Primitive Love and Love-Stories Read online

  --we see that Hero's risking of death for the sakeof his intrigue was not even a mark of exceptional courage; andregarding the quality and nature of his "love" it tells us nothingwhatever.

  THE ELEPHANT AND THE LOTOS

  In the Hindoo drama _Malavika and Agnimitra_, Kalidasa represents theking as seeking an interview with a new flame of his. When hiscompanion warns him that the queen might surprise them, the kinganswers:

  When the elephant sees the lotos leaves He fears no crocodile.

  Lotos leaves being the elephant's favorite food, these lines admirablysum up the Hindoo idea of risking life for "love"--cupboard love. Butwould the elephant risk his life to save the beautiful lotos flowersfrom destruction? Foolish question! Was not the lotos created togratify the elephant's appetite just as beautiful women were createdto subserve man's desires?

  Fighting crocodiles for the sake of the sweet lotos is acharacteristic of primitive "love" in all its various strata. "Nothingis more certain," writes M'Lean (135), "than that the enamouredEsquimau will risk life and limb in the pursuit of his object." Women,he says, are the main cause of all quarrels among the Esquimaux; andthe same is true of the lower races in general. If an Australian wantsto run away with another man's wife, the thought of risking hislife--and hers too--does not restrain him one moment. Ascending to theGreeks, we may cite Robert Burton's summing up of one of theirlegends:

  "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 [in a race], they made no account of it, but courageously for love died, till Pelops at last won her by a sleight."

  What is this but another version of the story of the lotos and theelephant? The prize was great, and worth the risk. Men risk theirlives daily for gold, and for objects infinitely less attractive tothe senses and the selfish ambitions than a beautiful princess. In thefollowing, which Burton quotes from Hoedus, the sensual and selfishbasis of all such confronting of death for "love's" sake is laid bareto 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 to their sweethearts, and if they be surprised, leap out at windows, cast themselves headlong down, bruising or breaking their legs or arms, and sometimes losing life itself, as Calisto did for his lovely Meliboea?"

  I have known rich young Americans and Europeans risk their lives overand over again in such "gallant" adventures, but if I had asked themif they loved these women, _i.e._, felt such a disinterested affectionfor them (like a mother's for her child) that they would have riskedtheir lives to _benefit them_ when there was _nothing to gain forthemselves_--they would have laughed in my face. Whence we see howfoolish it is to infer from such instances of "gallantry" and"self-sacrifice" that the ancients knew romantic love in our sense ofthe word. It is useless to point to passages like this (again fromBurton):

  "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; butwhere are the _actions_ corresponding to it? Where do we read of theseRomans and Greeks ever braving the crocodile for the sake ofpreserving the purity of the lotos herself? Or of sparing a lotosbelonging to another, but at their mercy? Perseus himself, muchvaunted for his chivalry, did not undertake to save the rock-chainedAndromeda from the sea monster until he had extorted a promise thatshe should be his prize. Fine sort of chivalry, that!

  SUICIDE IS SELFISH

  One more species of pseudo-self-sacrifice remains to be considered.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 soconsidered, and Eckstein, in his eagerness to prove that the ancientGreeks knew romantic love,[37] gives a list of six legendary suicidesfrom hopeless or foiled love. The question of suicide is aninteresting one and will be considered in detail in the chapter on theAmerican Indians, who, like other savages, were addicted to it, inmany cases for the most trivial reasons. In this place I will contentmyself with noting that if Eckstein had taken the pains to peruse thefour volumes of Ramdohr's _Venus Urania_ (a formidable task, I admit),he would have found an author who more than a hundred years ago knewthat 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 thekind where a man risks comfort and life to secure possession of acoveted body for his own enjoyment, or else where he takes his ownlife because he feels lonely after having failed to secure the desiredunion. These actions are no index of love, for they "may coexist withthe cruelest treatment" of the coveted woman. Very ambitious personsor misers may commit suicide 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, Ramdohr continues,lies in the sacrifice of one's own happiness _for another's sake_; inresigning one's self to separation from the beloved, or even to death,if that is necessary to secure her happiness or welfare. Of suchself-sacrifice he declares he cannot find a single instance in therecords and stories of the ancients; nor can I.

  The suicide of Dido after her desertion by Aeneas is often cited asproof of love, but Ramdohr insists (338) that, apart from the factthat "a woman really in love would not have pursued Aeneas withcurses," such an act as hers was the outcome of purely selfishdespair, on a par with the suicide of a miser after the loss of hismoney. It is needless to add to this that Hero's suicide was likewiseselfish; for of what possible benefit was it to the dead Leander thatshe took her own life in a cowardly fit of despondency at having losther chief source of delight? Had she lost her life in an effort tosave his, the case would have been different.

  Instances of women sacrificing themselves for men's sake abound inancient literature, though I am not so sure that they abounded inlife, except under compulsion, as in the Hindoo suttee.[38] As weshall see in the chapter on India, tales of feminine self-sacrificewere among the means craftily employed by men to fortify and gratifytheir selfishness. Still, in the long run, just as man's fierce"jealousy" helped to make women chaster than men, so the inculcationin women of self-sacrifice as a duty, gradually made them naturallyinclined to that virtue--an inclination which was strengthened byinveterate, deep-rooted, maternal love. Thus it happened thatself-sacrifice assumed rank in course of time as a specificallyfeminine virtue; so much so that the German metaphysician Fichte coulddeclare that "the woman's life should disappear in the man's without aremnant," and that this process is love. No doubt it is love, but lovedemands at the same time that the man's life should disappear in thewoman's.

  It is interesting to note the sexual aspects of gallantry andself-sacrifice. Women are prevented by custom, etiquette, and inbredcoyness from showing gallant attentions to men before marriage,whereas the impulse to sacrifice happiness or life for love's sake isat least as strong in them as in men, and of longer standing. If agirl of affectionate impulses on hearing that the man sheloved--though he might not have proposed to her--lay wounded, or illof yellow fever, in a hospital, threw away all reserve, coyness, andfear of violating decorum, and went to nurse him day and night, atimminent risk of her own life, all the world would applaud her,convinced that she had done a more feminine thing than if she hadallowed coyness to suppress her sympathetic and self-sacrificingimpulses.

  XII. AFFECTION

  A German poem printed in the _Wunderhorn_ relates how a young man,after a long absence from home, returns and eagerly hastens to see hisformer sweetheart. He finds her standing in the doorway and informsher that her beauty pleases his heart as much as ever:
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  Gott gruess dich, du Huebsche, du Feine, Von Herzen gefallst du mir.

  To which she retorts: "What need is there of my pleasing you? I got ahusband long ago--a handsome man, well able to take care of me."Whereupon the disappointed lover draws his knife and stabs her throughthe heart.

  In his _History of German Song_ (chap, v.), Edward Schure comments onthis 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 havebeen allowed to appear in a book without sending its author to prison."Necessary" to _murder_ a sweetheart because she has changed her mindduring a man's long absence! The wildest anarchist plot never includeda more diabolical idea. Brainless, selfish, impulsive young idiots areonly too apt to act on that principle if their proposals are notaccepted; the papers contain cases nearly every week of poor girlsmurdered for refusing an unwelcome suitor; but the world is beginningto understand that it is illogical and monstrous to apply the sacredword 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 thatman really loved that woman, he would have been no more capable ofmurdering her than of murdering his father for disinheriting him.

  Schure is by no means the only author who has thus confounded lovewith murderous, jealous lust. A most astounding instance occurs inGoethe's _Werther_--the story of a common servant who conceived apassion for a well-to-do widow.

  He lost his appetite, his sleep, forgot his errands; an evil spiritpursued him. One day, finding her alone in the garret, he made animproper proposal to her, and on her refusing he attempted violence,from which she was saved only through the timely arrival of herbrother. In defending his conduct the servant, in a most ungallant,unmanly, and cowardly way, tried to fasten the guilt on the widow bysaying that she had previously allowed him to take some liberties withher. He was of course promptly ejected from the house, and whensubsequently another man was engaged to take his place, and began topay his addresses to the widow, the discharged servant fell upon himand assassinated him. And this disgusting exhibition of murderous lustand jealousy 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 towardwomen all his life, it is perhaps not strange that he should havewritten the silly words just quoted. It was probably a guiltyconscience, a desire to extenuate selfish indulgence at the expense ofa poor girl's virtue and happiness, that led him to represent hishero, Werther, as using every possible effort in court to secure thepardon of that erotomaniac who had first attempted rape and thenfinished up by assassinating his rival.

  If Werther's friend had murdered the widow herself, Goethe would havebeen logically bound to see in his act still stronger evidence of the"reality," "fidelity," and "purity" of love among "people whom we calluneducated and coarse." And if Goethe had lived to read the Rev. W.W.Gill's _Savage Life in Polynesia_, he might have found therein (118) astory of cannibal "love" still more calculated to arouse his rapturousenthusiasm--

  "An ill-looking but brave warrior of the cannibal tribe of Ruanae, named Vete, fell violently in love with a pretty girl named Tanuau, who repelled his advances and foolishly reviled 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 tointercept the corpse secretly, and he had it carried away. It was toodecomposed to be eaten, so they cut it in pieces and burnedit--burning anything belonging to a person being the greatest injuryone can inflict on a native.

  THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON

  But what have all these disgusting stories to do with affection, thesubject of this chapter? Nothing whatever--and that is why I have putthem here--to show in a glaring light that what Goethe and Schure, anddoubtless thousands of their readers accepted as love is not love,since there is no affection in it. A true patriot, a man who feels anaffection for his country, lays down his life for it without a thoughtof personal advantage; and if his country treats him ungratefully hedoes not turn traitor and assassin--like the German and Polynesian"lovers" we have just read about. A real lover is indeed overjoyed tohave his affection returned; but if it is not reciprocated he is nonethe less affectionate, none the less ready to lay down his life forthe other, and, above all, he is utterly incapable of taking hers.What creates this difference between lust and love is affection, and,so far at least as maternal love is concerned, the nature of affectionwas known thousands of years ago. When two mothers came before KingSolomon, each claiming the same child as her own, the king sent for asword and said, "Divide the living child in two, and give half to theone and half to the other." To this the false claimant agreed, but thereal mother exclaimed, "O my lord, give her the living child and in nowise slay it." Then the king knew that she was the child's mother andgave him to her. "And all Israel saw that the wisdom of God was inSolomon, to do judgment."

  If we ask why this infallible test of love was not applied to thesexual passion, the answer is that it would have failed, becauseancient love between the sexes was, as all the testimony collected inthis book shows, too sensual and selfish to stand such a test. Yet itis obvious that if we to-day are to apply the word love to the sexualrelations, we must use the same test of disinterested affection thatwe use in the case of maternal love or love of country; and that loveis not love before affection is added to all the other ingredientsheretofore considered. In that servant's "love" which so excited thewonder of Goethe, only three of the fourteen ingredients of love werepresent--individual preference, monopoly, and jealousy--and thosethree, as we have seen, occur also in plain lust. Of the tender,altruistic, loving traits of love--sympathy, adoration, gallantry,self-sacrifice, affection--there is not a trace.

  STUFF AND NONSENSE

  When a great poet can blunder so flagrantly in his diagnosis of love,we cannot wonder that minor writers should often be erratic. Forinstance, 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 relations 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 affection that he wilted at once, and, instead of boldly asserting himself, dared do nothing but timidly touch her hand. The 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'shand and whispering in her ear--should be accepted as evidence of_affection_ is naive, to say the least, and need not be commented onafter what has just been said about the
true nature of affection andits altruistic test. Unfortunately many travellers who came in contactwith the lower races shared Bourke's crude conception of the nature ofaffection, and this has done much to mislead even expertanthropologists; Westermarck, for instance, who is induced by suchtestimony to remark (358) that conjugal affection has among certainuncivilized peoples "reached a remarkably high degree of development."Among those whom he relies on as witnesses is Schweinfurth, who saysof the man-eating African Niam-Niam that "they display an affectionfor their wives which is unparalleled among natives of so low a grade.... A husband will spare no sacrifice to redeem an imprisoned wife"(I., 472).

  SACRIFICES OF CANNIBAL HUSBANDS

  This looks like strong evidence, but when we examine the facts theillusion vanishes. The Nubians, it appears, are given to stealing thewives of these Niam-Niam, to induce them to ransom them with ivory. Acase 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 sacrificeto redeem their imprisoned women" amounts to: the Nubians counted onit that they would rather part with their ivory than with their wives!This, surely, involved no "sacrifice"; it was simply a question ofwhich the husbands preferred, the useless ivory or the usefulwomen--desirable as drudges and concubines. Why should buying back awife be evidence of affection any more than the buying of a bride,which is a general custom of Africans? As for their howling over theirlost wives, that was natural enough; they would have howled over lostcows too--as our children cry if their milk is taken away when theyare hungry. Actions which can be interpreted in such sensual andselfish terms can never be accepted as proof of true affection. Thatthe captured wives, on their part, were not troubled by conjugalaffection is evident from Schweinfurth's remark that they "wereperfectly composed and apparently quite indifferent."

  INCLINATIONS MISTAKEN FOR AFFECTION

  Let us take one more case. There are plenty of men who would like tokiss every pretty girl they see, and no one would be so foolish as toregard a kiss as proof of _affection_. Yet Lyon (another of thewitnesses on whom Westermarck relies) accepts, with a naiveteequalling Captain Bourke's, the rubbing together of noses, which amongthe Eskimos is an equivalent of our kissing, as a mark of "affection."In the case of unscientific travellers, such a loose use of words mayperhaps be pardonable, but a specialist who writes a history ofmarriage should not put the label of "affection" on everything thatcomes into his drag-net, as Westermarck does (pp. 358-59); aproceeding the less excusable because he himself admits, a few pageslater (362), that affection is chiefly provoked by "intellectual,emotional, and moral qualities" which certainly could not be foundamong some of the races he refers to. I have investigated a number ofthe alleged cases of conjugal "affection" in books of travel, andfound invariably that some manifestation of sensual attachment wasrecklessly accepted as an indication of "affection."

  In part, it is true, the English language is to be blamed for thisstate of affairs. The word affection has been used to mean almost anydisposition of the mind, including passion, lust, animosity, and amorbid state. But in good modern usage it means or implies analtruistic feeling of devotion which urges us to seek the welfare ofanother even at the expense of our own. We call a mother affectionatebecause she willingly and eagerly sacrifices herself for her child,toils for it, loses sleep and food and health for its sake. If shemerely cared for it [note the subtle double sense of "caring for"]because it is pretty and amusing, we might concede that she "liked"it, was "attached" to it, or "fond" of it; but it would be incorrectto speak of affection. Liking, attachment, and fondness differ fromaffection not only in degree but in kind; they are selfish, whileaffection is unselfish; they occur among savages, while affection ispeculiar to civilized persons and perhaps some animals.

  SELFISH LIKING AND ATTACHMENT

  Liking is the weakest kind of inclination toward another. It "neverhas the intensity of love." To say that I like a man is to indicatemerely that he pleases me, gives me selfish pleasure--in some way orother. 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 onlya few minutes; while a girl who will rather die than give any sign ofaffection, may be quite willing to confess that she likes him, knowingthat the latter means infinitely less and does not betray her; thatis, it merely indicates that he pleases her and not that she isparticularly anxious to please him, as she would be if she loved him.Girls "like" candy, too, because it gives them pleasure, and cannibalsmay like missionaries without having the least affection for them.

  Attachment is stranger than liking, but it also springs from selfishinterests and habits. It is apt to be similar to that gratitude whichis "a lively sense of favors to come." Mrs. Bishop (Isabella Bird)eloquently describes (II, 135-136) the attachment to her of a Persianhorse, and incidentally suggests the philosophy of the matter in onesentence: "To him I am an embodiment of melons, cucumbers, grapes,pears, peaches, biscuits, and sugar, with a good deal of petting andear-rubbing thrown in." Cases of attachment between husband and wifeno doubt abound among savages, even when the man is usuallycontemptuous and rude in his treatment of the wife. The Niam-Niamhusbands of Schweinfurth did not, as we saw, give any evidence ofunselfish affection, but they were doubtless attached to their wives,for obvious reasons. As for the women among the lower races, they areapt, like dogs, to cling to their master, no matter how much he maykick them about. They get from him food and shelter, and blind habitdoes the rest to attach them to his hearth. What habit and associationcan do is shown in the ease with which "happy families" of hostileanimals can be reared. But the beasts of prey must be well fed; a dayor two of fasting would result in the lamb lying down inside the lion.The essential selfishness of attachment is shown also in the way a manbecomes attached to his pipe or his home, etc. At the same time,personal attachment may prove the entering wedge of something higher."The passing attachments of young people are seldom entitled toserious notice; although sometimes they may ripen by long intercourseinto a laudable and steady affection" (Crabb).

  FOOLISH FONDNESS

  The word fondness is sometimes used in the sense of a tender, lovingdisposition; yet there is nearly always an implication of sillyextravagance or unseemly demonstrativeness, and in the most accurateusage it means a foolish, doting indulgence, without discriminatingintelligence, or even common-sense. As Crabb puts it in his _EnglishSynonyms_, "A fond parent does not rise above a fool." Everybody knowsfathers and mothers whose fondness induces them to indulge all theappetites, desires, and whims of their children, thereby ruining theirhealth and temper, making them greedy and selfish, and laying thefoundation for a wretched life for the children themselves and all whoare unfortunate enough to come into contact with them. This irrationalfondness is what travellers and anthropologists have so often mistakenfor genuine affection in the cases of savages and barbarians who werefound to be fondling their babes, doting upon them, playing with them,and refusing to punish them for any naughtiness. But it is far frombeing affection, because it is not only foolish, but _selfish_. Tosome of my readers this may seem a strange accusation, but it is afact recognized in the best literary usage, for, as Crabb remarks, "aperson is fond, who caresses an object or makes it a source ofpleasure _to himself_." Savages fondle their children because in doingso they please and amuse themselves. Their pranks entertain thefathers, and as for the mothers, nature (natural selection) hasimplanted in them an unconscious instinct of race preservation which,recognizing the selfishness of primitive man, has brought it aboutthat it gives the
mother a special pleasure to suckle and fondle herinfant. The essential selfishness of this fondness is revealed whenthere is a conflict between the mother's comfort and the child'swelfare. The horrible prevalence among many of the lower races, ofinfanticide--merely to save trouble--of which many examples are givenin various parts of this book (see index)--shows not only how selfish,but how shallow, fondness is. There are thousands of mothers in ourmodern cities who have not risen above this condition. An Italian,Ferriani, has written a book on degenerate mothers (_MadriSnaturate_), and I have in my note-books a statement of the LondonSociety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children referring to arecord of 2,141 cases of proved cruelty in the one month of August,1898; which would make at least 25,000 cases a year, in one cityalone, or possibly double that number, for many cases are never foundout, or else consist of mental torture which is worse than bodilymaltreatment. Yet there can be no doubt that all, or nearly all, ofthese mothers were fond of their babies--_i.e._, fondled them atfirst, till the animal instinct implanted in them was overcome by thedesire for personal comfort. This animal instinct, given to them bynature, is no virtue, for it is unconscious. A tigress has it, but wedo not call it a virtue in her any more than we call her cruelty toher prey a vice; she is acting unconsciously in either case, knowingno distinction between good and evil. Fondness, in a word, is not anethical virtue. In addition to all its enumerated shortcomings, it is,moreover, transient. A dog mother will care for her young for a fewmonths with the watchfulness and temporary ferocity implanted in herby natural selection, but after that she will abandon them andrecognize them no more as her own. Sometimes this instinctive fondnessceases 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 oldenough to take care of themselves, and all my efforts to make herreturn and let them sleep again under her warm feathers failed. Sheeven pecked at them viciously. Some of the lower savages similarlyabandon their young as soon as they are able to get along, while thosewho care for them longer, do so not from affection, but because sonsare useful assistants in hunting and fighting, and daughters can besold or traded off for new wives. That they do not keep them fromaffection is proved by the fact that in all cases where any selfishadvantage can be gained they marry them off without reference to theirwishes or chances of happiness.[39]

  UNSELFISH AFFECTION

  While the fondness of savages, which has been so often mistaken foraffection, is thus seen to be foolish, unconscious, selfish, shallow,and transient, true affection is rational, conscious, unselfish, deep,and enduring. Being rational, it looks not to the enjoyment or comfortof the moment, but to future and enduring welfare, and therefore doesnot hesitate to punish folly or misdeeds in order to avert futureillness or misfortune. Instead of being a mere instinctive impulse,liable to cease at any moment, like that of the California henreferred to, it is a conscious altruism, never faltering in itsethical sense of duty, utterly incapable of sacrificing another'scomfort or well-being to its own. While fondness is found coexistingwith cruelty and even with infanticide and cannibalism (as in thoseAustralian mothers, who feed their children well and carry them whentired, but when a real test of altruism comes--during a famine--killand eat them,[40] just as the men do their wives when they cease to besensually attractive), affection is horrified at the mere suggestionof such a thing. No man into whose love affection enters as aningredient 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 passionas 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 passion."

  How different this unaffectionate "love" from the love of which ourpoets sing! Shakspere knew that absorbing affection is an ingredientof love: Beatrice loves Benedick "with an enraged affection," which is"past the infinite of the night." Rosalind does not know how manyfathom deep she is in love: "It cannot he sounded; my affection hathan unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal." Dr. Abel has truly saidthat

  "affection is love tested and purified in the fire of the intellect. 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. According 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 ingredienttill minds were cultured, women esteemed, men made altruistic, andopportunities were given for youths and maidens to become acquaintedwith each other's minds and characters before marriage; as Dr. Abelsays, affection "comes slowly--but it endures." The love of whichaffection forms an ingredient can never change to hatred, can neverhave any murderous impulses, as Schure and Goethe believed. Itsurvives 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 ev'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--sympathy, adoration,gallantry, self-sacrifice, and affection--it has overthrown theGoliath of selfishness. We shall now see how it has overcome anotherformidable foe of civilization--sensualism--by means of two othermodern ingredients, one of which I will call mental purity (todistinguish it from bodily purity or chastity) and the other_esthetic_ admiration of personal beauty.

  GERMAN TESTIMONY

  Modern German literature contains many sincere tributes, in prose andverse, to the purity and nobility of true love and its refininginfluence. The psychologist Horwicz refers briefly (38) to the way inwhich

  "love, growing up as a mighty passion from the substratum of sexual life, has, under the repressing 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." "O 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 thebeloved, to enjoy her presence and sympathy, it has also a more orless prominent mental trait which ennobles the passion and places itat the service of the ideal of its fancy. It is accompanied by anenthusiasm for the good and the beautiful in general, which comes tomost people only during the brief period of love. "It is a temporaryself-exaltation, _purifying the desires_ and urging the lover togenerous deeds."r />
  Des hoechste Glueck hat keine Lieder, Der Liebe Lust ist still und mild; Ein 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 phenomenon in all animatednature, the mightiest magnet in the spiritual world, the source ofveneration and the sublimest virtues." Even Goethe had moments when heappreciated the purity of love, and he confutes his own coarseconception that was referred to in the last section when he makesWerther write: "She is sacred to me. _All desire is silent in herpresence."_[41]

  The French Edward Schure 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 theGermans is, of course, absurd, for it is found in the modernliterature of all civilized countries of Europe and America; as forinstance in Michael Angelo's

  The might of one fair face sublimes my love, For it _hath weaned my heart from low desires_.

  ENGLISH TESTIMONY

  English literature, particularly, has been saturated with thissentiment for several centuries. Love is "all purity," according toShakspere's Silvius. Schlegel remarked that by the manner in whichShakspere 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_ themselves into soul;"

  --which reminds one of Emerson's expression that the body is"ensouled" through love. Steele declared that "Love is a passion ofthe mind (_perhaps the noblest_), which was planted in it by the samehand that created it;" and of Lady Elizabeth Hastings he wrote that"to love her was a liberal education." In Steel's _Lover_ (No. 5) weread:

  "During this emotion I am highly elated in my Being, and my every sentiment improved by the effects of that Passion.... 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 No. 29: "Nothing can _mend the Heart_ better than an honorableLove, 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 inHonor 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 ofimprovement 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 _best 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 Cyclopaedia_, declares that "thepassion of love, throughout Mr. Browning's works, is treated as themost _sacred_ thing in the human soul." How Browning himself loved weknow from one of his wife's letters, in which she relates how shetried 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 ingredientof 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: "Mylove," he wrote afterward, "had the fire of passion, but not the claywhich drags it downward; it partook of the innocence of my years,while it etherealized me."

  Such ethereal love too is the prerogative of a young maiden, whoseimagination 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 kissed thee.

  In high school, when sentimental impulses first manifest themselves ina girl, she is more likely than not to transfer them to a girl. Herfeelings, in these cases, are not merely those of a warm friendship,but they resemble the passionate, self-sacrificing attitude ofromantic love. New York schoolgirls have a special slang phrase forthis 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 ofseventeen told me one day how madly she was in love with another girlwhose 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 aflower.[42] It has a pathologic phase, in some cases, which need notbe discussed here. But I wish to call attention to the fact that evenin abnormal states modern love preserves its purity. The most eminentauthority on mental pathology, Professor Krafft-Ebing, says,concerning erotomania:

  "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 awfulof diseases that can befall a woman--nymphomania.[43] The patientrelates:

  "I have also noticed that when my affections are aroused, they counteract animal passion. I could 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 toward those of my own sex. If they show any regard for me, the touch of a hand has power to take away all morbid feelings."

  A MODERN SENTIMENT

  There are all sorts and conditions of love. To those who have knownonly the primitive (sensual) sort, the conditions described in theforegoing pages will seem strange and fantastic if notfictitious--that is, the products of the writers' imaginations.Fantastic they are, no doubt, and romantic, but that they are real Ican vouch for by my own experience whenever I was in love, whichhappened several times. When I was a youth of seventeen I fell in lovewith a b
eautiful, black-eyed young woman, a Spanish-American ofCalifornian stock. She was married, and I am afraid she was amused atmy mad infatuation. Did I try to flirt with her? A smile, a glance ofher eyes, was to me the seventh heaven beyond which there could be noother. I would not have dared to touch her hand, and the thought ofkissing her was as much beyond my wildest flights of fancy as if shehad been a real goddess. To me she was divine, utterly unapproachableby mortal. Every day I used to sit in a lonely spot of the forest andweep; and when she went away I felt as if the son had gone out and allthe world were plunged into eternal darkness.

  Such is romantic love--a supersensual feeling of crystalline purityfrom which all gross matter has been distilled. But the love thatincludes this ingredient is a modern sentiment, less than a thousandyears old, and not to be found among savages, barbarians, orOrientals. To them, as the perusal of past and later chapters mustconvince the reader, it is inconceivable that a woman should serve anyother than sensual and utilitarian purposes. The whole story is toldin what Dodge says of the Indians, who, "animal-like, approach a womanonly to make love to her"; and of the squaws who do not dare even gowith a beau to a dance, or go a short distance from camp, withouttaking precautions against rape--precautions without which they "wouldnot be safe for an instant" (210, 213).

  PERSIANS, TURKS, AND HINDOOS

  We shall read later on of the obscene talk and sights that poison theminds of boys and girls among Indians, Polynesians, etc., from theirinfancy; in which respect Orientals are not much better than Huronsand Botocudos. "The Persian child," writes Mrs. Bishop (I., 218),

  "from infancy is altogether interested in the topics of adults; and as the conversation 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 thoroughly 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 degraded 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 matrons. The poor children! how should they in after life understand 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 spotless,peach-down purity which in our ideal is a maiden's supreme charm. Theydo 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 needsregard it as a thing to be picked at once and used to gratify theirappetite. Nay, they cannot even wait till it is a full-blown rose, butmust destroy the lovely bud. The "civilized" Hindoos, who are allowedlegally to sacrifice girls to their lusts before the poor victims havereached the age of puberty, are really on a level with the Africansavages who indulge in the same practice. An unsophisticated reader of_Kalidasa_ might find in the King's comparison of Sakuntala to "aflower that no one has smelt, a sprig that no one has plucked, a pearlthat has not yet been pierced," a recognition of the charm of maidenpurity. But there is a world-wide difference between this and themodern sentiment. The King's attitude, as the context shows, is simplythat of an epicure who prefers his oysters fresh. The modern sentimentis embodied in Heine's exquisite lines:

  DU BIST WIE EINE 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 lovely, pure, and fair. --_Trans, of Kate Freiligrath Kroeker_.

  It is not surprising that this intensely modern poem should have beenset to music--the most modern of all the arts--more frequently thanany other verses ever written. To Orientals, to savages, to Greeks, itwould be incomprehensible--as incomprehensible as Ruskin's "there isno 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 purifying,ennobling emotion, a stimulus to self-improvement and an impulse to dogenerous, unselfish deeds, but a mere animal passion, low anddegrading.

  LOVE DESPISED IN JAPAN AND CHINA

  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 folksto arrange their own marriages on a basis of love.

  "Among the lower classes, indeed," says Kuechler,[44] "such directunions are not infrequent; but they are held in contempt, and areknown as yago (meeting on a moor), a term of disrespect, showing thelow 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 relations."

  On another page (308) he says:

  "According to the Confucian ethical code, which the Japanese adopted, a man's parents, his teacher, and his lord claim his life-long service, his wife standing on an immeasurably lower plane."[45]

  Ball, in his _Things Chinese_ comments on the efforts made by Chinamento suppress love-matches 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 illustrations of the disorders of love, it is almost always the woman on whom the blame of seduction is laid."

  GREEK SCORN FOR WOMAN-LOVE

  The Greeks were in the same boat. They did indeed distinguish betweentwo kinds of love, the sensual and the celestial, but--as we shall seein detail in the special chapter devoted to them--they applied thecelestial kind only to friendship and boy-love, never to the lovebetween men and women. That love was considered impure and degrading,a humiliating affliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable tothe friendship between men or the feelings that unite parents andchildren. This is the view taken in Plato's writings, in Xenophon's_Symposium_ and everywhere. In Plutarch's _Dialogue on Love_, writtenfive hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faintprotest against the current notion that "there is no gust offriendship or heavenly ravishment of mind," in the love for women; butthis is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which isthus brutally expressed by one of the interlocutors in the samedialogue:

  "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 consists at the best in the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty."

  Another interlocutor sums up the Greek attitude in these words: "Itbehooves respectable women neither to love nor to be loved."

  Goethe had an apercu of the absence of purity in Greek love when hewrote, in his _Roman Elegies:_

  In der heroischen Zeit, da Goetter und Goettinnen liebt
en. Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.

  PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY

  The change in love from the barbarian and ancient attitude to themodern conception of it as a refining, purifying feeling is closelyconnected with the growth of the altruistic ingredients oflove--sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, and especiallyadoration. It is one of the points where religion and love meet.Mariolatry greatly affected men's attitude toward women in general,including their notions about love. There is a curious passage inBurton 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 antidote against it as the Virgin Mary's face."

  Mediaeval theologians had a special name for this faculty--PenetrativeVirginity--which McClintock and Strong's _Cyclopedia of BiblicalLiterature_ 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 sentiments but such as were consistent with chastity."

  In the eyes of refined modern lovers, every spotless maiden has thatgift of penetrative virginity. The beauty of her face, or the charm ofher character, inspires in him an affection which is as pure, aschaste, as the love of flowers. But it was only very gradually andslowly that human beauty gained the power to inspire such a pure love;the proof of which assertion is to be unfolded in our next section.

  XIV. ADMIRATION OF PERSONAL BEAUTY

  "When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind," exclaimedDryden; and Romeo asks:

  Did my heart love 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 ofa girl's personal beauty is no doubt the most entrancing ingredient.But such love is rare even to-day, while in ordinary love-affairs thesense of beauty does not play nearly so important a role as iscommonly supposed. In woman's love, as everybody knows, the regard formasculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient; and a man'slove, provided sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice,affection, and purity enter into it, may be of the genuine romantictype, even though he has no sense of beauty at all. And this is luckyfor the prospects of love, since, even among the most civilized racesto-day, the number of men and women who, while otherwise refined andestimable, have no real appreciation of beauty, personal or otherwise,is astonishingly large.

  DARWIN'S UNFORTUNATE MISTAKE

  This being true of the average man and woman among the most culturedraces, we ought to be able to conclude, as a matter of course andwithout the necessity of argumentation, that the admiration ofpersonal beauty has still less to do with the motives that lead asavage to marry this or that girl, or a savage girl to prefer this orthat suitor. Strange to say, this simple corollary of the doctrine ofevolution has been greatly obscured by Darwin himself, by his theoryof sexual selection, which goes so far as to attribute the beauty ofthe male _animals_ to the continued preference by the females of themore showy males, and the consequent hereditary transmission of theircolors and other ornaments. When we bear in mind how unimportant arole the regard for personal beauty plays even among the females ofthe most advanced human beings, the idea that the females of the loweranimals are guided in their pairing by minute subtle differences inthe beauty of masculine animals seems positively comic. It is an ideasuch as could have emanated only from a mind as unesthetic as Darwin'swas.

  So far as animals are concerned, Alfred Russell Wallace completelydemolished the theory of sexual selection,[46] after it had created agreat deal of confusion in scientific literature. In regard to thelower races of man this confusion still continues, and I thereforewish to demonstrate here, more conclusively than I did in my firstbook (60, 61, 327-30), that among primitive men and women, too, thesense of beauty does not play the important role attributed to it intheir love-affairs. "The Influence of Beauty in determining theMarriages of Mankind" is one of the topics discussed in the _Descentof Man_. Darwin tries to show that, "especially" during the earlierperiod of our long history, the races of mankind were modified by thecontinued selection of men by women and women by men in accordancewith their peculiar standards of beauty. He gives some of the numerousinstances 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 distinctive marks. _But self-adornment, vanity, and the admiration of others seem to be the commonest motives_."

  Among those who were led astray by these views of Darwin isWestermarck, who declares (257, 172) that "in every country, in everyrace, 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 interestingtreatise on the _Beginnings of Art_ (111, etc.), thereby marring hischapter on "Personal Decoration." In the following pages I shall show,on the contrary, that when we subject these primitive customs of"ornamentation" and mutilation to a critical examination we find innearly every case that they are either not at all or only indirectly(not esthetically), connected with the relations of the sexes; andthat neither does personal beauty exist as a rule among savages, norhave they the esthetic sense to appreciate its exceptional occurrence.They nearly always paint, tattoo, decorate, or mutilate themselveswithout the least reference to courtship or the desire to please theother sex. It is the easiest thing in the world to fill page afterpage--as Darwin, Westermarck, Grosse, and others have done--with theremarks of travellers regarding the addiction of savages to personal"ornamentation"; but this testimony rests, as we shall see, on theunwarranted assumptions of superficial observers, who, ignorant of thereal reasons why the lower races paint, tattoo, and otherwise "adorn"themselves, recklessly inferred that they did it to "make themselvesbeautiful." The more carefully the customs and traditions of theseraces are studied, the more obvious becomes the non-esthetic andnon-erotic origin of their personal "decorations." In my extensiveresearches, for every single fact that seemed to favor the sexualselection theory I have found a hundred against it; and I have becomemore and more amazed at the extraordinary _sang froid_ with which itsadvocates have ignored the countless facts that speak against it whileboosting into prominence the very few that at first sight appear tosupport it. In the following pages I shall attempt to demolish thetheory of sexual selection in reference to the lower races of man asWallace demolished it in reference to animals; premising that the massof cumulative evidence here presented is only a very small part ofwhat might be adduced on my side. Let us consider the differentmotives for personal "decoration" in succession.

  "DECORATION" FOR PROTECTION

  Many of the alleged personal "decorations" of inferior races aremerely measures to protect themselves against climate, insects, etc.The Maoris of New Zealand besmear themselves with grease and red ochreas a defence against the sand-flies.[47] The Andaman islanders plasterthemselves with a mixture of lard and colored earth to protect theirskins from heat and mosquitoes.[48] Canadian Indians painted theirfaces in winter as a protection against fros
t-bite. In Patagonia

  "both sexes smear their faces, and occasionally their bodies with paint, 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."[49]

  C. Bock notes that in Sumatra rice powder is lavishly employed by manyof the women, but "not with the object of preserving the complexion orreducing the color, but to prevent perspiration by closing the poresof the skin."[50] Baumann says of the African Bakongo that many oftheir peculiar ways of arranging the hair "seem to be intended less asornamental head-dresses than as a bolster for the burdens they carryon their heads;"[51] and Squier says that the reason given by theNicaraguans for flattening the heads of their children is that theymay be better fitted in adult life to bear burdens.[52]

  WAR "DECORATIONS"

  Equally remote as the foregoing from all ideas of personal beauty orof courtship and the desire to inspire sexual passion is the custom sowidely prevalent of painting and otherwise "adorning" the body forwar. The Australians diversely made use of red and yellow ochre, or ofwhite pigment for war paint.[53] Caesar relates that the ancientBritons stained themselves blue with woad to give themselves a morehorrid aspect in war. "Among ourselves," as Tylor remarks, "the guisewhich was so terrific in the Red Indian warrior has comedown to makethe circus clown a pattern of folly,"[54] Regarding Canadian Indianswe 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 dreadful 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."[55]

  The Sioux Indians blackened their faces when they went on the warpath.They

  "highly prize personal bravery, and therefore constantly wear the marks of distinction 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."[56]

  When Sioux warriors return from the warpath with scalps "the squaws aswell as the men paint with vermilion a semicircle in front of eachear."[57] North Carolina Indians when going to war painted their facesall over red, while those of South Carolina, according to DeBrahm,"painted their faces red in token of friendship and black inexpression of warlike intentions." "Before charging the foe," saysDorsey, "the Osage warriors paint themselves anew. This is called thedeath paint." The Algonquins, on the day of departure for war, dressedin their best, coloring the hair red and painting their faces andbodies red and black. The Cherokees when going to war dyed their hairred and adorned it with feathers of various colors.[58] Bancroft says(I., 105) that when a Thlinkit arms himself for war he paints his faceand powders his hair a brilliant red. "He then ornaments his head witha white eagle feather as a token of stern, vindictive determination."

  John Adair wrote of the Chickasaws, in 1720, that they "readily knowachievements in war by the blue marks over their breasts and arms,they being as legible as our alphabetical characters are to us"--whichcalls attention to a very frequent use of what are supposed to beornaments as merely part of a language of signs. Irving remarks in_Astoria,_ regarding the Arikara warriors, that "some had the stamp ofa red hand across their mouths, a sign that they had drunk thelife-blood of an enemy." In Schoolcraft we read (II., 58) that amongthe Dakotas on St. Peter's River a red hand means that the wearer hasbeen wounded by an enemy, while a black hand indicates "I have slainan enemy." The Hidatsa Indians wore eagle feathers "to denote acts ofcourage or success in war"; and the Dakotas and others indicated bymeans of special spots or colored bars in their feathers or cuts inthem, that the wearer had killed an enemy, or wounded one, or taken ascalp, or killed a woman, etc. A black feather denoted that an Ojibwawoman was killed. The marks on their blankets had similarmeanings.[59] Peter Carder, an Englishman captive among theBrazilians, 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."[60]

  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."[61]

  Fancourt(314) says of the natives of Yucatan that "in their wars, andwhen they went to their sacrificial dances and festivals, they hadtheir faces, arms, thighs, and legs painted and naked." In Fiji themen bore a hole through the nose and put in a couple of feathers, nineto twelve inches long, which spread out over each side of the facelike immense mustaches. They do this "to give themselves a fiercerappearance."[62] Waitz notes that in Tahiti mothers compressed theheads of their infant boys "to make their aspect more terrible andthus turn them into more formidable warriors." The Tahitians, as Ellisinforms us, "went to battle in their best clothes, sometimes perfumedwith fragrant oil, and adorned with flowers."[63] Of the wild tribesin Kondhistan, too, we read that "it is only, however, when they goout to battle ... that they adorn themselves with all theirfinery."[64]

  AMULETS, CHARMS, 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 amanifestation of savage superstition. In Tuckey's _Zaire_, from whichthe above citation is made (375), they are properly classed asfetiches, and the information is added that in the choice of them thenatives consult the fetich men. A picture is given in the book of oneappendage to the dress "which the weaver considered an infalliblecharm against poison." Others are "considered as protection againstthe effects of thunder and lightning, against the attacks of thealligator, 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 amulets, sure safeguards against sorcery."

  Concerning the Bushmen, 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."[65]

  Bastian relates that in many parts of Africa every infant is tattooedon the belly, to dedicate it thereby to a certain fetich.[66] Theinland negroes mark all sorts of patterns on their skins, partly "toexpel evil influences."[67] The Nicaraguans punctured and scarifiedtheir tongues because, as they explained to Oviedo, it would bringthem luck in bargains. The Peruvians, says Cieza, pulled out threeteeth of each jaw in children of very tender age because that would beacceptable to the gods; and Garcilassa notes that the Peruvians pulledout a hair of an eyebrow when making an offering. Jos. d'Acosta alsodescribes how the Peruvians pulled out eyelashes and eyebrows andoffered them to the deities. The natives of Yucatan, according toFancourt, wore their hair long as "a sign of idolatry."[68] WhenFranklin relates that Chippewayan Indians "prize pictures very highlyand esteem any they can get," we seem to have come across a genuineesthetic sense, till we read that it makes no difference how badlythey are executed, and that they are va
lued "as efficient charms."[69]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."[70]

  The Point Barrow Eskimos believe that clipping their hair on the backof the head in a certain way "prevents snow-blindness in the spring."These Eskimos painted their faces when they went whaling, and theKadiaks did so before any important undertaking, such as crossing awide strait, chasing the sea-otter, etc.[71] In regard to the amuletsor 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."[72]

  Marcano says that "the Indians of French Guiana paint themselves inorder to drive away the devil when they start on a journey or forwar."[73] In his treatise on the religion of the Dakotas, Lyndremarks:

  "Scarlet or red is the religious 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."[74]

  By the Tasmanians "the bones of relatives were worn around the neck,less, perhaps, as ornaments than as charms."[75] The Ainos of Japanand the Fijians held that tattooing was a custom introduced by thegods. Fijian women believed "that to be tattooed is a passport to theother world, where it prevents them from being persecuted by their ownsex."[76] An Australian custom ordained that every person must havethe septum of the nose pierced and must wear in it a piece of bone, areed, or the stalks of some grass. This was not done, however, withthe object of adorning the person, but for superstitious reasons: "theold men used to predict to those who were averse to this mutilationall kinds of evil." The sinner, they said, would suffer in the nextworld by having to eat filth. "To avoid a punishment so horrible, eachone gladly submitted, and his or her nose was pierced accordingly."(Brough Smyth, 274.) Wilhelmi says that in the Northwest the men placein the head-band behind the ears pieces of wood decorated with verythin shavings and looking like plumes of white feathers. They do this"on occasions of rejoicings and when engaged in their mysticceremonies." Nicaraguans trace the custom of flattening the heads ofchildren to instructions from the gods, and Pelew Islanders believedthat to win eternal bliss the septum of the nose must be perforated,while Eskimo girls were induced to submit to having long stitches madewith a needle and black thread on several parts of the face by thesuperstitious fear that if they refused they would, after death, beturned into train tubs and placed under the lamps in heaven.[77] Inorder that the ghost of a Sioux Indian may travel the ghost road insafety, it is necessary for each Dakota during his life to be tattooedin the middle of the forehead or on the wrists. If found withoutthese, he is pushed from a cloud or cliff and falls back to thisworld.[78] In Australia, the Kurnai medicine men were supposed to beable to communicate with ghosts only when they had certain bonesthrust through the nose.[79] The _American Anthropologist_ contains(July, 1889) a description of the various kinds of face-coloring toindicate degrees in the Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa. TheseIndians frequently tattooed temples, forehead, or cheeks of sufferersfrom headache or toothache, in the belief that this would expel thedemons who cause the pain. In Congo, scarifications are made on theback for therapeutic reasons; and in Timor-Laut (Malay Archipelago),both sexes tattooed themselves "in imitation of immense smallpoxmarks, in order to ward off that disease."[80]

  MOURNING LANGUAGE

  Australian women of the Port Lincoln tribes paint a ring around eacheye and a streak over the stomach, and men mark their breasts withstripes and paints in different patterns. An ignorant observer, or anadvocate of the sexual selection theory, would infer that these"decorations" are resorted to for the purpose of ornamentation, toplease individuals of the opposite sex. But Wilhelmi, who understoodthe customs of these tribes, explains that these divers stripes andpaints have a practical object, being used to "indicate the differentdegrees of relationship between a dead person and the mourners."[81]In South Australia widows in mourning "shave their heads, cover themwith a netting, and plaster them with pipe-clay"[82]. A white bandaround the brow is also used as a badge of mourning[83]. Taplin saysthat the Narrinyeri adorn the bodies of the dead with bright-redochre, and that this is a wide-spread custom in Australia. A Dyeri, onbeing asked why he painted red and white spots on his skin, answered:"Suppose me no make-im, me tumble down too; that one [the corpse]growl along-a-me." A further "ornament" of the women on theseoccasions consists in two white streaks on the arm to indicate thatthey have eaten some of the fat of the dead, according to theircustom. (Smyth, I., 120.) In some districts the mourners paintthemselves white on the death of a blood relation, and black when arelative by marriage dies. The corpse is often painted red. Red isused too when boys are initiated into manhood, and with most tribes itis also the war-color. Hence it is not strange that they shouldundertake long journeys to secure fresh supplies of ochre: for war,mourning, and superstition are three of the strongest motives ofsavage activity. African Bushmen anoint the heads of the dead with ared powder mixed with melted fat. Hottentots, when mourning, shavetheir heads in furrows. Damaras wear a dark-colored skin-cap: a pieceof leather round the neck, to which is attached a piece of ostrichegg-shell. Coast negroes bury the head of a family in his best clothesand ornaments, and Dahomans do the same[84]. Schweinfurth says that"according to the custom, which seems to belong to all Africa, as asign of grief the Dinka wear a cord round the neck."[85] Mourning NewZealanders tie a red cloth round the head or wear headdresses of darkfeathers. New Caledonians cut off their hair and blacken and oil theirfaces[85]. Hawaiians cut their hair in various forms, knock out afront tooth, cut the ears and tattoo a spot on the tongue[86]. TheMineopies use three coloring substances for painting their bodies; andby the way they apply them they let it be known whether a person isill or in mourning, or going to a festival.[87] In California theYokaia widows make an unguent with which they smear a white band twoinches wide all around the edge of the hair[88]. Of the Yukon Indiansof Alaska "some wore hoops of birch wood around the neck and waists,with various patterns of figures cut on them. These were said to beemblems of mourning for the dead."[89] Among the Snanaimuq "the faceof the deceased is painted with red and black paint... After the deathof husband or wife the survivor must paint his legs and his blanketred."[90] Numerous other instances may be found in Mallery, whoremarks that "many objective modes of showing mourning by styles ofpaint and markings are known, the significance of which are apparentwhen discovered in pictographs."[91]

  INDICATIONS OF TRIBE OR RANK

  Among the customs which, in Darwin's opinion, show "how widely thedifferent races of man differ in their taste for the beautiful," isthat of moulding the skull of infants into various unnatural shapes,in some cases making the head "appear to us idiotic." One would thinkthat before accepting such a monstrous custom as evidence of any kindof a sense of beauty, Darwin, and those who expressed the same opinionbefore and after him, would have inquired whether there is not somemore rational way of accounting for the admiration of deformed headsby these races than by assuming that they approved of them for_esthetic_ reasons. There is no difficulty in finding severalnon-esthetic reasons why peculiarly moulded skulls were approved of.The Nicaraguans, as I have already stated, believed that heads weremoulded in order to make it easier to bear burdens, and the Peruviansalso said they pressed the heads of children to make them healthierand able to do more work. But vanity--individual or tribal--andfashion were the principal motives. According to
Torquemada, the kingswere the first who had their heads shaped, and afterward permission tofollow their example was granted to others as a special favor. Intheir classical work on Peruvian antiquities (31-32) Eivero andTschudi describe the skulls they examined., including many varieties"artificially produced, and differing according to their respectivelocalities."

  "These irregularities were undoubtedly produced by mechanical causes, and were considered as the _distinctive marks 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 Indiantribes, especially in the Pacific States, and Bancroft (I., 180) saysthat, "all seem to admire a flattened forehead as _a sign of noblebirth_;" 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 headsbecause they are jealous of their noble descent. (Bastian, _D.M_.,II., 229.)

  "The genuine Turkish skull," says Tylor _(Anth.,_ 240),

  "is of the broad Tatar form, while the natives of Greece 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. Relics 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 Normandy were still giving the children's heads a sugar-loaf shape by bandages and a tight cap, while in Brittany they preferred to press it round."

  Knocking out some of the teeth, or filing them into certain shapes, isanother widely prevalent custom, for which it is inadmissible toinvoke a monstrous and problematic esthetic taste as long as it can beaccounted 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 outthe top incisor teeth, for the reason that it is "only horses that eatwith all their teeth, and that men ought not to eat like horses." Inother cases it is not contempt for animals but respect for them thataccounts for the knocking out of teeth. Thus Livingstone relates_(L. Tr_., II., 120), in speaking of a boy from Lomaine, that "the

  upper teeth extracted seemed to say that the tribe have cattle. Theknocking out of the teeth is in imitation of the animals they almostworship." The Batokas also give as their reason for knocking out theirupper front teeth that they wish to be like oxen. Livingstone tells us_(Zamb.,_ 115), that the Manganja chip their teeth to resemble thoseof the cat or crocodile: which suggests totemism, or superstitiousrespect for an animal chosen as an emblem of a tribe. That theAustralian custom of knocking out the upper front teeth at puberty ispart of a religious ceremonial, and not the outcome of a desire tomake 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 manuscript by A.W. Howitt, inwhich it is pointed out that the humming instrument kuamas, thebull-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 histeeth have been knocked out during the rites."[92] But perhaps thecommonest motive for altering the teeth is the desire to indicatetribal connections. "Various tribes," says Tylor _(Anthr._ 240),"grind their front teeth to points, or cut them away in angularpatterns, so that in Africa and elsewhere a man's tribe is often knownby the cut of his teeth."

  Peculiar arrangements of the hair also have misled unwary observersinto fancying that they were made for beauty's sake and to attract theopposite sex, when in reality they were tribal marks or had otherutilitarian purposes, serving as elements in a language of signs, etc.Frazer, _e.g._, notes (27) that the turtle clan of the Omaha Indianscuts off all the hair from a boy's head except six locks which hangdown in imitation of the legs, head, and tail of a turtle; while theBuffalo clan arranges two locks of hair in imitation of horns. "Nearlyall the Indian tribes," writes Mallery (419), "have peculiarities ofthe arrangement of the hair and of some article of apparel oraccoutrement by which they can always be distinguished." Heriotrelates (294) 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 distance." "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 Coyotero 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 oneach side of the head. (Mallery, 231-32.) Similar usages on othercontinents might be cited.

  Besides these arbitrary modifications of the skull and the teeth, andthe divers arrangements of the hair, there are various other ways inwhich the lower races indicate tribal connection, rank, or otherconditions. Writing about negroes Burton says _(Abeok.,_ I., 106),that lines, welts, and all sorts of skin patterns are used, partly forsuperstitious reasons, partly to mark the different tribes andfamilies. "A volume would not suffice to explain all the marks indetail." Of the Dahomans, Forbes says (I., 28), "that _according torank and wealth_ anklets and armlets of all metals, and necklaces ofglass, coral, and Popae beads, are worn by both sexes." Livingstonerelates _(Mis. Trav_., 276) that the copper rings worn on their anklesby the chiefs of Londa were so large and heavy that they seriouslyinconvenienced them in walking. That this custom was entirely anoutcome of vanity and emulation, and not a manifestation of theesthetic sense, is made clear by the further observations ofLivingstone. Men who could not afford so many of these copper ringswould still, he found, strut along as if they had them. "That is theway," he was informed, "in which they show off their lordship in theseparts." Among the Mojave Indians "nose-jewels designate a man ofwealth and rank," and elaborate headdresses of feathers are theinsignia of the chiefs[93]. Champlain says that among the Iroquoisthose who wore three large plumes were chiefs. In Thurn says (305)that each of the Guiana tribes makes its feather head-dresses ofspecial colors; and Martins has the following regarding the BrazilianIndians: "Commonly all the members of a tribe, or a horde, or afamily, agree to wear certain ornaments or signs as characteristicmarks." 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 andalleged "decorations" of it are not intended by these races as thingsof beauty, but have special meanings or uses in connection withprotection, war, superstition, mourning, or the desire to markdistinctions between the tribes, or degrees of rank within one tribeor horde. Usually the "ornamentations" are prescribed for all membersof 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 deviationsor exaggerations, and these are resorted to by ambitious individualsto attract attention to their important selves, and thus to gratifyvanity, which, in the realm of fashion, is a thing entirely apartfrom--and usually antagonistic to--the sense of beauty[94]. AtAustralian dances various colors are used with the object ofattracting attention. Especially fantastic are their "decorations" atthe corroborees, when the bodies of the men are painted with whitestreaks that make them look like skeletons. Bulmer believed that theirobject was to "make themselves as terrible as possible to thebeholders and not beautiful or attractive," while Grosse thinks (65)that as these dances usually take place by moonlight
, the object ofthe stripes is to make the dancers more conspicuous--two explanationswhich are not inconsistent with each other.

  Fry relates[95] that the Khonds adorn their hair till they may be seen"intoxicated with vanity on its due decoration." Hearne (306) sawIndians who had a single lock of hair that "when let down would trailon the ground as they walked." Anderson expresses himself withscientific precision when he writes (136) that in Fiji the men "wholike to _attract the attention_ of the opposite sex, don their bestplumage." The attention may be attracted by anything that isconspicuous, entirely apart from the question whether it be regardedas a thing of beauty or not. Bourne makes the very suggestivestatement (69-70) that in Patagonia the beautiful plumage of theostrich was not appreciated, but allowed to blow all over the country,while the natives adorned themselves with beads and cheap brass andcopper trinkets. We may therefore assume that in those cases wherefeathers are used for "adornment" it is not because their beauty isappreciated but because custom has given them a special significance.In many cases they indicate that the wearer is a person of rank--chiefor medicine man--as we saw in the preceding pages. We also saw thatspecial marks in feathers among Dakotas indicated that the wearer hadtaken a human life, which, more than anything else, excites theadmiration of savage women; so that what fascinates them in such acase is not the feather itself but the deed it stands for.Panlitzschke informs us (_E.N.O.Afr.,_ chap. ii.), that among theAfrican Somali and Gallas every man who had killed someone, boastfullywore an ostrich feather on his head to call attention to his deed. TheDanakil wore these feathers for the same purpose, adding ivory rods intheir ear-lobes and fastening a bunch of white horsehair to theirshield. A strip of red silk round the forehead served the samepurpose. Lumholtz, describing a festival dance in Australia (237),says that some of the men hold in their mouths tufts of talegallafeathers "for the purpose of giving themselves a savage look." By someAustralians bunches of hawk's or eagle's feathers are worn "eitherwhen fighting or dancing, and also used as a fan" (Brough Smyth, I.,281-282), which suggests the thought that the fantastic head-dressesof feathers, etc., often seen in warm countries, may be worn asprotection against the sun[96].

  I doubt, too, whether the lower races are able to appreciate flowersesthetically as we do, apart from their fragrance, which endears themto some barbarians of the higher grades. Concerning Australian womenwe find it recorded by Brough Smyth (I., 270) that they seem to haveno love of flowers, and do not use them to adorn their persons. A NewZealander explained his indifference to flowers by declaring that theywere "not good to eat."[97] Other Polynesians were much given towearing flowers on the head and body; but whether this was for_esthetic_ reasons seems to me doubtful on account of the revelationsmade 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, andfragrant oil, has been in a great degree discontinued, "partly fromthe connection of these ornaments with the evil practices to whichthey were formerly addicted."

  OBJECTS OF TATTOOING

  So far tattooing has been mentioned only incidentally; but as it isone of the most widely prevalent methods of primitive personal"decoration" a few pages must be devoted to it in order to ascertainwhether it is true that it is one of those ornamentations which, asDarwin would have us believe, help to determine the marriages ofmankind, or, as Westermarck puts it, "men and women began to... tattoothemselves chiefly in order to make themselves attractive to theopposite sex--that they might court successfully, or be courted." Weshall find that, on the contrary, tattooing has had from the earliestrecorded times more than a dozen practical purposes, and that its useas a stimulant of the passion of the opposite sex probably neveroccurred to a savage until it was suggested to him by a philosophizingvisitor.

  Twenty-four centuries ago Herodotus not only noted that the Thracianshad punctures on their skins, but indicated the reason for them: theyare, he said, "a mark of nobility: to be without them is a testimonyof mean descent."[98] This use of skin disfigurements prevails amongthe lower races to the present day, and it is only one of manyutilitarian and non-esthetic functions subserved by them. In hisbeautifully illustrated volume on Maori tattooing, Major-GeneralRobley 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 decorations on the face, the lines were made permanent. Hence arose the practice of carving the face and the body with dyed incisions. The Rev. 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."

  TATTOOING ON PACIFIC ISLANDS

  When Captain Cook visited New Zealand (1769) he was much interested inthe tattooing of the Maoris, and noted that each tribe seemed to havea different custom in regard to it; thus calling attention to one ofits main functions as a means to distinguish the tribes from eachother. He described the different patterns on divers parts of the bodyused by various tribes, and made the further important observationthat "by adding to the tattooing they grow old and honorable at thesame time." The old French navigator d'Urville found in the Maoritattooing an analogy to European heraldry, with this difference: thatwhereas the coat-of-arms attests the merits of ancestors, the Maorimoko illustrates the merits of the persons decorated with it. It makesthem, as Robley wittily says, "men of mark." One chief explained thata certain mark just over his nose was his name; it served the purposesof a seal in signing documents. It has been suggested that the body ofa warrior may have been tattooed for the sake of identification incase the head was separated from it; for the Maoris carried on aregular trade in heads. Rutherford, who was held for a long time as acaptive, said that only the great ones of the tribe were allowed todecorate the forehead, upper lip, and chin. Naturally such marks were"a source of pride" (a sign of rank), and "the chiefs were verypleased to show the tattooing on their bodies." To have an untattooedface was to be "a poor nobody." Ellis (_P.R._, III., 263) puts thematter graphically by saying the New Zealander's tattooing answers thepurpose 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 beemployed as "a means of enabling them to distinguish their enemies inbattle."

