotos feet on my lap and fondle them to my heart's content, you round-hipped maiden ?" "God for- bid that I should be so indiscreet with a man that commands respect," replies Sakuntala. She tries to escape, and when the king holds her, she says : " Son of Puru ! Observe the laws of propriety and custom ! I am, indeed, inflamed by love, but I cannot dispose of myself." The king urges her not to fear her foster father. Many girls, he says, have freely given themselves to kings without incurring parental disapproval ; and he tries to kiss her. A voice warns them that night ap- proaches, and, hearing her friends returning, Sakuntala urges the king to conceal himself in the bushes. Sakuntala now belongs to the king ; they are united ac- cording to one of the eight forms of Hindoo marriage known as that of free choice. After remaining with her a short time the king returns to his other wives at court. Before leaving he puts a seal ring on her finger and tells her how she can count the days till a messenger shall arrive to bring her to his palace. But month after month passes and no messenger arrives. " The king has acted abominably toward Sakuntala," says one of her friends ; "he has deceived an in- experienced girl who put faith in him. He has not even ' I have here followed Kellner, though Boehtlingk's version is more literal and Oriental : " Mir aber brennt Liebe, () Gransamer, Tag und Naoht gewaltig die Glieder, deren WUnsche auf dioh gerichtet smd. " 680 INDIA— DRAMAS Written her a letter, and she will soon be a mother." She feels convinced, howfever, that the king's tieglect is due to the action of a saint who had cursed Sakimtala because she had not waited on him promptly. " Like a drunkard, her lover shall forget What has happened," was his curse. He- lenting somewhat, he added afterward that tiie force of the curse could be broken by bringing to the king some orna- ment that he might have left as a souvenir. Sakuntala has her ring, and relying on that she departs with a retinue for the royal abode. On the way, in crossing a river, she loses the ring, and when she confronts the king he fails to reraem^ ber her and dismisses her ignominiously. A fisherman af- terward finds the ring in the stomach of a fish, and it gets into the hands of the king, who, at sight of it» remembers Sakuntala and is heartbroken at his cruel conduct toward her. But he cannot at once make amends, as he has chased her away, and it is not till some years later, and with super- natural aid, that they are reunited. II. THE STORY OP UEVASI The saint Narayana had spent so many years in solitude, addicted to prayers and ascetic practices, that the gods dreaded his growing power, which was making him like unto them, and to break it they sent down to him some of the se- ductive apsaras. But the saint held a flower-stalk to his loins, and Urvasi was born, a girl more beautiful than the celestial bayaderes who had been sent to tempt him. He gave this girl to the apsaras to take as a present to the god Indra, whose entertainers they were. »She soon became the special ornament of heaven and Indra used her to bring the saints to fall. One day King Pururavas, while out driving, hears female voices calling for help. Five apsaras appear and implore him, if he can drive tlirough tli6 air, to come to the assistance of their companion Urvasi, who has been seized and carried away, northward, by a demon. The king forthwith orders his charioteer to steer in that direction, and erelong he re- turns victorious, with the captured maiden on his chariot. She is still overcome with terror, her eyes are closed, and as the king gazes at her he doubts that she can be the daughter of a cold and learned hermit ; the moon must have created her, or the god of love himself. As the chariot descends, Urvasi, frightened, leans against tiie king's shoulder, and the little hairs on his body stand up straight, so much is he pleased THE STORY OF URVASI 681 thereat. He brings her back to tlie other apsaras, who are on a mountain-top awaiting their return. Urvasi, too much overcome to thank him for her rescue, begs one of her friends to do it for her, whereupon the apsaras, bidding him gooii- by, rise into the air. Urvasi lingers a moment on the pre- tence that her ])earl necklace has got entangled in a vine, but in reality to get another peep at the king, who addresses fervent words of thanks to the bush for having thus»given him another chance to look on her face. "Rising into the air," he exclaims, " this girl tears my heart from my body and carries it away with her." The queen soon notices that his heart has gone away with another. She complains of this estrangement to her maid, to whom she sets the task of discovering the secret of it. The maid goes at it slyly. Addressing the king's viduschaka (confidential adviser), she informs him that the queen is very unhappy because the king addressed her by the name of the girl he longs for. "What?" retorts the viduschaka — "the king himself has revealed the secret? He called her Urvasi ? " " And who, your honor, is Urvasi ? " says the maid. " She is one of the apsaras," be says. " 'J'he sight of her has infatuated the king's senses so that he tort- ures not only the queen but me, the Brahman, too, for he no longer thinks of eating." But he expresses his conviction tiiat the folly will not last long, and the maid departs. Urvasi, tortured, like the king, by love and doubt, sup- presses her bashfulness and asks one of her friends to go with her to get her pearl necklace which she had left entangled in the vine. " Then you are hurrying down, surely, to see Pur- uravas, the king ? " says the friend ; " and whom have you sent in advance?" " My heart," replied Urvasi. So they fly down to the earth, invisible to mortals, and when they see the king, Urvasi declares that he seems to her even more beautiful than at their first meeting. They listen to the conversation be- tween him and the viduschaka. The latter advises his mas- ter to seek consolation by dreaming of a union with his love, or by painting her picture, but the king answers that dreams cannot come to a man who is unable to sleep, nor would a picture be able to stop his flood of tears. " The god of love has pierced my heart and now he tortures me by denying my wish." Encouraged by these words, but unwilling to make herself visible, Urvasi takes a piece of birch-bark, writes on it a message, and throws it down. The king sees it fall, picks it up and reads : "I love you, master ; you did not know, nor I, that you burn with love for me. No longer do 1 find rest on my coral couch, and the air of the celestial 682 INDIA— DRAMAS grove burns me like fire." "What will he say to that?" wonders Urvasi, and her friend replies, " Is there not an an- swer in his limbs, which have become like withered lotos stalks ?" The king declares to his friend that the message on the leaf has made him as happy as if he had seen his be- loved's face. Fearing that the perspiration on his hand (the sign of violent love) might wash away the message, he gives the bifch-bark to the viduschaka. TJrvasi's friend now makes herself visible to the king, who welcomes her, but adds that the sight of her delights him not as it did when Urvasi was with her. " Urvasi bows before you," the apsara answers, " and sends this message : ' You were my protector, master, when a demon offered me violence. Since I saw you, god Kama has tortured me violently ; therefore you must some- time take pity on me, great king ! ' " And the king retorts : " The ardor of love is here equally great, on either side. It is proper that hot iron be welded with hot iron." After this Urvasi makes herself visible, too, but the king has hardly had time to greet her, when a celestial messenger arrives to sum- mon her hastily back to heaven, to her own great distress and the king's. Left alone, the king wants to seek consolation in the mes- sage written on the birch-bark. But to their consternation, they cannot find it. It had dropped from the viduschaka's hand and the wind had carried it off. " wind of Malaya," 'laments the king, "you are welcome to all the fragrance breathing from the flowers, but of what use to you is the love- letter you have stolen from me ? Know you not that a hun- dred such consolers may save the life of a love-sick man who cannot hope soon to attain the goal of his desires ?" In the meantime the queen and her maid have appeared in the background. They come across the birch-bark, see the message on it, and the maid reads it aloud. " With this gift of the celestial girl let us now meet . her lover," says the queen, and stepping forward, she confronts the king with the words : "Here is the bark, my husband. You need not search for it longer." Denial is useless ; the king prostrates himself at her feet, confessing his guilt and begging her not to be angry at her slave. But she turns her back and leaves him. " I cannot blame her," says the king ; " homage to a woman leaves her cold unless it is inspired by love, as an artificial jewel leaves an expert who knows the fire' of genuine stones." ' "Though Urvasi has my heart," he adds, "yet I highly esteem the queen. Of course, I shall meet her with firmness, since she has disdained my prostration at her feet." The reason why Urvasi had been summoned back to THE STORY OF URVASI 683 heaven so suddenly was that Indra wanted to hear a play which the celestial manager had rehearsed with the apsaras. Urvasi takes her part, but her thoughts are so incessantly with the king that she blunders repeatedly. She puts passion into lines which do not call for it, and once, when she is called on to answer the question, " To whom does her heart incline ?" she utters the name of her own lover instead of the one of similar sound called for in the play. For these mis- takes her teacher curses her and forbids her remaining in heaven any longer. Then Indra says to the abashed maiden : " I must do a favor to the king whom you love and who aids me in battle. Go and remain wy;h him at your will, until you have borne him a son." Ignorant of the happiness in store for him, the king mean- while continues to give utterance to his longings and laments. " The day has not passed so very sadly ; there was something to do, no time for longing. But how shall I spend the long night, for which there is no pastime ? " The viduschaka counsels hope, and the king grants that even the tortures of love have their advantage ; for, as the force of the torrent is increased a hundredfold if a rock is interposed, so is the power of love if obstacles retard the blissful union. The twitching of his right arm (a favorable sign) augments his hope. At the moment when he remarks : " The anguish of love increases at night," Urvasi and her friend came down -from the air and hover about him. " Nothing can cool the flame of my love," he continues, " neither a bed of fresh flowers, nor moonlight, nor strings of pearls, nor sandal ointment applied to the whole body. The only part of my body that has attained its goal is this shoulder, which touched her in the chariot." At these words I/rvasi boldly steps before the king, but he pays no attention to her. " The great king," she complains to her friend, "remains cold though I stand before him." "Impetuous girl," is the an- swer, " you are still wearing your magic veil ; he cannot see you." At this moment voices are heard and the queen appears with her retinue. She had already sent a message to the king to inform him that she was no longer angry and had made a vow to fast and wear no finery until the moon had entered the constellation of Eohini, in order to express her penitence and conciliate her husband. The king, greeting her, expresses sorrow that she should weaken her body, deli- cate as lotos root, by thus fasting. " What ? " he adds, " you yourself conciliate the slave who ardently longs to be with you and who is anxious to win your indulgence ! " "What 684 INDIA— DRAMAS great esteem he shows her ! " exclaims Urvasi, with a con- fused smile ; but her companion retorts : " You foolish girl, a man of the world is most polite when he loves another woman." " The power of my vow/' says the queen, "is re- vealed in his solicitude for me." Then she folds her hands, and, bowing reverently, says : " I call to witness these two gods, the Moon and his Kohini, that I beg my husband's pardon. Henceforth may he, unhindered, associate with the woman whom he loves and who is glad to be his companion." " Is he indifferent to you ?" asks the viduschaka. " Fool ! " she replies; "I desire only my husband's happiness, and give up my own for that. Judge for yourself whether I love him." When the queen has left, the king once more abandons him- self to his yearning for his beloved. "Would that she came from behind and put her lotos hands over my eyes." Urvasi hears the words and fulfils his wish. He knows who it is, for every little hair on his body stands up straight. "Do not consider me forward if now I embrace his body," siiys Urvasi to her friend ; " for the qiieen has given him to me." "You take my body as the queen's present," says tiie king ; " but who, you thief, allowed you before that to steal my heart ?" " It shall always be yours and I your slave alone," he continues. " When I took possession of the throne I did not feel so near my goal as now when I begin my service at your feet." " The moon's rays which formerly tortured me now refresh my body, and welcome are Kama's arrows which used to wound me." "Did my delaying do you harm?" asks Urvasi, and he replies : " Oh, no ! Joy is sweeter when it follows distress. He who has been exposed to the sun is cooled by the tree's shade more than oth'ers;" and he ends the same with the words : " A night seemed to consist of a hundred nights ere my wish wa,s fulfilled ; may it be the same now that I am with you, beauty ! how glad I should be ! " Absorbed by his happy love, the king hands over the reins of government to his ministers and 'retires with Urvasi to a forest. One day he looks for a moment thoughtfully at an- other girl, whereat Urvasi gets so Jealous that she refuses to accept his apology, and in her anger forgets that no woman must walk into the forest of the war-god. Hardly has she entered when she is changed into a vine. The king goes out of his mind from grief ; he roams all over the forest, alternately fainting and raving, calling upon peacock and cuckoo, bee, swan, and elephant, antelope, mountain, and river to give him tidings of his beloved, her with the antelope eyes and the big breasts, and the hips so broad that she can only walk MALAVIKA AND AGNIMITRA 685 slowly. At last he sees in a cleft a large red jewel and picks it up. It is the stone of union which enables lovers to find one another. An impulse leads him to embrace the vine before him and it changes to Urvasi. A son is afterward born to her, but she sends him away before the king knows about it, and has him brought up secretly lest she be com- pelled to return at once to heaven. But Indra sends a mes- senger to bring her permission to remain with the king as long as he lives. III. MALAVIKA AND AGNIMITRA Queen Dharini, the head wife of King Agnimitra, has re- ceived from her brother a young girl named Malavika, whom he has rescued from robbers. The queen is just having a large painting made of herself and her retinue, and Malavika finds a place on it at her side. The king sees the picture and eagerly inquires: " Who is that beautiful maiden ? " The suspicious queen does not answer his question, but takes measures to have the girl carefully concealed from him and kept busy with dancing lessons. But the king accidentally hears Malavika's name and makes up his mind that he must have her. " Arrange some stratagem," he says to his vidu- schaka, " so I may see her bodily whose pictiire I beheld ac- cidentally." The viduschaka promptly stirs up a dispute between the two dancing-masters, which is to be settled by an exhibition of their pupils before the king. The queen sees through the trick too late to prevent its execution and the king's desire is gratified. He sees Malavika, and finds her more beautiful even than her picture — her face like the harvest moon, her bosom firm and swelling, her waist small enough to span with the hand, her hips big, her toes beauti- fully curved. She has never seen the king, yet loves him passionately. Her left eye twitches — a favorable sign — and she sings : " I must obey the will of otliers, but my heart desires you ; 1 cannot conceal it." " She uses her song as a means of offering herself to you," says the viduschaka to the king, who replies : " In the presence of the queen her love saw no other way." " The Creator made her the poisoned arrow of the god of love," he continues to his friend after the performance is over and they ai'e alone. "Apply your mind and think out other plans for meeting her." " You remind me," says the viduschaka, "of a vulture that hovers over a butcher's shop, filled with greed for meat but also with fear. 1 believe the eagerness to have your will has 686 INDIA— DRAMAS made you ill." "How were it possible to remain well ?" the king retorts. " My heart no longer desires intimacies with any woman in all my harem. To her with the beau- tiful eyes, alone shall my love be devoted henceforth." In the royal gardens stands an asoka tree whose bloom is retarded. To hasten it, the tree must be touched' by the decorated foot of a beautiful woman. The queen was to have done this, but an accident has injured her foot and she has asked Malavika to take her place. While the king and his adviser are walking in the garden they see Malavika all alone. Her love has made her wither like a jasmine wreath blighted by frost. "How long," she laments, " will the god of love make me endure this anguish, from which there is no relief ? " One of the queen's maids presently arrives with the paints and rings for decorating Malavika's feet. The king watches the proceeding, and after the maiden has touched the tree with her left foot he steps forward, to the confusion of the two women. He tells Malavika that he, like the tree, has long had no occasion to bloom, and begs her to make him also, who loves only her, happy with the nectar of her touch. Unluckily this whole scene has also been secretly witnessed by Iravati, the second of the king's wives, who steps forward at this moment and sarcastically tells Mala- vika to do his bidding. The viduschaka tries to help out his confused master by pretending that the meeting was acci- dental, and the king humbly calls himself her loving hus- band, her slave, asks her pardon, and prostrates himself ; but she exclaims : " These are not the feet of Malavika whose touch you desire to still your longing," and departs. The king feels quite hurt by her action. "How unjust," he exclaims, "is love! My heart belongs to the dear girl, therefore Iravati did me a service by not accepting my pros- tration. And yet it was love that led her to do that ! Therefore I must not overlook her anger, but try to conciliate her." Iravati goes straight to the first queen to report on their common husband's new escapade. When the king hears of this he is astonished at "such persistent anger," and dismayed on learning further that Malavika is now confined in a dun- geon, under lock and key, which cannot be opened unless a messenger arrives with the queen's own seal ring. But once more the viduschaka devises a ruse which puts him in pos- session of the seal ring. The maiden is liberated and brought to the water-house, whither the king hastens to meet her with the viduschaka, who soon finds an excuse for going outside with the girl's companion, leaving the lovers alone. MALAVIKA AND AGNIMITRA 687 " Why do you still hesitate, beauty, to unite yourself with one who has so long longed for your love 'i " exclaims the king ; and Malavika answers : " What I should like to do I dare not ; I fear the queen." " You need not fear her." " Did I not see the master himself seized with fear when he saw the queen ? " " Oh, that," replies the king, " was only a mat- ter of good breeding, as becomes princes. But you, with the long eyes, I love so much that my life depends on the hope that you love me too. Take me, take me, who long have loved you." With these words he embraces her, while she tries to resist. " How charming is the coyness of young girls ! " he exclaims. " Trembling, she tries to restrain my hund, which is busy with her girdle ; while I embrace her ardently she puts up her own hands to protect her bosom ; her countenance with the beautiful eyelashes she turns aside when I try to raise it for a kiss ; by thus struggling she affords me the same delight as if I had attained what I desire." Again the second queen and her maid appear unexpectedly and disturb the king's bliss. Her object is to go to the king's picture in the water-house and beg its pardon for having been disrespectful, this being better, in her opinion, than appearing before the king himself, since he has given his heart to an- other, while in that picture he has eyes for her alone (as Mala- vika, too, had noticed when she entered the water-house). The viduschaka has proved an unreliable sentinel ; he has fallen asleep at the door of the house. The queen's maid perceives this and, to tease him, touches him with a crooked staff. He awakes crying that a snake has bitten him. The king runs out and is confronted again by Iravati. " Well, well ! " she exclaims, " this couple meet in broad daylight and without hindrance to gratify their wishes \" "An unheard- of greeting is this, my dear," said the king. " You are mis- taken ; I see no cause for anger. I merely liberated the two girls because this is a holiday, on which servants must not be confined, and they came here to thank me." But he is glad to escape when a messenger arrives opportunely to announce that a yellow ape has frightened the princess. " My heart trembles when I think of the queen," says Mal- avika, left alone with her companion. " What will become of me now ?" But the queen knows her duty, according to Hindoo custom. She makes her maids array Malavika in marriage dress, and then sends a message to the king saying that she awaits him with Malavika and her attendants. The girl does not know why she has been so richly attired, and when the king beholds her he says to himself : " We are so near and yet apart. 1 seem to myself like the bird Tschak- 688 INDIA— DRAMAS ravaka ; ' and the name of the night which does not allow me to be united with my love is Dharini." At that moment two captive girls are brought before the assemblage, and to every- one's surprise they greet Malavika as " Princess." A princess she proves to be, on inquiry, and the queen now carries out the plan she had had in her mind, with the consent also of the second queen, who sends her apologies at the same time. "Take her," says Dharini to the king, and at a hint of tlie viduschaka she takes a veil and by putting it on the new bride makes her a queen and spouse of equal rank with herself. And the king answers : " I am not surprised at your magna- nimity. If women are faithful and kind to their husbands, they even bring, by way of serving him, new wives to him, like unto the rivers which provide that the water of other streams also is carried to the ocean. I have now but one more wish ; be hereafter always, irascible queen, prepared to do me homage. I wish this for the sake of the other women." IV. THE STORY OF SAVITRI King Asvapati, though an honest, virtuous, pious man, was not blessed with offspring, and this made him unhappy.^ He curbed all his appetites and for eighteen years lived a life of devotion to his religious duties. At the expiration of tliese years Savitri, the daughter of the sun-god, appeared to him and offered to reward him by granting a favor. "Sons I crave, many sons, goddess, sons to preserve my family," he answered. But Savitri promised him a daughter ; and she was born to him by his oldest wife and was named after the goddess Savitri. She grew up to be so beautiful, so broad- hipped, like a golden statue, that she seemed of divine origin, aTid, abashed, none of the men came to choose her as his wife. This saddened her father and he said : " Daughter, it isT;ime for you to marry, but no one comes to ask me for you. Go and seek your own husband, a man your equal in worth. And when you have chosen, you must let me know. Then I will consider him, and betroth you. For, according to the laws, a father who does not give his daughter in marriage is blameworthy." And Savitri went on a golden chariot with a royal retinue, and she visited all the groves of the saints and ' Anas Caaarca, 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. '^For a Hindoo, unless lie 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. THE STORY OF SAVITRI 689 at last found a man after her heart, whose name was Satya- vant. Then she returned to her father — who was just con- versing with the divine sage NArada — and told him of her choice. But NArada exclaimed: "Woe and alas, you have chosen one who is, indeed, endowed with all the virtues, but who is doomed to die a year from this day." Thereupon the king begged Savitri to choose another for her husband, but she replied : " May his life be long or short, may he have merits or no merits, I have selected him as my husband, and a second I shall not choose." Then the king and IS' arada agreed not to oppose her, and she went with her father to the grove where she had seen Satyavant, the man of her choice. The king spoke to this man's father and said : " Here, royal saint, is my lovely daughter, Savitri ; take her as your daugliter-in-law in accordance with your duty as friend." And the saint replied : "Long have I desired such a bond of relationship ; but I have lost my royal dignity, and how could your daughter endure tlie hardships of life in the forest ? " But the king replied that they heeded not such things and their mind was made up. So all the Brahmans were called to- gether and the king gave his daughter to Satyavant, who was pleased to win a wife endowed with so many virtues. When her father had departed, Savitri put away all her or- naments and assumed the plain garb of the saints. She was modest, self-contained, and strove to make herself useful and to fulfil the wishes of all. But she counted the days, and the time came when she had to say to herself, " In three days he must die." And she made a vow and stood in one place three days and nights ; on the following day he was to die. In the afternoon her husband took his axe on his shoulder and went into the primeval forest to get some wood and fruits. For the first time she asked to go with him. " The way is too difficult for you," said he, but she persisted ; and her heart was consumed by the flames of sadness. He called her atten- tion, as they walked on, to the limpid rivers and noble trees decked with flowers of many colors, but she had eyes only for him, following his every movement; for she looked on him as a dead man from that hour. He was filling his basket with fruits when suddenly he was seized with violent headache and longing for sleep. She took his head on her lap and awaited his last moment. All at once she saw a man, in red attire, of fearful aspect, with a rope in his hand. And she said : "Who are you ?" " You," he replied, "are a woman faithful to your husband and of good deeds, therefore will I answer you. I am Yama, and 1 have come to take away your husband, whose life has 690 INDIA— DRAMAS reached its goal." And with a mighty Jerk he drew from the husband's body his spirit, the size of a thumb, and forthwith the breath of life departed from the body. Having carefully tied the soul, Yama departed toward the south. Savitri, tort- ured by anguish, followed him. "Turn back, Savitri," he said ; '' you owe your husband nothing further, and you have gone as far as you can go." " Wherever my husband goes or is taken, there I must go ; that is an eternal duty." There- upon Yama offered to grant any favor she might ask — except the life of her husband. " Eestore the sight of the blind king, my father-in-law," she said ; and he answered : " It is done already." He offered a second favor and she said : " Eestore his kingdom to my father-in-law ; " and it was granted, as was also the third wish : " Grant one hundred sons to my father, who has none." Her fourth wish, too, he agreed to: that she herself might have a hundred sons ; and as he made the fifth and last wish unconditional, she said : " Let Satya- vant return to life ; for, bereft of him, I desire not happi- ness ; bereft of him I desire not heaven ; I desire not to live bereft of him. A hundred sons you have promised me, yet you take away my husband ? I desire this as a favor ; let Satyavant live ! " " So be it ! " answered the god of death as he untied the string. ''Your husband is released to you, blessed one, pride of your race. Sound and well you shall take him home, live with him four hundred years, beget one hundred sons, and all of the'm shall be mighty kings." With these words he went his way. Life returned to the body of Satyavant, and his fii'st feeling was distress lest his parents grieve over his absence. Thinking him too weak to walk, Savitri wanted to sleep in the forest, surrounded by a fire to keep off wild beasts, but he replied : ''My father and mother are disti-essed even in the daytime when I am away. Without them I could not live. As long as they live I live only for them. Eatherthan let anything happen to them, I give up my own life, you woman with the beautiful hips ; truly I shall kill myself soon- er." So she helped him to rise, and they returned that very night, to the great joy of their parents and friends ; and all the promises of Yama were fulfilled. V. NALA AND DAMATANTI Once upon a time there was a king by the name of Nala, a man handsome as the god of love, endowed with all the virtues, a favorite of men and women. There was also NALA AND DAMAYANTI 691 another king, named Bhima, the Terrible. He was renowned as a warrior and endowed with many virtues ; yet he was dis- contented, for he had no offspring. But it happened that he was visited by a saint, whom he entertained so hospitably that the Brahman granted him in return a favor : a daughter and three sons were born to him. The daughter, who received the name of Damayanti, soon became famed for her beauty, her dignity, and her gracious manners. She seemed, amid her companions, like lightning born in a rain-cloud. Her beauty was so much vaunted in the hearing of King Nala, and his merits were so much extolled in her presence, that the two conceived an ardent passion for one another, though they had never met. Nala could hardly endure his yearn- ings of love : near the apartments of the women there was a forest ; into that he retired, living in solitude. One day he came across some gold-decked geese. He caught one of them and she said to him : " Spare my life and I promise to praise yon in Damayanti's presence in such a way that she shall never think of any other man." He did so, and the goose flew to Damayanti and said : " There is a man named Nala ; he is like the celestial knights ; no human being equals him. Yes, if you could become Ms wife, it would be worth while that you were born and became so beautiful. You are the pearl among women, but Nala, too, is the best of men." Damayanti begged the goose to go and speak to Nala sim- ilai;ly about her, and the goose said " Yes" and flew away. JFrom that moment IDamayanti was always in spirit with Nala. Sunk in reverie, sad, with pale face, she visibly wasted away, and sighing was her only, her favorite, occupation. If anyone saw her gazing upward, absorbed in her thoughts, he might have almost fancied her intoxicated. Often of a sudden her wliole face turned pale ; in short, it was ])lain that love-longing held her senses captive. Lying in bed, sitting, eating, everything is distasteful to her ; neither at night nor by day does sleep come to her. Ah and alas ! thus her wails resound, and over and over again she begins to weep. ' Her companions noted these symptoms and they said to the king : " Damayanti is not at all well." The king reflected, " Why is my daughter no longer well ? " and it occurred to him that she had reached the marriageable age, and it became clear to him that he must without delay give her a chance to choose a husband. So he invited all the kings to assem- ble at his court for that purpose on a certain day. Soon tlie roads were filled with kings, princes, elephants, horses, wagons, and warriors, 'for she, the pearl of the world, was de- 602 INDIA— DRAMAS sired of men above all other women. King Nala also had re- ceived the message and set out on his journey hopefully. Like the god of love incarnate he looked. Even the ruling gods heard of the great event and went to join the worldly rulers. As they approached the earth's surface they beheld King Nala. Pleased with his looks, they accosted him and said : " We are immortals journeying on account of Damay- anti. As for you, go you and bring Damayanti this message : ' The four gods, Indra, Agni, Yama, Varuna, desire to have you for a wife. Choose one of these four gods as your wed- ded husband.'" Folding his hands humbly, ISTala replied: "The very same affair has induced me to make this journey : therefore you must not send me on this errand. For how could a man who himself feels the longing of love woo the same woman for another?" But the gods ordered him to go at once, be- cause he had promised to serve them before he knew what they wanted. They endowed him with power to enter the care- fully guarded apartments of the princess, and presently he found himself in her presence. Her lovely face, her charm- ingly moulded limbs, her slender body, her beautiful eyes, diffused a splendor that mocked the light of the moon and increased his pangs of love ; but he resolved to keep his promise. When the young maidens beheld him they could not utter a word ; they were dazed by the splendor of his appearance, and abashed, the beautiful virgins. At last the astonished Damayanti began to speak and said with a sweet smile : " Who are you, you with the faultless form, who in- crease the yearnings of my love ? Like an immortal you came here, hero ! I would like to know you better, noljle, good man. Closely guarded is my house, however, and most strict in his orders is the king." " My name, gracious maiden, is Nala," he replied. " As messenger of the gods have I come. Four of them — Indra, Agni, Varuna, Yama — would like you as bride, therefore choose one of them as husband, beauty ! That I entered unseen is the result, too, of their power. Now you have heard all ; act as seems proper to you." As he spoke the names of the gods Damayanti bowed humbly ; then she laughed merrily and said : " Follow you the inclination of your heart and be kind to me. What can I do to please you ? Myself and all that is mine belongs to you. Lay aside all diffidence, my master and husband ! Alas, the entire speech of the gold-swans, my prince, was to me a real fire- brand. It was for your sake, hero, that all these kings were in reality called together so hastily. Should you ever. NALA AND DAMAYANTI 693 my pride, be able to scorn me, who is so devoted to yoli, 1 shall resort on your account to poison, fire, water, rope." " How can you," retorted Nala, "when gods are present in person, direct your desires toward a mortal ? Not so ! Let your inclination dwell with them, the creators of the world. Kemember, too, that a mortal who does something to dis- please the gods is doomed to death. Therefore, you with the faultless limbs, save me by choosing the most worthy of the gods. Hesitate no longer. Your husband must be one of the gods." Then said Damayanti, while her eyes were diffused with anguish-born tears : " My reverence to the gods ! As hus- band I choose you, mighty ruler on earth. What I say to you is immutable truth." "I am here now as messenger of the gods, and cannot, therefore, plead my own cause. Later I shall have a chance to speak for myself," said Nala ; and Damayanti said, smiling, while tears choked her voice : " I shall arrange that you as well as the gods are present on the day of my husband-choice. Then I shall choose you in the presence of the immortals. In that way no blame can fall on anyone." Keturning to the gods, Nala told them just what hap- pened, not omitting her promise that she would choose him in presence of the gods. The day now was approaching when the kings, who, urged by love-longings, had assembled, were to appear before the maiden. With their beautiful hair, noses, eyes, and brows, these royal personages shone like the stars in heaven. They fixed their gaze on the maid- en's limbs, and wherever the eyes first rested there they remained fixed immovably. But the four gods had all assumed the exact form and appearance of Nala, and when Damayanti was about to choose him she saw five men all alike. IIow could she tell which, of them was the king, her beloved ? After a moment's thought she uttered an invoca- tion to the gods calling upon them to assume the character- istics by which they differ from mortals. The gods, moved by her anguish, her faith in tlie power of truth, her intelli- gence and passionate devotion, heard her prayer and forth- with they appeared to her free from perspiration, with fixed gaze, ever fresh wreath, free from dust ; and none of them, while standing, touched the floor ; whereas King Nala be- trayed himself by throwing a shadow, by having dust and perspiration on his body, a withered wreath, and eyelids that winked. Thereupon the big-eyed maiden timidly seized him by the hem of his garment and put a beautiful wreath on his 694 INDIA— DRAMAS shoulders. Thus did she choose him to be her husband ; and the gods granted them special favors. ' According to Schroeder, the Hindoos are "the romantic nation " among the ancients, as the Germans are among the moderns ; and Albrecht Weber says that when, a little more than a century ago, Europe first became acquainted with Sanscrit literature, it was noticed that in the amorous poetry of India in particular the sentimental qualities of modem verse were traced in a much higher degree than they had been found in Greek and Eoman literature. All this is doubtless true. The Hindoos appear to have been the only ancient people that took delight in forests, rivers, and moun- tains as we do ; in reading their descriptions of Nature we are sometimes affected by a mysterious feeling of awe, like a reminiscence of the time when our ancestors lived in India. Their amorous hyperbole, too, despite its frequent grotesque- ness, affects us perhaps more sympathetically than that of the Greeks. And yet the essentials of what we call romantic love are so entirely absent from ancient Hindoo literature that such amorous symptoms as are noted therein can all be readily brought under the three heads of artificiality, sen- suality, and selfishness. ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS Commenting on the directions for caressing given in the Kama Soutra, Lamairesse remarks (56) : " All these practices and caresses are conventional rather than natural, like every- 1 The sequel of the story, relating to the misfortunes of Nala and Damayanti after marriage, will be referred to presently. The famous tale herewith liriefly summarized occurs in the MahdbJidrata^ the great epic or mythological cyclo- pedia of India, which embraces 320,000 metric lines, and antedates in the main the Christian era. The story of Savitri also occurs in the Mahdbhdrata ; and these two episodes have been pronounced by specialists the gems not only of that great epic, but of all Hindoo literature. I liave 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 Sakimtala and Otto Fritze's equally critical versions of the same poet's Urvasi and Afa- lavika and Agnimitra. Some of the earlier translators, notably Rlickert. per- mitted themselves unwarranted poetic licenses, modernizing and sentimental- izing 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. ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS 695 thing the Hindoos do. A bayadere straying to Paris and making use of them would be a curiosity so extraordinary that she would certainly enjoy a succ^s de vogue pour rire." Nail- marks on various parts of the body, blows, bites, meaningless exclamations are prescribed or described in the diverse love- scenes. In Hindoo dramas several of the artificial symptoms — pure figments of the poetic fancy — are incessantly referred to. One of the most ludicrous of them is the drops of perspi- ration on the cheeks or other parts of the body, which are regarded as an infallible and inevitable sign of love. UrVasi's royal lover is afraid to take her birch-bark message in his hand lest his perspiration wipe away the letters. lu Bhava- bhuti's drama, Malati and Madhava, the heroine's feet per- spire so profusely from excess of longing, that the lacquer of her couch is melted ; and one of the stage directions in the same drama is : " Perspiration appears on Madayantika, with other things indicating love." Another of these grotesque symptoms is the notion that the touch or mere thought of the beloved makes the small hairs all over the body stand erect. No love-scene seems to be complete without this detail. The drama just referred to, in different scenes, makes the hairs on the cheeks, on the arms, all over the body, rise " splendidly," the author says in one line.* A Hindoo lover always has twitching of the right or left arm or eye to indicate what kind of luck he is going to have ; and she is equally favored. Usually the love is mut- ual and at first sight — nay, preferably before first sight. The mere hearsay that a certain man or maiden is very beautiful suffices, as we saw in the story of Nala and Damayanti, to banish sleep and appetite, and to make the lover pale and wan and most wretched. Sakuntala's royal lover wastes away so rapidly that in a few days his bracelet falls from his attenu- ated arm, and Sakuntala herself becomes so weak that she can- not rise, and is supposed to have sunstroke ! Malati dwindles ' 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 (2I>) : " With thf Hindoos it is a consequence of great excitement, joy as well as fear, that the little hairs OD the body stand erect. The expression has become conventional. " 696 INDIA— DRAMAS until her form resembles the moon in its last quarter ; her face is as pale as the moon at morning dawn. Always both the lovers, though he be a king — as he generally is — and she a goddess, are diffident at first, fearing failure, even after the most unmistakable signs of fondness, in the betrayal of which the girls are anything but coy. All these symptoms the poets prescribe as regularly as a physician makes out a prescription for an apothecary. A peculiar stare — which must be sidelong, not direct at the beloved — is another conventional characteristic of Hindoo amorous fiction. The gait becomes languid, the breathing difficult, the heart stops beating or is paralyzed with joy ; the limbs or the whole body wither like flower-stalks after a frost ; the mind is lamed, the memory weakened ; cold shiv- ers run down the limbs and fever shakes the body ; the arms hang limp at the side, the breast heaves, words stick in the throat ; pastimes no longer entertain ; the perfumed Malayan wind crazes the mind ; the eyelids are motionless, sighs give vent to anguish, which may end in a swoon, and if things take an unfavorable turn the thought of suicide is not dis- tant. Attempts to cure this ardent love are futile ; Madhava tries snow, and moonlight, and camphor, and lotos roots, and pearls, and sandal oil rubbed on his skin, but all in vain. THE HIKDOO GOD OF LOVE Quite as artificial and unsentimental as the notions of the Hindoos concerning the symptoms of love is their conception of their god of love, Kama, the husband of Lust. His bow is made of sugar-cane, its string a row of bees, and his arrow- tips are red flower-buds. Spring is his bosom friend, and he rides on a parrot or the sea-monster Makara. He is also called Ananga — the bodiless — because Siwa once burned him up with the fire that flashed from his third eye for disturbing him in his devotions by awakening in him love for Parwati. Sakun- tala's lover wails that Kama's arrows are " not flowers, but hard as diamond." Agnimitra declares that the Creator made his beloved " the poison^steeped arrow of the God of Love ; " THE HINDOO GOD OF LOVE 697 and again, he says : " The softest and the sharpest things are united in yon, Kama." Urvasi's royal lover complains that his "heart is pierced by Kama's arrow," and in Malati and Madhava we are told that "a cruel god no doubt is Kama ; " while No. 329 of Hala's love-poems declares : " The arrows of Kama are most diverse in their effects — though made of flowers, very hard ; though not coming into direct contact, in- sufferably hot ; and though piercing, yet causing delight." Our familiarity with Greek and Roman literature has made us so accustomed to the idea of a Cupid awakening love by shooting arrows that we fail to realize how entirely fan- ciful, not to say whimsical, this conceit is. It would be odd, indeed, if the Hindoo poets had happened on the same fancy as the Greeks of their own accord ; but there is no rea- son to suppose that they did. Kama is one of the later gods of the Indian Pantheon, and there is every reason to believe that the Hindoos borrowed him from the Greeks, as the Ro- mans did. In Sakuntala (27) there is a reference to the Greek women who form the king's body-guard ; in Vrvasi (70) to a slave of Greek descent ; and there are many things in the Hindoo drama that betray Greek influence. Besides being artificial and borrowed, Kama is entirely sen- sual. Kama means "gratification of the senses,"' and of all the epithets bestowed on their god of love by the Hindoos none rises distinctly above sensual ideas. Dowson (147) has collated these epithets ; they are : " the beautiful," " the in- flamer," "lustful," "desirous," "the happy," " the gay, or wanton," " deluder," "the lamp of honey, or of spring," " the bewilderer," " the crackling fire," " the stalk of pas- sion," " the weapon of beauty," " the voluptuary," "remem- brance," "fire," "the handsome."' The same disregard of sentimental, devotional, and altru- > Hilopadem (25). This gratification the Hindoos regard as one of the four great objects of life, the other three being liberty (emancipation of the soul), wealth, and the performance of religious duties. ''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 miml or tem- per, the only points being the bride's person, her family, and the prospect of male oiTspring. 698 INDIA— DRAMAS istic elements is shown in the Ten Stages, of Love-Sickness as conceived by the Hindoos : (1) desire ; (3) thinking of her (his) beauty ; (3) reminiscent revery ; (4) boasting of her (his) excellence; (5) excitement ; (6) lamentations ; (7) distraction ; (8) illness ; (9) insensibility ; (10) death.' DYING FOR LOVE The notion that the fever of love may become so severe as to lead to death plays an important r61e in Hindoo amorous sophistry. " Hindoo casuists," says Lamairesse (151, 179), " always have a peremptory reason, in their own eyes, for dispensing with all scruples in love-afEairs : the necessity of not dying for love." " It is permissible," says the author of Kama Soutra, " to seduce another man's wife if one is in danger of dying from love for her ; " upon which Lamairesse comments : " This principle, liberally interpreted by those interested, excuses all intrigues ; in theory it is capable of accommodat- ing itself to all cases, and in the practice of the Hindoos it does thus accommodate itself. It is based on the belief that the souls of men who die of ungratified desires flit about a long time as manes before transmigrating." Thus did the wily priests invoke the aid even of supersti- tion to foster that national licentiousness by which they themselves profited most. Small wonder that the Hitopadesa declared (93) that " there is perhaps in all the world not a man who covets not his neighbor's wife ; " or that the same collection of wise stories and maxims should take an equally low view of feminine morals (39, 40, 41, 54, 88) ; e.g. (in substance) : " Then only is a wife faithful to her husband, when no other man covets her." " Seek chastity in those women only who have no opportunity to meet a lover." " A ' This is the list, as given by the eminent Sanscrit scholar, Professor Albreoht Weber in the Abhandlungen fur die Kuncle des Aiendlandes, Vol. V. , 135. Bur- ton, in his original edition of the Arabian Nights (III., 36), gives the stages thus: love of the eyes ; attraction of the man os 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. CJ\ Lamairesse, p. 179. WHAT HINDOO POETS ADMIRE IN WOMEN 699 woman's lust can no more be satisfied than a fire's greed for wood, the ocean's thirst for rivers, death's desire for victims." Another verse in the Hitopadesa (13) declares frankly that of the six good things in the world two of them are a caress- ing wife and a devoted sweetheart beside her — upon which the editor, Johannes Hertel, comments : " To a Hindoo there is nothing objectionable in such a sentiment." WHAT HINDOO POETS ADMIRE IN WOMEN The Hindoo's inability to rise above sensuality also mani- fests itself in his admiration of personal beauty, which is purely carnal. No. 217 of Hala's anthology declares : " Her face resembles the moon, the juice of her mouth nectar ; but wherewith shall I compare (my delight) when I seize her, amid violent struggles, by the head and kiss her ?" Apart from such grotesque comparisons of the face to the moon, or of the teeth to the' lotos, there is nothing in the amorous hyperbole of Hindbo poets that rises above the voluptuous into the neighborhood of esthetic admiration. Hindoo statues embodying the poets' ideal of women's waists so narrow that they can be spanned by the hand, show how in- finitely inferior the Hindoos were to the Greeks in their ap- preciation of human beauty. The Hindoo poet's ideal of feminine beauty is a wasp- waist and grossly exaggerated bust and hips. Bhavabhuti allows his heroine Malati to be thus addressed (by a girl !) : " The wind, sandal-cool, refreshes your moon-face, in which nectar-like drops of perspiration appear from your walking, during which you lifted your feet but slowly, as they wavered under the weight of your thighs, which are strong as those of an elephant." Usually, of course, these grotesquely coarse compliments are paid by the enamored men. Kalidasa makes King Pnruravas, crazed by the loss of Urvasi, exclaim : " Have you seen the divine beauty, who is compelled by the weight of her hips to walk slowly, and who n&l-er sees the flight of youth, whose bosom is high and swelUpg, whose gait is as the swan's ?" In another place he i«efers to her footsteps " pressed in deeper 700 INDIA— DRAMAS behind by the weight of the beloved's hips." Satyavant has no other epithet for Savitri than "beautiful-hipped." It is the same with Saiiuntala's lover (who has been held up as an ancient embodiment of modern ethereal sentiment). What does he admire in Sakuntala ? " Here,"' he says, " in the yellow sand are a number of fresh footsteps ; they are higher in front, but depressed behind by the weight of her hips." "How slow was her gait — and naturally so, considering the weight of her hips." Compare also the poet's remarks on her bodily charms when the king first sees her.^ Amoiig all of the king's hyperbolic compliments and remarks there is not one that shows him to be fascinated by anything but the purely bodily charms of the young girl, charms of a coarse, voluptU' ous kind, calculated to increase Ms pleasure should he suc- ceed in winning her, while there is not a trace of a desire on his part to make her happy. Nor is there anything in Sakun- tala's symptoms rising above selfish distress at her uncertainty, or selfish longing to possess her lover. In a word, there is no romantic love, in our sense of the word, in the dramas of the most romantic poet of the most romantic nation of antiquity.^ ' Prefer?ibly in Boehtlingk's literfil version, which 1 have fpilowed whenever Kellner idealizes. In this ease Kellner spealts of covering ' ' den Umfang des Briistepaars," while Boethlingt h^s *' das starke Brjigtepaar," yrhich espepially arouse the king's " love." " It would hardly be surprising if ICalidEI'Sp, 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 cpme to him from Arabia or from Europe, The t^Vftdition tl^at he flourished as early as the first century of our era was demolished by ProfesBor Weber (Zjfd. lA- Ges,, 217). Professor Max Mtiller (91) found np reason tij 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 supersena"al 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 tlie thir- teenth century, whqm I referred to on p, 199) thaf the qnly te^t of true love is self-sacrifice. It is true that Bhavab^uti, 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 Jife ; but that is also a case of self-defence. The other lover— ^the "hero " of the drama — faints when he sees his friend iii danger ! Generally speaking,. there is ^ pefluliar eflFemin^py, ^ Iflok of true manlinesii, about Hindoo lovers. They are always moping, whining, fainting ; the kings — the typical lovers — habitually neglect the affairs of state to lead a Ufe of voluptuous indulgence. Hindoo sculpture emphasises the same trait ! '* Even in tbe conception of male figures," says Liibke (109), " there is a touch of this WQma,nly sof tnsas ; " there ip " a lack of an energetic life, of a firm contexture of bone and muscle." It is not of such enervated stufiT that true Iqvers are made. THE OLD STORY Of SELFISHNESS TOl THE OLD STOEY OF SELFISHNESS It might be maintained that the symptoms of true affec- tion — altruistic devotion to tlie verge of self-sacrifice — are revealed, at any rate, in the conjugal love of Savitri and of Damayanti. SaVitri follows the god of death as he carries away hei' husband's spirit, and by her devotion and entreaties pel'suades Yama to restore him to life ; while Damayanti (whose stoi'y we did not finish) follows her husband, after he has gambled away all his kingdom, into the forest to suffer with him. One night, while She sleeps, he steals half of her only gatment and deserts her. Left alone in the terrible foi'eSt with tigers and snakes, she sobs aloud and repeatedly faints away from fear. " Yet I do not weep for myself," she exclaims ; "my only thought is, how will you fare, my royal master, being left thus all alone ? " She is seized by a huge snake, which coils its body around her ; yet " even in this situation she thinks not so much of herself as she bewails the fate of the king." A hunter saves her and proceeds to make impropei* advances, but she, faithful to her lord, curses the hunter and he falls dead before her. Then she resumes her Solitary roaming in the gloomy forest, "distressed iy grief for her husband's fate," unmindful of his cruelty, or of her oWn sad plight. It is needless to continue the tale ; the reader cannot be so obtuse as not to notice the moral of it. The stories of Savitri and of Damayanti, far from exemplifying Hindoo conjugal devotion, simply afford fresh proof of the hoggish selfishness of the male Hindoo. They are intended to be object-lessons to wives, teaching them — like the laws of Manu and the custom of widow burning — that they do not exist for their own sakes, but for their husbands. Beading the stories in the light of this remark, we cannot fail to note everywhere the subtle craft of the sly men who invented them. If further evidence were needed to sustain my view it would be found in the fact related by P. Reuleaux, that to this day the priests arrange an annual " prayer-festival " of Hindoo women at which the wife must iu every way show her subjection to her '?02 INDIA— DRAMAS husband and master. She must wash his feet, dry them, put a wreath around his neck, and bring offerings to the gods, praying that he may prosper and live long. Then follows a meal for which she has prepared all Ms favorite dishes. And as a climax, the story of Savitri is read, a story in which the wife lives only for the husband, while he, as he rudely tells her — after all her devotion — lives only for his parents ! If these stories were anything else than slyly planned ob- ject-lessons calculated to impress and subjugate the women, why is it that the husiand is never chosen to act the self- sacrificing part ? He does, indeed, sometimes indulge in frantic outbursts of grief and maudlin sentimentality, but that is because he has lost the young woman who pleased his senses. There is no sign of soul-love here ; the husband never dreams of devoting his life to her, of sacrificing it for her sake, as she is constantly exhorted to do for his sake. In a word, masculine selfishness is the keynote of Hindoo life. " When in danger, never hesitate to sacrifice your goods and your wife to save your life," we read in the Hitopadesa (25) ; and No. 4112 of Boehtlingk's Hindu Maxims declares bluntly that a wife exists for the purpose of bearing sons, and a son for the purpose of offering sacrifices after his father's death. There we have masculine selfishness in a nutshell. Another maxim declares that a wife can atone for her lack or loss of beauty by faithful subjection to her husband. And in return for all the devotion expected of her she is utterly despised — con- sidered unworthy of an education, unfit even to profess vir- ginity — in a word, looked on " as scarcely forming a part of the human species." In the most important event in her life — marriage — her choice is never consulted. The matter is, as we have seen, left to the family barber, or to the parents, to whom questions of caste and wealth are of infinitely more importance than personal preferences. When those matters are arranged the man satisfies himself concerning tlie inclina- tions of the chosen girl's kindred, and when assured that he will not " suffer the affront of a refusal " from them he pro- ceeds with the offer and the bargaining. " To marry or to buy a girl are synonymous terms in this country," says Du- BAYADERES AND PRINCESSES AS HEROINES 703 bois (I., 198) ; and he proceeds to give an account of the bargaining and the disgraceful quarrels this leads to. BATADlSlES AND PRINCESSES AS HEROINES Under such circumstances the Hindoo playwrights must have found themselves in a curious dilemma. They were sufficiently versed in the poetic art to build up a plot ; but what chance for an amorous plot was there in a country where there was no courtship, where women were sold, ig- nored, maltreated, and despised ? Perforce the poets had to neglect realism, give up all idea of mirroring respectable do- mestic life, and take refuge in the realms of tradition, fancy, or liaisons. It is interesting to note how they got around the difficulty. They either made their heroines bayaderes, or prin- cesses, or girls willing to be married in a way allowing them their own choice, but not reputed respectable. Bayaderes, though not permitted to marry, were at liberty to choose their temporary companions. Cudraka indulges in the poetic license of making Vasantasena superior to other bayaderes and rewarding her in the end by a regular marriage as the hero's wife number two. By way of securing variety, apsa- ras, or celestial ba,yaderes, were brought on the scene, as in Kalidasa's Urvasi, permitting the ,poet to indulge in still bolder flights of fancy. Princesses, again, were favorite hero- ines, for various reasons, one of which was the tradition con- cerning the custom called Svayamvara or " Maiden's Choice " — a princess being "permitted," after a tournament, to " choose " the victor. The story of Nala and Damayanti has made us familiar with a similar meeting of kings, at which the princess chooses the lover she has determined on before- hand, though she has never seen him. Apart from the fan- tasticality of this episode, it is obvious that even if the Sva}'- amvara was once a custom in royal circles it did not really insure to the princesses free choice of a rational kind. Brought up in strict seclusion, a king's daughter could never have seen any of the men competing for her. Tlie victor might be the least sympathetic to her of all, and even if she had a large 704 INDIA— DRAMAS number of suitors to choose from, her selectioix could not be based on anything but the momentary and superficial judg- ment of the eye. But for dramatic purposes the Svayamvara was useful. ' « VOLUNTARY UNIONS NOT RESPECTABLE In Sajcuntala, Kalidasa resorts to the third of the expe- dients I have mentioned. The king weds the girl whom he finds in the grove of the saints in accordance with a form which was not regarded as respectable — marriage based on mutual inclination, without the knowledge of the parents. The laws of Mann (III., 20-34) recognized eight kinds of mar- riage : (1) gift of a daughter to a man learned in the Vedas , (3) gift of a daughter to a priest ; (3) gift of a daughter in return for presents of cows, etc. ; (4) gift of a daughter, with a dress. In these four the father gives away his daughter as he chooses. In (.5) the groom buys the girl with presents to her kinsmen or herself ; (6) is voluntary union ; (7) forcible abduction (in war) ; (8) rape of a girl asleep, or drunk, or im- becile. In other words, of the eight kinds of niarriage recog- nized by Hindoo law and custom only one is based on free choice, and of that Mann says : " The voluntary connection of a maiden and a man is to be known as a Gandharva union, which arises from lust." It is classed among the blamable marriages. Even this appears not to have been a legal form before Manu. It is blamable because contracted without the consent or knowledge of the parents, and because, unless the sacred fire has been obtained from a Brahman to sanctify it, such a marriage is merely a temporary union. Gandharvas, after whom it is named, are singers and other musicians in Indra's heaven, who, like the apsaras, enter into unions that are not intended to be enduring, but are dissoluble at will. Such marriages (liaisons we call them) are frequently men- tioned in Hindoo literature (e.g. , Hitopadesa, p. 85). Malati (30) chides her friend for advising her to make a secret mar- riage, and later on exclaims (75) ; "I am lost ! What a girl must not do, my friend counsels me." The orthodox view is VOLUNTARY UNIONS NOT RESPECTABLE 705 unfolded by the Buddhist nun Kamandaki (33) ; " We hear of Duschyanta loving Sakuntala, of Pururavas loving Urvasi . . . but these cases look like arbitrary action and cannot be commended as models." In Sakuntala, too, the king feels it incumbent on him to apologize to the girl he covets, when she bids him not to transgress the laws of propriety, by ex- claiming that many other girls have thus been taken by kings without incurring parental disapproval. The directions for this form of courtship given in the Kama Soutra indicate that Sakuntala had every reason to appeal to the rules of pro- priety, social and moral. Kalidasa spares us the details. The king's desertion of Sakuntala after he had obtained his self-indulgent object was quite in accordance with the spirit of a Gandharva marriage. Kalidasa, for dramatic purposes, makes it a result of a saint's curse, which enables him to con- tinue his story interestingly. A poet has a right to such license, even though it takes him out of the realm of realism. Hindoo poets, like others, know how to rise above sordid reality into a more ideal sphere, and for this reason, even if we had found in the dramas of India a portrayal of true love, it would not prove that it existed outside of a poet's glowing and prophetic fancy. There is a Hindoo saying, " Do not strike a woman, even with a flower ; " but we have seen that these Hindoos often do physically abuse their wives most cruelly, besides subjecting them to indescribable mental an- guish, and mental anguish is much more painful and more prolonged than bodily torture. Fine words do not make fine feelings. From this point of view Dalton was perhaps right when he asserted that the wild tribes of India come closer to us in their love-affairs than the more cultured Hindoos, with their " unromantic heart-schooling." We have seen that Albrecht Weber's high estimate of the Hindoo's romantic sen- timent does not bear the test of a close psychological analysis. The Hindoo may have fewer uncultivated traits of emotion than tlie wild tribesmen, but they are in the same field. Hindoo civilization rose to splendid heights, in some respects, and even the great moral principle of altruism was cultivated ; but it was not applied to the relations between the sexes, and 706 INDIA— DRAMAS thus we see once more that the refinement of the affections — especially the sexual affections — comes last in the evolution of civilization. Masculine selfishness and sensuality have pre- vented the Hindoo from entering the Elysian fields of roman- tic love. He has always allowed, and still allows, the minds of women to lie fallow, being contented with their bodily charms, and unaware that the most delightful of all sexual differences are those of mind aud character. To quote once more the Abb6 Dubois (I., 371), the most minute and philo sophic observer of Indian manners and morals : " The Hindoos are nurtured in the belief that there can be nothing disinterested or innocent in the intercourse between a man and a woman ; and however Platonic the attachment might be between two persons of different sex, it would be infallibly set down to sensual love." DOES THE BIBLE IGNOEE EOMAJSTTIC LOVE? Mt assertion that there are no cases of romantic love re- corded in the Bible naturally aroused opposition, and not a few critics lifted up their voices in loud protest against such ignorant audacity. The case for the defence was well summed up in the Eochester Post-Express : "The ordinary reader will find many love-stories in the Scriptures. What are we to think, for instance, of this passage from the twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis : ' And Laban had two daughters : the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Eachel. Leah was tender- eyed ; but Eachel was beautiful and well-favored. And Jacob loved Eachel ; and said, I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter. And Laban said. It is better that I give her to thee, than that I should give her to another man : abide with me. And Jacob served seven years for Eachel ; and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her.' It may be said that after marriage Jacob's love was not of the modern conjugal type ; but cer- tainly his pre-matrimonial passion was self-sacrificing, en- during, and hopeful enough for a mediaeval romance. The courtship of Ruth and Boaz is a bold and pretty love-story, which details the scheme of an old widow and a young widow for the capture of a wealthy kinsman. The Song of Solomon is, on the surface, a wonderful love-poem. But it is needless to multiply illustrations from this source." A Chicago critic declared that it would be easy to show that from the moment when Adam said, " This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh ; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and cleave unto his wife : and they shall be one flesh " — from that moment unto this day " that which it pleases our author to call romantic love has been substantially one aud the same thing. . . . 707 708 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? lias this writer never heard of Isaac and Eebekah ; of Jacob and Rachel ? " A Philadelphia reviewer doubted whether I believed in my own theory because I ignored in my chapter on love among the Hebrews " the story of Jacob and Rachel and other similar instances of what deserves to be called ro- mantic love among the Hebrews." Professor il. C. Trum- bull emphatically repudiates my theory iu his Studies in Oriental Social Life (63-63) ; proceeding : " Yet in the very first book of the Old Testament narrative there appears the story of young Jacob's romantic love for Rachel, a love which was inspired by their first meeting [Gen. 29 : 10-18] and which was a fresh and tender memory in the patriarch Jacob's mind when long years after he had buried her in Canaan [Gen. 35 ; 16-20] he was on his death- bed in Egypt [Gen. 48 : 1-7]. In all the literature of romantic love in all the ages there can be found no more touching ex- hibit of the true-hearted fidelity of a romantic lover than that which is given of Jacob in the words : ' And Jacob served seven years for Rachel ; and they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her.' And the entire story con- firms the abiding force of that sentiment. There are, cer- tainly, gleams of romantic love from out of the clouds of de- graded human passion in the ancient East, in the Bible stories of Shechem and Dinah [Gen. 34 : 1-31], of Samson and the damsel of Timnath [Judg. 14 : 1-3], of David and Abigail [I. Sam. 25 : 1-42], of Adonijah and Abishag [I. Kings 2 : 13-17], and other men and women of whom the Scriptures tell us." Cenac Moncaut, who begins his Histoire de I' Amour dans VAntiquite with Adam and Eve, declares (28-31) that the episode of Jacob and Rachel marks the birth of perfect love in the world, the beginning of its triumph, followed, however, by relapses in days of darkness and degradation. If all these writers are correct then my theory falls to the ground and romantic love must be conceded to be at least four thousand years old, instead of less than one thousand. But let us look at the facts in detail and see whether there is really no differ- ence between ancient Hebrew and modern Christian love. The Rev. Stopford Brooke has remarked : "Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph may have existed as real men, and played THE STORY OF JACOB AND RACHEL 709 their part in the founding of the Jewish race, hut their stories, aS we have them, are as entirely legendary as those of Artliur or Siegfried, of Agamemnon or Charlemagne." This consid- eration would bring the date of the story from the time when Jacob is supposed to have lived down to the much later time when the legend was elaborated. I have no desire, however, to seek refuge behind such chronological uncertainties, nor to reassert that my theory is a question of evolution rather than of dates, and that, therefore, if Jacob and Eachel, dur- ing their prolonged courtship, had the qualities of mind and character to feel the exalted sentiment of romantic love, we might concede in their case an exception which, by its strik- ing isolation, would only prove tlie rule. I need no such refuge, for I can see no reason whatever for accepting the story of Jacob and Eachel as an exceptional instance of romantic love. THE STOET OF JACOB AND EACHEL Nothing could be more charmingly poetic than this story as told by the old Ilebi'ew chronicler. The language is so sirnple yet so pictorial that we fancy we can actually see Jacob as he accosts the shepherds at the well to ask after his uncle Laban, and they reply " Behold, Eachel his daughter Cometh with the sheep.'' We see him as he rolls the stone from the well's mouth and waters his uncle's flocks ; we see him as he kisses Eachel and lifts up his voice and weeps. He kisses her of course by right of being a relative, and not as a lover ; for we cannot suppose that even an Oriental shepherd girl could have been so devoid of maidenly prudence and coy- ness as to give a love-kiss to a stranger at their first meeting. Though apparently her cousin (Gen. 38 : 2 ; 29 : 10), Jacob tells her he is her uncle ; " and Jacob told Eachel that he was her father's brother."' There was the less impropriety in his • An explanation of this discrepancy may be found in A. K. Fiske's suggestion (191) tliat there is a douHe source for this story The reader will please bear in mind that all my quotations are from the revised version of the Bible. I do not believe in retaining inaccurate translations simply because they were made long ago. 710 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? kissing her, as she was probably a girl of fifteen or sixteen and he old enough to be her grandfather, or even great-grand- father, his age at the time of meeting her being seventy-seven.