  In his great work on Borneo (II., 83), Roth cites Brooke Low, who saidthat tattooing was a custom of recent introduction: "I have seen a fewwomen with small patterns on their breasts, but they were theexception to the rule and were not regarded with favor." Burns saysthat 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 hehas been present when an enemy has been killed, but tattoos hand andfingers if he has taken an enemy's head." Among the Ida'an a man makesa mark on his arm for each enemy slain. One man was seen withthirty-seven such stripes on the arm. A successful head-hunter is alsoallowed to "decorate" his ears with the canine teeth of a Borneanleopard. "In some cases tatu marks appear to be used as a means ofcommunicating a fact," writes Roth (II., 291). Among the Kayan itindicates rank. Slaughter of an enemy, or mere murder of a slave, areother reasons for tattooing. "A Murut, having run away from the enemy,was tatued on his back. So that we may justly conclude that tatuingamong the natives of Borneo is one method of writing." Among the Dusunthe men that took heads generally had a tattoo mark for each one onthe arm, and were looked upon as very brave, though their victim mighthave 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 theMicronesian Archipel
ago the natives of each island had special kindsof tattoo marks on different parts of the body, to distinguish themfrom others. These marks were named after the islands. TheMicronesians themselves attached also a religious significance tothese marks. The natives of Tobi believed that their island would bedestroyed if the English visitors who came among them were not at oncetattooed. Only those completely marked could enter the temple. The menwere more tattooed than the women, who were regarded as inferiors.

  In the sixth volume of Waitz-Gerland (30-40) is gathered a large massof evidence, all of which shows that on the Polynesian islands, too,tattooing was indulged in, not for aesthetic and amorous but forreligious and practical reasons. In Tonga it was a mark of rank, notpermitted to common people or to slaves. Not to be tattooed wasconsidered improper. In the Marquesas the older and more distinguisheda man, the more he was tattooed. Married women were distinguished byhaving marks on the right hand and left foot. In some cases tattoomarks were used as signs to call to mind certain battles or festivals.A woman in Ponape had marks for all her successive husbands made onher arm--everything and anything, in fact, except the purpose ofdecorating for the sake of attracting the other sex. Gerland (33-40)makes out a very strong case for the religions origin of tattooing,which he aptly compares to our confirmation.

  In Samoa the principal motive of tattooing seems to have beenlicentiousness. It was prohibited by the chiefs on account of theobscene practices always connected with it, and there is a legend ofthe incestuous designs of two divine brothers on their sister whichwas 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 purpose, it was practised among men." (Ellis, _P.R._, I., 262.)

  TATTOOING IN AMERICA

  On the American continent we find tattooing practised from north tosouth, from east to west, for the most diverse reasons, among whichthe desire to facilitate courtship is never even hinted at. TheEskimos, about the age of puberty, apply paint and tattooing to theirfaces, cut holes and insert plugs or labrets. The object of thesedisfigurements is indicated by Bancroft (I., 48): "Different tribes,and different ranks of the same tribe, have each their peculiar formof tattooing." Moreover, "these operations are supposed to possesssome significance other than that of mere ornament. Upon the occasionof piercing the lip, for instance, a religious feast is given." JohnMurdoch relates (Mallery, 396) that the wife of an Eskimo chief had "alittle mark tattooed in each corner of her mouth, which she said were'whale marks,' indicating that she was the wife of a successfulwhaleman." Of the Kadiaks Bancroft says (72): "The more the femalechin is riddled with holes, the greater the respectability." Among theChippewayan Indians Mackenzie found (85) that both sexes had "blue orblack bars, or from one to four straight lines, on their cheeks orforeheads 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 thedesign of a swan, the Indians would know your family name." It is atfestivals and masquerade performances, says the same writer, that "thetatoo marks show with the best effect, and the rank and familyconnection [are] known by the variety of design," Lafitan reports(II., 43) regarding the Iroquois and Algonquins that the designs whichthey have tattooed on their faces and bodies are employed ashieroglyphics, writing, and records, to indicate victories, etc. Thedesigns 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 reported that the Omahas are often neatly tattooed.... The daughters of chiefs and those of wealthy Indians generally are denoted by a small round spot tattooed on the forehead."

  (Mallery, 1888-89, 395.) Bossu says regarding the practice oftattooing by the Osages (in 1756): "It is a kind of knighthood towhich they are only entitled by great actions." Blue marks tattooedupon the chin of a Mojave woman indicate that she is married. TheSerrano Indians near Los Angeles had, as late as 1843, a custom ofhaving special tattoo marks on themselves which were also made ontrees to indicate the corner boundaries of patches of land. (Mallery,1882-83, 64, 182.) In his book on the California Indians, Powersdeclares (109) that in the Mattoal tribe the men tattoo themselves; inthe others the women alone tattoo. The theory that the women are thusmarked in order that the men may be able to recognize them and redeemthem from captivity seems plausible for the reasons that these Indiansare rent into a great number of divisions and that "the squaws almostnever attempt any ornamental tattooing, but adhere closely to theplain regulation mark of the tribe." The Hupa Indians have discoveredanother practical use for body-marks. Nearly every man has ten linestattooed across the inside of his left arm, and these lines serve as ameasurement of shell-money.

  The same non-esthetic motives for tattooing prevail in South andCentral America. In Agassiz's book on Brazil we read (318) concerningthe Mundurucu Indians:

  "Major Coutinho tells us that the tattooing _has nothing to do with individual taste_, but that the pattern is appointed for both sexes, and is _invariable throughout the tribe_. It is connected with their caste, the limits of which are very precise, and with their religion."

  The tattooing "is also an indication of aristocracy; a man whoneglected this distinction would not be respected in his tribe."Concerning the Indians of Guiana we read in Im Thurn (195-96) thatthey have small distinctive tribal marks tattooed at the corners ofthe mouth or on the arms. Nearly all have "indelibly excised lines"which are

  "scars originally made for _surgical_, not ornamental purposes." "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 tattooedthemselves to designate by special marks the tribes to which theybelonged; and as regards Yucatan, Landa writes (Sec. XXI.) that astattooing was accompanied by much pain, they thought themselves themore gallant and strong the more they indulged in it; and that thosewho omitted it were sneered at--which gives us still another motivefor tattooing--the fear of being despised and ridiculed for not beingin fashion.

  TATTOOING IN JAPAN

  Many more similar details might be given regarding the races ofvarious parts of the world, but the limits of space forbid. But Icannot resist the temptation to add a citation from ProfessorChamberlain's article on tattooing in his _Things Japanese_, becauseit admirably illustrates the diversity of the motives that led to thepractice. A Chinese trader, "early in the Christian era," Chamberlaintells us, "wrote that the men all tattoo their faces and ornamenttheir bodies with designs, differences of rank being indicated by theposition and size of the patterns." "But from the dawn of regularhistory," 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 for tattooing by the Japanese upper classes. From condemned 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 1808 "the government made tattooing a penal offence."

  It will be noticed that in this account the fantastic n
otion that thecustom was ever indulged in for the purpose of beautifying the body inorder to attract the other sex is, as in all the other citations Ihave made, not even hinted at. The same is true in the summary made byMallery of the seventeen purposes of tattooing he found. No. 13 is,indeed, "to charm the other sex;" but it is "magically," which is avery 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, identification 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 weakness; 16, to bring good fortune, and, 17, as the device of a secret society."

  SCARIFICATION.

  Dark races, like the Africans and Australians, do not practisetattooing, because the marks would not show conspicuously on theirblack skins. They therefore resort to the process of raising scars bycutting the skin with flint or a shell and then rubbing in earth, orthe juice of certain plants, etc. The result is a permanent scar, andthese scars are arranged by the different tribes in differentpatterns, 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 gradually 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 particularlygreat among the Australians, because they are subdivided in the mostcomplicated ways and have an elaborate code of sexual permissions andprohibitions. 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 language, ... 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 ofCentral South Africa has three cuts on the chest. They confessed tohim that they indicated a kind of free-masonry, insuring their beingwell received by Koranna everywhere. On the Congo, scarifications aremade on the back for therapeutic reasons, and on the face as tribalmarks. (Mallery, 417; H. Ward, 136.) Bechuana priests make long scarson a warrior's thigh to indicate that he has slain an enemy in battle.(Lichtenstein, II., 331.) According to d'Albertis the people of NewGuinea use some scars as a sign that they have travelled (I., 213).And so on, _ad infinitum_.

  ALLEGED TESTIMONY OF NATIVES

  In face of this imposing array of facts revealing the non-estheticcharacter of primitive personal "decorations," what have the advocatesof the sexual selection theory to say? Taking Westermarck as theirmost erudite and persuasive spokesman, we find him placing hisreliance on four things: (1) the practical ignoring of the vastmultitude of facts contradicting his theory; (2) the alleged testimonyof a few savages; (3) the testimony of some of their visitors; (4) thealleged fact that "the desire for self-decoration is strongest at thebeginning of the age of puberty," the customs of ornamenting,mutilating, painting, and tattooing being "practised most zealously atthat period of life." Concerning (1) nothing more need be said, as thelarge number of decisive facts I have collected exposes andneutralizes that stratagem. The other three arguments must be brieflyconsidered.

  A native of Lukunor being asked by Mertens what was the meaning oftattooing, answered: "It has the same object as your clothes; that is,to please the women," In reply to the question why he wore hisornaments, an Australian answered Bulmer: "In order to look well andmake himself agreeable to the women," (Brough Smyth, I., 275.) To onewho has studied savages not only anthropologically butpsychologically, these stories have an obvious cock-and-bull aspect. Anative of the Caroline Islands would have been as incapable oforiginating that philosophical comparison between the object of ourclothes and of his tattooing as he would have been of writingCarlyle's _Sartor Resartus_. Human beings in his stage of evolutionnever consciously reflect on the reasons of things, and considerationsof comparative psychology or esthetics are as much beyond his mentalpowers as problems in algebra or trigonometry. That such a sailor'syarn could be accepted seriously in an anthropologic treatise showsthat anthropology is still in its cradle. The same is true of thatAustralian's alleged answer. The Australian is unequal to the mentaleffort of counting up to ten, and, like other savages, is easilyfatigued by the simplest questions[99]. It is quite likely that Bulmerasked that native whether he ornamented himself "in order to look welland make himself agreeable to the women," and that the native answered"yes" merely to gratify him or to get rid of the troublesome question.

  The books of missionaries are full of such cases, and no end ofconfusion has been created in science by such false "facts." Theanswer given by that native is, moreover, utterly opposed to all thewell-attested details I have given in the preceding pages regardingthe real motives of Australians in "decorating" themselves; and tothose 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 TESTIMONY OF VISITORS

  "The Australians throughout the continent scar their persons, as Mr.Curr assures us, only as a means of decoration," writes Westermarck(169), and in the pages preceding and following he cites otherevidence of the same sort, such as Carver's assertion that theNaudowessies paint their faces red and black, "which they esteem asgreatly ornamental;" Tuckey's assumption that the natives of the Congofile their teeth and raise scars on the skin for purposes of ornamentand principally "with the idea of rendering themselves agreeable tothe women;" Kiedel's assertion, that in the Tenimber group the ladsdecorate their locks with leaves, flowers, and feathers, "only inorder to please the women;" Taylor's statement that in New Zealand itwas the great ambition of the young to have fine tattooed faces, "bothto render themselves attractive to the ladies, and conspicuous inwar," etc.

  Beginning with Curr, it must be conceded that he is one of the leadingauthorities on Australia, the author of a four-volume treatise on thatcountry and its natives. Yet his testimony on the point in questionhappens to be as worthless as that of the most hasty globe-trotter,partly because he had evidently paid little attention to it, andpartly also, I fancy, because of the fatal tendency of men of scienceto blunder as soon as they touch the domain of esthetics. What hereally wrote (II., 275) is that Chatfield had informed him that scarswere made by the natives on the right thigh "for the purpose ofdenoting the particular class to which they belong." This Curr doubts,"without further evidence," because it would conflict with the customprevalent throughout the continent, "as far as known, which is to makethese marks for ornament only." Now this is a pure assumption ofCurr's, based on a preconceived notion, and contradicted by thespecific evidence of a number of explorers who, as even Grosse isobliged to admit (75), "unanimously account for a part at least of thescars as tribal marks."[100]

  If so eminent an authority as Curr can err so grievously, it isobvious that the testim
ony of other writers and casual observers mustbe accepted with extreme caution. Europeans and Americans are soaccustomed to regard personal decorations as attempts to beautify theappearance that when they see them in savages there is a naturaldisposition to attribute them to the same motive. They do not realizethat they are dealing with a most subtle psychological question. Thechief source of confusion lies in their failure to distinguish betweenwhat is admired as a thing of beauty as such and what pleases them forother reasons. As Professor Sully has pointed out in his _Handbook ofPsychology_ (337):

  "At the beginning of life there is no clear separation of what is beautiful from what is simply pleasing to the individual. As in the history of the race, so in that of the 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 isbeautiful and what is merely pleasing because of its being useful andagreeable, we see at once that the words "decorative," "ornamental,""attractive," "handsome," etc., are constantly used by writers on thissubject in a misleading and question-begging way. We can hardly blamea man like Barrington for writing (11) that among the natives ofBotany Bay "scars are, by both sexes, deemed highly ornamental"; but ascientific author who quotes such a sentence ought to be aware thatthe evidence did not justify Barrington in using any word but_pleasing_ in place of "ornamental," because the latter implies andtakes for granted the esthetic sense, the existence of which is thevery thing to be proved. This remark applies generally to the evidenceof this kind which Westermarck has so industriously collected, andwhich, on account of this undiscriminating, question-beggingcharacter, is entirely worthless. In all these cases the fact isoverlooked that the "decorations" of one sex may be agreeable to theother for reasons that have nothing to do with the sense of beauty.

  Briefly summed up, Westermarck's theory is that in painting,tattooing, and otherwise decorating his person, primitive man'soriginal and conscious object was to beautify himself for the sake ofgaining an advantage in courtship; whereas my theory is that all thesedecorations originally subserved useful purposes alone, and that evenwhere they subsequently may have served in some instances as means toplease the women, this was not as things of beauty but indirectly andunintentionally through their association with rank, wealth,distinction in war, prowess, and manly qualities in general. WhenDobrizhoffer says (II., 12) that the Abipones, "more ambitious tobe dreaded by their enemies than to be loved, to terrify than attractbeholders, think the more they are scarred and sunburnt, the_handsomer_ they are," he illustrates glaringly the slovenly andquestion-begging use of terms to which I have just referred; for, ashis own reference to being loved and to attracting beholders shows, hedoes not use the word "handsome" in an esthetic sense, but as asynonyme for what is pleasing or worthy of approval on other grounds.If the scars of these Indians do please the women it is not becausethey are considered beautiful, but because they are tokens of martialprowess. To a savage woman nothing is so useful as manly valor, andtherefore nothing so agreeable as the signs of it. In that respect theaverage woman's nature has not changed. The German high-school girladmires the scars in the face of a "corps-student," not, certainly,because she considers them beautiful, but because they stand for adaredevil, masculine spirit which pleases her.

  When the Rev. R. Taylor wrote (321) that among the New Zealanders "tohave fine tattooed faces was the great ambition of the young, both torender themselves attractive to the ladies and conspicuous in war," hewould have shown himself a better philosopher if he had written thatby making themselves conspicuous in war with their tattooing they alsomake themselves attractive to the "ladies." That the sense of beautyis not concerned here becomes obvious when we include Robley'stestimony (28, 15) that a Maori chief's great object was to excitefear among enemies, for which purpose in the older days he "renderedhis 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 outthat if we accept the sexual selection theory this expert testimonylands us in insuperable difficulty; for it is clearly impossible thaton the same island, and in the same race, the painting and tattooingof the face should have the effect of terrifying the men and ofappearing beautiful to the women. But if we discard the beautytheory and follow my suggestion, we have no difficulty whatever. Thenwe may grant that the facial daubs or skin mutilations may seemterrible or hideous to an enemy and yet please the women, because thewomen do not regard them as things of beauty, but as distinguishingmarks of valiant warriors.

  By way of illustrating his maxim that "in every country, in everyrace, beauty stimulates passion," Westermarck cites (257) part of asentence by Lumholtz (213) to the effect that Australian women takemuch notice of a man's face, particularly of the part about the eyes.He does not cite the rest of the sentence--"and they like to see afrank and open, _or perhaps, more correctly, a wild expression ofcountenance,_" which makes it clear to the reader that what stimulatesthe passion of these women is not the lines of beauty in the[never-washed] faces of these men, but the unbeautiful aspect peculiarto a wild hunter, ferocious warrior, and intrepid defender of hishome. Their admiration, in other words, is not esthetic, butinstinctively utilitarian.

  "DECORATION" AT THE AGE OF PUBERTY

  We come now to the principal argument of Westermarck--the alleged factthat in all parts of the world the desire for self-decoration isstrongest at the beginning of the age of puberty, the customs ofornamenting, painting, mutilating, and tattooing the person beingpractised most zealously at that period. This argument is as futile asthe others, for several reasons. In the first place, it is not truethat in all parts of the world self-decoration is practised mostzealously at that period. More frequently, perhaps, it is begun someyears earlier, before any idea of courtship can have entered the headsof these children. The Congo cannibals begin the process of scarringthe face at the age of four.[101] Dyak girls are tattooed atfive.[102] The Botocudos begin the mutilating of children's lips atthe age of seven.[103] Eskimo girls are tattooed in their eighthyear,[104] and on the Andaman Islands few children are allowed to passtheir eighth year without scarification.[105] The Damaras chip theteeth with a flint "when the children are young."[106] The femaleOraons are "all tattooed in childhood."[107] The Tahitians begantattooing at eight.[108] The Chukchis of Siberia tattoo girls atnine;[109] and so on in various parts of the world. In the secondplace, of the divers personal "decorations" indulged in by the lowerraces it is only those that are intended to be of a permanentcharacter (tattooing, scarring, mutilating) that are made chiefly,though by no means exclusively[110] about or before the age ofpuberty.

  All the other methods of "decorating" described in the preceding pagesas being connected with the rites of war, superstition, mourning,etc., are practised throughout life; and that they constitute by farthe greater proportion of "ornamentations" is evidenced by thecitation I have already made, from Brough Smyth, that theornamentation of their persons was considered important by Australiansonly in connection with such ceremonies, and that "in ordinary lifelittle attention was given to the ornamenting of the person"; to whichmuch similar testimony might be added regarding other races; such asKane's (184), regarding the Chinooks: "Painting the face is not muchpractised among them, except on extraordinary occasions, such as thedeath of a relative, some solemn feast, or going on a war-party;" orMorgan's (263), that the feather and war dances were "the chiefoccasions" when the Iroquois warrior "was desirous to appear in hisbest attire," etc.

  Again, even if it were true that "the desire for self-decoration isstrongest at the beginning of the age of puberty," it does not by anymeans follow that this mu
st be due to the desire to make one's selfattractive to the opposite sex. Whatever their desire may be, thechildren have no choice in the matter. As Curr remarks regardingAustralians (11., 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 beinitiated. What Turner writes regarding the Samoans has a generalapplication:

  "Until a young man was tattooed, he was considered in his minority. He could not think of marriage, and he was constantly 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."[111]

  No one can read the accounts of the initiatory ceremonies ofAustralian and Indian boys (convenient summaries of which may be foundin the sixth volume of Waitz-Gerland and in Southey's _Brazil_ III.,387-88) without becoming convinced that with them, as with theSamoans, etc., there was no thought of women or courtship. Indeed thevery idea of such a thing involves an absurdity, for, since all theboys in each tribe were tattooed alike, what advantage could theirmarks have secured them? If all men were equally rich, would any womanever marry for money? Westermarck accepts (174) seriously theassertion of one writer that the reason why Australians knock out someof the teeth of the boys at puberty is because they know "thatotherwise they would run the risk of being refused on account ofugliness." Now, apart from the childish supposition that Australianwomen could allow their amorous inclinations to depend on the presenceor absence of two front teeth, this assertion involves the assumptionthat these females can exercise the liberty of choice in the selectionof a mate--an assumption which is contrary to the truth, since all theauthorities on Australia agree on at least one point, which is thatwomen have absolutely no choice in the selection of a husband, buthave to submit in all cases to the dispositions made by their malerelatives. These Australian women, moreover, perversely act in amanner utterly inconsistent with the theory of sexual selection. Sincethey do not choose, but are chosen, one would naturally expect, inaccordance with that theory, that they would decorate themselves inorder to "stimulate the passion" of the _desirable_ men; but they dono such thing.

  While the men are apt to dress their hair carefully, the women "lettheir black locks grow as irregular and tangled as do the Fuegians"(Grosse, 87); and Buhner says they "did little to improve theirappearance;" while such ornaments as they had "were not much regardedby the men." (Brough Smyth, I, 275.)[112]

  "DECORATION" AS A TEST OF COURAGE

  One of the most important reasons why young savages approachingpuberty are eager to receive their "decorations" remains to beconsidered. Tattooing, scarring, and mutilating are usually verypainful processes. Now, as all who are familiar with the life ofsavages know, there is nothing they admire so much as courage inenduring torture of any kind. By showing fortitude in bearing the painconnected with tattooing, etc., these young folks are thus able to winadmiration, gratify their vanity, and show that they are worthy to bereceived in the ranks of adults. The Sea Dyaks are proud of theirscars, writes Brooke Low.

  "The women often 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."

  (Roth, II., 80.) Here we have an illustration which explains in themost simple way why scars _please_ both the men and the women, withoutmaking necessary the grotesque assumption that either sex admires themas things of beauty. To take another case, equally eloquent: Bossusays of the Osage Indians that they suffer the pain of tattooing withpleasure in order to pass for men of courage. If one of them shouldhave himself marked without having previously distinguished himself inbattle, he would be degraded and looked upon as a coward, unworthy ofsuch an honor. (Mallery, 1889-90, 394.)

  Grosse is inclined to think (78) that it is in the male only thatcourage is expected and admired, but he is mistaken, as we may see,_e.g._, in the account given by Dobrizhoffer (II., 21) of thetattooing customs of the Abipones, whom he studied so carefully. Thewomen, 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 theoperation the girl has her eyes, cheeks, and lips so horribly swelledthat she "looks like a Stygian fury." If she groans while undergoingthe torture, or shows signs of pain in her face, the old woman whooperates 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 hiswife?" Such courage, Dobrizhoffer explains further, is admired in agirl because it makes her "prepared to bear the pains of parturitionin time." In some cases vanity supplies an additional motive why thegirls should submit to the painful operation with fortitude; for thoseof them who "are most pricked and painted you may know to be of highrank."

  Here again we see clearly that the tattooing is admired for other thanesthetic reasons, and we realize how foolish it is to philosophizeabout the peculiar "taste" of these Indians in admiring a girl wholooks like "a Turkish carpet" or "a Stygian fury." If they had eventhe rudiments of a sense of beauty they would not indulge in suchdisgusting disfigurements.

  MUTILATION, FASHION, AND EMULATION

  Grosse declares (80) that "we know definitely at least, that tattooingis regarded by the Eskimo as an embellishment." He bases thisinference on Cranz's assertion that Eskimo mothers tattoo theirdaughters in early youth "for fear that otherwise they would not get ahusband." Had Grosse allowed his imagination to paint a particularinstance, he would have seen how grotesque his inference is. Afavorite way among the Eskimo of securing a bride is, we are told, todrag her from her tent by the hair. This young woman, moreover, hasnever washed her face, nor does any man object to her filth. Yet weare asked to believe that an Eskimo could be so enamoured of the_beauty_ of a few simple lines tattooed on a girl's dirty face that hewould refuse to marry her unless she had them! Like other champions ofthe sexual selection theory, Grosse searches in the clouds for acomically impossible motive when the real reason lies right before hiseyes. That reason is fashion. The tattoo marks are tribal signs(Bancroft, I., 48) which _every_ girl _must_ submit to have inobedience to inexorable custom, unless she is prepared to be an objectof scorn and ridicule all her life.

  The tyranny of fashion in prescribing disfigurements and mutilationsis not confined to savages. The most amazing illustration of it is tobe found in China, where the girls of the upper classes are obliged tothis day to submit to the most agonizing process of crippling theirfeet, which finally, as Professor Flower remarks in his book on_Fashion and Deformity_, assume "the appearance of the hoof of someanimal rather than a human foot." There is a popular delusion that theChinese approve of such deformed small feet because they consider thembeautiful--a delusion which Westermarck shares (200). Since theChinese consider small feet "the chief charm of women," it might besupposed, he says, that the women would at least have the pleasure offascinating men by a "beauty" to acquire which they have to undergosuch 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 apparent anomaly Westermarck assumes that the objectof the concealment "is to excite through
the unknown!" To suchfantastic nonsense does the doctrine of sexual selection lead. Inreality there is no reason for supposing that the Chinese considercrippled feet--looking like "the hoof of an animal"--beautiful anymore than mutilations of other parts of the body. In all probabilitythe origin of the custom of crippling women's feet must be traced tothe jealousy of the men, who devised this procedure as an effectiveway of preventing their wives from leaving their homes and indulgingin amorous intrigues; other practices with the same purpose beingcommon in Oriental countries. In course of time the foot-bindingbecame an inexorable fashion which the foolishly conservative womenwere more eager to continue than the men. All accounts agree that theanti-foot-binding movement finds its most violent and stubbornopponents 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 wholequestion 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'sdesire to arouse the esthetic admiration and amorous passion of the_men_ by a hoof of beauty, but the fear of ridicule and persecution bythe other women, slaves of fashion all. These same motives are thesource of most of the ugly fashions prevalent even in civilized Europeand America. Theophile Gautier believed that most women had no senseof beauty, but only a sense of fashion; and if explorers andmissionaries had borne in mind the fundamental difference betweenfashion and esthetics, anthropological literature would be the poorerby hundreds of "false facts" and ludicrous inferences.[113]

  The ravages of fashion are aggravated by emulation, which has itssources in vanity and envy. This accounts for the extremes to whichmutilations and fashions often go among both, civilized anduncivilized races, and of which a startling instance will be describedin detail in the next paragraph. Few of our rich women wear theirjewels because of their intrinsic beauty. They wear them for the samereason that Polynesian or African belles wear all the beads they canget. In Mariner's book on the Tongans (Chap. XV.) there is an amusingstory of a chiefs daughter who was very anxious to go to Europe. Beingasked why, she replied that her great desire was to amass a largequantity of beads and then return to Tonga, "because in England beadsare so common that no one would admire me for wearing them, and _Ishould not have the pleasure of being envied."_ Bancroft (I., 128)says of the Kutchin Indians: "_Beads are their wealth,_ used in theplace of money, and the rich among them literally load themselves withnecklaces and strings of various patterns." Referring to the tinornaments worn by Dyaks, Carl Bock says he has "counted as many assixteen rings in a single ear, each of them the size of a dollar";while of the Ghonds Forsyth tells us (148) that they "deck themselveswith an inordinate amount of what they consider ornaments. _Quantityrather than quality is aimed at."_

  PERSONAL BEAUTY VERSUS PERSONAL DECORATION

  Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced sofar in this long chapter, assume that savages and barbarians have noesthetic sense at all, not even a germ of it? Not necessarily. Ibelieve that the germ of a sense of visible beauty _may_ exist evenamong savages as well as the germ of a musical sense; but that it islittle more than a childish pleasure in bright and lustrous shells andother objects of various colors, especially red and yellow, everythingbeyond 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 agerm of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants _years before theyhave the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty;_ andthis brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it,I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for thesake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the leastyielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admirationof personal beauty is not one of the motives which induce a savage tomarry a particular girl or man; for most of the "decorations"described in the preceding pages are not elements of _personal_ beautyat all, but are either external appendages to that beauty, ormutilations of it. I have shown by a superabundance of facts thatthese "decorations" do not serve the purpose of exciting the amorouspassion and preference of the opposite sex, except non-estheticallyand indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as marks ofrank, wealth, distinction in war, etc. I shall now proceed to show,much more briefly, that still less does personal beauty proper serveamong the lower races as a stimulant of sexual passion. This we shouldexpect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure inbright baubles must long precede the pleasure in beautiful faces orfigures. Every one who has been among Indians or other savages knowsthat nature produces among them fine figures and sometimes even prettyfaces; but these are not appreciated. Galton told Darwin that he sawin one South African tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls, butthey were not attractive to the natives. Zoeller saw at least onebeautiful negress; Wallace describes the superb figures of some of theBrazilian Indians and the Aru Islanders in the Malay Archipelago(354); and Barrow says that some of the Hottentot girls have beautifulfigures when young--every joint and limb well turned. But as we shallsee presently, the criterion of personal charm among Hottentots, asamong savages in general, is fat, not what we call beauty. Ugliness,whether natural or inflicted by fashion, does not among these racesact as a bar to marriage. "Beauty is of no estimation in either sex,"we read regarding the Creeks in Schoolcraft (V., 272): "It isstrength or agility that recommends the young man to his mistress; andto be a skilful or swift hunter is the highest merit with the woman hemay choose for a wife." Belden found that the squaws were valued "onlyfor their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever istaken of their personal beauty," etc., etc. Nor can the fact thatsavages kill deformed children be taken as an indication of a regardfor personal beauty. Such children are put out of the way for thesimple reason that they may not become a burden to the family or thetribe.

  Advocates of the sexual selection theory make much ado over the factthat in all countries the natives prefer their own peculiar color andfeatures--black, red, or yellow, flat noses, high cheek bones, thicklips, etc.--and dislike what we consider beautiful. But the likes ofthese races regarding personal appearance have no more to do with asense of beauty than their dislikes. It is merely a question of habit.They like their own faces because they are used to them, and dislikeours because they are strange. In their aversion to our faces they areactuated by the same motive that makes a European child cry out andrun away in terror at sight of a negro--not because he is ugly, for hemay be good-looking, but because he is strange.

  Far from admiring such beauty as nature may have given them, the lowerraces exercise an almost diabolical ingenuity in obliterating ormutilating it. Hundreds of their visitors have written of certaintribes that they would not be bad looking if they would only leavenature alone. Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeballs, hasescaped the uglifying process. "Nothing is too absurd or hideous toplease them," writes Cameron. The Eskimos afford a strikingillustration of the fact that a germ of taste for ornamentation ingeneral is an earlier manifestation of the esthetic faculty than theappreciation of personal beauty; for while displaying considerableskill and ingenuity in the decorations of their clothes, canoes, andweapons, they mutilate their persons in various ways and allow them tobe foul and malodo
rous with the filth of years. One of the mostdisgusting mutilations on record is that practised by the Indians ofBritish 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 theThlinkeet females. When the operation is completed and the block iswithdrawn "the lip drops down upon the chin like a piece of leather,displaying the teeth, and presenting 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 partof the face"; a third that an old woman, the wife of a chief, had alip "ornament" so large "that by a peculiar motion of her under-lipshe could almost conceal her whole face with it"; and a fourth gives adescription of this "abominably revolting spectacle," which is toonauseating to quote.

  DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM (?)

  "Abominably revolting," "hideous," "filthy," "disgusting,""atrocious"--such are usually the words of observers in describingthese shocking mutilations. Nevertheless they always apply the word"ornamentation" to them, with the implication that the savages lookupon them as beautiful, although all that the observers had a right tosay was that they pleased the savages and were approved by fashion.What is worse, the philosophers fell into the pitfall thus dug forthem. Darwin thinks that the mutilations indulged in by savages show"how different is the standard of _taste_"; Humboldt (III., 236)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 standardof beauty and that savages have "just as much right" to their ideas onthe subject as we have to admire a madonna of Raphael. This view,indeed, is generally held; it is expressed in the old saw, _Degustibus non est disputandum_. Now it is true that it is _unwise_ todispute about tastes _conversationally_; but scientifically speaking,that old saw has not a sound tooth in it.

  If a peasant who has never had an opportunity to cultivate his musicalsense insisted that a certain piano was exquisitely in tune and had asbeautiful a tone as any other piano, whereas an expert musiciandeclared that it had a shrill tone and was terribly out of tune, wouldanybody be so foolish as to say that the peasant had as much right tohis opinion as the musician? Or if an Irish toper declared that abottle of Chambertin, over which French epicures smacked their lips,was insipid and not half as fine as the fusel-oil on which he dailygot drunk, would not everybody agree that the Irishman was no judge ofliquors, and that the reason why he preferred his cheap whiskey to theBurgundy was that his nerves of taste were too coarse to detect thesubtle and exquisite bouquet of the French wine? In both theseexamples we are concerned only with simple questions of senseperception; yet in the matter of personal beauty, which involves notonly the senses, but the imagination, the intellect, and the subtlestfeelings, we are asked to believe that any savage who has never seen awoman but those of his own race has as much right to his opinion as aRuskin or a Titian, who have given their whole life to the study ofbeauty!

  If an astronomer--to take another illustration--were told that _deastronomia non est disputandum_, and that the Namaquas, who believethat the moon is made of bacon, or the Brazilian tribes who think thatan eclipse consists in an attempt on the part of a monstrous jaguar toswallow the sun--have as much right to their opinion as he has, hewould consider the person who advanced such an argument either a wagor a fool. Only a wag or a fool, again, would argue that a Fijian hasjust as much right as we have to his opinions on medical matters, oron the morality of polygamy, infanticide, and cannibalism. Yet when wecome across a dirty, malodorous savage, so stupid that he cannot countten, who mutilates every part of his body till he has lost nearly allsemblance to a human being, we are soberly asked to look upon this asmerely a "difference in the standard of esthetic taste," and to admitthat the savage has "as much right to his taste," as we have. The moreI think of it, the more I am amazed at this unjust and idioticdiscrimination against the esthetic faculty--a discrimination forwhich I can find no other explanation than the fact already referredto, that most men of science know so much less about matters of beautythan about everything else in the world. They labor under the delusionthat the sense of beauty is one of the earliest products of mentalevolution, whereas their own attitude in the matter affords painfulproof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day thata steatopygous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because anAfrican finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlotis beautiful because she pleases a drunken libertine.

  What makes the traditional attitude of scientific men in this matterthe less pardonable is that--as we have seen--there is always asimple, practical explanation for the predilections of these savages,so that there is no necessity whatever for assuming the existence ofso paradoxical and impossible a thing as an esthetic admiration ofthese hideous deformities. Thus, in regard to the nauseating lip"ornaments" of the Thlinkeets just referred to, the testimonycollected by Bancroft indicates unmistakably that they are approvedof, perpetuated, and aggravated for two reasons--bothnon-esthetic--namely, as indications of rank, and from the necessityof conforming to fashion. Ladies of distinction, we read, increase thesize of their lip plug. Langsdorff even saw women "of very high rank"with this "ornament" full five inches long and three broad; Dixon saysthe mutilation is always in proportion to the person's wealth; andMayne relates, in his book on the British Columbia Indians, that "awoman's rank among women is settled according to the size of herwooden lip."

  INDIFFERENCE TO DIRT

  That savages can have no sense of personal beauty is further proved bytheir habitual indifference to personal cleanliness, the mostelementary and imperative of esthetic requirements. When we read inMcLean (II., 153) that some Eskimo girls "might pass as pretty ifdivested of their filth;" or in Cranz (I., 134) that "it is almostsickening to view their hands and faces smeared with grease ... andtheir filthy clothes swarming with vermin;" and when we further readin Kotzebue (II., 56) regarding the Kalush that his "filthycountrywomen with their lip-trough ... often awaken in him the mostvehement passion," we realize vividly that that passion is a coarseappetite which exists quite apart from, and independently of, anythingthat might be considered beautiful or ugly.

  The subject is not a pleasant one; but as it is one of my strongestarguments, I must be pardoned for giving some more unsavory details.Among some of the British Columbia Indians "pretty women may be seen;nearly all have good eyes and hair, but the state of filth in whichthey live generally neutralizes any natural charms they may possess."(Mayne, 277.) Lewis and Clarke write (439) regarding the ChinookIndians:

  "Their broad, flat foreheads, their falling breasts, their ill-shaped limbs, the awkwardness of their positions, and _the 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): "Thedirt on their faces was fairly stratified, and seemed so ancient andso 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 theApaches, "the sight of a man washing his face and hands almostconvulsed them with laughter." He adds that their personal appearanceexplained their surprise. Burton (80) found among the Sioux a disliketo cleanliness "which nothing but the fear of the rod will subdue.""In an Indian village," writes Neill (79), "all is filth andlitter.... Water, except in very warm weather, seldom touches theirbodies."

  The Comanches are "disgustingly filthy in their persons."(Schoolcraft, I., 235.) The South American Waraus "are exceedinglydirty and disgusting in their habits, and their children are so muchneglected that their fingers and toes are frequently destroyed byvermin." (Bernau, 35.) The Patagonians "are excessively filthy intheir personal habits." (Bourne, 56.) The Mundrukus "are very dirty"(Markham, 172), etc.

  Of the Dama
ra negroes, Anderson says (_N._, 50): "Dirt oftenaccumulates to such a degree on their persons as to make the color oftheir skins totally undistinguishable;" and Galton (92) "could find nopleasure in associating or trying to chat with these Damaras, theywere so filthy and disgusting in every way." Thunberg writes of theHottentots (73) that they "find a peculiar pleasure in filth andstench;" wherein they resemble Africans in general. Griffith declaresthat the hill tribes of India are "the dirtier the farther weadvance;" elsewhere[114] 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 "uncleanlinessis elevated into a virtue hallowed by tradition." The Kalmucks aredescribed as filthy, the Kamtschadales as exceedingly so, etc.

  REASONS FOR BATHING.

  Among the inhabitants of the islands of the Pacific we meet withapparent exceptions. These natives are practically amphibious,spending half their time in the ocean, and are therefore of necessityclean. So are certain coast negroes and Indian tribes living alongriver-banks. But Ellis _(Pol. Res._, I., 110) was shrewd enough to seethat the habit of frequent bathing indulged in by the South SeaIslanders was a luxury--a result of the hot climate--and not anindication of the virtue of cleanliness. In this respect Captain Cookshowed less acumen, for he remarks (II., 148) that "nothing appears togive them greater pleasure than personal cleanliness, to produce whichthey frequently bathe in ponds." His confusion of ideas is madeapparent in the very next sentence, where he adds that the water inmost of these ponds "stinks intolerably." That it is merely the desirefor comfort and sport that induces the Polynesians to bathe so much isproved further by the attitude of the New Zealanders. Hawksworthdeclares (III., 451) that they "stink like Hottentots;" and the reasonlies in the colder climate which makes bathing less of a luxury tothem. The Micronesians also spend much of their time in the water, forcomfort, not for cleanliness. Gerland cites grewsome details of theirnastiness. (Waitz, V., Pt. II., 81, 188.) The Kaffirs, says Gardiner(101), "although far from cleanly," are fond of bathing. In some othercases the water is sought for its warmth instead of its coolness. InBrazil the morning air is much colder than the water, wherefore thenatives take to the river for comfort, as the Japanese do in winter totheir hot tubs. All Indians, says Bancroft (I., 83), "attach greatimportance to their sweatbaths," not for cleanliness--for they are"extremely filthy in their persons and habits"--but "as a remedialmeasure."

  Unless they happen to indulge in bathing for comfort, the lowest ofsavages are also the dirtiest. Leigh writes (147) that in SouthAustralia many of the women, including the wives of chiefs, had "soreeyes from the smoke, the filth, and their abominable want ofcleanliness." Sturt (II., 53) refers to the Australian women as"disgusting objects." At funerals, "the women besmear themselves withthe most disgusting filth." The naked boys in Taplin's school "had nonotion of cleanliness." The youths from the age of ten to sixteen orseventeen were compelled by custom to let their hair grow, the resultbeing "a revolting mass of tangled locks and filth." (Woods, 20, 85.)Sturt sums up his impressions by declaring (II., 126): "Really, theloathsome condition and hideous countenances of the women would, Ishould imagine, have been a complete antidote to the sexual passion."

  CORPULENCE VERSUS BEAUTY

  An instructive instance of the loose reasoning which prevails in theesthetic sphere is provided by the Rev. H.N. Hutchinson, in his_Marriage Customs in Many Lands_. After describing some of the customsof the Australians, he goes on to say:

  "One would think that such degraded creatures as these men are would be quite incapable of appreciating female beauty, but that is not the case. Good-looking girls are much admired and consequently frequently stolen away."

  As a matter of fact, beauty has nothing to do with the stealing of thewomen. The real motive is revealed in the following passage fromBrough Smyth (79):

  "_A very fat woman_ presents such an attractive appearance to the eyes of the blacks that she is always liable to be stolen. _However old and ugly she way 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 provokeththieves sooner than gold," instead of "beauty provoketh thieves." Andthe amended maxim applies to savages in general, as well as tobarbarians and Orientals. In his _Savage Life in Polynesia_, the Rev.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 fattened and imprisoned till nightfall when a little gentle exercise was permitted. If refractory, the guardian would whip the culprit for not eating more."[115]

  American Indians do not differ in this respect from Australians andPolynesians. The horrible obesity of the squaws on the Pacific Coastused to inspire me with disgust, as a boy, and I could not understandhow anyone could marry such fat abominations. Concerning the SouthAmerican tribes, Humboldt says (_Trav.,_ I., 301): "In severallanguages of these countries, to express the beauty of a woman, theysay that she is fat, and has a narrow forehead."

  FATTENING GIRLS FOR THE MARRIAGE MARKET

  The population of Africa comprises hundreds of different peoples andtribes, the vast majority of whom make bulk and weight the chiefcriterion of a woman's charms. The hideous deformity known assteatopyga, or hypertrophy of the buttocks, occurs among South AfricanBushman, Koranna, and Hottentot women. Darwin says that Sir AndrewSmith

  "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 herself 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.'"[116]

  The notions of the Yoruba negroes regarding female perfection consist,according to Lander, in "the bulk, plumpness, and rotundity of theobject."

  Among the Karague, women were exempted from hard labor because the menwere anxious to have them as fat as possible. To please the men, theyate enormous quantities of bananas and drank milk by the gallon. Threeof Rumanika's wives were so fat that they could not go through anordinary door, and when they walked they needed two men each tosupport them.

  Speke measured one of the much-admired African wonders of obesity, whowas unable to stand except on all fours. Result: around the arms, 1foot 11 inches; chest, 4 feet 4 inches; thigh, 2 feet 7 inches; calf,1 foot 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 fattening 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."

  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 orderthat she might fatten upon milk after her native fashion.

  ORIENTAL IDEALS

  Mungo Park declared that the Moorish women

  "seem to be br
ought up for no other purpose than that of ministering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious masters. Voluptuousness is therefore considered as their chief accomplishment.... The Moors have singular ideas of feminine perfection. The gracefulness of figure and motion, and a countenance enlivened by expression, are by no means essential points in their standard: With them _corpulence and beauty seem to be 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 morebeautiful." Nubian girls are especially fattened for their marriage byrubbing grease over them and stuffing them with polenta and goat milk.When the process is completed they are poetically likened to ahippopotamus. In Egypt and India, where the climate naturally tends tomake women thin, the fat ones are, as in Australia, the ideals ofbeauty, as their poets would make plain to us if it were not knownotherwise. A Sanscrit poet declares proudly that his beloved is soborne down by the weight of her thighs and breasts that she cannotwalk fast; and in the songs of Hala there are numerous "sentiments"like that. The Arabian poet Amru declares rapturously that hisfavorite beauty has thighs so delightfully exuberant that she canscarcely enter the tent door. Another Arabian poet apostrophizes "themaid of Okaib, who has haunches like sand-hills, whence her body riseslike a palm-tree." And regarding the references to personal appearancein the writings of the ancient Hebrews, Rossbach remarks:

  "In all these descriptions human beauty is recognized in the luxurious fulness of parts, not in their harmony and proportion. Spiritual expression in the sensual form is not adverted to" (238).

  Thus, from the Australian and the Indian to the Hebrew, the Arab, andthe Hindoo, what pleases the men in women is not their beauty, buttheir voluptuous rotundity; they care only for those sensual aspectswhich emphasize the difference between the sexes. The object of themodern wasp waist (in the minds of the class of females who, strangeto 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 samereason that barbarian and Oriental girls are fattened for the marriagemarket. The appeal is to the appetite, not to the esthetic sense.

  THE CONCUPISCENCE THEORY OF BEAUTY

  In writing this I do not ignore the fact that many authors have heldthat personal beauty and sensuality are practically identical orindissolubly associated. The sober philosopher, Bain, gravely advancesthe opinion that, on the whole, personal beauty turns, 1, uponqualities and appearances that heighten the expression of favor orgood-will; and, 2, upon qualities and appearances that suggest theendearing embrace. Eckstein expresses the same idea more coarsely bysaying that "finding a thing beautiful is simply another way ofexpressing the manifestation of the sexual appetite." But it remainedfor Mantegazza to give this view the most cynical expression:

  "We look at woman through the prism of desire, and she looks at us in the same way; her beauty appears to us the more perfect the more it arouses our sexual desires--that is, the more voluptuous enjoyment the possession of her promises us."

  He adds that for this reason a man of twenty finds nearly all womenbeautiful.

  Thus the beauty of a woman, in the opinion of these writers, consistsin those physical qualities which arouse a man's concupiscence. Iadmit that this theory applies to savages and to Orientals; thedetails given in the preceding pages prove that. It applies also, Imust confess, to the majority of Europeans and Americans. I have paidspecial attention to this point in various countries and have noticedthat a girl with a voluptuous though coarse figure and a plain facewill attract much more masculine attention than a girl whose figureand face are artistically beautiful without being voluptuous. But thisonly helps to prove my main thesis--that the sense of personal beautyis one of the latest products of civilization, rare even at thepresent day. What I deny most emphatically is that the theoryadvocated by Bain, Eckstein, and Mantegazza applies to those personswho are so lucky as to have a sense of beauty. These fortunateindividuals can admire the charms of a living beauty without any moreconcupiscence or thought of an endearing embrace than accompaniestheir contemplation of the Venus de Milo or a Madonna painted byMurillo; and if they are in love with a particular girl theiradmiration of her beauty is superlatively free from carnalingredients, as we saw in the section on Mental Purity. Since in sucha question personal evidence is of importance, I will add that,fortunately, I have been deeply in love several times in my life andcan therefore testify that each time my admiration of the girl'sbeauty was as purely esthetic as if she had been a flower. In eachcase the mischief was begun by a pair of brown eyes.

  Eyes, it is true, can be as wanton and as voluptuous as a plumpfigure. Powers notes (20) that some California Indian girls are prettyand have "large, voluptuous eyes." Such eyes are common among thelower races and Orientals; but they are not the eyes which inspireromantic love. Lips, too, it might be said, invite kisses; but a loverwould consider it sacrilege to touch his idol's lips unchastely.Savages are strangers to kissing for the exactly opposite reason--thatit is too refined a detail of sensuality to appeal to their coarsenerves. How far they are from being able to appreciate lipsesthetically appears from the way in which they so often deform them.The mouth is peculiarly the index of mental and moral refinement, anda refined pair of lips can inspire as pure a love as the celestialbeauty of innocent eyes. As for the other features, what is there tosuggest lascivious thoughts in a clear complexion, an oval chin, ivoryteeth, rosy cheeks, or in curved eyebrows, long, dark lashes, orflowing tresses? Our admiration of these, and of a graceful gait, isas pure and esthetic--as purely esthetic--as our admiration of asunset, a flower, a humming-bird, a lovely child. It has been trulysaid that a girl's marriage chances have been made or marred by thesize or shape of her nose. What has the size or shape of a girl's noseto do with the "endearing embrace?" This question alone reduces theconcupiscence theory _ad absurdum_.

  UTILITY IS NOT BEAUTY

  Almost as repulsive as the view which identifies the sense of personalbeauty with concupiscence is that which would reduce it to a matter ofcoarse utility. Thus Eckstein, misled by Schopenhauer, holds thathealthy teeth are beautiful for the reason that they guarantee theproper mastication of the food; while small breasts are ugly becausethey do not promise sufficient nourishment to the child that is to beborn.

  This argument is refuted by the simple statement that our teeth, ifthey looked like rusty nails, might be even more useful than now, butcould no longer be beautiful. As for women's breasts, if utility werethe criterion, the most beautiful would be those of the Africanmothers who can throw them over their shoulders to suckle the infantson their backs without impeding their work. As a matter of fact, theloveliest breast is the virginal, which serves no use while it remainsso. A dray horse is infinitely more useful to us than an Arab racer,but is he as beautiful? Tigers and snakes are anything but useful tothe human race, but we consider their skins beautiful.

  A NEW SENSE EASILY LOST AGAIN

  No, the sense of personal beauty is neither a synonyme for libidinousdesires nor is it based on utilitarian considerations. It ispractically a new sense, born of mental refinement and imagination. Itby no means scorns a slight touch of the voluptuous, so far as it doesnot exceed the limits of artistic taste and moral refinement--awell-rounded figure and "a face voluptuous, yet pure"--but it is anentirely different thing from the predilection for fat and othercoarse exaggerations
of sexuality which inspire lust instead of love.This new sense is still, as I have said, rare everywhere; and, likethe other results of high and recent culture, it is easilyobliterated. In his treatise on insanity Professor Krafft-Ebing showsthat in degeneration of the brain the esthetic and moral qualities areamong the first to disappear. It is the same with normal man when hedescends into a lower sphere. Zoller relates (III., 68) that whenEuropeans arrive in Africa they find the women so ugly they can hardlylook at them without a feeling of repulsion. Gradually they becomehabituated to their sight, and finally they are glad to accept them ascompanions. Stanley has an eloquent passage on the same topic (_II. 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 personalbeauty is displaced again by the concupiscence which had held itsplace in the early history of mankind.

  MORAL 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 oftenbeautifully chiselled, though the expression in them is always coarseand 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.... From the staring wildness of their eyes, a stranger would immediately 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."

  BEAUTIFYING INTELLIGENCE

  Galton's reference to the Damaras illustrates the well-known factthat, even where nature makes an effort at chiselling beautifulfeatures the result is a failure if there is no moral and intellectualculture to inspire them, and this puts the grave-stone on theConcupiscence Theory--for what have moral and intellectual culture todo with carnal desires? A noble soul even possesses the magic power oftransforming a plain face into a radiant vision of beauty, the emotionchanging not only the expression but the lines of the face. Goethe(Eckermann, 1824) and others have indeed maintained that intellect ina woman does not help a man to fall in love with her. This is true inso far as brains in a woman will not make a man fall in love with herif she is otherwise unattractive or unfeminine. But Goethe forgot thatthere is such a thing as _hereditary intellectual culture incarnatedin the face_. This, I maintain, makes up more than half of thepersonal beauty which makes a man fall in love. A girl with goodfeatures is twice as beautiful if she is morally pure and has a brightmind. Sometimes a face is accidentally moulded, into such a regularbeauty of form that it seems to mirror mental beauty too. A man mayfall in love with such a face, but as soon as he finds out that it isinhabited by a stupid or coarse mind he will make haste to fall outagain, unless his love was predominantly sensual. I remember oncefalling in love with a country girl at first sight; her face andfigure seemed to me extremely beautiful, except that hard work hadenlarged and hardened her hands. But when I found that her intellectwas as coarse as her hands, my ardor cooled at once.

  If intellect, as revealed in the face, in words, and in actions, didnot assist in inspiring the amorous sentiment, it would be as easy tofall 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 ademented person. Let us imagine a belle who is thrown from a horse andhas become insane from the shock. For a time her features will remainas 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 lovewith an imbecile? The vacant stare, the absence of intellect, makebeauty and love alike impossible in such a case.

  THE STRANGE GREEK ATTITUDE

  The important corollary follows, from all this, that in countrieswhere women receive no education sensual love is the only kind men canfeel toward them. Oriental women are of that kind, and so were theancient Greeks. The Greeks are indeed renowned for their statuary, yettheir attitude toward personal beauty was of a very peculiar kind.Their highest ideal was not the feminine but the masculine type, andaccordingly we find that it was toward men only that they professed tofeel a noble passion. The beauty of the women was regarded merely froma sensual point of view. Their respectable women were deliberatelyleft without education, wherefore their charms can have been at bestof a bodily kind and capable of inspiring love of body only. There isa prevalent superstition that the Greeks of the day of Perikles had aclass of intelligent women known as hetairai, who were capable ofbeing true companions and inspirers of men; but I shall show, in alater chapter, that the mentality of these women has been ludicrouslyexaggerated; they were coarse and obscene in their wit andconversation, and their morals were such that no man could haverespected them, much less loved them with a pure affection; while themen whom they are supposed to have inspired were in most casesvoluptuaries of the most dissolute sort.

  A COMPOSITE AND VARIABLE SENTIMENT

  Our attempt to answer the question "What is romantic love," has takenup no fewer than two hundred and thirty-five pages, and even thisanswer is a mere preliminary sketch, the details of which will besupplied in the following chapters, chiefly, it is true, in a negativeway, by showing what is _not_ romantic love; for the subject of thisbook is Primitive Love.

  DEFINITION OF LOVE

  Can love be defined in one sentence? The _Century Dictionary's_definition, which is as good as any, is: "Intimate personal affectionbetween individuals of opposite sex capable of intermarriage; theemotional incentive to and normal basis of conjugal union." This iscorrect enough as far as it goes; but how little it tells us of thenature of love! I have tried repeatedly to condense the essentialtraits of romantic love into one brief definition, but have notsucceeded. Perhaps the following will serve as an approximation. Loveis an intense longing for the reciprocal affection and jealouslyexclusive possession of a particular individual of the opposite sex; achaste, proud, ecstatic adoration of one who appears a paragon ofpersonal beauty and otherwise immeasurably superior to all otherpersons; an emotional state constantly hovering between doubt andhope, aggravated in the female heart by the fear of revealing herfeelings too soon; a self-forgetful impulse to share the tastes andfeelings of the beloved, and to go so far in affectionate and gallantdevotion as to eagerly sacrifice, for the other's good, all comfortand life itself if necessary.

  These are the essential traits. But romantic love is altogether toocomplex and variable to be defined in one sentence; and it is thiscomplexity and variability that I wish to emphasize particularly.Eckermann once suggested to Goethe that no two cases of love are quitealike, and the poet agreed with him. They did not, however, explaintheir seeming paradox, so diametrically opposed to the current notionthat love is everywhere and always the same, in individuals as innations; nor could they have explained it unless they had analyzedlove into its component elements as I have done in this volume. Withthe aid of this analysis it is easy to show how and why love haschanged and grown, like other sentiments; to explain how and why thelove of a civilized white man must differ from that of an Australianor African savage, just as their faces differ. Since no two races lookalike, and no two individuals in the same race, why should their lovesbe alik
e? Is not love the heart of the soul and the face merely itsmirror? Love is varied through a thousand climatic, racial, family,and cultural peculiarities. It is varied through individual tastes andproclivities. In one case of love admiration of personal beauty may bethe strongest ingredient, in another jealous monopoly, in a thirdself-sacrificing affection, and so on. The permutations andcombinations are countless, and hence it is that love-stories arealways fresh, since they can be endlessly varied. A lover's variedfeelings in relation to the beloved become gradually blended into asentiment which is a composite photograph of all the emotions she hasever aroused in him. This has given rise to the delusion that love isa simple feeling.[117]

  WHY CALLED ROMANTIC

  In the introductory chapter of this book I alluded briefly to myreasons for calling pure prematrimonial infatuation romantic love,giving some historic precedents for such a use of the word. We are nowin 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; chimerical, fanciful, extravagantly enthusiastic."

  Every one of these terms applies to love in the sense in which I usethe word. Love is ideal, heroic, marvellous, imaginative, chimerical,fanciful, extravagantly enthusiastic; its hyperbolic adoration evengives it a supernatural tinge, for the adored girl seems more like anangel or a fairy than a common mortal. The lover's heroine is asfictitious as any heroine of romance; he considers her the mostbeautiful and lovable person in the world, though to others she mayseem ugly and ill-tempered. Thus love is called romantic, because itis so great a romancer, attributing to the beloved all sorts ofperfections which exist only in the lover's fancy. What could be morefantastic than a lover's stubborn preference for a particularindividual and his conviction that no one ever loved so frantically ashe does? What more extravagant and unreasonable than his imperiousdesire to completely monopolize her affection, sometimes guarding herjealously even from her girl friends or her nearest relatives? Whatmore romantic than the tortures and tragedies, the mixed emotions,that doubt or jealousy gives rise to? Does not a willing but coylyreserved maiden romance about her feelings? What could be morefanciful and romantic than her shy reserve and coldness when she islonging to throw herself into the lover's arms? Is not her proudbelief that her lover--probably as commonplace and foolish a fellow asever lived--is a hero or a genius a romantic exaggeration? Is not thelover's purity of imagination, though real as a feeling, a romanticillusion, since he craves ultimate possession of her and would be theunhappiest of mortals if she went to a nunnery, though she promised tolove him always? What could be more marvellous, more chimerical, thanthis temporary suppression of a strong appetite at the time when itwould be supposed to manifest itself most irresistibly--thisdistilling of the finer emotions, leaving all the gross, materialelements behind? Can you imagine anything more absurdly romantic thanthe gallant attentions of a man on his knees before a girl whom, withhis stronger muscles, he could command as a slave? Who but a romanticlover would obliterate his selfish ego in sympathetic devotion toanother, trying to feel her feelings, forgetting his own? Who but aromantic lover would sacrifice his life in the effort to save orplease another? A mother would indeed do the same for her child; butthe child is of her own flesh and blood, whereas the beloved may havebeen a stranger until an hour ago. How romantic!

  The appropriateness of the word romantic is still further emphasizedby the consideration that, just as romantic art, romantic literature,and romantic music are a revolt against artificial rules and barriersto the free expression of feeling, so romantic love is a revoltagainst the obstacles to free matrimonial choice imposed by parentaland social tyranny.

  Indeed, I can see only one objection to the use of the word--itsfrequent application to any strange or exciting incidents, whence someconfusion may ensue. But the trouble is obviated by simply bearing inmind the distinction between romantic _incidents_ and romantic_feelings_ which I have summed up in the maxim that _a romanticlove-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love_. Nearly allthe tales brought together in this volume are romantic love-stories,but not one of them is a story of romantic love. In the end theantithesis will aid us in remembering the distinction.

  In place of "romantic" I might have used the word "sentimental"; butin the first place that word fails to indicate the essentiallyromantic nature of love, on which I have just dwelt; and secondly, italso is liable to be misunderstood, because of its unfortunateassociation with the word sentimentality, which is a very differentthing from sentiment. The differences between sentiment,sentimentality, and sensuality are indeed important enough to merit abrief chapter of elucidation.

  SENSUALITY, SENTIMENTALITY, AND SENTIMENT

  From beginnings not yet understood--though Haeckel and others havespeculated plausibly on the subject--there has been developed inanimals and human beings an appetite which insures the perpetuation ofthe species as the appetite for food does that of the individual. Boththese appetites pass through various degrees of development, from theutmost grossness to a high degree of refinement, from which, however,relapses occur in many individuals. We read of Indians tearing out theliver from living animals and devouring it raw and bloody; of Eskimoseating the contents of a reindeer's stomach as a vegetable dish; andthe books of explorers describe many scenes like the following fromBaker's _Ismailia_ (275) relating to the antics of negroes afterkilling a buffalo:

  "There was now an extraordinary scene over the carcass; four hundred men scrambling over a mass of blood and entrails, fighting and tearing with each other and cutting off pieces of flesh with their lance-heads, with which they escaped as dogs may retreat with a bone."

  APPETITE AND LONGING

  What aeons of culture lie between such a scene and a dinner party inEurope or America, with its refined, well-behaved guests, its tableetiquette, its varied menu, its choice viands, skilfully cooked andblended so as to bring out the most diverse and delicate flavors, itsesthetic features--fine linen and porcelains, silver and cut glass,flowers, lights--its bright conversation, and flow of wit. Yet thereare writers who would have us believe that these Indians, Eskimos, andAfricans, who manifest their appetite for food in so disgustinglycoarse a way, are in their love-affairs as sentimental and aestheticas we are! In truth they are as gross, gluttonous, and selfish in thegratification of one appetite as in that of the other. To a savage awoman is not an object of chaste adoration and gallant devotion, but amere bait for wanton lust; and when his lust hath dined he kicks heraway like a mangy dog till he is hungry again. In Ploss-Bartels[118]may be found an abundance of facts culled from various sources in allparts of the world, showing that the bestiality of many savages is noteven restrained by the presence of spectators. At the phallic andbacchanalian festivals of ancient and Oriental nations alldistinctions of rank and all family ties were forgotten in a carnivalof lust. Licentious orgies are indeed carried on to this day in ourown large cities; but their participants are the criminal classes, andoccasionally some foolish young men who would be very much ashamed tohave their doings known; whereas the orgies and phallic festivals ofsavages and barbarians are national or tribal institutions, approvedby custom, sanctioned by religion, and indulged in openly by every manand woman in the community; often regardless even of incest.

  More shockingly still are the grossness and diabolical selfishness ofthe savage's carnal appetite revealed by his habit of sacrificingyoung girls to it years before they have reached the age of puberty.Some details will be found in the chapters on Australia, Africa, andIndia. Here it may be noted--to indicate the wide prevalence of acustom which it would be unjust to animals to call bestial, becausebeasts never sink so low--that Borneans, as Schwaner notes, marry offgirls from three to five; that in Egypt child-wives of seven or eightcan be seen; that Javanese girls may be married at seven; that NorthAmerican Indians often took
brides of ten or eleven, while in SouthernAustralia girls were appropriated as early as seven. Hottentot girlswere not spared after the age of seven, nor were Bushman girls, thoughthey did not become mothers till ten or twelve years old; while Kaffirgirls married at eight, Somals at six to eight. The cause of theseearly marriages is not climatic, as some fancy, but simply, asRoberton has pointed out, the coarseness of the men. The list might beextended indefinitely. In Old Calabar sometimes, we read in Ploss,

  "a man who has already several wives may be seen with an infant 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 hiscruel maltreatment of girls before they have reached the age ofpuberty,[119] but in his ignorance, in most cases, of the simplestcaresses and kisses for which we often find corresponding acts inbirds and other animals. The nerves of primitive men are too coarsefor such a delicate sensation as labial contact, and an embrace wouldleave them cold. An African approximation to a kiss is described byBaker (_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 unpleasantembrace, licked both my eyes with her tongue." If we may venture aninference from Mr. A.H. Savage Landor's experience[120] among theaboriginal Ainos of Yezo (Japan), one of the lowest of human races, wemay conclude that, in the course of evolution, biting precededkissing. He had made the acquaintance of an Ainu maiden, the mostlovely Ainu girl he had ever come across. They strolled together intothe 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 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 undoubtedly a curious way of making love, and when I had been bitten 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 distinct fromthat of love. The ancient Greeks and Romans, and the Orientals,especially the Hindoos, were familiar, thousands of years ago, withrefinements and variations of lust beyond which the human imaginationcannot go. According 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, Convictus, Oscula, Tactus_--sight, conference, association, kisses, touch."

  All these degrees are abundantly illustrated in Burton, often in a waythat would not bear quotation in a modern book intended for generalreading.

  It is interesting to observe, furthermore, that among the higherbarbarians and civilized races, lust has become to a certain extentmentalized through hereditary memory and association. Aristotle made amarvellous anticipation of modern scientific thought when he suggestedthat what made birds sing in spring was the memory of former seasonsof love. In men as in animals, the pleasant experiences of love andmarriage become gradually ingrained in the brain, and when a youthreaches the age for love-making the memory of ancestral amorousexperiences courses through his nerves vaguely but strongly. He longsfor something, he knows not what, and this mental longing is one ofthe earliest and strongest symptoms of love. But it characterizes allsorts of love; it may accompany pure fancies of the sentimental lover,but it may also be a result of the lascivious imaginings andanticipations of sensualism. It does not, therefore, in itself provethe presence of romantic love; a point on which I must place greatemphasis, because certain primitive poems expressing a longing for anabsent girl or man have been quoted as positive evidence of romanticlove, when as a matter of fact there is nothing to prove that they maynot have been inspired by mere sensual desires. I shall cite andcomment 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 symptomsoccurring among such advanced nations as the Greeks and Hindoos andoften accepted as evidence of true love; but since, like longing, theyalso accompany lust and other strong passions or violent emotions,they cannot be accepted as reliable symptoms of romantic love. Theonly certain criteria of love are to be found in the manifestation ofthe altruistic factors--sympathy, gallantry, and self-sacrificingaffection. Romantic love is, as I have remarked before, not merely anemotional phenomenon, but an _active impulse._ The true lover doesnot, like the sensualist and the sentimentalist, ululate his time awayin dismal wailing about his bodily aches and tremors, woes andpallors, but lets his feelings expend themselves in multitudinous actsrevealing his eagerness to immolate his personal pleasures on thealtar of his idol.

  It must not be supposed that sensual love is necessarily coarse andobscene. An antique love-scene may in itself be proper and exquisitelypoetic without rising to the sphere of romantic love; as whenTheocritus declares: "I ask not for the land of Pelops nor for talentsof gold. But under this rock will I sing, holding you in my arms,looking at the flocks feeding together toward the Sicilian Sea." Apretty picture; but what evidence is there in it of affection? It ispleasant for a man to hold a girl in his arms while gazing at theSicilian Sea, even though he does not love her any more than athousand other girls.

  Even in Oriental literature, usually so gross and licentious, one maycome across a charmingly poetic yet entirely sensual picture like thefollowing from the Persian _Gulistan_ (339). On a very hot day, whenhe was a young man, Saadi found the hot wind drying up the moisture ofhis mouth and melting the marrow of his bones. Looking for a refugeand refreshment, he beheld a moon-faced damsel of supreme lovelinessin 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 off, found myself restored to new life."

  Ward writes (115) that the following account of Sharuda, the daughterof Brumha, translated from the Shiva Purana, may serve as a justdescription of a perfect Hindoo beauty. This girl was of a yellowcolor; 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 thelotos; her eyebrows extended to her ears; her lips were red, like theyoung leaves of the mango-tree; her face was like the full moon; hervoice like the sound of the cuckoo; her throat was like that of apigeon; her loins narrow, like those of a lion; her hair hung in curlsdown 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 ispurely sensual, and so it is with the thousands of amorous rhapsodiesof Hindoo, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other Eastern poets.Concerning the Persians, Dr. Polak remarks (I., 206) that the word_Ischk_ (love) is always associated with the idea of carnality(_Was'l_). Of the Arabs, Burckardt says that "the passion of loveis indeed much talked of by the inhabitants of the towns; but I doubtwhether anything is meant by them more than the grossest animaldesire." In his letters from the East the keen-eyed Count von Moltkenotes that the Turk "passes over all the preliminary rigmarole offalling in love, paying court, languishing, revelling in ecstatic joy,as so much _faux frais_, and goes straight to the point."

  WILES OF AN ORIENTAL GIRL

  But is
the German field-marshal quite just to the Turk? I have beforeme a passage which seems to indicate that these Orientals do know athing or two about the "rigmarole of love-making." It is cited byKremer[121] from the Kitab almowascha, a book treating of socialmatters in Baghdad. Its author devotes a special chapter to thedangers lurking in female singers and musical slaves, in the course ofwhich 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 tearstain 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 presentstill his purse is empty, whereupon she discards him.

  Was Count Moltke, then, wrong? Have we here, after all, thesentimental symptoms of romantic love? Let us apply the tests providedby our analysis of love--tests as reliable as those which chemists useto analyze fluids or gases. Did the Baghdad music-girl prefer that manto all other individuals? Did she want to monopolize him jealously?Oh, no! any man, however old and ugly, would have suited her, providedhe had plenty of money. Was she coy toward him? Perhaps; but not froma feeling of modesty and timidity inspired by love, but to make himmore ardent and ready to pay. Was she proud of his love? She thoughthim a fool. Were her feelings toward him chaste and pure? As chasteand pure as his. Did she sympathize with his pleasures and pains? Shedismissed him as soon as his purse was empty, and looked about foranother victim. Were his presents the result of gallant impulses toplease her, or merely advance payment for favors expected? Would hehave sacrificed his life to save her any more than she would hers tosave him? Did he respect her as an immaculate superior being, adoreher as an angel from above--or look on her as an inferior, a slave inrank, a slave to passion?

  The obvious moral of this immoral episode is that it is notpermissible to infer the existence of anything higher than sensuallove from the mere fact that certain romantic tricks are associatedwith the amorous dalliance of Orientals, or Greeks and Romans.Drinking from the same cup, throwing kisses, sending locks of hair ortear-stained letters, adjusting a foot-stool, or fanning a heatedbrow, are no doubt romantic _incidents_, but they are no proof ofromantic _feeling_ for the reason that they are frequently associatedwith the most heartless and mercenary sensuality. The coquetry of theBaghdad girl is romantic, but there is no _sentiment_ in it. Yet--andhere we reach the most important aspect of that episode--there is an_affectation of sentiment_ in that sending of locks, notes, andsplinters from her lute; and this affectation of sentiment isdesignated by the word _sentimentality_. In the history of lovesentimentality precedes sentiment; and for a proper understanding ofthe history and psychology of love it is as important to distinguishsentimentality from sentiment as it is to differentiate love fromlust.

  When Lowell wrote, "Let us be thankful that in every man's life thereis 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 assumingthat there is such a holiday of romance in every man's life; millionsnever enjoy it; but the words I have italicized--"an illumination ofthe senses by the soul"--are one of those flashes of inspiration whichsometimes enable a poet to give a better description of a psychicprocess than professional philosophers have put forth.

  From one point of view the love sentiment may be called anillumination of the senses by the soul. Elsewhere Lowell has givenanother admirable definition: "Sentiment is intellectualized emotion,emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals of thought."Excellent, too, is J.F. Clarke's definition: "Sentiment is nothing butthought blended with feeling; _thought made 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 sentiment of patriotism; the sentiment of honor; the world is ruled by sentiment. The thought in a sentiment is often that of _duty_, and is penetrated and _exalted_ by feeling."

  Herbert Spencer sums up the matter concisely _(Psych_., II., 578) whenhe speaks of "that remoteness from sensations and appetites and fromideas of such sensations and appetites which is the common trait ofthe feelings we call sentiments."

  It is hardly necessary to point out that in our Baghdad girl'slove-affairs there is no "remoteness from sensations and appetites,"no "illumination of the senses by the soul," no "intellectualizedemotion," no "thought made affectionate, sympathetic, moral." Butthere is in it, as I have said, a touch of sentimentality. Ifsentiment 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 ofsentimentality. While sentiment is the noblest thing in the world,sentimentality is its counterfeit, its caricature; there is somethingtheatrical, operatic, painted-and-powdered about it; it differs fromsentiment as astrology differs from astronomy, alchemy from chemistry,the sham from the real, hypocrisy from sincerity, artificial posingfrom natural grace, genuine affection from selfish attachment.

  RARITY OF TRUE LOVE

  Sentimentality, as I have said, precedes sentiment in the history oflove, and it has been a special characteristic of certain periods,like that of the Alexandrian Greeks and their Roman imitators, to whomwe shall recur in a later chapter, and the mediaeval Troubadours andMinnesingers. To the present day sentimentality in love is so muchmore abundant than sentiment that the adjective sentimental iscommonly used in an uncomplimentary sense, as in the following passagefrom one of Krafft-Ebing's books (_Psch. Sex_., 9):

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

  Steele speaks in _The Lover_ (23, No. 5) of the extraordinary skill ofa poet in making a loose people "attend to a Passion which they never,or that very faintly, felt in their own Bosoms." La Rochefoucauldwrote: "It is with true love as with ghosts; everybody speaks of it,but few have seen it." A writer in _Science_ expressed his belief thatromantic love, as described in my first book, could really beexperienced only by men of genius. I think that this makes the circletoo small; yet in these twelve years of additional observation I havecome to the conclusion that even at this stage of civilization only asmall proportion of men and women are able to experience full-fledgedromantic love, which seems to require a special emotional or estheticgift, like the talent for music. A few years ago I came across thefollowing in the London _Tidbits_ which echoes the sentiments ofmultitudes:

  "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 they read about so much in novels, and hear about in actual life."

  At the same time the
re are not a few men of genius, too, who neverfelt true love in their own hearts. Herder believed that Goethe wasnot capable of genuine love, and Grimm, too, thought that Goethe hadnever experienced a self-absorbing passion. Tolstoi must have beenever a stranger to genuine love, for to him it seems a degrading thingeven in marriage. A suggestive and frank confession may be found inthe literary memoirs of Goncourt.[122] At a small gathering of men ofletters Goncourt remarked that hitherto love had not been studiedscientifically in novels. Zola thereupon declared that love was not aspecific emotion; that it does not affect persons so absolutely as thewriters say; that the phenomena characterizing it are also found infriendship, in patriotism, and that the intensity of this emotion isdue entirely to the anticipation of carnal enjoyment. Turgenieffobjected to these views; in his opinion love is a sentiment which hasa unique color of its own--a quality differentiating it from all othersentiments--eliminating the lover's own personality, as it were. TheRussian novelist obviously had a conception of the purity of love, forGoncourt reports him as "speaking of his first love for a woman as athing entirely spiritual, having nothing in common with materiality."And now follows Goncourt's confession:

  "In all this, the thing to regret is that neither Flaubert ... nor Zola, nor myself, have ever been very seriously in love and that we are therefore unable to describe love. Turgenieff alone could have done that, but he lacks precisely the critical sense which we could have exercised in this matter had we been in love after his fashion."

  The vast majority of the human race has not yet got beyondthe sensual stage of amorous evolution, or realized thedifferencebetween sentimentality and sentiment. There is muchfood for thought in this sentence from Henry James's charmingessay on France's most poetic writer--Theophile Gautier:

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

  Readers are interested only in emotions with which they are familiarby experience. Howells's refined love-scenes have often been sneeredat by men who like raw whiskey but cannot appreciate the delicatebouquet of Chambertin. As Professor Ribot remarks: in the higherregions of science, art, religion, and morals there are emotions sosubtle 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 personin 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 loveonly 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 ofanother but self-love, more or less disguised--the kind of "love"which makes a young man shoot a girl who refuses him. The mediaevalwriter Leon Hebraeus evidently knew of no other when he defined loveas "a desire to enjoy that which is good"; nor Spinoza when he definedit as _laetetia concomitante idea externae causae_--a pleasureaccompanied by the thought of its external cause.

  MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE

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

  HOW ROMANTIC LOVE IS METAMORPHOSED

  On hearing the words "love letters," does anybody ever think of aman'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 writeslove letters he writes them to his sweetheart. Thus, public opinionand every-day literary usage clearly recognize the difference betweenromantic love and conjugal affection. Yet when I maintained in myfirst book that romantic love differs as widely from conjugalaffection as maternal love differs from friendship; that romantic loveis almost as modern as the telegraph, the railway, and the electriclight; and that perhaps the main reasons why no one had anticipated mein an attempt to write a book to prove this, were that no distinctionhad heretofore been made between conjugal and romantic love, and thatthe apparent occurrence of noble examples of conjugal attachment amongthe ancient Greeks had obscured the issue--there was a chorus ofdissenting voices. "The distinction drawn by him between romantic andconjugal love," wrote one critic, "seems more fanciful than real." "Hewill not succeed," wrote another, "in convincing anybody that romanticand conjugal love differ in kind instead of only in degree or place";while a third even objected to my theory as "essentially immoral!"

  Mr. W.D. Howells, on the other hand, accepted my distinction, and in aletter to me declared that he found conjugal affection an even moreinteresting field of study than romantic love. Why, indeed, shouldanyone be alarmed at the distinction I made? Is not a man's feelingtoward his sweetheart different from his feeling toward his mother orsister? Why then should it be absurd or "immoral" to maintain that itdiffers from his feeling toward his wife? What I maintain is thatromantic love disappears gradually, to be replaced, as a rule, byconjugal affection, which is sometimes a less intense, at other timesa more intense, feeling than the emotions aroused during courtship.The process may be compared to a modulation in music, in which some ofthe tones in a chord are retained while others are displaced by newones. Such modulations are delightful, and the new harmony may be asbeautiful as the old. A visitor to Wordsworth's home wrote:

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

  A husband may be, and should be, quite as tender, as attentive, asgallant and self-sacrificing, as sympathetic, proud, and devoted as alover; yet all his emotions will appear in a new orchestration, as itwere. In the gallant attentions of a loving husband, the anxiouseagerness to please is displaced by a pleasant sense of duty andgentlemanly courtesy. He still prefers his wife to all other women andwants a monopoly of her love; but this feeling has a proprietary tingethat was absent before. Jealousy, too, assumes a new aspect; it may,temporarily, bring back the uncertainty of courtship, but the emotionis colored by entirely different ideas: jealousy in a lover is agreen-eyed monster gnawing merely at his hopes, and not, as in ahusband, threatening to destroy his property and his familyhonor--which makes a great difference in the quality of the feelingand its manifestation. The wife, on her part, has no more use forcoyness, but can indulge in the luxury of bestowing gallant attentionswhich before marriage would have seemed indelicate or forward, whileafter marriage they are a pleasant duty, rising in some cases toheroic self-sacrifice.

  If even within the sphere of romantic love no two cases are exactlyalike, how could love before marriage be the same as after marriagewhen so many new experiences, ideas, and associations come into play?Above all, the feelings relating to the children bring an entirely newgroup of tones into the complex harmony of affection. The intimaciesof married life, the revelation of characteristics undiscovered beforemarriage, the deeper sympathy, the knowledge that theirs is "one gloryan' one shame"--these and a hundred other domestic experiences makeromantic love undergo a change into something that may be equally richand strange but is certainly quite different. A wife's charms aredifferent from a girl's and inspire a different kind of love. Thehusband 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. ButCowper 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 abo
ve; And earth a second Eden shows, Where'er the healing water flows.

  Some of the specifically romantic ingredients of love, on the otherhand--adoration, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair--donot normally enter into conjugal affection. No one would fail to seethe absurdity of a husband's exclaiming

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

  He _may_ touch that cheek, and kiss it too--and that makes atremendous difference in the tone and tension of his feelings. Unlikethe lover, the husband does not think, feel, and speak in perpetualhyperboles. He does not use expressions like "beautiful tyrant, fiendangelical," or speak of

  The cruel madness of love The honey of poisonous flowers.

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

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

  WHY SAVAGES VALUE WIVES

  The notion that genuine romantic love does not undergo a metamorphosisin marriage is the first of five mistakes I have undertaken to correctin 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 conjugal affection was entirely wanting in the human race ... it seems, in its most primitive form, to have been as old as marriage itself. It must be a certain degree of affection that induces the male to defend the female during her period of pregnancy."

  Now I concede that natural selection must have developed at an earlyperiod 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 dailyfood in the forest and at the same time defend herself and herhelpless babe against wild beasts and human enemies. Hence naturalselection favored those groups in which the males attached themselvesto a particular female for a longer time than the breeding-season,defending her from enemies and giving her a share of their game. Butfrom this admitted fact to the inference that it is "affection" thatmakes the husband defend his wife, there is a tremendous logical skipnot warranted by the situation. Instead of making such an assumptionoffhand, the scientific method requires us to ask if there is not someother way of accounting for the facts more in accordance with theselfish disposition and habits of savages. The solution of the problemis easily found. A savage's wife is his property, which he hasacquired by barter, service, fighting, or purchase, and which he wouldbe a fool not to protect against injury or rivals. She is to him asource of utility, comfort, and pleasure, which is reason enough whyhe 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 movecarries the tent and kitchen utensils, as well as her child to thenext place. If his motive in protecting her against men and beastswere _affection_, he would not thus compel her to do all the workwhile he walks unburdened to the next camping-place.

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

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

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

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

  We need not assume a problematic affection to explain why such a manmarries.

  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 hetires of her it is easy enough to get rid of her or to make her adrudge pure and simple, while her successor enjoys his caresses.Speaking of Pennsylvania Indians, Buchanan remarks naively (II., 95)that "the wives are the true servants of their husbands; otherwise themen are very affectionate to them." On another page (102) heinadvertently explains what he means by this paradox: "the ancientwomen are used for cooks, barbers, and other services, the younger fordalliance." In other words, Buchanan makes the common mistake ofapplying the altruistic word affection to what is nothing more thanselfish indulgence of the sensual appetite. So does Pajeken when hetells us in the _Ausland_ about the "touching tenderness" of a Crowchief toward a fourteen-year-old girl whom he had just added to thenumber of his wives.

  "While he was in the wigwam 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 demanded the utmost respect in their treatment of his little one."

  This reference to the other wives ought to have opened Pajeken's eyesas to the silliness of speaking of the "touching" tenderness of theCrow chief to his latest favorite. In a few years she was doomed to bediscarded, like the others, in favor of a new victim of his carnalappetite. Affection is entirely out of the question in such cases.

  The Malayans of Sumatra have, as Carl Bock tells us (314), a localcustom allowing a wife to marry again if her faithless spouse hasdeserted her for three months:

  "The early age at which marriage is contracted is an obstacle 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 matter of pounds,shillings, and pence. His servant had married a "grass-widow" of threemonths' 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 h
er 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, according 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 toher husband's comforts and pleasure he repudiates her. Baileysays[123] that this heartless desertion of a sick wife is "the worsttrait in the Kandyan character, and the cool and unconcerned manner inwhich they themselves allude to it shows that it is as common as it iscruel."

  "How can a man be contented with one wife," exclaimed an Arab sheik toSir Samuel Baker (_N.T.A._, 263). "It is ridiculous, absurd." And thenhe proceeded to explain why, in his opinion, monogamy is such anabsurdity:

  "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 severalwives:

  "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 reasons franklystated--sensual gratification and utilitarianism.

  MOURNING TO ORDER

  One of the most gossipy and least critical of all writers on primitiveman, Bonwick, declares (97), in describing Tasmanian funerals, that

  "the affectionate nature of women appeared 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 off in grief was thrown upon the mound."

  Descriptions of the howling and tortures to which savages subjectthemselves as part of their funeral rites abound in works of travel,and although every school-boy knows that the deepest waters aresilent, it is usually assumed that these howling antics betray thedeep grief and affection of the mourners. Now I do not deny that thelower races do feel grief at the loss of a relative or friend; it isone of the earliest emotions to develop in mankind. What I object toin particular is the notion that the penances to which widows submiton the death of their husbands indicate deep and genuine conjugalaffection. As a matter of fact, these penances are not voluntary butprescribed, each widow in a tribe being expected to indulge in thesame howlings and mutilations, so that this circumstance alone wouldmake it impossible to say whether her lamentations over her latespouse came under the head of affection, fondness, liking, orattachment, or whether they are associated with indifference orhatred. It is instructive to note that, in descriptions of mourningwidows, the words "must" or "obliged to" nearly always occur. Amongthe Mandans, we read in Catlin (I., 95), "in mourning, like the Crowsand most other tribes, the women _are obliged_ to crop their hair alloff; and the usual term of that condolence is until the hair has grownagain to its former length." The locks of the men (who make them dothis), "are of much greater importance," and only one or two can bespared. According to Schomburgk, on the death of her husband, anArawak wife _must_ cut her hair; and until this has again grown to acertain length she _cannot_ remarry. (Spencer, _D.S._, 20.) Among thePatagonians, "the widow, or widows, of the dead, are _obliged_ tomourn and fast for a whole year after the death of their husbands."They _must_ abstain from certain kinds of food, and _must not_ washtheir faces and hands for a whole year; while "during the year ofmourning they are _forbidden_ to marry." (Falkner, 119.) The grief isall prescribed and regulated according to tribal fancy. The Brazilians"repeat the lamentation for the dead twice a day." (Spix and Martins,II., 250.) The Comanches

  "mourn for the dead _systematically and periodically_ with great noise and vehemence; at which time the _female_ 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 quality and estimation of the deceased; varying from three to five or seven days."

  (Schoolcraft, I., 237.) James Adair says in his _History of theAmerican Indians_ (188), "They _compel_ the widow to act the part ofthe disconsolate dove, for the irreparable loss of her mate."

  In Dahomey, during mourning "the weeping relatives _must_ fast andrefrain from bathing," etc. (Burton, II., 164.) In the Transvaal,writes the missionary Posselt,

  "there are a number 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 fumigated," etc.

  Concerning the Asiatic Turks Vambery writes that the women are notallowed to attend the funeral, but "are _obliged_ meanwhile to remainin their tent, and, while lamenting incessantly, scratch their cheekswith their nails, _i.e._, mar their beauty." The widow _must_ lamentor sing dirges for a whole year, etc. Chippewa widows are _obliged_ tofast and must not comb their hair for a year or wear any ornament. AShushwap widow _must not_ allow her shadow to fall on any one, andmust bed her head on thorns. Bancroft notes (I., 731) that among theMosquito Indians

  "the widow was _bound_ to supply the grave of her husband with provisions for a year, after which she took up the bones and carried 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 Oregon were subjected to suchmaltreatment that some of them committed suicide to escape theirsufferings. For nine days they were obliged to sleep beside the corpseand follow certain rules in regard to dressing and eating. If a widowneglected any of these, she was on the tenth day thrown on the funeralpile with the corpse and tossed about and scorched till she lostconsciousness. Afterward she was obliged to perform the function of aslave to all the other women and children of the tribe.[124]

  So far as I am aware, no previous writer on the subject has emphasizedthe obligatory character of all these performances by widows. To methat seems by far the most important aspect of the question, as itshows that the widows were not prompted to these actions byaffectionate grief or self-sacrificing impulses, but by the command ofthe men; and if we bear in mind the superlative selfishness of thesemen we have no difficulty in comprehending that what makes them compelthe women to do these penances is the desire to make them eager tocare for the comfort and welfare of their husbands lest the latter dieand they thus bring upon themselves the discomforts arid terrors ofwidowhood.

  Martius justly remarks that the great dependance of savage women makesthem eager to please their husbands (121); and this eagerness wouldnaturally be doubled by making widowhood forbidding. Bruhier wrote, in1743, that in Corsica it was customary, in case a man died, for thewomen to fall upon his widow and give her a sound drubbing. Thiscustom, he adds significantly, "prompted the women to take good careof their husbands."

  It is true that the widowers also in some cases subjected themselvesto penance; but usually they made it very much easier for themselvesthan for the widows. In his _Lettres sur le Congo_ (152) EdouardDupont relates that a man who has lost his wife and wants to showgrief shaves his head, blackens himself, _stops work_, and sits infront of his chimbeque several days. His neighbors meanwhile feed him[no fasting for _him_!], and at last a friend brings him a calabash ofmalofar and tells him "stop mourning or you will die of starvation.""It does not happen often," Dupont adds, "that the advice is notpromptly followed."<
br />
  Selfish utilitarianism does not desert the savage even at the grave ofhis wife. An amusing illustration of the shallowness of aboriginalgrief where it seems "truly touching" may be found in an article bythe Rev. F. McFarlane on British New Guinea.[125] Scene: "A woman isbeing buried. The husband is lying by the side of the grave,apparently in an agony of grief; he sobs and cries as if his heartwould break." Then he jumps into the grave and whispers into the earsof the corpse--what? a last farewell? Oh, no! "He is asking the spiritof his wife to go with him when he goes fishing, and make himsuccessful also when he goes hunting, or goes to battle," etc.; hislast request being, "_And please don't be angry if I get anotherwife_!"

  The simple truth is that in their grief, as in everything else,savages are nothing but big children, crying one moment, laughing thenext. Whatever feelings they may have are shallow and withoutdevotion. If the widows of Mandans, Arawaks, Patagonians, etc., do notmarry until a year after the death of their husband this is not onaccount of affectionate grief, but, as we have seen, because they arenot allowed to. Where custom prescribes a different course, theyfollow 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. "Afterthe death of a husband, the sooner a squaw marries again, the greaterrespect and regard she is considered to show for his memory." (Hunter,246.) The Australian custom for women, especially widows, is to mournby scratching the face and branding the body. As for the grief itself,its quality may be inferred from the fact that these women sit dayafter day by the grave or platform, howling their monotonous dirge,but, as soon as they are allowed to pause for a meal they indulge inthe merriest pranks. (K.E. Jung, 111.)

  MOURNING FOR ENTERTAINMENT

  In many cases the mourning of savages, instead of being an expressionof affection and grief, appears to be simply a mode of gratifyingtheir love of ceremonial and excitement. That is, they mourn forentertainment--I had almost said for fun; and it is easy to see too,that vanity and superstition play their role here as in their"ornamenting" and everything else they do. By the Abipones "women areappointed to go forward on swift steeds to dig the grave, and _honor_the funeral with lamentations." (Dobrizhoffer II., 267.) During theceremony of making a skeleton of a body the Patagonians, as Falknerinforms us (119), indulge in singing in a mournful tone of voice, andstriking the ground, to _frighten away_ the Valichus or Evil Beings.Some of the Indians also visit the relatives of the dead, indulging inantics which show that the whole thing is done for effect and pastime."During this visit of condolence," Falkner continues,

  "they cry, howl, and sing, in the most dismal manner; straining out tears, and 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 Rev. W. Ellis writes that the Tahitians, when someone had died,"not only wailed in the loudest and most affecting tone, but toretheir hair, rent their garments, and cut themselves with shark's teethor knives in a most shocking manner." That this was less an expressionof genuine grief than a result of the barbarous love of excitement,follows from what he adds: that in a milder form, this loud wailingand cutting with shark's teeth was "an expression of joy as well as ofgrief." (_Pol. Res_., I., 527.) The same writer relates in his book onHawaii (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 (226-27) of an Indian girlwhom he found one day lying on a grave singing a song "so despairingthat it seemed to well out from a broken heart." A half-breed friend,who thoroughly understood the native customs, marred his illusion byinforming him that he had heard the girl say to her mother that as shehad nothing else to do, she believed she would go and take a bawl overher brother's grave. The brother had been dead five years!

  The whole question of aboriginal mourning is patly summed up in awitty remark made by James Adair more than a century ago (1775). Hehas seen Choctaw mourners, he declares (187), "pour out tears likefountains of water; but after thus tiring themselves they might withperfect propriety have asked themselves, '_ And who is dead?_'"

  THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDOW-BURNING

  Instructive, from several points of view, is an incident related byMcLean (I., 254-55): A carrier Indian having been killed, his widowthrew herself on the body, shrieking and tearing her hair. The otherfemales "evinced all the external symptoms of extreme grief, chantingthe death-song in a most lugubrious tone, the tears streaming downtheir cheeks, and beating their breasts;" yet as soon as the riteswere ended, these women "were seen as gay and cheerful as if they hadreturned from a wedding." The widow alone remained, being "obliged bycustom" 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 wretched 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 quarrels."

  Obviously the compulsory mourning enforced in McLean's day was simplya mild survival of this former torture, which, in turn, was a survivalof the still earlier practice of actually burning the widows alive, orotherwise killing them, which used to prevail in various parts of theworld, as in India, among some Chinese aboriginal tribes, the oldGermans, the Thracians and Scythians, some of the Greeks, theLithuanians, the Basutos, the natives of Congo and other Africancountries, the inhabitants of New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, NewHebrides, Fiji Islands, the Crees, Comanches, Caribs, and variousother Indian tribes in California, Darien, Peru, etc.[126]

  Some writers have advanced the opinion that jealousy prompted the mento compel their wives to follow them into death. But the most widelyaccepted opinion is that expressed long ago by St. Boniface when hedeclared regarding the Wends that

  "they _preserve their conjugal love_ with such ardent zeal that the wife refuses to survive her husband; 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 demolishin this chapter.

  In the monumental work of Ploss and Bartels (II., 514), the opinion isadvanced that the custom of slaughtering widows on the death of theirhusbands is the result of the grossly materialistic view the races inquestion hold in regard to a future world. It is supposed that awarrior will reappear with all his physical attributes and wants; forwhich reason he is arranged in his best clothes, his weapons areplaced by his side, and often animals and slaves are slaughtered to beuseful to him in his new existence. His principal servant and providerof home comforts, however, is his wife, wherefore she, too, isexpected to follow him.

  This, no doubt, is the truth about widow-burning; but it is not thewhole truth. To comprehend all the horrors of the situation we mustrealize clearly that it was the fiendish selfishness of the men,extending even beyond death, which thus subjected their wives to acruel death, and that the widows, on their part, did not follow thembecause of the promptings of affection, but either under physicalcompulsion or in consequence of a systematic course of moralreprobation and social persecution which made death preferable tolife. In Peru, for instance, where widows were not killed againsttheir will, but were allowed to choose between widowhood and
beingburied alive,

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

  The consequence of this was that

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

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

  "were either buried alive or strangled, often at their own desire, because they believed that in this way alone could they reach the realms of bliss, and that she who met her death with the greatest devotedness would become the favorite wife in the abode of spirits. On the other hand, a widow who did not permit herself to be killed was considered an adulteress."

  To realize vividly how far widow-burning is from being an act ofvoluntary wifely devotion one must read Abbe Dubois's account of thematter (I., chap. _21_). He explains that, however chaste and devoteda wife may have been during her husband's life, she is treated worsethan the lowest outcast if she wants to survive him. By a "voluntary"death, on the contrary, she becomes "an illustrious victim of conjugalattachment," and is "considered in the light of a deity." On the wayto the funeral pyre the accompanying multitude stretch out their handstoward her in token of admiration. They behold her as alreadytranslated 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 thatafterward crowds of votaries will daily frequent her shrine. TheBrahmans compliment her on her heroism. (Sometimes drugs areadministered to stifle her fears.) She knows, too, that it is uselessto falter at the last moment, as a change of heart would be an eternaldisgrace, not only to herself but to her relatives, who, therefore,stand around with sabres and rifles to _intimidate_ her. In short,with satanic ingenuity, every possible appeal is made to her familypride, vanity, longing for future bliss and divine honors after life,enforced by the knowledge that if she lives earth will be a hell toher, so that refusal is next to impossible. And this is themuch-vaunted "conjugal affection and fidelity" of Hindoo widows!

  FEMININE DEVOTION IN ANCIENT LITERATURE

  The practice of "voluntary" widow-burning is, as the foregoing shows,about as convincing proof of wifely devotion as the presence of an oxin the butcher's stall is proof of his gastronomic devotion to man. Inreality it is, as I have said, simply the most diabolical aspect ofman's aboriginal disposition to look on woman as made solely for hisown comfort and pleasure, here and hereafter. Now it is veryinstructive to note that whenever there is a story of conjugaldevotion in Oriental or ancient classical literature it is nearlyalways inspired by the same spirit--the idea that the woman, as aninferior being, should subject herself to any amount of suffering ifshe can thereby save her sacred lord and master the slightest pang.For instance, an old Arabic writer (Kamil Mobarrad, p. 529) relateshow a devoted wife whose husband was condemned to death disfigured herbeautiful face in order to let him die with the consoling feeling thatshe would not marry again. The current notion that such stories areproof of conjugal devotion is the fifth of the mistakes to becorrected in this chapter. These stories were written by men, selfishmen, who intended them as lessons to indicate to the women what wasexpected of them. Were it otherwise, why should not the men, too, berepresented, at least occasionally, as devoted and self-sacrificing?Hector is tender to Andromache, and in the Sanscrit drama, _Kanisika'sWrath,_ the King and the Queen contend with one another as to whoshall be the victim of that wrath; but these are the only instances ofthe kind that occur to me. This interesting question will be furtherconsidered in the chapters on India and Greece, where corroborativestories will be quoted. Here I wish only to emphasize again the needof caution and suspicion in interpreting the evidence relating to thehuman feelings.

  WIVES ESTEEMED AS MOTHERS ONLY

  So much for the feminine aspect of conjugal devotion. In regard to themasculine aspect something must be added to what was said in precedingpages (307-10). We saw there that primitive man desires wives chieflyas drudges and concubines. It was also indicated briefly that wivesare valued as mothers of daughters who can be sold to suitors. As arule, sons are more desired than daughters, as they increase a man'spower and authority, and because they alone can keep up thesuperstitious rites which are deemed necessary for the salvation ofthe father's selfish old soul. Now the non-existence or extreme rarityof conjugal attachment--not to speak of affection--is painfullyindicated by the circumstance that wives were, among many races,valued (apart from grossly utilitarian and sensual motives) as mothersonly, and that the men had a right, of which they commonly availedthemselves, of repudiating a wife if she proved barren. On the lowerCongo, says Dupont (96), a wife is not respected unless she has atleast three children. Among the Somali, barren women are dieted anddosed, and if that proves unavailing they are usually chased away.(Paulitschke, _B.E.A.S_., 30.) If a Greenlander's wife did not bearhim any children he generally took another one. (Cranz, I., 147.)Among the Mexican Aztecs divorce, even from a concubine, was not easy;but in case of barrenness even the principal wife could be repudiated.(Bancroft, II., 263-65.) The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Germans, theChinese and Japanese, could divorce a wife on account of barrenness.For a Hindoo the laws of Manu indicate that "a barren wife may bedispensed with in the eighth year; one whose children all die, in thetenth; one who bears only daughters, in the eleventh." The tragicimport of such bare statements is hardly realized until we come uponparticular instances like those related by the Indian authoressRamabai (15):

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

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

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

  WHY CONJUGAL PRECEDES ROMANTIC LOVE

  The conclusion to be drawn from the testimony collected in thischapter is that genuine conjugal love--the affection for a wife _forher own sake_--is, like romantic love, a product chiefly of moderncivilization.

  I say chiefly, because I am convinced that conjugal love was knownsooner than romantic love, and for a very simple reason. Among thoseof the lower races where the sexes were not separated in youth, alicense prevailed which led to shallow, premature, temporary alliancesthat precluded all idea of genuine affection, even had these folk beencapable of such a sentiment; while among those tribes and peoples thatpractised the custom of separating the boys and girls from theearliest age, and not allowing them to become acquainted till aftermarriage, the growth of real, prematrimonial affection was, of course,equally impossible. In married life this was different. Livingtogether for years, having a common interest in their children,sharing the same joys and sorrows, husband and wife would learn therudiments of sympathy, and in happy cases there would be anopportunity for the growth of liking, attachment, fondness, or even,in exceptional instances, of affection. I cannot sufficientlyemphasize the fact that my theory is psychological or cultural, notchronological. The fact that a man lives in the year 1900 makes it nomore self-evident that he should be capable of sexual affection thanthe fact that a man lived seven centuries before Christ makes itself-evident that he could n
ot love affectionately. Hector andAndromache existed only in the brain of Homer, who was in manyrespects thousands of years ahead of his contemporaries. Whether sucha couple could really have existed at that time among the Trojans, orthe Greeks, we do not know, but in any case it would have been anexception, proving the rule by the painful contrast of the surroundingbarbarism.

  Exceptions may possibly occur among the lower races, through happycombinations of circumstances. C.C. Jones describes (69) a picture ofconjugal devotion among Cherokee Indians:

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

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

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

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

  "Ijan, a Balau chief, was bathing with his wife in the Lingga River, a place notorious for man-eating alligators, when Indra Lela, 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; 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 anyindication in them of affection? The Cherokee squaw mourns theimpending death of her husband, which is a selfish feeling. TheCalifornian, similarly, laments the loss of his spouse. The only thinghe does is to "tar his face in mourning," and even this is regarded bythe other Indians as "extraordinary" and "unprecedented." As for thewoman in the third story, it is to be noted that her act is one ofselfish despair, not of self-sacrifice for her husband's sake. Weshall see in later chapters that women of her grade abandon themselvesto suicidal impulses, not only where there is occasion for realdistress, but often on the most trivial pretexts. A few days later, inall probability, that same woman would have been ready to marryanother man. There is no evidence of altruistic action--action foranother's benefit--in any of these incidents, and altruism is the onlytest of genuine affection as distinguished from mere liking,attachment, and fondness, which, as was explained in the chapter onAffection, are the products of selfishness, more or less disguised. Ifthis distinction had been borne in mind a vast amount of confusioncould have been avoided in works of exploration and theanthropological treatises based on them. Westermarck, for instance,cites on page 357 a number of authors who asserted that sexualaffection, or even the appearance of it, was unknown to the Hovas ofMadagascar, the Gold Coast, and Winnabah natives, the Kabyles, theBeni-Amer, the Chittagong Hill Tribes, the Ponape islanders, theEskimo, the Kutchin, the Iroquois, and North American Indians ingeneral; while on the next pages he cites approvingly authors whofancied they had discovered sexual affection among tribes some of whom(Australians, Andamanese, Bushmans) are far below the peoples justmentioned. The cause of this discrepancy lies not in these racesthemselves, but in the inaccurate use of words, and the differentstandards of the writers, some accepting the rubbing of noses or othersexual caresses as evidence of "affection," while others take any actsindicating fondness, attachment, or a suicidal impulse as signs of it.In a recent work by Tyrrell (165), I find it stated that the Eskimomarriage is "purely a love union;" and in reading on I discover thatthe author's idea of a "love union" is the absence of a marriageceremony! Yet I have no doubt that Tyrrell will be cited hereafter asevidence that love unions are common among the Eskimos. So, again,when Lumholtz writes (213) that an Australian woman

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

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

  Morgan, the great authority on the Iroquois--the most intelligent ofNorth American Indians--lived long enough among them to realizevaguely that there must be a difference between sexual attachmentbefore and after marriage, and that the latter is an earlierphenomenon in human evolution. After declaring that among the Indians"marriage was not founded on the affections ... but was regulatedexclusively 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 temperaments they were below this passion in its simplest forms."

  He is no doubt right in declaring that the Indians before marriagewere "in their temperaments" below affectionate love "in its simplestforms"; but, that being so, it is difficult to see how they could haveacquired real affection after marriage. As a matter of fact we knowthat they treated their wives with a selfishness which is entirelyincompatible with true affection. The Rev. Peter Jones, moreover, anIndian 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 haveused the word attachment in place of affection. Bulmer (by accident, Isuspect) uses the right word when he says (Brough Smyth, 77) thatAustralians, notwithstanding their brutal forms of marriage, often"get much attached to each other." At the same time it is easy to showthat, if not among Australians or Indians, at any rate with such apeople as the ancient Greeks, conjugal affection may have existedwhile romantic love was still impossible. The Greeks looked down ontheir women as inferior beings. Now one can feel affection--conjugalor friendly--toward an inferior, but one cannot feel adoration--andadoration is absolutely essential to romantic love. Before romanticlove could be born it was necessary that women should not only berespected as equal to man but worshipped as his superior. This was notdone by any of the lower or ancient races; hence romantic love is apeculiarly modern sentiment, later than any other form of humanaffection.

  OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE

  When Shakspere wrote that "The course of true love never did runsmooth" he had in mind individual cases of courtship. But what is trueof individuals also applies to the story of love itself. For manythousands of years savagery and barbarism "proved an unrelenting foeto love," and it was with almost diabolical ingenuity that obstaclesto its birth and growth were maintained and multiplied. It wascrushed, balked, discountenanced, antagonized, discredited,disheartened so persistently that the wonder is not that there shouldbe so little true love even at the present day, but that there is anyat all. A whole volume might be written on the Obstacles to Love; myoriginal plan for this book included a long chapter on this matter;but partly to avoid repetition, partly to save space, I will conden
semy material to a few pages, considering briefly the followingobstacles: I. Ignorance and stupidity. II. Coarseness and obscenity.III. War. IV. Cruelty. V. Masculine selfishness. VI. Contempt forwomen. VII. Capture and sale of brides. VIII. Infant marriages. IX.Prevention of free choice. X. Separation of the sexes. XI. Sexualtaboos. XII. Race aversion. XIII. Multiplicity of languages. XIV.Social barriers. XV. Religious prejudice.

  I. IGNORANCE AND STUPIDITY

  Intelligence alone does not imply a capacity for romantic love. Dogsare the most intelligent of all animals, but they know nothing oflove; the most intelligent nations of antiquity--the Greeks, Romansand Hebrews--were strangers to this feeling; and in our times we haveseen that such intelligent persons as Tolstoi, Zola, Groncourt,Flaubert have been confessedly unable to experience real love such asTurgenieff held up to them. On the other hand, there can be no genuinelove without intelligence. It is true that maternal love exists amongthe lowly, but that is an instinct developed by natural selection,because without it the race could not have persisted. Conjugalattachment also was, as we have seen, necessary for the preservationof the race; whereas romantic love is not necessary for thepreservation of the race, but is merely a means for its improvement;wherefore it developed slowly, keeping pace with the growth of theintellectual powers of discrimination, the gradual refinement of theemotions, and the removal of diverse obstacles created by selfishness,coarseness, foolish taboos, and prejudices. A savage lives entirely inhis senses, hence sensual love is the only kind he can know. His loveis as coarse and simple as his music, which is little more than amonotonous rhythmic noise. Just as a man, unless he has musicalculture, cannot understand a Schumann symphony, so, unless he hasintellectual culture, he cannot love a woman as Schumann loved ClaraWieck.

  Stupid persons, men and women with blunt intellects, also have bluntfeelings, excepting those of a criminal, vengeful kind. Savages havekeener senses than we have, but their intellect and emotions are bluntand untrained. An Australian cannot count above ten, and Galton says(132) that Damaras in counting "puzzle very much after five, becauseno spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that arerequired for units." Spix and Martins (384) found it very difficult toget any information from the Brazilian (Coroado) because "scarcely hasone begun to question him about his language when he gets impatient,complains of headache, and shows that he cannot endure thiseffort"--for he is used to living entirely in and for his senses.Fancy such savages writing or reading a book like _The Reveries of aBachelor_ and you will understand why stupidity is an obstacle tolove, and realize the unspeakable folly of the notion that love isalways and everywhere the same. The savage has no imagination, andimagination is the organ of romantic love; without it there can be nosympathy, and without sympathy there can be no love.

  II. COARSENESS AND OBSCENITY

  Kissing and other caresses are, as we have seen, practices unknown tosavages. Their nerves being too coarse to appreciate even the morerefined forms of sensualism, it follows of necessity that they are toocoarse to experience the subtle manifestations of imaginativesentimental love. Their national addiction to obscene practices andconversation proves an insuperable obstacle to the growth of refinedsexual feelings. Details given in later chapters will show that whatTurner says of the Samoans, "From their childhood their ears arefamiliar with the most obscene conversation;" and what the Rev. GeorgeTaplan 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 obscenityand licentiousness to its present function as chiefly a means ofbringing young people together and providing innocent opportunitiesfor courtship; two extremes differing as widely as the coarse drumaccompaniment of a primitive dance from the sentimental melodies,soulful harmonies, and exquisite orchestral colors of a Strauss waltz.A remark made by Taine on Burns suggests how even acquired coarsenessin a mind naturally refined may crush the capacity for true love:

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

  The poets have done much to confuse the public mind in this matter bytheir fanciful and impossible pastoral lovers. The remark made in myfirst book, that "only an educated mind can feel romantic love," ledone of its reviewers to remark, half indignantly, half mournfully,"There goes the pastoral poetry of the world at a single stroke of thepen." Well, let it go. I am quite sure that if these poetic dreamershad ever come across a shepherdess in real life--dirty, unkempt,ignorant, coarse, immoral--they would themselves have made haste todisavow their heroines and seek less malodorous "maidens" forembodiments of their exalted fancies of love[128]. Richard Wagner waspromptly disillusioned when he came across some of those modernshepherdesses, the Swiss dairy-maids. "There are magnificent womenhere 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[129] to showing thatalong with chronic militancy there goes a brutal treatment of women,whereas industrial tribes are likely to treat their wives anddaughters well. To militancy is due the disregard of women's claimsshown in stealing or buying them, the inequality of status between thesexes entailed by polygamy; the use of women as laboring slaves, thelife-and-death power over wife and child. To which we may add that warproves an obstacle to love, by fostering cruelty and smotheringsympathy, and all the other tender feelings; by giving the coarsestmasculine qualities of aggressiveness and brute prowess the aspect ofcardinal virtues and causing the feminine virtues of gentleness,mercy, kindness, to be despised, and women themselves to be esteemedonly in so far as they appropriate masculine qualities; and byfostering rape and licentiousness in general. When Plutarch wrote that"the most warlike nations are the most addicted to love," he meant, ofcourse, lust. In wars of the past no incentive to brutal courageproved so powerful as the promise that the soldiers might have thewomen of captured cities. "Plunder if you succeed, and paradise if youfall. Female captives in the one case, celestial houris in theother"--such was, according to Burckhardt, the promise to their mengiven by Wahabi chiefs on the eve of battle.

  IV. CRUELTY

  Love depends on sympathy, and sympathy is incompatible with cruelty.It has been maintained that the notorious cruelty of the lower andwar-like races is manifested only toward enemies; but this is anerror. Some of the instances cited under "Sentimental Murder" and"Sympathy" show how often superstitious and utilitarian considerationssmother all the family feelings. Three or four more illustrations maybe added here. Burton says of the East Africans, that "when childhoodis past, the father and son become natural enemies, after the mannerof wild beasts." The Bedouins are not compelled by law or custom tosupport their aged parents, and Burckhardt (156) came across such menwhom their sons would have allowed to perish. Among the Somals itfrequently occurs that an old father is simply driven away and exposedto distress and starvation. Nay, incredible cases are related offathers being sold as slaves, or killed. The African missionary,Moffat, one day came across an old woman who had been left to diewithin an enclosure. He asked her why she had been thus deserted, andshe 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. MASCULINE SELFISHNESS

  The South American Chiquitos, as Dobrizhoffer informs us (II., 264),used to kill the wife of a sick man, believing her to be the cause ofhis illness, and fancying that his recovery would follow herdisappearance. Fijians have been known to kill and eat their wives,when they had no other use for them. Carl Bock (275) says of theMalays of Sumatra, that the men are extremely indolent and make thewomen their beasts of b
urden (as the lower races do in general).

  "I have," he says,

  "continually met a file of women carrying loads of rice or coffee on their heads, while the men 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 hundredsgiven in other parts of this volume, revealing uncivilized man'sdisposition to regard woman as made for his convenience, both in thisworld and the next. Nor is it necessary to add that such an attitudeis an insuperable obstacle to love, which in its essence isaltruistic.

  VI. CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN

  As late as the sixth century the Christian Provincial Council of Macondebated the question whether women have souls. I know of no earlypeople, savage, barbarous, semi-civilized or civilized--from theAustralian to the Greek--in which the men did not look down on thewomen as inferior beings. Now contempt is the exact opposite ofadoration, and where it prevails there can of course be no romanticlove.[130]

  VII. CAPTURE AND SALE OF BRIDES

  In the Homeric poems we read much about young women who were capturedand forced to become the concubines of the men who had slain theirfathers, brothers, and husbands. Other brides are referred to as[Greek: alphesiboiai], wooed with rich presents, literally "bringingin oxen." Among other ancient nations--Assyrians, Hebrews,Babylonians, Chaldeans, etc., brides had to be bought with property orits equivalent in service (as in the case of Jacob and Rachel).Serving for a bride until the parents feel repaid for their selfishtrouble in bringing her up, also prevails among savages as low as theAfrican Bushman and the Fuegian Indians, and is not therefore, asHerbert Spencer holds, a higher or later form of "courtship" thancapture or purchase. But it is less common than purchase, which hasbeen a universal custom. "All over the earth," says Letourneau (137),

  "among all races and at all times, wherever history gives us information, we find well-authenticated examples of marriage by purchase, which allows us to assert that during the middle period of civilization, the right of parents over their children, and especially over their daughters, included in all countries the privilege of selling them."

  In Australia a knife or a glass bottle has been held sufficientcompensation for a wife. A Tartar parent will sell his daughter for acertain number of sheep, horses, oxen, or pounds of butter; and so onin innumerable regions. As an obstacle to free choice and love unions,nothing more effective could be devised; for what Burckhardt writes(_B. and W._, I., 278) of the Egyptian peasant girls has a generalapplication. They are, he says, "sold in matrimony by their fathers_to the highest bidders_; a circumstance that frequently causes themost mean and unfeeling transactions."

  In his collection of Esthonian folk-songs Neus has a poem whichpathetically pictures the fate of a bartered bride. A girl going tothe field to cut flax meets a young man who informs her bluntly thatshe belongs to him, as he has bought her. "And who undertook to sellme?" she asks. "Your father and mother, your sister and brother," hereplies, adding frankly that he won the father's favor with a presentof a horse, the mother's with a cow, the sister's with a bracelet, thebrother's with an ox. Then the unwilling bride lifts her voice andcurses the family: "May the father's horse rot under him; may themother's cow yield blood instead of milk!" Hundreds of millions ofbartered brides have borne their fate more meekly. It is needless toadd that what has been said here applies _a fortiori_ to capturedbrides.

  VIII. INFANT MARRIAGES

  Of the diabolical habit of forcing girls into marriage before they hadreached the age of puberty and its wide prevalence I have alreadyspoken (293), and reference will be made to it in many of the pagesfollowing this. Here I may, therefore, confine myself to a few detailsrelating to one country, by way of showing vividly what a deadlyobstacle to courtship, free choice, love, and every tender andmerciful feeling, this cruel custom forms. Among all classes andcastes of Hindoos it has been customary from time immemorial to uniteboys of eight; seven, even six years, to girls still younger. It iseven prescribed by the laws of Manu that a man of twenty-four shouldmarry a girl of eight. Old Sanscrit verses have been found declaringthat "the mother, father, and oldest brother of a girl shall all bedamned if they allow her to reach maturity without being married;" andthe girl herself, in such a case, is cast out into the lowest class,too low for anyone to marry her.[131] In some cases marriage meansmerely engagement, the bride remaining at home with her parents, whodo not part with her till some years later. Often, however, thehusband takes immediate possession of his child-wife, and theconsequences are horrible. Of 205 cases reported in a BengalMedico-Legal Report, 5 ended fatally, 38 were crippled, and thegeneral effect of such cruelty is pathetically touched on by Mme.Ryder, who found it impossible to describe the anguish she felt whenshe saw these half-developed females, with their expression ofhopeless suffering, their skeleton arms and legs, marching behindtheir husbands at the prescribed distance, with never a smile on theirfaces.

  It would be a mistake to seek a partial excuse for this inhumanity inthe early maturing effects of a warm climate. Mme. Ryder expresslystates that a Hindoo girl of ten, instead of seeming older than aEuropean girl of that age, resembles our children at five or sixyears.

  IX. PREVENTION OF FREE CHOICE

  One of the unfortunate consequences of Darwin's theory of sexualselection was that it made him assume that

  "in utterly barbarous tribes the women have more power in choosing, rejecting, and tempting their lovers, or of afterward exchanging their husbands than might have been expected. As this is a point of importance,"

  he adds, "I will give in detail such evidence as I have been able tocollect;" which he proceeds to do. This "evidence in detail" consistsof three cases in Africa, five among American Indians, and a fewothers among Fijians, Kalmucks, Malayans, and the Korarks ofNortheastern Asia. Having referred to these twelve cases, he proceedswith his argument, utterly ignoring the twelve hundred facts thatoppose his assumption--a proceeding so unlike his usual candid habitof stating the difficulties confronting him, that this circumstancealone indicates how shaky he felt in regard to this point. Moreover,even the few instances he cites fail to bear out his doctrine. It isincomprehensible to me how he could claim the Kaffirs for his side.Though these Africans "buy their wives, and girls are severely beatenby their fathers if they will not accept a chosen husband, it isnevertheless manifest," Darwin writes, "from many facts given by theRev. Mr. Shooter, that they have considerable power of choice. Thus,very ugly, though rich men, have been known to fail in getting wives."What Shooter really does (50) is to relate the case of a man soill-favored that he had never been able to get a wife till he offereda big sum to a chief for one of his wards. She refused to go, but "herarms were bound and she was delivered like a captive. Later sheescaped and claimed the protection of a rival chief."