* But as men are reported to have aged slowly in those days, this did not prevent him from desiring to marry Eachel, for whose sake he was willing to serve her father. Strange to say, the words " And Jacob served seven years for Kachel " have been accepted as proof of self-sacrifice by several writers, including Dr. Abel, who cites those words as indicating that the ancient Hebrews knew " the devotion of love, which gladly serves the beloved and shuns no toil in her behalf." In reality Jacob's seven years of service have nothing whatever to do with self-sacrifice. He did not " serve his beloved " but her father ; did not toil " in her behalf " but on his own behalf. He was simply doing that very unromantic thing, paying for his wife by working a stipulated time for her father, in accordance with a custom prevalent among primi- tive peoples the world over. Our text is very explicit on the subject ; after Jacob had been with his relative a month Laban had said unto him : " Because thou art my brother shouldst thou therefore serve me for naught ? tell me what shall thy wages be ? " And Jacob had chosen Rachel for his wages. Rachel and Leah themselves quite understood the commercial nature of the matrimonial arrangement ; for when, years afterward, they are prepared to leave their father they say : " Is there yet any portion or inheritance for us in our father's house ? Are we not counted of him strangers ? for he hath sold us, and hath also quite devoured the price paid for us." Instead of the sentimental self-sacrifice of a devoted lover for his mistress we have here, therefore, simply an example of a prosaic, mercenary marriage custom familiar to all students of anthropology. But how about the second half of that sen- tence, which declares that Jacob's seven years of service 'MoClintook and Strong's Encyclop. of Biblical Literature says: "It must be borne in mind that Jacob himself had now reached the mature age of seventy- seven years, as appears from a comparison of Joseph's age . . . with Jacob's." That Rachel was not much over fifteen may be assumed because among Orien- tal nomadic races shepherd girls are very seldom unmarried after that age, or even an earlier age, for obvious reasons. THE STORY OF JACOB AND RACHEL 711 " seemed to him but a few days for the love he had for her ? " Is not this the language of an expert in love ? Many of my critics, to my surprise, seemed to think so, but I am con- vinced that none of them can have ever been in love or they would have known that a lover is so impatient and eager to call his beloved irrevocably his own, so afraid that someone else might steal away her affection from him, that Jacob's seven years, instead of shrinking to a few days, would have seemed to him like seven times seven years. A minute examination of the story of Jacob and Eachel thus reveals world-wide differences between the ancient He- brew and the modern Christian conceptions of love, corre- sponding, we have no reason to doubt, to differences in actual feeling. And as we proceed, these differences become more and more striking : " And Jacob said unto Laban, Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her. And Laban gathered together all the men of the place, and made a feast. And it came to pass in the evening, that he took Leah his daughter, and brought her to him ; and he went in unto her. . . . And it came to pass, in the morning that, behold, it was Leah : and he said to Laban, What is this thou has done unto me ? Did not I serve with thee for Eachel ? Wherefore then hast thon beguiled me ? And Laban said. It is not so done in our place, to give the younger before the first-born. Fulfil the week of this one, and we will give thee the other also for the service which tliou shalt serve with me yet seven other years. And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week ; and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife." Surely it would be difficult to condense into so few lines more facts and conditions abhorrent to the Christian concep- tion of the sanctity of love than is done in this passage. Can anyone deny that in a modern Christian country Laban's breach of contract with Jacob, his fraudulent substitution of the wrong daughter, and Jacob's meek acceptance of two wives in eight days would not only arouse a storm of moral indignation, but would land both these men in a police court and in jail ? I say this not in a flippant spirit, but merely to bring out as vividly as possible the difference between the an- 712 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? cient Hetrew and modern Christian ideals of love. Further- more, what an utter ignorance or disregard of the rights of personal preference, sympathy, and all the higher ingredients of love, is revealed in Laban's remark that it vpas not custom- ary to give the younger daughter in marriage before the older had been disposed of ! And how utterly opposed to the modern conception of love is the sequel of the story, in wliicli we are told that "because" Leah was hated by her husband " therefore " she was made fruitful, and she bore him four sons, while the beloved Eachel remained barren ! Was per- sonal preference thus not only to be repressed by marrying oil girls according to their age, but even punished ? No doubt it was, according to the Hebrew notion ; in their patriarchal mode of life the father was the absolute tyrant in the house- hold, who reserved the right to select spouses for both his sons and daughters, and felt aggrieved if his plans were inter- fered with. The object of mai'riage was not to make a happy, sympathetic couple, but to raise sons ; wherefore the hated Leah naturally exclaims, after she has borne Reuben, her first son, " Now my husband will love me." That is not the kind of love we look for in our marriages. We expect a man to love his wife for her own sake. This notion, that the birth of sons is the one object of marriage, and the source of conjugal love, is so preponder- ant in the minds of these women that it crowds out all traces of monopoly or jealousy. Leah and Eachel not only submit to Laban's fraudulent substitution on the wedding-night, but each one meekly accepts her half of Jacob's attentions. The utter absence of jealousy is strikingly revealed in this pas- " And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister ; and she said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel : and he said. Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb ? And she said. Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her ; that she may bear upon my knees, and I also may obtain children by her. And she gave him Bilhah her handmaid to wife : and Jacob went in unto her. And Bilhah conceived and bare / THE STORY OF JACOB AND RACHEL 713 Jacob a son. . . . And Bilhah, Racliel's liaudmaicl, con- ceived agiiin, and bare Jacob a second son. . . . When Leah saw she had left bearing, she took Zilpah her hand- maid, and gave her to Jacob to wife. And Zilpah Leah's handmaid bare Jacob a son. . . . And God hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and bare Jacob a fifth son. And Leah said, God hath given me my hire, because I gave my handmaid to my husband." Thus polygamy and concubinage are treated not only as a matter of course, but as a cause for divine reward ! It might be said that there does exist a sort of jealousy between Leah and Rachel : a rivalry as to which of the two shall bear their husband the more sons, either by herself or by proxy. But how utterly different this rivalry is from the jealousy of a modern Christian wife, the very essence of which lies in the imperative insistence on the exclusive affection and chaste fidelity of her husband ! And as modern Christian jealousy differs from ancient Hebrew jealousy, so does modern ro- mantic love in general differ from Hebrew love. There is not a line in the story of Jacob and Rachel indicating the existence of monopoly, jealousy, coyness, hyperbole, mixed moods, pride, sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, adoration, purity. Of the thirteen essential ingredients of romantic love only two are implied — individual preference and admira- tion of personal beauty. Jacob preferred Rachel to Leah, and this preference was based on her bodily charms : she was " beautiful and vt'ell-favored." Of the higher mental phases of personal beauty not a word is said. In the case of the women, not even their individual pre- ference is hinted at, and this is eminently characteristic of the ancient Hebrew notions and practices in regard to mar- riage. Did Rachel and Leah marry Jacob because they pre- ferred him to all other men they knew ? To Laban and his contemporaries such a question would have seemed absurd. They knew nothing of marriage as a union of souls. The woman was not considered at all. The object of marriage, as in India, was to raise sons, in order that there might be someone to represent the departed father. Being chiefly for the father's benefit, the marriage was naturally arranged \ 714 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? by him. As a matter of fact, even Jacob did not select his own wife ! " And Isaac called Jacob, and blessed him, and charged him and said unto him. Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan, Arise, go to Padan-aram, to the house of Bethuel, thy mother's father ; and take thee a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban thy mother's bfother." And Jacob did as ordered. His choice was limited to the two sisters. THE COUETIITG OF KEBEKAH Isaac himself had even less liberty of choice than Jacob. He courted Rebekah by proxy — or rather his father courted her through her father, for him, by proxy ! When Abraham was stricken with age he said to his servant, the elder of his house, that ruled over all that he had, and enjoined on him, under oath, " thou shalt not take a wife for. my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I shall dwell ; but thou shalt go into my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife for my son Isaac." And the servant did as he had been ordered. He journeyed to the city of Mesopotamia where Abraham's brother Nahor and his descendants dwelt. As he lingered at the well, Eebekah came out with her pitcher upon her shoulder. " And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her." And she filled her pitcher and gave him drink and then drew water and filled the trough for all his camels. And he gave her a ring and two bracelets of gold'. And she ran and told her mother's house what had happened. And her brother Laban ran out to meet the servant of Abraham and brought him to the house. Then the servant delivered his message to him and to Eebekah's father, Bethuel ; and they answered : " Be- hold, Rebekah is before thee, take her, and go, and let her be thy master's son's wife." And he wanted to take her next day, but they wished her to abide with them at the least ten days longer. " And they said. We will call the damsel, and inquire at her mouth. And they called Eebekah, and said unto her, wilt thou go with this man ? And she said, I will go. And they sent away Eebekah their sister, and her nurse. HOW RUTH COURTED BOAZ 715 and Abraham's servant, and his men. " And Isaac was in the field meditating when he saw their camels coming toward him. Eebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac she lighted oflE her camel, and asked the servant who was the man coming to meet them ; and when he said it was his mas- ter, she took her veil and covered herself. And Isaac brought her into her mother's tent and she became his wife, and he loved her. Such is the story of the courting of Eebekah. It resembles a story of modern courtship and love about as much as the Hebrew language resembles the English, and calls for no further comment. But there is another story to consider ; my critics accused me of ignoring the three E's of Hebrew love — Eachel, Eebekah, and Euth. " The courtship of Euth and Boaz is a bold and pretty love-story." Bold and pretty, no doubt ; but let us see if it is a love-story. The following omits no essential point. HOW RUTH COURTED BOAZ It came to pass during a famine that a certain man went to sojourn in the country of Moab with his wife, whose name was Naomi, and two sons. The husband died there and the two sons also, having married, died after ten years, leaving Naomi a widow with two widowed daughters-in-law, whose names were Orpah and Euth. She decided to return to the country whence she had come, but advised the younger wid- ows to remain and go back to the families of their mothers. 1 am too old, she said, to bear again husbands for you, and even if I could do so, would you therefore tarry till they were grown ? Orpah thereupon kissed her mother-in-law and went back to her people ; but Euth clave unto her and said " Whither thou goest, I will go ; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. . . . Where thou diest, will I die." So the two went until they came to Bethlehem, in which place Naomi had a kinsman of her husband, a mighty man of wealth, whose name was Boaz. They arrived in the beginning of the barley harvest, and Euth went and gleaned in the field after the reapers. Her hap was to light on the portion of the field belonging to Boaz. When he saw her he asked the reapers " Whose damsel is this ? " And they told him. Then Boaz spoke to Euth and told her to glean in his field and abide with 716 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? his maidens, and when athirst drink of that which the young men had drawn ; and he told the young men not to touch her. At meal-time he gave her bread to eat and vinegar to dip it in, and he told his young men to let her glean even among the sheaves and also to pull out some for her from the bundles, and leave it, and let her glean and rebuke her not. And he did all this because, as he said to her, ' ' It hatll been shewed me, all that thou hast done to thy mother-in- law since the death of thine husband : and how thou hast left thy father and mother, and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people which thou knewest not heretofore." So Ruth gleaned in the field until even ; then she beat out what she had gleaned and took it to Naomi and told her all that had happened. And Naomi said unto her, " My daugh- ter, shall I not seek rest for thee, that it may be well with thee ? And now is there not Boaz our kinsman, with whose maidens thou wast ? Behold, he winnoweth barley to-night in the threshing-floor. Wash thyself therefore, and anoint thee and put thy raiment upon thee, and get thee down to the threshing-floor ; but make not thyself known unto the man, until he shall have done eating and drinking. And it shall be, when he lietli down, that thou shalt mark the place where he shall lie, and thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet, and lay thee down ; and he will tell thee what thou wilt do." And Euth did as her rriother-in-law .bade her. And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn ; and she oarne softly and uncovered his feet, and laid her down. And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid [startled], and turned himself ; and, behold, a woman lay at his feet. And he said, " who art thou ?'' And she answered, " I am Ruth thine handmaid ; spread therefore thy skirt over thine hand- maid ; for thou art a near kinsman." And he said, "Blessed be thou of the Lord, my daughter ; thou hast shewed more kindness in the latter end, than at the beginning, inasmuch as thoU followedst not young men, whether poor or rich. And now, my daughter, fear not ; I will do to thee all that thou sayest ; for all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman. And now it is true that I am a near kinsman : howbeit there is a kinsman nearer than I. Tarry this night, and it shall be in the morning, that if he will perform unto thee the part of a kinsman, well ; let him do the kinsman's part ; but if he will not do the part of a kinsman to thee, then will I do the part of a kinsman to thee, as the Lord liveth : lie down until the morning." And she lay at his feet until the morning : and she rose up before HOW RUTH COURTED BOAZ 717 one could discern another. For he said, " Let it not be known that the woman came to the threshing-floor." Then he gave her six measures of barley and went into the city. He sat at the gate until the other kinsman he had spoken of came by, and Boaz said to him, " Naomi selleth the parcel of land which was our brother Elimelech's. If thou wilt redeem it, redeem it ; but if thou wilt not redeem it, then tell me that I may know ; for there is none to redeem it beside thee ; and I am after thee. What day thou buyest the field of the hand of Naomi, thou must buy it also of Ruth, the wife of the dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance." And the near kinsman said, " I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar mine own inheritance ; take then my right of redemption on thee ; for I cannot redeem it. Buy it for thyself." And he drew off his shoe. And Boaz called the elders to witness, saying, " Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be not cut off from among his brethren, and from the gate of his place." So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. How anyone can read this charmingly told, frankj and realistic tale of ancient Hebrew life and call it a love-story, passeth all understanding. There is not the slightest sug- gestion of love, either sensual or sentimental, on the part of either Ruth or Boaz. Ruth, at the suggestion of her mother- in-law, spends a night in a way which would convict a Chris- tian widow, to say the least, of an utter lack of that modesty and coy reserve which are a woman's great charm, and which, even among the pastoral Hebrews, cannot have been approved, inasmuch as Boaz did not want it to be known that she had come to the thresh ing-flooi*. He praises Ruth for following " not young men, whether rich or poor." She followed him, a wealthy old man. Would love have acted thus ? What she wanted was not a lover but a protector ("rest for thee that it may be well for thee," as Naomi said frankly), and above all a son in order that her husband's name might not perish. Boaz understands this as a matter of course ; but so far is he, on his part, from being in love with Ruth, that he offers her first to the other relative, and on his re- fusal, buys her for himself, without the least show of emotion indicating that he was doing anything but his duty. He was 718 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? simply fulfilling the law of the Levirate, as written in Deu- teronomy (35 :5), ordaining that if a husband die without leaving a son his brother shall take the widow to him to wife and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her ; that is, to beget a son (the first-born) who shall succeed in the name of his dead brother, "that his name be not blotted out of Israel." How very seriously the Hebrews took this law is shown by the further injunction that if a brother refuses thus to perform his duty, " then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak unto him : and if he stand and say, I like not to take her ; then shall his brother's wife come into him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe off his foot, and spit in his face ; and she shall answer and say, so shall it be done unto the man that doth not build up his brother's house. And his name shall be called in Israel, the house of him that hath his shoe loosed." Onan was even slain for thus refusing to do his duty (Gen. 38 : 8-10). NO SYMPATHY OE SENTIMENT The three E's of Hebrew love thus show how these people arranged their marriages with reference to social and relig- ious customs or utilitarian considerations, buying their wives by service or otherwise, without any thought of sentimental preferences and sympathies, such as underlie modern Chris- tian marriages of the higher order. It might be argued that the ingredients of romantic love existed, but simply are not dwelt on in the old Hebrew stories. But it is impossible to believe that the Bible, that truly inspired and wonderfully realistic transcript of life, which records the minutest details, should have neglected in its thirty-nine books, making over seven hundred pages of fine print, to describe at least one case of sentimental infatuation, romantic adoration, and self- sacrificing devotion in pre-matrimonial love, had such love existed. Why should it have neglected to describe the mani- festations of sentimental love, since it dwells so often on the symptoms and results of sensual passion ? Stories of lust A MASCULINE IDEAL OF WOMANHOOD 719 aboand in the Hebrew Scriptures ; Genesis alone has five. The Lord repented that he had made man on earth and de- stroyed even his chosen people, all but Noah, because every imagination in the 'thoughts of man's heart "was only evil continually." But the flood did not cure the evil, nor did the destruction of Sodom, as a warning example. It is after those events that the stories are related of Lot's incestuous daughters, the seduction of Dinah, the crime of Judah and Tamar, the lust of Potiphar's wife, of David and Bath-sheba, of Amnon and Tamar, of Absalom on the roof, with many other references to such crimes.^ A MASCULINE IDEAL OF WOMAKHOOD There is every reason to conclude that these ancient Jews, unlike many of their modern descendants, knew only the coarser phases of the instinct which draws man to woman. They knew not romantic love for the simple reason that they had not discovered the charm of refined femininity, or even recognized woman's right to exist for her own sake, and not merely as man's domestic servant and the mother of his sons. " Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee," Eve was told in Eden, and her male descendants administered that punishment zealously and persistently ; whereas the same lack of gallantry which led Adam to put all the blame on Eve impelled his descendants to make the women share his part of the curse too — " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread " ; for they were obliged to do not only all the work in the house, but most of that in the fields, seething under a tropical sun. From this point of view the last chapter of the Proverbs (31 : 10-31) is instructive. It is often referred to as a portrait of a perfect woman, but in reality it is little more than a picture of Hebrew masculine selfishness. Of the forty-five lines making up this chapter, nine are devoted to praise of the feminine virtues of fidelity to a husband, kindness to the needy, strength, dignity, wis- •Gen. 19:1-9; 19:30-;68; 34:1-31; 38:8-25; 39:&-30; Jndges 19:28-30; n. Sam. 3 : 6-9 ; 11 : 3-27 ; 13 : 1-22 ; 16 : 23 ; etc. 720 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? dotn, and fear of the Lord ; while the rest of the chapter goes to show that the Hebrew woman indeed " eateth not the bread of idleness," and that the husband " shall have no lack of gain " — or spoil, as the alternative reacfing is : " She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchant ships : she bringetli her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and §iveth meat to her household, and their task to the maidens, he considereth a field and bijyeth it ; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. . . . She perceiveth that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. . . . She maketh for herself carpets of tapestry. . . . She maketh linen garments and selleth them ; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant." As for the husband, he " is known in the gates. When he sitteth among the elders of the land," which is an easy and pleasant thing to do ; hardly in accordance with the curse the Lord pronounced on Adam and his male descendants. The wife being thus the maid of all work, as among Indians and other primitive races, it is natural that the ancient He- brew ideal of femininity should be masculine : "She girdeth her loins with strength, and maketh strong her arms ; " while the feminine charms are sneered at : " Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain." NOT THE CHEISTIAIT IDEAL OF LOVE Not only feminine charms, but the highest feminine virtues are sometimes strangely, nay, shockingly disregarded, as in the story of Lot (Gen. 19 : 1-13), who, when besieged by the mob clamoring for the two men who had taken refuge in his house, went' out and said : " I pray you, my brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man ; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes ; only unto these men do nothing, forasmuch as they are come under the shadow of my roof." And this man was saved, though his action was surely more villainous than the wickedness of the NOT THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LOVE 731 Sodomites who were destroyed with brimstone and fire. In Judges (19 : 22-30) we read of a man offering his maiden daughter and his concubine to a mob to prevent an unnatural crime being committed against his guest : " Seeing that this man is come into my house, do not this folly." This case is of extreme sociological importance as showing that not- withstanding the strict laws of Moses (Levit. 20 : 10 ; Deut. 23 : 13-30) on sexual crimes, the law of hospitality seems to have been held more sacred than a father's regard for liis daughter's honor. The story of Abraham shows, too, that he did not hold his wife's honor in the same esteem as a modern Christian does : "And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, ' Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon ; and it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say. This is his wife ; and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. Say, I pray thee. Thou art my sister ; that it may be well with me for thy sake, and that my soul may live because of thee." And it happened as he had arranged. She was taken into Pharaoh's house and he was treated well for her sake ; and he had sheep, and oxen, and other presents. When he went to so- journ in Gerar (Gen. 20 : 1-15) Abraham tried to repeat tlie same stratagem, taking refuge, when found out, in the double excuse that he was afraid he would be slain for his wife's sake, and that she really was his sister, the daughter of his father, but not the daughter of his mother. Isaac fol- lowed his father's example in Gerar : " The man of the place asked him of his wife ; and he said. She is my sister : for lie feared to say. My wife ; lest (said he) the men of the place should kill me for Kebekah ; because she was fair to look upon." Yet we were told that Isaac loved Rebekah. Such is not Christian love. The actions of Abraham and Isaac re- mind one of the Blackfoot Indian tale told on page 631 of this volume. An American army officer would not only lay down his own life, but shoot his wife with his own pistol before he would allow her to fall into the enemy's hands, because to him her honor is, of all things human, the most sacred. 723 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? UNCHIVALEOUS SLAUGHTER OF WOMEN Emotions are the product of actions or of ideas about actions. Inasmuch as Hebrew actions toward women and ideas about them were so radically difEerent from ours it logically follows that they cannot have known the emotions of love as we know them. The only symptom of love referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures is Amnon's getting lean from day to day and feign- ing sickness (II. Sam. 13 : 1-33) ; and the story shows what kind of love that was. It would be contrary to all reason and psychological consistency to suppose that modern tenderness of romantic feeling toward women could have existed among a people whose greatest and wisest man could, for any reason whatever, chide a returning victorious army, as Moses did (Numbers 31 : 9-19), for saving all the women alive, and could issue this command : " Now, therefore, kill every male among the living ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." The Arabs were the first Asiatics who spared women in war ; the Hebrews had not risen to that chival- rous stage of civilization. Joshua (8 : 36) destroyed Ai and slew 13,000, " both of men and women : " and in Judges (31 : 10-13) we read how the congregation sent an army of 13,000 men and commanded them, saying, "Go and smite the inhab- itants of Jabesh-gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the little ones. And this is the thing ye shall do ; ye shall utterly destroy every male and every woman that hath lain by man.'' And they did so, sparing only the four hundred virgins. These were given to the tribe of Benjamin, "that a tribe be not blotted out from Israel ; " and when it was found that more were needed they lay in wait in the vineyards, and when the daughters of Shiloh came out to dance, they caught them and carried them off as their wives ; whence we see that these Hebrews had not advanced beyond the low stage of evolution, when wives are secured by capture or killed after battle. Among such seek not for romantic love. ABISHAG THE SHUNAMMITE 723 FOUR MORE BIBLE STORIES Dr. Trnmbull's opinion has already been cited that there are certainly " gleams of romantic love from out of the clouds of degraded human passions in the ancient East/' in the stories of Shechem and Dinah, Samson and the damsel of Timnah, David and Abigail, Adonijah and Abishag. But I fail to find even " gleams " of romantic love in these stories. Shechem said he loved Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, but he humbled her and dealt with her "as with an harlot," as her brothers said after they had slain him for his conduct toward her. Concerning Samson and the Timnah girl we are simply told that he saw her and told his father, " Get her for me ; for she pleaseth me well " (literally, " she is right in my eyes "). And this is evidence of romantic love ! As for Abigail, after her husband has refused to feed David's shepherds, and David has made up his mind there- fore to slay him and his ofEspring, she takes provisions and meets David and induces him not to commit that crime ; she does this not from love for her husband, for when David has received her presents he says to her, " See, I have heark- ened to thy voice, and have accepted thy person." Ten days later, Abigail's husband died, and when David heard of it he " sent and spake concerning Abigail, to take her to him to wife. . . . And she rose and bowed herself with her face to the earth, and said. Behold, thine handmaid is a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my lord. And Abigail, hasted, and arose, and rode upon an ass, with five damsels of hers that followed her ; and she went after the messengers of David, and became his wife." And as if to emphasize how utterly unsentimental and un-Christian a transaction this was, the next sentence tells us that " David also took Ahin- oam of Je^'eel ; and they became both of them his wives." ABISHAG THE SHUlfAMMITE The last of the stories referred to by Dr. Trumbull, though as far from proving his point as the others, is of peculiar in- terest because it introduces us to the maiden who is believed 724 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? by some commentators to be the same as the Shulamite, the heroine of the Soncj of Songs. After Solomon had become king his elder brother, Adonijah, went to the mother of Solomon, Bath-sheba, and said : " Thou knowest thy king- dom was mine, and that all Israel set their faces on me, that I should reign : howbeit the kingdom is turned about, and is become my brother's : for it was his from the Lord. And now I ask one petition of thee, deny me not. . . . Speak, I pray thee, unto Solomon the king (for he will not say thee nay) that he give me Abishag the Shunammite to wife.^^ But when Solomon heard this request he declared that Adonijah had spoken that word against his own life ; and he sent a man who fell on him and killed him. Who was this Abishag, the Shunammite ? The opening lines of the First Book of Kings tell us how she came to the court : " Now King David was old and stricken in years ; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him. Let there be sought for my lord the king, a young virgin, and let her stand before the king and cherish him ; and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. And the damsel was very fair ; and she cherished the king, and ministered to him ; but the king knew her not." THE SONG OF SONGS Now it is plausibly conjectured that this Abishag of Shu- nam or Shulam (a town north of Jerusalem) was the same as the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, and that in the lines 6 : 11-13 she tells how she was kidnapped and brought to . court : 1 went down into the garden of nuts, To see the green plants of the valley, To see whether the vine budded, And the pomegranates were in flower, Or ever I was aware, my soul [desirej set me Among the chariots of viy princely people. THE SONG OF SONGS 725 She also explains why her face is tanned like the dark tents of Kedar : "My mother's sons were incensed against me. They made me keeper of the vineyards." The added words "mine own vineyard have I not kept "are interpreted by some as an apology for her neglected personal appearance, but Kenan (10) more plausibly refers them to her conscious- ness of some indiscretion, which led to her capture. We may suppose that, attracted by the glitter and the splendor of the royal cavalcade, she for a moment longed to enjoy it, and her desire was gratified. Brought to court to comfort the old king, she remained after his death at the palace, and Solomon, who wished to add her to his harem, killed his own brother when he found him coveting her. The maiden soon regrets her indiscretion in having exposed herself to capture. She is " a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley," and she feels like a wildflower transplanted to a palace hall. While Sol- omon in all his glory urges his suit, she, tormented by home- sickness, thinks only of her vineyard, her orchards, and the young shepherd whose love she enjoyed in them. Absent- minded, as one in a revery, or dreaming aloud, she answers the addresses of the king and his women in words that ever refer to her shepherd lover : ' " Tell me, thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feed- est thy flock." " My beloved is unto me as a cluster of henna flowers in the vineyards of En-gedi." " Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant : Also our couch is green." '■ As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my be- loved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste." " The voice of my beloved ! behold, he cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills." " My beloved is mine, and I am his : He feedeth his flock among the lilies." ^' Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field, let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards. . . . There will 1 give thee my love." The home-sick country girl, in a word, has found out that the splendors of the palace are not to her taste, and the ' For whom the Hebrew poet has a special word Idodi) different from that used when Solomon is referred to. 726 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? thought of being a young shepherd's darling is pleasanter to her than that of being an old king's concubine. The polyg- amous rapture with which Solomon addresses her : " There are three-score queens and four-score concubines, and maid- ens without number," does not appeal to her rural taste. She has no desire to be the hundred and forty-first piece of mosaic inlaid in Solomon's palanquin (III., 9-10), and she stubbornly resists his advances until, impressed by her firm- ness, and unwilling to force her, the king allows her to return to her vineyard and her lover. The view that the gist of the Song of Songs is the Shula- mite's love of a shepherd and her persistent resistance to the advances of Solomon, was first advanced in 1771 by J. F. Jacobi, and is now universally accepted by the commentators, the overwhelming majority of whom have also given up the artificial and really blasphemous allegorical interpretation of this poem once in vogue, but ignored in the Revised Version, as well as the notion that Solomon wrote the poem. Apart from all other arguments, which are abundant, it is absurd to suppose that Solomon would have written a drama to proclaim his own failure to win the love of a simple country girl. In truth, it is very probable that, as Eenan has elo- quently set forth (91-100), the Song of Songs was written practically for the purpose of holding up Solomon to ridicule. In the northern part of his kingdom there was a strong feel- ing against him on account of his wicked ways and vicious innovations, especially his harem, and other expensive habits that impoverished the country. "Taken all in all," says the Rev. W. E. Griffis, of Solomon (44), " he was probably one of the worst sinners described in the Old Testament. With its usual truth and fearlessness, the Scriptures expose his real character, and by the later prophets and by Jesus he is ignored or referred to only in rebuke." The contempt and hatred inspired by his actions were especially vivid shortly after his death, when the Song of Songs is believed to have been writ- ten (Renan, 97); and, as this author remarks (100), "the poet seems to have been animated by a real spite against the king ; the establishment of a harem, in particular, appears to THE SONG OF SONGS 727 incense him greatly, and he takes evident pleasure in showing us a simple shepherd girl triumphing over the presumptuous sultan who thinks he can buy love, like everything else, with his gold." That this is intended to be the moral of this Biblical drama is further shown by the famous lines near the close : " For love is strong as death ; jealousy is cruel as the grave [liter- ally : passion is as inexorable (or hard) as sheol] : The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench it, nor can the floods drown it : If a man should give all the substance of his house for love, he [it] would utterly be contemned." These lines constitute the last of the passages cited by my critics to prove that the ancient Hebrews knew romantic love and its power. They doubtless did know the power of love ; all the ancient civil- ized nations knew it as a violent sensual impulse which blindly sacrifices life to attain its object. The ancient Hindoos em- bodied their idea of irresistible power in the force and fury of an amorous elephant. Among animals in general, love is even stronger than death. Male animals of most species en- gage in deadly combat for the females. " For most insects," says Letourneau, " to love and to die are almost synonymous terms, and yet they do not even try to resist the amorous frenzy that urges them on." Yet no one would dream of calling this romantic love ; from that it differs as widely as the insect mind in general differs from the human mind. Waters cannot quench any kind of love or affection nor floods drown it. What we are seeking for are actions or words, de- scribing the specific symptoms of sentimental love, and these are not to be found in this passage any more than elsewhere in the Bible. An old man may buy a girl's body, but he cannot, with all his wealth and splendor, awaken her love, either sen- timental or sensual ; love, whatever its nature, will always prefer the apple-tree and the shepherd lover to the vain de- sires and a thousand times divided attentions of a decrepit king, though he be a Solomon. It would be strange if this purely profane poem, which was added to the Scriptural collection only by an unusual stretch 728 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? of liberality/ and in which there is not one mention of God or of religion, should give a higher conception of sexual love than the books which are accepted as inspired, and which paint manners, emotions, and morals as the writers found them. As a matter of fact the Song of Songs was long held to be so objectionable that the Talmudists did not allow young people to read it before their thirtieth year. Whiston denounced it as foolish, lascivious, and idolatrous. " The excessively amative character of some j^assages is designated as almost blasphemous when supposed to be addressed by Christ to his Church," ^ as it was by the allegorists. On the other hand there is a class of commentators to whom this poem is the ideal of all that is pure and lovely. Herder went into ecstasies over it. Israel Abrahams refers to it (163) as " the noblest of love-poems ;" as "this idealization of love." The Bev. W. E. Griffis declares rapturously (166, 63, 21, 16, 250) that " the purest-minded virgin may safely read the Song of Songs, in which is no trace of immoral thought.'' lu it "sensuality is scorned and pure love glorified;" it " sets forth the eternal romance of true love," and is " chastely pure in word and delicate in idea throughout." "The poet of the Canticle shows us how to love." "An angel might envy such artless love dwelling in a human heart." The trpth, as usual in such cases, lies about half-way between these extreme views. There is only one passage wliich is objectionably coarse in the English version and in the Hebrew original obscene;' yet, on the other hand, I maintain that the whole poem is purely Oriental in its ex- clusively sensuous and often sensual character, and that there is not a tr^^ce of romantic- sentiment such as would color a similar love-story if told by a modern j^oet. The Song of Songs is so confused in its arrangement, its plan so obscure, * See Renan, Preface, p. iv. It is of all Biblical books, the one *' pour Ipqiiel les scril^es q^ui put decide' du sort des 6critB hdbreux ont le plus glargi leurB regies d'admission." ' MoClintock and Strong. 