  In other words, this man did _not_ fail to get a wife, and the girlhad _no_ choice. Darwin ignores the rest of Shooter's narrative(55-58), which shows that while perhaps as a rule moral persuasion isfirst tried before physical violence is used, the girl in any case isobliged to take the man chosen for her. The man is highly praised inher presence, and if she still remains obstinate she has to"encounter the wrath of her enraged father ... the furious parent willhear nothing--go with her husband she must--if she return she shall beslain." Even if she elopes with another man she "may be forciblybrought back and sent to the one chosen by her father," and only bythe utmost perseverance can she escape his tyranny. Leslie (whomDarwin cites) is therefore wrong when he says "it is a mistake toimagine that a girl is sold by her father in the same manner, and withthe same authority, with which he would dispose of a cow." Those whoknew the Kaffirs most intimately agree with Shooter; the Rev. W.C.Holden, _e.g._, who writes in his elabor
ate work, _The Past and Futureof the Kaffir Races_ (189-211) that "it is common for the youngest,the healthiest, ... the handsomest girls to be sold to old men whoperhaps have already half-a-dozen concubines," and whom the work ofthese wives has made rich enough to buy another. A girl is in manyinstances "compelled by torture to accept the man she hates. The wholeis as purely a business transaction as the bartering of an ox orbuying a horse." From Dugmore's _Laws and Customs_ he cites thefollowing: "It sometimes occurs that the entreaties of the daughterprevail over the avarice of the father; but such cases, the Kaffirsadmit, are rare ... the highest bidder usually gains the prize."Holden adds that when a girl is obstreperous "they seize her by mainstrength, and drag her on the ground, as I have repeatedly seen;" andin his chapter on polygamy he gives the most harrowing details of thevarious cruelties practised on the poor girls who do not wish to besold like cows.

  That Kaffir girls "have been known to propose to a man," as Darwinsays, does not indicate that they have a choice, any more than thefact that they "not rarely run away with a favored lover." They mightpropose to a hundred men and not have their choice; and as for theelopement, that in itself shows they have no liberty of choice; for ifthey had they would not be obliged to run away. Finally, how couldDarwin reconcile his attitude with the remark of C. Hamilton, cited byhimself, that with the Kaffirs "the chiefs generally have the pick ofthe women for many miles round, and are most persevering inestablishing or confirming their privilege"?

  I have discussed this case "in detail" in order to show to whatdesperate straits a hopeless theory may reduce a great thinker. Tosuppose that in this "utterly barbarous tribe" the looks of the racecan be gradually improved by the women accepting only those males who"excite or charm them most" is simply grotesque. Nor is Darwin muchhappier with his other cases. When he wrote that "Among the degradedBushmen of Africa" (citing Burchell) "'when a girl has grown up towomanhood without having been betrothed, _which, however, does notoften happen_, her lover must gain her approbation as well as that ofher parents'"--the words I have italicized ought to have shown himthat this testimony was not for but against his theory. Burchellhimself tells us that Bushman girls "are most commonly betrothed" whenabout seven years old, and become mothers at twelve, or even at ten.To speak of choice in such cases, in any rational sense of the word,would be farcical even if the girls were free to do as they please,which they are not. With regard to the Fuegians, Darwin cites King andFitzroy to the effect that the Indian obtains the consent of theparents by doing them some service, and then attempts to carry off thegirl; "but if she is unwilling, she hides herself in the woods untilher admirer is heartily tired of looking for her and gives up hispursuit; _but this seldom happens_." If this passage means anything,it means that it is customary for the parents to decide upon who is tomarry their daughters, and that, though she may frustrate the plan,"this seldom happens." Darwin further informs us that "Hearnedescribes how a woman in one of the tribes of Arctic Americarepeatedly ran away from her husband and joined her lover." How muchthis single instance proves in regard to woman's liberty of choice orpower to aid sexual selection, may be inferred from the statement bythe same "excellent observer" of Indian traits (as Darwin himselfcalls him) that "it has ever been the custom among these people towrestle for any woman to whom they are attached; and, of course, thestrongest party always carries off the prize"--an assertion borne outby Richardson (II., 24) and others. But if the strongest man "alwayscarries off the prize," where does woman's choice come in? Hearne addsthat "this custom prevails throughout all their tribes" (104). Andwhile the other Indian instances referred to by Darwin indicate thatin case of decided aversion a girl is not absolutely compelled, asamong the Kaffirs, to marry the man selected for her, the customnevertheless is for the parents to make the choice, as among mostIndians, North and South.

  Whereas Darwin's claim that primitive women have "more power" todecide their fate as regards marriage "than might have been expected,"is comparatively modest, Westermarck goes so far as to declare thatthese women "are not, _as a rule,_ married without having any voice oftheir own in the matter." He feels compelled to this course because herealizes that his theory that savages originally ornamented themselvesin order to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex"presupposes of course that savage girls enjoy great liberty in thechoice of a mate." In the compilation of his evidence, unfortunately,Westermarck is even less critical and reliable than Darwin. Inreference to the Bushmen, he follows Darwin's example in citingBurchell, but leaves out the words "which, however, does not oftenhappen," which show that liberty of choice on the woman's part is notthe rule but a rare exception.[132] He also claims the Kaffirs,though, as I have just shown, such a claim is preposterous. To theevidence already cited on my side I may add Shooter's remarks (55),that if there are several lovers the girl is asked to decide forherself. "This, however, is merely formal," for if she chooses one whois poor the father recommends to her the one of whom he calculated toget the most cattle, and that settles the matter. Not even the widowsare allowed the liberty of choice, for, as Shooter further informs us(86), "when a man dies those wives who have not left the kraal remainwith the eldest son. If they wish to marry again, they must go to oneof their late husband's brothers." Among the African women "who haveno difficulty in getting the husbands whom they may desire,"Westermarck mentions the Ashantees, on the authority of Beecham (125).On consulting that page of Beecham I find that he does indeed declarethat "no Ashantee compels his daughter to become the wife of one shedislikes;" but this is a very different thing from saying that she canchoose the man she may desire. "In the affair of courtship," writesBeecham, "the wishes of the female are but little consulted; thebusiness being chiefly settled between the suitor and her parents."And in the same page he adds that "it is not infrequently the casethat infants are married to each other ... and infants are alsofrequently wedded to adults, and even to elderly men," while it isalso customary "to contract for a child before it is born." The samedestructive criticism might be applied to other negroes of WesternAfrica whom both Darwin and Westermarck claim on the very dubiousevidence of Reade.[133]

  Among other peoples to whom Westermarck looks for support of hisargument are the Fijians, Tongans, and natives of New Britain, Java,and Sumatra. He claims the Fijians on the peculiar ground (the italicsare mine) that among them "forced marriages are _comparatively_ rareamong the _higher classes_." That may be; but are not the higherclasses a small minority? And do not all classes indulge in the habitsof infant betrothal and of appropriating women by violence withoutconsulting their wishes? Regarding the Tongans, Westermarck cites thesupposition of Mariner that perhaps two-thirds of the girls hadmarried with their own free consent; which does not agree with theobservations of Vason (144), who spent four years among them:

  "As the choice of a husband is not in the power of the daughters but he is provided by the discretion of the parents, an instance of refusal on the part of the daughter is unknown in Tonga."

  He adds that this is not deemed a hardship there, where divorce andunchastity are so general.

  "In the New Britain Group, according to Mr. Romilly, after the man has worked for years to pay for his wife, and is finally in a position to take her to his house, she may refuse to go, and _he cannot claim back from the parents the large sums he has paid_ them in yams, cocoa-nuts, and sugar-canes."

  This Westermarck guilelessly accepts as proof of the liberty of choiceon the girl's part, missing the very philosophy of the whole matter.Why are girls not allowed in so many cases to choose their ownhusbands? Because their selfish parents want to benefit by sellingthem to the highest bidder. In the above case, on the contrary, as theitalics show, the selfish parents benefit by making the girl refuse togo with that man, keeping her as a bait for another profitable suitor.In all probability she refuses to go with him at the positive commandof her parents. What the real state of affairs is on the New BritainGroup we may gather from the revelations given in an art
icle on themarriage customs of the natives by the Rev. B. Danks in the _Journalof the Anthropological Institute_ (1888, 290-93): In New Britain, hesays, "the marriage tie has much the appearance of a money tie." Thereare instances of sham capture, when there is much laughter and fun;

  "but in many cases which came under my notice it was not a matter of form but painful earnestness." "It often happens that the young woman has a liking for another and none for the man who has purchased her. She may refuse to go to him. In that case her friends consider themselves disgraced by her conduct. She ought, according to their notions, to fall in with their arrangements with thankfulness and gladness of heart! They drag her along, beat her, kick and abuse her, and it has been my misfortune to see girls dragged past my house, struggling in vain to escape from their fate. Sometimes they have broken loose and then ran for the only place of refuge in all the country, the mission-house. I could render them no assistance until they had bounded up the steps of my veranda into our bedroom and hidden themselves under the bed, trembling for their lives. It has been my privilege and duty to stand between the infuriated brother or father, who has followed close upon the poor girl, spear in hand, vowing to put her to death for the disgrace she has brought upon them." "Liberty of choice,"

  indeed!

  "In some parts of Java, much deference is paid to the bride'sinclinations," writes Westermarck. But Earl declares (58) that amongthe Javanese "courtship is carried on entirely through the medium ofthe parents of the young people, and any interference on the part ofthe bride would be considered highly indecorous," And Raffles writes(I., Ch. VII.) that in Java "marriages are invariably contracted, notby the parties themselves, but by their parents or relations on theirbehalf." Betrothals of children, too, are customary. Regarding theSumatrans, Westermarck cites Marsden to the effect that among theRejang a man may run away with a virgin without violating the laws,provided he pays her parents for her afterward--which tells us littleabout the girl's choice. But why does he ignore Marsden's fullaccount, a few pages farther on, of Sumatran marriages in general?There are four kinds, one of which, he says, is a regular treatybetween the parties on a footing of equality; this is called marriageby _semando_. In the _jujur_ a sum of money is given by one man toanother "as a consideration for the person of his daughter, whosesituation in this case differs not much from that of a slave to theman she marries, and to his family." In other cases one virgin isgiven in exchange for another, and in the marriage by _ambel anak_ thefather of a young man chooses a wife for him. Finally he shows thatthe customs of Sumatrans do not favor courtship, the young men andwomen being kept carefully apart.

  At first sight Westermarck's chapter on the Liberty of Choice seemsrather imposing, as it consists of twenty-seven pages, while Darwindevoted only two to the subject. In reality, however, Westermarck hasfilled only eight pages with what he considers proofs of his theory,and after scouring the whole world he has not succeeded in bringingtogether thirty cases which stand the test of critical examination. Igrant him, though in several instances with suspicions, some AmericanIndian tribes, natives of Arorae, of the Society Islands, Micronesiansin general (?), Dyaks, Minabassers of Celebes, Burmese, Shans,Chittagong Hill tribes, and a few other wild tribes of India, possiblysome aboriginal Chinese tribes, Ainos, Kamchadales, Jakuts, Ossetes,Kalmucks, Aenezes, Touaregs, Shulis, Madis, the ancient Cathaei andLydians. My reasons for rejecting his other instances have alreadybeen given in part, and most of the other cases will be disposed of inthe pages relating to Australians, New Zealanders, American Indians,Hindoos, and Wild Tribes of India. In the chapter on Australia, aftercommenting on Westermarck's preposterous attempt to include that racein his list in the face of all the authorities, I shall explain alsowhy it is not likely that, as he maintains, still more primitive racesallowed their women greater freedom of choice than modern savagesenjoy in his opinion.

  To become convinced that the women of the lower races do not "as arule" enjoy the liberty of choice, we need only contrast the meagreresults obtained by Darwin and Westermarck with the vast number ofraces and tribes whose customs indicate that women are habituallygiven in marriage without being consulted as to their wishes. Amongthese customs are infant marriage, infant betrothal, capture,purchase, marrying whole families of sisters, and the levirate. It istrue that some of these customs do not affect all members of thetribes involved, but the very fact of their prevalence shows that theidea of consulting a woman's preference does not enter into the headsof the men, barring a few cases, where a young woman is soobstreperous that she may at any rate succeed in escaping a hatedsuitor, though even this (which is far from implying liberty ofchoice) is altogether exceptional. We must not allow ourselves to bedeceived by appearances, as in the case of the Moors of Senegambia,concerning whom Letourneau says (138) that a daughter has the right torefuse the husband selected for her, on condition of remainingunmarried; if she marries another, she becomes the slave of the manfirst selected for her. Of the Christian Abyssinians, Combes andTamisier say (II., 106) that the girls are never "seriously"consulted; and "at Sackatou a girl is usually consulted by herparents, but only as a matter of form; she never refuses."(Letourneau, 139.) The same may be said of China and Japan, where thesacred duty of filial obedience is so ingrained in a girl's soul thatshe would never dream of opposing her parents' wishes.

  Of the horrible custom of marrying helpless girls before they aremature in body or mind--often, indeed, before they have reached theage of puberty--I have already spoken, instancing some Borneans,Javanese, Egyptians, American Indians, Australians, Hottentots,natives of Old Calabar, Hindoos; to which may be added some Arabs andPersians, Syrians, Kurds, Turks, natives of Celebes, Madagascar,Bechuanas, Basutos, and many other Africans, etc. As for those whopractise infant betrothal, Westermarck's own list includes Eskimos,Chippewayans, Botocudos, Patagonians, Shoshones, Arawaks, Macusis,Iroquois; Gold Coast negroes, Bushmen, Marutse, Bechuanas, Ashantees,Australians; tribes of New Guinea, New Zealand, Tonga, Tahiti, andmany other islands of the South Sea; some tribes of the MalayArchipelago; tribes of British India; all peoples of the Turkishstock; Samoyedes and Tuski; Jews of Western Russia.

  As regards capture, good authorities now hold that it was not auniversal practice in all parts of the world; yet it prevailed verywidely--for instance, among Aleutian Islanders, Ahts, Bonaks, MacasIndians of Ecuador, all Carib tribes, some Brazilians, MosquitoIndians, Fuegians; Bushmen, Bechuanas, Wakamba, and other Africans;Australians, Tasmanians, Maoris, Fijians, natives of Samoa, Tukopia,New Guinea, Indian Archipelago; wild tribes of India; Arabs, Tartars,and other Central Asians; some Russians, Laplanders, Esthonians,Finns, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Scandinavians, Slavonians, etc. "Thelist," says Westermarck (387), "might easily be enlarged." As for thelist of peoples among whom brides were sold--usually to the highestbidder and without reference to feminine choice--that would be muchlarger still. Eight pages are devoted to it and two only to theexceptions, by Westermarck himself, who concludes (390) that "Purchaseof wives may, with even more reason than marriage by capture, be saidto form a general stage in the social history of mankind," How nearlyuniversal the practice is, or has been, may be inferred from the factthat Sutherland (I., 208), after examining sixty-one negro races,found fifty-seven recorded as purchasing their wives.

  Widely prevalent also was the custom of allowing a man who had marrieda girl to claim all her sisters as soon as they reached a marriageableage. Whatever their own preferences might be, they had no choice.Among the Indian tribes alone, Morgan mentions forty who indulged inthis custom. As for the levirate, that is another very wide-spreadcustom which shows an utter disregard of woman's preference andchoice. It might be supposed that widows, at any rate, ought always tobe allowed, in case they wished to marry again, to follow their ownchoice. But they are, like the daughters, regarded as personalproperty, and are inherited by their late husband's brother or someother male relative, who marries them himself or
disposes of them ashe pleases. Whether the acceptance of a brother's widow or widows is aright or a duty (prescribed by the desire for sons andancestor-worship) is immaterial for our purpose; for in either casethe widow must go as custom commands, and has no liberty of choice.The levirate prevails, or has prevailed, among a great number ofraces, from the lowest to those considerably advanced.

  The list includes Australians, many Indians, from the low Braziliansto the advanced Iroquois, Aleuts, Eskimos, Fijians, Samoans, CarolineIslanders, natives of New Caledonia, New Guinea, New Britain, NewHebrides, the Malay Archipelago, Wild tribes of India, Kamchadales,Ostiaks, Kirghiz, Mongolians in general, Arabs, Egyptians, Hebrews,natives of Madagascar, many Kaffir tribes, negroes of the Gold Coast,Senegambians, Bechuanas, and a great many other Africans, etc.

  Twelve pages of Westermarck's chapter on the Liberty of Choice aredevoted to peoples among whom not even a son is, or was, allowed tomarry without the father's consent. The list includes Mexicans,Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrews, Egyptians,Romans, Greeks, Hindoos, Germans, Celts, Russians, etc. In all thesecases the daughters, of course, enjoyed still less liberty ofdisposing of their hand. In short, the argument against Darwin andWestermarck is simply overwhelming--all the more when we look at thenumbers of the races who do not permit women their choice--the400,000,000 Chinese, 300,000,000 Hindoos, the Mohammedan millions, thewhole continent of Australia, nearly all of aboriginal America andAfrica, etc.

  A drowning man clings to a straw. "In Indian and Scandinavian tales,"Westermarck informs us,

  "virgins are represented as having the power to dispose of themselves freely. Thus it was agreed that Skade should choose for herself a husband among the Asas, but she was to make her choice by the feet, the only part of their persons she was allowed to see."

  Obviously the author of this tale from the _Younger Edda_ had moresense of humor than some modern anthropologists have. No lesstopsy-turvy is the Hindoo _Svayamvara_ or "Maiden's Choice," to whichWestermarck alludes (162). This is an incident often referred to inepics and dramas. "It was a custom in royal circles," writesSamuelson, "when a princess became marriageable, for a tournament tobe held, and the _victor was chosen_ by the princess as her husband."If the sarcasm of the expression "Maiden's Choice" is unconscious, itis all the more amusing. How far Hindoo women of all classes were andare from enjoying the liberty of choice, we shall see in the chapteron India.

  X. SEPARATION OF THE SEXES

  I have given so much space to the question of choice because it is oneof exceptional importance. Where there is no choice there can he noreal courtship, and where there is no courtship there is noopportunity for the development of those imaginative and sentimentaltraits which constitute the essence of romantic love. It by no meansfollows, however, that where choice is permitted to girls, as with theDyaks, real love follows as a matter of course; for it may beprevented, as it is in the case of these Dyaks, by their sensuality,coarseness, and general emotional shallowness and sexual frivolity.The prevention of choice is only one of the obstacles to love, but itis one of the most formidable, because it has acted at all times andamong races of all degrees of barbarism or civilization up to modernEurope of two or three centuries ago. And to the frustration and freechoice was added another obstacle--the separation of the sexes. SomeIndians and even Australians tried to keep the sexes apart, thoughusually without much success. In their cause no harm was done to thecause of love, because these races are constitutionally incapable ofromantic love; but in higher stages of civilization the strictseclusion of the women was a fatal obstacle to love. Whereverseparation of the sexes and chaperonage prevails, the only kind ofamorous infatuation possible, as a rule, is sensual passion, fiery buttransient. To love a girl sentimentally--that is, for her mentalbeauty and moral refinement as well as her bodily charms--a man mustget acquainted with her, be allowed to meet her frequently. This wasnot possible until within a few generations. The separation of thesexes, by preventing all possibility of refined and legitimatecourtship, favored illicit amours on one side, loveless marriages onthe other, thus proving one of the most formidable obstacles to love."It is not enough to give time for mutual knowledge and affectionafter marriage," wrote the late Henry Drummond.

  "Nature must deepen the result by extending it to the time before marriage.... Courtship, with its vivid perceptions and quickened emotions, is a great opportunity for evolution; and to institute and lengthen reasonably a period so rich in impression is one of its latest and brightest efforts."

  XI. SEXUAL TABOOS

  If a law were passed compelling every man living in Rochester, N.Y.,who wanted a wife to get her outside of that city, in Buffalo,Syracuse, Utica, or some other place, it would be considered anoutrageous restriction of free choice, calculated to diminish greatlythe chances of love-matches based on intimate acquaintance. If such alaw had existed for generations and centuries, sanctioned by religionand custom and so strictly enforced that violation of it entailed thedanger of capital punishment, a sentiment would have grown up incourse of time making the inhabitants of Rochester look upon marriagewithin the city with the same horror as they do upon incestuousunions. This is not an absurd or fanciful supposition. Such laws andcustoms actually did prevail in this very section of New York State.The Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Indians was divided into twophratries, each of which was again subdivided into four clans, namedafter their totems or animals; the Bear, Wolf, Beaver, and Turtleclans belonging to one phratry, while the other included the Deer,Snipe, Heron, and Hawk clans. Morgan's researches show that originallyan Indian belonging to one phratry could marry a woman belonging tothe other only. Subsequently the line was drawn less strictly, butstill no Indian was allowed to marry a squaw of his own clan, thoughthere might be no blood, relationship between them. If an Algonkinmarried a girl of his clan he committed a crime for which his nearestrelatives might put him to death. This law has prevailed widely amongthe wild races in various parts of the globe. McLennan, who firstcalled attention to its prevalence and importance, called it exogamy,or marrying-out.

  What led to this custom is not known definitely; nearly everyanthropologist has his own theory on the subject.[134] Luckily we arenot concerned here with the origin and causes of exogamy, but onlywith the fact of its existence. It occurs not only among barbarians ofa comparatively high type, like the North American Indians, but amongthe lowest Australian savages, who put to death any man who marries orassaults a woman of the same clan as his. In some Polynesian islands,among the wild tribes of India as well as the Hindoos, in variousparts of Africa, the law of exogamy prevails, and wherever it existsit forms a serious obstacle to free choice--_i.e._, free love, in theproper sense of the expression. As Herbert Spencer remarks,

  "The exogamous custom as at first established [being connected with capture] implies an extremely abject condition of women; a brutal treatment of them; an entire absence of the higher sentiments that accompany the relations of the sexes."

  While exogamy thwarts love by minimizing the chances of intimateacquaintance and genuine courtship, there is another form of sexualtaboo which conversely and designedly frustrates the tendency ofintimate acquaintance to ripen into passion and love. Though we do notknow just how the horror of incest arose, there can be no doubt thatthere must be a natural basis for so strong and widely prevalent asentiment.In so far as this horror of incest prevents the marriage of nearrelatives, it is an obstacle to love that must be commended asdoubtless useful to the race. But when we find that in China there areonly 530 surnames, and that a man who marries a woman of the samesurname is punished for the crime of "incest"; that the Church underTheodosius the Great forbade the union of relatives to the seventhdegree; that in many countries a man could not wed a relative bymarriage; that in Rome union with an adopted brother or sister was asrigidly forbidden as with a real sister or brother;--when we comeacross such facts we see that artificial and foolish notions regardingince
st must be added to the long list of agencies that have retardedthe growth of free choice and true love. And it should be noted thatin all these cases of exogamy and taboos of artificial incest, theman's liberty of choice was restricted as well as the woman's. Thusour cumulative evidence against the Darwin-Westermarck theory of freechoice is constantly gaining in weight.

  XII. RACE AVERSION

  Max O'Rell once wrote that he did not understand how there could besuch a thing as mulattoes in the world. It is certainly safe to saythat there are none such as a consequence of love. The features,color, odor, tastes, and habits of one race have ever aroused theantagonism of other races and prevented the growth of that sympathywhich is essential to love. In a man strong passion may overcome theaversion to a more or less enduring union with a woman of a lowerrace, just as extreme hunger may urge him to eat what his palate wouldnormally reject; but women seem to be proof against this temptation tostoop: in mixed marriages it is nearly always the man who belongs tothe superior race. At first thought it might seem as if this racialaversion could not do much to retard the growth of free choice andlove, since in early times, when facilities for travel were poor, theraces could not mix anyway as they do now. But this would be a greaterror. Migrations, wars, slave-making and plundering expeditions haveat all times commingled the peoples of the earth, yet nothing is moreremarkable than the stubborn tenacity of racial prejudices.

  "Count de Gobineau remarks that not even a common religion and country can extinguish the hereditary aversion of the Arab to the Turk, of the Kurd to the Nestorian of Syria, of the Magyar to the Slav. Indeed, so strong, among the Arabs, is the instinct of ethnical isolation that, as a traveller relates, at Djidda, where sexual morality is held in little respect, a Bedouin woman may yield herself for money to a Turk or European, but would think herself forever dishonored if she were joined to him in lawful wedlock."[135]

  We might suppose that the coarser races would be less capable of suchaversions than the half-civilized, but the contrary is true. InAustralia nearly every tribe is the deadly enemy of every other tribe,and according to Chapman a Bushman woman would consider herselfdegraded by intercourse with anyone not belonging to her tribe."Savage nations," says Humboldt, in speaking of the Chaymas of NewAndalusia,

  "are subdivided into an infinity 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 meettheir Heros. Poor Cupid! Everybody and everything seems to be againsthim.

  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 unlesshe can speak to her. Now Africa alone has 438 languages, besides anumber of dialects. Dr. Finsch says (38) that on the Melanasian islandof Tanua nearly every village has a dialect of its own which those ofthe next village cannot understand; and this is a typical case.American Indians usually communicate with each other by means of asign language. India has countless languages and dialects, and inCanton the Chinamen from various parts of the Empire have to conversewith each other in "pidjin English." The Australians, who are perhapsall of one race, nevertheless have no end of different names for evenso common a thing as the omnipresent kangaroo.[136] In Brazil, saysvon Martins, travellers often come across a language

  "used only by a few individuals connected with each other by relationship, who are thus completely isolated, and can hold no communication with any of their other countrymen far or near";

  and how great was the confusion of tongues among other South AmericanIndians may be inferred from the statement (Waitz, III., 355) that theCaribs were so much in the habit of capturing wives from differenttribes and peoples that the men and women of each tribe never spokethe same language. Under such circumstances a wife might becomeattached to her husband as a captured, mute, and maltreated dog mightto his master; but romantic love is as utterly out of the question asit is between master and dog.

  XIV. SOCIAL BARRIERS

  Not content with hating one another cordially, the different races,peoples, and tribes have taken special pains at all times andeverywhere to erect within their own limits a number of barriersagainst free choice and love. In France, Germany, and other Europeancountries there is still a strong prejudice against marriages betweennobles and commoners, though the commoner may be much nobler than thearistocrat in everything except the genealogical table. Civilizationis gradually destroying this obstacle to love, which has done so muchto promote immorality and has led to so many tragedies involving anumber of kings and princes, victims to the illusion that accident ofbirth is nobler than brains or refinement. But among the ancientcivilized and mediaeval peoples the social barrier was as rigidly heldup as the racial prejudices. Milman remarks, in his _History of LatinChristianity_ (I., 499, 528), that among the ancient Romans

  "there could 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 actresses, tavern-keepers, the daughters of tavern-keepers, procurers (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 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 Ripuarian 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 Ripuarian 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 connection."

  In mediaeval Germany the line was so sharply drawn between the socialclasses that for a long time slavery, or even death, was thepunishment for a mixed marriage. In course of time this barbarouscustom fell into disuse, but free choice continued to be discouragedby the law that if a man married a woman beneath him in rank, neithershe nor her children were raised to his rank, and in case of his deathshe had no claim to the usual provisions legally made for widows.

  In India the caste prejudices are so strong and varied that they formalmost insuperable barriers to free love-choice. "We find casteswithin castes," says Sir Monier Williams (153), "so that even theBrahmans are broken up and divided into numerous races, which againare subdivided into numerous tribes, families, or sub-castes," and allthese, he adds, "do not intermarry." In Japan, until three decadesago, social barriers as to marriage were rigidly enforced, and inChina, to this day, slaves, boatmen, actors, policemen, can marrywomen of their own class only. Nor are these difficulties eliminatedat once as we descend the ladder of civilization. In Brazil, CentralAmerica, in the Polynesian and other Pacific Islands and elsewhere wefind such barriers to free marriage, and among the Malayan Hovas ofMadagascar even the slaves are subdivided into three classes, which donot intermarry! It is only among those peoples which are too low to beable to experience sentimental love anyway that this formidableobstacle of class prejudice vanishes, while race and tribal hatredremain in full force.

&nbs
p; XV. RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE

  Among peoples sufficiently advanced to have dogmas, religion hasalways proved a strong barrier in the way of the free bestowal ofaffection. Not only have Mohammedans and Christians hated and shunnedeach other, but the different Christian sects for a long time detestedand tabooed one another as cordially as they did the heathen and theJews. Tertullian denounced the marriage of a Christian with a heathenas fornication, and Westermarck cites Jacobs's remark that

  "the folk-lore of Europe regarded the Jews as something 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 enoughhas been said to make it clear why romantic love was the last of thesentiments to be developed.

  Having considered the divers ingredients and different kinds of loveand distinguished romantic love from sensual passion andsentimentality, as well as from conjugal affection, we are now in aposition to examine intelligently and in some detail a number of racesin all parts of the world, by way of further corroborating andemphasizing the conclusions reached.

  SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE

  What is the lowest of all human races? The Bushmen of South Africa,say some ethnologists, while others urge the claims of the natives ofAustralia, the Veddahs of Ceylon, or the Fuegians of South America. Asculture cannot be measured with a yardstick, it is impossible toarrive at any definite conclusion. For literary and geographicreasons, which will become apparent later on, I prefer to begin thesearch for traces of romantic love with the Bushmen of South Africa.And here we are at once confronted by the startling assertion of theexplorer 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 oneof the lowest human races--then I have been pursuing awill-o'-the-wisp in the preceding pages of this book, and it will be awaste of ink and paper to write another line. But _is_ it true? Let usfirst see what manner of mortals these Bushmen are, before subjectingMr. Chapman's special testimony to a cross-examination. The followingfacts are compiled from the most approved authorities.

  BUSHMAN QUALIFICATIONS FOR LOVE

  The eminent anatomist Fritsch, in his valuable work on the natives ofSouth Africa (386-407), describes the Bushmen as being even inphysical development far below the normal standard. Their limbs are"horribly thin" in both sexes; both women and men are "frightfullyugly," and so much alike that, although they go about almost naked, itis difficult to tell them apart. He thinks they are probably theaboriginal inhabitants of Africa, scattered from the Cape to theZambesi, and perhaps beyond. They are filthy in their habits, and"washing the body is a proceeding unknown to them." When the Frenchanatomist Cuvier examined a Bushman woman, he was reminded of an apeby her head, her ears, her movements, and her way of pouting the lips.The language of the Bushmen has often been likened to the chatteringof monkeys. According to Bleek, who has collected their tales, theirlanguage is of the lowest known type. Lichtenstein (II., 42) found theBushman women like the men, "ugly in the extreme," adding that "theyunderstand each other more by their gestures than by their speaking.""No one has a name peculiar to himself." Others have described them ashaving protuberant stomachs, prominent posteriors, hollowed-out backs,and "few ideas but those of vengeance and eating." They have only twonumerals, everything beyond two being "much," and except in thosedirections where the struggle for life has sharpened their wits, theirintellectual faculties in general are on a level with theirmathematics. Their childish ignorance is illustrated by a questionwhich some of them seriously asked Chapman (I., 83) one day--whetherhis big wagons were not the mothers of the little ones with slendertires.

  How well their minds are otherwise adapted for such anintellectualized, refined, and esthetic feeling as love, may also beinferred from the following observations. Lichtenstein points out thatwhile 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 Chapman (I., 57), "in whatever state of decomposition,is ever discarded by Bushmen." They dispute carrion with wolves andvultures. Rabbits they eat skins and all, and their menu is varied byall sorts of loathsome reptiles and insects.

  No other savages, says Lichtenstein, betray "so high a degree ofbrutal ferocity" as the Bushmen. They "kill their own children withoutremorse." The missionary Moffat says (57) that "when a mother dieswhose infant is not able to shift for itself, it is, without anyceremony, 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 beatenis apt to take revenge by killing their child; and that, on variousoccasions, parents smother their children, cast them away in thedesert, or bury them alive without remorse. Murder is an amusement,and is considered a praiseworthy act. Livingstone (_M.T._, 159) tellsof a Bushman who thought his god would consider him a "clever fellow"because he had murdered a man, two women, and two children. Whenfathers and mothers become too old to be of any use, or to take careof themselves, they are abandoned in the desert to be devoured aliveby wild beasts. "I have often reasoned with the natives on this cruelpractice," says the missionary Moffat (99); "in reply to which, theywould only laugh." "It appears an awful exhibition of humandepravity," he adds, "when children compel their parents to perish forwant, or to be devoured by beasts of prey in a desert, _from no othermotive but sheer laziness._" Kicherer says there are a few cases of"natural affection" sufficient to raise these creatures to "a levelwith the brute creation," Moffat, too, refers to exceptional cases ofkindness, but the only instance he gives (112) describes their terroron finding he had drunk some water poisoned by them, and theirgladness when he escaped--which terror and gladness were, however,very probably inspired not by sympathy but by the idea of punishmentat causing the death of a white man. Chapman himself, the chosenchampion of the Bushmen, relates (I., 67) how, having heard of Bushmenrescuing and carrying home some Makalolos whom they had found dying ofthirst 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 carrying human beings whom they had found half dead out of a desert implies an act of charity quite inconsistent with their natural disposition and habits."

  Barrow declares (269) that if Bushmen come across a Hottentot guardinghis master's cattle,

  "not contented with putting 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 thusleave him to be pecked to death by crows.

  "LOVE IN ALL THEIR MARRIAGES"

  And yet--I say it once more--we are asked to believe there is "love inall the marriages" of these fiendish creatures--beings who, asKicherer says, live in holes or caves, where they "lie close togetherlike pigs in a sty" and of whom Moffat declares that with theexception of Pliny's Troglodites "no tribe or people are surely morebrutish, ignorant, and miserable." Our amazement at Chapman'sassertion increases when we examine his argument more closely. Here itis (I., 258-59):

  "Although they have a plurality of wives, which they also obtain by purchase, there is still love in all their marriages, and courtship among them is a very formal and, in some respects, a rath
er 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 off 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, 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 numberof lines a greater amount of ignorance and naivete than this passageincludes. And yet a number of anthropologists have accepted thispassage serenely as expert evidence that there is love in all themarriages of the lowest of African races. Peschel was misled by it;Westermarck triumphantly puts it at the head of his cases intended toprove that "even very rude savages may have conjugal affection;" Mollmeekly accepts it as a fact (_Lib. Sex._, Bd. I., Pt. 2, 403); and itseems to have made an impression on Katzel, and even on Fritsch. Ifthese writers had taken the trouble to examine Chapman'squalifications for serving as a witness in anthropological questions,they would have saved themselves the humiliation of being thus duped.His very assertion that there is love in _all_ Bushman marriages oughtto have shown them what an untrustworthy witness he is; for a morereckless and absurd statement surely was never penned by anyglobe-trotter. There is not now, and there never has been, a peopleamong whom love could be found in all marriages, or half themarriages. In another place (I., 43) Chapman gives still more strikingevidence of his unfitness to serve as a witness. Speaking of thefamily 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 interpreter explained the matrimonial usages of their people."

  Chapman's own editor was tempted by this exhibition of ignorance towrite the following footnote: "The author seems not to have been awarethat such early marriages are common among the Hindoos." He might haveadded "and among most of the lower races."

  The ignorance which made Chapman "laugh outright" when he wasconfronted by one of the most elementary facts of anthropology, isresponsible for his reckless assertions in the paragraph above quoted.It is an ignorant assumption on his part that it is the feelings of"respect, duty, and gratitude" that make a Bushman provide his bride'sfather with game for a couple of winters. Such feelings are unknown tothe Bushman's soul. Working for the bride's father is simply his way(if he has no property to give) of paying for his wife--anillustration of the widespread custom of service. If polygamy and thecustom of purchasing wives do not, as Chapman intimates, prevent lovefrom entering into all Bushman marriages, then these aborigines mustbe constructed on an entirely different plan from other human beings,among whom we know that polygamy crushes monopoly of affection, whilea marriage by purchase is a purse-affair, not a heart-affair--the girlgoing nearly always to the highest bidder.

  But Chapman's most serious error--the one on which he founded histheory that there is love in all Bushman marriages--lies in hisassumption that the ceremony of sham capture indicates modesty andlove, whereas, as we saw in the chapter on Coyness, it is a meresurvival of capture, the most ruffianly way of securing a bride, inwhich her choice or feelings are absolutely disregarded, and whichtells us nothing except that a man covets a woman and that she feignsresistance because custom, as taught by her parents, compels her to doso. Inasmuch as she _must_ resist whether she likes the man or not,how could such sham "coyness" be a symptom of love? Moreover, itappears that even this sham coyness is exceptional, since, as Burchellinforms us (II., 59), it is only when a girl grows up to womanhoodwithout having been betrothed--"which, however, seldom happens"--thatthe female receives the man's attentions with such an "affectation ofgreat alarm and disinclination on her part."

  Burchell also informs us that a Bushman will take a second wife whenthe first one has become old, "not in years but in constitution;" andBarrow discovered the same thing (I., 276): "It appeared that it wascustomary for the elderly men to have two wives, one old and pastchild-bearing, the other young." Chapman, too, relates that a Bushmanwill often cast off his early wife and take a younger one, and as thatdoes not prevent him from finding affection in their conjugal unions,we are enabled from this to infer that "love" means to him notenduring sympathy or altruistic capacity and eagerness forself-sacrifice, but a selfish, transient fondness continuing only aslong as a woman is young and can gratify a man's sexual appetite. Thatkind 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 eithergood or bad, so a man or woman is either chaste or unchaste. Otherwriters, who had no desire to whitewash savages, tell us not only"comparatively" but positively what Bushman morals are. A Bushman toldTheophilus Halm (_Globus_, XVIII., 122) that quarrels for thepossession of women often lead to murder; "nevertheless, thelascivious fellow assured me it was a fine thing to appropriate thewives of others." Wake (I., 205) says they lend their wives tostrangers, and Lichtenstein tells us (II., 48) that "the wife is notindissolubly united to the husband; but when he gives her permission,she may go whither she will and associate with any other man." Andagain (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."[137]

  That this is not too severe a criticism is obvious from the fact thatLichtenstein, in judging savages, was rather apt to err on the side ofleniency. The equally generous and amiable missionary Moffat (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 realcharacter. Had he dwelt among them, accompanied them on journeys, andknown them as he (Moffat) did, "he would not have attempted to revivethe fabled delights and bliss of ignorance reported to exist in theabodes of heathenism."

  It is in comparison with these Bechuanas that Chapman calls theBushmen moral, obviously confounding morality with licentiousness.Without having any moral principles at all, it is quite likely thatthe Bushmen are less licentious than their neighbors for the simplereason that they are less well-fed; for as old Burton remarks, for themost part those are "aptest to love that are young and lusty, live atease, stall-fed, free from cares, like cattle in a rankpasture"--whereas the Bushmen are nearly always thin, half-starveddenizens of the African deserts, enervated by constant fears, and sounmanly that "a single musket shot," says Lichtenstein, "will put ahundred to flight, and whoever rushes upon them with only a good stickin his hand has no reason to fear any resistance from ever so large anumber."

  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, generallyspeaking, henpecked. They always consult their wives. The Damaras donot." Chapman himself, with unconscious humor, gives us (I., 391) asample of the "love" which he found in "all Bushman marriages;" hisremarks confirming at the same time the truth I dwelt on in thechapter on Individual Preference, that among savages the sexes areless individualized than with us, the men being more effeminate, thewomen
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 accompanied 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 theirhusbands' heads, the Bushman women have not succeeded in teaching themeven the rudiments of gallantry. "The woman is a beast of burden,"says Hahn; "at the same time she is subjected to ill-treatment whichnot seldom leads to death." When camp is moved, the gallant husbandcarries his spear and quiver, the wife "does the rest," carrying thebaby, the mat, the earthen cooking-pot, the ostrich shells, and abundle of skins. If it happens, as it often does, that there is notenough to eat, the wife has to go hungry. In revenge she usuallyprepares her own food only, leaving him to do his own cooking. If awife falls ill on the way to a new camping-place, she is left behindto perish. (Ratzel, I., 7.)

  In conclusion, and as a climax to my argument, I will quote thetestimony of three missionaries who did not simply make a flying visitor two to the country of the Bushmen, as Chapman did, but lived amongthem. The Rev. R. Moffat (49) cites the missionary Kicherer, "whosecircumstances while living among them afforded abundant opportunitiesof becoming intimately acquainted with their real condition," and whowrote that the Bushmen "are total strangers to domestic happiness. Themen have several wives, but conjugal affection is little known." Thisopinion is thus endorsed by Moffat, and a third missionary, the Rev.F. Fleming, wrote (167) that among Bushmen "conjugal affection seemstotally unknown," and pre-matrimonial love is of course out ofquestion in a region where girls are married as infants. The wifealways has to work harder than the husband. If she becomes weak or illshe is unceremoniously left behind to starve. (Ratzel, I., 72.)

  FALSE FACTS REGARDING HOTTENTOTS

  Darwin has well observed that a false argument is comparativelyharmless because subsequent discussion is sure to demolish it, whereasa false fact may perplex speculation for ages. Chapman's assertionthat there is love in all Bushman marriages is one of these falsefacts, as our cross-examination has shown. In passing now to theneighbors of the Bushmen, the Hottentots, let us bear in mind thelesson taught. They called themselves Khoi-Khoin, "men of men," whileVan Riebeck'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, orthe Kaffirs, whom we shall consider next. Ethnologists are not agreedas to the relationship that exists between Bushmen and Hottentots, butit is certain that the latter represent a somewhat higher level ofcivilization. Yet, here again we must guard carefully against "falsefacts," especially in reference to the topic that interests us--therelations of the sexes. As late as 1896 the eminent Americananthropologist, Dr. Brinton, had an article in _Science_ (October16th), in which he remarked that "one trait which we admire inHottentots is their regard for women," He was led into making thisassertion by an article entitled "Woman in Hottentot Poetry," whichappeared in the German periodical _Globus_ (Vol. 70, pp. 173-77). Itwas written by Dr. L. Jakobowski, and is quite as misleading asChapman's book. Its logic is most peculiar. The writer first shows (tohis own satisfaction) that the Hottentots treat their women somewhatbetter than other South Africans do, and from this "fact" he goes onto infer that they must have love-songs! He admits, indeed, that (witha few exceptions, to be presently considered) we know nothing of thesesongs, but it "seems certain" that they must be sung at the eroticdances of the natives; these, however, carefully conceal them from themissionaries, 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 assertion thatHottentots 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 him chained and punished, and if a slave who is being castigated 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."

  EFFEMINATE MEN AND MASCULINE WOMEN

  If all these statements were real facts--and we shall presently seethat they are not--they would prove no more than that the modernHottentots, like their neighbors, the Bushmen, are hen-pecked. Barrow(I., 286) speaks of the "timid and pusillanimous mind whichcharacterizes 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 condition, which is that of a languid, listless, phlegmatic people, in whom the prolific powers of nature seem to be almost exhausted."

  It does not, therefore, surprise us to be told (by Thunberg) that "itfrequently happens that a woman marries two husbands." And these womenare anything but feminine and lovable. One of the champions of theHottentots, Theophilus Hahn, says (_Globus_, XII., 304) of the Namaquawomen that they love to torture their slaves: "When they cudgel aslave one can easily read in their faces the infernal joy it givesthem to witness the tortures of their victims." He often saw womenbelaboring the naked back of a slave with branches of the cruel_acacia delinens_, and finally rub salt or saltpetre into the wounds.Napier (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-songsamong these cruel Hottentots, Jakobowski had no trouble in findingsongs of hate, of defiance, and revenge. Even these cannot be citedwithout omitting objectionable words. Here is one, properlyexpurgated:

  "Take this man away from me that he may be beaten and his mother weep over 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 chainedand punished is obviously a cock-and-bull story. It is diametricallyopposed to what Peter Kolben says: "The eldest son has in a manner anabsolute authority over all his brothers and sisters." "Among theHottentots an eldest son may after his father's death retain hisbrothers and sisters in a sort of slavery." Kolben is now accepted asthe leading authority on the aboriginal Hottentots, as he found themtwo centuries ago, before the missionaries had had time to influencetheir customs. What makes him the more unimpeachable as a witness inour case is that he is decidedly prejudiced in favor of theHottentots.[138] What was the treatment of women by Hottentots aswitnessed by Kolben? Is it true that, as Jakobowski asserts, theHottentot woman rules at home? Quite true; most emphatically so. Thehusband, says Kolben (I., 252-55), after the hut is built,

  "has absolutely nothing more to do with the house and domestic 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 himse
lf 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."

  The wife, he goes on to say, has to cut the fire-wood and carry it tothe house, gather roots and other food and prepare it for the wholefamily, milk the cows, and take care of the children. The olderdaughters help her, but need so much watching that they are only anadditional care; and all this time the husband "lies lazily on hisback." "Such is the wretched life of the Hottentot woman," he sums up;"she lives in a perpetual slavery." Nor is there any family life orcompanionship, 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 commands as master, she obeys as slave, without ever complaining."

  "REGARD FOR WOMEN"

  "What we admire in Hottentots is their regard for women." Here aresome more illustrations of this loving "regard for women." The Rev. J.Philip (II., 207) says that the Namaqua women begged Moffat to remainwith them, telling him that before he came "we were treated by the menas brutes, and worse than they treated brutes." While the men loafedthey had to go and collect food, and if they returned unsuccessful, aswas often the case, they were generally beaten. They had to cook forthe 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 toconsume the offals given to us." When twins are born, says Kolben(304), there is great rejoicing if they are boys; two fat buffaloesare killed, and all the neighbors invited to the feast; but if thetwins are girls, two sheep only are killed and there is no feast orrejoicing. If one of the twins is a girl she is invariably killed,buried alive, or exposed on a tree or in the bushes. When a boy hasreached a certain age he is subjected to a peculiarly disgustingceremony, and after that he may insult his mother with impunitywhenever he chooses: "he may cudgel her, if he pleases, to suit hiswhim, without any danger of being called to an account for it." Kolbensays he often witnessed such insolence, which was even applauded as asign of manliness and courage. "What barbarity!" he exclaims. "It is aresult of the contempt which these peoples feel for women." He used toremonstrate with them, but they could hardly restrain theirimpatience, and the only answer he could get was "_it is the custom ofthe Hottentots, they have never done otherwise_."

  Andersson (_Ngami_, 332) says of the Namaqua 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 themen could do as they chose. In later times a lashing with a strap ofrhinoceros hide was substituted for burning. Kolben thought that theserious punishment for adultery prevalent in his time argued thatthere must be love among the Hottentots, though he confessed he couldsee no signs of it. He was of course mistaken in his assumption, for,as was made clear in our chapter on Jealousy, murderous rage at aninfringement on a man's conjugal property does not constitute or provelove, but exists entirely apart from it.

  CAPACITY FOR REFINED LOVE

  The injuriousness of "false facts" to science is illustrated by aremark which occurs in the great work on the natives of South Africaby Dr. Fritsch, who is justly regarded as one of the leadingauthorities on that subject. Speaking of the Hottentots (Namaqua) hesays (351) that "whereas Tindall indicates sensuality and selfishnessas two of their most prominent characteristics, Th. Hahn lauds theirconjugal attachment independent of fleshly love." Here surely isunimpeachable evidence, for Theophilus Hahn, the son of a missionary,was born and bred among these peoples. But if we refer to the passagewhich Fritsch alluded to (_Globus_, XII., 306), we find that thereasons Hahn gives for believing that Hottentots are capable ofsomething higher than carnal desires are that many of them, thoughrich enough to have a harem, content themselves with one wife, andthat if a wife dies before her husband, he very seldom marries again.Yet in the very next sentence Hahn mentions a native trait whichsufficiently explains both these customs. "Brides," he says, "costmany oxen and sheep, and the men, as among other South Africanpeoples, the Kaffirs, for instance, would rather have big herds ofcattle than a good-looking wife." Apart from this explanation, I failto see what necessary connection there is between a man's beingcontent with one wife and his capacity for sentimental love, since hisgreed for cattle and his lack of physical stamina and appetite fullyaccount for his monogamy. This matter must be judged from theHottentot point of view, not from ours. It is well known that inregions where polygamy prevails a man who wishes to be kind to hiswife does not content himself with her, but marries another, orseveral others, to share the hard work with her. These Hottentots havenot enough consideration for their hard-worked wives to do even that.

  HOTTENTOT COARSENESS

  The coarseness and obscenity of the Hottentots constitute furtherreasons for believing them incapable of refined love. Their eulogist,Kolben, himself was obliged to admit that they "find a peculiarpleasure in filth and stench" and "are in the matter of diet thefilthiest people in the world." The women eat their own vermin, whichswarm in their scant attire. Nor is decency the object for which theywear this scant dress---quite the reverse. Speaking of the maleHottentot'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 marry a girl he goeswith his father to the girl's father, who gives the answer afterconsulting with his wife. If the verdict is unfavorable "the gallant'slove for the beauty is readily cured and he casts his eyes on anotherone." But a refusal is rarely given unless the girl is alreadypromised to another. The girl, too, is consulted, but only nominally,for if she refuses she can retain her liberty only by an all-nightstruggle with her suitor in which she usually succumbs, after whichshe has to marry him whether she wishes to or not. Kolben gives otherdetails of the marriage ceremony which are too filthy to be evenhinted 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 modelsof chastity Kolben tried to prove them, indulged in licentiousfestivals lasting several days, at which all restraints were castaside. And this brings us back to our starting-point--Dr. Jakobowski'speculiar argument concerning the "love poems" which he feels sure mustbe sung at the erotic dances of the natives, though they are carefullyconcealed from the missionaries. If they were poems of sentiment, themissionaries would not disapprove, and there would be no reason forconcealing them; but the foregoing remarks show clearly enough whatkind of "love" they would be likely to sing about. If any doubtremained on the subject the following delightful confession, which theeugolist Hahn makes in a moment of confidence, would settle thematter. To appreciate the passage, bear in mind that the Hottentotsare the people among whom excessive posterior corpulence (steatopyga)is especially admired as the acme of physical attractions. Now Hahnsays (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 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 beable to declare it on such unquestionable authority. What a Hottentot"regards" in a woman is _Fat_; _Sentiment_ is out of the question.When Hottentots are together, 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'sexamples of Hottentot lyrics[139] a few which may be vaguely includedin the category of love-poems. "Where did you hear that I love youwhile you are unloving toward me?" complained one Hottentot; whileanother warned his friend: "That is the misfortune pursuing you thatyou love where you ought not to!" A third declared. "I shall not ceaseto love however much they (_i.e._, the parents or guardians) mayoppose 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!

  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 forthe fourth, what is there in it besides reference to the girl'sfatness (fleshy hand), her utility in milking and serving the milk andher carnal bites? Yet in this frank avowal of masculine selfishnessand sensuality Hahn finds "a certain refinement of sentiment"!

  A HOTTENTOT FLIRT

  Though a Hottentot belle's value in the marriage market is determinedchiefly by the degree of her corpulence, girls of the higher familiesare not, it seems, devoid of other means of attracting the attentionof men. At least I infer so from the following passage in Dalton'sbook (_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 winning grace consisted in this feat of bo-peep, first eclipsing an eye and languishing out of the other, and then with an elegant 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 sentimentalists havingproved to be illusory. If we now turn to the Kaffirs, who share withthe Hottentots the southern extremity of Africa, we find that hereagain we must above all things guard against "false facts."Westermarck (61), after citing Barrow (I., 206) to the effect that "aKaffir woman is chaste and extremely modest," adds:

  "and Mr. Cousins informs me that between their various feasts the Kaffirs, both men and women, have to live in strict continence, the penalty being banishment from the tribe if this law is broken."

  It would be interesting to know what Barrow means by "extremelymodest" 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 clashesmost outrageously with all recorded facts and the testimony of theleading authorities, including many missionaries. Dr. Fritsch says inthe preface to his standard book on the natives of South Africa thatthe assertions of Barrow are to be accepted "with caution, or ratherwith suspicion." It is the absence of this caution and suspicion thathas led Westermarck into so many erroneous conclusions. In the presentinstance, however, it is absolutely incomprehensible why he shouldhave cited the one author who calls the Kaffirs chaste, ignoring thecrushing weight of countless facts showing them to be extremelydissolute.

  It is worthy of note that testimony as to the chastity of wild racesgenerally comes from mere travellers among them, ignorant of theirlanguage and intimate habits, whereas the writings of those who havedwelt among them give one a very different idea. As the Rev. 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 Kaffirpeople twenty years, filling various positions among them, varyingfrom a mission teacher to a border magistrate, and so well acquaintedwith their language that he was able to collect and print a volume on_Kaffir Folk Lore_. Like all writers who have made a specialty of asubject, he is naturally somewhat biased in favor of it, and thisgives still more weight to his words on negative points. Regarding thequestion of chastity he says:

  "Kaffir 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 beating, but that finishes the penalty."

  The German missionary Neuhaus bears witness to the fact that (like theBushmen and most other Africans) the Kaffirs are in one respect lowerthan the lowest beasts, inasmuch as for the sake of filthy lucreparents often marry off their daughters before they have attainedmaturity. Girls of eight to ten are often given into the clutches ofwealthy old men who are already supplied with a harem. Concerninggirls in general, and widows, we are told that they can do whateverthey please, and that they only ask their lovers not to be imprudent,as they do not wish to lose their liberty and assume maternal dutiestoo soon if they can help it. Lichtenstein says (I., 264) that

  "a traveller remaining some time with a horde easily finds an unmarried young woman with whom he contracts 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 inmarriage" (161). The German missionary Alberti relates (97) thatsometimes a Kaffir girl is offered to a man in marriage. Havingassured himself of her health, he claims the further privilege of anight's acquaintance; after which, if she pleases him, he proceeds tobargain for her permanent possession. Another competent and reliableobserver, Stephen Kay, corresponding member of the South AfricanInstitution, who censures Barrow sharply for his incorrect remarks onKaffir morals, says:

  "No man deems it any sin whatever to seduce his neighbor's wife: his only grounds of fear are the probability of detection, and the fine demanded by law in such cases. The females, accustomed from their youth up to this gross depravity 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 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 delinquent.... So degraded indeed are their views on subjects of this nature ... that the man who has thus obtained six or eight head of cattle deems it a fortunate circumstance rather than otherwise; he at once renews his intimacy with the seducer, and in the course of a few days becomes as friendly and familiar with him as ever" (141-42).

  "Whenever the Kaffir monarch hears of a young woman possessed of more than ordinary beauty, and at all within his reach, he unceremoniously sends for her or fetches her himself.... Seldom or never does any young girl, residing in his immediate neighborhood, escape defilement after attaining 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 intercourse 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 instances apparent for awhile, but it is generally of comparatively short duration."

  Fritsch (95) describes a Kaffir custom called _U'pundhlo_ which hasonly 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 visiting 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 civilization, thiscustom gave no special offence; "and why should it?" adds Fritsch,"since with the Kaffirs marriageable girls are morally free and theirpurity seems a matter of no special significance." When boys reach theage of puberty, he says (109), they are circumcised;

  "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 polluted while yetin its embryo. "A really pure girl is unknown among the raw Kaffirs,"writes Hol. "All demoraln sense of purity and shame is lost." Whilesuperstition forbids the marrying of first cousins as incestuous, real"incest in its worst forms"--between mother and sons--prevails. At theceremony called _Ntonjane_ the young girls "are degraded and pollutedat the very threshold of womanhood, and every spark of virtuousfeeling annihilated" (197, 207, 185).

  "Immorality," says Fritsch (112),

  "is too deeply rooted in African blood to make it difficult to find an occasion for indulging in it; wherefore the custom of celebrating puberty, harmless in itself, is made the occasion for lascivious practices; 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 morally, at least judicially, little above cattle, and consequently it is impossible to speak of family life in one sense of the word."

  In his _Nursery Tales of the Zulus_ (255) Callaway gives an account,in the native language as well as in the English, of the licenseindulged in at Kaffir puberty festivals. Young men assemble from allquarters. The maidens have a "girl-king" to whom the men are obligedto give a present before they are allowed to enter the hut chosen forthe meeting. "The young people remain alone and sport after their ownfancies in every way." "It is a day of filthiness in which everythingmay be done according to the heart's desire of those who gather aroundthe _umgongo_." The Rev. J. MacDonald, a man of scientificattainments, gives a detailed account of the incredibly obsceneceremonies to which the girls of the Zulu-Kaffirs are subjected, andthe licentious yet Malthusian conduct of the young folks in generalwho "separate into pairs and sleep _in puris naturalibus_, for that isstrictly ordained by custom." The father of a girl thus treated feelshonored on receiving a present from her partner.[140]

  INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE FOR--COWS

  The utter indifference of the Kaffirs to chastity and theirlicentiousness, approved and even prescribed by national custom, werenot the only obstacle to the growth of sentiments rising above meresensuality. Commercialism was another fatal obstacle. I have alreadyquoted Hahn's testimony that a Kaffir "would rather have big herds ofcattle than a good-looking wife." Dohne asserts (Shooter, 88) that "aKaffir loves his cattle more than his daughter," and Kay (111) tellsus 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 page (85) he says that in time of war the poor women fallinto 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, wemight infer that in matrimonial arrangements bovine interests weremuch more regarded than any possible sentimental considerations; andthis we find to be the case. Barrow (149) tells us that

  "the females being considered as the property of their parents, 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 interested, on being told that she is about to be disposed of. There is no previous courtship, no exchange of fine sentiments, no nice feelings, no attentions to catch the affections and to attach the heart."[141]

  BARGAINING FOR BRIDES

  The Rev. L. Grout says in his _Zululand_ (166):

  "So long as the government allows the custom called _ukulobolisha_, 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 allowed little or no right to a voice as to whom she shall marry, but at the hands of her heathen proprietor, who, in his degradation, 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 veryfruitful 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 herfather and demand compensation. A favorite way is to retain a wife asa slave and go on marrying other girls as fast as the man's meansallow. Theal says (213) that if a wife has no children the husband hasa right to return her to her parents and if she has a marriageablesister, take her in exchange. But the acme of commercialism is reachedin a Zulu marriage ceremony described by Shooter. At the wedding thematrons belonging to the bridegroom's party tell the bride that toomany cows have been given for her; that she is rather plain thanotherwise, and will never be able to do a
married woman's work, andthat altogether it is very kind of the bridegroom to condescend tomarry her. Then the bride's friends have their innings. They condolewith her parents on the very inadequate number of cows paid for her,the loveliest girl in the village; declare that the husband is quiteunworthy of her, and ought to be ashamed for driving such a hardbargain with her parents.