'In the seventh chapter there are lines where, as Renan points out (50), the speaker, in describing the girl, " vante sea oharmes les plusintimes," and where the trf^psltiijQf w^s ** ^blige a des attenuations." THE SONG OF SONGS 729 its repetitions and repeated denouements so puzzling,* that commentators are not always agreed ;is to what character in the drama is to be held responsible for certain lines ; but for our purpose this difficulty makes no difference. Taking the lines just as they stand, I find that the following : — 1 : 2-4, 13 (in one version), IT ; 2 : G ; 4 : 10 ; 5 : 1 ; 8 : y, 3— are indelicate in language or suggestion, as every student of Oriental amorous poetry knows, and no amount of spe- cious argumentation can alter this. The descriptions of the beauty and charms of the beloved or the lover, are, moreover, invariably sensuous and often sensual. Again and again are their bodily charnis dwelt on rapturously, as is customary in the poems of all Orientals with all sorts of quaint hyperbolic comparisons, some of which are poetic, others grotesque. Xo fewer than Ave times are the external charms thus enumerated , but not once in the whole poem is any allusion made to tlie spiritual attractions, the mental and moral cliarms of femin- inity which are the food of romantic love. Mr. Griffis, wlio cannot help commenting (223) on this frequent description of the human body, makes a desperate effort to come to the rescue. Referring to 4 : 12-14, he says (212) that the lover now "adds a more delicate compliment to her modesty, her instinctive refinement, her chaste life, her purity amid court temptations. He praises her inward ornaments, her soul's charms." What are these ornaments ? The possible refer- ence to her chastity in the lines : "A garden shut up is my sister, my bride. A spring shut up, a fountain sealed " — a reference which, if so intended, would b(3 regarded by a Chris- tian maiden not as a compliment, but an insult ; while every student of Eastern manners knows that an Oriental makes of ' Renan says justly that it is the most obscure of alJ Hebrew poems. Ac- cording to the old Hebrew exegesis, every passage in the Bible has seventy dif- ferent meanings, all of them equally true ; but of this Song a great many more than seventy interpretations have been givi-n : the titles of treatises on the Canticles fill four columns of fine print in McClintock and Strong's Cyclopaedia. Griffis declares that it is. "probably, the most perfect poem in any language," but in ray opinion it is far inferior to other books in the Bible. The adjective perfect is not applicable to a poem so obscure that more than half its meaning has to be read between the lines, while it'^ plan, if plan it has, is so mixed np and hindmost foremost that I soniPtimes feel tempted to accept the view of Herder and others that the Song of Songs is not one drama, but a collection oj unconnected poems. 730 DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE LOVE? his wife "a garden shut up," and " a fountain sealed" not by way of complimenting her chastity, but because he has no faith in it whatever, knowing that so far as it exists it is founded on fear, not on affection. Mr. GrifBs knows this himself when he does not happen to be idealizing an impos- sible shepherd girl, for he says (161) ; " To one familiar with the literature, customs, speech, and ideas of the women who live where idolatry prevails, and the rulers and chief men of the country keep harems, the amazing purity and modesty of maidens reared in Christian homes is like a revelation from heaven."' Supersensual charms are not alluded to in the Song of Songs, for the simple reason that Orientals never did, and do not now, care for such charms in women or cultivate them. They know love only as an appetite, and in accordance with Oriental taste and custom the Song of Songs compares it al- ways to things that are good to eat or drink or smell. Hence such ecstatic expressions as "How much better is thy love than wine ! And the smell of thine ointments than all manner of spices !" Hence her declaration that her beloved is "as the apple-tree among the trees of the wood. . . . I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. . . . Stay ye me with raisins, com- fort me with apples : For I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me." Hence the shepherd's description of his love : " I am come into the garden, my sister, my bride : I have gathered my ' Mr. Griffis' liicid, ingenious, and admirably written monograph entitled. The Lily among Thorns^ is unfortunately marred in many parts by the au- thor's attitude, which is not that of a critic or a judge, but of a lawyer who has a case to prove, that black and gray are really snow white. His sense of humor ought to have prevented him from picturing an Eastern shepherd complimenting a gir) of his class on her " instinctive refinement, " He carries this idealizing; pro- cess so far that he arbitrarily divides the line " I am black but comely," attribut- ing the first three words to the Shulamite, the other two to a chorus of her rivals in .Solomon's harem I The latter supposition is inconceivable ; and why should not the Shulamite call herself comely ? 1 once looked admiringly at a g.vpsy girl in Spain, who promptly opened her lips, and said, with an arch smile, *' soy muy bonita " — '^I am very pretty ! " — which seemed the natural, naive attitude of an Oriental girl. To argue away such a trifling spot on maiden modesty as the Shulamite's calling herself comely, while seeing no breach of delicacy in her in- viting her lover to come into the garden and eat his precious fruits, though ad- mitting (314) that 'Hhe maiden yields thus her heart and her all to her lover," is surely straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. THE SONG OF SONGS 731 myrrh with my spice : I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey ; I have drunk my wine with my milk." Modern love does not express itself in such terms ; it is more mental and sentimental, more esthetic and sympathetic, more decorous and delicate, more refined and supersensual. While it is possible that, as Renan suggests (143), the author of the Canticles conceived his heroine as a saint of her time, rising above sordid reality, it is clear from all we have said that the author himself was not able to rise above Oriental- ism. The manners of the East, both ancient and modern, are incompatible with romantic love, because they suppress the evolution of feminine refinement and sexual mentality. The documents of the Hebrews, like those of the Hindoos and Persians, Greeks, and Romans, prove that tender, refined, and unselfish affection between the sexes, far from being one of the first shoots of civilization, is its last and most beautiful flower. GEEEK LOVE-STOEIES AND POEMS The most obstinate disbeliever ia the doctri-ne that roman- tic love, instead of being one of the earliest products of civili- zation, is one of the latest, will have to capitulate if it can be shown that even the Greeks, the most cultivated and refined nation of antiquity, knew it only in its sensual and selfish side, which is not true love, but self-love. In reality I have already shown this to be the case incidentally in the sections in which I have traced the evolution of the fourteen ingredi- ents of love. In the present chapter, therefore, we may con- fine ourselves chiefly to a consideration of the stories and poems which have fostered the belief I am combating. But first we must hear what the champions of the Greeks have to say in their behalf. CHAMPIONS OF GREEK LOVE Professor Eohde declares emphatically (70) that " no one would be so foolish as to doubt the existence of pure and strong love " among the ancient Greeks. Another eminent German scholar. Professor Ebers, sneers at the idea that the Greeks were not familiar with the love we know and celebrate. Having been criticised for making the lovers in his ancient historic romances act and talk and express their feelings pre- cisely as modern lovers in Berlin or Leipsic do, he wrote for the second edition of his Egyptian Princess a preface in which he tries to defend his position. He admits that he did, per- haps, after all, put too warm colors on his canvas, and frankly confesses that when he examined in the sunshine what he had written by lamplight, he made up his mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend. He admits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between 732 CHAMPIONS OF GREEK LOVE 733 the sexes ; yet he thinks it " quite conceivable tliat a Greek heart should have felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart," and he refers to a number of romantic stories invent- ed by the Greeks as proof that ,they knew love in our sense of the word — such stories as Apuleius's Cupid and Psyche, Homer's portrait of Penelope, Xenophon's tale of Panthea and Abradates. " Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have been unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, was transferred as a constellation to the skies ; or can devotion to love be doubted in the case of peoples who, for the sake of a beautiful woman, wage terrible wars with bitter pertinacity ? " Hegel's episodic suggestion referred to in our first chapter regarding the absence of romantic love in ancient Greek literature having thus failed to convince even his own countrymen, it was natural that my revival of that sugges- tion, as a detail of my general theory of the evolution of love, should have aroused a chorus of critical dissent. Com- menting on my assertion that there are no stories of roman- tic love in Greek literature, an editorial writer in the Lon- don Daily Neios exclaimed : "Why, it would be less wild to remark that the Greeks had nothing but love-stories."' After referring to the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, Meleager and Atalanta, Alcyone and Ceyx, Cephalus and Procris, the writer adds, " It is no exaggeration to say that any school-girl could tell Mr. Pinck a dozen others." " The Greeks were human beings, and had the sentiments of human beings, which really vary but little. . . . " The New York Mail and Express also devoted an editorial article to my book, in which it remarked that if romantic love is, as I claim, an exclusively modern sentiment, " we must get rid of some old-fashioned fancies. How shall we hereafter classify our old friends Hero and Leander ? Leander was a fine fellow, just like the handsomest boy you know. He fell in love with the lighthouse-keeper's daughter[ !] and used to swim over the river[!] every night and make love to her. It was all told by an old Greek named Musaeus. How did he get such modern notions into his noddle ? How, moreover, shall we classify Daphnis and Chloe ? This fine 734 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS old romance of Longus is as sweet and beautiful a love-story as ever skipped in prose." " Daphnis and Chloe," wrote a New Haven critic, " is one of the most idyllic love-stories ever written." " The love story of Hero and Leander upsets this author's theory com- pletely,'' said a Kochester reviewer, while a St. Louis critic declared boldly that " in the pages of Achilles Tatius and Theodoras, inventors of the modern novel, the young men and maidens loved as romantically as in Miss Evans's latest." A Boston censor pronounced my theory " simply absurd," adding : " Mr. Finck's reading, wide as it is, is not wide enough ; for had he read the Alexandrian poets, Theocritus especially, or Behr A'Adin among the Arabs, to speak of no others, he could not possibly have had courage left to maintain his theory ; and with him, really, it seems more a matter of cour- age than of facts, notwithstanding his evident training in a scientific atmosphere." GLADSTONE OTS THE WOMEK OF HOMEE The divers specifications of my ignorance and stupidity contained in the foregoing criticisms will be attended to in their proper place in the chronological order of the present chapter, which naturally begins with Homer's epics, as noth- ing definite is known of Greek literature before them. Homer is now recognized as the first poet of antiquity, not only in the order of time ; but it took Europe many centuries to dis- cover tliat fact. During the Middle Ages the second-rate Virgil was held to be a much greater genius than Homer, and it was in England, as Professor Christ notes (69), that the truer estimate originated. Pope's translation of the Homeric poems, with all its faults, helped to dispel the mists of ignor- ance, arid in 1775 appeared Eobert Wood's book. On fJie Original Genius and Writings of Homer, which combated the foolish prejudice against the poet, due to the coarseness of the manners he depicts. Wood admits (161) that " most of Homer's heroes would, in the present age, be capitally GLADSTONE ON THE WOMEN OF HOMER 735 convicted, in any country in Europe, on the poet's evideuce;" but this, he explains, does not detract from the greatness of Homer, who, upon an impartial view, " will appear to excel his own state of society, in point of decency and delicacy, as much as he has surpassed more polished ages in point of genius." In this judicious discrimination between the genius of Homer and the realistic coarseness of his heroes. Wood forms an agreeable contrast to many modern Homeric scholars, no- tably the Et. Hon. W. B. Gladstone, who, having made this poet his hobby, tried to persuade himself and his readers that nearly everything relating not only to Homer, but to the characters he depicts, was next door to perfection. Confining ourselves to the topic that concerns us here, we read, in his Studies on Homer (II., 502), that " we find throughout the poems those signs of the overpowering force of conjugal at- tachments which ... we might expect." And in his shorter treatise on Homer he thus sums up his views as to the position and estimate of woman in the heroic age, as re- vealed in Homer's female characters : " The most notable of them compare advantageously with those commended to us in the Old Testament ; while Achaiian Jezebels are nowhere found. There is a certain authority of the man over the woman ; but it does not destroy freedom, or imply the absence either of respect, or of a close mental and moral fellowship. Not only- the relation of Odusseus to Pen- elope and of Hector to Andromache, but those of Achilles to Briseis, and of Menelaus to the returned Helen, are full of dignity and attachment. Briseis was but a captive, yet Achilles viewed her as in expectation a wife, called her so, avowed his love for her, and laid it down that not he only, but every man must love his wife if he had sense and virtue. Among the Achaiian Greeks monogamy is invariable ; divorce unknown ; incest abhorred. . . . The sad institution which, in Saint Augustine's time, was viewed by him as sav- ing the world from yet worse evil is unknown or unrecorded. Concubinage prevails in the camp before Troy, but only sim- ple concubinage. Some of t}ie women, attendants in the Ith- acan palace, were corrupted by the evil-minded Suitors ; but some were not. It should, perhaps, be noted as a token of the respect paid to the position of the woman, that these very 736 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS bad men are not represented as ever having included in their plans the idea of offering violence to Penelope. The noblest note, however, of the Homeric woman remains this, that she shared the thought and heart of her husband : as in the fine utterance of Penelope she prays that rather slie may be borne away by the Harpies than remain to ' glad the heart of a mean- er man' {Od. XX., 82) than her husband, still away from her." Only a careful student of Homer can quite realize the dip- lomatic astuteness which inspired this sketch of Homeric morals. Its amazing sophistry can, however, be made appar- ent even to one who has never read the Iliad and the Odyssey. ACHILLES AS A LOVEK The Trojan War lasted ten years. Its object was to punish Paris, son of the King of Troy, for eloping with Helen, the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and taking away a ship- load of treasures to boot. The subject of liomer's Iliad is popularly supposed to be this Trojan War ; in reality, how- ever, it covers less than two months (fifty-two days) of those ten years, and its theme, as the first lines indicate, is the wrath of Achilles — the ruinous wrath, which in the tenth year, brought on the other Greek warriors woes innumerable. Achilles had spent much of the intervening time in ravaging twelve cities of Asia Minor, carrying away treasures and cap- tive women, after the piratical Greek custom. One of these captives was Briseis, a high priest's daughter, whose husband and three brothers he had slain with his own hand, and who became his favorite concubine. King Agamemnon, the chief commander of the Greek forces, also had for his favorite con- cubine a high priest's daughter, named Chryseis. Her father came to ransom the captive girl, but Agamemnon refused to give her up because, as he confessed with brutal frankness, he preferred her to his wife.' For this refusal Apollo brings a pestilence on the Greek army, which can be abated only by restoring Chryseis to her father. Agamemnon at last con- ' Which, however, evidently vpas not B^.yiDg much, as he immediately added that he was ready to give her up provided they gave him another girl, lest he be the only one of the Greeks without a "prize of honor." Strong individual preference, as we shall see also in the case of Achilles, was not a trait of "heroic" Greek love. ACHILLES AS A LOVER 737 seuts, on condition that some other prize of honor be given to him — though, as Thersites taunts him (11., 220-228), his tents are already full of captive women, among whom he al- ways has had first choice. Achilles, too, informs him that he shall have all the women he wants when Troy is taken ; but what really hurts Agamemnon's feelings is not so much the loss of his favorite as the thought that the hated Achilles should enjoy Briseis, while his prize, Chryseis, must be re- turned to her father. So he threatens to retaliate on Achilles by taking Briseis from his tent and keeping her for himself. " I would deserve the name of coward," retorts Achilles " were I to yield to you in everything. . . . But this let me say — Ngver shall I lift my arm to strive for the girl either with you or any other man ; you gave her, you can take her. But of all else, by the dark ship, that belongs to me, thereof you shall not take anything against my will. Do that and all shall see your black blood trickle down my spear." Having made this " uncowardly," chivalrous, and romantic distinction between his two kinds of property — yielding Briseis, but threatening murder if aught else belonging to him be touched — Achilles goes and orders his friend Patroclus to take the young woman from the tent and give her to the king. She leaves her paramour — her husband's and brothers' mur- derer — unwillingly, and he sits down and weeps — why ? he- cause, as he tells his mother, he has been insulted bv Aga- memnon, who has taken away his prize of honor. From that moment Aehilles refuses to join the assemblies, or take a part in the battles, thus bringing " woes innumerable" on his countrymen. He refuses to yield even after Agamemnon, alarnied by his reverses, seeks to conciliate him by offering him gold and horses and women in abundance ; telling him he shall have back his Briseis, whom the king swears he has never touched, and, besides her, seven Lesbian women of more than human beauty ; also, the choice of twenty Trojan women as soon as the city capitulates ; and, in addition to these, one of the three princesses, his own daughters — twenty- nine women in all ! Must not a hero who so stubbornly and wrathfully resented 738 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS the seizure of his concubine have been deeply in love with her ? He himself remarks to Odysseus, who comes to at- tempt a reconciliation (IX., 340-44) : " Do the sons of Atreus alone of mortal men love their bedfellows ? Every man who is good and sensible loves his concubine and cares for her as I too love mine with all my heart, though but the captive of my spear." Gladstone here translates the word aXoxos " wife," though, as far as Achilles is concerned, it means concubine. Of course it would have been awkward for England's Prime Minister to make Achilles say that " every man must love his concubine, if he has sense and virtue ;" so he arbitrarily changes the meaning of the word and then begs us to notice the moral beauty of this sentimgnt and the "dignity" of the relation between Achilles and Briseis ! Yet no one seems to have denounced him for this transgres- sion against ethics, philology, and common sense. On the contrary, a host of translators and commentators have done the same thing, to the obscuration of the truth. Nor is this all. When we examine what the Achilles of Homer means by the fine phrase " every man loves his bedfel- low as I love mine," we come across a grotesque parody even of sensual infatuation, not to speak of romantic love. If Achilles had been animated by the strong individual prefer- ence which sometimes results even from animal passion, he would not have told Agamemnon, "take Briseis, but don't you dare to touch any of my other property or I will smash your skull." If he had been what we understand by a lover, he would not have been represented by the poet, after Briseis was taken away from him, as having "his heart consumed by grief" because "he yearned for the battle." He would, in- stead, have yearned for the girl. And when Agamemnon offered to give her back untouched, Achilles, had he been a real lover, would have thrown pride and wrath to the winds and accepted the offer with eagerness and alacrity. But the most amazing part of the story is reached when we ask what Achilles means when he says that every good and sensible man ^CKiu rai KijScTai— loves and cherishes — his con- cubine, as he professes to love his own. How does he love ACHILLES AS A LOVER 739 Briseis ? Patroclus had promised her (XIX., 297-99), prob- ably for reasons of his own (she is represented as being ex- tremely fond of him), to see to it that Achilles would ulti- mately make her his legitimate wife, but Achilles himself never dreams of such a thing, as we see in lines 393-400, book IX. After refusing the offer of one of Agamemnon's daugh- ters, he goes on to remark : "If the gods preserve me and I return to my home, Peleus himself will seek a wife for me. There are many Achaian maidens in Hellas and Phthia, daughters of city-protecting princes. Among these I shall select the one I desire to be my dear wife. Very often is my manly heart moved with longing to be there to take a wedded wife (iA.vr]crTr]v aXoxov), and enjoy the possessions Peleus has gathered." And if any further detail were needed to prove how utterly shallow, selfish, and sensual was his " love " of Briseis, we should find it a few lines later (663) where the poet naively tells us, as a matter of course, that "Achilles slept in the innermost part of the tent and by his side lay a beautiful-cheeked woman, whom he had brought from Lesbos. On the other side lay Patroclus with the fair Isis by his side, the gift of Achilles." Obviously even individual preference was not a strong ingredient in the " love " of these " heroes," and we may well share the significant surprise of Ajax (638) that Achilles should persist in his wrath when seven girls were offered him for one. Evidently the tent of Achilles, like that of Agamemnon, was full of women (in line 366 he es- pecially refers to his assortment of "fair-girdled women" whom he expects to take home when the war is over) ; yet Gladstone had the audacity to write that though concubinage prevailed in the camp before Troy, it was " only single con- cubinage." In his larger treatise he goes so far as to apolo- gize for these ruffians — who captured and traded off women as they would horses or cows — on the ground that they were away from their wives and were indulging in the "mildest and least licentious " of all forms of adultery ! Yet Gladstone was personally one of the purest and noblest of men. Strange what somersaults a hobby ridden too hard may induce a man to make in his ethical attitude ! 740 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS ODYSSEUS, LIBERTINE AND EUFFIAN If we now turn from the hero of the Iliad to the hero of the OdyssBy, we find the same Gladstone declaring {II., 503) that " while admitting the superior beauty of Calypso as an immortal, Ulysses frankly owns to her that his heart is pin- ing every day for Penelope ; " and in the shorter treatise he goes so far as to say (131), that "the subject of the Odyssey gives Homer the opportunity of setting forth the domestic character of Odusseus, in his profound attachment to wife, child, and home, in such a way as to adorn not only the hero, but his age and race." The "profound attachment" of Odysseus to his wife may be gauged in the first place by the fact that he voluntarily remained away from her ten years, fighting to recover, for another king, a worthless, adulterous wench. Before leaving on this expedition, from which he feared he might never re- turn, he spoke to his wife, as she herself relates (XVIII., 369), begging her to be mindful of his father and mother, "and when you see our son a bearded man, then marry whom you will, and leave the house now yours " — namely for the benefit of the son, for whose welfare he was thus more con- cerned than for a monopoly of his wife's love. After the Trojan war was ended he embarked for home, but suffered a series of shipwrecks and misfortunes. On the island of M^s, he spent a whole year sharing the hospitality and bed of the beautiful sorceress Circe, with no pangs of conscience for such conduct, nor thought of home, till his comrades, in spite of the "abundant meat and pleasant wine," longed to depart and admonished him in these words : " Unhappy man, it is time to think of yotir native land, if you are destined ever to be saved and to reach your home in the land of your fathers." Thus they spoke and " persuaded his manly heart." lu view of the ease with which he thus abandoned himself for a whole year to a life of indulgence, till his comrades prodded his conscience, we may infer that he was not so very unwilling a prisoner afterward, of the beautiful nymph Calypso, who held him eight years by force ODYSSEUS, LIBERTINE AND RUFFIAN 741 oil her island. We read, indeed, that, at the expiration of these years, Odysseus -was always weeping, and his sweet life ebbed away in longing for his home. But idl the sentiment is taken out of this by the words which follow : ivu ovk€ti TjvSave vv/icfir] — " because the nymph pleased him no more ! " Even so Tannhauser tired of tlie pleasures in the grotto of Venus, and begged to be allowed to leave. While thus permitting himself the unrestrained indulgence of his passions, witliout a thought of his wife, Odysseus has the barbarian's stern notions regarding the duties of women who belong to him. There are fifty young women in his palace at home who ply their hard tasks and bear the ser^ vant's lot. Twelve of these, having no one to marry, yield to the temptations of the rich princes who sue for the hand of Penelope in the absence of her husband. Ulysses, on his return, hears of this, and forthwith takes measures to ascertain who the guilty ones are. Then he tells his son Telemachus and the swineherd and neatherd to "go and lead forth these serving-maids out of the stately hall to a spot between the roundhouse and the neat courtyard wall, and smite them with your long swords till you take life from all, so that they may forget their secret amours with the suitors." The "discreet" Telemachus carried out these orders, leading the maids to a place whence there was no es- cape and exclaiming : " ' By no honorable death would I take away the lives of those who poured reproaches on my head and on my motlier, and lay beside the suitors.' " " He spoke and tied the cable of a dark-bowed ship to a great pillar, then lashed it to the roundhouse, stretching it high across, too high for one to touch the feet upon tlie ground. And as the wide-winged thrushes or the doves strike on a net set in the bushes ; and when they think to go to roost a cruel bed receives them ; even so the women held their heads in line, and around every neck a noose was laid that they might die most vilely. They twitched their feet a little, but not long." A more dastardly, cowardly, unmanly deed is not on record in all human literature, yet the instigator of it, Odysseus, is 742 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS always the "wise," "royal," "princely," "good," and "god- like," and there is not the slightest hint that the great poet views his assassination of the poor maidens as the act of a ruffian, an act the more monstrous and unpardonable because Homer (XXII., 37) makes Odysseus himself say to the suit- ors that they outraged his maids by force (yStatcos). What world-wide difference in this respect between the greatest poet of antiquity and Jesus of Nazareth who, when the Scribes and Pharisees brought before him a woman who had erred like the maids of Odysseus, and asked if she should be stoned as the law of Moses commanded, said unto them, " He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her ; " whereupon, being convicted by their own con- sciences, they went out one by one. And Jesus said, " Where are those thine accusers ? Hath no man condemned thee ? " She said, " No man. Lord." And Jesus said unto her, " Neither do I condemn thee ; go, and sin no more." He is lenient to the sinner because of his sense of justice and mercy ; yet at the same time his ethical ideal is infinitely higher than Homer's. He preaches that " whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart ; " whereas Homer's ideas of sexual morality are, in the last analysis, hardly above those of a sav- age. The dalliance of Odysseus with the nymphs, and the licentious treatment of women captives by all the " heroes," do not, any more than the cowardly murder of the twelve maids, evoke a word of censure, disgust, or disapproval from his lips. His gods are on the same low level as his heroes, if not lower. When the spouse of Zeus, king of the gods, wishes to beguile him, she knows no other way than borrowing the girdle of Aphrodite. But this scene [Iliad, XIV., 153 seq.) is innocuous compared with the shameless description of the adulterous amours of Ares and Aphrodite in the Odyssey (VIII., 266-365), in presence of the gods, who treat the mat- ter as a great joke. For a parallel to this passage we would have to descend to the Botocudos or the most degraded Aus- tralians. All of which proves that the severity of the pun- WAS PENELOPE A MODEL WIFE? 743 ishment inflicted on the twelve maids of Odysseus does not indicate a high regard for chastity, but is simply another il- lustration of typical barbarous fury against women for pre- suming to do anything without the consent of the man whose private property they are. WAS PENELOPE A MODEL WIFE ? If the real Odysseus, unprincipled, unchivalrous, and cruel, is anything but a hero who "adorns his age and race," must it not be conceded, at any rate, that " the unwearied fidelity of Penelope, awaiting through the long revolving years the return of her storm-tossed husband," presents, as Lecky de- clares (II., 279), and as is commonly supposed, a picture of perennial beauty " which Kome and Christendom, chivalry and modern civilization, have neither eclipsed nor tran- scended ? " We have seen that the fine words of Achilles regarding his " love " of Briseis are, when confronted with his actions, re- duced to empty verbiage. The same result is reached in the case of Penelope, if we subject her actions and motives to a searching critical analysis. Ostensibly, indeed, she is set up as a model of that feminine constancy which men at all times have insisted on while they themselves preferred to be models- of inconstancy. As usual in such cases, the feminine model is painted with touches of almost grotesque exaggeration. After the return of Odysseus Penelope informed her nurse (XXIII., 18) that she has not slept soundly all this time — twenty years ! Such phrases, too, are used as " longing for Odysseus, I waste my heart away/' or " May I go to my dread grave seeing Odysseus still, and never gladden heart of meaner husband." But they are mere phrases. The truth about her attitude and her feelings is told frankly in several places by three different persons — the goddess of wisdom, Telemachus, and Penelope herself. Athene urges Telema- chus to make haste that he may find his blameless mother still at home instead of the bride of one of the suitors. " But let her not against your will take treasure from your home. ?44 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS You know a wortiaii's \Vay ; she strives to enrich his house who marries her, while of her former children and the hus- band of lier youth, when he is dead she thinks not, and she talks of him no more" (XV., 15-23). In the next book (73-77) Telemachus says to the swineherd : " Moreover my mother's feeling wavers, whether to bide beside me here and keep the house, and thus revere her husband's