  Leslie's assertion (194) that it is "a mistake to imagine that a girlis sold by her father in the same manner and with the same authoritywith which he would dispose of a cow," is contradicted by theconcurrent testimony of the leading authorities. Some of these havealready been cited. The reliable Fritsch says (112) of the Ama-Xosabranch:

  "It is characteristic that as a rule the inclination of the girl to be married is never consulted, but that her nearest male relatives select a husband for her to whom she is unceremoniously 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 hebargains to get her as cheaply as possible (though he knows that aKaffir girl's chief pride is the knowledge that many heads of cattlewere paid for her). Regarding the Ama-Zulu, Fritsch says (141-42) thatthe women are slaves and a wife is regarded as so much investedcapital. "If she falls ill, or remains childless, so that the man doesnot get his money's worth, he often returns her to her father and askshis cattle back." Older and less attractive women are sometimesmarried off on credit, or to be paid for in instalments. "In allthis," Fritsch sums up, "there is certainly little of poetry andromance, but it cannot be denied that under the influence of Europeanresidents an improvement has been effected in some quarters." Hehimself saw at Natal a young couple who "showed a certain interest ineach other," such as one expects of married persons; but in partsuntouched by European influence, he adds, true conjugal devotion is anunusual thing.

  AMOROUS PREFERENCES

  It is probably owing to such European influences that Theal (209)found that although a woman is not legally supposed to be consulted inthe choice of a husband, in point of fact "matches arising from mutuallove are not uncommon. In such cases, if any difficulties are arrangedby the guardians on either side, the young people do not scruple torun away together." The word "love" in this passage is of course usedin that vague sense which indicates nothing but a preference of oneman or woman to others. That a Kaffir girl should prefer a young manto an old suitor to the point of running away with him is to beexpected, even if there is nothing more than a merely sensualattachment. The question how far there are any amorous preferencesamong Kaffirs is an interesting one. From the fact that they prefertheir cows to their wives in moments of danger, we infer that thoughthey might also like one girl better than another, such preferencewould be apt to prove rather weak; and this inference is borne out bysome remarks of the German missionary 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 habitual 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 possible refusal. Altogether, he is much less solicitous about gaining her predilection than about getting her for the lowest possible price."

  Alberti was evidently a thinker as well as a careful observer. Hislucid remarks gives us a deep insight into primitive conditions whenlove had hardly yet begun to germinate. What a worldwide differencebetween this languid Kaffir wooer, hardly caring whether he gets thisgirl or another, and the modern lover who thinks life not worthliving, unless he can gain the love of his chosen one. In all theliterature on the subject, I have been able to find only one case ofstubborn preference among Kaffirs. Neuhaus knew a young man whorefused for two years to marry the girl chosen for him by his father,and finally succeeded in having his way with another girl whom hepreferred. As a matter of course, strong aversion is more frequentlymanifested than decided preference, especially in the case of girlswho are compelled to marry old men. Neuhaus[142] saw a Zulu girl whosehands had been nearly burned off by her tormentors; he knew of twogirls who committed suicide, one just before, the other just after, anenforced marriage. Grout (167) speaks of the "various kinds of tortureresorted to by the father and friends of a girl to compel her to marrycontrary to her choice." One girl, who had fled to his house forrefuge, told him repeatedly that if delivered into the hands of hertormentors "she would be cruelly beaten as soon as they were out ofsight and be subjected to every possible abuse, till she should complywith the wishes of her proprietor."

  ZULU GIRLS NOT COY

  Where men are so deficient in sentiment and manly instincts that oneyoung woman seems to them about as good as another, it is hardlystrange that the women too should lack those qualities of delicacy,gentleness, and modesty which make the weaker sex adorable. Thedescription of the bloody duels often fought by Kaffir women given bythe British missionary Beste (Ploss, II., 421) indicates a decidedlyAmazonian disposition. But the most suggestive trait of Kaffir womenis the lack of feminine coyness in their matrimonial preliminaries.According to Gardiner (97),

  "it is not regarded as a matter either of etiquette or of delicacy 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 womandoes not receive an early proposal, her father or brother go fromkraal 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 goesto the kraal of the bridegroom, to stand there. She remains withoutspeaking, but they understand her. If they "acknowledge" her, a goatis killed and she is entertained. If they do not like her, they giveher a burning piece of firewood, to intimate that there is no fire inthat kraal to warm herself by; she must go and kindle a fire forherself.[143]

  CHARMS AHD POEMS

  Though in all this there is considerable romance, there is no evidenceof romantic love. But how about love-charms, poems, and stories?According to Grout (171), love-charms are not unknown in Zulu land.They are made of certain herbs or barks, reduced to a powder, and sentby the hand of some unsuspected friend to be given in a pinch ofsnuff, deposited in the dress, or sprinkled upon the person of theparty whose favor is to be won. But love-powders argue a verymaterialistic way of regarding love and tell us nothing aboutsentiments. A hint at something more poetic is given by the Rev. J.Tyler (61), who relates that flowers are often seen on Zulu heads, andthat one of them, the "love-making posy," is said to foster "love."Unfortunately that is all the information he gives us on thisparticular point, and the further details supplied by him (120-22)dash all hopes of finding traces of sentiment. The husband "eatsalone," and when the wife brings him a drink of home-made beer "shemust first sip to show there is no 'death in the pot.'" While heguzzles beer, loafs, smokes, and gossips, she has to do all the workat home as well as in the field, carrying her child on her back andreturning in the evening with a bundle of firewood on her head. "Inthe winter the natives assemble almost daily for drinking and dancing,and these orgies are accompanied by the vilest obscenities and evilpractices."

  As regards poems Wallaschek remarks (6) that "the Kaffir in his poetryonly recognizes a threefold subject: war, cattle, and excessiveadulation of his ruler." One Kaffir love-poem, or rathermarriage-poem, I have been able to find (Shooter, 236), and it isdel
ightfully 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 LOVE-STORY

  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 takesup six pages of his book it cannot be quoted entire, but in thefollowing condensed version I have retained every detail that ispertinent to our inquiry. It is entitled _The Story of Mbulukazi_.

  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 children 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.

  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 replied: "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: "Go 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 sayshe has taken care in his collection not to give a single sentence thatdid not come from native sources. He calls attention, however, to thefact that tens of thousands of Kaffirs have adopted the religion ofEuropeans and have accepted ideas from their teachers, wherefore "itwill surprise no one to learn that these tales are already undergoinggreat changes among a very large section of the natives on theborder." I suspect that the touch of sentiment in the place where theyoung chief will accept a drink from the girl's hand alone is such acase of European influence, and so, in all probability is thepreference for a light complexion implied in the tale; for Shooter (p.I) tells us expressly that to be told that he is light-colored "wouldbe 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 tothe 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 northwardin Eastern Africa, into the region of the lakes--Nyassa, VictoriaNyanza and Albert Nyanza--embracing British Central, German East, andBritish East Africa, we are doomed to disappointment if we expect tofind conditions more favorable to the growth of refined romantic orconjugal love. We shall not only discover no evidence of what isvaguely called Platonic love, but we shall find men ignoring evenPlato's injunction (_Laws_, VIII., 840) that they should not be lowerthan beasts, which do not mate till they have reached the age ofmaturity. H.H. Johnston, in his recent work on British Central Africa,gives some startling revelations of aboriginal depravity. As theseregions have been known a few years only, the universality of thisdepravity disproves most emphatically the ridiculous notion thatsavages are naturally pure in their conduct and owe their degradationto 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 exactitude to boys and girls in many other parts of Africa. As regards the little girls, over nearly the whole of British Central Africa, chastity before puberty is an unknown condition.... Before a girl becomes a woman (that is to say, before she is able to conceive), it is a matter of absolute indifference what she does, and scarcely any girl remains a virgin after about five years of age."

  Girls are often betrothed at birth, or even before, and when four orfive years old are placed at the mercy of the degraded husbands.Capture is another method of getting a wife, and Johnston'sdescription of this custom indicates that individual preference is asweak 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 reason. But as a general rule they seem to accept very cheerfully 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 him would be so contrary to custom that he might kill her.' Of course this would apply only to females that are not engaged."

  COLONIES OF FREE LOVERS

  Of the Taveita forest region Johnston says:

  "After marriage the greatest laxity of manners is allowed among the women, who often court their love
rs 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 toThomson. 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 affairs 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 bedescribed as colonies of free lovers." As for life among the Masaiwarriors, he says (431) that it

  "was promiscuous in a remarkable degree. They may indeed 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."[144]

  A LESSON IN GALLANTRY

  Crossing the waters of the Victoria Nyanza we come to Uganda, a regionwhich 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 followed 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 afterward helped the girls over a brook. The king noticed it, but instead of upbraiding me, passed it off as a joke, and running 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 happen next?'"

  There is perhaps no part of Africa where such an act of gallantrywould not have been laughed at as an absurd prank. In Eastern CentralAfrica

  "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 highway. 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 forfirewood," says the same writer (137). "The man goes first, carryinghis gun, bow and arrows, while the woman carries the invariable bundleof firewood on her head." He used to amuse such parties by taking thewife's load and putting it on the husband, telling him, 'This is thecustom in our country.' The wife has to do not only all the domesticbut all the hard field work, and the only thing the lazy husband doesin return is to mend her clothes. That constitutes her "rights;"neglect of it is a cause for divorce! Burton notes the absence ofchivalrous ideas among the Somals (_F.F._, 122), adding that

  "on first entering the nuptial hut, the bridegroom draws forth his horsewhip and inflicts memorable chastisement upon the fair person of his bride, with the view of taming any lurking propensity 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 sentimental 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 toUganda.

  The Queen of Uganda offered Speke the choice between two of herdaughters as a wife. The girls were brought and made to squat in frontof 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 chainthe girl two or three days, until she became used to him, else, frommere fright, she might run away.

  A high official also bestowed on him a favor which throws light on thetreatment of Uganda women. He had his women come in, made them stripto the waist, and asked Speke what he thought of them. He assured himhe had paid him an unusual compliment, the Uganda men being veryjealous of one another, so much so that anyone would be killed iffound staring upon a woman, even in the highways. Speke asked him whatuse 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."

  NOT A PARTICLE OF ROMANCE

  The northeastern boundary of Uganda is formed by the waters of thelake whose name Sir Samuel Baker chose for the title of one of hisfascinating books on African travel, the _Albert N'yanza_. Baker was akeen observer and he had abundant experience on which to base thefollowing conclusions (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 propagate 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 hereads in the same book (240) that among the Latookas it is considereda disgrace to kill a woman in war. Have these men that respect forwomen which makes romantic love possible? Alas, no! They spare thembecause women are scarce and have a money value, a female being worthfrom five to ten cows, according to her age and appearance. It wouldtherefore be a waste of money to kill them.

  I may as well add here what Baker says elsewhere (_Ismailia_, 501) byway of explaining why there is no insanity in Central Africa: thereare "no hearts to break with overwhelming love." Where coarseness isbliss, 'twere folly to be refined.

  NO LOVE AMONG NEGROES

  Let us now cross Central Africa into the Congo region on the Westernside, returning afterward to the East for a bird's-eye view of theAbyssinians, the Somali, and their neighbors.

  In his book _Angola and the River Congo_ (133-34) Monteiro says thatnegroes show 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 would indicate the slightest loving regard or affection on either side. They have no words or expressions in their language indicative of affection or love. Their passion is purely of an animal description, unaccompanied by the least sympathetic affections of love or endearment."[145]

  In other words, these negroes not only do not show any tenderness,aff
ection, sympathy, in their sexual relations, they are too coarseeven to appreciate the more subtle manifestations of sensual passionwhich we call caresses. Jealousy, too, Monteiro says, hardly exists.In case of adultery "the fine is generally a pig, and rum or otherdrink, with which a feast is celebrated by all parties. The woman isnot punished in any way, nor does any disgrace attach to her conduct."As a matter of course, where all these sentiments are lacking,admiration of personal beauty cannot exist.

  "From 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 apicture seen directly with the eyes differs from one reflected in aconcave mirror. This is vividly illustrated by a quaint story recordedin the _Folk Tales of Angola_ (_Memoirs of Amer. Folk Lore Soc._, Vol.I., 1804, 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 then they all gave up, 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, "Friend, the deer, didst thou catch it indeed?" Then the other: "I caught it. The girl delights me much. Rather 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; because, 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."

  SUICIDES

  According to Livingstone, in Angola suicide is sometimes committed bya girl if it is predicted to her that she will never have anychildren, which would be a great disgrace. A writer in the _Globus_(Vol. 69, p. 358) sums up the observations of the medical missionary,G. Liengme, on suicides among the peoples of Africa. The most frequentcause is a family quarrel. Sometimes a girl commits suicide ratherthan marry a man whom she detests, "whereas on the other hand suicidefrom unhappy love seems to be unknown." In another number of the_Globus_ (70: 100), however, I find mention of a negro who killedhimself 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 weknow that lust may be as maddening and as obstinate as love itself;moreover, as we shall see in the chapter on American Indians, suicidedoes not argue strong feelings, but a weak intellect. Savages are aptto kill themselves, as we shall see, on the slightest and most trivialprovocation.

  POETIC LOVE ON THE CONGO

  In his entertaining book on the Congo, H.H. Johnston says (423) of theraces living along the upper part of that river: "They are decidedlyamorous in disposition, but there is a certain poetry in theirfeelings which ennobles their love above the mere sexual lust of thenegro." If this is true, it is one of the most important discoveriesever made by an African explorer, one on which we should expect theauthor to dwell at great length. What does he tell us about the Congotribes? "The women," he says of the Ba-Kongo, "have little regard fortheir virtue, either before or after marriage, and but for thejealousy of the men there would be promiscuous intercourse between thesexes." These women, he says, rate it as especially honorable to be awhite man's mistress:

  "Moreover, though the men evince some marital jealousy among themselves, they are far from displaying anything but 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 offering, 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 lower Congo, and it is only ofthe upper river that Johnston predicates the poetic features whichennoble love. Stanley Pool being accepted by him as the dividing line,we may there perhaps begin our search for romantic love. One day, theauthor 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, 'moyennant' several 'longs' of cloth. Seeing my hesitation, he mistook 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, putting 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 whatever 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 those of other people_." "Marriage is _a mere question of purchase_, and is attended by no rejoicings or special 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 affection except what the following sentence allows us 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 luxury 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 thisregion, surely so startling a novelty in West Africa would have calledfor a full "bill of particulars," which would have bee
n of infinitelygreater scientific value than the details he gives regardingunchastity, infidelity, commercialism, separation from wives andcontempt for women, which are so common throughout the continent as tocall for no special notice. Evidently his ideas regarding "poeticlove" were as hazy as those of some other writers quoted in thischapter, and we have once more been led on by the mirage of a "falsefact."[146]

  In 1891 the Swedish explorer Westermarck published a book describinghis adventures among the cannibal tribes of the Upper Congo. I havenot seen the book, but the Rev. James Johnston, in summing up itscontents, 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 prepared in palm oil, and, in order to make the flesh more palatable, 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 KAMERUN

  From the banks of the Congo to Kamerun is not a very far cry asdistances go in Africa. Kamerun is under the German flag, and a Germanwriter, Hugo Zoeller, has described life in that colony with the eyesof a shrewd observer. What he says about the negro's capacity for loveshows 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 princess, still an ideally endowed being."

  Zoeller adds that in all his African experiences he never found anegress of whom he should have been willing to assume that she wouldsacrifice herself for a man she was attached to. On another page hesays:

  "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 belonging 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 palaver,' as a damage to property, but one never, positively never, hears of a love-affair. The negress never has a sweetheart, 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 SLAVE COAST LOVE-STORY

  Travelling a short distance northwest from Kamerun we reach the SlaveCoast of West Africa, to which A.B. Ellis has devoted two interestingbooks, including chapters in the folklore of the Yoruba andEwe-speaking peoples of this region. Among the tales recorded are twowhich illustrate African ideas regarding love. I copy the firstverbatim from Ellis's book on the Yoruba (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 and 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 middle 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. O 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.'

  "When it was the fifth day, the King sent out his crier to call all the people together. The people came. Tortoise cried out, 'Everybody wanted Buje, the slender, and Buje 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 Hartmann (480) describes the Yoruba people as vivacious andintelligent. But the details given by Ellis (154) regarding thepeculiar functions of bridesmaids, and the assertion that "virginityin a bride is only of paramount importance when the girl has beenbetrothed in childhood," explain sufficiently why we must not look forsentimental features in a Yoruba love-story. The most noticeable thingin the above tale is the girl's power to refuse chiefs and even theKing. In Ellis's book on the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast,there is also a love-story (271) concerning a "Maiden who alwaysrefused." It has a moral which seems to indicate masculine disapprovalof such a feminine privilege. 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.

  Now the leopard, in the leopard's place, hears this. He turns himself to resemble man. He takes a musical instrument 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 slave
s to take along, and goats, sheep, and fowls. 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 hunter concealed in the bush; he has witnessed the scene; he aims his gun and kills the leopard on the leap. Then he cuts off 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 off."

  AFRICAN STORY-BOOKS

  While the main object of this discussion is to show that Africans areincapable of feeling sentimental love, I have taken the greatest painsto discover such traces of more refined feelings as may exist. Theseone might expect to find particularly in the collections of Africantales such as Callaway's _Nursery Tales of the Zulus_, Theal's _KaffirFolk Lore_, the _Folk Lore of Angola_, Stanley's _My Dark Companionsand their Stories_, Koelle's _African Native Literature_, Jacottet's_Contes Populaires des Bassoutos_. All that I have been able to findin these books and others bearing on our topic is included in thischapter--and how very little it is! Love, even of the sensual kind,seems to be almost entirely ignored by these dusky story-tellers infavor of a hundred other subjects--in striking contrast to our ownliterature, in which love is the ruling passion. I have before meanother interesting collection of South and North African stories andfables--Bleek's _Reinecke Fuchs in Afrika_. Its author had unusualfacilities for collecting them, having been curator of Sir G. Grey'slibrary at Cape Town, which includes a fine collection of Africanmanuscripts. In Bleek's book there are forty-four South African,chiefly Hottentot, fables and tales, and thirty-nine relating to NorthAfricans. Yet among these eighty-three tales there are only three thatcome under the head of love-stories. As they take up eight pages, Ican give only a condensed version of them, taking care, however, toomit no essential feature.[147]

  THE FIVE SUITORS

  Four handsome youths tried to win a beautiful girl living in the same town. While they were quarrelling among themselves 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." The 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 off 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 PRINCESS

  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?" Undismayed by the failure of men of wealth and rank, Tamba, who lived far in the East 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 contained, 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 Tamba 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 rivals appeared the next morning he gave to each the materials 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 yourself 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 nothint at any other ingredient of love, while the father's promise ofthe girl to the fastest worker shows a total indifference to what thatpreference might be. In the following tale (also from Koelle) the girlagain 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 disappointment. However, at last one took heart of grace, and began the task. He obtained the beauty; for the father said, '_Kam ago tsuru baditsia tsido_--he who undertakes whatever he says, will do it.'"

  PROVERBS ABOUT WOMEN

  The last two tales I have cited were gathered among the Bornu peoplein the Soudan. In Burton's _Wit and Wisdom from West Africa_ we find a
few proverbs about women that are current in the same region.

  "If a woman speaks two words, take one and leave the other." "Whatever be thy intimacy, 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 ofBurton's book, which includes over four hundred proverbs and tales,there are only half a dozen brief references to women, and those aresneers.

  AFRICAN AMAZONS

  As I have had occasion to remark before, African women lack the finerfeminine qualities, both bodily and mental, wherefore even if anAfrican man were able to feel sentimental love he could not find anobject to bestow it on. An incident related by Du Chaillu (_AshangoLand_, 187) illustrates the martial side of African femininity. Amarried man named Mayolo had called another man's wife toward him. Hisown wife, hearing of this, got jealous, told him the other must be hissweetheart, and rushed out to seek her rival. A battle ensued:

  "Women's fights in this country always begin by their throwing off their _dengui_--that is, stripping themselves entirely 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 theAfrican woman have been utilized in forming bands of Amazons which aredescribed as "the flower of the army." They are made up of femalecaptives and other women, wear special uniforms, and in battle arecredited with even greater ferocity than the men. These women areAmazons not of their own accord but by order of the king. But in otherparts of Africa there is reason to believe that bands ofself-constituted female warriors have existed at various times.Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the time of Julius Caesar, says that onthe western coast of Libya (Africa) there used to live a peoplegoverned by women, who carried on wars and the government, the menbeing obliged to do domestic work and take care of the children. Inour time Livingstone found in the villages of the Bechuanas and Banyasthat men were often badly treated by the women, and the eminent Germananthropologist Bastian says(_S.S._, 178) that in "the Soudan the powerof the women banded together for mutual protection is so great thatmen are often put under ban and obliged to emigrate." Mungo Parkdescribed the curious bugaboo(_mumbo-jumbo_)by means of which theMandingo negroes used to keep their rebellious women in subjection.According to Bastian, associations for keeping women in subjection arecommon among men along the whole African West Coast. The women, too,have their associations, and at their meetings compare notes on themeanness and cruelty of their husbands. Now it is easy to conceivethat among tribes where many of the men have been killed off in warsthe women, being in a great majority, may, for a time at least, turnthe tables on the men, assume their weapons and make them realize howit feels to be the "inferior sex." For this reason Bastian sees nooccasion to share the modern disposition to regard all the Amazonlegends as myths.

  WHERE WOMAN COMMANDS

  If we now return from the West Coast to Eastern Africa we find on thenorthern confines of Abyssinia a strange case of the subjection ofmen, which Munzinger has described in his _Ostafrikanische Studien_(275-338). The Beni Amer are a tribe of Mohammedan shepherds amongwhom "the sexes seem to have exchanged roles, the women being moremasculine in their work." Property is legally held in common,wherefore the men rarely dare to do anything without consulting theirwives. In return for this submission they are treated with the utmostcontempt:

  "For every angry word that the husband utters he is compelled 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 him contemptuously. It is considered 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 companions 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 FOR ROMANTIC LOVE

  The causes of this singular effeminacy of the men and masculinity ofthe women are not indicated by Munzinger; but so much is clear that,although the tables are turned, Cupid is again left in the cold. Noris there any romance in the courtship which leads to such hen-peckedconjugal 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 remains another whole year with her parents. After its expiration 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 veiled, and after the village has been left behind betrays herself and runs away."

  These Beni Amer are of course far superior in culture to the Bushmen,Hottentots, Kaffirs, and West Coast peoples we have been consideringso far, having long been in contact with Oriental influences. It istherefore as strange as it is instructive to note that as soon as arace becomes civilized enough to feel a kind of love exalted abovemere 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 engagement.This last custom seems to be of common occurrence in this part ofAfrica. Munzinger (387) says of the Kunama: "As among the borderpeoples engagements are often made at a very early age, after whichtime bride and bridegroom avoid each other;" and again (147)concerning the region of Massua, on the Red Sea:

  "From 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 isalways consulted gives an unfavorable forecast, the engagement isforthwith broken off. It is instructive to note further that the rigidseparation of a man from his betrothed serves merely to stiflelegitimate love; its object cannot be to prevent improper intimacies,for before engagement the girls enjoy perfect liberty to do what theyplease, and after engagement they may converse with _anyone except thelover_. As Parkyns (II., 41) tells us, he is never allowed to see hisintended wife even for a moment, unless he can bribe some femalefriend to arrange it so he can get a peep at her by concealinghimself; but if the girl discovers him she covers her face, screams,runs away, and hides. This "coyness" is a pure sham. In reality theAbyssinian girl is anything but coy. Munzinger thus describes herchar
acter:

  "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 freedom 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 lovepoetry" will find further food for thought in the following Abyssinianpicture 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 sentimental 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 engage 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 Abyssinians,describes them as living practically in a state of promiscuity,divorce being so frequent that he once saw a woman surrounded by sevenformer husbands, and there being hardly any difference betweenlegitimacy and illegitimacy. Another old writer, Rev. S. Gobat,describes the Abyssinians as light-minded, having nothing constant butinconstancy itself. A more recent writer, J. Hotten (133-35),explains, in the following sentence, a fact which has often misledunwary observers:

  "Females are rarely gross or immodest outwardly, seeing that they need in no way be ashamed of the freest intercourse with the other sex," "Rape is venial, and adultery regards only the husband."

  The Christian Abyssinians are in this respect no better thanthe others, regarding lewd conduct with indifference. But the moststartling exhibition of Abyssinian grossness is given by the Habab andMensa concerning whom Munzinger says (150), that whenever a girldecides to give herself up to a dissolute life "a public festival isarranged, cows are butchered and a night is spent amid song anddances."

  The four volumes of Combes and Tamisier on Abyssinia give a vivid ideaof the utter absence of sexual morality in that country. With anintelligence rare among explorers they distinguish between love of thesenses and love of the heart, and declare that the latter is not to befound in this country. "Abyssinian women love everybody for money andno one gratis." They do not even suspect the possibility of any otherkind of love, and the only distinction they make is that a man whopleases 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 feelings which convert an atheist 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 wassaid to have committed suicide to escape a hated suitor forced on her;but there is nothing improbable in this, as we know that a strongaversion may exist even where there is no capacity for true love, andthe former by no means implies the latter. Jealousy, they foundfurther,

  "is practically unknown in Abyssinia," "If jealousy is manifested occasionally by women we must not deceive ourselves regarding the nature of this feeling; when an Abyssinienne envies the love another inspires she is jealous only of the comfort which that love may insure for the other" (II., Chap. V.).

  ABYSSINIAN BEAUTY AND FLIRTATION

  Abyssinian women are not deficient in a certain sensual kind ofbeauty. Their fine figures, large black eyes, and white teeth havebeen admired by many travellers. But Parkyns (II., 5) avers that"though flowers of beauty nowhere bloom with more luxuriance than inAethiopia, yet, alas! there shines on them no mental sun." They makeuse of their eyes to great advantage--but not to express soul-love.What flirtation in this part of the world consists in, may be inferredfrom Donaldson Smith's amusing account (245, 270) of a young Borangirl who asked permission to accompany his caravan, offering to cook,bring wood, etc. She was provided with a piece of white sheeting for adress, but when tired from marching, being unused to so much clothing,she threw the whole thing aside and walked about naked. Her name wasOla. Some time afterward one of the native guides began to make loveto 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 COARSENESS

  South of Abyssinia there are three peoples--the Galla, Somali, andHarari--among some of whom, if we may believe Dr. Paulitschke, thegerms of true love are to be found. Let us briefly examine them inturn, with Paulitschke's arguments. Hartmann (401) assigns to theGallas a high rank among African races, and Paulitschke (_B.z.E_.,51-56) describes them as more intelligent than the Somali, but alsomore licentious. Boys marry at sixteen to eighteen, girls at twelve tosixteen. The women are compelled to do most of the hard work; wivesare often badly treated, and when their husbands get tired of themthey send them away. Good friends lend each other their wives, andthey also lend them to guests. If a man kills his wife no one mindsit. 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 smallpresents. In other parts girls take a pride in preserving theirpurity, but atone for it by a dissolute life after marriage. Bridesare subjected to an obscene examination, and if not found pure aresupposed to be legally disqualified from marriage. To avoid thedisgrace, the parents bribe the bridegroom to keep the secret, and toassert the bride's innocence. A curious detail of Galla courtshipconsists in the precautions the parents of rich youths have to take toprotect them from designing poor girls and their mothers. Often, whenthe parents of a rich youth are averse to the match, the coy bridegoes to their hut, jumps over the surrounding hedge, and remains thereenduring the family's abuse until they finally accept her. To preventsuch an invasion--a sort of inverted capture, in which the woman isthe aggressor--the parents of rich sons build very high hedges roundtheir houses to keep out girls! Not infrequently, boys and girls aremarried when only six or eight years old, and forthwith live togetheras husband and wife.

  SOMALI LOVE-AFFAIRS

  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 camel's milk thou wert more beautiful still.' The girl, on her part, gives expression to her longing for the absent lover in this melancholy song: 'Th
e camel needs good grazing, and dislikes to leave it. My beloved has left the country. On account of the children of Sahal (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 beloved.'"

  What evidence of "idealized" love is there in these poems? The girlexpresses longing for an absent man, and longing, as we have seen,characterizes all kinds of love from the highest to the lowest. It isone of the selfish ingredients of love, and is therefore evidence ofself-love, not of other-love. As for the lover's poem, what is it butthe grossest sensualism, the usual African apotheosis of fat? Imaginean American lover saying to a girl, "You are beautiful for you areplump, but you would be more beautiful still if you ate more pork andbeans"--would she regard this as evidence of refined love, or wouldshe turn her back and never speak to him again? Anthropologists aresometimes strangely naive. We have just seen what kind of"attachments" are formed by African youths and girls while tendingcattle; Burton adds to the evidence _(F.F_., 120) by telling us thatamong the Somali "the bride, as usual in the East, is rarelyconsulted, but frequent _tete-a-tetes_ at the well and in the bushwhen tending cattle effectually obviate this inconvenience." "At thewells," says Donaldson Smith (15), "you will see both sexes bathingtogether, with little regard for decency." They are indeed lower thanbrutes in their impulses, for the only way parents can save theirinfant girls from being maltreated is by the practice of infibulation,to which, as Paulitschke himself tells us, the girls are subjected atthe early age of four, or even three; yet, even this, he likewiseinforms us, is not always effectual.

  As for the father's great pride in his daughter, and his guarding herlike a treasure, that is, by the concurrent testimony of theauthorities, not a token of affection or a regard for virtue, but apurely commercial matter. Paulitschke himself says (30) that while themother is devoted to her child, "the father pays no attention to it."On the following 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[148]that when a man has fixed his choice on a girl he pays her father $100to $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 instances 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."[149]

  Donaldson Smith remarks (12) that Somali women "are regarded merely asgoods and chattels. In a conversation with one of my boys he told methat he only owned five camels, but that he had a sister from whom heexpected to get much money when he sold her in marriage." The grosscommercialism of Somali love-affairs is further illustrated by theOgaden custom (Paulitschke, _E.N.A._, 199) of pouring strong perfumesover the bride in order to stimulate the ardor of the suitor and makehim willing to pay more for her--a trick which is often successful.How, under such circumstances, Somal marriages can be "mostly based oncordial mutual affection" is a mystery for Dr. Paulitschke to explain.Burton proved himself a keener observer and psychologist when he wrote(_F.F._, 122), "The Somal knows none of the exaggerated and chivalronsideas by which passion becomes refined affection among the ArabBedouins and the sons of civilization." I may add what this writersays regarding 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 compares her legs to the tall, straight Libi tree, and imprecates the direst curses 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 whomPaulitschke fancied that he discovered signs of idealized love(_B.E.A.S._, 70). Their youthful attachments, he says, are intense andnoble, and in proof of this he translates two of their poems on thebeauty 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 translated and printed in the appendix of the samevolume) 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 Kahul. 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 perfumes are united."

  It is easy to note Arabic influences in these poems. The Harari arelargely Arabic; their very language is being absorbed in the Arabic;yet I cannot find in these poems the least evidence of amorousidealism or "noble" sentiment. To have a lover compare a girl's faceto silk, her form to a lance-shaft or a burning lamp, her eyes to thefull moon, may be an imaginative sort of sensualism, but it is purelysensual nevertheless. If an American lover told a girl, "I bought somedelicious candy and ate it, thinking of you; I ordered a glass ofsweet soda-water and drank it to your health"--would she regard thatas evidence of "noble" love, or of any kind of love at all, except akind of cupboard love?

  No, not even here, where Arabian influences prevail, do we come acrossthe germs of true love. It is the same all over Africa. Nowhere do wefind indications that men admire other things in women except, atmost, voluptuous eyes and plump figures; nowhere do the men performunselfish acts of gallantry and self-sacrifice; nowhere exhibitsympathy with their females, who, far from being goddesses, are noteven companions, but simply drudges and slaves to lust. A whole volumewould be required to demonstrate that this holds true of all parts ofAfrica; but the present chapter is already too long and I must closewith a brief reference to the Berbers of Algeria (Kabyles) to showthat at the northern extremity of Africa, as at the southern, theeastern, the western, love spells lust. Here, too, man is lower thananimals. Camille Sabatier, who was a justice of the peace atTizi-Ouzan, speaks[150] of "_la brutalite du male qui, souvent memechez les Kabyles, n'attend pas la nubilite pour deflorer la jeuneenfant._" 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 theimpression that there is, after all, an oasis in the desert of Africanlovelessness and contempt for women. Touareg women, we are toldtherein (208-10), are allowed to dispose of their hands and to eatwith the men, certain dishes being reserved for them, others(including tea and coffee) for the men. In the evening the womenassemble and improvise songs while the men sit around in their bestattire. The women
write mottoes on the men's shields, and the mencarve their chosen one's name in the rocks and sing her praises. Thesituation has been compared to mediaeval chivalry. But when we examineit more critically than the biassed Chavanne did, we find, using hisown data, more of Africa than appeared to be there at first sight. Thewoman, we are informed, owes the husband obedience, and he can divorceher at pleasure. When a woman talks to a man she veils her face "as asign of respect." And when the men travel, they are accompanied bythose of their female slaves who are young and pretty. Their moralsare farther characterized by the fact that descent is in the femaleline, which is usually due to uncertain paternity. The women are uglyand masculine, and Chavanne does not mention a single fact or actwhich proves that they experience supersensual, altruistic love.

  So far as the position of Touareg women is superior to that of otherAfricans, it is due to the fact that slaves are kept to do the hardwork and to certain European and Christian influences and theinstitution of theoretical monogamy. Possibly the germs of a bettersort of love may exist among them, as they may among the Bedouins;they must make a beginning somewhere.

  AN AFRICAN LOVE-LETTER

  T.J. Hutchinson declares that the gentle god of love is unknown in themajority of African kingdoms: "It in fact seems to be crawling intolife only in one or two places where our language is the establishedone." He prints a quaint love-letter addressed by a Liberian native tohis colored sweetheart. The substance of the letter, it is true, ispurely egotistic; it might be summed up in the words, "Oh, how I wishyou were here to make me happy." Yet it opens up vistas of futurepossibilities. 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 O 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 especially O I am long to see you O miss if I don't see you shortly surely I must die I shut my mouth to hold my breath Miss don't you cry O 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 O miss."

  ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE

  The founders of the Australian race, Curr believes, were Africans, andmay have arrived in one canoe. The distance from Africa to Australiais, however, great, and there are innumerable details of structure,color, custom, myth, implements, language, etc., which have led thelatest authorities to conclude that the Australian race was formedgradually by a mixture of Papuans, Malayans, and Dravidians of CentralIndia.[151] Topinard has given reasons for believing that there aretwo distinct races in Australia. However that may be, there arecertainly great differences in the customs of the natives. As regardsthe relations of the sexes, luckily, these differences are not sogreat as in some other respects, wherefore it is possible to give atolerably accurate bird's-eye view of the Australians as a whole fromthis point of view.

  PERSONAL CHARMS OF AUSTRALIANS

  Once in awhile, in the narrative of those who have travelled orsojourned among Australians, one comes across a reference to thesymmetrical form, soft skin, red lips, and white teeth of a youngAustralian girl. Mitchell in his wanderings saw several girls withbeautiful features and figures. Of one of these, who seemed to be themost 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, addressing me vehemently,"

  etc. Of two other girls the same writer says (II., 93):

  "The youngest was the handsomest female I had ever seen 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 unconscious 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 hand 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 symmetry 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 pleasing expression to a countenance that might often be called good-looking--occasionally pretty."

  "Occasionally, though rarely," and then only for a few years, is anAustralian woman attractive from _our_ point of view. As a rule she isvery much the reverse--dirty, thin-limbed, course-featured, ungainlyin every way;[152] and Eyre tells us why this is so. The extremitiesof the women, he says, are more attenuated than those of the men;probably because "like most other savages, the Australian looks uponhis wife as a slave," makes her undergo great privations and do allthe hard work, such as bringing in wood and water, tending thechildren, carrying all the movable property while on the march, _ofteneven 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 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 whichclimate and circumstances have impressed on them is not borne outamong Australians. An arid soil and a desiccating climate make themthin as a race, but they do not admire thinness. "Long-legged,""thin-legged," are favorite terms of abuse among them, and Grey onceheard a native sing scornfully

  Oh, what a leg,

  * * * * *

  You kangaroo-footed churl!

  Nor is it beauty, in our sense of the word, that attracts them, butfat, as in Africa and the Orient. I have previously quoted BroughSmyth's assertion that an Australian woman, however old and ugly, isin constant danger of being stolen if she is fat. That women have thesame standard of "taste," appears from the statement of H.E.A. Meyer(189), that the principal reason why the men anoint themselves withgrease and ochre is that it makes them look fat and "gives them an airof importance in the eyes of the women, for they admire a fat manhowever ugly." But whereas these men admire a fat woman for sensualreasons, the women's preference is based on utilitarian motives. Lowas their reasoning powers are, they are shrewd enough to reflect thata man who is in good condition proves thereby that he is"somebody"--that he can hunt and will be able to bring home some meatfor his wife too. This interpretation is borne out by what was said ona previous page (278) about one of the reasons why corpulence isvalued in Fiji, and also by an amusing incident related by the eminentAustralian explorer George Grey (II., 93). He had reproached hisnative guide with not knowing anything, when the guide replied:

  "I know nothing! I know how to keep myself fat; the 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 you know? Where is your fat? What for do y
ou know so much, if you can't keep fat?"

  CRUEL TREATMENT OF WOMEN

  Eyre was no doubt right in his suggestion that the inferiority ofAustralian women to the men in personal appearance was due to theprivations and hardships to which the women were subjected. Much asthe men admire fat in a woman, they are either too ignorant, or tooselfish otherwise, to allow them to grow fat in idleness. Women inAustralia never exist for their own sake but solely for theconvenience of the men. "The man," says the Rev. H.E.A. Meyer (11),"regarding them more as slaves than in any other light, employs themin every possible way to his own advantage." "The wives were theabsolute property of the husband," says the Rev. G. Taplin (XVII. toXXXVII.),

  "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 dereliction 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 circumstances. 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 treatment, 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 the extreme; in fact, in no savage nation of which there is any record can it be 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 (322), "are frequently beaten about the head withwaddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for themost 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" (80). "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-longsticks on the heads of the women" (Waitz, VI., 775). "In the case of aman killing his own gin [wife], he has to deliver up one of his ownsisters for his late wife's friends to put to death" (W.E. Roth, 141).After a war, when peace is patched up, it sometimes happens that "theweaker party give some nets and women to make matters up" (Curr, II.,477). In the same volume (331) we find a realistic picture ofmasculine 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, 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[153] that "onthe journey her lord would coolly walk along with merely his warimplements, weighing only a few pounds, while his wife was carryingperhaps sixty pounds."

  The lives of the women "are rated as of the less value than those ofthe men." "Their corpses are often thrown to dogs for food" (Waitz,VL, 775). "These poor creatures," says Wilkinson of the SouthAustralian women (322),

  "are in an abject state, and are only treated with about the same consideration as the dogs that accompany them; they are obliged 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 alreadypicked, with a nonchalance that is extremely amusing." The women arealso excluded from religious ceremonies; many of the best things toeat are taboo to them; and the cruel contempt of the men pursues themeven after death. The men are buried with ceremony (Curr, I., 89), but"as the women and children are held to be very inferior to the menwhilst alive, and their spirits are but little feared after death,they are interred with but scant ceremony... the women alone wailing."Thus they show their contempt even for the ghosts of women, thoughthey are so afraid of other ghosts that they never leave camp in thedark or have a nocturnal dance except by moonlight or with big fires!

  WERE SAVAGES CORRUPTED BY WHITES?

  Such is the Australian's treatment of woman--a treatment so selfish,so inconsistent with the altruistic traits and impulses of romanticlove--sympathy, gallantry, and self-sacrificing affection, not tospeak of adoration--that it alone proves him incapable of so refined asentiment. If any doubt remained, it would be removed by his utterinability to rise above the sensual sphere. The Australian isabsolutely immoral and incredibly licentious. Here, however, we areconfronted by a spectre with which the sentimentalists try to frightenthe searchers for truth, and which must therefore be exorcised first.They grant the wantonness of savages, but declare that it is "duechiefly to the influence of civilization." This is one of the favoritesubterfuges of Westermarck, who resorts to it again and again. Inreference to the Australians he cites what Edward Stephens wroteregarding 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 intoxicants 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 immoralities were well known ... and I say it fearlessly, that nearly all their evils they owed to the white man's immorality and to the white man's drink."

  Now the first question a conscientious truth-seeker feels inclined toask regarding this "fearless" Stephens who thus boldly accuses ofignorance all those who hold that the Australian race was degradedbefore it came in contact with whites, is, "Who is he and what are hi
squalifications for serving as a witness in this matter?" He is, orwas, a simple-minded settler, kindly no doubt, who for someinscrutable reason was allowed to contribute a paper to the _Journalof the Royal Society of New South Wales_ (Vol. XXXIII.). Hisqualifications for appearing as an expert in Australian anthropologymay be inferred from various remarks in his paper. He naively tells astory about a native who killed an opossum, 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 havejust seen that all the explorers, in all parts of the country, foundthat the natives who had never seen a white man treated their womenlike slaves and dogs.

  ABORIGINAL HORRORS

  If the savage learned his wantonness from the whites, did he get allhis other vicious habits from the same source? We know on the bestauthorities that the disgusting practice of cannibalism prevailedextensively among the natives. "They eat the young men when they die,and the young women if they are fat" (Curr, III., 147). Lumholtzentitled his book on Australia _Among Cannibals_. The Rev. G. Taplinsays (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 alwaysparticularly careful not to leave her unprotected, lest she might beseized by prowling cannibals." Among the wilder tribes few women areallowed to die a natural death, "they being generally despatched erethey become old and emaciated, that so much good food may not belost."[154] Would the "fearless" Stephens say that the natives learnedthese practices from the whites? Would he say they learned from thewhites the "universal custom ... to slay every unprotected malestranger met with" (Curr, I., 133)?

  "Infanticide is very common, and appears to be practised solely to getrid of the trouble of rearing children," wrote Eyre (II., 324). Curr(I., 70) heard that "some tribes within the area of the CentralDivision cut off the nipples of the females' breasts, in someinstances, for the purpose of rendering their rearing of childrenimpossible." On the Mitchell River, "children were killed for the mosttrivial offences, such as for accidentally breaking a weapon as theytrotted about the camp" (Curr, II., 403). Twins are destroyed in SouthAustralia, says Leigh (159), and if the mother dies "they throw theliving infant into the grave, while infanticide is an every-dayoccurrence." Curr (I., 70) believes that the average number ofchildren borne by each woman was six, the maximum ten; but of allthese only two boys and one girl as a rule were kept, "the rest weredestroyed immediately after birth," as we destroy litters of puppies.Sometimes the infants were smothered over a fire (Waitz, VI., 779),and deformed children were always killed. Taplin (13) writes thatbefore his colony was established among them infanticide was veryprevalent among the natives. "One intelligent woman said she thoughtthat if the Europeans had waited a few more years they would havefound the country without inhabitants." Strangulation, a blow of thewaddy, or filling the ears with red-hot embers, were the favorite waysof killing their own babies.

  Did the whites teach the angelic savages all these diabolical customs?If so, they must have taught them customs invented for the occasion,since they are not practised by whites in any part of the world. Butperhaps Stephens would have been willing to waive this point.Sentimentalists are usually more or less willing to concede thatsavages are devils in most things if we will only admit in return thatthey are angels in their sexual relations. For instance, if we maybelieve Stephens, no nun was ever more modest than the nativeAustralian woman. Once, he says, he was asked to visit a poor oldblack woman in the last stages of consumption:

  "Her case was hopeless, and when she was in almost the last agony of mortal dissolution I was astounded at her efforts 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 hadany modesty regarding exposure of the body she could have learned itfrom no one but the dreadful, degraded whites, for the Australianhimself is an utter stranger to such a feeling. On this point theexplorers and students of the natives are unanimous. Both men andwomen went absolutely naked except in those regions where the climatewas cold.

  NAKED AND NOT ASHAMED

  "They are as innocent of shame as the animals of the forest," says E.Palmer; and J. Bonwick writes: "Nakedness is no shame with them. As aFrench writer once remarked to a lady, 'With a pair of gloves youcould clothe six men.'" Even ornaments are worn by the men only:"females are content with their natural charms." W.E. Roth, in hisstandard work on the Queensland natives, says that "with both sexesthe privates are only covered on special public occasions, or when inclose proximity to white settlements." With the Warburton River tribe(Curr, II, 18) "the women go quite naked, and the men have only a beltmade of human hair round the waist from which a fringe spun of hair ofrats hangs in front." Sturt wrote (I., 106): "The men are much betterlooking than the women; both go perfectly naked."

  At the dances a covering of feathers or leaves is sometimes worn bythe women, but is removed as soon as the dance is over. Narrinyerigirls, says Taplin (15), "wear a sort of apron of fringe, calledKaininggi, until they bear their first child. If they have no childrenit is taken from them and burned by their husbands while they areasleep." Meyer (189) says the same of the Encounter Bay tribe, andsimilar customs prevailed at Port Jackson and many other places.Summing up the observations of Cook, Turnbull, Cunningham, Tench,Hunter, and others, Waitz 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 seventeenmonths among the natives, describes them as being "as nude as Adam andEve" (99). "The Australians' utter lack of modesty is remarkable,"writes F. Mueller (207):

  "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., 126), found the natives of theinterior, without exception, "in a complete state of nudity."

  The still earlier Governor Philipps (1787) found that the inhabitantsof New South Wales had no idea that one part of the body ought to becovered more than any other. Captain Flinders, who saw much ofAustralia in 1795, speaks in one place (I., 66) of "the short skincloak which is of kangaroo, and worn over the shoulders, leaving therest of the body naked." This was in New South Wales. At Keppel Bay(II., 30) he writes: "These people ... go entirely naked;" and so onat other points of the continent touched on his voyage. In Dawson (61)we read: "They were perfectly naked, as they always are." Nor has theAustralian in his native state changed in the century or more sincewhites 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 bootsis perfectly happy."

  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 theanthropologist who uses him as such. It surely ought not to benecessary to prove that races among whom cannibalism, infanticide,wife enslavement and murder, and other hideous crimes are rampant asunreproved national customs, could not possibly be refined and moralin their sexual relations, which offer the greatest of all temptationsto unrestrained selfishness. Yet Stephens tells us in his article thatbefo
re the advent of the whites these people were chaste, and"conjugal infidelity was almost if not entirely unknown;" whileWestermarck (61, 64, 65) classes the Australians with those savages"among whom sexual intercourse out of wedlock is of rare occurrence."On page 70 he declares that "in a savage condition of life ... thereis comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations;" and onpage 539, in summing up his doctrines, he asserts that "we have somereason to believe that irregular connections between the sexes have,on the whole, exhibited a tendency to increase along with the progressof civilization." The refutation of this libel on civilization--whichis widely believed--is one of the main objects of the followingpages--is, in fact, one of the main objects of this whole volume.

  There are a few cities in Southern Europe where the rate ofillegitimacy equals, and in one or two cases slightly exceeds, thelegitimate births; but that is owing to the fact that betrayed girlsfrom the country nearly always go to the cities to find a refuge andhide their shame. Taking the countries as a whole we find that evenScotland, which has always had a somewhat unsavory reputation in thisrespect, had, in 1897, only 6.98 per cent of illegitimate births--sayseven in a hundred; the highest rate since 1855 having been 10.2.There are, of course, besides this, cases of uncertain paternity, buttheir number is comparatively small, and it certainly is much largerin the _less_ civilized countries of Europe than in the morecivilized. Taking the five or six most advanced countries of Europeand America, it is safe to say that the paternity is certain in ninetycases out of a hundred. If we now look at the Australians as describedby eye-witnesses since the earliest exploring tours, we find a stateof affairs which makes paternity uncertain _in all cases withoutexception_, and also a complete indifference on the subject.

  ABORIGINAL WANTONNESS

  One of the first explorers of the desert interior was Eyre (1839). Hisexperiences--covering ten years--led him to speak (378) of "theillicit and almost unlimited intercourse between the sexes." "Marriageis not looked upon as any pledge of chastity; indeed, no such virtueis recognized" (319). "Many of the native dances are of a grosslylicentious character." Men rarely get married before they aretwenty-five, but that does not mean that they are continent. Fromtheir thirteenth year they have promiscuous intercourse with girls whoabandon themselves at the age of ten, though they rarely becomemothers before they are sixteen.[155]

  Another early explorer of the interior (1839), T.L. Mitchell, givesthis glimpse of aboriginal morality (I., 133):

  "The natives ... in return for our former disinterested 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 apprehension, but seemed to regard us as beings of a race so different, without the slightest indication of either fear, aversion, or surprise. 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 intoNorthwestern and Western Australia, likewise came in contact with the"uncontaminated" natives, found that, though "a spear through the calfof the leg is the least punishment that awaits" a faithless wife ifdetected, and sometimes the death-penalty is inflicted, yet "theyounger women were much addicted to intrigue" (I., 231, 253), asindeed they appear to be throughout the continent, as we shall seepresently.

  Of all Australian institutions none is more characteristic than thecorrobborees or nocturnal dances which are held at intervals by thevarious tribes all over the continent, and were of course heldcenturies before a white man was ever seen on the continent; and nowhite man in his wildest nightmare ever dreamt of such scenes as areenacted at them. They are given preferably by moonlight, are apt tolast all night, and are often attended by the most obscene andlicentious practices. The corrobboree, says Curr (I., 92), wasundoubtedly "often an occasion of licentiousness and atrocity";fights, even wars, ensue, "and almost invariably as the result ofoutrages on women." The songs heard at these revels are sometimesharmless and the dances not indecent, says the Rev. G. Taplin (37),

  "but at other times the songs will consist 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 nobody 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 corrobboreesof the Mary Eiver tribes that

  "the representations were rarely free from obscenity, and on 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 saplings 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."[156]

  LOWER THAN BRUTES

  The lowest depth of aboriginal degradation remains to be sounded. Likemost of the Africans, Australians are lower than animals inasmuch asthey often do not wait till girls have reached the age of puberty.Meyer (190) says of the Narrinyeri: "They are given in marriage at avery early age (ten or twelve years)." Lindsay Cranford[157] testifiesregarding five South Australian tribes that "at puberty no girl,without exception, is a virgin." With the Paroo River tribes "thegirls became wives whilst mere children, and mothers at fourteen"(Curr, II., 182). Of other tribes Curr's correspondents 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 fourteen or fifteen" (342).

  The Birria tribe waits a few years longer, but atones for this by aresort to another crime: "Males and females are married at fromfourteen to sixteen, but are not allowed to rear children until theyget to be about thirty years of age; hence infanticide is general."The missionary O.W. Schuermann says of the Port Lincoln tribe (223):"Notwithstanding the early marriage of females, I have not observedthat they have children at an earlier age than is common amongEuropeans." Of York district tribes we are told (I., 343) that "girlsare betrothed shortly after birth, and brutalities are practised onthem while mere children." Of the Kojonub tribe (348): "Girls arepromised in marriage soon after birth, and given over to theirhusbands 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 Meening tribe(402):

  "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 Australian savages, that the girls were made use of for promiscuous 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 isrecognized," has already been quoted, and is borne out by testimony ofmany other writers. In the Dieyerie tribe "each married woman ispermitted a paramour." (Curr, II., 46.) Taplin says of the Narrinyeri(16, 18) that boys are not allowed to marry until their beard hasgrown a certain length; "but they are allowed the abominable privilegeof promiscuous intercourse with the youn
ger portion of the other sex."A.W. Howitt describes[158] a strange kind of group marriage prevalentamong the Dieri and kindred tribes, the various couples being allottedto each other by the council of elder men without themselves beingconsulted as to their preferences. During the ensuing festivities,however, "there is for about four hours a general license in camp asregards" the couples thus "married." Meyer (191) says of the EncounterBay tribes that if a man from another tribe arrives having anythingwhich a native desires to purchase, "he perhaps makes a bargain to payby 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 thenatives have a special name for the custom of lending one of theirwives to young men who have none. Sometimes they are thus lent for amonth at a time.[159] As we shall presently see, one reason whyAustralian men marry is to have the means of making friends by lendingtheir wives to others. The custom of allowing friends to share thehusband's privileges was also widely prevalent.

  In New South Wales and about Riverina, 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., 128) that if a woman resist her husband's ordersto give herself up to another man she is "either speared or cruellybeaten." Fison (303) believes that the lending of wives to visitorswas looked on not as a favor but a duty--a right which the visitorcould claim; and Howitt showed that in the native gesture languagethere was a special sign for this custom--"a peculiar folding of thehands," indicating "either a request or an offer, according as it isused by the guest or the host."[160] Concerning Queensland tribes Rothsays (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 violates 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 greatest compliment that can be paid him, provided that permission 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 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 paedomatronym other than his own, no one troubles himself about the matter. On the other hand, death by the spear or club is the punishment 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 soindifferent to chastity as the other natives; but the informationgiven by Roth (who for three years was surgeon-general to the Boulia,Cloncurry and Normanton hospitals) dispels such an illusion mostradically.[161]

  USELESS PRECAUTIONS

  In Central Australia, says H. Kempe,[162] "there is no separation ofthe sexes in social life; in the daily camp routine as well as atfestivals all the natives mingle as they choose." Curr asserts (I.,109) that

  "in most tribes a woman is not allowed 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 apartand the young men were never allowed to approach them and notpermitted to hold converse with any one except their mother orsisters. "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 issuccessfully guarded; but the writers quoted themselves take care todispel that illusion. Grey tells us that (in spite of thesearrangements) "the young females are much addicted to intrigue;" andagain (248):

  "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 attempts atseclusion are from succeeding in enforcing chastity:

  "Notwithstanding the savage jealousy, _varied by 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 more commonly to strangers visiting 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 italicizedabove would alone show that what makes an Australian in some instancesguard his females is not a regard for chastity, or jealousy in oursense of the word, but simply a desire to preserve his movableproperty--a slave and concubine who, if young or fat, is very liableto be stolen or, on account of the bad treatment she receives from herold master, to run away with a younger man.[163]

  If any further evidence were needed on this head it would be suppliedby the authoritative statement of J.D. Wood[164] that

  "In fact, chastity as a virtue is absolutely unknown amongst all the tribes of which there are records. The buying, 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 PROMISCUITY

  Since this chapter was written a new book on Australia has appearedwhich bears out the views here taken so admirably that I must insert abrief reference to its contents. It is Spencer and Gillen's _TheNative Tribes of Central Australia_ (1899), and relates to nine tribesover whom Baldwin Spencer had been placed as special magistrate andsub-protector for some years, during which he had excellentopportunities 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 exclusive 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."

  "Occasionally, but rarely, it happens that a man attempts to prevent his wife's _Piraungaru_ from having access to her, but this leads to a fight, and the husband is looked upon as churlish. When visiting distant groups where, in all likelihood, the husband has no _Piraungaru_, it is customary for other 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 Arunta tribe there is a restriction of a particular woman to aparticular man, "or rather, a man has an exclusive
right to onespecial woman, though he may of his own free will lend her to othermen," 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 marriage 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, andafterward she belongs to him exclusively." At this time when a womanis being, so to speak, handed over to one particular individual,special individuals with whom at ordinary times she may have nointercourse, have the right of access to her. Such customs our authorsinterpret plausibly as partial promiscuity pointing to a time whenstill greater laxity prevailed--suggesting rudimentary organs inanimals (96).

  Among some tribes at corrobboree time, every day two or three womenare told off and become the property of all the men on the corrobboreegrounds, excepting fathers, brothers, or sons. Thus there are threestages of individual ownership in women: In the first, whilst the manhas exclusive right to a woman, he can and does lend her to certainother men; in the second there is a wider relation in regard toparticular men at the time of marriage; and in the third a still widerrelation to all men except the nearest relatives, at corrobboree time.Only in the first of these cases can we properly speak of wife"lending"; in the other cases the individuals have no choice andcannot withhold their consent, the matter being of a public or tribalnature. As regards the corrobborees, it is supposed to be the duty ofevery man at different times to send his wife to the ground, and themost striking feature in regard to it is that the first man who hasaccess to her is the very one to whom, under normal conditions, she ismost strictly taboo, her _Mura_. [All women whose daughters areeligible 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 offerany opposition" (98).