bed and heed the public voice, or finally to follow some chief of the Achai- ans who woos her in the hall with largest gifts." And a lit- tle later (126) he exclaims, " She neither declines the hated suit nor has she power to end it, while they with feasting impoverish my home." These words of Telemachus are endorsed in full by Penel- ope herself, whose remarks (XIX., 524-35) to the disguised Odysseus give us the key to the Whole situation and explain whv she lies abed so much weeping and not knowing what to do." " . . . so does my doubtful heart toss to and fro whether to bide beside my son and keep all here in safety — my goods, rtiv maids, and iny great high-roofed house — and thus revere my husband and heed the jjublic voice, or finally to follow some chief of the Achaiians who woos me in my hall with countless gifts. My son, while but a child and slack of understanding, did not permit my viarrying and departing frohi my husband's home ; but now that he is grown and come to man's estate, he prays me to go home again and leave the hall, so troubled is he for that substance which. the Achai- ians waste." If these words mean anything, they mean that what kept Penelope from marrying again was not afEection for her hus- band but the desire to live up to the demands of " the public voice" and the fact that her son — who, according to Greek usage, was her master — would not permit her to do so. This, then, was the cause of that proverbial constancy ! But a darker shadow still is cast on her much-vaunted afEection by her cold and suspicious reception of her husband on his return. While the dog recognized him at once and the swine- herd was overjoyed, she, the wife, held him aloof, fearing that he might be some man who had come to cheat her ! At HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE 745 first Odysseus thought she scorned him because he "was foul and dressed in sorry clothes ; " but even after he had bathed and put on his princely attire she refused to embrace him, because she wished to " prove her husband ! " No won- der that her son declared that her " heart is always harder than a stone," and that Odysseus himself thus accosts her : " Lady, a heart impenetrable beyond the sex of women the dwellers on Olympus gave you. There is no other woman of such stubborn spirit to stand off from the husband who, after many grievous toils, came in the twentieth year home to his native land. Come then, good nurse, and make my bed, that I may lie alone. For certainly of iron is the heart within her breast." HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE A much closer approximation to the modern ideal of con- jugal love than the attachment between Odysseus and Penel- ope with the " heart of iron," may be found in the scene describing Hector's leave-taking of Andromache before he goes out to fight the Greeks, fearing he may never return. The serving-women inform him that his wife, hearing that the Trojans were hard pressed, had gone in haste to the wall, like unto one frenzied. He goes to find her and when he arrives at the Skaian gates, she comes running to meet him, together with the nurse, who holds his infant boy on her bosom. Andromache weeps, recalls to his mind that she had lost her father, mother, and seven brothers, wherefore he is to her a father, mother, brothers, as well as a husband. " Have pity and abide here upon the tower, lest thou make thy child an orphan and thy wife a widow." Though Hector cannot think of shrinking from battle like a coward, he declared that her fate, should the city fall and he be slain, troubles him more than that of his father, mother, and broth- ers — the fate of being led into captivity and slavery by a Greek, doomed to carry water and to be pointed at as tlie former wife of the brave Hector. He expresses the wish that his boy — who at first is frightened by the horse-hair crest on his helmet — mav become greater than his father, bringing 746 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS with him blood-stained spoils from the enemy he has slain, and gladdening his mother's heart ; then caressing his wife with his hand, he begs her not to sorrow overmuch, but to go to her house and see to her own tasks, the loom and the dis- taff. Thus he spake, and she departed for her home, oft looking back and letting fall big tears. This scene, which takes up four pages of the Iliad (VI., 370-503), is the most touching, the most inspired, the most sentimental and modern passage not only in the Homeric poems, but in all Greek literature. Benecke has aptly re- marked (10) that the relation between Hector and Androm< ache is unparalleled in that literature ; and he adds : " At the same time, how little really sympathetic to the G-reek of the period was this wonderful and unique passage is suffi- ciently shown by this very fact, that no attempt was ever made to imitate or develop it. It may sound strange to say so, but in all probability we to-day understand Andromache better than did the Greeks, for whom she was created ; bet- ter, too, perhaps than did her creator himself." Benecke should have written Hector in place of Andromache. There was no difficulty, even for a Greek, in understanding Androm- ache. She had every reason, even from a purely selfish point of view, to dread Hector's battling with the savage Greeks ; for while he lived she was a princess, with all the comforts of life, whereas his fall and the fall of Troy meant her enslavement and a life of misery. What makes the scene in question so modern is the attitude of Hector — his dividing his caresses equally between his wife and his son, and assuring her that he is more troubled about her fate and anguish than about what may befall his father, mother, and brothers. That is an utterly un-Greek sentiment, and that is the reason why the passage was not imitated. It was not a realistic scene from life, but a mere product of Homer's imagination and glowing genius — like the pathetic scene in which Odys- seus wipes away a tear on noting that his faithful dog Argos recognized him and wagged his tail. It is extremely improb- able that a man who could behave so cruelly toward women as Odysseus did could have thus sympathized with a dog. BARBAROUS TREATMENT OF GREEK WOMEN 747 Certainly no one else did, not even his " faithful " Penelope. As long as Argos was useful in the chase, tlie poet tells us, he was well taken care of ; but now that he was old, he " lay neglected upon a pile of dung," doomed to starve, for he had not strength to move. Homer alone, with the prophetic in- sight of a genius, could have conceived such a touch of mod- ern sentiment toward animals, so utterly foreign to ancient ideas; and he alone could have put such a sentiment of wife- love into the mouth of the Trojan Hector — a barbarian whose ideal of manliness and greatness consisted in "bringing home blood-stained spoils of the enemy." BARBAROUS TREATMENT OF GREEK WOMEN It seems like a touch of sarcasm that Homer incarnates his isolated and un-Greek ideal of devotion to a wife in a Trojan, as if to indicate that it must not be accepted as a touch of Greek life. From our point of view it is a stroke of. genius. On the other hand it is obvious that attributing such a sentiment to a Trojan likewise cannot be anything but a poetic license ; for these Trojans were quite as piratical, coarse, licentious, and polygamous as the Greeks, Hector's own father having had fifty children, nineteen of whom were borne by his wife, thirty-one by various concubines. Many pages of the Hiad bear witness to the savage ferocity of Greeks and Trojans alike — a ferocity utterly incompatible with such tender emotions as Homer himself was able to conceive in his imagination. The ferocity of Achilles is typical of the feelings of these heroes. Not content with slaughtering an enemy who meets him in honorable battle, defending his wife and home, he thrust thongs of ox-hide through the prostrate Hector's feet, bound him to his chariot, lashed his horses to speed, and dragged him about in sight of the wailing wife and parents of his victim. This he repeated several times, aggravating the atrocity a hundredfold by his intention — in spite of the piteous entreaties of the dying Hector — to throw his corpse to be eaten by the dogs, thus depriving even his spirit of rest, and his family of religious consolation. Nay, 748 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS Achilles expresses the savage wish that his rage might lead him so far as to carve and eat raw Hector's flesh. The Homeric " hero," in short, is almost on a level in cruelty with the red Indian. But it is in their treatment of women — which Gladstone commends so highly — that the barbarous nature of the Greek " heroes " is revealed in all its hideous nakedness. The king of their gods set them the example when he punished his wife and queen by hanging her up amid the clouds with two anvils suspended from her feet ; clutching and throwing to the earth any gods that came to her rescue. {Iliad, XV., 15-24.) Rank does not exempt the women of the heroic age from slavish toil. Nausicaa, though a princess, does the work of a washerwoman and drives her own chariot to the laundry on the banks of the river, her only advantage over her maids being that they have to walk.' Her motiier, too, queen of the Phoeaceans, spends her time sitting among the waiting maids spinning yarn, while her husband sits idle and "sips his wine like an immortal." The women have to do all the work to make the men comfortable, even washing their feet, giving them their bath, anointing them, and put- ting their clothes on them again {Odyssey, XIX., 317 ; VIII., 454; XVII., 88, etc.),^ even a princess like Polycaste, daugh- ter of the divine Nestor, being called upon to perform such menial service (III., 464-67). As for the serving-maids, they grind corn, fetch water, and do other work, just like red squaws ; and in the house of Odysseus we read of a poor girl, who, while the others were sleeping, was still toiling at her corn because her weakness had prevented her from finish- ing her task (XX., 110). Penelope was a queen, but was very far from being treated like one. Gladstone found " the strongest evidence of the 'I have already commented (115) on Nausicna's lack of feminine delicacy and coyness; yet Gladstone says (132) "it may almost be questioned whether anywhere in literature there is to be found a conception of the maiden so per- fect as Nau6ic£la in grace, tenderness, and delicacy " ! ' How Gladstone reconciled his conscience with these lines when he wrote (113) that "on one important and characteristic subject, the exposure of the person to view, the men of that time had a peculiar and fastidious delicacy," X cannot conceive. BARBAROUS TREATMENT OF GREEK WOMEN 749 respect in wh'ich women were held " in the fact that the suitors stopped short of violence to her person ! They did everything but that, making themselves at home in her house, unbidden and hated guests, debauching her maid- servants, and consuming her provisions by wholesale. But her own son's attitude is hardly less disrespectful and in- sulting than that of the ungallant, impertinent suitors. He repeatedly tells his mother to mind her own business — the loom and the distaff — leaving words for men ; and each time the poet recommends this rude, unfilial speech as a "wise saying" which the queen humbly "lays to heart." His love of property far exceeds his love of his mother, for as soon as he is grown up he begs her to go home and get married again, " so troubled is he for the substance which the suitors waste." He urges her at last to " marry whom she will," offering as an extra inducement "countless gifts" if she will only go. To us it seems topsy-turvy that a mother should have to ask her son's consent to marry again, but to the Greeks that was a matter of course. There are many references to this custom in the Homeric poems. Girls, too, though they be princesses, are disposed of without the least regard to their wishes, as when Agamemnon offers Achilles the choice of one of his three daughters (IX., 145). Big sums are sometimes paid for a girl — by Iphidamas, for instance, who fell in bat- tle, "far from his bride, of whom he had known no joy, and much had he given for her ; first a hundred kine he gave, and thereafter promised a thousand, goats and sheep together." The idea, too, occurs over and over again that among the suitors the one who has the richest gifts to offer should take the bride. How much this mercenary, unceremonious, and often cruel treatment of women was a matter of course among these Greeks is indicated by Homer's naive epithet for bride,s, napSivoi dX<^«a-tj8oiat, " virgins who bring in oxen." And this is the state of affairs which Gladstone sums up by saying " there is a certain authority of the man over the woman ; but it does not destroy freedom " ! The early Greeks were always fighting, and the object of 750 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS their wars, as among the Australian savages; was usually woman, as Achilles frankly informs us when he speaks of having laid waste twelve cities and passed through many bloody days of battle, "warring with folk for their women's sake." {Iliad, IX., 337.) Nestor admonishes the Greeks to " let no man hasten to depart home till each have lain by some Trojan's wife" (354^55). The leader of the Greek forces issues this command regarding the Trojans : " Of them let not one escape sheer destruction at our hands, not even the man-child that the mother beareth in her womb ; let not even him escape, but all perish together out of Ilios, uncared for and unknown " (VI., 57) ; while Homer, with consummate art, paints for us the terrors of a captured city, showing how the women — of all classes — were maltreated : " As a woman wails and clings to her dear husband, who falls for town and people, seeking to shield his home and children from the ruthless day ; seeing him dying, gasping, she flings herself on him with a piercing cry ; while men be- hind, smiting her with the spears on back and shoulder, force her along to bondage to suffer toil and trouble ; with pain most pitiful her cheeks are thin. . . ." {Odyssey, VIII., 523-30.) » LOVE IK SAPPHO's POEMS Having failed to find any traces of romantic love, and only one of conjugal affection, in the greatest poet of the Greeks, let us now subject their greatest poetess to a critical exam- ination. Sappho undoubtedly had the divine spark. She may have * It will always remain one of the strangest riddles of the nineteenth century why the statesman who so often expressed his righteous indignation over the " Bulgarian atrocities " of his time should not only have pardoned, but with in- sidious and glaring sophistry apologized for the similar atrocities of the heroes whom Homer fancies he is complimenting when he calls them professional " spoilers of towns." I wish every reader of this volume who has any doubts regarding the correctness of my views would first read Gladstone's shorter work on Homer (a charmingly written book, with all its faults), and then the epics themselves, which are now accessible to all in the admirable prose versions 6f the fliad by Andrew Ijang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers, and of the Odyssey by Professor George H. Palmer of Harvard — versions which are far more poetic than any translations in verse ever made and which make of these epics two of the most entertaining novels ever written. It is from these versions that I have cited, except in a few cases where I preferred a more literal rendering of certain words. LOVE IN SAPPHO'S POEMS 751 possibly deserved the epithet of the " tenth Muse," bestowed on her by ancient writers, or of " the Poetess," as Homer was " the Poet." Among the one hundred and seventy frag- ments preserved some are of great beauty — the following, for example, which is as delightful as a Japanese poem and in much the same style — suggesting a picture in a few words, with the distinctness of a painting: "As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough, the very end of the bough, which the gatherers overlooked, nay overlooked not, but could not reach." ^ It is otherwise in her love-poems, or rather frag- ments of such, comprising the following : " Now love masters my limbs, and shakes me, fatal creature, bitter-sweet." " Now Bros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain fall- ing on the oaks." " Sleep thou in the bosom of thy tender girl-friend." " Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am by longing for a maiden, at soft Aphrodite's will." "For thee there was no other girl, bridegroom, like her." " Bitter-sweet," " giver of pain,^' " the weaver of fictions," are some expressions of Sappho's preserved by Maximus Tyrius ; and Libanius, the rhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying " that night might be doubled for her." But the most important of her love-poems, and the one on which her adulators chiefly base their praises, is the follow- ing fragment addressed IIpos VwaiKa 'Epoft.evriv ("to a beloved woman ") : " That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy pres- ence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laugh- ter ; that indeed makes my heart flutter in my bosom. For when I see thee but a little I have no utterance left, my. tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat baithes me, and a trembling seizes all my body ; I am paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than 07ie dead. But I must dare all, since one so poor ..." * In all the extracts here made I follow the close literal prose version made by H. T. Wharton, in his admirable book on Sappho, by far the best in the English language. 753 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS The Platonist Longinus (third century) said that this ode was " not one passion, but a congress of passions," and declared it the most perfect expression in all ancient literature of the effects of love. A Greek physician is said to have copied it into his book of diagnoses "as a compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotion." F. B. Jevons, in his his- tory of Greek literature (139), speaks of the " marvellous fidelity in her representation of the passion of love." Long before him Addison had written in the Spectator (No. 233) that Sappho "felt the passion in all its warmth, and de- scribed it in all its symptoms." Theodore Watts wrote : "Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers." That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne, speaks of the " dignity of divinity, which informs the most passionate and piteous notes of the unapproachable poetess with such grandeur as would seem impossible to such passion." And J. A. Symonds assures ns that "Nowhere, except, perhaps, in some Persian or Provencal love-songs, can be found more ardent expressions of overmastering passion." I have read this poem a score of times, in Greek, in the Lat- in version of Catullus, and in English, German, and French translations. The more I read it and compare with it the eu- logies just quoted, the more I marvel at the power of cant and conventionality in criticism and opinion, and at the amaz- ing current ignorance in regard to the psychology of love and of the emotions in general. I have made a long and mi- nute study of the symptoms of love, in myself and in others ; I have found that the torments of doubt and the loss of sleep may make a lover " paler than grass " ; that his heart is apt to " flutter in his bosom," and his tongue to be embarrassed ' in presence of the beloved ; but when Sappho speaks of a lover bathed in sweat, of becoming blind, deaf, and dumb, trem- bling all over, and little better than one dead, she indulges in exaggeration which is neither true to life nor poetic. An amusing experiment may be made with reference to this famous poem. Suppose you say to a friend : " A woman was walking in the woo^s when she saw something that made LOVE IN SAPPHO'S POEMS 753 her turn pale as a sheet ; her heart fluttered, her ears rang, her tongue was paralyzed, a cold sweat covered her, she trembled all over and looked as if she would faint and die : what did she see ? " The chances are ten to one that your friend will answer "a bear!"* In truth, Sappho's famous "symptoms of love "are laughably like the symptoms of fear which we find described in the books of Bain, Darwin, Mosso, and others — "a cold sweat,'' " deadly pallor," " voice becom- ing husky or failing altogether," " heart beating violently," " dizziness which will blind him," " trembling of all the muscles of the body,'' "a fainting fit." Nor is fear the only emotion that can produce these symptoms. Almost any strong passion, anger, extreme agony or joy, may cause them ; so that what Sappho described was not love in par- ticular, but the physiologic effects of violent emotions in gen- eral. I am glad that the Greek physician who copied her poem into his book of diagnoses is not my family doctor. Sappho's love-poems are not psychologic but purely physi- ologic. Of the imaginative, sentimental, esthetic, moral, al- truistic, sympatlietic, affectional symptoms of what we know as romantic love they do not give us the faintest hint. Hegel remarked truly that " in the odes of Sappho the language of love rises indeed to the point of lyrical inspiration, yet what she reveals is rather the slow consuming flame of the blood than the inwardness of the subjective heart and soul." Nor was Byron deceived : " I don't think Sappho's ode a good example." The historian Bender had an inkling of the truth when he wrote (183) : " To us who are accustomed to spirit- ualized love-lyrics after the style of Geibel's this erotic song of Sappho may seem too glowing, too violent ; but we must not forget that love was conceived by the Greeks altogether in a less spiritual manner than we demand that it should be." That is it precisely. These Greek love-poems do not depict romantic love but sensual passion. Nor is this the worst of it. Sappho's absurdly overrated love-poems are not even good descriptions of normal sensual passion. I have just said that they are purely physiologic ; but that is too much praise for them. The word physiologic implies something healthy and 754 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS normal, but Sappho's poems are not healthy and normal ; they are abnormal, they are pathologic. Had they been written by a man, this would not be the case ; but Sappho was a woman, and her famous ode is addressed to a woman. A woman, too, is referred tt> in her famous hymn to Venus in these lines, as translated by Wharton : " What beauty now wouldst thou draw to love thee ? Who wrongs thee, Sappho .'' For even if she flies, she shall soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give, and if she loves not shall soon love, how- ever loth." In the five fragments above quoted there are also two at least which refer to girls. Now I have not the slightest desire to discuss the moral character of Sappho or the vices of her Lesbian countrywomen. She had a bad reputa- tion among the Eomans as well as the Greeks, and it is a fact that in the year 1073 her poems were burnt at Eome and Con- stantinople, " as being," in the words of Professor Gilbert Mur- ray, "too much for the shaky morals of the time." Another recent writer. Professor Peck of Columbia University, says that " it is diflBcult to read the fragments which remain of her verse without being forced to come to the conclusion that a woman who could write such poetry could not be the pure woman that her niodern apologists would have her." The following lament alone would prove this : AeSvKe fxev a SeA-ai/a Kal Tl\7j'id5eSj fieffai Se v^KTes, vaph S' epx^T &pa eyit 5f fi6va Ko^evSw MASCULIJiTE MIN-DS IN" FEMALE BODIES Several books and many articles have been written on this topic, * but the writers seem to have overlooked the fact that in the light of the researches of Kraflt-Ebing and Moll it is possible to vindicate the character of Sappho without ignor- ing the fact that her passionate erotic poems are addressed to women. These alienists have shown that the abnormal state ^ F. B. Jevons refers to some of these as " mephitic exhalations from the bogs of perverted imaginings ! " Welcker's defence of Sappho is a masterpiece of naivety written in ignorance of mental pathology. MASCULINE MiNDS IN FEMALE BODIES 755 of a masculine mind inhabiting a female body, or vice versa, is sarprisingly common in all parts of the world. They look on it, with the best of reasons, as a diseased condition, which does not necessarily, in persons of high principles, lead to vicious and unnatural practices. In every country there are thousands of girls who, from childhood, would rather climb trees and fences and play soldiers with the boys than fondle dolls or play with the other girls. When they get older they prefer tobacco to candy ; they love to masquerade in men's clothes, and when they hear of a girl's love-affair they can- not understand what pleasure there can be in dancing with a man or kissing him, while they themselves may long to kiss a girl, nay, in numerous cases, to marry her.^ Many such marriages are made between women whose brains and bodies are of different sexes, and their love-affairs are often charac- terized by violent jealousy and other symptoms of intersexual passion. Not a few prominent persons have been innocent victims of this distressing disease ; it is well-known what strange masculine proclivities several eminent female novelists and artists have shown ; and whenever a woman shows great creative power or polemic aggressiveness the chances are that her brain is of the masculine type. It is therefore quite pos- sible that Sappho may have been personally a pure woman, her mental masculinity (" mascula Sappho" Horace calls her) being her misfortune, not her fault. But even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and take for granted that she had enough character to resist the abnormal impulses and passions which she describes in her poems, and which the Greeks easily pardoned and even praised, we cannot and must not overlook the fact that these poems are the result of a diseased brain- centre, and that what they describe is not love, but a phase of erotic pathology. Normal sexual appetite is as natural a passion as the hunger for food ; it is simply a hunger to perpetuate the species, and without it the world would soon ' The most elaborate discussion of this subject is to be found in Moll's Unter- suchungen, 314-440, where also copious bibliographic references are given. The most striking impression left by the reading of this book is that the differentia- tion of the sexes is by no means as complete yet as it ought to be. All the more need is there of romantic love, whose function it is to assist and accelerate this differentiation. 756 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS come to an end ; but Sapphic passion is a disease which luckily cannot become epidemic because it cannot perpetuate itselfj but must always remain a freak.* ANACEEON AND OTHERS There is considerable uncertainty regarding the dates of the earliest Greek poets. By dint of ingenious conjectures and combinations philologists have reached the conclusion that the Homeric poems, with their interpolations, originated between the dates 850 and 730 B.C. — say 3700 years ago. Hesiod probably flourished near the end of the seventh cen- tury, to which Archilochus and Alcman belong, while in the sixth and fifth centuries a number of names appear — little more than names, it is true, since of most of them fragments only have come down to us — Alcseus, Mimnermus, Theognis, Sappho, Stesichorus, Anacreon, Ibycus, Bacchylides, Pindar, and others. Best known of all these, as a poet of love, is Anacreon, though in his case no one has been so foolish as to claim that the love described in his poems (or those of his imitators) is ever supersensual. Professor Anthon has aptly characterized him as " an amusing voluptuary and an elegant profligate," and Hegel pointed out the superficiality of Anac- reontic love, in which there is no conception of the tremen- dous importance to a lover of having this or that particular girl and no other, or what I have called individual preference. Benecke puts this graphically when he remarks (35) regard- ing Mimnermus : '"What is life without love ?' he says ; he does not say, ' What is life without your love ? ' " Even in Sappho, I may add here, in spite of the seeming violence of her passion, this quality of individual preference is really lacking or weak, for she is constantly transferring her atten- ' As long ago as 1836-38 a Swiss author, Heinrich Hossli, wrote a remarkable book with the title Tlie TJnreliahilUy of External Signs as Indications of 8ex in Body and Mind. I may add here that if it were known how many of the " shrieking sisterhood" who are clamoring for masculine "rights" for women, are among the unfortunates who were bom with male brains in female bodies, the movement would collapse as if struck by a ton of dynamite. Theseamazons often wonder why the great mass of women are so hard to stir up in this matter. The reason is that the great mass of women — heaven be thanked ! — have femi- nine minds as well as feminine bodies. WOMAN AND LOVE IN ^SCHYLUS 757 tion from one girl to another. And as Sappho's poems are iwldressed to girls, so are Anacreon's and those of the other poets named, to boys, in most cases. The following, pre- served by Athenseus (XIII., 564D), is a good specimen : 'n TTOL nap^evioif ^Kewuv, ii^efiai ire, tru S' ou KoeTs J / ovK eiSths tirt t^j ^M^s i/iuX^s Tjvioxfifis. Such a poem, even if addressed properly, would indicate nothing more than simple admiration and a longing which is specified in the following : *A\Xi Trpiirive It would hardly be worth while, even if the limitations of space permitted, to subject the fragments of the other poets of this period to analysis. The reader has the key in his hands now — the altruistic and supersensual ingredients of love pointed out in this volume ; and if he can find those in- gredients in any of these poems, he will be luckier than I have been. We may therefore pass on to the great tragic poets of the sixth and fifth centuries B. C. WOMAN AND LOVE IN ^SCHTLUS In the Frogs of Aristophanes, j33schylus is made to declare that he had never introduced a woman in love into any of his plays — OVK oils' oiSeis ^VTiv ipuMTav iroTrr' eironjo'a •yiii/aiKa. He certainly has not done so in any one of the seven plays which have survived of the ninety that he wrote, according to Suidas ; and Aristophanes would not have put that expression in his mouth had it not been true of the others, too. To us it seems extraordinary that an author should boast of having kept out of his writings the element which constitutes the greatest fascination of modern literature ; but after reading his seven surviving tragedies we do not wonder that .^schylus should not have introduced a woman in love, or a man either, in plays wherewith he competed for the state prize on the solemn occasions of the great festivals at Athens ; for love of 758 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS an exalted kind, worthy of such an occasion, could not have existed in a community where such ideas prevailed about women as iEschylus unfolds in the few places where he con- descends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of sexual love of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in the remarks of Prometheus and lo regarding the designs of Zeus on the latter. An apparent exception seems at first sight to exist in the cordial reception Clytsemnestra accords to her husband. King Agamemnon, when he returns from the Trojan war. She calls the day of his return the most joyous of her life, asserts her complete fidelity to him during his long absence, de- clares she is not ashamed to tell her fond feelings for her spouse in public, and adds that she has wept for him till the gushing fountains of her eyes have been exhausted. Indeed, she goes so far in her homage that Agamemnon protests and exclaims, " Pamper me not after the fashion of women, nor as though I were a barbaric monarch. . . I bid thee reverence me as a man, not a god." But ere long we discover (as in the case of Achilles), that all this fine talk of Clytfem- nestra is mere verbiage, and worse — deadly hypocrisy. In reality she has been living with a paramour, and the genuine- ness and intensity of her "fond feelings" for her husband may be inferred from the fact that hardly has he returned when she makes a murderous assault on him by throwing an artfully woven circular garment over him, while he is taking a bath, and smiting him till he falls dead. "And I glory in the deed " she afterwards declares, adding that it " has long since been meditated." Agamemnon, for his part, not only brought back with him from Troy a new concubine, Cassandra, and installed her in his home with the usual Greek indifference to the feelings of his legitimate wife, but he really was no better than his mur- derous wife, since he had been willing to kill her daughter and his own, Iphigenia, to please his brother, curb a storm, and expedite the Trojan war. In the words of the Chorus, " Thus he dared to become the sacrificer of his daughter to promote a war undertaken for the avenging of a woman, and WOMAN AND LOVE IN ^SCHYLUS 759 as a first offering for the fleet : and the chieftains, eager for the fight, set at naught her supplications and her cries to her father, and her maiden age. But after prayer her father bade the ministering priests vvith all zeal, to lift, like a kid, high above the altar, her who lay prostrate wrapped in her robes, and to put a check upon her beauteous mouth, a voice of curses upon the house, by force of muzzles and strength which allowed no vent to her cry." The barbarous sacrifice of an innocent maiden is of course a myth, but it is a myth which doubtless had many counter- parts in Greek life. ^^schylus did not live so very long after Homer, and in his age it was still a favorite pastime of the Greeks to ravage cities, a process of which ^schylus gives us a vivid picture in a few lines, in his Seven against TJiebes : *' And for its women to be dragged away captives, alas ! alas ! both the young and the aged, like horses by their hair, while their vestments are rent about their persons. And the emptied city cries aloud, while its booty is wasted, amid con- fused clamors. . . . And the cries of children at the breast all bloody resound, and there is rapine, sister of pell- mell confusion . . And young female slaves have new sorrows ... so that they hope for life's gloomy close to come, a guardian against these all-mournful sorrows." Eor women of rank alone is there any consideration — so long as they are not among the captives ; yet even queens are not honored as women, but only as queens, that is, as the mothers or wives of kings. In The Fernians the Chorus salutes Atossa in terms every one of which emphasizes this point : " queen, supreme of Persia's deep-waisted matrons, aged mother of Xerxes, hail to thee I spouse to Darius, con- sort of the Persians, god and mother of a god thou art," while Clytsemnestra is saluted by the chorus in Agamemnon in these words : " I have came revering thy majesty, Clytsem- nestra ; for it is right to honor the consort of a chieftain hero, when the monarch's throne has been left empty." We read in these plays of such unsympathetic things as a " man-detesting host of Amazons ; " of fifty virgins fleeing from incestuous wedlock and all but one of them cutting 760 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS \ their husbands' throats at night with a sword ; of the folly of marrying out of one's own rank. In all JSschylus there is on the other hand only one noticeable reference to a genuine womanly quality — the injunction of Danaus to his daughters to honor modesty more than life while they are travelling among covetous men ; an admonition much needed, since, as Danaus adds — characterizing the coarseness and lack of chiv- alry of the men — -violence is sure to threaten them every- where, "and on the fair-formed beauty of virgins everyone that passes by sends forth a melting dart from his eyes, over- come by desire." Masculine coarseness and lack of chivalry are also revealed in such abuse of woman as j^Eschyhis — in the favorite Greek manner, puts in the mouth of Eteocles : " ye abominations of the wise. Neither in woes nor in welcome prosperity may I be associated with woman-kind ; for when woman prevails, her audacity is more than one can live with ; and when afErighted she is still a greater mischief to her home and city." WOMAN AND LOVE IN SOPHOCLES Unlike his predecessor, Sophocles did not hesitate, it seems, to bring " a woman in love " on the stage. Not, it is true, in anyone of the. seven plays which alone remain of the one hundred and twenty-three he is said to have written. But there are in existence some fragments of his Phmdra, which Rohde (31) and others are inclined to look on as the " first tragedy of love." It has, however, nothing to do with what we know as either romantic or conjugal love, but is simply the story of the adulterous and incestuous infatuation of Phaedra for her stepson Hippolytus. It is at the same time one of the many stories illustrating the whimsical, hypocriti- cal, and unchivalrous attitude of the early Greeks of always making woman the sinful aggressor and representing man as being coyly reserved (see Rohde, 34-35). The infatuation of Phaedra is correctly described [fr., 611, 607 Dind.) as a ^e-qXaTo^ i'o which, except for one circumstance, is much like modern romantic love. Euripides knew this kind of romantic love. Among the fragments that remain to us of his lost tragdiies is one from Didys, in which occurs this sentiment : " He was my friend, and never did love lead me to folly or to Cypris. Yes, there is another kind of love, love for the soul, honorable, conti- nent, and good. Surely men should have passed a law that only the chaste and self-contained should love, and Cypris [Venus] should have been banished." Now it is very inter- esting to note that Euripides was a friend of Socrates, who often declared that his philosophy was the science of love, and whose two pupils, Xenophon and Plato, elucidated this science in several of their works. In Xenophon's Symposium Critobulus declares that he would rather be blind to every- thing else in the world than not to see his beloved ; that he would rather give all he had to the beloved than receive twice the amount from another ; rather be the beloved's slave than free alone ; rather work and dare for the beloved than live alone in ease and security. For, he continues, the enthusi- asm which beauty inspires in lovers "makes them more gen- erous, more eager to exert themselves, and more ambitious to overcome dangers, nay, it makes them purer and more conti- nent, causing them to avoid even that to which the strongest appetite urges them." Several of Plato's dialogues, especially the Symposium and PhcBilrus, also bear witness to the fact that the Socratic con- ception of love resembled modern romantic love in its ideal of purity and its altruistic impulses. Especially notable in this respect are the speeches of Phsedrus and Pausanius in the Symposium (175-78), in which love is declared to be the source of the greatest benefits to ns. There can be no greater blessing to a young person, we read, than a virtuous lover. Such a lover would rather die a thousand deaths than do a cowardly or dishonorable deed ; and love would make an in- spired hero out of the veriest coward. " Love will make men dare to die for the beloved — love alone." " The actions of a ROMANTIC LOVE, GREEK STYLE 773 lover have a grace which ennobles them." " Prom this point of view a man fairly argues that in Athens to love and be loved is a very honorable thing." " There is a dishonor in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth, or of political power." " For when the lover and beloved come together . , . the lover thinks that he is right in doing any service which he can to his gracious loving one." And in the Republic (VL, 485) : " He whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections." ' All this, as I have said, suggests romantic love, except for one circumstance — a fatal one, however. Modern romantic love is an ecstatic adoration of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman, whereas the romantic love described by Xeno- phon and Plato — so-called "Platonic love " — has nothing what- ever to do with women. It is a passionate, romantic friend- ship between men and boys, which (whether it really existed or not) the pupils of Socrates dilate upon as the only noble, exalted form of the passion that is presided over by Eros. On this point they are absolutely explicit. Of course it would not do for a Greek philosopher to deny that a woman may perform the noble act of sacrificing her life for her husband — that is her ideal function, as we have seen — so Alcestis is praised and rewarded for giving up her life ; yet Plato tells us distinctly {Symp., 180) that this phase of feminine love is, after all, inferior to that which led Achilles to give his life for the purpose of avenging the death of his friend Patroclus.^ What chiefly distinguishes the higher love' from the lower is, in the opinion of the pupils of Socrates, purity ; and this kind of love does not exist, in their opinion, between men and women. In discussing this higher kind of love both Plato and Xenophon consistently and persistently ignore women, and not only do they ignore them, but they deliber- ately distinguish between two goddesses of love, one of whom, ' In Mailer's book on the Dnrio race we read (310) that the love of the Cor- inthian Philolaus and Diocles "lasted until death," and even their graves were turned toward one another, in token of their affection. Lovers in Athens carved the beloved's names on walls, and innumerable poems were addressed by the leading bards to their favorites. X Compare Bamdohr, IIL, 191 and 124. 774 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS the celestial, presides — not over refined love between men and women, as we would say — but over the friendships between men only, while the feelings toward women are always in- spired by the common goddess of sensual love. In Plato's Symposium (181) this point is made clear by Pausanias : " The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul. . . . But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is de- rived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part, — she is from the male only ; this is that love which is of youths, and the goddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in her." PLATONIC LOVE OF WOMElf In thus excluding women from the sphere of pure, super- sensual romantic love, Plato shows himself a Greek to the marrow. In the Greek view, to be a woman was to be inferior to man from every point of view — even personal beauty. Plato's writings abound in passages which reveal his lofty contempt for women. In the Lmvs (VI., 781) he declares that "women are accustomed to creep into dark places, and when dragged out into the light they will exert their utmost powers of resistance, and be far too much for the legislator." While unfolding, in Timmus (91), his theory of the creation of man, he says gallantly that " of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation ; " and on another page (43) he puts the same idea even more insultingly by writing that the man " who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired." In other words, in Plato's mind a woman ranks half-way PLATONIC LOVE OF WOMEN 775 between a man and a brute. " Woman's nature," he says, " is inferior to that of men in capacity for virtue " (Laws^ VI., 781) ; and his idea of ennobling a woman consists in making her resemble a man, giving her the same education, the same training in athletics and warlike exercises, in wrest- ling naked with each other, even though the old and ugly would be laughed at {Republic, Bk. V.). Fathers, sons, moth- ers, daughters, will, in his ideal republic, go to war together. " Let a man go out to war from twenty to sixty years, and for a woman if there appear any need of making use of her in military service, let the time of service be after she shall have brought forth children up to fifty years of age " (Laws, VI., 785). Having thus abolished woman, except as a breeder of sons, Plato proceeds to eliminate marriage and morality. " The brave man is to have more wives than others, and he is to have first choice in such matters more than others" {Republic, v., 468). All wives, however, must be in common, no man having a monopoly of a woman. Nor must there be any choice or preference for individuals. The mothers are to be arranged by officials, who will see that the good pair with the good, the bad with the bad, the offspring of the latter being destroyed, just as is done in the breeding of animals. Mater- nal and filial love also must be abolished, infants being taken from their mothers and educated in common. Nor must husband and wife remain together longer than is necessary for the perpetuation of the species. This is the only object of marriage in Plato's opinion ; for he recommends {Laws, VI., 784) that if a couple have no children after being married ten years, they should be "divorced for their mutual benefit." In all history there is not a more extraordinary spectacle than that presented by the greatest philosopher of Greece, proposing in his ideal republic to eliminate every variety of family affection, thus degrading the relations of the sexes to a level inferior in some respects even to that of Australian savages, who at least allow mothers to rear their own children. And this philosopher, the most radical enemy love has ever known — practically a champion of promiscuity — has, by a 776 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS strange irony of fate, lent his name to the purest and most exalted form of love ! ' SPARTAN OPPORTUNITIES FOR LOTE Had Plato lived a few centuries earlier he might have vis- ited at least one Greek state where his barbarous ideal of the sexual relations was to a considerable extent realized. The Spartan law-maker Lycurgus shared his views regarding marriage, and had the advantage of being able to enforce them. He, too, believed that human beings should be bred like cattle. He laughed, so Plutarch tells us in his bio- graphic sketch, at those who, while exercising care in raising dogs and horses, allowed unworthy husbands to have off- spring. This, in itself, was a praiseworthy thought ; but the method adopted by Lycurgus to overcome that objection was subversive of all morality and affection. He considered it advisable that among worthy men there should be a commu- nity of wives and children, for which purpose he tried to suppress Jealousy, ridiculing those who insisted on a conju- gal monopoly and who even engaged in fights on account of it. Elderly men were urged to share their wives with young- er men and adopt the children as their own ; and if a man considered another's wife particularly prolific or virtuous he was not to hesitate to ask for her. Bridegrooms followed the custom of capturing their brides. An attendant, after cutting off the bride's hair and putting a man's garment on her, left her alone in the dark, whereupon her bridegroom visited her, returning soon, however, to his comrades. For months — sometimes until after children had been born — the husband would thus be unable to see his wife. ' I hare before me a dictionary which defineE Platonic love as it is now uni- versally, and incorrectly, understood, as " a pure spiritual affection Bubsistino: between the sexes, unmixed with carnal desires, a species of love for which Plato was a warm advocate." In reality Platonic {i.e. Socratic) love has noth- ing whatever to do with women, but is a fantastic and probably hypocritical idealization of a species of infatuation which in our day is treated neither in poems nor in dialogues, nor discussed in text-bonks of psychology or phyiol- ogy, but relegated to treatises on mental diseases and abnormalities. In fact, the whole philosophy of Greek love may be summed up in the assertion that " Platonic love," as understood by us, was by Plato and the Greeks in general considered an impossibility. SPARTAN OPPORTUNITIES FOR LOVE 77? Reading Greek literature in the light of modern science, it is interesting to note that we have in the foregoing account unmistakable allusions to several primitive customs which have prevailed among savages and barbarians in all parts of the world.' The Greek writers, ignorant of the revelations of anthropology regarding the evolution of human habits, assumed such customs to have been originated by particular lawgivers. This was natural enough and pardonable under the circumstances ; but how any modern writer can consider such customs (wliether aboriginal or instituted by lawgivers) especially favorable to love, passes my comprehension. Yet one of the best informed of my critics assured me that " in Sparta love was made a part of state policy, and opportu- nities were contrived for the young men and women to see each other at public games and become enamored." As usual in such cases, the writer ignores the details regarding these Spartan opportunities for seeing one another and fall- ing in love, which would have spoiled his argument by indi- cating what kind of " love " was in question here. Plutarch relates that Lycurgus made the girls strip naked and attend certain festivals and dance in that state before the youths, who were also naked. Bachelors who refused to marry were not allowed to attend these dances, which, as Plutarch adds with characteristic Greek naivete, were " a strong incentive to marriage." The erudite 0. 0. Muller, in his history of the Doric race (II., 298), while confessing that in all his reading of Greek books he had not come across a single instance of an Athenian in love with a free- born woman and marrying her because of a strong attach- ment, declares that Sparta was somewhat different, personal ' In the Deipnomphtsts of Atheniens (III., Bk. XII.) we find some other in- formation of anthropological significance : " Herraippus stated in his book about lawgivers that at Lacedaemon all the damsels used to be shut up in a dark room, while a number of unmarried young men were shut up with them ; and whichever girl each of the young men caught hold of he led away as his wife without a dowry." " But Clearches the Solensian, in his treatise on Prov- erb.'*, says : ' In Lacedasmon the women, on a certain festival, drag the unmarried men to an altar and then buffet them ; in order that, for the purpose of avoid- ing the insults of such treatment, they may become more affectionate and in due sea.son may turn their thoughts to marriage. But at Athens Cecrops was the first person who married a man to one woman only, when before his time uounectiouB had taken place at random and men had their wives in common.' " 778^ GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS attachments having been possible there because the young men and women were brought together at festivals and dances ; but he has the acumen to see that this love was "not of a romantic nature." ' AMAZON'IAN IDEAL OF GREEK WOMAJS'HOOD Jlomantic love, as distinguished from friendship, is de- pendent on sexual differentiation, and the highest phases of romantic love are possible only, as we have seen, where the secondary and tertiary sexual qualities, physical and mental, are highly developed. Now the Spartans, besides maintain- ing all the love-suppressing customs just alluded to, made special and systematic efforts to convert their women into Amazons devoid of all feminine qualities except such as were absolutely necessary for the perpetuation of the species. One of the avowed objects of making girls dance naked in the presence of men was to destroy what they considered as ef- feminate modesty. The law which forbade husbands to as- sociate with their wives in the daytime prevented the growth of any sentimental, sympathetic attachment between hus- band and wife. Even maternal feeling was suppressed, as far as possible, Spartan mothers being taught to feel proud and happy if their sons fell in battle, disgraced and unhappy if they survived in case of defeat. The sole object, in brief, of Spartan institutions relating to women was to rear a breed of healthy animals for the purpose of supplying the state > My critics might have convicted me of a genuine blunder inasmuch as in my first book (78) I assumed that Plato "foresaw the importance of pre- matrimonial acquaintance as the basis of a rational and happy marriage choice." This was an unwarranted concession, because all that Plato recommended was that " the youths and maidens shall dance together, seeing and being seen naked," after the Spartan manner. This might lead to a rational choice of sound bodies, but romantic love implies an acquaintance of minds, and is altogether a more complicated process than the dog and cattle breeder's procedure com- mended by Plato and Lycurgus. I may add that in view of Lycurgus's sys- tematic encouragement of promiscuity, the boast of the Spartan Geradas (re- corded by Platarch) that there were no cases of adultery in Sj^rta, must be accepted either as broad sarcasm, or in the manner of Limburg-Brouwer, who declares (IV., 165) that the boast is "like saying that in a band of brigands there is not a single thief." Even from the cattle-breeding point of view Lycurgus proved a failure, for according to Aristotle {Pol. 11., 9) the Spar- tans grew too lazy to bring up children, and rewards had to be offered for large families. AMAZONIAN IDEAL OF GREEK WOMANHOOD 779 with warriors. Not love, but patriotism, was the underlying motive of these institutions. To patriotism, the most mascu- line of all virtues, the lives of these women were immolated, and what made it worse was that, while they were reared as men, these women could not share the honors of men. Brought up as warriors, they were still despised by the war- riors, who, when they wanted companionship, always sought it in association with comrades of their own sex. In a word, instead of honoring the female sex, the Spartans suppressed and dishonored it. But they brought on their own punish- ment ; for the women, being left in charge of affairs at home during the frequent absence of their warlike husbands and sons, learned to command slaves, and, after the manner of the African Amazons we have read about, soon tried to lord it over their husbands too. And this utter suppression of femininity, this glorification of the Amazon — a being as repulsive to every refined mind as an effeminate man — has been lauded by a host of writers as emancipation and progress ! " If your reputation for prowess and the battles you have fought were taken away from you Spartans, in all else, be very sure, you have not your inferiors," exclaims Peleus in the Andromache of Euripides, thus summing up Athenian opinion on Sparta. There was, however, one other respect in which the enemies of Sparta admired her. C. 0. Miiller alludes to it in the following (II., 304) : " Little as the Athenians esteemed their own women, they involuntarily revered the heroines of Sparta, such as Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas ; Lampito, the daughter of Leotychidas, the wife of Archidamus and mother of Agis." This is not surprising, for in Athens, as among the Spartans and all other Greeks, patriotism was the supreme virtue, and women could be com- pared with men only in so far as they had the opportunity and courage to participate in this masculine virtue. Aris- totle appears to have been the only Greek philosopher who recognized the fact that "each sex has its own peculiar virtues in which the other rejoices ; " yet there is no indica- tion that even he meant by this anything more than the 780 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS qualities in a woman of being a good nurse and a chaste housemaid.! Plato, as we have seen, considered woman in- ferior to man because she lacked the masculine qualities which he would have lijied to educate into her ; and this remained the Greek attitude to the end, as we realize viv- idly on reading the special treatise of Plutarch — who flour- ished nearly half a thousand years after Plato — On the Virt- ues of Women, in which, by way of proving " that the virtues of a man and a woman do not differ," a number of stories are told of heroic deeds, military, patriotic, and otherwise, per- formed by women. Greek ideas on womanhood are admirably symbolized in their theology. Of their four principal goddesses — using the more familiar Latin names — Juno is a shrew, Venus a wan- ton, while Minerva and Diana are Amazons or hermaphro- dites — masculine minds in female bodies. In Juno, as Glad- stone has aptly said, the feminine character is strongly marked ; but, as he himself is obliged to admit, " by no means on its higher side." Kegarding Minerva, he remarks with equal aptness that " she is a goddess, not a god ; but she has nothing of sex except the gender, nothing of the woman except the form." She is the goddess, among other things, of war. Diana spends all her time hunting and slaughtering animals, and she is not only a perpetual virgin but ascetically averse to love and feminine tenderness — as un- sympathetic a being as was ever conceived by human imagina- tion — as unnatural and ludicrous as her devotee, the Hippo- lytus of Euripides. She is the Amazon of Amazons, and was represented dressed as an Amazon. Of course she is pictured as the tallest of women, and it is in regard to the question of stature that the Greeks once more betray their ultra-mascu- line inability to appreciate true femininity ; as, for example, in the stupid remark of Aristotle {Eth. Nicom., IV., 7), to KciWos iv [ieydXia (rii/jian, oi /xiKpol S' aoTtioi koI crv/ji,[jL€Tpot, KaXoi * See tlie evidence cited in Becker {III., 315) regarding Aristotle's views as to the inferiority of women. After comparing it with the remarks of . other writers Becker sums up the matter by saying that ''the virtue of which a woman was in those days considered capable did not differ very much from that of a faithful slave." ATHENIAN ORIENTALISM 781 8" oi! — " beauty consists in a large body ; the petite are pretty and symmetrical, but not beautiful."' ATHENIAN OKIENTALISM Both Diana and Venus were brought to Greece from Asia. Indeed, when we examine Greek life in the light of compar- ative CuUurgescliiclUe, we find a surprising prevalence of Oriental customs and ideas, especially in Athens, and jjartic- ularly in the treatment of women. In this respect Athens is the antipode of Sparta. AVhile at Sparta the women wrestled naked with the men, in Athens the women were not even per- mitted to witness their games. The Athenians moreover had very decided opinions about the effect of Spartan customs. The beautiful Helen who caused the Trojan war by her adulterous elopement was a Spartan, and the Athenian Eu- ripides makes Peleus taunt her husband Menelaus in these words : "Thou who didst let a Phrygian rob thee of thy wife, leaving thy home without bolt or guard, as if forsooth the cursed woman thou hadst was a model of virtue. No ! a Spartan maid could not be chaste, e'en if she would, who leaves her home and bares her limbs and lets her robe float free, to share with youth their races and their sports — customs I cannot away with. Is it any wonder that ye fail to educate your women in virtue ?" The Athenian, to be sure, did not any more than the Spar- tan educate his women in virtue. What he did was to compel them to be virtuous by locking them up in the Oriental style. Unlike the Spartan, the Athenian had a regard for paternity and genealogy, and the only way he knew to insure it was the Asiatic. He failed to make the discovery that the best safe- guard of woman's virtue is education — as witness America ; and to this failure is due to a large extent the collapse of Greek civilization. Athenian women were more chaste than ' In'the Odyssey (XV., 418) Homer speaks of " a Phoenioian woman, handsome and tall." He makes Odysseus compare Nausicaato Diana " in beauty, height, and bearing," and in another place he declares that, like Diana among her nymphs, she o'ertops her companions by head and brow (VI., 152, 102). How- ever this manner of measuring beauty with a yard-stick indicates some progress over' the savage and Oriental custom of making rotundity the criterion of beauty. 782 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS Spartans because they had to be, and they were superior also in being less masculine ; but the topsy-turvy Athenian men looked down on them because they were not more masculine and because they lacked the education which they themselves perversely refused to give them ! Few Athenian women could read or write, nor had they much use for such accom- plishments, being practically condemned to life-long impris- onment. The men indorsed the Oriental idea that educating a woman is an unwise and reprehensible thing.* Widely as the Athenian way of treating women differed from the Spartan, the result was the same — the frustration of pure love. The girls were married off in their early teens, before what little mind they had was developed, to men whom they had never seen before, and in the selection of whom they were not consulted ; the result being, in the words of a famous orator, that the men married respectable women for the sake of rearing legitimate offspring, keeping concubines - for the daily wants and care of the body, and associating with hetairai for pleasant companionship. Hence, as Becker justly remarks (III., 337), though we come across stories of passionate love in the pages of Terence {i.e. Menander) and other Greek writers, "sensuality was always the soil from which such passion sprang, and none other than a sensual love between a man and a woman was even acknowledged." LITEKATUKE AND LIFE ■ Although dogs are the most intelligent of all animals and at the same time proverbial for their faithful attachment to their masters, they are nevertheless, as I have before pointed out, in their sexual relations utterly incapable of that ap- proximation to conjugal love which we find instinctive in some birds. Most readers of this book, too, are probably ac- quainted with men and women, who while highly educated and refined, as well as devoted to the members of their fam- ily, are strangers to romantic love ; and I have pointed out ' Compare Menander, Frag. Incert. , 154 ; vuralx' 6 SiSiitricoiv ypiij.ii.ar oi xaXiit LITERATURE AND LIFE 783 (302) that men of genius may in this respect be in the same boat as ordinary mortals. In view of these considerations, and of the rarity of true love even in modern Europe and America, it surely is not unnatural or reckless to assume that there may have been whole nations in this predicament, though they were as advanced in many other respects as were the Greeks and as capable of other forms of domestic attach- ment. Yet, as I remarked on page 6, several writers, includ- ing so eminent a thinker as Professor "William James, have held that the Greeks could have differed from us only in their ideas about love, and not in their feelings themselves. "It is incredible," he remarks in the review referred to, " that individual women should not at all times have had the power to fill individual manly breasts with enchanted respect. ... So powerful and instinctive an emotion can never have been recently evolved. But our ideas about our emotions, and the esteem in which we hold them, differ very much from one generation to another." In the next para- graph he admits, however, that " no doubt the way in which we think about our emotions reacts on the emotions them- selves, dampening or inflaming them, as the case may be ; " and in this admission he really concedes the whole matter. The main object of my chapter " How Sentiments Change and Grow " is to show how men's ideas regarding nature, religion, murder, polygamy, modesty, chastity, incest, affect and modify their feelings in relation to them, thus furnish- ing indirectly a complete answer to the objection made to my theory.* Now the ideas which the Greeks had about their women could not but danipen any elevated feelings of love that might otherwise have sprung up in them. Their literature attests that they considered love a degrading, sensual passion, ' A homely but striking illustration may here be added. In Africa the ne- groes are proud of their complexion and look with aversion on a white skin. In the United States, knowing that a black skin is looked down on as a symbol of slavery or inferiority, they are ashamed of it. The wife of an eminent Southern judge informed me that Georgia negroes believe that in heaven they will be white ; and I have heard of one negro woman who declared that if she could become' white by being flayed she would gladly submit to the torture. ThuB have i/Ica.-i regarding the complexion changed the emotion of pride to the emotion of shame. 784 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS not an ennobling, supersensual sentiment, as we do. With such an idea how could they have possibly felt toward women as we do ? With the idea firmly implanted in their minds that women are in every respect the inferiors of men, how could they have experienced that emotional state of ec- static adoration and worship of the beloved which is the very essence of romantic love ? Of necessity, purity and adoration were thus entirely eliminated from such love as they were capable of feeling toward women. Nor can they, though noted for their enthusiasm for beautiful human forms, have risen above sensualism in the admiration of the personal beauty of women ; for since their girls were left to grow up in utter ignorance, neither their faces nor their minds can have been of the kind which inspires supersensual love. With boys it was different. They were educated mentally as well as physically, and hence as Winckelmann — himself a Greek in this respect — has remarked, " the supreme beauty of Greek art is male rather than female." If the healthy Greek mind could be so utterly different from the healthy modern mind in regard to the love of boys, why not in re- gard to the love of women ? The perverseness of the Greeks in this respect was so great that, as we have seen, they not only adored boys while despising women, but preferred mas- culine women to feminine women. But the most serious oversight of the champions of Greek love is that they regard love as merely an emotion, or group of emotions, whereas, as I have shown, its most essential in- gredients and only safe criteria are the altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacrifice, allied with sympathy and affec- tion. That there was no gallantry and self-sacrifice in Greek love of women I have already indicated (188, 197, 203, 163) ; and that there was no sympathy in it is obvious from the ftieartless way in which the men treated the women — in life I mean, not merely in literature — refusing to allow them the least liberty of movement, or choice in marriage, or to give them an education which would have enabled them to enjoy the higher pleasures of life on their own account. As for affection, it is needless to add that it cannot exist where there GREEK LOVE IN AFRICA 785 is no sympathy, no gallant kindness and courtesy, and no willingness to sacrifice one's selfish comfort or pleasures for another. Of course we know all these things only on the testimony of Greek literature ; but it would surely be the most extraor- dinary thing in the world if these altruistic impulses had ex- isted in Greek life, and Greek literature had persistently and absolutely ignored them, while on the other hand it is con- stantly harping on the other ingredients of love which also accompany lust. If literature has any historic value at all, if we can ever regard it as a mirror of life, we are entitled to the inference that romantic love was unknown to the Greeks of Europe, whereas the caresses and refinements and • ardent longings of sensual love — including hyperbole and the mixed moods of hope and despair — were familiar to them and are often expressed by them in poetic language (see 137, 140-44, 295, 399). I say the Greeks of Europe, to distinguish them from those of Greater Greece, whose capacities for love we still have to consider. GREEK LOVE llj AEEICA It is amusing to note the difference of opinion prevailing among the champions of Greek love as to the time when it began to be sentimental and " modern.'' Some boldly go back to Homer, at the threshold of literature. Many begin with Sappho, some with Sophocles, and a host with Euripides. Menander is the starting-point to others, while Benecke has written a book to prove that the credit of inventing modern love belongs to Antimachus of Colophon. The majority hesi- tate to go back farther than the Alexandrian school of the fourth century before Christ, while some modestly content themselves with the romancers of the fourth or fifth centu- ries after Christ — thus allowing a latitude of twelve or thir- teen hundred years to choose from. "We for our part, having applied our improved chemical test to such love as is recorded in the prose and verse of Classical Greece, and having found the elements of romantic sentiment missing, must now examine briefly what traces of 786 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS it may occur in the mucli-vanrited erotic poems and stories of Greater Greece, notably, the capital of Egypt in the third century before Christ. It is true that of the principal poets of the Alexandrian school — Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius — only the last named was probably a native of Alexandria; but the others made it their home and sphere of influence, being at- tracted by the great library, which contained all the treas- ures of Greek literature, and other inducements which the Ptolemies held out to men of letters. Thus it is permissible to speak of an African or Alexandrian period of Greek litera- ture, all the more as the cosmopolitan influences at work at Alexandria gave this literature a peculiar character of its own, erotically as well as otherwise, which tinged Greek writ- ings from that time on. In reading Homer we are struck by the utter absence not only of stories of romantic love but of romantic love-stories. Even the relations of Achilles and Briseis, which offered such fine romantic opportunities, are treated in an amazingly pro- saic manner. An emphatic change in this respect is hardly to be noted till we come to Euripides, who, though ignorant of romantic love, gave women and their feelings more atten- tion than they had previously received in literature. Aris- tophanes, in several of his plays, gave vent to his indignation at this new departure, but the tendency continued in the New Comedy (Menander and others), which gave up the ever- lasting Homeric heroes and introduced everyday contempo- rary scenes and people. Thus the soil was prepared for the Alexandrians, but it was with them that the new plant reached its full growth. Not content with following the example of the New Comedy, they took up the Homeric personages again, gods as well as heroes, but in a very differ- ent fashion from that of their predecessors, proceeding to sentimentalize them to their hearts' content, the gods being represented as sharing all the amorous weaknesses of mortals, differing from them only, as Rohde remarks (107), in being even more fickle than they, eternally changing their loves. The infusion of this romantic spirit into the dry old myths GREEK LOVE IN AFRICA 787 undoubtedly brings tbe poems and stories of the Alexan- drians and their imitators a step nearer to modern conditions. The poets of the Alexandrian period must also be credited with being the first who m'ade love (sensual love, I mean) — which had played so subordinate a r61e in the old epics and tragedies — the central feature of interest, thus setting a fashion which has continued without interruption to the present day. As Couat puts it, with the pardonable exag- geration of a specialist (155) : "Les Alexandrins* n'ont pas invente I'amour dans la litterature . . . mais ils ont cr66 la litterature de I'amour." Their way of treating love was followed in detail by the Eoman poets, especially Ovid, Ca- tullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and by the Greek novel- ists, Xenophou Ephesius, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Char- iton, Longus, etc., up to the fourth or fifth centuries (dates are uncertain) of our era. There is a " suprising similarity " in the descriptions of love- affairs by all these writers, as is noted by Rohde, who devotes twenty pages (145-165, chiefly foot-notes, after the fashion of German professors) to detailed proof of his assertion. The substance of these pages, may, however be summed up very briefly, under seventeen heads. In all these writings, if the girl is represented as being respectable, (1) the lovers meet or see each other for the first time at religious festi- vals, as those were practically the only occasions where such women could appear in public. (2) The love is sudden, at first sight, no other being possible under circumstances that permit of no prolonged courtship. (3) The youth is repre- sented as having previously felt a coy, proud aversion to the goddess of love, who now avenges herself by smiting him with a violent, maddening passion. (4) The love is mutual, and it finds its way to the heart through the eyes. (5) Cupid with his arrows, urged on by Venus, is gradually relegated to the back- ground as a shadowy abstraction. (6) Both the youth and the maiden are extraordinarily beautiful. No attempt is made, however, to describe the points of beauty in detail, after the dry fashion of the Oriental and the later Byzantine authors. Hyperbole is used in comparing the complexion to snow, the 788 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS cheeks to roses, etc ; but the favorite way of picturing a youth or maiden is to compare tlie same to some one of the gods or goddesses who were types familiar to all through pictures and statues — a characteristically Greek device, going back as far as Hesiod and Homer. (7) The passion of the lovers is a genuine disease, which (8) monopolizes their souls, and (9) makes them neglect the care of the body, (10) makes pallor alternate with blushes, (11) deprives them of sleep, or fills their dreams with the beloved ; (12) it urges them to seek solitude, and (13) to tell their woes to the trees and rocks, which (14) are supposed to sympathize with them. (15) The passion is incurable, even wine, the remedy for other cares, serving only to aggravate it. (IG) Like Orientals, the lovers may swoon away or fall into dangerous illness. (17) Tlie lover cuts the beloved^'s name into trees, follows her footsteps, consults the flower oracle, wishes he were a bee so he could fly to her, and at the banquet puts his lips to the spot where she drank from the cup. Having finished his list of erotic traits, Rohde confesses frankly that it "embraces, to be sure, only a limited number of the simplest symptoms of love." But instead of drawing therefrom the obvious inference that love which has no other_ symptoms than those is very far from being like modern love, he adds perversely and illogically that " in its essential traits, this passion is presumaily the same at all times and with all nations."