  ABORIGINAL DEPRAVITY

  These revelations of Spencer and Gillen, taken in connection with theabundant evidence I have cited from the works of early explorers as tothe utter depravity of the aboriginal Australian when first seen bywhite men, will make it impossible hereafter for anyone whosereasoning powers exceed a native Australian's to maintain that it wasthe whites who corrupted these savages. It takes an exceptionallyshrewd white man even to unravel the customs of voluntary orobligatory wife sharing or lending which prevail in all parts ofAustralia, and which must have required not only hundreds butthousands of years to assume their present extraordinarily complexaspect; customs which form part and parcel of the very life ofAustralians 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 somecases, no doubt, contact with the low whites and their liquoraggravated these evils by fostering professional prostitution andmaking men even more ready than before to treat their wives asmerchandise. Lumholtz, who lived several years among these savages,makes this admission (345), but at the same time he is obliged to joinall the other witnesses in declaring that apart from this "there isnot much to be said of the morals of the blacks, for I am sorry to saythey have none." On a previous page (42) I cited Sutherland's summaryof a report of the House of Commons (1844, 350 pages), which showsthat the Australian native, as found by the first white visitors,manifested "an absolute incapacity to form even a rudimentary notionof chastity." The same writer, who was born and brought up inAustralia, 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 pollutions deeper than any I have thought it necessary to mention, and all that the lower fringe of civilized men can do to harm the uncivilized is to stoop to the level of the latter, instead of teaching them a better way."[165]

  THE QUESTION OF PROMISCUITY

  As regards the promiscuity question, Spencer and Gillen's observationsgo far to confirm some of the seemingly fantastic speculationsregarding "a thousand miles of wives," and so on, contained in thevolume of Fison and Howitt[166] and to make it probable thatunregulated intercourse was the state of primitive man at a stage ofevolution earlier than any known to us now. Since the appearance ofWestermarck's _History of Human Marriage_ it has become the fashion toregard the theory of promiscuity as disproved. Alfred Russell Wallace,in his preface to this book, expresses his opinion that "independentthinkers" will agree with its author on most of the points wherein hetakes issue with his famous predecessors, including Spencer, Morgan,Lubbock, and others. Ernst Grosse, in a volume which the president ofthe German Anthropological Society pronounced "epoch-making"--_DieFormen der Familie_--refers (43) to Westermarck's "very thoroughrefutation" of this theory, which he stigmatizes as one of theblunders of the unfledged science of sociology which it will be bestto forget as soon as possible; adding that "Westermarck's best weaponswere, however, forged by Starcke."

  In a question like this, however, two independent observers are worthmore than two hundred "independent thinkers." Spencer and Gillen areeye-witnesses, and they inform us repeatedly (100, 105, 108, 111) thatWestermarck's objections to the theory of promiscuity do not stand thetest of facts and that none of his hypotheses explains away thecustoms which point to a former prevalence of promiscuity. They haveabsolutely disproved his assertion (539) that "it is certainly notamong the lowest peoples that sexual relations most nearly approachpromiscuity." Cunow, who, as Grosse admits (50), has written the mostthorough and authentic monograph on the complicated familyrelationship of Australia, devotes two pages (122-23) to exposing someof Westermarck's arguments, which, as he shows, "border on the comic."I myself have in this chapter, as well as in those on Africans,American Indians, South Sea Islanders, etc., revealed the comicalityof the assertion that there is in a savage condition of life"comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations," which formsone of the main props of Westermarck's anti-promiscuity theory; and Ihave also reduced _ad absurdum_ his systematic overrating of savagesin the matter of liberty of choice, esthetic taste and capacity foraffection which resulted from his pet theory and marred his wholebook.[167]

  It is interesting to note that Darwin (_D.M._, Ch. XX.) concluded fromthe facts known to him that "_almost_ promiscuous intercourse or veryloose intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world:" andthe only thing that seemed to deter him from believing in _absolutely_promiscuous intercourse was the "strength of the feeling of jealousy."Had he lived to understand the true nature of savage jealousyexplained in this volume and to read the revelations of Spencer andGillen, that difficulty would have vanished. On this point, too, theirremarks are of great importance, fully bearing out the view set forthin my chapter on jealousy. They declare (99) that they did not findsexual 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 property, in the other he has offended against tribal law."

  Jealousy, they sum up, "is indeed a factor which need not be takeninto serious account in regard to the question of sexual relationsamongst the Central Australian tribes."

  The customs described by these authors show, moreover, that thesesavages _do not allow jealousy to stand in the way of sexualcommunism_, a man who refuses to share his wife being consideredchurlish, in one class of cases, while in another no choice is allowedhim, the matter being arranged by the tribe. This point has notheretofore been sufficiently emphasized. It knocks away one of thestrongest props of the anti-promiscuity theory, and it is supported bythe remarks of Howitt,[168] who, after explaining how, among theDieri, couples are chosen by headmen without consulting theirwishes,--new allotments being made at each circumcision ceremony--andhow the dance is followed by a general license, goes on to relate thatall these matters are carefully arranged _so as to prevent jealousy_.Sometimes this passion breaks out nevertheless, leading to bloodyquarrels; but the main point is that systematic efforts are made tosuppress jealousy: "No jealous feeling is allowed to be shown duringthis time under penalty of strangling." Whence we may fairly inferthat under more primitive conditions the individual was allowed stillless right to assert jealous claims of individual possession.

  Australian jealousy presents some other interesting aspects, but weshall be better able to appreciate them if we first consider why anative ever puts himself into a position where jealous watchfulness ofprivate property is called for.

  WHY DO AUSTRALIANS MARRY?

  Since chastity among the young of both sexes is not held of anyaccount, and since the young girls, who are married to men four orfive times their age, are always ready for an intrigue with a youngbachelor, why does an Australian ever marry? He does not marry forlove, for, as this whole chapter proves, he is incapable of such asentiment. His appetites need not urge him to marry, since there areso many ways of appeasing them outside of matrimony. He does not marryto enjoy a monopoly of a woman's favors, since he is ready to sharethem with others. Why then does he marry? One reason may be that, asthe men get older (they seldom marry before they are twenty-five oreven thirty), they have less relish for the dangers connected withwoman-stealing and intrigues. A second reason is indicated in Hewitt'sexplanation (_Jour. Anthr. Inst_., XX., 58), that it is an advantageto an Australian to have as many wives as possible, as they work andhunt for him, and "he also obtains great influence in the tribe bylending them his Piraurus occasionally, and receiving presents fromthe young men."

  The main reason, however, why an Australian marries is in order thathe may have a drudge. I have previously cited Eyre's statement thatthe 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 several 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 atrace of romance connected with an Australian marriage. After a manhas secured his girl, she quietly submits and goes with him as hiswife and drudge, to build his camp, gather firewood, fetch water, makenets, clear away grass, dig roots, fish for mussels, be his baggagemule on journeys, etc. (Brough Smyth, 84); and Eyre (II., 319) thuscompletes 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

  Thus the woman becomes the man's slave--his property in every sense ofthe word. No matter how he obtained her--by capture, elopement, orexchange for another woman--she is his own, as much as his spear orhis boomerang. "The husband is the absolute owner of the wife," saysCurr (I., 109). To cite Eyre once more (318):

  "Wives 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 wesee in this case. Another instance is the word _gramma_, concerningwhich we read in Lumholtz (126):

  "The robbery of women, who also among these savages are regarded as _a man's most valuable property_, is both the grossest 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 Australian jealousy.The native knows jealousy in its crudest form--that of mere animalrage at being prevented by a rival from taking immediate possession ofthe object of his desire. He knows also the jealousy ofproperty--_i.e._, revenge for infringement on it. Of this it isneedless to give examples. But he knows not true jealousy--_i.e._,anxious concern for his wife's chastity and fidelity, since he isalways ready to barter these things for a trifle. Proofs of this havealready been adduced in abundance. Here is another authoritativestatement by the missionary Schurmann, who writes (223):

  "The loose practices of the aborigines, with regard to the sanctity of matrimony, form the worst trait in their character; although the men are capable of fierce jealousy if their wives transgress _unknown to them_, yet they frequently send them 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 (152) shows in a startling way thatamong the Australians jealousy means nothing more than a desire forrevenge 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 criminal should be sacrificed, or the adulterous chief give a victim to appease the wrathful husband. This was agreed to and he _gave one of his 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 conclusion 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."[169]

  The men being indifferent to female chastity, it would be vain toexpect true jealousy on the part of the women. The men are entirelyunrestrained in their appetites unless they interfere with other men'sproperty rights, and in a community where polygam
y prevails thejealousy which is based in a monopoly of affection has little chanceto 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 trouble"

  as the senior wife is "mistress of the camp," and in such a case thefirst wife is apt to run away. Vanity and envy, or the desire to bethe favorite, thus appear to be the principal ingredients in anAustralian woman's jealousy. Meyer (191) says of the Encounter Baytribe:

  "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 ofeach other, and is utterly different from modern conjugal or lover'sjealousy, which is chiefly based on an ardent regard for chastity andunswerving fidelity. In this phase jealousy is a noble and usefulpassion, helping to maintain the purity of the family; whereas, in thephase that prevails among savages it is utterly selfish and brutal.Palmer says[170] that "a new woman would always be beaten by the otherwife, and a good deal would depend on the fighting powers of theformer whether she kept her position or not." "Among the Kalkadoon,"writes Roth (141),

  "where a man may have three, four, or even five gins, 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."

  Lumholtz says (213) the black women "often have bitter quarrels aboutmen whom they love and are anxious to marry. If the husband isunfaithful, the wife frequently becomes greatly enraged."

  George Grey (II., 312-14) gives an amusing sketch of an aboriginalscene of conjugal bliss. Weerang, an old man, has four wives, the lastof whom, just added to the harem, gets all his attention. This excitesthe anger of one of the older ones, who reproaches the husband withhaving stolen her, an unwilling bride, from another and better man."May the sorcerer," she adds, "bite and tear her whom you have nowtaken to your bed. Here am I, rebuking young men who dare to look atme, while she, your favorite, replete with arts and wiles, dishonorsyou." This last insinuation is too much for the young favorite, whoretorts by calling her a liar and declaring that she has often seenher exchanging nods and winks with her paramour. The rival's answer isa blow with her stick. A general engagement follows, which the old manfinally ends by beating several of the wives severely about the headwith a hammer.[171]

  PUGNACIOUS FEMALES

  Jealousy is capable of converting even civilized women into fiends;all the more these bush women, who have few opportunities forcultivating the gentler feminine qualities. Indeed, so masculine arethese women that were it not for woman's natural inferiority instrength their tyrants might find it hard to subdue them. Bulmersays[172] 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."

  Describing 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 encouraging their friends. It was a perfect tempest of rage."

  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 receives 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 up 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," Greyinforms us (II., 314); "they deal dreadful blows at one another," etc.

  For some unexplained reason--possibly a vague sense of fair play whichin time may lead to the beginnings of gallantry--there is oneoccasion, an initiation ceremonial, at which women are allowed to havetheir 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 chastise; for, as each pair appear around the corner at the entrance 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 allowed to retaliate in any way whatsoever--the only occasion in the whole of her life when the woman can take the law into her own hands without fear or favor."

  WIFE STEALING

  This last assertion is not strictly accurate. There are otheroccasions when women take the law into their hands, especially whenmen try to steal them, an every-day occurrence, at least in formertimes. 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 individual, be smitten by a female of a different tribe, he endeavors 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 discomfiture of the Adonis."

  Similarly G.B. Wilkinson describes how the young men go, usually ingroups of two or three, to capture brides of hostile tribes. They lurkabout in concealment till they see that the women are alone, when theypounce upon them and, either by persuasion or blows, take away thosethey want; whereupon they try to regain their own tribe before pursuitcan be attempted. "This stealing of wives is one cause of the frequentwars that take place amongst the natives."

  Barrington's _History of New South Wales_ is adorned with the pictureof a big naked man having beside him, on her back, a beautifullyformed naked girl whom he is dragging away by one arm. The monster, weread in the text, has come upon her unawares, clubbed her on the headand 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 violence and determination of a savage," etc.

  Curr (I., 237) objects to this picture as a gross exaggeration. Healso declares (I., 108) that it is only on rare occasions that a wifeis captured from another tribe and carried off, and that at presentwoman-stealing is not encouraged, as it is apt to involve a wholetribe in war for one man's sake. From older writers, however, one getsthe impression that wife-stealing was a common custom. Howitt (351)remarks concerning the "wild white man" William Buckley, who livedmany years among the natives, and whose adventures were written up byJohn Morgan, that at first sight his statements "seem to record merelya series of duels and battles about women who were stolen, speared,and slaughtered;" and Brough Smyth (77) quotes John Bulmer, who saysthat among the Gippsland natives

  "so
metimes a man who has no sister [to swap] will, in desperation, steal a wife; but this is invariably a cause of bloodshed. 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 forbride-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 sameimpression is conveyed by the writings of Salvado, Wilkes, andothers--Sturt, _e.g._, who wrote (II., 283) that the abduction of amarried or unmarried woman was a frequent cause of quarrel. Mitchell(I., 330) relates that when some whites told a native that they hadkilled a native of another tribe, his first thought and only remarkwas, "Stupid white fellows! 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 flights, of bad treatment from other females 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."

  It is not only from other and hostile tribes that these men forciblyappropriate girls or married women. Among the Hunter River tribes(Curr, III., 353), "men renowned as warriors frequently attacked theirinferiors in strength and took their wives from them." The Queenslandnatives, we are told by Narcisse Peltier, who lived among themseventeen years, "not unfrequently fight with spears for thepossession of a woman" (Spencer, _P.S._, I., 601). Lumholtz says (184)that "the majority of the young men wait a long time before they getwives, partly for the reason that they have not the courage to fightthe 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 natives 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 off, 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 GIRLS

  It is obvious that when women are forcibly appropriated at home orstolen from other tribes, their inclination or choice is notconsulted. 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 mereaccident, not likely to occur often. The same is true of another formof Australian "courtship" which may be called swapping girls, andwhich is far the most common way of getting a wife. Curr, after fortyyears' experience with native affairs, wrote (I., 107) that "theAustralian male _almost invariably_ obtains his wife or wives, eitheras the survivor of a married brother, or in exchange for his sistersor daughters." The Rev. H.E.A. Meyer says (10) that the marriageceremony

  "may with great propriety be considered an exchange, for no man can obtain a wife unless he can promise to give his sister or other relative in exchange.... 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 frequently 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 different words:

  "The old men manage to keep the females a good deal amongst themselves, 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 heobtained from divers sources. A yam-stick is given to a girl when shereaches the age of marriage; with this she drives away any young manshe does not fancy, for a mere "no" would not keep him at bay. "Thewomen never initiate matches;" these are generally arranged betweentwo young men who have sisters to exchange. "The young woman's opinionis not asked." When the young man is ready to "propose" to the girl hehas bartered his sister for, he walks up to her equipped as forwar--ready to parry her "love-taps" if she feels inclined that way."After a little fencing between the pair the woman, if she has noserious objections to the man, quietly submits." If she _has_ "seriousobjections," what happens? The same writer tells us graphically (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, 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. Sometimesthey are disposed of by being exchanged for young women of anothertribe 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., 322).

  In the Murray tribes "a widow could not marry any one she chose. Shewas the property of her husband's family, hence she must marry herhusband's brother or near relative; and even if he had a wife she mustbecome No. 2 or 3."

  THE PHILOSOPHY OF ELOPEMENTS

  The evidence, in short, is unanimously to the effect that theAustralian girl has absolutely no liberty of choice. Yet theastonishing Westermarck, ignoring, _more suo_, the overwhelming numberof facts against him, endeavors in two places (217, 223) to convey theimpression to his readers that she does largely enjoy the freedom ofchoice, placing his sole reliance in two assertions by Howitt andMathew.[173] Howitt says that among the K
urnai, women are allowed freechoice, and Mathew "asserts that, with varying details, marriage bymutual consent will be found among other tribes, also, though it isnot completed except by means of a runaway match." Now Hewitt'sassertion is contradicted by Curr, who, in addition to his own fortyyears of experience among the natives had the systematized notes of alarge number of correspondents to base his conclusions on. He says(I., 108) that "in no instance, unless Mr. Howitt's account of theKurnai be correct, which I doubt, has the female any voice in theselection of a husband." He might have added that Hewitt's remark iscontradicted in his own book, where we are told that among the Kurnaielopement is the rule. Strange to say, it seems to have occurredneither to Howitt, nor to Westermarck, nor to Mathew that _elopementproves the absence of choice_, for if there were liberty of choice thecouple would not be obliged to run away. Nor is this all. The factsprove that marriage by actual elopement[174] is of rare occurrence;that "marriage" based on such elopement is nearly always adulterous(with another man's wife) and of brief duration--a mere intrigue, infact; that the guilty couple are severely punished, if not killedoutright; and that everything that is possible is done to prevent orfrustrate elopements based on individual preference or liking. On thefirst of these points Curr gives us the most comprehensive andreliable 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 _but 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 forseventeen months, tells a similar story. Elopements, he says (174),are usually with wives. The couple escape to a distant tribe andremain a few months--_rarely more than seven or eight_, so far as heobserved; then the faithless wife is returned to her husband and theelopers are punished more or less severely. "At times," we read inSpencer 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."

  Sometimes the husband seems glad to have got rid of his wife, for whenthe elopers return to camp he first has his revenge by cutting thelegs and body of both and then he cries "You keep altogether, I throwaway, I throw away."

  It is instructive to note with what ingenuity the natives seek toprevent matches based on mutual inclination. Taplin says (11) of theNarrinyeri that "a young woman who goes away with a man and lives withhim as his wife without the consent of her relatives is regarded asvery little better than a prostitute." Among these same Narrinyeri,says Gason, "it is considered disgraceful for a woman to take ahusband who has given no other woman for her." (Bonwick, 245.) Thedeliberate animosity against free choice is emphasized by a statementin Brough Smyth (79), that if the owner of an eloping female suspectsthat she favored the man she eloped with, "he will not hesitate tomaim or kill her." She must have no choice or preference of her own,under any circumstances. It must be remembered, too, that even anactual elopement by no means proves that the woman is following aspecial inclination. She may be merely anxious to get away from acruel or superannuated husband. In such cases the woman may take theinitiative. Dawson (65) once said to a native, "You should not havecarried 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 ofromantic feelings, but even as an incident it is apt to be prosaic orcruel rather than romantic, as our elopements are. In many cases it ishard to distinguish from brutal capture, as we may infer from anincident related by Curr (108-9). He was sleeping at a station on theLachlan.

  "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 nativessubject girls who venture to have inclinations of their own wascommunicated by W.E. Stanbridge to Brough Smyth (80). The scene is alittle dell among undulating grassy plains. In the lower part of thedell a limpid spring bursts forth.

  "On one side of this dell, and nearest to the spring at the 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 the right breast with a jagged hand-spear by her brother, and is supposed to be dying."

  CHARMING A WOMAN BY MAGIC

  Besides the three ways already mentioned of securing awife--elopement, which is rare; capture, which is rarer still, and_Tuelcha mura_, in which a girl is assigned to a man before she isborn, and while her prospective mother is still a girl herself--by farthe commonest arrangement--there is a fourth, charming by magic. Ofthis, too, Spencer and Gillen have given the best description(541-44). When a man, they tell us, wants to charm a woman belongingto a distant tribe he takes a _churinga_, or sacred stick, and goeswith 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 invitation 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 humming 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 performed 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'swife will do just as well, and if her owner comes armed to stopproceedings, 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 bysinging over it. Then he places it on his head and wears it about thecamp so that the woman can see it. Her attention is drawn to it, andshe becomes violently attached to the man, or, as the natives say,"her internal organs shake with eagerness." Here, again, it makes nodifference whether the woman be married or not.

  Still another way of charming a woman is by means of a certain shellornament, which a man ties to his waist-belt at a corrobboree afterhaving charmed it.[175]

  "While he is dancing the woman whom he wishes to attract alone sees the lightning 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 belongs 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 ofeloping, she would be severely punished, if not put to death;" andagain: these cases are not of frequent occurrence, for they depend onthe woman's consent, and she knows that if caught she will in allprobability be killed, or at least very roughly handled. Hence she is"not very easily charmed away from her original possessor." Moreover,even these adulterous elopements seldom lead to anything more than atemporary liaison, as we have seen, and it would be comic to speak ofa "liberty of choice" in cases where such a choice can be exercisedonly at the risk of being killed on the spot.

  OTHER OBSTACLES TO LOVE

  Looking back over the ground traversed in this chapter, we see thatCupid is thwarted in Australia not only by the natural stupidity,coarseness, and sensuality of the natives, but by a number ofartificial obstacles which seem to have been devised with almostdiabolical ingenuity for the express purpose of stifling the germs oflove. The selfish, systematic, and deliberate suppression of freechoice is only one of these obstacles. There are two others almostequally fatal to love--the habit of marrying young girls to men oldenough to be their fathers or grandfathers, and the complicatedmarriage taboos. We have already seen that as a rule the old menappropriate the young girls, the younger men not being allowed tomarry till they are twenty-five or thirty, and even then beingcompelled to take an old man's cast-off wife of thirty-five or fortysummers, "It is usual," says Curr (I., 110),

  "to see old men with mere girls as wives, and men in the prime of life married to widows.... Women have very frequently two husbands during their life-time, the first older and the second younger than themselves.... There are always many bachelors in every tribe."[176]

  Not to speak of love, this arrangement makes it difficult even foranimal passion to manifest itself except in an adulterous orillegitimate 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 mostextraordinary. Suppose one man has a son, another a daughter,generally both of tender age. Now it would be bad enough to betroththese two without their consent and before they are old enough to haveany real choice. But the Australian way is infinitely worse. It isarranged that the girl in the case shall be, by and by, not the boy'swife, 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 marrybut till her daughter is old enough to marry! And this is "by far themost common method"!

  MARRIAGE TABOOS AND "INCEST."

  The marriage taboos are no less artificial, absurd, and fatal to freechoice and love. An Australian is not only forbidden to marry a girlwho is closely related to him by blood--sometimes the prohibitionextends to first, second, and even third cousins--but he must notthink of such a thing as marrying a woman having his family name orbelonging to certain tribes or clans--his own, his mother's orgrandmother's, his neighbor's, or one speaking his dialect, etc. Theresult is more disastrous than one unfamiliar with Australianrelationships would imagine; for these relationships are socomplicated that to unravel them takes, in the words of Howitt (59),"a patience compared with which that of Job is furious irritability."

  These prohibitions are not to be trifled with. They extend even to warcaptives. If a couple disregard them and elope, they are followed bythe indignant relatives in hot pursuit and, if taken, severelypunished, perhaps even put to death. (Howitt, 300, 66.) Of theKamilaroi 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 taboos, thesenotions of real or fancied incest, could have ever arisen. Curr(I.,236) remarks pointedly that

  "most persons who have any practical knowledge of our savages will, I think, bear me out when I assert that, whatever their objections 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 differential calculus."[177]

  Whatever may have been the origin of these prohibitions, it is obviousthat, as I have said, they acted as obstacles to love; and what ismore, in many cases they seem to have impeded legitimate marriageonly, without interfering with licentious indulgence. Roth (67) citesO'Donnell to the effect that with the Kunandaburi tribe the _jusprimae noctis_ is allowed all the men present at the camp withoutregard to class or kin. He also cites Beveridge, who had livedtwenty-three years in contact with the Riverina tribes and who assuredhim that, apart from marrying, there was no restriction onintercourse. In his book on South Australia J.D. Wood says (403):

  "The fact that marriage does not take place between 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., 92) refers to the fact that secret violations ofthe rule against fornication within the forbidden classes were notpunished. Bonwick (62) cites the Rev. C. Wilhelmi on the Port Lincolncustoms:

  "There are no instances of two Karraris or two Matteris having been married together; and yet connections of a less virtuous 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.

  AFFECTION FOR WOMEN AND DOGS

  There is a strange class of men who always stand with a brush in handready to whitewash any degraded creature, be he the devil himself. Forwant of a better name they are called sentimentalists, and they areamong men what the morbid females who bring bouquets and sympathy tofiendish murderers are among women. The Australian, unutterablydegraded, particularly in his sexual relations, as the foregoing pagesshow him to be, has had his champions of the type of the "fearless"Stephens. There is another class of writers who create confusion bytheir reckless use of words. Thus the Rev. G. Taplin asserts (12) thathe has "known as well-matched and loving couples amongst theaborigines" as he has amongst Europeans. What does he mean by lovingcouples? What, in his opinion, are the symptoms of affection? Withamusing naivete 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 ayoung bride pleases her husband, "he _shows his affection_ byfrequently rubbing her with grease to improve her personal appearance,and with the idea that it will make her grow rapidly and become fat."If such selfish love of obesity for sensual purposes merits the nameof affection, I cheerfully grant that Australians are capable ofaffection to an unlimited degree. Taplin, furthermore, admits that"as wives got old, they were often cast off by their husbands, orgiven to young men in exchange for their sisters or other relations attheir disposal" (XXXI.); and again (121):

  "From childhood to old age the gratification of appetite and passion is the sole purpose 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 orself-sacrifice, such as constitutes the sole criterion of affection.Nor in the hundreds of books and articles on Australia that I haveread have I come across a single instance of this kind. On the subjectof the cruel tre
atment of women all the observers are eloquent; hadthey seen any altruistic actions, would they have failed to make arecord of them?

  The Australian's attachment to his wife is evidently a good deal likehis love of his dog. Gason (259) tells us that the dogs, of whichevery camp has from six to twenty, are generally 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 verybadly_, receiving nothing but the bones." "Hence the dog is always invery low condition."

  Another writer[178] 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 oftenand lovingly after he has eaten them."

  As for the women, they are little better than the men. What Mitchellsays of them (I., 307) is characteristic. After a fight, he says, thewomen

  "do not always follow their fugitive 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 girls followed our party, beseeching us to take them with us."

  The following from Grey (II., 230) gives us an idea of wifelyaffection and fidelity: "The women have generally some favoriteamongst the young men, always looking forward to be his wife at thedeath of her husband." How utterly beyond the Australian horizon wasthe idea of common decency, not to speak of such a holy thing asaffection, 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 be absurd to suppose the widows in such casescapable of suffering as our women would under such circumstances. Theyare quite as callous and cruel as the men. Evidence is given in theJackman book (149) that, like Indian women, they torture prisoners ofwar, breaking toes, fingers, and arms, digging out the eyes andfilling 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 (321) he says, with reference to the fact that marriage isnot regarded as any pledge of chastity, which is not recognized as avirtue: "But little real affection consequently exists betweenhusbands and wives, and younger men value a wife principally for herservices as a slave." And in a Latin footnote, in which he describesthe licentious customs of promiscuous intercourse and the harshtreatment of women, he adds (320), "It is easy to understand thatthere can hardly be much love among husbands and wives." He also givesthis particular instance of conjugal indifference and cruelty. In 1842the wife of a native in Adelaide, a girl of about eighteen, wasconfined and recovered slowly. Before she was well the tribe removedfrom the locality. The husband preferred accompanying them, and lefthis wife to die unattended. William Jackman, the Englishman who livedseventeen months as a captive among the natives, says (118) that"wife-killing, among the aborigines of Australia, is frequent andelicits neither surprise nor any sort of animadversion." By way ofillustrating this remark he relates how, one day, he returned with anative from an unsuccessful hunt. The native's twelve-year-old wifehad caught an opossum, roasted it, and, impelled by hunger, had begunto eat it instead of saving it for her master--an atrocious crime. Forfifteen minutes the husband sat in silent rage which his featuresbetrayed. Presently he jumped up with the air of a demon,

  "scooped his two hands full of embers and burning sand, and flung the whole into the face and bosom of the naked object of his vengeance; for I must repeat that none of the natives 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 HORRIBLE CUSTOM

  Suppose this young wife had saved the opossum for her husband. Hewould then have eaten it and, in accordance with their universalcustom, have thrown her the bones to share with the dog. After that hemight have rubbed her with grease and indulged in sensual caresses.Would that have proved his capacity for affection? Would you call amother affectionate who fondled her child, but allowed it to starvewhile she gratified her own appetite? The only sure test of affectionlies in disinterested actions of self-sacrifice; and even actions maysometimes mislead us. Thus several authors have been led into absurdlyerroneous conclusions by a horrible custom prevalent among thenatives, and thus described by Curr (I., 89):

  "In some cases a woman is obliged 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 claycan be thus worshipped for the spirit that once was its tenant"(!!).Angas was an uneducated scribbler, but what shall we say on findinghis sentimental view accepted by the professional Germananthropologists, Gerland (VI., 780) and Jung (109)? Anyone familiarwith Australian life must suspect at once that this custom is simplyone of the horrible modes of punishment devised for women. Curr saysthe woman is "_obliged by custom_" to carry her dead child, and headds: "I believe that this practice is insisted on when a young motherloses her first born, as the death of the child is thought to havecome about by carelessness." To suppose that Australian mothers whousually kill all but two of their six or more children could becapable of such an act for sentimental reasons is to show a logicalfaculty on a par with the Australian's own. This point has alreadybeen 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 AFFLICTION

  Here, as in several of the alleged cases of African sentimentality, wesee the great need of caution and detective sagacity in interpretingfacts. To take another instance: Westermarck (503), in his search forcases 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 romanticaffliction--

  'I never shall see my darling again.'"

  As a matter of fact this line has no more to do with the "truemonogamous instinct, the absorbing passion for one," than with JuliusCaesar. Eyre relates (310, 70) that when Miago, the first native whoever 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.

  Grosse, who often sides
with Westermarck, here parts company with him,being convinced that

  "what is called love in Australia ... is no spiritual affection, but 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)[179].

  A LOCK OF HAIR

  A more subtle problem than those so far considered is presented by acourtship custom described by Bulmer (Brough Smyth, 82-84). Thenatives are very superstitious in regard to their hair. They carefullydestroy any that has been cut off and would be greatly frightened toknow it had fallen into another person's hands, as that would placetheir health and life in jeopardy at the other's will. Yet a girl whohas a lover will not hesitate to give him a lock of her hair. It seemsimpossible to deny that this is a touch of true sentiment, of romanticlove; and Bulmer accordingly calls this lock of hair a "token ofaffection." But is it a token of affection? The sequel will show. Indue course of time the couple elope, in the black of the night theytake to the bush. Great excitement prevails in camp when they arefound missing. They are called "long-legged," "thin-legged,""squint-eyed," or "big-headed." Search is made, the pair are trackedand caught, and both are cruelly beaten. They make a promise not torepeat the offence, but do not keep it; another elopement follows,with more beatings. At last the girl becomes afraid to elope again.She alters her tactics, feigns a severe illness, and the parents arealarmed. Then she remembers that her lover has a lock of her hair. Heis made to confess, and another fight follows. He is half killed, butafter that he is allowed to keep the girl.

  Thus we see that the lock, instead of being a "token of affection," asBulmer would have us believe, and as it would be in our community, isnot even a sentimental sign of the girl's confidence in her lover, butmerely a detail of a foolish custom and stupid superstition.

  TWO NATIVE STORIES

  As a matter of course Australian folk-lore, too, shows no traces ofthe existence of love. The nearest approach to such a thing I havebeen able to find is a quaint story about a man who wanted two wivesand 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 them. 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-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 to 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 he 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 girl 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 inWoods'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 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, Nurrunduri 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 moonare to the aboriginal mind only symbols of their coarse, sensuallives: the heavenly bodies are concubines of the men, welcomed whenfat, driven away when thin. That puts the substance of Australian lovein a nutshell.

  BARRINGTON'S LOVE-STORY

  In the absence of aboriginal love-stories let us amuse ourselves byexamining critically a few more of the alleged cases of romantic lovediscovered by Europeans. The erudite German anthropologist Gerlandexpresses his belief (VI., 755) that notwithstanding the degradationof the Australians "cases of true romantic love occur among them," andhe refers for an instance to Barrington (I., 37). On consultingBarrington I find the following incident related as a sample of"genuine love in all its purity." I condense the unessential parts:

  A young man of twenty-three, belonging to a tribe near Paramatta, was living in a cave with two sisters, one of fourteen, 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 told him that a man had come to carry off 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 belonged. As they approached the camp, Barrington continues, "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 herself, 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 implore his pity, but before she could speak, his revenge softened 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 calling 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 (!) because 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 address 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 anecdote I havegiven as the young man related it to me and perhaps I have _lost muchof its simplicity_." It is very much to be feared that he has. I havemarked with, exclamation points the most absurdly impossible parts ofthe tale as idealized and embellished by Barrington. The Australiannever told him that he "gazed motionless" on the "enchanting beauty"of the girl's form or that his "revenge softened into love;" he neverclasped her in his arms, nor "vowed eternal constancy." The girl neverdreamt of saying that his pity gained her love, or of excusing herbrother for doing what all Australian men do. These sentimentaltouches are gratuitous additions of Barrington; native Australians donot even clasp each other in their arms, and they are as incapable ofvowing eternal constancy as of comparing Herbert Spencer's philosophywith Schopenhauer's. Yet on the strength of such dime novel rubbish ananthropologist assures us that savages are capable of feeling pureromantic love! The kernel of truth in the above tale reduces itself tothis, that the young man whose sister was stolen intended to takerevenge by killing the abductor, but that on seeing his sister heconcluded to marry her. These savages, as we have seen, always actthus, killing the enemy's women only when unable to carry them off.

  RISKING LIFE FOR A WOMAN

  Lumholtz relates the following story to show that "these blacks alsomay be greatly overcome by the sentiment of love" (213):

  "A 'civilized' black man entered a station on Georgina River 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 loveas a sentiment and love as an appetite, he would have realized theerror of using the expression "the sentiment of love" in connectionwith such a story of adulterous kidnapping, in which there isabsolutely nothing to indicate whether the kidnapper coveted the otherman's wife for any other than the most carnal reasons. It is notunusual for an Australian to risk his life in stealing a woman. Hedoes that every time he captures one from another tribe. In men whohave so little imaginative faculty as these, the possibility of beingkilled has no more deterrent effect than it has in two dogs or stagsfighting for a female. We must not judge such indifference to deadlyconsequences from our point of view.

  GERSTAECKER'S LOVE-STORY

  Gerstaecker, a German traveller, who traversed a part of Australia,has a tale of aboriginal love which also bears the earmarks offiction. On his whole trip, he says, in his 514-page volume devoted toAustralia, he heard of only one case of genuine love. A young man ofthe Bamares tribe took a fancy to a girl of the Rengmutkos. She wasalso pleased with him and he eloped with her at night, taking her tohis hunting-ground on the river. The tribe heard of his escapade andordered him to return the girl to her home. He obeyed, but two weekslater eloped with her again. He was reprimanded and informed that ifit happened again he would be killed. For the present he escapedpunishment personally, but was ordered to cudgel the girl and thensend her back home. He obeyed again; the girl fell down before him andhe rained hard blows on her head and shoulders till the eldersthemselves interceded and cried enough. The girl was chased away andthe lover remained alone. For two days he refused to join in thehunting or diversions of his companions. On the third day he ascendedan eminence whence the Murray Valley can be seen. In the distance hesaw two columns of smoke; they had been maintained for him all thistime by his girl. He took his spear and opossum coat and hastenedtoward the columns of smoke. He was about to commit his third offence,which meant certain death, yet on he went and found the girl. Herwounds were not yet healed, but she hastened to meet him and put herhead on his bosom.

  This tale is open to the same criticism as Lumholtz's. The man riskshis life, not for another, but to secure what he covets. It is aromantic love-story, but there is no indication anywhere of romanticlove, while some of the details are fictitiously embellished. AnAustralian girl does not put her head on her lover's bosom, nor couldshe camp alone and keep up two columns of smoke for several dayswithout being discovered and kidnapped. The story is evidently one ofan ordinary elopement, embellished by European fancy.[180]

  LOCAL COLOR IN COURTSHIP

  There is some quaint local color in Australian courtship, but usuallyblows play too important a role to make their procedure acceptable toanyone with a less waddy-proof skull than an Australian. Spencer andGillen relate (556) that in cases of charming, the initiative issometimes 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 courtshipgiven 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 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 light might last a quarter of an hour, then they separated. Some even might be left on the ground insensible. 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 djeetgun, 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 'Djeetgun!' She said 'Yeerung! What does the yeerung eat?' The reply was, 'He eats so-and-so,' mentioning kangaroo, opossum, or emu, or some other game. Then they laughed, and she ran off with him without telling anyone."

  LOVE-LETTERS

  Apart from magic and birds Australian lovers appear not to have beenwithout means of communicating with one another. Howitt says that if aKurnai girl took a fancy to a man she might send him a secret messageasking, "Will you find me some food?" And this was understood to be aproposal--a rather unsentimental and utilitarian proposal, it must beconfessed. According to one of the correspondents of Curr (III., 176)the natives along the Mary River even made use of a kind oflove-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 _dhomka_ (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."

  Such a "love-letter," consisting of three notches cut in a twig,symbolically sums up this whole chapter. The difference between thisbushman's twig and the love-letter of a civilized modern suitor is nogreater than the difference between aboriginal Australian "love" andgenuine romantic love.

  ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC

  Between the northern extremity of Australia and the southern extremityof New Guinea, about ninety miles wide, lies Torres Strait, discoveredby a Spaniard in 1606, and not visited again by whites till CaptainCook sailed through in 1770. This strait has been called a "labyrinthof islands, rocks, and coral reefs," so complicated and dangerous thatTorres, the original discoverer, required two months to get through.

  WHERE WOMEN PROPOSE

  The larger islands in this strait are of special interest to studentsof the phenomena of love and marriage, for on them it is not onlypermissible but obligatory for women to propose to the men. Needlessto say that the inhabitants of these islands, though so nearQueensland, are not Australians. They are Melanesians, but theircustoms are insular and unique. Curr (I., 279) says of them that theyare "with one exception, of the Papuan type, frizzle-haired people whocultivate the soil, use the bow and arrow and not the spear, and,un-Australian-like, treat their women with some consideration."

  Luckily the customs of these islanders have been carefully andintelligently studied by Professor A.C. Haddon, who published anentertaining account of them in a periodical to which one usuallylooks for instruction rather than amusement.[181] Professor Haddoncombines the two. On the island of Tud, he tells us, when boys undergothe ordeal of initiation into manhood, one of the lessons taught themis: "You no like girl first; if you do, girl laugh and call youwoman." When a girl likes a man, she tells his sister and gives her aring of string. On the first suitable opportunity the sister says toher brother: "Brother, I have some good news for you. A woman lovesyou." He asks who it is, and, if willing to go on with the affair,tells his sister to ask the girl to keep an appointment with him insome spot in the bush. On receipt of the message the enamoured girlinforms her parents 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 fondling. The ensuing dialogueis given by Haddon in the actual words which Maino, chief of Tud,used:

  "Opening the conversation, the man says, 'You like me proper?'

  "'Yes,' she replies, 'I like you proper with my heart inside. Eye along my heart see you--you my man.'

  "Unwilling to rashly give himself away, he asks,'How you like me?'

  "'I like your leg--you got fine body--your skin good--I like you altogether,' replies the girl.

  "After matters have proceeded satisfactorily the girl, anxious 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 Mabniag, after a girl has sent an intermediary tobring a string to the man she covets, she follows this up by sendinghim food, again and again. But he "lies low" a month or two before heventures to eat any of this food, because he has been warned by hismother that if he takes it he will "get an eruption all over hisface." Finally, he concludes she means business, so he consults thebig men of the village and marries her.

  If a man danced well, he found favor in the sight of these islanddamsels. His being married did not prevent a girl from proposing. Ofcourse she took good care not to make the advances through one of theother wives--that might have caused trouble!--but in the usual way. Onthis island the men never made the first advances toward matrimony.Haddon tells a story of a native girl who wanted to marry a LoyaltyIslander, a cook, who was loafing on the mission premises. He did notencourage 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 bigpalaver before the chief, at which the verdict was that the cook wasinnocent and that the girl had trumped up the charge in order to forcethe marriage.

  If a man and a girl began to keep company, he was branded on the backwith a charcoal, while her mark was cut into the skin (because "sheasked the man"). It was expected they would marry, but if they did notnothing could be done. If it was the man who was unwilling, the girl'sfather told the other men of the place, and they gave him a soundthrashing. Refusing 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 point of view; quite the reverse. So the white man's fashion is being introduced. As an illustration 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 firstenamoured of a youth at his initiation, and who first asked him inmarriage, was one who "like too many men." The lad, being on hisguard, might get rid of her attentions by playing a trick on her,making a bogus appointment with her in the bush, and then informingthe elder men, who would appear in his place at the trysting-place, tothe girl's mortification.

  Various details given in the chapter on Australia indicated that ifthe women on that big island did not propose, as a rule, it was notfrom coyness but because the selfishness of the men and theirarrangements made it impossible in most cases. On these neighboringislands the women could propose; yet the cause of love, of course, didnot gain anything from such an arrangement, which could serve only tostimulate licentiousness. Haddon gathered the impression that"chastity before marriage was unknown, f
ree intercourse not beingconsidered wrong; it was merely 'fashion along we folk.'" Their excusewas the same as Adam's: "Woman, he steal; man, how can he helpit?"[182]

  Nocturnal courtship was in vogue:

  "Decorum was observed. 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 advantage 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, theother women cut a mark down her back, to make her feel ashamed. Yetshe had no difficulty on this account in subsequently finding ahusband.

  Besides the existence of "free love," there are other customs arguingthe absence of sentiment in these insular affairs of the heart.Infanticide was frequently resorted to, the babes being buried alivein the sand, for no other reason than to save the trouble of takingcare of them. After marriage, in spite of the fact that the girl didthe proposing, she becomes the man's property; so much so that if sheshould offend him, he may kill her and no harm will come to him. Ifher sister comes to remonstrate, he can kill her too, and if he hastwo wives and they quarrel, he can kill both. In that love-scenereported by Maino, the chief of Tud, the girl gives us her"sentimental" reasons why she loves him: because he has a fine leg andbody, and a good skin. The "romance" of the situation is furtheraggravated when we read that, as in Australia, swapping sisters is theusual way of getting a wife, and that if a man has no sister toexchange he must pay for his wife with a canoe, a knife, or a glassbottle. Chief Maino himself told Haddon that he gave for his wifeseven pieces of calico, one dozen shirts, one dozen singlets, onedozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen tomahawks, besidestobacco, fish-lines and hooks and pearl shells. He finished hisenumeration by exclaiming "By golly, he too dear!"

  How did these islanders ever come to indulge in the custom, soinconsistent with their general attitude toward women, of allowingthem to propose? The only hint at an explanation I have been able tofind is contained in the following 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 informed), 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.'"

  BORNEAN CAGED GIRLS

  The islands of the Pacific Ocean and adjacent waters are almostinnumerable. To give an account of the love-affairs customary on allof them would require a large volume by itself. In the present work itis not possible to do more than select a few of the islands, assamples, preference being given to those that show at least sometraces of feelings rising above mere sensualism. One of the largestand best known of these islands is Borneo, and of its inhabitants theDyaks are of special interest from our point of view. Their customshave been observed and described by St. John, Low, Bock, H. Ling Rothand others.[183]

  In some parts of Dutch Borneo the cruel custom prevails of locking upa girl when she is eight to ten years old in a small, dark apartmentof 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 notallowed to see anyone--not even of her own family--except a femaleslave. When she is free from her prison she appears bleached a lightyellow, as though made out of wax, and totters along on small, thinfeet--which the natives consider especially attractive.

  CHARMS OF DYAK WOMEN

  Dyak girls are not subjected to any such restraints, and in somerespects they enjoy more liberty than is good for them. As usual amongthe lower races, they have to do most of the hard work. "It is a sadsight," says Low (75), "to see the Dyak girls, some but nine or tenyears of age, carrying water up the mount in bamboos, their bodiesbent nearly double, and groaning under the weight of their burden."Lieutenant Marryat found that the mountain Dyak girls, if notbeautiful, 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 generalthey are inferior in looks to the men. Marryat thought he saw"something wicked in their dark furtive glances," while Earl found thefaces of Dyak women generally extremely interesting, largely onaccount of "the soft expression given by their long eyelashes, and bythe habit of keeping the eyes half closed." "Their generalconversation is not wanting in wit," says Brooke (I., 70),

  "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 mentioned 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."

  DYAK MORALS

  Concerning the sexual morality of the Dyaks, opinions of observersdiffer somewhat. St. John (I., 52) observes that "the Sea Dyak womenare modest and yet unchaste, love warmly and yet divorce easily, butare generally faithful to their husbands when married." It is agreedthat the morality of the Land Dyaks is superior to that of the SeaDyaks; 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, according 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 unmarried ladies attach much importance to bravery, they are always desirous of securing the affections of a renowned warrior. Lax, however, as this code may appear before marriage, it would seem to be sufficiently stringent after the matrimonial. One wife only is allowed, and infidelity is punished by fine on both sides--inconstancy on the part of the husband being esteemed equally as bad as in the female. The breach of the marriage vows, however, appears to be infrequent, though they allow that, during the time of war, more license is given."

  NOCTURNAL COURTSHIP

  Brooke Low relates that the Sea Dyak girls receive their male visitorsat 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 w
ith 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 parents on either side have no objections to offer. It is in fact the only way open to the man and woman to become acquainted with each other, as privacy during the daytime is out of the question in a Dyak village."

  The same method of courtship prevails among the Land Dyaks. Some queerdetails are given by St. John, Crossland and Leggatt (Roth, 110).About nine or ten o'clock at night the lover goes on tiptoe to themosquito curtains of his beloved, gently awakens her and offers hersome prepared betel-nut. If she accepts it, he is happy, for it meansthat his suit is prospering, but if she refuses it and says "Be goodenough to blow up the fire," it means that he is dismissed. Sometimestheir discourse is carried on through the medium of a sort ofJew's-harp, one handing it to the other, asking questions andreturning answers. The lover remains until daybreak. After the consentof the girl and her parents has been obtained, one more ordealremains; the bridal couple have to run the gauntlet of the mischievousvillage boys, who stand ready with sooted hands to begrime their facesand bodies; and generally they succeed so well that bride and groompresent the appearance of negroes.

  Elopements also occur in cases where parental consent is withheld.Brooke Low thus describes an old custom which permits a man to carryoff 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 favor for the acceptance of her family, 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 HUNTERS A-WOOING

  In one of the introductory chapters of this volume a brief account wasgiven of the Dyak head-hunters. Reference was made to the fact thatthe more heads a man has cut off, the more he is respected. He cannotmarry until he has killed a man, woman, or child, and brought home thehead as a trophy, and cases are known of men having to wait two yearsbefore they could procure the skull necessary to soften the heart ofthe 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 victim'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."

  Roth cites a correspondent who says:

  "At this moment there are two Dyaks in the Kuching 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 pseudo 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 herhand and heart:

  "Why don't you 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., 222):

  "No aristocratic youth dare venture to pay his addresses to a Dyak demoiselle unless he throws at the blushing maiden'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) represents a youngwarrior returning from a head-hunting expedition and, on meeting hisbeloved, holding in each hand one of the captured heads by the hair.She takes one of the heads, whereupon they dance round each other withthe most extravagant gestures, amidst the applause of the Rajah andhis people. The next step is a feast, at which the young couple eattogether. When this is over, they have to take off whatever clothesthey have on and sit naked on the ground while some of the old womenthrow over them handfuls of paddy and repeat a prayer that they mayprove 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 another who may have only ten, and upwards to the Rajah's family, who can take any woman at pleasure."

  FICKLE AND SHALLOW PASSION

  Though the Dyaks may be somewhat less coarse than those Australianswho make a captured woman marry the man who killed her husband, analmost equal callousness of feeling is revealed by J. Dalton'sstatement that the women taken on the head-hunting expedition "soonbecame attached to the conquerors"--resembling, in this respect, theAustralian woman who, of her own accord, deserts to an enemy who hasvanquished her husband. Cases of frantic amorous infatuation occur, asa matter of course. Brooke (II., 106) relates the story of a girl ofseventeen who, for the sake of an ugly, deformed, and degradedworkman, left her home, dressed as a man, and in a small broken canoemade a trip of eighty miles to join her lover. In olden times deathwould have been the penalty for such an act; but she, being a "NewWoman" in her tribe, exclaimed, "If I fell in love with a wild beast,no one should prevent me marrying it." In this Eastern clime, Brookedeclares, "love is like the sun's rays in warmth." He might have addedthat it is as fickle and transient as the sun's warmth; every passingcloud chills it. The shallow nature of Dyak attachment is indicated bytheir ephemeral unions and universal addiction to divorce. "Among theUpper Sarawak Dyaks divorce is very frequent, owing to the greatextent of adultery," says Haughton (Roth, I., 126); and St. Johnremarks:

  "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 disappointments, 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."

  "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 keenobserver, "is a business of partnership for the purpose of havingchildren, dividing labor, and, by means of their offspring, providingfor their old age;" and Brooke Low remarks that "intercourse beforemarriage is strictly to ascertain that the marriage will be fruitful,as the Dyaks want children," In other words, apart from sensualpurposes, the women are not desired and cherished for their own sakes,but only for utilitarian reasons, as a means to an end. Whence weconclude that, high as the Dyaks stand above Australians and manyAfricans, they are still far from the goal of genuine affection. Theirfeelings 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 away," "I am the hawk flying down the Kanyau Kiver, coming 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."

  Roth (I., 119-21) cites forty-five of these verses, mostly expressiveof such selfish boasting and vanity. Not one of them expresses afeeling of tenderness or admiration of a beloved person, not to speakof altruistic feelings.

  THE GIRL WITH THE CLEAN FACE

  Is a Dyak capable of admiring personal beauty? Some of the girls havefine figures and pretty faces; but there is no evidence that any butthe voluptuous (non-esthetic) qualities of the figure are appreciated,and as for the faces, if the men really appreciated beauty as we do,they would first of all things insist that the girls must keep theirfaces clean. An amusing experiment made by St. John with some Ida'angirls (I., 339) is suggestive from this point of view:

  "We selected one who had the dirtiest face--and it was difficult 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 universal 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 about 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 evening nine ofthe girls had received looking-glasses.[184]

  FIJIAN REFINEMENTS

  In the chapter on Personal Beauty I endeavored to show that if savageswho live near the sea or river are clean, it is not owing to theirlove of cleanliness, but to an accident, bathing being resorted to bythem as an antidote to heat, or as a sport. This applies particularlyto the Melanesian and Polynesian inhabitants of the South Sea Islands,whose chief pastimes are swimming and surf riding. Thomas Williams, inhis authoritative work on Fiji and the Fijians, makes some remarkswhich 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 Fijiancannibals cleanliness as a virtue. They have erred also in regard toseveral other alleged refinements they discovered among these tribes.One of these is the custom prohibiting a father from cohabiting withhis wife until the child is weaned. This has been supposed to indicatea kind regard for the welfare and health of mother and child. But whenwe examine the facts we find that far from being a proof of superiormorality, this custom reveals the immorality of the husband, and makesan 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 disappeared. This practice seemed to be universal on Vanua Levu--quite a matter of course--so that few women could be found who had not in some way been murderers. The extent of infanticide in some parts of this island reaches nearer to two-thirds than half."

  Williams further informs us (117) that "husbands are as frequentlyaway from their wives as they are with them, since it is thought notwell for a man to sleep regularly at home." He does not comment onthis, but Seeman (191) and Westermarck (151) interpret the custom asindicating Fijian "ideas of delicacy in married life," which, afterwhat has just been said, is decidedly amusing. If Fijians really werecapable of considering it indelicate to spend the night under the sameroof with their wives, it would indicate their indelicacy, not theirdelicacy. The utterly unprincipled men doubtless had their reasons forpreferring to stay away from home, and probably their great contemptfor women also had something to do with the custom.

  HOW CANNIBALS TREAT WOMEN

  In Fiji, says Crawley (225), women are kept away from participation inworship. "Dogs are excluded from some temples, women from all." Inmany 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 betrothed and married as children without consulting theirchoice. "I have seen an old man of sixty living with two wives bothunder fifteen years of age." Such of the young women as are acquaintedwith foreign ways envy the favored women who wed "the man to whomtheir spirit flies." Women are regarded as the property of the men,and as an incentive to bravery they are "promised to such as shall, bytheir prowess, render themselves deserving." They are used for payingwar-debts and other accounts; for instance, "the people submitted totheir chiefs and capitulated, offering two women, a basket of earth,whales' teeth, and mats, to buy the reconciliation of the Rewans."

  "A chief of Nandy, in Viti Levu, was very desirous to have 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 weddings the prayer is that the bride may "bring forth malechildren"; and when the son is born, one of the first lessons taughthim 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 defencelesswoman was an honorable deed.

  "I once asked a man why he was called Koroi. 'Because,' 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 abominably slain." "I have labored to make the murderers of females ashamed of themselves; and have heard their cowardly cruelty defended by the assertion that such victims were doubly good--because they ate well, and because of the distress 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 tofetch wood and collect leaves to line the oven. When she hadcheerfully and unsuspectingly obeyed his orders, he killed her, puther in the oven, and ate her. There had been no quarrel; he was simplyhungering for a dainty morsel. Even after death the women aresubjected 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."[185]

  FIJIAN MODESTY AND CHASTITY

  With these facts in mind the reader is able to appreciate the humor ofthe suggestion that it is "ideas of delicacy" that prevent Fijianhusbands from spending their nights at home. Equally amusing is theblunder 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 probably be killed."

  Williams, the great authority on Fijians, says that"Commodore Wilkes's account of Fijian marriages seems to be compoundedof Oriental notions and Ovalan yarns" (147). Having been a mereglobe-trotter, it is natural that he should have erred in hisinterpretation of Fijian customs, but it is unpardonable inanthropologists to accept such conclusions without examination. As amatter of fact, the scant Fijian attire has nothing to do withmodesty; quite the contrary. Williams says (147) "that young unmarriedwomen wear a _liku_ little more than a hand's breadth in depth, whichdoes 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 ideasof modesty," and that its real purpose is to attract attention. Aselsewhere among such peoples the matter is strictly regulated byfashion. "Both sexes," says Williams (143), "go unclad until the tenthyear and some beyond that. Chiefs' children are kept longest withoutdress." Any deviation from a local custom, however ludicrous thatcustom 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 Hebrideans: "Notpossessed of masi and pretend to have gods!"

  The alleged chastity of Fijians is as illusive as their modesty. Girlswho had been betrothed as infants were carefully guarded, and adulterysavagely punished by clubbing or strangling; but, as I made clear inthe chapter on jealousy, such vindictive punishment does not indicatea regard for chastity, but is merely revenge for infringement onproperty rights. The national custom permitting a man whose conjugalproperty had been molested to retaliate by subjecting the culprit'swife to the same treatment in itself indicates an utter absence of thenotion of chastity as a virtue. Like the Papuan, Melanesian, andPolynesian inhabitants of the Pacific Islands in general, the Fijianswere utterly licentious. Young women, says Williams (145) are thevictims 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 theobscene gestures of their dance, in which the young virgins arecompelled to take part, or the foul insults offered to the corpses ofthe slain, fit to be described.... On these occasions the ordinarysocial restrictions are destroyed, and the unbridled andindiscriminate indulgence of every evil lust and passion completes thescene of abomination" (43). Yet,

  "voluntary breach of the marriage contract is rare in comparison with that which is enforced, as, for instance, when the chief gives up the women of a town to a company of visitors or warriors. Compliance with this mandate 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 preventsunfaithfulness more than affection, though I believe that instances ofthe latter are numerous," we must not allow ourselves to be deceivedby a word. Fijian "affection" is a thing quite different from thealtruistic feeling we mean by the word. It may in a wife assume theform of a blind attachment, like that of a dog to a cruel master, butis not likely to go beyond that, since even the most primitive lovebetween parents and children is confessedly shallow, transient, orentirely absent. Williams (154, 142) "noticed cases beyond numberwhere natural affection was wanting on both sides;" two-thirds of theoffspring are killed, "such children as are allowed to live aretreated with a foolish fondness"--and fondness is, as we have seen,not an altruistic but an egoistic feeling. In writing about Fijianfriendships 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 distinctionbetween sentimentality and sentiment. Sentimentality of a mostextraordinary kind is also found in the attitude of sons towardparents. A Fijian considered it a mark of affection to club an agedparent (157), and Williams has seen the breast of a ferocious savageheave and swell with strong emotion on bidding a temporary farewell tohis aged father, whom he afterward strangled (117). Such are theemotions of barbarians--shallow, fickle, capricious--as different fromour affection as a brook which dries up after every shower is from thedeep and steady current of a river which dispenses its beneficentwaters even in a drought.

  FIJIAN LOVE-POEMS

  In his article on Fijian poetry, referred to in the chapter onCoyness, Sir Arthur Gordon informs us that among the "sentimental"class of poems "there are not a few which are licentious, and manymore which, though not open to that reproach, are coarse and indecentin their plain-spokenness." Others of the love-songs, he declares,have "a ring of true feeling very unlike what is usually found insimilar Polynesian compositions, and which may be searched for in vainin Gill's _Songs of the Pacific_." These songs, he adds, "more nearlyresemble European love-songs than any with which I am acquainted amongother semi-savage races;" and he finds in them "a ring of true passionas if of love arising not from mere animal instinct but intelligentassociation." I for my part cannot find in them even a hint atsupersensual altruistic sentiment. To give the reader a chance tojudge for himself I cite the following:

  I

  _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 meI 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.

  III

  In the mountain war of 1876 there was in the native force on thegovernment side a handsome lad of the name of Naloko, much admired bythe ladies. One day, all the camp and the village of Nasauthoko werefound 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 PROPOSALS

  At the time when Williams studied the Fijians, their poetry consistedof dirges, serenades, wake-songs, war-songs, and hymns for the dance(99). Of love-songs addressed to individuals he says nothing. Theserenades do not come under that head, since, as he says (140), theyare practised at night "by _companies_ of men and women"--which takesall the romance out of them. One detail of the romance of courtshiphad, however, been introduced even in his time, through Europeaninfluence. "Popping the question" is, he says, of recent date, "andthough for the most part done by the men, yet the women do nothesitate to adopt the same course when so inclined." No violentindividual preference seems to be shown. The following is a specimenof a man's proposal.

  Simioni Wang Ravou, wishing to bring the woman he wanted to adecision, remarked to her, in the hearing of several other persons:

  "I do not wish to have you because you are a good-looking woman; that you are not. But a woman is like a necklace of flowers--pleasant to the eye and grateful to the smell: but such a necklace does not long continue attractive; beautiful 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 suchcircumstances, which bears out Williams's remark (148) that nodistinctive preference is apparent among these men and women. Undersuch circumstances it may appear strange that some widowers shouldcommit suicide upon the death of a wife, as Seernan assures us they do(193). Does not this indicate deep feeling? Not in a savage. In allcountries suicide is usually a sign of a weak intellect rather than ofstrong feelings, and especially is this the case among the lowerraces, where both men and women are apt to commit suicide in a momentof excitement, often for the most trivial cause, as we shall see inthe next chapter. Williams tells us (106) of a chief on Thithia whowas addressed disrespectfully by a younger brother and who, ratherthan live to have the insult made the topic of common talk, loaded hismusket, placed the muzzle at his breast, and pushing the trigger withhis toe, shot himself through the heart. He knew a similar case onVanua 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 fashionable way of destroying themselves; but they sometimes resort to the rope. Of deadly poisons they are ignorant, and drowning would be a difficult thing; for from infancy they learn to be almost as much at home in the water as on dry land."