^ ' Professor Rohde appears to follow the old metaphysical maxim "If facts do not agree with my theory, so much the worse for the facts." He piles up pages of evidence which show conclusively that these Greeks knew nothing of the higher traits and symptoms of love, and then he adds : " but they must have known them all the same." To give one instance of his contradictory procedure. On page 70 he admits that, as women were situated, the tender ani passionate courtship of the youths as described in poems and romances of the period ' ' could hardly have been copied from life," because the Greek custom of allow- ing the fathers to dispose of their daughters without consulting their wishes wa« incompatible with the poetry of such courting. " It is very significant," he adds, '^that among the numerous references to the ways of obtaining brides made by poets and moral philosophers, including those of the Hellenistic [Al- exandrian] period, and collected by Stobaeus in chapters 70, 71, and 7^ of his PVorilegium^ love is never mentioned among the motives of marriage choice." In the next sentence he declares nevertheless that " no one would be so foolish as to deny the existence of pure, strong love in the Greek life of this period ; " and ten lines farther on he backs down again, admitting that though there may be indications of supersensual, sentimental love in the literature of this period theie traits had not yet taken hold of the life of these men, though there were ALEXANDRIAN CHIVALRY 789 ALEXANDRIAN CHIVALRY. It is in the Alexandrian period of Greek literature and art that, according to Helbig (194), " we first meet traits that suggest the adoration of women {FrauencuUus) and gallan- try." This opinion is widely prevalent, a special instance be- ing that ecstatic exclamation of Professor Ebers : " Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have been unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, was transferred as a constellation to the skies ? " In reality this act was in- spired by selfish adulation and had not the remotest connec- tion with love. The story in brief is as follows ; Shortly after his marriage to Berenice, Ptolemy went on an expedition into Syria. To insure his safe return to Egypt Berenice vowed to conse- crate her beautiful hair to Venus. On his return she fulfilled her vow in the temple ; but on the following day her hair could not be found. To console the king and the queen, and to conciliate the royal favor, the astronomer Conon declared tliat the locks of Berenice had been removed by divine interposition and transferred to the skies in the form of a constellation.' A still more amusing instance of Alexandrian "gallantry " is to be found in the case of the queen Stratonice, whose court-poets were called upon to compete with each other in singing of the beauty of her locks. The fact that she was bald, did not, as a matter of course, make the slightest differ- ence in this kind of homage. longings for them. And at the end of the paragraph he emphasizes his back- down by declaring that " the very essence of sentimental poetry is the longing for what tloes not exist." ( ht doiJi das rechte Element gerade der setitimeutalen Piiexie die Sehnsueht narh dem riicitt Vorhandenen.') What makes this admission the more significant is that Professor Rohde, in speaking of "sentimental" ele- ments, does not even nse that word as the adjective of sentiment but of senti- menta'lity. He defines this Sentimentalitdt to which he refers as a " .SVAj/ck, Sinnen und Hbffen," a. " Selbstgenuss der teidenschaft "—a " longing, dre.nm- ing, and hoping," a " revelling in (literally, self -enjoying of ) passion." In other words, an enjoyment of emotion for emotion's sake, a gloating over one's selfish joys and sorrows. Now in this respect I actually go beyond Bohde as a champion of Greek love ! Such Sentimentalitdt existed, I am convinced, in Alexandri- an life as well as in Alexandrian literature ; but of the existence of true super- sensual altruistic sentiment I can find no evidence. The trouble with Rohde, as with so many who have written on this subject, is that he has no clear idea of the diitinction between sensual love, which is selfish {Selbstgenuss) and ro- mantic love, which is altruistic; hence he flounders in hopeless contradictions. ' See Anthon, 25S, and the authors there referred to. 790 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS Unlike his colleagues, Eohde was not misled into accept- ing such adulation of queens as evidence of adoration of women in general. In several pages of admirable erudition (63-69), which I commend to all students of the subject, he exposes the hoUowness and artificiality of this so-called Alexandrian chivalry. Fashion ordained that poems should be addressed to women of exalted rank : " As the queens were, like the kings, enrolled among the gods, the court- poets, of course, were not allowed to neglect the praise of the queens, and they were called upon to celebrate the royal weddings ; ' nay, in the extravagance of their gallant homage they rose to a level of bad taste the pinnacle of which was reached by Callimachus in his elegy — so well-known through the imitation of Catullus — on the hair of queen Berenice placed among the constellations by the courtesy of the astron- omer Conon." He then proceeds to explain that we must be careful not to infer from such a courtly custom that other women enjoyed the freedom and influence of the queen or shared their compliments. " In actual life a certain chival- rous attitude toward women existed at most toward hetairai, in which case, as a matter of course, it was adulterated with a very unpleasant ingredient of frivolous sentimentality. . . . Of an essential change in the position of respectable girls and women there is no indication." Though there were a number of learned viragoes, there is "absolutely no evidence" that women in general received the compliment and benefit of an education. The poems of Philetas and Callimachus, like those of Propertius and Ovid, so far as they referred to women, appealed only to the wanton hetairai. As late as our first century Plutarch felt called upon to write a treatise, oTi KoX ■ymnuKWi iraiSfuriav — " that women too should be edu- cated." Cornelius Nepos still speaks of the gynaikonitis as the place where women spend their time. " In particular, the emancipation of virgins from the seclusion of their jeal- ous confinement would have implied a revolution in all social ' See Theocritus, Idyll XVII. Regarding the silly and degrading adulation which the Alexandrian court-poets were called upon to bestow on the kings and queens, and its demoralizing effect on literature, see also Christ's Oriechische Litteraturgeschiehte, 493-494 and 507. ALEXANDRIAN CHIVALRY 791 arrangements of the Greeks of which we have no intimation anywhere," including Alexandria (69). In another chapter, Rohde comments (354-356) with documentary proof, on the "extraordinary tenacity," with which the Greeks down to the latest periods of their literature, clung to their custom of re- garding and treating women as inferiors and servants — a custom which precluded the possibility of true chivalry and adoration. That sympathy also — and consequently true, al- truistic affection — continued to be wanting in their emotional life is indicated by the fact, also pointed out by Rohde, that " the most palpable mark of a higher respect," an education, was withheld from the women to the end of the Hellenic period .1 ^ T have given Professor Rohde's testimony on this point not only because he is a famous specialist in the literature of this period, but because his peculiar bias makes his negative attitude in regard to the question of Alexandrian gal- lantry the more convincing. A reader of his book would naturally expect him to take the opposite view, since he himself fancied he had discovered traces of gallantry in an author who preceded the Alexandrians. The A ndromeda of Eurip- ides, he declares (23), " became in his hands one of the most brilliant examples of chivalrous love." This, however, is a pure assiunption on his part, not war- ranted by the few fragments of this play that have been preserved. Benecke has devoted a special *' Excursus " to this play (203-205), in which he justly re- marks that readers of Greek literature ^ ' need hardly be reminded of how utterly foreign to the Greek of Euripides's day is the conception of the * galante Hitter ' setting out in search of ladies that want rescuing." He might have brought out th? hnmor of the matter by quoting the characteristically Greek version of the Perseus story given by Apollodorus, who relates dryly (II., chap. 4) that Ce- pheus, in obedience to an oracle, bound his daughter to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster. ' ' Perseus saw her, fell in love with her, and promised Ce- pheus to slaughter the monster if he would proynise to give him the rescued daughter to marry. The contract was made and Perseus undertook the advent- ure, killed the monster and rescued Andromeda." Nothing could more strikingly reveal the difference between Hellenic and modern ideas regarding lovers than the fact that to the Greek mind there was nothing disgraceful in this selfish, ungallaut bargain made by Perseus as a condition of his rescuing the poor girl from a horrible death. A mediaeval knight, or a modem geutleman, not to speak of a modern lover, would have saved her at the risk of his own life, reward or no reward. The difference is further emphasized by the attitude of the girl, who exclaims to her deliverer, "Take me, O stranger, for thine handmaiden, or wife, or slave." Professor Murray, who cites this line in his History of Oreek Literature, remarks with comic naivete'; "The love-note in this pure and titude of inferiority, submission, and self-sacrifice? Was not ^?t(S(8S written to enforce that principle of conduct ? And does not that very exclamation of Andromeda show how utterly antipodal the situation and the whole drama of Euripides were to modem ideas of chivalrous love ? Having just mentioned Benecke, I may as well add here that his own theory regarding the first appearance of the romantic elements in Greek love-poetry rests on an equally flimsy basis. He held that Antimaehus, who flourished be- fore Euripides and Plato had passed away, was the first poet who applied to women the idea of a pure, chivalrous love, which up to his time had been attrib- 793 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS THE NEW COMEDY Another current error regarding the Alexandrian period botli in Egypt and in Greece (Menander and the New Com- edy) is that a regard for purity enters as a new element into its literature. It does, in some instances, less, however, as a virtue than as a bonne louche for epicures,' as is made most patent in that offshoot of the Alexandrian manner, the abom- inably raffiue story of Daphnis and Chloe. There may also be traces of that "longing for an ennobling of the passion of love " of which Rohde speaks (though I have not found any in my own reading, and the professor, contrary to his favor- ite usage, gives no references) ; but apart from that, the later Greek literature differs from the older not in being purer, but by its coarse and shameless eroticism, both un- natural and natural. The old epics and tragedies are models of purity in comparison, though Euripides set a bad example in his Hippolytus, and still more his ^olus, the coarse in- cestuous passion of which was particularly admired and imi- tated by the later writers.^ Aristophanes is proverbial for his unspeakable license and obscenity. Concerning the plays of Menander (more than a hundred, of which only fragments have come down to us and Latin versions of several by Ter- ence and Plautus), Plutarch tells us, indeed, that they were all tied together by one bond — love ; but it was love in the only sense known to the Greeks, and always involving a he- taira or at most a xpevSoKofyri, or demie-vierge, since respectable girls could not be involved in realistic Greek love-affairs. nted only to the romantic friendshipB with boys. The "romantic idea," ac- cording to Benecke, is '* the idea that a woman is a worthy object for a man^s love and that such love may well be the chief, if not the only, aim of a man's life." But that Antimachus knew anything of such love is a pure figment of Benecke's imagination. The works of Antimachus are lost, and all that we know about them or him is that he lamented the loss of his wife — a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon — and consoled himself by writing an elegy named Ai)STi,in which he brought together from mythical and traditional sources a number of sad tales. Couiugal grief does not take us very far toward so complicated an altruistic state of mind as I have shown romantic love to be. ' Theocritus makes this point clear in line ."5 of Idyl 13 : 0ipsL Tpiyifioio yvvaLKOi. ' See Helbig, 246, and Rohd^^, 36, for details. Helbig remarks that the Alex- andrians, following the procedure of Euripides, chose by preference incestuous passions, "and it appears that such passions were not rare in actual life too in those times." THEOCRITUS AND CALLIMACHUS 703 Professor Gercke has well remarked (141) that the charm of elegance with which Menauder covers up his moral rotten- ness, and which made him the favorite of the jet(nesse doree of his time, exerted a bad influence on the stage through many centuries. There are a few quasi-altruistic expressions in the plays of Terence and Plautus, but they are not sup- ported by actions and do not reach beyond the sphere of sen- timentality into that of sentiment. Here again I may ad- duce Rohde as an unbiassed witness. While declaring that there is " a longing for the ennobling of the passion in actual life " he admits that " really sentimental effusions of love are strikingly rare in Plautus and Terence.' One might think the authors of the Latin versions had omitted the senti- mental passages, were it not that in the remnants of the Newer Comedy of the Attic writers themselves there are, apart from general references to Eros, no traces whatever of sentimental allusions."^ THEOCRItUS AKD CALLIMACHUS Let us now return from Athens and Rome to Alexandria, to see whether we can find a purer and more genuinely ro- mantic atmosphere in the works of her leading poets. Of 1 He refers as instances to Plant., Asin., III. ,3, particnlarly v. 608 flf. and 61.5 ; adding that '* a very sentimental cliaracter is Charinus in the Mercator ; and he also points to Tor., JSun., 103 ff. 2 What makes this evidence the more conclusive is that Rohde's use of the word "sentimental" refers, according to his own definition, to egoistic senti- mentality, not to altruistic sentiment. Of sentimentality — altiloquent, fabri- cated feeling and cajolery — there is enough In Greek and Latin literature, doubt- less as a reflection of life. But when, in the third act of the Asinaria, the lover says to his girl, '* If I were to hear that you were in want of life, at once would I present you my own life and from my own would add to yours," we promptly ask, " Would he have done it ? " And the answer, from all we know of these men and their attitude toward women, would have been the same as that of the maiden to the enamoured Daphnis, in the twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus : ' ' Now you promise me everything, but afterward you will not give me a pinch of salt.'* As for the purity of the characters in the play, its quality may be inferred from the fact that the girl is not only a hetaira, but the daughter oi a procuress, v Prom the point of view of purity the Captivi is par- ticularly instructive. Riley calls it '* the most pure and innocent of all the plays of Plautus ; " and when we examine why this is so we find that it is be- cause there is no woman in it ! In the epilogue Plautus himself — who made his living by translating Athenian comedies into Latin — makes the significant confession that there were but few Greek plays from which he might have cop- ied so chaste a plot, in which " there is no wenching, no intriguing, no exposure of a child " to be found by a procuress and brought up as a hetaira — which are the staple features of these later Greek plays. 794 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS these the first in time and fame is Theocritus. He, like Sappho, has been lauded as a poet of love ; and he does re- semble Sappho in two respects. Like her, he often glorifies unnatural passion in a way which, as in the twelfth and twenty-third Idyls, for example, tempts every normal person who can read the original to throw the whole book away in disgust. Like Sappho and the Hindoos (and some modern critics) he also seems to imagine that the chief symptoms of love are emaciation, perspiration, and paralysis, as we see in the absurdly overrated second Idyl, of which I have al- ready spoken (116). Lines 87-88 of Idyl I., lines 139-142 of Idyl II., and the whole of Idyl XXVII. , practically sum up the conception of love prevailing in the bucolic school of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, except that Theocritus has an idea of the value of coyness and jealousy as stimulants of passion, as Idyl VI. shows. Crude coyness and rude Jeal- ousy no doubt were known also to the rustic folk he sings about ; but when he makes that ugly, clumsy, one-eyed mon- ster, the Cyclops Polyphemus, fall in love with the sea-nymph Galatea (Idyl XL) and lament that he was not born with fins that he might dive and kiss her hand if his lips she refused, he applies Alexandrian pseudo-gallanti;y to pastoral condi- tions where they are ludicrously out of place. The kind of " gallantry " really to be expected under these conditions is realistically indicated in Idyl XIV., where ^schines, after declaring that he shall go mad some day because the beauti- ful Cyniska flouted him, tells his friend how, in a fit of jeal- ousy, he had struck the girl on the cheek twice with clenched fist, while she was sitting at his own table. Thereupon she left him, and now he laments : " If I could only find a cure for my love ! " Another quaintly realistic touch occurs in the line (Idyl II.) in which Battis declares that Amaryllis, when she died, was as dear to him as his goats. In this line, no doubt, we have the supreme ideal of Sicilian pastoral love ; nor is there a line which indicates that Theocritus himself knew any higher phases of love than those which he embodies in his shepherds. In a writer who has so many poetic THEOCRITUS AND CALLIMACHUS 795 charms ' this may seem strange, but it simply bears out my theory that romaatic love is one of the latest products of civ- ilization — as late as the love of romantic scenery, which we do not find in Theocritus, though he writes charmingly of other kinds of scenery — of cool fountains, shady groves, pastures with cattle, apple trees, and other things that please the senses of man — as women do while they are young and pretty. Callimachus, the younger contemporary of Theocritus, is another Alexandrian whose importance in the history of love has been exaggerated. His fame rests chiefly on the story of Acontius and Cydippe which occurred in the collection of legends and tales he had brought together in his Ama. His own version is now lost, like most of his other works ; and such fragments of the story as remain would not suffice for the purpose of reconstruction were we not aided by the two epistles which the lovers exchange with each other in the Heroides of Ovid, and more still by the prose version of Aristsenetus, which appears to be quite literal, judging by the correspondence of the text with some of the extant frag- ments of the original.^ The story can be related in a few lines. Acontius and Cydippe are both very beautiful and have both been coy to others of the opposite sex. As a pun- ishment they are made to fall in love with each other at first sight in the Temple of Diana. It is a law of this temple that any vow made in it must be kept. To secure the girl, Acon- tius therefore takes an apple, writes on it a vow that she will be his bride and throws it at her feet. She picks it up, reads the vow aloud and thus pledges herself. Her parents, some time after, want to marry her to another man ; three times the wedding arrangements are made, but each time she falls ill. Finally the oracle at Delphi is consulted, which declares that the girl's illness is due to her not keeping her vow ; whereupon explanations follow and the lovers are united. In the literary history of love this story may be allowed a ' Those who cannot read Greek will derive much pleasure from the admirable prose version of Andrew Lang, which in charm of style sometimes excels the original, while it veils those features that too much offiend modern taste. 2 Couat, 143. There are reasons to believe that the epistles referred to are not by Ovid. Aristaehetus lived about the fifth century. It is odd that the poem of Callimachus should have been lost after surviving eight centuries. 796 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS conspicuous place for the reason thatj as Mahafly remarks {G. L. & T., 236), it is the first literary original of that sort of tale which makes falling in love and happy marriage the beginning and the end, while the obstacles to this union form the details of the plot. Moreover, as Couat points out (145), the later Greek romances are mere imitations of this Alexandrian elegy — Hero and Leander, Leucippe and Clito- phon, and other stories all recall it. But from my point of view — the evolutionary and psychological — I cannot see that the story told by Callimachus marks any advance. The lovers see each other only a moment in the temple ; they do not meet afterward, there is no real courtship, they have no chance to get acquainted witli each other's mind and char- acter, and there is no indication whatever of supersensual, altruistic afEection. Nor was Callimachus the man from whom one would have expected a new gospel of love. He was a dry old librarian, without originality, a compiler of catalogues and legends, etc. — eight hundred works all told — in which even the stories were marred by details of pedantic erudition. Moreover, there is ample evidence in the extant epigrams that he did not differ from his contemporaries and predecessors in the theory and practice of love. Instead of having the modern feeling of abhorrence toward any sugges- tion of TraiSepaoTTia, he glorified it in the usual Greek style. The fame he enjoyed as an erotic poet among the coarse and unprincipled Roman bards does not redound to his credit, and he himself tells us unmistakably what he means by love when he calls it a <^t\o7raiSa voaov and declares that fasting is a sure remedy for it [Ejiigr., 47). MEDEA AKD JASON Another writer of this period who has been unduly ex- tolled for his insight into the mysteries of love,- is Apollonius Ehodius, concerning whom Professor Murray goes so far as to say (383), that " for romantic love on the higher side he is without a peer even in the age of Theocritus. "(!) He owes this fame to the story of Medea and Jason, introduced in the MEDEA AND JASON 797 third book of his version of the Argonautic expedition (275 seq.). It begins in the old-fashioned way with Cupid shooting his arrow at Medea's heart, in which forthwith the destruct- tive passion glows. Blushes and pallor alternate in her face, and her breast heaves fast and deep as she incessantly stares at Jason with flaming eyes. She remembers afterwards every detail about his looks and dress, and how he sat and walked. Unlike all other men he seemed to her. Tears run down her cheeks at the thought that he might succumb in his com- bat with the two terrible bulls he will have to tame before he can recover the Golden Fleece. Even in her dreams she suffers tortures, if she is able to sleep at all. She is dis- tracted by conflicting desires. Should she give him the magic salve which would protect his body from harm, or let him die, and die with him ? Should she give up her home, her family, her honor, for his sake and become the topic of scandalous gossip ? or should she end it all by committing suicide ? She is on the point of doing so when the thought of all the joys of life makes her hesitate and change her mind. She resolves to see Jason alone and give him the oint- ment. A secret meeting is arranged in the temple of Hecate. She gets there first, and while waiting every sound of foot- steps makes her bosom heave. At last he comes and at sight of him her cheek flames red, her eyes grow dim, conscious- ness seems to leave her, and she is fixed to the ground unable to move forward or backward. After Jason has spoken to her, assuring her that the gods themselves would reward her for saving the lives of so many brave men, she takes the salve from her bosom, and she would have plucked her heart from it to give him had he asked for it. The eyes of both are modestly turned to the ground, but when they meet longing speaks from them. Then, after explaining to him the use of the salve, she seizes his hand and begs him after he shall have reached his home again, to remember her, as she will bear him in mind, even against her parents' wishes. Should he forget her, she hopes messengers will bring news of him, or that she herself in;iy be able to cross the seas and appear an unexpected guest to remind him how she had saved him. 798 GREEK LOVE-STOR^. S AND POEMS Such was the love of Medea, which historians have pro- claimed such a new thing in literature — " romantic love on the higher side." For my part I cannot see in this description — in which no essential trait is omitted — anything different from what we have found in Homer, in Sappho, and in Eu- ripides. The unwomanly lack of coyness which Medea dis- plays when she practically proposes to Jason, expecting him to marry her out of gratitude, is copied after the Nausicaa of the Odyssey. The flaming cheeks, dim eyes, loss of conscious- ness, and paralysis are copied from Sappho ; while the Hip- ■polytus of Euripides furnished the model for the dwelling on the subjective symptoms of the " pernicious passion of love." The stale trick too, of making this love originate in a wound inflicted by Cupid's arrows is everlastingly Greek ; and so is the device of representing the woman alone as being consumed by the flames of love. For Jason is about as unlike a modern lover as a caricaturist could make him. His one idea is to save his life and get the Fleece. "Necessity compels me to clasp your knees and ask your aid," he exclaims when he meets her ; and when she gives him that broad hint " do not forget me ; I shall never forget you," his reply is a long story about his home. Not till after she has threatened to visit him does he declare " But should you come to my home, you would be honored by all . . . in that case I hope you may grace my bridal couch." And again in the fourth book he relates that he is taking Medea home to be his wife "in ac- cordance with her wishes ! " Without persiflage, his attitude may be summed up in these words : " I come to you because I am in danger of my precious life. Help me to get back the Golden Fleece and I promise you that, on condition that I get home safe and sound, I will condescend to marry you." Is this, perhaps, the "romantic love on the higher side " which Professor Murray found in this story ? But there is more to come. Of the symptoms of love in Medea's heart described in the foregoing paragraph not one rises above that egotistic gloat- ing over the pangs and joys of sensual infatuation which con- stitute one phase of sentimentality ; while the further prog- POETS AND HETAIRAI 799 ress of the story shows that Medea had no idea whatever of sacrificing herself for Jason, but that the one motive of her actions was the eager desire to possess him. When the fugitives are being pursued closely, and the chivalrous Argo- nauts, afraid to battle with a superior number, propose to re- tain the Golden Fleece, but to give up Medea and let some other king decide whether she is to be returned to her par- ents, it never occurs to her that she might save her beloved by going back home. She wants to have him at any cost, or to perish with him ; so she reproaches him bitterly for his in- gratitude, and meditates the plan of setting fire to the ships and burning him up with all the crew, as well as herself. He tries to pacify her by protesting that he had not quite liked the plan proposed himself, but had indorsed it only to gain time ; whereupon she suggests a way out of the dilemma pleasanter to herself, by advising the Argonauts to inveigle her brother, who leads the pursuers, into their power and assas- sinate him ; which they promptly proceed to do, while she stands by with averted eyes. It is with unconscious sarcasm that Apollonius exclaims on the same page where all these details of " romantic love on the higher side " are being un- folded : " Accursed Bros, the world's most direful plague." POETS AND HETAIEAI. The one commendable feature which the stories of Acon- tius and Cydippe and of Medea and Jason have in common is that the heroine in each case is a respectable and pure maiden (see Argon., IV., 1018-1025). But, although the later romance writers followed this example, it would be a great mistake to suppose, with Mahaffy (272), that this touch of virgin purity was felt by the Alexandrians to be "the necessary starting-point of the love-romance in a refined so- ciety." Alexandrian society was anything but refined in matters of love, and the trait referred to stands out by reason of its novelty and isolation in a literature devoted chiefly to the hetairai. We see this especially also in the epigrams of the period. It is astonishing, writes Couat (173), how many 800 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS of these are erotic ; and " almost all/' he adds, " are ad- dressed to courtesans or young boys." " Dans toutes I'auteur ne chante que la beaut6 plastique et les plaisirs faciles ; leur Cypris est la Oypris TravSr/zAos, celle qui se vend a tout le inonde." In these verses of Callimachus, Asclepiades, Posei- dippus and others, he finds sentimentality but no sentiment ; and on page 62 he sums up Alexandria with French patness as a place " ou Ton faisait assidiiment des vers sur I'amour sans etre amoureux " — " where they were ever writing love- poems without ever being in love." But what repels modern taste still more than this artificiality and lack of inspiration is the effeminate degradation of the masculine type most ad- mired. Helbig, who, in his book on Campanisclie Wandma- lerei, enforces the testimony of literature with the inferences that can be drawn from mural paintings and vases, remarks (358) that the favorite poetic ideals of the time are tender youths with milk-white complexion, rosy cheeks and long, soft tresses. Thus is Apollo represented by Callimachus, thus even Achilles by the bucolic poets. In later representations indicating Alexandrian influences we actually see Polyphe- mus no longer as a rude giant, but as a handsome man, or even as a beardless youth.* That the Alexandrian period, far from marking the ad- vent of purity and refinement in literature and life, really represents the climax of degradation, is made most obvious when we regard the role which the hetairai played in social life. In Alexandria and at Athens they were the centre of attraction at all the entertainments of the young men, and to some of them great honors were paid. In the time of Polyb- ius the most beautiful houses in Alexandria were named after flute girls ; portrait statues of such were placed in tem- ples and other public places, by the side of those of genferals and statesmen, and there were few prominent men whose names were not associated with these creatures. The opinion has been promulgated countless times that these haipai were a mentally superior class of women, and on the strength of this information I assumed, in Romantic ■ See also Helbig' s Chap. XXII. on the increasing lubricity of Greek art. POETS AND HETAIRAI 801 Love and Personal Beauty (79), that, notwithstanding their frailty, they may have been able, in some cases, to inspire a more refined, spiritual sort of love than the uneducated do- mestic women. A study of the original sources has now con- vinced me that this was a mistake. Aspasia no doubt was a remarkable woman, but she stands entirely by herself. Theodota is visited once by Socrates, but he excuses himself from calling again, and as for Diotima, she is a seeress rather than a hetaira. Athenaeus informs iis that some of these women " had a great opinion of themselves, paying attention to education and spending a part of their time on literature ; so that they were very ready with tlieir rejoinders and replies ; " but the specimens he gives of these rejoinders and replies consist chiefly of obscene jokes, cheap puns on names or pointless witticisms. Here are two specimens of the better kind, relating to Gnathaena, who was famed lor her repartee : " Once, when a man came to see her and saw some eggs on a dish, and said, ' Are these raw Gnathaena, or boiled ?' she replied, 'They are made of bi-ass, my boy.'" " On one occasion, when some poor lovers of the daughter of Gnathaena came to feast at her house, and threatened to throw it down, saying that they had brought spades and mat- tocks on purpose ; 'But,' said Gnathaena, ' if you had these implements, you should have pawned them and brought some money with you.' " The pictures of the utter degrada- tion of the most famous of the hetairai — Leontium, Lais, Phryne, and others, drawn by Atheuseus, need not be trans- iierred to these pages. Combined with the revelations made in Lucian's EraipiKol StaXoyoi, they demonstrate absolutely that these degraded, mercenary, mawkish creatures could not have inspired romantic sentiment in the hearts of the men, even if the latter had been capable of it. It is to s^ch vulgar persons that the poets of classical Greece and Alexandria addressed their verses. And herein they were followed by those of the Latins who may be re- garded as imitators of the Alexandrians — Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, the principal erotic poets of Rome. They wrote all their love-poems to, for, or about, a class of 802 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS women corresponding to the Greek hetairai. Of Ovid I have already spoken (189), and v>fhat I said of him practically ap- plies to the others. Propertius not only writes with the hetairai in his mind, but, like his Alexandrian models, he appears as one who is forever writing love-poems without ever being really in love. With Catullus the sensual passion at least is sincere. Yet even Professor Sellar, who declares that he is, " with the exception perhaps of Sappho, the greatest and truest of all the ancient poets of love," is obliged to ad- mit that he "has not the romance and purity of modern sen- timent" (349, 32). Like the Greeks, he had a vague idea that there is something higher than sensual passion, but, like a Greek, in expressing it, he ignores women as a matter of course. " There was a time," he writes to his profligate Lesbia, " when I loved you not as a man loves his mistress, but as a father loves his son or his son-in-law" ! Dicebas quondam solum te nosse CatuUum, Lesbia, neo prae me velle tenere lovera. Dilexi turn te non ut volgus amicam, Sed pater ut gnatoa diligit et generos. In Tibullus there is a note of tenderness which, however, is a mark of effeminacy rather than of an improved manli- ness. His passion is fickle, his adoration little more than adulation, and the expressions of unselfish devotion here and there do not mean more than the altiloquent words of Achilles about Briseis or of Admetus about Alcestis, for they are not backed up by altruistic actions. In a word, his poems belong to the region of sentimentality, not sentiment. Mor- ally he is as rotten as any of his colleagues. He began his poetic career with a glorification of TraiScpuo-Ti'a, and continued it as an admirer of the most abandoned women. A French author who wrote a history of prostitution in three volumes quite properly devoted a chapter to Tibullus and his love- affairs.