  In his book on the Melanesians Codrington says (243) 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 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 wife or husband in a labor vessel to Queensland or Fiji."

  There is one class of men in Fiji who are not likely to commitsuicide. They are the bachelors, who, though they are scorned andfrowned on in this life, must look forward to a worse fate afterdeath. There is a special god, named Nangganangga--"the bitter haterof bachelors"--who watches for their souls, and so untiring is hiswatch, as Williams was informed (206), that no unwedded spirit hasever reached the Elysium of Fiji. Sly bachelors sometimes try to dodgehim by stealing around the edge of a certain reef at low tide; but heis up to their tricks, seizes them and dashes them to pieces on thelarge black stone, just as one shatters rotten fire-wood.

  SAMOAN TRAITS

  Cruel and degraded as the Fijians are, they mark a considerableadvance over the Australian savages. A further advance is to be notedas we come to the Samoans. Cannibalism was indulged in occasionally inmore remote times, but not, as in Fiji, owing to a relish for humanflesh, but merely as a climax of hatred and revenge. To speak ofroasting a Samoan chief is a deadly insult and a cause for war(Turner, 108). Sympathy was a feeling known to Samoans; theirtreatment of the sick was invariably humane (141). And whereas inAustralia, Borneo, and Fiji, it is just as honorable to slay a femaleas a male, Samoans consider it cowardly to kill a woman (196). Nor dothey practise infanticide; but this abstinence is counterbalanced bythe fact that the custom of destroying infants before birth prevailedto a melancholy extent (79).

  Yet here as everywhere we discover that the sexual refinement on whichthe capacity for supersensual love depends comes last of the virtues.The Rev. George Turner, who had forty years of experience among thePolynesians, writes (125) that at their dances "all kinds of obscenityin looks, language, and gesture prevailed; and often they danced andrevelled till daylight." The universal custom of tattooing wasconnected with immoral practices (90). During the wedding ceremoniesof 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 description.... Night dances and the attendant immoralities wound up the ceremonies."

  The same obscene ceremonies, he adds, were gone through, and thiscustom, he thinks, had some influence in cultivating chastity,especially among young women of rank who feared the disgrace andbeating that was the lot of faithless brides. Presents were also givento those who had preserved their virtue; but the result of theseefforts is thus summed up by Turner (91):

  "Chastity was ostensibly cultivated by both sexes; but it was more a name than a reality. From 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 exceptions, 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 private revenge."

  When a chief took a wife, th
e bride's uncle or other relative had togive up a daughter at the same time to be his concubine; to refusethis, would have been to displease the household god. A girl's consentwas a matter of secondary importance: "She had to agree if her parentswere in favor of the match." Many marriages were made chiefly for thesake of the attendant festivities, the bride being compelled to gowhether or not she was willing. In this way a chief might in a shorttime get together a harem of a dozen wives; but most of them remainedwith 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 husband."

  COURTSHIP PANTOMIME

  Elopements occur in Samoa in some cases where parental consent isrefused. A vivid description of the pantomimic courtship preceding anelopement has been given by Kubary (_Globus_, 1885). A young warrioris surrounded by a bevy of girls. Though unarmed, he makes variousgestures as if spearing or clubbing an enemy, for which the girlscheer him.

  He then selects one, who at first seems coyly unwilling, and begins adance with her. She endeavors to look indifferent and forbidding,while he, with longing looks and words, tries to win her regard.Presently, yielding to his solicitations, she smiles, and opens herarms for him. But he, foolishly, stops to reproach her for holding himoff so long. He shakes his head, rolls his eyes, and lo! when he getsready to grasp her at last, she eludes him again, with a mockinglaugh.

  It is now his turn to be perverse. Revenge is in his mind and mien.All his looks and gestures indicate contempt and malice, and he keepsturning his back to her. She cannot endure this long; his scornovercomes her pride, and when he changes his attitude and once morebegins to entreat, she at last allows him to seize her and they dancewildly. When finally the company separates for the evening meal, onemay hear the word _toro_ whispered. It means "cane," and indicates anocturnal rendezvous in the cane-field, where lovers are safe fromobservation. They find each other by imitating the owl's sound, whichexcites no suspicion.

  When they have met, the girl says: "You know that my parents hate you;nothing remains but _awenga_." Awenga means flight; three nights laterthey elope in a canoe to some small island, where they remain for afew weeks till the excitement over their disappearance has subsided inthe village and their parents are ready to pardon them.

  TWO SAMOAH LOVE-STORIES

  Turner devotes six pages (98-104) to two Samoan love-stories. One ofthem illustrates the devotion of a wife and her husband's ingratitudeand 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 bathing-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 subsequently 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 off 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 raceswoman has--as many observations indicate--a greater capacity forconjugal attachment than man.

  The courtship scene cited above indicates an instinctive knowledge ofthe strategic value of coyness and feigned displeasure. The followingstory, which I condense from the versified form in which Turner givesit, would seem to be a sort of masculine warning to women against thedanger 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 husband," 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 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 off 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.

  PERSONAL CHARMS OF SOUTH SEA ISLANDERS

  "Falling in love" with a person of the other sex on the mere report ofhis or her beauty is a very familiar motive in the literature ofOriental and mediaeval nations in particular. It is, therefore,interesting to find such a motive in the Samoan story just cited. Inmy view, as previously explained, beauty, among the lower races, meansany kind of attractiveness, sensual more frequently than esthetic. TheSouth Sea Islanders have been credited with considerable personalcharms, although it is now conceded that the early voyagers (to whom,after an absence from shore of several months, almost any female musthave seemed a Helen) greatly exaggerated their beauty.

  Captain Cook kept a level head. He found Tongan women lessdisting
uished from the men by their features than by their forms,while in the case of Hawaiians even the figures were remarkablysimilar (II., 144, 246). In Tahitian women he saw "all those delicatecharacteristics which distinguish them from the men in othercountries." The Hawaiians, though far from being ugly, are "neitherremarkable for a beautiful shape, nor for striking features" (246).

  The indolent, open-air, amphibious life led by the South Sea Islanderswas favorable to the development of fine bodies. Cook saw among theTongans "some absolutely perfect models of the human figure." But finefeathers do not make fine birds. The nobler phases of love are notinspired by fine figures so much as by beautiful and refined faces.Polynesian and Melanesian features are usually coarse and sensual.Hugo Zoller says that "the most beautiful Samoan woman would standcomparison at best with a pretty German peasant girl;" and from my ownobservations at Honolulu, and a study of many photographs, I concludethat what he says applies to the Pacific Islanders in general. EdwardReeves, in his recent volume on _Brown Men and Women_ (17-22), speaksof "that fraud--the beautiful brown woman." He found her a "dream ofbeauty and refinement" only in the eyes of poets and romancers; inreality they were malodorous and vulgar. "All South Sea Island womenare very much the same."

  "To compare the prettiest Tongan, Samoan, Tahitian, or even Rotuman, to the plainest and most simply educated Irish, French, or Colonial girl that has been decently brought up is an insult to one's intelligence."

  Wilkes (II., 22) hesitated to speak of the Tahitian females because hecould 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 THEIR WHITE VISITORS

  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" isthe criterion and ideal of "beauty" among the Pacific Islanders, asamong barbarians in general. Consequently their love cannot have beenennobled by any of the refined, esthetic, intellectual, and moralqualities which are embodied in a refined face and a daintily modelledfigure.

  Coarsest of all the Polynesians were the Tahitians; yet even hereefforts have been made[186] to convey the impression that they owedtheir licentious practices to the influence of white visitors. Thegrain of truth in this assertion lies in the undoubted fact that thewhites, with their rum and trinkets and diseases, aggravated the evil;but their contribution was but a drop in the ocean of iniquity whichexisted ages before these islands were discovered by whites. Tahitiantraditions trace their vilest practices back to the earliest timesknown. (Ellis, I., 183.) The first European navigators found the samevices which later visitors deplored. Bougainville, who tarried atTahiti in 1767, called the island Nouvelle Cythere, on account of thegeneral immorality of the natives. Cook, when he visited the island inthe following year, declined to make his journal "the place forexhibiting a view of licentious manners which could only serve todisgust" his readers (212). Hawkesworth relates (II., 206) that theTahitians offered sisters and daughters to strangers, while breachesof conjugal fidelity are punished only by a few hard words or a slightbeating:

  "Among other diversions there is a dance called Timorodee, which is performed by young girls, whenever eight or ten of them 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, accompanied by words which, if it were possible, would more explicitly convey the same ideas." "But there is a scale in dissolute 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 nativesbefore whites could have possibly corrupted them.[187] The latermissionaries found no change for the better. Captain Cook alreadyreferred to the Areois who made a business of depravity (220). "Soagreeable," he wrote,

  "is this licentious 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 island, declares that they werenoted 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 disposition, and the cheerful vivacity of their conversation, no portion of the human race was ever, perhaps, sunk lower in brutal licentiousness and moral degradation than this isolated people" (87).

  He also describes the Areois (I., 185-89) as "privileged libertines,"who travelled from place to place giving improper dances andexhibitions, "addicted to every kind of licentiousness," and"spreading a moral contagion throughout society," Yet they were "heldin the greatest respect" by all classes of the population. They hadtheir own gods, who were "monsters in vice," and "patronized everyevil practice perpetrated during such seasons of public festivity."

  Did the white sailors also give the Tahitians their idea of Tahitiandances, and professional Areois, and corrupt gods? Did they teach themcustoms which Hawkesworth, himself a sailor, and accustomed to scenesof low life, said "no imagination could possibly conceive?" Did theEuropean whites teach these natives to regard men as _ra_ (sacred) andwomen as _noa_ (common)? Did they teach them all those other customsand atrocities which the following paragraphs reveal?

  HEARTLESS TREATMENT OF WOMEN

  It can be shown that quite apart from their sensuality, the Tahitianswere too coarse and selfish to be able to entertain any of thoserefined sentiments of love which the sentimentalists would have usbelieve 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 requiresthe fostering sunshine of sympathy and adoration. To a Tahitian awoman was merely a toy to amuse him. He liked her as he liked his foodand drink, or his cool plunge into the waves, for the reason that shepleased his senses. He could not feel sentimental love for her, since,far 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 provision was kept, and the house 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 another in aparticularly offensive way he would use some expression referring tothis degraded condition of the women, such as "mayst thou be baked asfood for thy mother." Young children were deliberately taught todisregard their mother, the father encouraging them in their insultsand violence (205). Cook (220) found that Tahitian women were oftentreated with a degree of harshness, or rather "brutality," which onewould scarcely suppose a man would bestow on an object for whom he hadthe least affection. Nothing, however, is more common than "to see themen beat them without mercy" (II., 220). They killed more female thanmale infants, because, as they said, the female
s were useless for war,the fisheries, or the service of the temple. For the sick they had nosympathy; at times they murdered them or buried them alive. (Ellis,I., 340; II., 281.) In battle they gave no quarter, even to women orchildren. (Hawkesworth, II., 244.)

  "Every horrid torture was practised. The females experienced 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 caught on the point of the warrior's spear, where it writhed in agony, and died, ... some having two or three infants hanging on the spear they bore across their shoulders" (I., 235-36). The bodies of females slain in war were treated with "a degree of brutality as inconceivable as it was detestable."

  TWO STORIES OF TAHITIAN INFATUATION

  While ferocity, cruelty, habitual wantonness and general coarsenessare fatal obstacles to sentimental love, they may be accompanied, aswe have seen, by the violent sensual infatuation which is so oftenmistaken for love. Unsuccessful Tahitian suitors have been known tocommit suicide under the influence of revenge and despair, as isstated by Ellis (I., 209), who also notes two instances of violentindividual preference.

  The chief of Eimeo, twenty years old, of a mild disposition, becameattached to a Huahine girl and tendered proposals of marriage. She wasa niece of the principal roatira in the island, but though her familywas willing, she declined all his proposals. He discontinued hisordinary occupations, and repaired to the habitation of the individualwhose favor he was so anxious to obtain. Here he appeared subject tothe deepest melancholy, and from morning to night, day after day, heattended his mistress, performing humiliating offices with apparentsatisfaction. His disappointment finally became the topic of generalconversation. At length the girl was induced to accept him. They werepublicly 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 unwilling. Abelle of Huahine became exceedingly fond of the society of a young manwho was temporarily staying on the island and living in the samehouse. It was soon intimated to him that she wished to become hiscompanion for life. The intimation, however, was disregarded by theyoung man, who expressed his intention to prosecute his voyage. Theyoung woman became unhappy, and made no secret of the cause of herdistress. She was assiduous in redoubling her efforts to please theindividual whose affection she was desirous to retain. At this periodEllis never saw him either in the house of his friend or walkingabroad without the young woman by his side. Finding the object of herattachment, who was probably about eighteen years of age, unmoved byher attentions, she not only became exceedingly unhappy, but declaredthat if she continued to receive the same indifference and neglect,she would either strangle or drown herself. Her friends nowinterfered, 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 whichhad been so ardent in the bosom of the young woman before marriage wassuperseded by a dislike as powerful, and though he seemed not unkindto 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 topographicalobservations are characterized by remarkable accuracy. The same may besaid in general of his observations regarding the natives of theislands he visited more than a century ago. He, too, noted some casesof strong personal preference among Tahitians, but this did notmislead him into attributing to them a capacity for true love:

  "I have seen several instances where the women have preferred personal 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 Tongagroup he gave it the name of "Friendly Islands," because of theapparently amicable disposition of the natives toward him; but, as amatter of fact, their intention was to massacre him and his crew andtake the two ships--a plan which would have been put in execution ifthe chiefs had not had a dispute as to the exact mode and time ofmaking the assault.[188] Cook was pleased with the appearance and theways of these islanders; they seemed kind, and he was struck at seeing"hundreds of truly European faces" among them. He went so far as todeclare that it was utterly wrong to call them savages, "for a morecivilized people does not exist under the sun." He did not stay withthem long enough to discover that they were morally not far above theother South Sea Islanders.

  WERE THE TONGANS CIVILIZED?

  Mariner, who lived among the Tongans four years, and whose adventuresand observations were afterward recorded by Martin, gives informationwhich indicates that Cook was wrong when he said that a more civilizedpeople does not exist under the sun. "Theft, revenge, rape andmurder," Mariner attests (II., 140), "under many circumstances are notheld to be crimes." It is considered the duty of married women toremain true to their husbands and this, Mariner thinks, is generallydone. Unmarried women "may bestow their favors upon whomsoever theyplease, without any opprobrium" (165). Divorced women, like theunmarried, may admit temporary lovers without the least reproach orsecresy.

  "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 dishonor being to be a prisoner and consequently a sort of servant to the conqueror. Rape, 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 allusions, 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 wishesof the chiefs, who did not hesitate to shoot a resisting husband.(Waitz-Gerland, VI., 184.)

  While these details show that Captain Cook overrated the civilizationof the Tongans, there are other facts indicating that they were insome respects superior to other Polynesians, at any rate. The womenare capable of blushing, and they are reproached if they change theirlovers too often. They seem to have a dawning sense of the value ofchastity and of woman's claims to consideration. In Mariner'sdescription (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. Marinersays, somewhat naively, that when a man has an amour, he keeps itsecret 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 t
he 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 theTongans are superior to all other peoples we have so far considered inthis book. Though the husband's authority at home is absolute, andthough one girl in every three is betrothed in her infancy, men donot, he says, make slaves or drudges of their wives, or sell theirdaughters, two out of every three girls being allowed to choose theirown husbands--"early and often." The men do most of the hard work,even to the cooking. "In Tonga," says Seemann (237), "the women havebeen treated from time immemorial with all the consideration demandedby their weaker and more delicate constitution, not being allowed toperform any hard work." Cook also found (II., 149) that the provinceallotted to the men was "far more laborious and extensive than that ofthe women," whose employments were chiefly such as may be executed inthe house.

  LOVE OF SCENERY

  If we may rely on Mariner there is still another point in which theTongans appear to be far above other Polynesians, and barbarians ingeneral. He would have us believe that while they seldom sing aboutlove or war, they evince a remarkable love of nature (I., 293). Hedeclares that they sometimes ascend a certain rock to "enjoy thesublime beauty of the surrounding scenery," or to reflect on the deedsof their ancestors. He cites a specimen of their songs, which, hesays, is often sung by them; it is without rhymes or regular measure,and is given in a sort of recitative beginning with this highly poeticpassage:

  "Whilst we were talking of _Vavaoo tooa Licoo_, the women said to us, let us repair to the back of the island to contemplate the setting 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 _Matawlo_. And now, as we stand motionless on the eminence over _Ana Manoo_, 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 astonishment 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."

  Inasmuch as Mariner did not take notes on the spot, but relied on hismemory after an absence of several years, it is to be feared that theabove passage may not be unadulterated Tongan. The rest of the songhas a certain Biblical tone and style in a few of the sentences whicharouse the suspicion (remember Ossian!) that a missionary may haveedited, if not composed, this song. However that may be, the remainderof it gives us several pretty glimpses of Tongan amorous customs andmay 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 perhaps or the next day we may die. We will dress ourselves with _chi coola_, and put bands of white _tappa_ round our waists: we will plait thick wreaths of _jiale_ for our heads, and prepare strings of _hooni_ for our necks, that their whiteness may 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 coining from _Licoo_!--how beautiful are their skins, diffusing around a fragrance like the flowery precipice of _Mataloco_:' Let us also visit _Licoo_; we will depart to-morrow."

  A CANNIBAL BARGAIN

  This story intimates, what may be true, that the Fijians first taughtthe Tongans the art of war, and if the Tongans were not originally awarlike people, we would have in that significant fact alone anexplanation of much of their superiority to other Pacific islanders.The Fijians also appear to have taught them cannibalism, to which,however, they never became so addicted as their teachers. Mariner (I.,110-111) tells a story of two girls who, in a time of scarcity, agreedto play a certain game with two young men on these conditions: if thegirls won, they were to divide a yam belonging to them and give halfto the men; if the two men won they were still to have their share ofthe yam, but they were to go and kill a man and give half his body tothe girls. The men won and promptly proceeded to carry out their partof the contract. Concealing themselves near a fortress, they soon sawa man who came to fill his cocoanut shells with water. They rushed onhim with their clubs, brought the body home at the risk of theirlives, divided it and gave the young women the promised half.

  THE HANDSOME CHIEFS

  To Captain Cook the muscular Tongan men conveyed the suggestion ofstrength rather than of beauty. They have, however, a legend whichindicates 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 nobles, 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 despatched to bring back and punish the girls. When he arrived, one of them had already fallen a victim to the contending 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

  On the west coast of the Tongan Island of Hoonga there is a peculiarcave, the entrance to which is several feet beneath the surface of thesea, even at low water. It was first discovered by a young chief,while diving after a turtle. He told no one about it, and luckily, aswe shall see. He was secretly enamoured of a beautiful young girl, thedaughter 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 acruel tyrant, whose misdeeds at last incited this girl's father toplot an insurrection. The plot unfortunately was discovered and thechief with all his relatives, including the beautiful girl, condemnedto be taken out to sea in a canoe and drowned.

  No time was to be lost. The lover hastened to the girl, informed herof her danger, confessed his love, and begged her to come with him toa place of safety. Soon her consenting hand was clasped in his; theshades of evening favored their escape; while the woods afforded herconcealment until her lover had brought a canoe to a lonely part ofthe beach. In this they speedily embarked, and as he paddled heracross the smooth water he related his discovery of the caverndestined to be her asylum till an opportunity offered of conveying herto the Fiji Islands.

  When they arrived at the rock he jumped into the water, and shefollowed close after; they rose into the cavern, safe from allpossibility of discovery, unless he should be watched. In the morninghe 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 asmuch of his time as prudence allowed, and meanwhile pleaded his taleof 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 dutyhad caused her to smother her growing fondness), his measure
ofhappiness was full.

  This cave was a very nice place for a honeymoon, but hardly for apermanent residence. So the young chief contrived a way of getting herout of the cavernous prison. He told his inferior chiefs that hewanted them to take their families and go with him to Fiji. A largecanoe was soon got ready, and as they embarked he was asked if hewould not take a Tongan wife with him. He replied, No! but that heshould probably find one by the way. They thought this a joke, butwhen they came to the spot where the cave was, he asked them to waitwhile he went into the sea to fetch his wife. As he dived, they beganto suspect he was insane, and as he did not soon reappear they fearedhe had been devoured by a shark.

  While they were deliberating what to do, all at once, to their greatsurprise, he rose to the surface and brought into the canoe abeautiful young woman who, they all supposed, had been drowned withher family. The chief now told the story of the cave, and theyproceeded to Fiji, where they lived some years, until the cruelgovernor of Tonga died, whereupon they returned to that island.

  A HAWAIIAN CAVE-STORY

  In an interesting book called _The Legends and Myths of Hawaii,_ byKing Kalakaua, there is a tale called "Kaala, the Flower of Lanai; AStory of the Spouting Cave of Palikaholo," which also involves the useof a submarine cave, but has a tragic ending. It takes the Kingfifteen pages to tell it, but the following condensed version retainsall 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 whirlpool. 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 cave. 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 fifteen, who was so beautiful that her admirers were counted by the hundreds.

  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 favorite 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 he 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 pretended 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 him 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 you."

  But Oponui's wrath was greater than before, and he plotted 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 followed him, though her husband had some misgivings. Arriving 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 jumped with her into the circling waters above the Spouting Cave. 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 returned to the shore.

  Kaaialii awaited his wife's return with his heart aching for her warm embrace. He recalled 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 _tabu_ 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."

  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, "I am dying, but I am 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 her 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 bu
rial-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 Ua; 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.

  IS THIS ROMANTIC LOVE?

  These two Polynesian cave-stories are of interest from several pointsof view. In Waitz-Gerland (VI., 125), the Tongan tale is referred toas "a very romantic love-story," and if the author had known theHawaiian story he would have had even more reason to call it romantic.But is either of these tales a story of romantic love? Is thereevidence in them of anything but strong selfish passion or eagernessto possess one of the other sex? Is there any trace of the _higher_phases of love--of unselfish attachment, sympathy, adoration, as of asuperior being, purity, gallantry, self-sacrifice? Not one. TheHawaiian Kaaialii does indeed smash his own skull when he finds hisbride is dead. But that is a very different thing from sacrificinghimself to save or please _her_. We have seen, too, on how slight aprovocation these islanders will commit suicide, an act which proves aweak intellect rather than strong feeling. A man capable of feelingtrue love would have brains enough to restrain himself from committingsuch a silly and useless act in a fit of disappointment.

  There is every reason to believe, moreover, that these stories havebeen embroidered by the narrators. In the vast majority of cases themen who have had an opportunity to note down primitive love-storiesunfortunately did not hesitate to disguise their native flavor withEuropean sauce in order to make them more palatable to the generalpublic. This makes them interesting stories, made realistic by the useof local color, but utterly mars them for the scientific epicure whooften relishes most what is caviare to the general. Take that Hawaiianstory. It is supposed to be told by King Kalakaua himself. At least,the book of _Legend and Myths_ has "By His Hawaiian Majesty" on thetitle page. Beneath those words we read that the book was edited bythe Hon. E.M. Daggett; and in the preface acknowledgment is made to asmany as eight persons "for material in the compilation of many of thelegends embraced in this volume." Thus there are ten cooks, and thequestion arises, "did they carefully and conscientiously tell thesestories exactly as related to them by aboriginal Hawaiians, free frommissionary influences, or did they flavor the broth with Europeancondiments?" To this question no answer is given in the book, butthere is plenty of evidence that either the King himself, in order tomake his people as much like ours as possible, or his foreignassistants, embellished them with sentimental details. To take onlytwo significant points: it sounds very sentimental to be told that thegirl Ua, after Kaaialii had jumped into the vortex "wailed upon thewinds a requiem of love and grief," but a native Hawaiian has no morenotion of the word requiem than he has of a syllogism. Then again, thestory is full of expressions like this: "His _heart beat with joy_,for he thought she was Kaala;" or "He asked her for a smile and she_gave him her heart_." Such phrases mislead not only the generalreader but careless anthropologists into the belief that the lowerraces feel and express their love just as we do. As a matter of fact,Polynesians do not attribute feelings to the heart. Ellis (II., 311),could not even make them understand what he was talking about when hetried to explain to them our ideas regarding the heart as a seat ofmoral feeling. The fact that our usage in this respect is a mereconvention, not based on physiological facts, makes it all the morereprehensible to falsify psychology by adorning aboriginal tales withthe borrowed plumes and phrases of civilization.

  VAGARIES OF HAWAIIAN FONDNESS

  It is quite possible that the events related in the cave-story didoccur; but a Hawaiian, untouched by missionary influences, would havetold them very differently. It is very much more likely, however, thatif a Hawaiian had found himself in the predicament of Kaaialii, hewould have sympathized 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 inaccordance with what observers have 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 ofthe Hawaiians are usually ephemeral," says "Haeole," the author of_Sandwich Island Notes_ (267). The widow seldom or never plants asolitary flower over the grave of her lord. She may once visit themound that marks the repose of his ashes, but never again, unless byaccident. It not unfrequently happens that a second husband isselected while the remains of the first are being conveyed to his"long home." Hawaiian women seem more attached to pigs and puppiesthan to their husbands or even their children. The writer just quotedsays whole volumes might be written concerning the "silly affection"of the women for animals. They carry them in their bosoms, and do nothesitate to suckle them. It is one of their duties to drive pigs tothe market, and one day "Haeole" came across a group of native womenwho had taken off their only garments and soaked them in water to cooltheir dear five hundred-pounder, while others were fanning him! Aslate as 1881 Isabella Bird wrote (213) that

  "the crime of infanticide, which formerly prevailed to a horrible extent, has long been extinct; but the love of pleasure and the dislike of trouble which partially actuated it are apparently 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 lavished upon infants as upon the pet dogs that the women carry about with them."

  HAWAIIAN MORALS

  Hawaiians did not treat women as brutally as Fijians do; yet how farthey were from respecting, not to speak of adoring, them, is obviousfrom the contemptuous and selfish taboos which forbade women, onpenalty of death, to eat any of the best and commonest articles offood, such as bananas, cocoanuts, pork, turtle; or refused thempermission to eat with their lords and masters, or to share in divineworship, because their touch would pollute the offerings to the gods.

  The grossness of the Hawaiian erotic taste is indicated by "Haeole's"reference (123) to "the immense corpulency of some of the old Hawaiianqueens, a feature which, in those days, was deemed the _ne plus ultra_of female beauty." Incest was permitted to the chiefs, and the peoplevied 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. Tregear;[189] and in Dibble's _History of the SandwichIslands_ (126-27) we read:

  "For husbands to interchange wives, or for wives to interchange husbands, was a common act of friendship, and persons who would not do this were not considered on good terms of sociability. For a m
an 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 alsocustomary for a married woman to have an acknowledged lover known as_punula_. The word _hula hula_ is familiar the world over as the nameof an improper dance, but it is nothing to what it used to be. Thefamous cave Niholua was consecrated to it. In past generations

  "warriors came here to revel with their paramours. The Tartarean 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 _hula hula_ (the licentious dance).... Wives were exchanged, and so were concubines; fathers despoiled their own daughters, and brothers deemed it no crime to perpetrate incest."

  Waitz-Gerland (VI., 459) cite Wise as attesting that "in 1848 themissionaries gave up a girls' school, because it was impossible topreserve the virtue of their pupils," and Steen Bill wrote that in1846 seventy per cent of all the crimes punished were of a lewdcharacter, and that on the whole island there was not a chaste girl ofeleven years of age. Isabella Bird wrote (169) that "the Hawaiianwomen have no notions of virtue as we understand it, and if there isto be any future for this race it must come through a highermorality."

  THE HELEN OF HAWAII

  As there was practically no difference between married and unmarriedwomen in Hawaii, it is not strange that cases of abduction of wivesshould have occurred. The following story, related in Kalakana's book,probably suffered no great change at the hands of the recorder. I givea condensed version of it:

  In the twelfth century, the close of the second era of migration 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 Kaupeepee, 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 _kapa_, 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 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. "Return me to my children!" "Impossible!" was the firm reply. "Then kill me," she exclaimed. The 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 among 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 herself. "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 the meantime her two sons by her first 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-LETTERS

  The Rev. H.T. Cheever prints in his book on the Sandwich Islands(226-28) a few amusing specimens of the love-letters exchanged betweenthe native lads of the Lahainaluna Seminary and certain lasses ofLahaina. The following ones were intercepted by the missionaries. Thefirst 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 consequence of not having seen you these times. Much affection for thee dwelling there where the sun causeth the 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.

  "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 hungry. 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.[190] 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, O Pomare, thou royal woman 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 Lahaina. O 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 secretly 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. O 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 regret 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 sea again, because I supposed you had not returned. I feared lest I should see all the places where you and I conversed together, 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, O thou who wilt forever be loved. Here, also is this: consent 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 importantconsiderations. Were these letters penned by natives or byhalf-castes, with foreign blood in their veins and inheritedcapacities of feeling? Unless we know that, no scientific deduction isallowable. These natives are very imitative. They learn our musiceasily and rapidly, and with the art of writing and reading theyreadily acquire our amorous phrases. A certain Biblical tone,suggesting the Canticles, is noticeable. The word "heart" is used in away foreign to Polynesian thought, and apart from these details, isthere anything in these letters that goes beyond selfish longing andcraving for enjoyment? Is there anything in them that may not besummed up in the language of appetite: "Thou art very desirable--Idesire thee--I grieve, and weep, and refuse to eat, because I cannotpossess thee now?" Such longing, so intense and fiery[191] that itseems as if all the waters of the ocean could not quench it,constitutes a phase of all amorous passion, from the lowest up to thehighest. Philosophers have, indeed, disputed as to which is the moreviolent and irrepressible, animal passion or sentimental love.Schopenhauer believed the latter, Lichtenberg the former.[192]

  MAORIS OF NEW ZEALAND

  Hawaii has brought us quite near the coast of America, whose red menwill form the subject of our next chapter. But, before passing on tothe Indians, we must once more return to the neighborhood ofAustralia, to the island of New Zealand, which offers some points ofgreat interest to a student 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 shallnow see that south of Australia, too, there is an island (or rathertwo islands), whose inhabitants are utterly un-Australian in mannersand customs, as well as in origin. The Maoris (that is, natives) ofNew Zealand have traditions that their ancestors came from Hawaii(Hawaiki), disputes about land having induced them to emigrate. Theymay have done so by way of other islands, on some of their largecanoes, aided by the trade winds.[193] The Maoris are certainlyPolynesians, and they resemble Hawaiians and Tongans in many respects.Their ferocity and cannibalism put them on a level with Fijians,making them a terror to navigators, while in some other respects theyappear to have been somewhat superior to most of their Polynesiancousins, the Tongans excepted. The Maoris and Tongans best bear outWaitz-Gerland's assertion that "the Polynesians rank intellectuallyconsiderably higher than all other uncivilized peoples." The sameauthorities 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 willgive condensed versions, taking care, as usual, to preserve allpertinent details and intimations of higher qualities.

  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 Eotorua 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 lowborn 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 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 oft 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 servant 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, I 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 Hin
e-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 beautiful 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 reposed there; and thenceforth, according to the ancient laws of the Maori, they were man and wife.

  THE MAN ON THE TREE

  A young man named Maru-tuahu left home in quest of his father, who hadabandoned his mother before the son was born because he had beenunjustly accused of stealing sweet potatoes from another chief.Maru-tuahu took along a slave, and they carried with them a spear forkilling 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 aforest tree when two young girls, daughters of a chief, came along.They saw the slave sitting at the root of the tree, and sportivelycontested with each other whose slave he should be.

  All this time Maru-tuahu was peeping down at the two girls from thetop of the tree; and they asked the slave, saying, "Where is yourmaster?" He answered, "I have no master but him," Then the girlslooked about, and there was a cloak lying on the ground, and a heap ofdead birds, and they kept on asking, "Where is he?" but it was notlong before a flock of Tuis settled on the tree where Maru-tuahu wassitting; he speared at them and struck one of the birds, which madethe tree ring with its cries; the girls heard it, and looking up, theyoungest 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;" butthe eldest sister exclaimed, "You shall be mine," and they beganjesting and disputing between themselves which should have him for ahusband, for he was a very handsome young man.

  Then the two girls called up to him to come down from the tree, anddown he came, and dropped upon the ground, and pressed his noseagainst the nose of each of the young girls. They then asked him tocome to their village with them; to which he consented, but said, "Youtwo go on ahead, and leave me and my slave, and we will follow youpresently;" and the girls said, "Very well, do you come after us."Maru-tuahu then told his slave to make a present to the girls of thefood they had collected, and he gave them two bark baskets of pigeons,preserved in their own fat, and they went off to their village withthese.

  As soon as the girls were gone, Maru-tuahu went to a stream, washedhis hair, and combed it carefully, tied it in a knot, and stuck fiftyred Kaka feathers and other plumes in his head, till he looked ashandsome as the large-crested cormorant. The young girls soon cameback from the village to meet their so-called husband, and when theysaw him in his new head-dress and attired in a chief's cloak they feltdeeply in love with him and they said, "Come along to our father'svillage with us." On the way they found out from the slave that hismaster was the far-famed Maru-tuahu, and they replied: "Dear, dear, wehad not the least idea that it was he," Then they ran off to tell hisfather (for this was the place where his father had gone and marriedagain) that he was coming. The son was warmly welcomed. All the younggirls 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 allthis time the two girls were quarrelling with each other as to whichof them should have the young chief for a husband. The elder girl wasplain, but thought herself pretty, and could not see the least reasonwhy he should be frightened at her; but Maru-tuahu did not like her onaccount of her plainness, and her pretty sister kept him as herhusband.

  LOVE IN A FORTRESS

  A chief named Rangirarunga had a daughter so celebrated for her beautythat the fame of it had reached all parts of these islands. A younghero named Takarangi also heard of her beauty, and it may be that hisheart sometimes dwelt long on the thoughts of such loveliness. Theybelonged to different tribes, and war broke out between them, duringwhich the fortress of the girl's father was besieged. Soon theinhabitants were near dying from want of food and water. At last theold chief Rangirarunga, overcome by thirst, stood on the top of thedefences and cried out to the enemy: "I pray you to give me one dropof water." Some were willing, and got calabashes of water, but otherswere angry thereat and broke them in their hands. The old chief thenappealed to the leader of the enemy, who was Takarangi, and asked himif 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 wasreally thinking was, "That dying old man is the father of Rau-mahora,of that lovely maid. Ah, how should I grieve if one so young andinnocent should die tormented with the want of water." Then he filleda calabash with fresh cool water, and the fierce warriors looked on inwonder and silence while he carried it to the old man and hisdaughter. They drank, both of them, and Taka-rangi gazed eagerly atthe young girl, and she too looked eagerly at Takarangi; long timegazed they each one at the other; and as the warriors of the army ofTakarangi looked on, lo, he had climbed up and was sitting at theyoung maiden's side; and they said, amongst themselves, "O comrades,our lord Takarangi loves war, but one would think he likes Rau-mahoraalmost as well."

  At last a sudden thought struck the heart of the aged chief; so hesaid to his daughter, "O my child, would it be pleasing to you to havethis young chief for a husband?" And the young girl said, "I likehim." Then the old man consented that his daughter should be given asa bride to Takarangi, and he took her as his wife. Thence was that warbrought 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 permanentvictory peace was at last concluded. Then one day the chief Te Ponga,with some of his followers, approached the fortress of their formerenemies. 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 theranks of the dancers, and that they might look as slight as if theirwaists were almost severed in two.

  As soon as it began to get dark the villagers danced, and whilst theysprang nimbly about, Puhihuia, the young daughter of the villagechief, watched them till her time came to enter the ranks. Sheperformed her part beautifully; her fall-orbed eyes seemed clear andbrilliant as the full moon rising in the horizon, and while thestrangers looked at the young girl they all were quite overpoweredwith her beauty; and Te Ponga, their young chief, felt his heart growwild with emotion when he saw so much loveliness before him.

  Then up sprang the strangers to dance in their turn. Te Ponga waitedhis opportunity, and when the time came, danced so beautifully thatthe people of the village were surprised at his agility and grace, andas for the young girl, Puhihuia, her heart conceived a warm passionfor Te Ponga.

  When the dance was concluded, everyone, overcome with weariness, wentto sleep--all except Te Ponga, who lay tossing from side to side,unable to sleep, from his great love for the maiden, and devisingscheme after scheme by which he might have an opportunity ofconversing with her alone. At last he decided to carry out a plansuggested by his servant. The next night, when he had retired in thechief's house, he called this servant to fetch him some water; but theservant, following out the plot, had concealed himself and refused torespond. Then the chief said to his daughter, "My child, run and fetchsome 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 startoff than he too arose and went out, feigning to be angry with hisslave and going to give him a beating; but as soon as he was out ofthe house he went straight off after the girl. He did not well knowthe path to the well, but was guided by the voice of the maiden, whosang merrily as she went along.

  When she arrived at the fountain she heard someone behind her, andturning suddenly around she beheld the young chief. Astonished, sheasked, "What can have brought you here?" He answered, "I came here fora draught of water
." But the girl replied, "Ha, indeed! Did not I comehere to draw water for you? Could not you have remained at my father'shouse until I brought the water for you?" Then Te Ponga answered, "Youare the water that I thirsted for." And as the maiden listened to hiswords, she thought within herself, "He, then, has fallen in love withme," and she sat down, and he placed himself by her side, and theyconversed together, and to each of them the words of the other seemedmost pleasant and engaging. Before they separated they arranged a timewhen they might escape together, and then they returned to thevillage.

  When the time came for Te Ponga to leave his host he directed somedozen men of his to go to the landing-place in the harbor, prepare onelarge canoe in which he and his followers might escape, and then totake the other canoes and cut the lashings which made the top sidesfast to the hulls. The next morning he announced that he must returnto his own country. The chief and his men accompanied him part of theway to the harbor. Puhihuia and the other girls had stolen a littleway 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 andran back toward the village, but as to Puhihuia, her heart beat but tothe one thought of escaping with her beloved Te Ponga. So she began torun. Te Ponga and his men joined in the swift flight, and as soon asthey had reached the water they jumped into their canoe, seized theirpaddles and shot away, swift as a dart from a string. When thepursuing villagers arrived at the beach they laid hold of anothercanoe, but found that the lashings of all had been cut, so thatpursuit was impossible. Thus the party that had come to make peacereturned joyfully to their own country, with the enemy's youngchieftainess, 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 theystories of romantic love? There is romance and quaint local color inthe 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 anunseen man up a tree; in the action of the chief who saved thebeautiful girl and her father from dying of thirst, and acted so thathis men came to the conclusion he must love her "almost as well" aswar; in the slyly planned elopement of Te Ponga. But there is nothingto indicate the quality of the love--to show an "illumination of thesenses by the soul," or a single altruistic trait. Even such touchesof egoistic sentimentality as the phrase "To the heart of each of themthe other appeared pleasing and worthy, so that in the breast of eachthere grew up a secret passion for the other;" and again, "he felt hisheart grow wild with emotion, when he saw so much loveliness beforehim," 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 aword as "emotions" is entirely beyond their powers of abstraction andconception. Grey tells us that he collected different portions of hislegends from different natives, in very distant parts of the country,at long intervals, and afterward rearranged and rewrote them. In thisway he succeeded in giving us some interesting legends, but aphonographic record of the _fragments_ related to him, without anyembroidering of "heart-affairs," "wild emotions," and other adornmentsof modern novels, would have rendered them infinitely more valuable tostudents of the evolution of emotions. It is a great pity that so fewof the recorders of aboriginal tales followed this principle; and itis strange that such neatly polished, arranged, and modernized talesas these should have been accepted so long as illustrations ofprimitive love.[194]

  MAORI LOVE-POEMS

  Besides their stories of love, the Maoris of New Zealand also havepoems, some accompanied with (often obscene) pantomimes, otherswithout accompaniment. Shortland (146-55), Taylor (310), and othershave collected and translated some of these poems, of which thefollowing 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, Beloved 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 frequentlyaccompanied by immodest gestures of the body. Some of them are "notsufficiently decent to bear translating." The one marked (4) isinteresting as an attempt at hyperbole.

  (1)

  Your body is at Waitemata, But your spirit came hither And aroused me from my sleep.

  (4)

  Tawera is the bright star Of the morning. Not less 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 utilitarian are (6) and (7), in which a woman asks "Who willmarry a man too lazy to till the ground for food?" And a man wants toknow "Who will marry a woman too lazy to weave garments?" Veryunlover-like is the following:

  I don't like the habits of woman. When she goes out-- She _Kuikuis_ She _Koakoas_ She chatters The very ground is terrified, And the rats run away. Just so.

  More poetic are the _waiata_, which are sung without the aid of anyaction. The following ode was composed by a young woman forsaken byher 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 is my farewell of love to thee.

  A young woman, who had been carried away prisoner from Tuhua, givesvent 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 Tahua. I 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? O Hu! you husband of Pohiwa, sailing away on the tide to Europe.

  "O Tom! 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 gooddeal more than the loss of her lover. In another ode cited byShortland a deserted girl, after referring to her tearful eyes, windsup 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 shallcite:

  "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, O 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 Rawhirawhwi. Don't be angry with me, O madam [addressed to Rawhirawhwi'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 coollyrequests the wife of the person for whom she acknowledges an unlawfulpassion not to be angry with her, because 'she--the lawful wife--hasalways possession of the person of her husband; while hers is only anempty, Platonic sort of love.' This is rather a favorit
e sentiment,and is not unfrequently introduced similarly into love-songs of thisdescription."

  THE WOOING-HOUSE

  It is noticeable that these love-poems are all by females, and mostfrequently by deserted females. This does not speak well for thegallantry or constancy of the men. Perhaps they lacked those qualitiesto offset the feminine lack of coyness. In the first of our Maoristories the maiden swims to the man, who calmly awaits her, playinghis horn. In the second, a man is simultaneously proposed to by twogirls, before he has time to come off his perch on the tree. Thisarouses a suspicion which is confirmed by E. Tregear's revelationsregarding 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 character. 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, another an arm, another the hair, etc. Girls have been injured for life in these disputes, or even murdered by the losing party."

  LIBERTY OF CHOICE AND RESPECT FOR WOMEN

  The assertion that "the girl generally began the courting" must notmislead us into supposing that Maori women were free, as a rule, tomarry the husbands of their choice. As Tregear's own remarks indicate,the advances were either of an improper character, or the girl hadmade sure beforehand that there was no impediment in the way of herproposal. The Maori proverb that as the fastidious Kahawai fishselects the hook which pleases it best, so a woman chooses a man outof many (on the strength of which alone Westermarck, 217, claimsliberty of choice for Maori women) must also refer to such liaisonsbefore marriage, for all the facts indicate that the original Maoricustoms allowed women no choice whatever in regard to marriage. Herethe brother's consent had to be obtained, as Shortland remarks (118).Many of the girls were betrothed in infancy, and many others marriedat an age--twelve to thirteen--when the word choice could have had norational meaning. Tregear informs us that if a couple had not beenbetrothed as children, everyone in the tribe claimed a right tointerfere, and the only way the couple could get their own way was byeloping. Darwin was informed by Mantell "that until recently almostevery girl in New Zealand who was pretty or promised to be pretty wastapu 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. Butthe most graphic and harrowing description of Maori maltreatment ofwomen is given by the Rev. E. Taylor:

  "The _ancient and most general way_ of obtaining a wife was for the gentleman to summon his friends and make a regular _taua_, or fight, to carry off the lady by force, and oftentimes 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 between two contending parties, would soon be divested of every 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 sometimes ended in the strongest party bearing off 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 another."

  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 mostferocious brutes, since those at least spare their females--the samewriter informs us on page 338 that "there are few races who treattheir women with more deference than the Maori!" If that is so, it canonly be due to the influence of the whites, since all the testimonyindicates that the unadulterated Maori--with whom alone we are hereconcerned--did not treat them "with great respect," nor pay anydeference to them whatever. The cruel method of capture describedabove was so general that, as Taylor himself tells us, the native termfor courtship was _he aru aru_, literally, a following or pursuingafter; and there was also a special expression for this struggling oftwo 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, saysAngas (II., 110), "will sometimes permit his favorite wife to eat withhim, though not out of the same dish." Ellis relates (III., 253) thatNew Zealanders are "addicted to the greatest vices that stain thehuman character--treachery, cannibalism, infanticide, and murder." Thewomen caught in battle, as well as the men, were, he says, enslaved oreaten. "Sometimes they chopped off the legs and arms and otherwisemangled the body before they put the victim to death." Concubines hadto do service as household drudges. A man on dying would bequeath hiswives to his brother. No land was bequeathed to female children. Thereal Maori feeling toward women is brought out in the answer given toa sister who went to her brothers to ask for a share of the lands ofthe family: "Why, you're only a slave to blow up your husband's fire."(Shortland, 119, 255-58.)

  MAORI MORALS AND CAPACITY FOR LOVE

  When Hawkesworth visited New Zealand with Captain Cook, he one daycame accidentally across some women who were fishing, and who hadthrown off their last garments. When they saw him they were asconfused and distressed as Diana and her nymphs; they hid among therocks and crouched down in the sea until they had made and put ongirdles of seaweeds (456). "There are instances," writes William Brown(36-37), "of women committing suicide from its being said that theyhad been seen naked. A chief's wife took her own life because she hadbeen hung up by the heels and beaten in the presence of the wholetribe."

  Shall we conclude from this that the Maoris were genuinely modest andperhaps capable of that delicacy in regard to sexual matters which isa prerequisite of sentimental love? What is modesty? The _CenturyDictionary_ says it is "decorous feeling or behavior; purity ordelicacy of thought or manner; reserve proceeding from pure or chastecharacter;" and the _Encyclopaedic Dictionary_ defines it as"chastity; purity of manners; decency; freedom from lewdness orun-chastity." Now, Maori modesty, if such it maybe called, was onlyskin deep. Living in a colder climate than other Polynesians, itbecame customary among them to wear more clothing; and what customprescribes must be obeyed to the letter among all these peoples, bethe ordained dress merely a loin cloth or a necklace, or a cover forthe back only, or full dress. It does not argue true modesty on thepart of a Maori woman to cover those parts of her body which customorders her to cover, any more than it
argues true modesty on the partof an Oriental barbarian to cover her face only, on meeting a man,leaving the rest of her body exposed. Nor does suicide prove anything,since it is known that the lower races indulge in self-slaughter foras trivial causes as they do in the slaughter of others. True modesty,as defined above, is not a Maori characteristic. The evidence on thispoint is too abundant to quote in full.

  Shortland (126-27) describes in detail all of the ceremonies whichwere in former days the pastimes of the New Zealanders, and whichaccompanied the singing of their _haka_ or "love-songs," to whichreference has already been made. In the front were seated threeelderly ladies and behind them in rows, eight or ten in a row, andfive or six ranks deep, sat "_the best 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 permitted to young females. The more admirers they can attract 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 notdeemed one of the virtues; and a lady before marriage may be asliberal of her favors as she pleased without incurring censure." "As arule," writes E. Tregear in the _Journal of the AnthropologicalInstitute_ (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 her husband,but of course not from any regard for chastity, but because she washis private property. Like so many other uncivilized races the Maorisaw no impropriety in lending his wife to a friend. (Tregear, 104.)

  The faces of Maori women were always wet with red ochre and oil. Bothsexes anointed their hair (which was vermin-infested) with rancidshark's oil, so that they were as disagreeable to the smell asHottentots. (Hawkesworth, 451-53.) They were cannibals, not fromnecessity, but for the love of human flesh, though they did not, likethe Australians, eat their own relatives. Food, says Thompson (I.,160), affected them "as it does wild beasts." They practisedinfanticide, killed cripples, abandoned the sick--in a word, theydisplayed a coarseness, a lack of delicacy, in sexual and othermatters, which makes it simply absurd to suppose they could have lovedas we love, with our altruistic feeling of sympathy and affection.William Brown says (38) that mothers showed none of that dotingfondness for their children common elsewhere, and that they suckledpigs and pups with "affection." "Should a husband quarrel with hiswife, she would not hesitate to kill her children, merely to annoyhim" (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 attachment 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 fortrue love. Let us now see whether the vast continent of North andSouth America will bring us any nearer to our goal.

  HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE

  "On the subject of love no persons have been less understood than theIndians," 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 remote 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 degradation of woman, cases of romantic love are not even very rare"

  among Indians. "Their languages," writes Professor Brinton (_R.P._,54),

  "supply us with evidence that the sentiment 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 African 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 leastbehind us in conjugal, in filial, and in paternal affection." In thepreface to Mrs. Eastman's _Life and Legend of the Sioux_, Mrs. Kirkmanexclaims that

  "in spite of all that renders gross and mechanical their ordinary 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 bySchoolcraft.[195]

  THE RED LOVER

  Many years ago there lived a Chippewa warrior on the banks of LakeSuperior. His name was Wawanosh and he was renowed for his ancestryand personal bravery. He had an only daughter, eighteen years old,celebrated for her gentle virtues, her _slender_ form, her fullbeaming hazel eyes, and her dark and flowing hair. Her hand was soughtby a young man of humble parentage, but a tall commanding form, amanly step, and an eye beaming with the tropical fires of love andyouth. These were sufficient to attract the favorable notice of thedaughter, but did not satisfy the father, who sternly informed theyoung man that before he could hope to mingle his humble blood withthat of so renowned a warrior he would have to go and make a name forhimself by enduring fatigue in the campaigns against enemies, bytaking scalps, and proving himself a successful hunter.

  The intimidated lover departed, resolved to do a deed that shouldrender 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 alleager, like himself, to distinguish themselves in battle. Armed withbow and quiver, and ornamented with war-paint and feathers, they hadtheir war-dance, which was continued for two days and nights. Beforeleaving with his companions the leader sought an interview with thedaughter of Wawanosh. He disclosed to her his firm intention never toreturn unless he could establish his name as a warrior. He told her ofthe pangs he had felt at her father's implied imputation of effeminacyand cowardice. He averred that he never could be happy, either with orwithout her, until he had proved to the whole tribe the strength ofhis heart, which is the Indian term for courage. He repeated his_protestations of inviolable attachment_, which she returned, and,_pledging vows of mutual fidelity_, they parted.

  She never saw him again. A warrior brought home the tidings that hehad received a fatal arrow in his breast after distinguishing himselfby the most heroic bravery. From that moment the young girl neversmiled again. She pined away by day and by night. Deaf to entreaty andreproach, she would seek a sequestered spot, where she would sit undera shady tree, and sing her mournful laments for hours together. Asmall, beautiful bird, of a kind she had never seen, sat on her tree,every day, singing until dark. Her fond imagination soon led her tosuppose it was the spirit
of her lover, and her visits were repeatedwith greater frequency. She passed her time in fasting and singing herplaintive songs. Thus she pined away, until _the death she sofervently desired_ came to her relief. After her death the bird wasnever more seen, and it became a popular opinion that this mysteriousbird had flown away with her spirit. But bitter tears of regret fellin the lodge of Wawanosh. Too late he _regretted his false pride_ andhis harsh treatment of the noble youth.

  THE FOAM WOMAN

  There once lived an Ottawa woman on the shores of Lake Michigan whohad a daughter as beautiful as she was modest and discreet. She was sohandsome that her mother feared she would be carried off, and, toprevent it, she put her in a box on the lake, which was tied by a longstring to a stake on the shore. Every morning the mother pulled thebox ashore, and combed her daughter's long, shining hair, gave herfood, and then put her out again on the lake.

  One day a handsome young man chanced to come to the spot at the momentshe was receiving her morning's attentions from her mother. He wasstruck with her beauty and immediately went home and told his feelingsto his uncle, who was a great chief and a powerful magician. The uncletold him to go to the mother's lodge, sit down in a modest manner,and, without saying a word, _think_ what he wanted, and he would beunderstood and answered. He did so; but the mother's answer was: "Giveyou my daughter? No, indeed, my daughter shall never marry _you_."This pride and haughtiness angered the uncle and the spirits of thelake, who raised a great storm on the water. The tossing waves brokethe string, and the box with the girl floated off through the straitsto Lake Huron. It was there cast on shore and found by an old spiritwho took the beautiful girl to his lodge and married her.

  The mother, when she found her daughter gone, raised loud cries, andcontinued her lamentations for a long time. At last, after two orthree years, the spirits had pity on her and raised another storm,greater even than the first. When the water rose and encroached on thelodge where the daughter lived, she leaped into the box, and the wavescarried her back to her mother's lodge. The mother was overjoyed, butwhen she opened the box she found that her daughter's beauty hadalmost all departed. However, she still loved her because she was herdaughter, and she now thought of the young man who had made her theoffer of marriage. She sent a formal message to him, but he hadchanged his mind, for he knew that she had been the wife of another."_I_ marry your daughter?" said he; "_your_ daughter! No, indeed! Ishall never marry her."

  THE HUMPBACK MAGICIAN

  Bokwewa and his brother lived in a secluded part of the country. Theywere considered as Manitoes who had assumed mortal shapes. Bokwewa wasa humpback, but had the gifts of a magician, while the brother wasmore like the present race of beings. One day the brother said to thehumpback that he was going away to visit the habitations of men, andprocure a wife. He travelled alone a long time. At length he came to adeserted camp, where he saw a corpse on a scaffold. He took it downand found it was the body of a beautiful young woman. "She shall be mywife," he exclaimed.

  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 variousceremonies, succeeded in restoring her to life. They lived veryhappily for some time. But one day when the humpback was home alonewith the woman, her husband having gone out to hunt, a powerful Manitocame and carried her off, though Bokwewa used all his strength to saveher.

  When the brother returned and heard what had happened he would nottaste food for several days. Sometimes he would fall to weeping for along time, and appear almost beside himself. At last he said he wouldgo in search of her. His brother, finding that he could not dissuadehim, cautioned him against the dangers of the road; he must pass bythe 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 hisjourney 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 hehad eaten of the grapes and frog's eggs--snares laid for him--he wassoon overcome by their flatteries and pleasures, and he was not longafterward seen beating corn with their women (the strongest proof ofeffeminacy), although his wife, for whom he had mourned so much, wasin that Indian metropolis.

  Meanwhile Bokwewa waited patiently for his brother, but when he didnot return he set out in search of him. He avoided the allurementsalong the road and when he came among the luxurious people of theSouth he wept on seeing his brother beating corn with the women. Hewaited till the stolen wife came down to the river to draw water forher new husband, the Manito. He changed himself into a hair-snake, wasscooped up in her bucket, and drunk by the Manito, who soon after wasdead. Then the humpback resumed his human shape and tried to reclaimhis brother; but the brother was so taken up with the pleasures anddissipations into which he had fallen that he refused to give them up.Finding he was past reclaiming, Bokwewa left him and disappearedforever.

  THE BUFFALO KING

  Aggodagauda was an Indian who lived in the forest. Though he hadaccidentally lost the use of one of his two legs he was a famoushunter. But he had a great enemy in the king of buffaloes, whofrequently passed over the plain with the force of a tempest. Thechief object of the wily buffalo was to carry off Aggodagauda'sdaughter, who was very beautiful. To prevent this Aggodagauda hadbuilt a log cabin, and it was only on the roof of this that hepermitted his daughter to take the open air and disport herself. Nowher hair was so long that when she untied it the raven locks hung downto the ground.

  One day, when her father was off on a hunt, she went out on top of thehouse and sat combing her long and beautiful hair, on the eaves of thelodge, when the buffalo king, coming suddenly by, caught her glossyhair, and winding it about his horns, tossed her onto his shouldersand carried her to his village. Here he _paid every attention to gainher affections_, but all to no purpose, for she sat pensively anddisconsolate in the lodge among the other females, and scarcely everspoke, 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 herand win her affections_. He told the others in his lodge to give hereverything she wanted, and to be _careful not to displease her_. Theyset before her the choicest food. They _gave her the seat of honor inthe lodge_. The king himself went out hunting to obtain the mostdainty bits of meat. And not content with these proofs of hisattachment _he fasted himself_, and would often take his flute and sitnear 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!

  In the meantime Aggodagauda had returned from his hunt, and findinghis daughter gone, determined to recover her. During her flight herlong hair had caught on the branches and broken them, and it was byfollowing these broken twigs that he tracked her. When he came to theking's lodge it was evening. He cautiously peeped in and saw hisdaughter sitting disconsolately. She caught his eye, and, in order tomeet him, said to the king, "Give me a dipper, I will go and get you adrink of water." Delighted with this token of submission, the kingallowed her to go to the river. There she met her father and escapedwith him.

  THE HAUNTED GROVE

  Leelinau was the favorite daughter of an Odjibwa hunter, living on theshore of Lake Superior. From her earliest youth she was observed to bepensive and timid, and to spend much of her time _in solitude andfasting_. Whenever she could leave her father's lodge she would fly tothe remote haunts and recesses of the woods, or _sit upon some highpromontory of rock overhanging the lake_. But her favorite place was aforest of pines known as the Sacred Grove. It was supposed to beinhabited by a class of _fairies who love romantic scenes_. This spotLeelinau visited often, _gathering on the way strange flowers orplants_ to bring home. It was there that she fasted, supplicate
d, andstrolled.

  The effect of these visits was to make the girl melancholy anddissatisfied with the realities of life. She did not care to play withthe other young people. Nor did she favor the plan of her parents tomarry her to a man much her senior in years, but a reputed chief. Noattention was paid to her disinclination, and the man was informedthat his offer had been favorably received. The day for the marriagewas fixed and the guests invited.