* ^ Space permitting, it would be interesting to examine these poets in detail, as well as the other Romans — Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, etc., who came less under Greek influence. But in truth such examination would be superfluous. Any one may pursue the investigation by himself, and if he will bear in mind and apply as tests, the last seven of my ingredients of love — the altruistic-supersen- SHORT STORIES 803 SHORT STORIES A big volume might be filled with the short love-stories in prose or verse scattered through a thousand years of Greek literature. But, although some of them are quite romantic, I must emphatically reiterate what I said in my first book (76) — that romantic love does not appear in the writings of any Greek author and that the passion of the desperately enamoured young people so often portrayed sprang entirely from sensuality. One of the critics referred to at the begin- ning of this chapter held me up to the ridicule of the British public because I ignored such romantic love-stories as Or- pheus and Eurydice, Alcyone and Oeyx, Atalanta and Me- leager, Cephalus and Procris, and "a dozen others" which " any school girl " could tell me. To begin with the one last named, the critic asks : " What can be said against Ce- phalus and Procris ?" A great deal, I am afraid. As told by Antoninus Liberalis in No. 41 of his MeiamorpJwses (/xerajuop^coo'Eun' cruvayijiyq) it is one of the most abominable and obscene stories ever penned even by a Greek. Some of the disgusting details are omitted in the versions of Ovid and Hyginus, but in the least offensive version that can be made the story runs thus : Oephalus, having had experience of woman's unbridled pas- sion, doubts his wife's fidelity and, to test her, disguises him- sual group — he cannot fail to become convinced that there are no instances of what I have described as romantic love in Latin literature any more than in Greek. And since it is the province of poets to idealize, we may feel doubly sure that the emotions which they did not even imagine cannot have existed in the actual life of their more prosaic contemporaries. It would, indeed, be strange if a people so much more coarse-fibred and practical, and so much less emotional and esthetic, than the Greeks, should have excelled them in the ca- pacity for what is one of the most esthetic and the most imaginative of all sen- timents. Before leaving the poets, I may add that the Greek Anthology^ the basis of which was laid by Meleager, a contemporary of the Roman poets just referred to, contains a collection of short poems by many Greek writers, in which, of course, some of my critics have discovered romantic love. One of them wrote that " the poems of Meleager alone in the Greek Autliology would suffice to re- fate the notion that Greece ignored romantic passion." If this critic will take tlie trouble to read these poems of Meleager in the original he will find that a disgustingly large number relate to iraiScpatrTia, which in No. III. is expressly declared to be superior to the love for women ; that most of the others relate to hetairai ; and that not one of them — or one in the whole Anthology — comes up to my standard of romantic love. 804 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS self and offers her a bag[ of gold. At first she refuses, but wheu he doubles the siim, she submits, whereupon he throws away his disgujse and confronts her with lier guilt. Covered with shame, she flies. Afterward she cuts her hair like a man's, changes her clothes so as to be unrecognizable, and joins him in the chase. Being more successful than he, she promises to teach him on a certain condition ; and on his assenting, she reveals her identity and accuses him of be- ing Just as bad as she was. Another version reads that after their reconciliation she suspected his fidelity on hearing that he used to ascend a hill and cry out " Come, Nephela, come " {Ni(j>€\.7j means cloud). So she went and concealed herself on the hill in a thicket, where her husband accidentally killed her with his javelin. Is this the kind of Greek " love-stories " that English school girls learn by the dozen ? Coarse as it is, the majority of these stories are no better, being absolutely unfit for literal trans- lation, which is doubtless the reason why no publisher has ever brought out a collection of Greek "love-stories." Of those referred to above none is so objectionable as the tale of Cephalus and Procris, nor, on the other hand, is any one of them in any way related to what we call romantic love. At- alanta was a sweet masculine maiden who could run fastfer than any athlete. Her father was anxious to have her marry, and she finally agreed to wed any man who could reach a certain goal before her, the condition being, however, that she should be allowed to transfix with her spear every suitor who failed. She had already ornamented the place of con- test with the heads of many courageous young men, this tender-hearted, romantic maiden had, when her fun was rudely spoiled by Meleager, who threw before her three gol- den apples which she stopped to pick up, thus losing the race to that hero, who, no doubt, was extremely happy with such a wife ever after. Even to this story an improper sequel was added. Alcyone and Ceyx is the story of a wife who committed suicide on discovering the body of her husband on thfe sea- beach ; and the story of Orpheus, who grieved so over the death of his wife Eurydic^ that he went to the lower world to bring her up again, but lost her again because, contrary to SHORT STORIES 805 liis agreement with Pluto and Proserpina, he looted back to see if she was following, is known to everybody. The con- jugal attachment and grief at the loss of a spouse which these two legends tell of, are things the existence of which in Greece no one has ever denied. They are simple phenomena quite apart from the complex state of mind we call romantic love, and are shared by man with many of the lower animals. In such attachment and grief there is no evidence of altru- istic affection. Orpheus tried to bring back Eurydice to please himself, not her, and Alcyone's suicide was of no pos- sible use to Ceyx.' The story of Panthea and Abradates, to whi5h Professor Ebers refers so triumphantly, is equally inconclusive as to the existence of altruistic affection. Abradates, having been urged by his wife Panthea to show himself worthy of the friendship of Cyrus by doing valorous deeds, falls in a battle, whereat Panthea is so grieved at the result of her advice that she commits suicide. From the modern Christian point of view this was not a rational proof of afEection, but a foolish and criminal act. But it harmonized finely with the Greek ideal — the notion that patriotism is even a woman's first duty, and her life not worth living except in subservience to her husband. There is good reason to believe '^ that this story was a pure invention of Xenophon and deliberately intended to be an object lesson to women regarding the ideal they ought to live up to. The whole of the book in which it ap- pears — Kvpov iraiZeia — is what the Germans call a Tendenzro- man — a historic romance with a moral, illustrating the im- portance of a correct education and glorifying a certain form of government. To a student of Greek love one of the most instructive documents is the ipioriKo. iraBrnj-aTa of Parthenius, who was a ' The best-known ancient story of " love-suicide " is that of Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus, having reason to think that Thisbe, with whom he had ar- ranged a secret interview at the tomb of Ninus, has been devoured by a lion, stabs himself in despair, and Thisbe, on finding his body, plunges on to the same sword, still warm with his blood. This tale, which is probably of Babylonian origin, is related by Ovid (Metamoi-pJi. , IV., 5.5-166), and was much admired and imitated in the Middle Ages. Comment on it would be superfluous after what I have written on pages (ill5-010. > See Rohde, 130; Christ, 349. 806 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS contemporary of the most famous Roman poets (first century before Christ), and the teacher of Virgil. It is a collection of thirty-six short love-stories in prose, made for him by his friend Cornelius Gallus, who was in quest of subjects which he might turn into elegies. It has been remarked that these poems are peculiarly sad, but a better word for them 'is coarse. Unbridled lust, incest, TraiStpaaria, and adultery are the favorite motives in them, and few rise above the mephit- ic atmosphere which breathes from Gephalus and Procris or other stories of crime, like that of Philomela and Procne, which were so popular among Greek and Roman poets, and presumably suited their readers. With amusing naivete Eckstein pleads for these " specimens of antique romance " on the ground that there is more lubricity in Bandello and Boccaccio ! — which is like declaring that a man who assassi- nates another by simply hitting him on the head is virtuous because there are others who make murder a fine art. I com- mend the stories of Parthenius to the special attention of any one who may have any lingering doubts as to the difference between Greek ideas of love and modern ideals.* GREEK ROMANCES Parthenins is regarded as a connecting link of the Alexan- drian school with the Roman poets on one side, and on the other with the romances which constitute the last phase of Greek erotic literature. "•' In these romances too, a number of my critics professed to discover romantic love. The reviewer of my book in Nature (London) asked me to see whether ' No more like stories of romantic love than these are the five "love-stories " written in the second century after Christ by Plutarch. This is the more re- markable as Plutarch was one of the few ancient writers to whom at any rate the idea occurred that women might be able to feel and inspire a love rising above the senses. This suggestion is what distinguishes his jDialogue on Love most favorably from Plato's Symposium, which it otherwise, however, resembles strikingly in the peculiar notions regarding the relation of the sexes ; showing how tenacious the unnatural Greek ideas were in Greek life. Plutarch's various writings show that though he had advanced notions compared with other Greeks, he was nearly as far from appreciating true femininity, chivalry, and romantic love as LticiaUi who also wrote a dialogue on love in the old-fashioned manner. ^Hirschig's Scriptores Mrotici begins with Parthenius and ircludes Achilles Tatius, LonguB, Xenophou, Heliodorus, Chariton, etc. The right-hand column gives a literal translation into Latin. GREEK ROMANCES 807 Heliodorus's account of the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea does not come up to my standard. I am sorry to say it does not. Jowett perhaps dismisses this story somewhat too curtly as " silly and obscene " ; but it certainly is far from being a love-story in the modern sense of the word, though its moral tone is doubtless superior to that of the other Greek ro- mances. The notion that it indicates an advance in erotic literature may no doubt be traced to the legend that Heliodo- rus was a bishop, and that he introduced Christian ideas into his romance — a theory which Professor Eohde has scuttled and sent to the bottom of the sea.' The preservation of the heroine's virginity amid incredible perils and temptations is one of the tricks of the Greek novelists, the real object of which is made most apparent in Dap/mis and Chloe. The ex- traordinary emphasis placed on it on every possible occasion is not only very indelicate, but it shows how novel and re- markable such an idea was considered at the time. It was one of the tricks of the Sophists (with whom Heliodorus must be classed), who were in the habit of treating a moral question like a mathematical problem. " Given a maiden's innocence, how can it be preserved to the end of the story ?" is the arti- ficial, silly, and vulgar leading motive of this Greek romance, as of others. Huet, Villemain, and many other critics have been duped by this sophistico-mathematical aspect of the story into descanting on the peculiar purity and delicacy of its moral tone ; but one need only read a few of the heroine's speeches to see how absurd this judgment is. When she says to her lover, " I resigned myself to you, not as to a paramour, but as to a legitimate husband, and I have preserved my chastity with you, resisting your urgent solicitations because I always had in mind the lawful marriage to which we pledged ourselves," she uses the language of a shrewd hetaira, not of an innocent girl ; nor could the author have made her say the following had his subject been romantic love : "Op/Aiyi/ yap, > Der (Jriechische Roman, 433-67. An excrescence of this theory is the foolish story that "Bishop " Heliodorus, being called upon by a provincial synod either to destroyhis erotic books or to abdicate his position, preferred the latter alter- native. The date of the real Heliodorus is perhaps the end of the third or the first half of the fourth century after Christ. 808 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS is uurSa, KpaTovurj'; iTriSvfiia^ f-'hci Z*^" "'•"■"T"""! ejrtTretVet, A.oyos S" eiKUV Kol irpos to jSouXrjyiia (rvvTpi)(ti>v ttjv irpwrrjv Koi ^iaucrav (jjopav IcrretXe xat to koito^u rijs op€^£u)S t<3 ijSet t^s iirdyytXias KaTeuvacre. The story of lieliodorus is full of such coarse remarks, and his idea of love is plainly enough revealed when he moralizes that '' a lover inclines to drink and one who is drunk is in- clined to love." It is not only on account of this coarseness that the story of Theagenes and Chariclea fails to come up to the standard of romantic love. When Arsace (VIII., 9) imprisons the level's together, with the idea that the sight of their chains will increase the sufferings of each, we have an intimation of crude sympathy ; but apart from that the symptoms of love referred to in the course of the romance are the same that I have previously enumerated, as peculiar to Alexandrian lit- erature. The maxims, " dread the revenge that follows neg- lected love ; " " Idve soon finds its end in satiety ; " and "the greatest happiness is to be free from love,/' take us back to the oldest Greek times. Peculiarly Greek, too, is the scene in which the women, unable to restrain their feelings, fling fruits and flowers at a young man because he is so beau- tiful ; although on the same page we are suprised by the admission that woman's beauty is even more alluring than man's, which is not a Greek sentiment. In this last respect, as in some others, the romance of He- liodorus differs favorably from that of Achilles Tatius, which relates the adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon ; but I need not dwell on this amazingly obscene and licentious narrative, as its author^s whole philosophy of love, like that of HeliodoruS, is summed up in this passage : "As the wine produced its effect I cast lawless glances at Leucippe : for Love and Bacchus are violent god's, they invade the soul and so inflame it that they forget modesty, and while one kindles the flame the other supplies the fuel ; for wine is the food of love." Nor need I dwell on the stories of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, or the epic Dionysiaca of Nonnus, as they yield us no new points of view. The romance of Longns', however, calls for some remarks, as it is the best known of the Greek DAPHNIS AND CHLOE 809 novels and has oftea been pronounced a story of refined love worthy of a modern writer. DAPHNIS AND CHLOE Goethe found in Daphni.s and Cliloe " a delicacy of feeling which cannot be excelled." Professor Murray backs up the morals of Longus : " It needs an unintelligent reader or a mor- bid translator," he writes (403), "to find harm iu the His- tory of Dajjhnis and CJiloej" and an editorial writer in the New York Mail and Express accused me, as before intimated, of unexampled ignorance for not knowing that JJaphnis and Cliloe is " as sweet and beautiful a love-story as ever skipped in prose." This, indeed, is the prevalent opinion. How it ever arose is a mystery to me. Fiction has always been the sphere of the most unrestrained license, yet Dunlop wrote in his History of Fiction that there are in this story '' jDarticular passages so extremely reprehensible that I know nothing like them in almost any work whatever." In collect- ing the material for the present volume I have been obliged to examine thousands of books referring to the relations of men and women, but I declare that of all the books I have seen only the Hindoo Kamasutram, the literal version of the Arabian Nights, and the American Indian stories collected by Dr. Boas, can compare with this "sweet and beautiful" romance of Longus in downright obscenity or deliberate las- civiousness. I have been able, without going beyond the latitude permissible to anthropologists, to give a fairly ac- curate idea of the love-affairs of savages and barbarians ; but I find it impossible, after several trials, to sum up the story of Daphnis and Chloe without going beyond tlie limits of propriety. Among all the deliberate pictures of moral de- pravity painted by Greek and Eoman authors not one is so objectionable as this " idyllic '' picture of the innocent shep- herd boy and girl. Pastoral love is coarse enough, in all truth : but this story is infinitely more immoral than, for in- stance, the frank and natural sensualism of the twenty- seventh Idyl of Theocritus. Professor Anthon (755) de- 810 GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS scribed the story of Daphnis and Chloe as " the romance, par excellence, of physical love. It is a history of the senses rather than of the mind, a picture of the development of the instincts rather than of the sentiments. . . . Paul and Virginia is nothing more than DapJinis and Chloe delineated by a refined and cultivated mind, and spiritualized and pu- rified by the influence of Christianity." This is true ; but Anthon erred decidedly in saying that in the Greek story " vice is advocated by no sophistry." On the contrary, what makes this romance so peculiarly objectionable is that it is a master work of that kind of fiction which makes vice allur- ing under the sophistical veil of innocence. Longus knew very well that nothing is so tempting to libertines as purity and ignorant innocence ; hence he made purity and ignorant innocence the pivot of his prurient story. Professor Eohde (516) has rudely torn the veil from his sly sophistry : " The way in which Longus excites the sensual desires of the lovers by means of licentious experiments going always only to the verge of gratification, betrays an abominably hyp- ' ocritical raffinement ' which reveals in the most disagreeable manner that the naivete of this idyllist is a premeditated ar- tifice and he himself nothing but a sophist. It is difficult to understand how anyone could have ever been deceived so far as to overlook the sophistical character of this pastoral ro- mance of Longus, or could have discovered genuine naivete in this most artificial of all rhetorical productions. No at- tentive reader who has some acquaintance with the ways of the Sophistic writers will have any difficulty in apprehending the true inwardness of the story. ... As this sophist, in those offensively licentious love-scenes, suddenly shows the cloven foot under the cloak of innocence, so, on the other hand, his eager desire to appear as simple and childlike as possible often enough makes him cold, finical, trifiing, or ut- terly silly in his affectation." ^ ' He refers in a footnote to such scenes as are painted in I. , 33, 4 ; II. , 9. 11 ; III., 14, 24, 3 ; IV., 6, 3 — scenes and hypocritically naive experiments which he justly considers much more offensive than the notorious scene between Daphnis and Lykainion (III., 18). - Rohde (516) tries to excuse Goethe for his ridiculous praise of this ro- mance (Eckermann, II., 305, 318-321, 322) because he knew the story only in the French version of Amyot- Courier. But I find that this version retains most of the coarseness of the original, and I see no reason for seeking any other explanation of Goethe's attitude than his own indelicacy and obtuseness which, as I noted on page 208, made him £^o into ecstacies of adiriration over a servant HERO AND LEANDER 811 Apart from his coarseness, there is nothing in Longus's conception of love that goes beyond the ideas of the Alexan- drians. Of the symptoms of true love — mental or sentimen- tal, esthetic and sympathetic, altruistic and supersensual, he knows no more than Sappho did a thousand years before him. Indeed, in making lovers become indolent, cry out as if they had been beaten, and jump into rivers as if they were afire, he is even cruder and more absurd than Sappho was in her painting of sensual passion. His whole idea of love is summed up in what the old shepherd Philetas says to Daph- nis and Chloe (II., 7) : 'Eyi/wi' S* iyii> koI ravpov ipaa-Sivra koI is oitTTpft) TrXijycis e/jLVKaro, /cat rpdyov <^iX7j(TavTa olya koI r/KoXovSei iravTa^ov. Autos fjikv yap ^/xjjv veos Kal 7]pa.77 ; courtship, 598. Negroes, African : feminine aspect of men, 60 ; delight in torture, 155 ; scarification, 344 ; idea of beauty, 3311 ; no love among, 389. New Britain Group : paying for a wife, 310. New Hebrides : infanticide, 33. New Zealanders : masculine women, 60; wooing-hou.se, 111 ; decorations, 333 ; unesthetic, 247 ; object of tat- tooing, 248, 357, 200; filthy, 376; origin of the Maoris, 528 ; love- poems, 53G-.538 ; courtship, 539 ; morals, 543. Niam-Niam : conjugal love, 211. Nicaraguans : tattooing, 2.53 ; licen- tious festivals, 559 ; eating a rival, 609. Nudity (see Modesty). Obscenity : an obstacle to love, 329. Odysseus as a husband, 740. Old maids, 193. Oraahas : tribal marks, 343 ; tattoo- ing, 353 ; courtship, 594 ; buying wives, and elopements, 604 ; an idyl, 619; love-poems, 619-621. OrAons : promiscuity, 642 ; courtship, 647. . Oriental ideal of beauty, 280 ; senti- mentality, 298. Osages : tattooing, 353 ; unchaste, 564. Pacific Islands : love on, 476-544. Paharias : attachment, 649. naiSepoiTTia, 163, 757, 771-774, 776, 779, 794, 79B, 803, 806. Papuans : nudity, 39. Pastoral love, 339, 405, 794. Patagonians : adultery, 93 ; decora- tions, 333 ; no esthetic sense, 346 ; li- centiousness, .565 ; women as drudges, 588 ; marriages, 601 ; a courtship, 615. Paul and Virginia, 49. Pawnees : apathy of brides, 55 ; daugh- ters as merchandise, 598 ; courtship, 612. Penelope as a model wife, 743. Persens and Andromeda, 791. Persians : cruel jealousy, 93 ; unjealous women, 103 ; amorous hyperbole, 139, 147; love among, 199-203; im- purity, 32.5. Peruvians: mutilations, 237; sun vir- gins, 567 ; cruel to women, .587 ; marriage, 600 ; love-charms, 610 ; words to express love, 624. Philippine Islanders : Bisayos, indif- ferent to chastity, 44 ; women not jealous, 9. Piutes : nocturnal court'^hip, 613. Pocahontas, story of. 632. Polynesians : gods, 22 ; infanticide, 31 ; proposals by women, 110; tattooing, 2.50 ; reasons for bathing, 276 ; beauty means fat, 27S. Pride, amorous, 148-153. Priestesses, 173, 567, 574. Promiscuity, practical, 79, 87, 89, 371- 376, 386, 435-440, .523, 543, 567, 559- 571, 641-645, 7,76-777. Proposing: by women, 109-114, 117, 119, 476-480, 648 ; in Fiji, 496 ; si- lent, by Indians, 616. Puberty : decorations and mutilations at, 361 ; marriage before (see Mar- riage). 850 INDEX OF SUBJECTS PuebloB : girls propose, 111 ; unchas- tity, 560. Purchase of brides (see Marriage). Purity, mental, 318-389, 573, 771-776. Ra«e aversion, 349. Kebekah, the courting of, 714. Religion : no love in early, 21 ; fear, blasphemy, sacrifices, 33 ; immorality associated with, 35. Religious prejudices, 353. Romans ; refined sensual love, 80 ; mer- cenary coyness, 130 ; amorous hyper- bole, 138-144; sham gallantry, 189; suicide and love, 305 ; Terence and Plautus, 793; Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, 801-803. Romantic, meaning of, 15, 389. Ruth and Boaz, 715-718. Saknntala, 677-680. Samoans : idea of modesty, 39 ; ob- scene conversation, 339; various traits, 498 ; chastity, 499 ; courtship pantomime, 500 ; love-stories, 501- 503; personal appearance, 508,. Samoyedes : selfish men, 154. Savitri, 688-690. Scarification, 354. Scenery, romantic, 30, 513, 795. Selfishness, 153-155, 307-311 ; 317-321 (see Women, maltreatment of ; Adoration, Sympathy, Gallantry, Affection). Self-saorifiee, 195-206 ; 631, 633, 701. Sensuality, antipode of love, 14 ; fas- tidious, is not love, 61 ; Goethe's er- ror, 208 ; appetite and longing, 393- 397 ; and sentimentality, 298 (see Chastity). Sentiment, versus sentimentality, 299, 300. Sentimentality, 18, 398-300, 494, 703, 736-739, 758, 76.5-767, 788. Sentiments: hovi' they change and grow, 19-51. Separation of the sexes, 346. Sexual characters, primary and secon- dary, 61, 66, 754-756, 815. Sexual selection, 330seg'7. Sexuality, mental, 64, 754-756. Singhalese : utilitarian marriage, 310. Sioux (see Dakotas). Social barrier? to love, 851. Somali : unjealous vrives, 101 ; fea- thers, 246 ; fat versus beauty, 279 ; a love-song, 380 ; child-wives, 393 ; barren women chased away, 321 ; ab- sence of gallantry, 387 ; love-afifairs, 409. Song of Songs, 733-731. Sorceresses, 174. Stories, incidents, and dramas : Afri- can, 58, 383, 390, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 408 ; American Indian, 36, 40, 63, 76, 111, 310, 546, 547, .548, 549, 550, 551, 553, 594, 595, 597, 609, 615, 619, 627, 038, 639, 633 ; Austra- Uan, 4.55, 466, 467, 469, 471, 473; Eskimo, 75; Greek, 197, 732-814 passim, ; Hawaiian, 516, 534 ; He- brew, 709, 714, 715, 733; Indian (Hindoo and wild tribes), 74, 75, 644, 665, 677, 680, 685, 688, 690 ; New Zealand, 539, 531, 532, 533 ; Oriental, 69; Polynesian, 209; Samoan, 501, 503; Tahitian, 508; Tongan, 513, 514, 515. Suicide and love, 304, 323, 324, 393, 579, 605-610, 805. Sumatrans : marriages, 310 ; selfish men, 831 ; no choice, 341. Swedes : mock-capture, 128. Sympathy, 153-166, 331, 356, 423. 579, 791. Syria : idea of modesty, 40. Taboos, sexual, 347. Tahitians : tattooing, 39 ; indifference to chastity, 43; contempt for wom- en, 170 ; compressed heads, 235 ; flowers and licentiousness, 247 ; mourning, 316 ; personal appearance, .504 ; depraved by white visitors ? 504. Tasmanians : charms, 238 ; mourning, 311. Taste, disputing about, 372. Tattooing, 247-370. Temple girls, Hindoo, 664 seqq. Thibet : unchastity, 91 ; woman's wretched lot, 170. Thlinkeets : exchanging vrives, 89 ; war-paint, 334 ; mutilations, 871 J suicide, 608. __ INDEX OF SUBJECTS 851 Todas : unjealous, 92. Tongans : tattooing, 39 ; beads and vanity, 268 ; personal appearance, 503 ; were they civilized ? 510 ; love of scenery, 512. Torres Strait Islanders, 475-480. Tribal marks, 241 seqq. Tupis : no jealousy, 89. Turks : modesty, 40 ; love-song, 81 ; amorous hyperbole, 144; arousing pride, 151 ; coarseness, 225 ; lust ver- sus love, 297 ; mourning to order, 313. Uganda : nudity, 39 ; disposal of wom- en, 388. Unchastity (see Chastity). Crvasi, 680-685. Utility of love, 18, 19, 104-108, 131, 165, 192, 206, 210, 218-221, 815-825. Vasantaaena, 665 668. Ved Jahs : incest, 47. Virginity: penetrative, 228; indiffer- ence to, see Chastity. Votyaks : indifference to chastity, 44; mock capture, 128. War, an obstacle to love, 330. Whites : did they corrupt savages ? 42, 423, 427, 504-506, 559. Widows : tormented in India, 659 ;. burning of, 31 7, 661. Winona's leap, 605. Wives (see Marriage). Women : homage to priestesses, 173 ; dome.stic rule, 176 ; political rule, 177 ; is gallantry an " insult ? " 192 ; pugnacious, 446 ; cruder than men, 161, 463 ; woman's sphere, 64-67, 754-756; maltreatment of and con- tempt for, 169-173, 317, 332, 365-367, 377, 419-421, 490, 506, 540, 572-5S9, 650-662, 722, 747, 759, 774, 789; masculine women, 60, 118, 361, 364, 403, 414, 446-448, 503, 719, 776-781 ; no liberty of choice (see Choice). Wooing : by women (see Propos- ing). Yucatan ; war decorations, 835 ; tat- tooing, 253. Yumas : immorality, 565. Books by Henry T. Finck ** Nlr. Finck' s ivritings are like a breeze in their refreshing and stimulating effect" — The Critic CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers » » » JUST PUBLISHED Primitive Love and Love-Stories 8vo. ^3.00 Summary of Contents : History of an Idea — How Sentiments Change and Grow— What is Romantic Love? — Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment — Mistakes regarding Conjugal Love — Obstacles to Romantic Love — Specimens of African Love — Aboriginal Australian Love — Island Love on the Pacific^The American Indian's Love — India, Wild Tribes and Temple Girls — Utility and Future of Love. Mr. Finck*s new work, the fruit of thirteen years of research among original authorities, is destined to attract the widest attention among students of the evolution of marriage. From the very nature of its subject, the work is not written 'virginibus puerisque ; but, the fulness and frankness of the discussion, which is fortified by an extraordinarily large and varied cpllectfon of love-stories Qf primitive races, make the book of the highest scientific value. ^ ^ 9 Lotos-Time in Japan With 16 full-page illustrations. Crown 8vo. $i-7S Contents : To Japan via Hawaii — Yokohama, Foreign and Native — Railway and Kuruma— Street Scenes in Tokyo — From Morning till Midnight— Wine, Women, and Song —A Theatre and a School— The Mikado and the Exhibition— Off for Japanese Siberia— On a Coast Steamer— Japanese Gibraltar— American Sapporo— Into the Virgin Forest— The Ainos and the Whale— From Mororan to Hakodate — Through Mediseval Japan— A Pil- gnm's Paradise— Nikko Lakes and Waterfalls— Railway Genre Pictures — Fascinations of Kyoto— Lake and Lotos Pond— Are the Japanese Topsy-turvy ?— The Mote and the Beam —Nudity and Bathing— The iEsthetic Nation — A Superior Civilization. <* Mr. Finck shows the every-day life of the Japanese better than do a majority of the other travellers who have written about them. He certainly has a keen eye BOOKS BY HENRY T. FINCK The Pacific Coast Scenic Tour From Southern California to Alaska : The Yosemite : The Canadian Pacific Railway, Yellowstone Park, and the Grand Canon With 24 full-page illustrations. 8vo, $2.50 " Mr. Finck is familiar with most parts of the United States and with the finest scenery of Europe. He is, moreover, an artist and an author of some note, and his pages supply an excellent guide-boolc to the more accessible parts of the picturesque region from Southern California to Alaska." — Tht Academy. "The massive sublimities of the Selkirk Range, the solitary splendors of Shasta, Hood, and Tacoma, the immensity of the forests, the romantic shores of Puget Sound and the Columbia River, the glaciers of Alaska, the wild chasms through which the Canadian Pacific threads its way, and the fantastic curiosities of the Yellowstone Park — all these pass before the eye in a striking panorama. . . . The story comes as near to the reality as any story well can."— Boston Uterary World. ¥ » « Wagner and His Works The Story of his Life, with Critical Comments Fifth Edition. With portraits. Z volumes. Crown 8vo. $4.00 Contents: I. Prelude, Poetic Prophecies — A Theatrical Family — Richard Wagner's Childhood — The First Operas — Konigsberg and Riga — Furst Visit to Paris — Rienzi in Dresden — The Flying Dutchman— Wagner as Royal Conductor — Tannhauser in Dresden — Revolution, Artistic and Political— Lohengrin at Weimar— Literary Period — Welding the Nibelung's Ring — Was Wagner a Great Conductor? — II. Last Years of Exile — In Paris Again — King Ludwig finds Wagner — Tristan and Isolde in Munich — Political and Personal — Wagner's Only Comic Opera — From Munich to Bayreuth — The Nibelung's lUng — The Parsifal Period — The Last Seven Months— Wagner and Wagnerism — Index. " It is a pleasure to say that he has written the story of Wagner's life and works with most admirable clearness, vigor, picturesqueness, and variety. In these qualities and in the compilation and ordering of facts, his work stands easily at the head of the Wagner biographies." — New York Tribune, " It contains an enormous quantity of interesting material — descriptions of Wagner's music-dramas and writings, comments, criticisms, quotations from letterSp BOOKS BY HEN-RY T. FINCK for humorous incidents, and for those touches of nature which make all the world more or less akin." — New York Timet. "This is not only a delightful, but a useful book — one well calculated, we think, to demonstrate that the whole subject of Japanese aesthetics, and of Japan as a teacher of beauty, is worthy of a treatise by an able writer of long residence and experience — who is at once a scholar and a poet." — Tht Critic. "Though many writers have told us about these places and the people in them, yet it is as a ^ passionate pilgrim ' with a soul sensitive to every form of loveliness, that Mr, Finck has gone. His pleasant narrative is a mosaic of most delightful quotations from standard writers, unique and original generalizations of his own, and sentences that provoke thought and imagination.**— Boston Literary JVorld. " Mr. Finck took a pair of keen but friendly eyes with him and kept them wide open, and be tells his stoiy in a racy and entertaining style." — Tit Atlantic Monthly. » » » Spain and Morocco Studies in Local Color l2mo. ^1.25 Contents : From Paris to Madrid — Cosmopolitan Madrid — Two Skeleton Cities — ^Local Color in Seville— Sherryland and Cadiz — The "Infidel City" of Morocco— On Horseback to Tetuan — Gibraltar and Malaga — Granada and the Alhambra — A Romantic Episode — Mediterranean Spain. " We have but one fault to find with Mr. Flnck's book, namely, that it is not longer. A writer who has so rare a gift of graphic description, and who knows so well how to discriminate between the commonplace and the interesting, might very well have given free rein to his Pegasus. His studies in local color are all that they should be." — New York Tribune. " He finds room in his narrative for occasional trivialities, and his humor is in places exuberant, but he has the merit of never being dull, or of taxing the reader's datience with labored descriptions of famous pictures or buildings. He is at his best in his sketches of street scenes." — The Nation. "Tangier, the 'Infidel City,' and Tetuan are described in chapters positively glowing with imagery." — Philadelphia Public Ledger. BOOKS BY HEbTRY T. FTNCIC biographyi etc. There is something of everything, and a careful reader of these volumes will learn much about Wagner.'* — The Academy. *'An ithportant and a welcome addition to Wagner literature. . . , We cordially recommend Mr. Finck's book to all readers of the literature of music." — Boston Transcript, **Mr, Finck's work is, perhaps, the most exhaustive and appreciative account of the ^reat compose)* that has appeared in the English language." — London Times, 9 9 9 Chopin, and Other Musical Essays Second Edition. i2mo. $^'S^ Contents : Chopin, the Greatest Genius of the Pianoforte — How Composers Work — Schumann, as Mirrored in his Letters— Music and Morals — Italian and German \'ocal Styles — German Opera in New York. ** Half a dozen delightful essays, the two most important of which are respect- ively devoted to the Polish and German composers (Chopin and Schumann) above named. 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CHARLES SCklBNER'S SONS, Publishers •S3-IS7 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK JIM! II I ' til '