  The girl had told her parents that she would never consent to thematch. On the evening preceding the day fixed for her marriage shedressed herself in her best garments and put on all her ornaments.Then she told her parents she was going to meet her little lover, thechieftain of the green plume, who was waiting for her at the SpiritGrove. Supposing she was going to act some harmless freak, they lether go. When she did not return at sunset alarm was felt; with lightedtorches the gloomy pine forest was searched, but no trace of the girlwas ever found, and the parents mourned the loss of a daughter whoseinclinations they had, in the end, too violently thwarted.

  THE GIRL AND THE SCALP

  About the middle of the seventeenth century there lived on the shoresof Lake Ontario a Wyandot girl so beautiful that she had for suitorsnearly all the young men of her tribe; but while she rejected none,neither did she favor any one in particular. To prevent her fromfalling to someone not in their tribe the suitors held a meeting andconcluded that their claims should be withdrawn and the war chiefurged to woo her. He objected on account of the disparity of years,but was finally persuaded to make his advances. His practice had beenconfined rather to the use of stone-headed arrows than love-darts, andhis dexterity in the management of hearts displayed rather in makingbloody incisions than tender impressions. But after he had painted andarrayed himself as for battle and otherwise adorned his person, hepaid court to her, and a few days later was accepted on condition thathe would pledge his word as a warrior to do what she should ask ofhim. When his pledge had been given she told him to bring her thescalp of a certain Seneca chief whom she hated. He begged her toreflect that this chief was his bosom friend, whose confidence itwould be an infamy to betray. But she told him either to redeem hispledge or be proclaimed for a lying dog, and then left him.

  Goaded into fury, the Wyandot chief blackened his face and rushed offto the Seneca village, where he tomahawked his friend and rushed outof the lodge with his scalp. A moment later the mournful scalp-whoopof the Senecas was resounding through the village. The Wyandot campwas attacked, and after a deadly combat of three days the Senecastriumphed, avenging the murder of their chief by the death of hisassailant 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 1759 great exertions were made by the French Indian Departmentunder General Montcalm to bring a body of Indians into the valley ofthe lower St. Lawrence, and invitations for this purpose reached theutmost shores of Lake Superior. In one of the canoes from thatquarter, which was left on the way down at the mouth of the Utawas,was a Chippewa girl named Paigwaineoshe, or the White Eagle. While theparty awaited there the result of events at Quebec she formed anattachment for a young Algonquin belonging to a French mission. Thisattachment was mutual, and gave rise to a song of which the followingis 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 Algonquin.

  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 ofsentimental touches. Do they not disprove my theory that uncivilizedraces are incapable of feeling sentimental love? Some think they do,and Waitz is not the only anthropologist who has accepted such storiesas proof that human nature, as far as love is concerned, is the sameunder all circumstances. The above tales are taken from the books of aman who spent much of his life among Indians and issued a number ofworks about them, one of which, in six volumes, was published underthe auspices of the United States Government. This expert--Henry R.Schoolcraft--was member of so many learned societies that it takestwelve lines of small type to print them all. Moreover, he expresslyassures us[196] that "the value of these traditionary stories appearsto depend very much upon their being left, as nearly as possible, intheir original forms of thought and expression," the obvious inferencebeing an assurance that he has so left them; and he adds that in thecollection and translation of these stories he enjoyed the greatadvantages of seventeen years' life as executive officer for thetribes, and a knowledge of their languages.

  And now, having given the enemy's battle-ship every possibleadvantage, the reader will allow me to bring on my littletorpedo-boat. In the first place Schoolcraft mentions (_A.R_., I., 56)twelve persons, six of them women, who helped him collect andinterpret the material of the tales united in his volumes; but he doesnot tell us whether all or any of these collectors acted on theprinciple that these stories could claim absolutely no _scientific_value unless they were verbatim reports of aboriginal tales, _withoutany additions and sentimental embroideries by the compilers_. Thisomission alone is fatal to the whole collection, reducing it to thevalue of a mere fairy book for the entertainment of children, andallowing us to make no inferences from it regarding the quality andexpression of an Indian's love.

  Schoolcraft stands convicted by his own action. When I read his talesfor the first time I came across numerous sentences and sentimentswhich I knew from my own experience among Indians were utterly foreignto Indian modes of thought and feeling, and which they could no morehave uttered than they could have penned Longfellow's _Hiawatha_, orthe essays of Emerson. In the stories of "The Red Lover," "The BuffaloKing," and "The Haunted Grove,"[197] I have italicized a few of thesesuspicious passages. To take the last-named tale first, it is absurdto speak of Indian "fairies who love romantic scenes," or of a girlromantically sitting on a rocky promontory,[198] or "gathering strangeflowers;" for Indians have no conception of the romantic side ofnature--of scenery for its own sake. To them a tree is simply a grouseperch, or a source of fire-wood; a lake, a fish-pond, a mountain, thedreaded abode of evil spirits. In the tale of the "Buffalo King" weread of the chief doing a number of things to win the affection of therefractory bride--telling the others not to displease her, giving her"the seat of honor," and going so far as to fast himself, whereas inreal life, under such circumstances, he would have curtly clubbed thestolen bride into submission. In the tale of the "Red Lover" the girlis admired for her "slender form," whereas a real Indian values awoman in proportion to her weight and rotundity. Indians do not make"protestations of inviolable attachment," or "pledge vows of mutualfidelity," like the lovers of our fashionable novels. As Charles A.Leland remarks of the same race of Indians (85), "When an Indian seeksa wife, he or his mutual friend makes no great ado about it, bututters two words which tell the whole story." But there is no need ofciting 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 seventeenyears and received the title of _The Myth of Hiawatha and other OralLegends of the North American Indians_, he seemed to remember what hewrote in the preface of the first regarding these stories, "that inthe original there is no attempt at ornament," so he removed nearlyall of the romantic embroideries, like those
I have italicized andcommented on, and also relegated the majority of his ludicrouslysentimental interspersed poems to the appendix. In the preface to_Hiawatha_, he refers in connection with some of these verses to "thepoetic use of aboriginal ideas." Now, a man has a perfect right tomake such "poetic use" of "aboriginal ideas," but not when he has ledhis readers to believe that he is telling these stories "as nearly aspossible in their original forms of thought and expression." It isvery much as if Edward MacDowell had published the several movementsof his Indian Suite as being, not only in their ideas, but in their(modern European) harmonies and orchestration, a faithful transcriptof aboriginal Indian music. Schoolcraft's procedure, in other words,amounts to a sort of Ossianic mystification; and unfortunately he hashad not a few imitators, to the confusion of comparative psychologistsand students of the evolution of love.

  It is a great pity that Schoolcraft, with his valuable opportunitiesfor ethnological research, should not have added a critical attitudeand a habit of accuracy to his great industry. The historian Parkman,a model observer and scholar, described Schoolcraft's volumes on theIndian Tribes of the United States as

  "a singularly crude and illiterate production, stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page of a striking unfitness for historical or scientific inquiry."[199]

  REALITY VERSUS ROMANCE

  A few of the tales I have cited are not marred by superaddedsentimental adornments, but all of them are open to suspicion fromstill another point of view. They are invariably so proper and purethat they might be read to Sunday-school classes. Since one-half ofSchoolcraft's assistants in the compilation of this material werewomen, this might have been expected, and if the collection had beenissued as a Fairy Book it would have been a matter of course. But theywere issued as accurate "oral legends" of wild Indians, and from thepoint of view of the student of the history of love the most importantquestion to ask was, "Are Indian stories in reality as pure andrefined in tone as these specimens would lead us to suspect?" I willanswer that question by citing the words of one of the warmestchampions of the Indians, the eminent American anthropologist,Professor D.G. Brinton _(M.N.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, artfullysentimentalized at one end and expurgated at the other, are advancedas proofs that a savage Indian's love is just as refined as that of acivilized Christian! What Indian stories really are, the reader, if hecan stomach such things, may find out for himself by consulting themarvellously copious and almost phonographically accurate collectionof native tales which another of our most eminent anthropologists, Dr.Franz Boas, has printed.[200] And it must be borne in mind that thesestories are not the secret gossip of vulgar men alone by themselves,but are national tales with which children of both sexes becomefamiliar from their earliest years. As Colonel Dodge remarks (213): itis customary for as many as a dozen persons of both sexes to live inone room, hence there is an entire lack of privacy, either in word oract. "It is a wonder," says Powers (271), "that children grow up withany virtue whatever, for the conversation of their elders in theirpresence is often of the filthiest description." "One thing seems tome more than intolerable," wrote the French missionary Le Jeune in1632 (_Jesuit Relations_, 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 amongthem as a captive) wrote (140): "The squaws are generally veryimmodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young mento the blush."

  DECEPTIVE MODESTY

  The late Dr. Brinton shot wide off the mark when he wrote (_R. andP._, 59) that even among the lower races the sentiment of modesty "isnever absent." With some American Indians, as in the races of otherparts of the world, there is often not even the appearance of modesty.Many of the Southern Indians in North America and others in Centraland South America wear no clothes at all, and their actions are asunrestrained as those of animals.[201] The tribes that do wear clothessometimes present to shallow or biassed observers the appearance ofmodesty. To the Mandan women Catlin (I.,93, 96) attributes "excessive modesty of demeanor."

  "It was 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 theiranxiety to guard their property than about the character of the women.On that point we are enlightened by Maximilian Prinz zu Wied, whofound that these women were anything but prudes, having often two orthree lovers at a time, while infidelity was seldom punished (I.,531). According to Gatschet (183) Creek women also "were assigned abathing-place in the river currents at some distance below the men;"but that this, too, was a mere curiosity of pseudo-modesty becomesobvious when we read in Schoolcraft (V., 272) that among these Indians"the sexes indulge their propensities with each other promiscuously,unrestrained by law or custom, and without secrecy or shame." Powers,too, relates (55) that among the Californian Yurok "the sexes batheapart, 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. Hefully understood the philosophy of the matter, as the following shows(412):

  "Notwithstanding 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 offence is generally punished with speedy death. Brothers and sisters scrupulously avoid living alone 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."

  WERE INDIANS CORRUPTED BY WHITES?

  Having disposed of the modesty fallacy, let us examine once more, andfor the last time, the doctrine that savages owe their degradation tothe whites.

  In the admirable preface to his book on the Jesuit missionaries inCanada, Parkman writes concerni
ng the Hurons (XXXIV.):

  "Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724, says that the nation was corrupt in his time, but that this was a degeneracy from their ancient manners. La Potherie and Charlevoix 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 license. 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_, 322). 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. Brinton, writes(_M.N.W._, 159) that promiscuous licentiousness was frequentlyconnected with the religious ceremonies of the Indians:

  "Miscellaneous congress very often terminated their dances and festivals. Such orgies were of common occurrence among the Algonkins and Iroquois at a very early date, and are often mentioned in the _Jesuit Relations_; Venagas describes them as frequent among the tribes of Lower California, 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 Babylon, 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 theIndians of the Southwestern United States_,[202] A.F. Bandelier, theleading authority on the Indians of the Southwest, writes regardingthe 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 suffered a penalty. But there was the utmost liberty, even license, as toward girls. Intercourse was almost promiscuous with members of the tribe. Toward outsiders the strictest abstinence was observed, and this fact, which has long been overlooked or misunderstood, explains the prevailing 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 neverbeen visited by whites. Their observations regarding immoral practicesand the means used to obviate the consequences bear out the abovetestimony. M'Lean (II., 59, 120) also ridicules the idea that Indianswere corrupted by the whites. But the most conclusive proof ofaboriginal depravity is that supplied by the discoverers of America,including Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. Columbus on his fourth voyagetouched the mainland going down near Brazil. In Cariay, hewrites,[203] 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 that more could not be expected from public women."

  On another page (30) he writes: "The habits of these Caribbees arebrutal," adding that in their attacks on neighboring islands theycarry off as many women as they can, using them as concubines. "Thesewomen also say that the Caribbees use them with such cruelty as wouldscarcely be believed; and that they eat the children which they bearto them."

  Brazil was visited in 1501 by Amerigo Vespucci. The account he givesof the dissolute practices of the natives, who certainly had never seteye on a white man, is so plain spoken that it cannot be quoted herein full. "They are not very jealous," he says, "and are immoderatelylibidinous, and the women much more so than the men, so that fordecency I omit to tell you the ... They are so void of affection andcruel that if they be angry with their husbands they ... and they slayan infinite number of creatures by that means.... The greatest sign offriendship which they can show you is that they give you their wivesand their daughters" and feel "highly honored" if they are accepted."They eat all their enemies whom they kill or capture, as well femalesas males." "Their other barbarous customs are such that expression istoo weak for the reality."

  The ineradicable perverseness of some minds is amusingly illustratedby Southey, in his _History of Brazil_. After referring to AmerigoVespucci's statements regarding the lascivious practices of theaboriginals, he exclaims, in a footnote: "This is false! Man has neveryet been discovered in such a state of depravity!" What the navigatorswrote regarding the cannibalism and cruelty of these savages heaccepts as a matter of course; but to doubt their immaculate purity ishigh treason! The attitude of the sentimentalists in this matter isnot only silly and ridiculous, but positively pathological. As theirnumber is great, and seems to be growing (under the influence of suchwriters as Catlin, Helen Hunt Jackson, Brinton, Westermarck, etc.), itis necessary, in the interest of the truth, to paint the Indian as hereally was until contact with the whites (missionaries and others)improved him somewhat.[204]

  THE NOBLE RED MAN

  Beginning with the Californians, their utter lack of moral sense hasalready been described. They were no worse than the other Pacificcoast tribes in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska.George Gibbs, the leading authority on the Indians of Western Oregonand Washington, says regarding 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 legitimate source of profit.... Cohabitation of unmarried females among their own people brings no disgrace if unaccompanied 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 women," says Ross(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 Indians_" they became acquainted with on their perilouspioneer trips through the Western wilds, prostitution of females wasnot considered criminal or improper (439).

  Such revelations, illustrating not individual cases of depravity, buta whole people's attitude, show how utterly hopeless it is to expectrefined and pure love of these Indians. Gibbs did not give himself upto any illusions on this subject. "A strong _sensual_ attachment oftenundoubtedly 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 wanting 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 yearsamong the Indians (as we shall see at the end of this chapter) Gibbsclearly realized the difference between red love and whitelove--between sensual and sentimental attachments, and failed to findthe latter among the American savages.

  British Columbian capacity for sexual delicacy and refined love issufficiently indicated by the reference on a preceding page (556) tothe stories collected by Dr. Boas. Turning northeastward we findM'Lean, who spent twenty-five years among the Hudson's Bay natives,declaring of the Beaver Indians (Chippewayans) that "the unmarriedyouth, of both sexes, are generally under no restraint whatever," andthat "the lewdness of the Carrier [Taculli] Indians cannot possibly becarried to a greater excess." M'Lean, too, after observing thesenorthern Indians for a quarter of a century, came to the conclusionthat "the tender passion seems unknown to the savage breast."

  "The Hurons are lascivious," wrote Le Jeune (whom I have alreadyquoted), in 1632; and Parkman says (_J.N.A._, XXXIV.):

  "A practice also preva
iled of temporary or experimental 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."

  Regarding the Sioux, that shrewd observer, Burton, wrote (_C. of S._,116): "If the mother takes any care of her daughter's virtue, it isonly out of regard to its market value." The Sioux, or Dakotas, areindeed, sometimes lower than animals, for, as S.R. Riggs pointed out,in a government publication (_U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Soc._, Vol. IX.),"Girls are sometimes taken very young, before they are of marriageableage, which generally happens with a man who has a wife already." "Themarriageable age," he adds, "is from fourteen years old and upward."Even the Mandans, so highly lauded by Catlin, sometimes brutallydispose 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 appears to have been a very prevalent custom with the Indians of this country, before they became acquainted with the Europeans, to compliment strangers with their wives;"

  and "the Indian women in general are amorous, and before marriage notless esteemed for gratifying their passions."

  Of the New York Indians J. Buchanan wrote (II., 104):

  "that it is no offence for their married women to associate with another man, provided she acquaint her husband or some near relation therewith, but if not, it is sometimes punishable with death."

  Of the Comanches it is said (Schoolcraft, V., 683) that while "the menare grossly licentious, treating female captives in a most cruel andbarbarous manner," upon their women "they enforce rigid chastity;" butthis is, as usual, a mere question of masculine property, for on thenext page we read that they lend their wives; and Fossey (_Mexique_,462) says: "Les Comanches obligent le prisonnier blanc, dont ils ontadmire le valeur dans le combat, a s'unir a leurs femmes pourperpetuer sa race." Concerning the Kickapoo, Kansas, and Osage Indianswe are informed by Hunter (203), who lived among them, that

  "a female may become a parent out of wedlock without loss of reputation, or diminishing her chances for a subsequent matrimonial alliance, so that her paramour is of respectable standing."

  Maximilian Prinz zu Weid found that the Blackfeet, though theyhorribly mutilated wives for secret intrigues [violation of propertyright], offered these wives as well as their daughters for a bottle ofwhiskey. "Some very young girls are offered" (I., 531). "The Navajowomen 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 indiscriminate violence" (Bancroft, I., 514).

  Colonel R.I. Dodge writes of the Indians of the plains (204):

  "For an unmarried Indian 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 "Indian men who, animal-like, approach a female onlyto make love to her," and to whom the idea of continence is unknown(210). Among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes

  "no unmarried woman considers herself dressed to meet her beau at night, to go to a dance or other gathering, unless she has tied her lower limbs with a rope.... Custom has made this an almost perfect protection against the brutality of the men. Without it she would not be safe for an instant, and even with it, an unmarried girl is not safe if found alone away from the immediate protection of the lodge" (213).

  A brother does not protect his sister from insult, nor avenge outrage(220).

  "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 River Indians "barter and sell their women intoprostitution, with hardly an exception." (Bancroft, I., 514.) In his_Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, C.C. Jones says of the Creeks,Cherokees, Muscogulges, etc. (69):

  "Comparatively little virtue existed among the unmarried women. Their chances of marriage were not diminished, but rather augmented, by the fact that they had been great favorites, provided they had avoided conception during their years of general pleasure."

  The wife "was deterred, by fear of public punishment, from thecommission of indiscretions." "The unmarried women among the Natchezwere unusually unchaste," says McCulloh (165).

  This damning list might be continued for the Central and SouthAmerican Indians. We should find that the Mosquito Indians often didnot wait for puberty (Bancroft, I., 729); that, according to Martius,Oviedo, and Navarette,

  "in Cuba, Nicaragua,[205] 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 primae noctis_ was exercised by the priests" (Brinton, _M.N.W._, 155);

  that the Waraus give girls to medicine men in return for professionalservices (Brett, 320); that the Guaranis lend their wives anddaughters for a drink (Reich, 435); that among Brazilian tribes the_jus primae noctis_ is often enjoyed by the chief (_Journ. Roy. G.S._,II., 198); that in Guiana "chastity is not considered an indispensablevirtue among the unmarried women" (Dalton, I., 80); that thePatagonians 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.

  APPARENT EXCEPTIONS

  A critical student will not be able, I think, to find any exceptionsto this rule of Indian depravity among tribes untouched by missionaryinfluences. Westermarck, indeed, refers (65) with satisfaction toHearne's assertion (311) that the northern Indians he visitedcarefully guarded the young people. Had he consulted page 129 of thesame writer he would have seen that this does not indicate a regardfor chastity as a virtue, but is merely a result of their habit ofregarding women as property, to which Franklin, speaking of these sameIndians, refers (287); for as Hearne remarks in the place alluded to,"it is a very common custom among the men of this country to exchangea night's lodging with each other's wives." An equal lack of insightis shown by Westermarck, when he professes to find female chastityamong the Apaches. For this assertion he relies on Bancroft, who doesindeed say (I., 514) that "all authorities agree that the Apachewomen, both before and after marriage, are remarkably pure." Yet hehimself adds that the Apaches will lend their wives to eachother.[206] If the women are otherwise chaste, it is not from a regardfor purity, but from fear of their cruel husbands and masters. UnitedStates Boundary Commissioner, Bartlett, has enlightened us on thispoint. "The atrocities inflicted upon an Apache woman taken inadultery baffle all description," he writes, "and the females whomthey capture from their enemies are invariably doomed to the mostinfamous treatment." Thus they are like other Indians--the Comanches,for instance, concerning whom we read in Schoolcraft (V., 683) that"the men are grossly licentious, treating female captives in a mostcruel and barbarous manner; but they enforce rigid chastity upon theirwomen."

  Among the Modocs a wife who violated her husband's property rights inher "chastity," was disembowelled in public, as Bancroft informs us(I., 350). No wonder, that, as he adds, "adultery, being attended withso much danger, is comparatively rare, but among the unmarried, whohave nothing to fear, a gross licentiousness prevails."

  The Peruvian sun virgins are often supposed to indicate a regard forpurity; but in reality the temples in which these girls were rearedand guarded were nothing but nurseries for providing a choiceassortment of concubines for the licentious Incas and their friends.(Torquemada, IX., 16.)[207]

  "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 erroneously saidthat they valued purity; but Bandelier has collected facts from theold Spanish writers, in summing which up he says: "This almostestablishes promiscuity among the ancient Mexicans, as a preliminaryto formal marriage." Oddly enough, the crime of adultery with amarried woman was considered one against a cluster of kindred, and notagainst the husband; for if he caught the culprits _in flagrantedelictu_ and killed the wife, he lost his own life!

  Another source of error regarding exceptional virtue in an Indiantribe lies in the fact that in some few cases female captives werespared. This was due, however, not to a chivalrous regard for femalevirtue, but to superstition. James Adair relates of the Choktah (164)that even a certain chief noted for his cruelty

  "did not attempt the virtue of his female captives lest (as he told one of them) 'it should offend the Indian's god;' though at the same time his pleasures were heightened in proportion to the shrieks and groans from prisoners of both sexes while they were under his torture. Although the Choktah are libidinous, yet I have known them to take several female prisoners without offering the least violence to their virtue, till the time of purgation was expired; then some of them forced their captives, notwithstanding their pressing entreaties and tears."

  Parkman, too, was convinced (_Jes. in Can._, XXXIV.) that theremarkable forbearance observed by some tribes was the result ofsuperstition; and he adds: "To make the Indian a hero of romance ismere nonsense."

  INTIMIDATING CALIFORNIA SQUAWS

  Besides the atrocious punishments inflicted on women who forgot theirrole as private property, some of the Indians had other ways ofintimidating them, while reserving for themselves the right to do asthey pleased. Powers relates (156-61) that, among the CaliforniaIndians in general,

  "there is scarcely such an attribute known as virtue or chastity in either sex before marriage. Up to the time when they enter matrimony most of the young women are a kind of _femmes incomprises_, the common property of the tribe; and after they have once taken on themselves the marriage covenant, simple as it is, they are guarded with a Turkish jealousy, for even the married women are not such models as Mrs. Ford.... The one great burden of the harangues delivered by the venerable peace-chief on solemn occasions is the necessity and excellence of _female_ virtue; all the terrors of superstitious 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 hung suspended over the heads of those who are persistently lascivious. All the devices that savage cunning can invent, all the mysterious masquerading horrors of devil-raising, all the secret sorceries, the frightful apparitions and bugbears, which can be supposed effectual in terrifying women into virtue and preventing smock treason, are resorted to by the Pomo leaders."

  Among these Pomo Indians, and Californian tribes almost universally(406), there existed secret societies whose simple purpose was toconjure up infernal terrors and render each other assistance inkeeping their women in subjection. A special meeting-house wasconstructed for this purpose, in which these secret women-tamers helda grand devil-dance once in seven years, twenty or thirty men daubingthemselves with barbaric paint and putting vessels of pitch on theirheads. At night they rushed down from the mountains with these vesselsof pitch flaming on their heads, and making a terrible noise. Thesquaws fled for dear life; hundreds of them clung screaming andfainting to their valorous protectors. Then the chief took arattlesnake from which the fangs had been extracted, brandished itinto the faces of the shuddering women, and threatened them with direthings if they did not live lives of chastity, industry, andobedience, until some of the terrified squaws shrieked aloud and fellswooning upon the ground.

  GOING A-CALUMETING

  We are now in a position to appreciate the unintentional humor ofAshe's indignant outcry, cited at the beginning of this chapter,against those who calumniate these innocent people "by denying thatthere is anything but 'brutal passion' in their love-affairs." Headmits, indeed, that "no expressions of endearment or tenderness everescape the Indian sexes toward each other," as all observers haveremarked, but claims that this reserve is merely a compliance with apolitical and religious law which "stigmatizes youth wasting theirtime in female dalliance, except when covered with the veil of nightand beyond the prying eye of man." Were a man to speak to a squaw oflove in the daytime, he adds, she would run away from him or disdainhim. He then proceeds, with astounding naivete, to describe thenocturnal love-making of "these innocent people." The Indians leavetheir doors open day and night, and the lovers take advantage of thiswhen 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 forever 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 promiscuousimmorality carefully concealed! "On the subject of love," he sums upwith an injured air, "no persons have been less understood than theIndians." Yet this writer is cited seriously as a witness byWestermarck and others!

  In view of the foregoing facts every candid reader must admit that toan Indian an expression like "Love hath weaned my heart from lowdesires," or Werther's "She is sacred to me; all desire is silent inher presence," would be as incomprehensible as Hegel's metaphysics;that, in other words, mental purity, one of the most essential andcharacteristic ingredients of romantic love, is always absent in theIndian's infatuation. The late Professor Brinton tried to come to therescue by declaring (_E.A._, 297) 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 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 thatamong nations, as among individuals, intellectual culture alone doesnot insure a capacity for true love, because that also impliesemotional and esthetic culture. Now in our civilized communities thereare all sorts of individuals, many coarse, a few refined, while somecivilized races, too, are more refined than others. To prove his pointDr. Brinton would have had to show that among the Indians, too, thereare tribes and individuals who are morally and esthetically refined;and this he failed to do; wherefore his argument is futile. Diligentand patient search has not revealed to me a single exception to therule of depravity above described, though I admit the possibility thatamong the Indians who have been for generations under missionarycontrol such exceptions might be found. But we are here consideringthe wild Indian and not the missionary's garden plant.

  SQUAWS AND PERSONAL BEAUTY

  An excellent test of the Indian's capacity for refined amorous feelingmay be found in his attitude toward personal beauty. Does he admirereal beauty, and does it decide his choice of a mate? That there aregood-looking girls among some Indian tribes cannot be denied, thoughthey are exceptional. Among the thousands of squaws I have seen on thePacific Slope, from Mexico to Alaska, I can recall only one whom Icould ca
ll really beautiful. She was a pupil at a Sitka Indian school,spoke English well, and I suspect had some white blood in her. JoaquinMiller, who married a Modoc girl and is given to romancing andidealizing, relates (227) how "the brown-eyed girls danced, gay andbeautiful, half-nude, in their rich black hair and flowing robes."Herbert Walsh,[208] speaking of the girls at a Navajo Indian school,writes that

  "among them was one little girl of striking beauty, with fine, dark eyes, regularly and delicately modelled features, and a most winning expression. Nothing could be more attractive than the unconscious grace of this child of nature."

  I can find no indication, however, that the Indians ever admire suchexceptional beauty, and plenty of evidence that what they admire isnot beautiful. "These Indians are far from being connoisseurs inbeauty," wrote Mrs. Eastman (105) of the Dakotas. Dobrizhoffer says ofthe Abipones (II., 139) what we read in Schoolcraft concerning theCreeks: "Beauty is of no estimation in either sex;" and I have alsopreviously quoted Belden's testimony (302), that the men select thesquaws not for their personal beauty but "their strength and abilityto work;" to which he should have added, their weight; for bulk is thesavage's synonym for beauty. Burton (_C.S._, 128) admired the prettydoll-like faces of the Sioux girls, but only up to the age of six."When full grown the figure becomes dumpy and _trapu_;" and that iswhat attracts the Indian. The examples given in the chapter onPersonal Beauty of the Indians' indifference to geological layers ofdirt on their faces and bodies would alone prove beyond allpossibility of dispute that they can have no esthetic appreciation ofpersonal charms. The very highest type of Indian beauty is thatdescribed by Powers in the case of a California girl

  "just gliding out of the uncomfortable obesity of youth, her complexion a soft, creamy hazel, her wide eyes dreamy and idle ... a not unattractive type of vacuous, facile, and voluptuous beauty"

  --a beauty, I need not add, which may attract, but would not inspirelove of the sentimental kind, even if the Indian were capable of it.

  ARE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS GALLANT?

  Having failed to find mental purity and admiration of personal beautyin the Indian's love-affairs, let us now see how he stands in regardto the altruistic impulses which differentiate love from self-love. DoIndians behave gallantly toward their women? Do they habituallysacrifice their comfort and, in case of need, their lives for theirwives?

  Dr. Brinton declares (_Am. R._, 48) that "the position of women in thesocial scheme of the American tribes has often been portrayed indarker colors than the truth admits." Another eminent Americananthropologist, Horatio Hale, wrote[209] that women among the Indiansand other savages are not treated with harshness or regarded asinferiors except under special circumstances. "It is entirely aquestion of physical comfort, and mainly of the abundance or lack offood," he maintains. For instance, among the sub-arctic Tinneh, womenare "slaves," while among the Tinneh (Navajos) of sunny Arizona theyare "queens." Heckewelder declares (_T.A.P.S._, 142) that the laborsof the squaws "are no more than their fair share, under everyconsideration and due allowance, of the hardships attendant on savagelife." This benevolent and oft-cited old writer shows indeed such aneager desire to whitewash the Indian warrior that an ignorant readerof his book might find some difficulty in restraining his indignationat the horrid, lazy squaws for not also relieving the poor,unprotected men of the only two duties which they have retained forthemselves--murdering men or animals. But the most "fearless" championof the noble red man is a woman--Rose Yawger--who writes (in _TheIndian and the Pioneer_, 42) that "the position of the Indian woman inher nation was not greatly inferior to that enjoyed by the Americanwoman of to-day." ... "They were treated with great respect." Let usconfront these assertions with facts.

  Beginning with the Pacific Coast, we are told by Powers (405) that, onthe whole, California Indians did not make such slaves of women as theIndians of the Atlantic side of the continent. This, however, ismerely comparative, and does not mean that they treat them kindly,for, as he himself says (23), "while on a journey the man lays far thegreatest burdens on his wife." On another page (406) he remarks thatwhile a California boy is not "taught to pierce his mother's fleshwith an arrow to show him his superiority over her, as among theApaches and Iroquois," he nevertheless afterward "slays his wife ormother-in-law, if angry, with very little compunction." Colonel McKee,in describing an expedition among California Indians (Schoolcraft,III., 127), writes:

  "One of the whites here, in breaking in his squaw to her household duties, had occasion to beat her several times. She complained of this to her tribe and they informed him that he must not do so; if he was dissatisfied, _let him kill her and take another_!" "The men," he adds, "allow themselves the privilege of shooting any woman they are tired of."

  The Pomo Indians make it a special point to slaughter the women oftheir enemies during or after battle. "They do this because, as theyargue with the greatest sincerity, one woman destroyed is tantamountto five men killed" (Bancroft, I., 160), for without women the tribecannot multiply. A Modoc explained why he needed several wives--one totake care of his house, a second to hunt for him, a third to dig roots(259). Bancroft cites half a dozen authorities for the assertion thatamong the Indians of Northern California "boys are disgraced by work"and "women work while men gamble or sleep" (I., 351). John Muir, inhis recent work on _The Mountains of California_ (80), says it istruly astonishing to see what immense loads the haggard old Pah Utesquaws make out to carry bare-footed over the rugged passes. The men,who are always with them, stride on erect and unburdened, but whenthey come to a difficult place they "kindly" pile stepping-stones fortheir patient pack-animal wives, "just as they would prepare the wayfor their ponies."

  Among some of the Klamath and other California tribes certain womenare allowed to attain the rank of priestesses. To be "supposed to havecommunication with the devil" and be alone "potent over cases ofwitchcraft and witch poisoning" (67) is, however, an honor which womenelsewhere would hardly covet. Among the Yurok, Powers relates (56),when a young man cannot afford to pay the amount of shell-moneywithout which marriage is not considered legal, he is sometimesallowed to pay half the sum and become what is termed "half-married.""Instead of bringing her to his cabin and making her his slave, hegoes to live in her cabin and becomes her slave." This, however,"occurs only in case of soft uxorious fellows." Sometimes, too, asquaw will take the law in her own hands, as in a case mentioned bythe same writer (199). A Wappo Indian abandoned his wife and went downthe river to a ranch where he took another woman. But the lawfulspouse soon discovered his whereabouts, followed him up, confrontedhim before his paramour, upbraided him fiercely, and then seized himby the hair and led him away triumphantly to her bed and basket. It isto check such unseemly "new-womanish" tendencies in their squaws thatthe Californians resorted to the bugaboo performances already referredto. The Central Californian women, says Bancroft (391), are more aptthan the others to rebel against the tyranny of their masters; but themen usually manage to keep them in subjection. The Tatu and Pomotribes intimidate them in this way:

  "A man is stripped naked, painted with red and black stripes, and then at night takes a sprig of poison oak, dips it in water, and sprinkles it on the squaws, who, from its effects on their skins, are convinced of the man's satanic power, so that his object is attained." (Powers, 141.)

  The pages of Bancroft contain many references besides those alreadyquoted, showing how far the Indians of California were from treatingtheir women with chivalrous, self-sacrificing devotion. "The principallabor falls to the lot of the women" (I., 351). Among theGallinomeros,

  "_as usual_, the women are treated with great contempt by the men, and forced to do all the hard and menial work; they are not even allowed to sit at the same fire or eat at the same repast with their lords" (390).

  Among the Shoshones "the weaker sex _of course_ do the hardest labor"(437), etc. With the Hupa a girl will bring in the market
$15 to$50--"about half the valuation of a man." (Powers, 85.)

  Nor do matters mend if we proceed northward on the Pacific coast.Thus, Gibbs says (198) of the Indians of Western Oregon andWashington, "the condition of the woman is that of slavery under anycircumstances;" and similar testimony might be adduced regarding theIndians of British Columbia and Alaska.

  Among the eastern neighbors of the Californians there is one Indianpeople--the Navajos of Arizona and New Mexico--that calls for specialattention, as its women, according to Horatio Hale, are not slaves but"queens." The Navajos have lived for centuries in a rich and fertilecountry; their name is said to mean "large cornfields" and theSpaniards found, about the middle of the sixteenth century, that theypractised irrigation. A more recent writer, E.A. Graves,[210] saysthat the Navajos "possess more wealth than all the wild tribes in NewMexico combined. They are rich in horses, mules, asses, goats, andsheep." Bancroft cites evidence (I., 513) that the women were theowners of the sheep; that they were allowed to take their meals withthe men, and admitted to their councils; and that they were relievedof the drudgery of menial work. Major E. Backus also noted(Schoolcraft, IV., 214) that Navajo women "are treated more kindlythan the squaws of the northern tribes, and perform far less oflaborious work than the Sioux or Chippewa women." But when we examinethe facts more closely we find that this comparative "emancipation" ofthe Navajo women was not a chivalrous concession on the part of themen, but proceeded simply from the lack of occasion for the exerciseof their selfish propensities. No one would be so foolish as to saythat even the most savage Indian would put his squaw into thetreadmill merely for the fun of seeing her toil. He makes a drudge ofher in order to save himself the trouble of working. Now the Navajoswere rich enough to employ slaves; their labor, says Major Backus, was"mostly performed by the poor dependants, both male and female." Hencethere was no reason for making slaves of their wives. Backus givesanother reason why these women were treated more kindly than othersquaws. After marriage they became free, for sufficient cause, toleave their husbands, who were thus put on their good behavior. Beforemarriage, however, they had no free choice, but were the property oftheir fathers. "The consent of the father is absolute, and the one sopurchased assents or is taken away by force."[211]

  A total disregard of these women's feelings was also shown in the"very extensive prevalence of polygamy," and in the custom that thewife last chosen was always mistress of her predecessors. (Bancroft,I., 512.) But the utter incapacity of Navajo men for sympathetic,gallant, chivalrous sentiment is most glaringly revealed by thebarbarous treatment of their female captives, who, as before stated,were often shot or delivered up for indiscriminate violence. Wheresuch a custom prevails as a national institution it would be uselessto search for refined feeling toward any woman. Indeed, the Navajowomen themselves rendered the growth of refined sexual feelingimpossible by their conduct. They were notorious, even among Indians,for their immodesty and lewd conduct, and were consequently incapableof either feeling or inspiring any but the coarsest sensual passion.They were not queens, as the astonishing Hale would have it, but theycertainly were queans.

  Concerning other Indians of the Southwest--Yumas, Mojaves, Pueblos,etc.--M.A. Dorchester writes:[212]

  "The native Indian is naturally polite, but until touched by civilization, it never occurred to him to be polite to his wife." "If there is one drawback to Indian civilization more difficult to overcome than any other, it is to convince the Indian that he ought not to put the hardest work upon the Indian women."

  The ferocious Apaches make slaves of their women. (Bancroft, I., 512.)Among the Comanches "the women do all the menial work." The husbandhas the pleasant excitement of killing the game, while the women dothe hard work even here: "they butcher and transport the meat, dressthe skins, etc." "The females are abused and often beatenunmercifully." (Schoolcraft, I., 236, V., 684.) The Moquis squaws wereexempt from field labor not from chivalrous feelings but because themen feared amorous intrigues. (Waitz, IV., 209.) A Snake, Lewis andClarke found (308),

  "would consider himself degraded by being compelled to walk any distance; and were he so poor as to possess only two horses, he would ride the best of them, and leave the other for his wives and children and their baggage; and if he has too many wives or too much baggage for the horse, the wives have no alternative but to follow him on foot."

  Turning to the great Dakota or Sioux stock, we run against one of themost naive of the sentimentalists, Catlin, who perpetrated severalbooks on the Indians and made many "fearless" assertions about the redmen in general and the Mandans in particular. G.E. Ellis, in his book,_The Red Man and the While Man_ (101), justly observes of Catlin that"he writes more like a child than a well-balanced man," and Mitchell(in Schoolcraft, III., 254) declares that much of what Catlin wroteregarding the Mandans existed "entirely in the fertile imagination ofthat gentleman," Yet this does not prevent eminent anthropologistslike Westermarck (359) from soberly quoting Catlin's declaration that"it would be untrue and doing injustice to the Indians, to say thatthey were in the least behind us in conjugal, in filial, and inpaternal affection" (_L.N.N.A.I._, I., 121). There is only one way ofgauging a man's affection, and that is by his actions. Now how,according to Catlin himself, does an Indian act toward his wife? Evenamong the Mandans, so superior to the other Indians he visited, hefound that the women, however attractive or hungry they might be,

  "are not allowed to sit in the same group with the men while at their meals. So far as I have yet travelled in the Indian country I have never seen an Indian woman eating with her husband. Men form the first group at the banquet, and _women and children and dogs_ all come together at the next."

  Men first, women and dogs next--yet they are "not in the least behindus in conjugal affection!" With his childish disregard of logic andlack of a sense of humor Catlin goes on to tell us that Mandan womenlose their beauty soon because of their early marriages and "theslavish life they lead." In many cases, he adds, the inclinations ofthe girl are not considered in marriage, _the father selling her tothe highest bidder_.

  Mandan conjugal affection, "just like ours," is further manifested bythe custom, previously referred to, which obliges mourning women tocrop off all their hair, while of a man's locks, which "are of muchgreater importance," only one or two can be spared. (Catlin, _l.c._,I., 95, 119, 121; II., 123.) An amusing illustration of the Mandan'ssupercilious contempt for women, also by Catlin, will be givenlater.[213]

  The Sioux tribes in general have always been notorious for the brutaltreatment of their women. Mrs. Eastman, who wrote a book on theircustoms, once received an offer of marriage from a chief who had ahabit of expending all his surplus bad temper upon his wives. He hadthree of them, but was willing to give them all up if she would livewith him. She refused, as she "did not fancy having her head splitopen every few days with a stick of wood." G.P. Belden, who also knewthe Sioux thoroughly, having lived among them twelve years, wrote(270, 303-5) that "the days of her childhood are the only happy orpleasant days the Indian girl ever knows." "From the day of hermarriage [in which she has no choice] until her death she leads a mostwretched life." The women are "the servants of servants." "On a winterday the Sioux mother is often obliged to travel eight or ten miles andcarry her lodge, camp-kettle, ax, child, and several small dogs on herback and head." She has to build the camp, cook, take care of thechildren, and even of the pony on which her lazy and selfish husbandhas ridden while she tramped along with all those burdens. "So severeis their treatment of women, a happy female face is hardly ever seenin the Sioux nation." Many become callous, and take a beating much asa horse or ox does. "Suicide is very common among Indian women, and,considering the treatment they receive, it is a wonder there is notmore of it."[214]

  Burton attests (_C.S._, 125, 130, 60) that "the squaw is a mere slave,living a life of utter drudgery." The husbands "care little for theirwives." "The drudgery of the tent and field renders the s
quaw cold andunimpassioned." "The son is taught to make his mother toil for him.""One can hardly expect a smiling countenance from the human bipedtrudging ten or twenty miles under a load fit for a mule." "Dacotahfemales," writes Neill (82, 85),

  "deserve the sympathy of every tender heart. From early childhood they lead worse than a dog's life. Uncultivated and treated like brutes, they are prone to suicide, and, when desperate, they act more like infuriated beasts than creatures of reason."

  Of the Crow branch of the Dakotas, Catlin wrote:[215] "They are,_like all other Indian women, the slaves of their husbands_ ... andnot allowed to join in their religious rites and ceremonies, nor inthe dance or other amusements." All of which is delightfullyconsistent with this writer's assertion that the Indians are "not inthe least behind us in conjugal affection."[216]

  In his _Travels Through the Northwest Regions of the United States_Schoolcraft thus sums up (231) his observations:

  "Of the state of female society among the Northern Indians I shall say little, because on a review of it I find very little to admire, either in their collective morality, or personal endowments.... Doomed to drudgery and hardships from infancy ... without either mental resources or personal beauty--what can be said in favor of the Indian women?"

  A French author, Eugene A. Vail, writes an interesting summary(207-14) of the realistic descriptions given by older writers of thebrutal treatment to which the women of the Northern Indians weresubjected. He refers, among other things, to the efforts made byGovernor Cass, of Michigan, to induce the Indians to treat their womenmore humanely; but all persuasion was in vain, and the governorfinally had to resort to punishment. He also refers to the selfishingenuity with which the men succeeded in persuading the foolishsquaws that it would be a disgrace for their lords and masters to doany work, and that polygamy was a desirable thing. The men took asmany wives as they pleased, and if one of them remonstrated against anew rival, she received a sound thrashing.

  In Franklin's _Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea_ we are informed(160) that the women are obliged to drag the heavily laden sledges:

  "Nothing can more shock the feelings of a person accustomed to civilized life than to witness the state of their degradation. When a party is on a march the women have to drag the tent, the meat, and whatever the hunter possesses, whilst he only carries his gun and medicine case."

  When the men have killed any large beast, says Hearne (90), the womenare always sent to carry it to the tent. They have to prepare and cookit,

  "and when it is done the wives and daughters of the greatest captains in the country are never served till all the males, even those who are in the capacity of servants, have eaten what they think proper."

  Of the Chippewas, Keating says (II., 153), that "frequently ... theirbrutal conduct to their wives produces abortions."

  A friend of the Blackfoot Indians, G.B. Grinnell, relates (184, 216)that, while boys play and do as they please, a girl's duties begin atan early age, and she soon does all a woman's "and so menial" work.Their fathers select husbands for them and, if they disobey, have aright to beat or even kill them. "As a consequence of this severity,suicide was quite common among the Blackfoot girls."

  A passage in William Wood's _New England Prospect_, published in1634,[217] throws light on the aboriginal condition of Indian women inthat region. Wood refers to "the customarie churlishnesse and salvageinhumanitie" of the men. The Indian women, he says, are

  "more loving, pittiful and modest, milde, provident, and laborious than their lazie husbands.... Since the _English_ arrivall comparison hath made them miserable, for seeing the kind usage of the _English_ to their wives, they doe as much condemne their husbands for unkindnesse and commend the _English_ for love, as their husbands, commending themselves for their wit in keeping their wives industrious, doe condemn the _English_ for their folly in spoiling good working creatures."

  Concerning the intelligent, widely scattered, and numerous Iroquois,Morgan, who knew them more intimately than anyone else, wrote (322),that "the Indian regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, andthe servant of man, and, from nature and habit, she actuallyconsidered herself to be so." "Adultery was punished by whipping; butthe punishment was inflicted on the woman alone, who was supposed tobe the only offender" (331). "Female life among the Hurons had nobright side," wrote Parkman (_J.C._, XXXIII.). After marriage,

  "the Huron woman from a wanton became a drudge ... in the words of Champlain, 'their women were their mules.' The natural result followed. In every Huron town were shrivelled hags, hideous and despised, who, in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the men."

  The _Jesuit Relations_ contain many references to the mercilesstreatment of their women by the Canadian Indians. "These poor womenare real pack-mules, enduring all hardships." "In the winter, whenthey break camp, the women drag the heaviest loads over the snow; inshort, the men seem to have as their share only hunting, war, andtrading" (IV., 205). "The women here are mistresses and servants"(Hurons, XV.). In volume III. of the _Jesuit Relations_ (101), Biardwrites under date of 1616:

  "These poor creatures endure all the misfortunes and hardships of life; they prepare and erect the houses, or cabins, furnishing them with fire, wood, and water; prepare the food, preserve the meat and other provisions, that is, dry them in the smoke to preserve them; go to bring the game from the place where it has been killed; sew and repair the canoes, mend and stitch the skins, curry them and make clothes and shoes of them for the whole family; they go fishing and do the rowing; in short, undertake all the work except that alone of the grand chase, besides having the care and so weakening nourishment of the children....

  "Now these women, although they have so much trouble, as I have said, yet are not cherished any more for it. The husbands beat them unmercifully, and often for a very slight cause. One day a certain Frenchman undertook to rebuke a savage for this; the savage answered, angrily: 'How now, have you nothing to do but to see into my house, every time I strike my dog?'"

  Surely Dr. Brinton erred grievously when he wrote, in his otherwiseadmirable book, _The American Race_ (49), that the fatigues of theIndian women were scarce greater than those of their husbands, northeir life more onerous than that of the peasant women of Europeto-day. Peasants in Europe work quite as hard as their wives, whereasthe Indian--except during the delightful hunting period, or inwar-time, which, though frequent, was after all merely episodic--didnothing at all, and considered labor a disgrace to a man, fit only forwomen. The difference between the European peasant and the Americanred man can be inferred by anyone from what observers reported of theCreek Indians of our Southern States (Schoolcraft, V., 272-77):

  "The summer season, with the men, is devoted to war, or their domestic amusements of riding, horse-hunting, ball-plays, and dancing, and by the women to their customary hard labor."

  "The women perform all the labor, both in the house and field, and are, in fact, but slaves to the men, without any will of their own, except in the management of the children."

  "A stranger going into the country must feel distressed when he sees naked women bringing in huge burdens of wood on their shoulders, or, bent under the scorching sun, at hard labor in the field, while the indolent, robust young men are riding about, or stretched at ease on some scaffold, amusing themselves with a pipe or a whistle."

  The excesses to which bias and unintelligent philanthropy can lead aman are lamentably illustrated in the writings of the Moravianmissionary, Heckewelder, regarding the Delaware Indians.[218] Heargues that

  "as women are not obliged to live with their husbands any longer than suits their pleasure or convenience, it cannot be supposed that they would submit to be loaded with unjust or
unequal burdens" (!) "Were a man to take upon himself a part of his wife's duty, in addition to his own [hunting (!), for the Delawares were then a peaceful tribe], he must necessarily sink under the load, and of course his family must suffer with him."

  The heartless sophistry of this reasoning--heartless because of itspitiless disregard of the burdens and sufferings of the poor women--isexposed in part by his own admissions regarding the selfish actions ofthe men. He does not deny that after the women have harvested theircorn or maple sugar the men arrogate the right to dispose of it asthey please. He relates that in case of a domestic quarrel the husbandshoulders his gun and goes away a week or so. The neighbors naturallysay that his wife is quarrelsome. All the odium consequently falls onher, and when he gets back she is only too willing to drudge for himmore than ever. Heckewelder naively gives the Indian's recipe forgetting a useful wife:

  "Indian, when he see industrious squaw, which he like, he go to _him_ [her], place his two forefingers close aside each other, make two look like one--see _him_ [her] smile--which is all _he_ [she] say, _yes!_ so he take _him_ [her] home. Squaw know too well what Indian do if _he_ [she] cross! Throw _him_ [her] away and take another! Squaw love to eat meat! no husband! no meat! Squaw do everything to please husband! he do same to please squaw [??]! live happy."

  When that Indian said "he do the same to please the squaw," he musthave chuckled at his own sarcasm. Heckewelder does, indeed, mention afew instances of kindness to a wife _(e.g._, going a great distance toget some berries which she, in a pregnant state, eagerly desired;) butthese were obviously exceptional, as I have found nothing like them inother records of Indian life. It must be remembered that, as Rooseveltremarks (97) these Indians, under the influence of the Moravianmissionaries, had been

  "transformed in one generation from a restless, idle, blood-thirsty people of hunters arid fishers into an orderly, thrifty, industrious folk; believing with all their hearts the Christian religion."

  It was impossible, however, to drive out the devil entirely, as thefacts cited show, and as we may infer from what, according to Loskiel,was true a century ago of the Delawares as well as the Iroquois:"Often it happens that an Indian deserts his wife because she has achild to suckle, and marries another whom he presently abandons forthe same reason." In this respect, however, the women are not muchbetter than the men, for, as he adds, they often desert a husband whohas no more presents to give them, and go with another who has. TrulyCatlin was right when he said that the Indians (and these were thebest of them) were "not in the least behind us in conjugal affection!"

  Thus do even the apparent exceptions to Indian maltreatment ofwomen--which exceptions are constantly cited as illustrations of therule--melt away like mists when sunlight is brought to bear upon them.One more of these exceptions, of which sly sentimentalists have madeimproper use, must be referred to here. It is maintained, on theauthority of Charlevoix, that the women of the Natchez Indiansasserted their rights and privileges even above those of the men, forthey were allowed to put unfaithful husbands to death while theythemselves could have as many paramours as they pleased. Moreover, thehusband had to stand in a respectful posture in the presence of hiswife, was not allowed to eat with her, and had to salute her in thesame way as the servants. This, truly, would be a remarkablesociological fact--if it were a fact. But upon referring to the pagesof Charlevoix (264) we find that these statements, while perfectlytrue, do not refer to the Natchez women in general, but only to theprincesses, or "female suns." These were allowed to marry none butprivate men; but by way of compensation they had the right to discardtheir husbands whenever they pleased and take another. The other womenhad no more privileges than the squaws of other tribes; whenever achief saw a girl he liked he simply informed the relatives of the factand enrolled her among the number of his wives. Charlevoix adds thathe knew of no nation in America where the women were more unchaste.The privileges conferred on the princesses thus appear like a coarse,topsy-turvy joke, while affording one more instance of the lowestdegradation of woman.

  Summing up the most ancient and trustworthy evidence regarding Mexico,Bandelier writes (627):

  "The position of women was so inferior, they were regarded as so far beneath the male, that the most degrading epithet that could be applied to any Mexican, aside from calling him a dog, was that of woman."

  If a woman presumed to don a man's dress her death alone could wipeout the dishonor.

  SOUTH AMERICAN GALLANTRY

  So much for the Indians of North America. The tribes of the southernhalf of the continent would furnish quite as long and harrowing a taleof masculine selfishness and brutality, but considerations of spacecompel us to content ourselves with a few striking samples.

  In the northern regions of South America historians say that "when atribe was preparing poison in time of war, its efficacy was tried uponthe old women of the tribe."[219]

  "When we saw the Chaymas return in the evening from their gardens,"writes Humboldt (I., 309),

  "the man carried nothing but the knife or hatchet (machete) with which he clears his way among the underwood; whilst the woman, bending under a great load of plantains, carried one child in her arms, and, sometimes, two other children placed upon the load."

  Schomburgk (II., 428) found that Caribbean women generally bore marksof the brutal treatment to which they were subjected by the men. Brettnoted (27, 31) that among the Guiana tribes women had to do all thework in field and home as well as on the march, while the men madebaskets, or lay indolently in hammocks until necessity compelled themto go hunting or fishing. The men had succeeded so thoroughly increating a sentiment among the women that it was their duty to do allthe work, that when Brett once induced an Indian to take a heavy bunchof plantains off his wife's head and carry it himself, the wife (slaveto the backbone) seemed hurt at what she deemed a degradation of herhusband. One of the most advanced races of South America were theAbipones of Paraguay. While addicted to infanticide they, contrary tothe rule, were more apt to spare the female children; but their reasonfor this was purely commercial. A son, they said, would be obliged topurchase a wife, whereas daughters may be sold to a bridegroom(Dobrizhoffer, II., 97). The same missionary relates (214) that boysare laughed at, praised and rewarded for throwing bones, horns, etc.,at their mothers.

  "If their wives displease them, it is sufficient; they are ordered to decamp.... Should the husband cast his eyes upon any handsome woman the old wife must move merely on this account, her fading form and advancing age being her only accusers, though she may be universally commended for conjugal fidelity, regularity of conduct, diligent obedience, and the children she has borne."

  In Chili, among the Mapuches (Araucanians) the females, says Smith(214), "do all the labor, from ploughing and cooking to the saddlingand unsaddling of a horse; for the 'lord and master' does nothing buteat, sleep, and ride about." Of the Peruvian Indians the Jesuit PaterW. Bayer (cited Reich, 444) wrote about the middle of the eighteenthcentury that wives are treated as slaves and are so accustomed tobeing regularly whipped that when the husband leaves them alone theyfear he is paying attention to another woman and beg him to resume hisbeating. In Brazil, we are informed by Spix and Martins (I., 381),

  "the women in general are slaves of the men, being compelled when on the march to carry everything needed, like beasts of burden; nay, they are even obliged to bring home from the forest the game killed by the men."

  Tschndi (_R.d.S.A._, 284, 274) saw the marks of violence on many ofthe Botocudo women, and he says the men reserved for themselves thebeautiful plumes of birds, leaving to the women such ornaments aspig's claws, berries, and monkey's teeth. A peculiar refinement ofselfishness is alluded to by Burton (_H.B._, II., 49):

  "The Brazilian natives, to warm their naked bodies, even in the wigwam, and to defend themselves against wild beasts, use
d to make their women keep wood burning all night."

  Of the Patagonians Falkner says (125) that the women "are obligedto submit to every species of drudgery." He gives a long list of theirduties (including even hunting) and adds:

  "No excuse of sickness, or being big with child, will relieve them from their appointed labor; and so rigidly are they obliged to perform their duty, that their husbands cannot help them on any occasion, or in the greatest distress, without incurring the highest ignominy."

  Even the wives of the chiefs were obliged to drudge unless they hadslaves. At their marriages there is little ceremony, the bride beingsimply handed over to the man as his property. The Fuegians, accordingto Fitzroy, when reduced to a state of famine, became cannibals,eating their old women first, before they kill their dogs. A boy beingasked why they did this, answered: "Doggie catch otters, old womenno." (Darwin, _V B._, 214.)

  Thus, from the extreme north to the extreme south of the Americancontinent we find the "noble red man" consistent in at least onething--his maltreatment of women. How, in the face of these facts,which might be multiplied indefinitely, a specialist like Horatio Halecould write that there was among the Indians "complete equality of thesexes in social estimation and influence," and that

  "casual observers have been misled by the absence of those artificial expressions of courtesy which have descended to us from the time of chivalry, and which, however gracious and pleasing to witness, are, after all, merely signs of condescension and protection from the strong to the weak"[220]

  --surpasses all understanding. It is a shameful perversion of thetruth, as all the intelligent and unbiassed evidence of observers fromthe earliest time proves.

  HOW INDIANS ADORE SQUAWS

  Not content with maltreating their squaws, the Indians literally addinsult to injury by the low estimation in which they hold them. A fewsample illustrations must suffice to show how far that adoration whicha modern lover feels for women and for his sweetheart in particular isbeyond their mental horizon.

  "The Indians," says Hunter (250), "regarding themselves as the lordsof the earth, look down upon the squaws as an inferior order ofbeings," created to rear families and do all the drudgery; "and thesquaws, accustomed to such usage, cheerfully acquiesce in it as aduty." The squaw is not esteemed for her own sake, but "in proportionto the number of children she raises, particularly if they are males,and prove brave warriors." Franklin says (287) that the Copper Indians"hold women in the same low estimation as the Chippewayans do, lookingupon them as a kind of property which the stronger may take from theweaker." He also speaks (157) "of the office of nurse, so degrading inthe eyes of a Chippewayan, as partaking of the duties of a woman.""The manner of the Indian boy toward his mother," writes Willoughby(274), "is almost uniformly disrespectful;" while the adults considerit a disgrace to do a woman's work--that is, practically any work atall; for hunting is not regarded as work, but is indulged in for thesport and excitement. In the preface to Mrs. Eastman's book on theDakotas we read:

  "The peculiar sorrows of the Sioux woman commence at her birth. Even as a child she is despised, in comparison with her brother beside her, who is one day to be a great warrior."

  "Almost everything that a man owns is sacred," says Neill (86), "butnothing that the woman possesses is so esteemed." The most insultingepithets that can be bestowed on a Sioux are coward, dog, woman. Amongthe Creeks, "old woman" is the greatest term of reproach which can beused to those not distinguished by war names. You may call an Indian aliar without arousing his anger, but to call him a woman is to bringon a quarrel at once. (Schoolcraft, V., 280.) If the Natchez have aprisoner who winces under torture he is turned over to the women asbeing unworthy to die by the hands of men. (Charlevoix, 207.) In manycases boys are deliberately taught to despise their mothers as theirinferiors. Blackfeet men mourn for the loss of a man by scarifyingtheir legs; but if the deceased is only a woman, this is never done.(Grinnell, 194.) Among all the tribes the men look on manual work as adegradation, fit only for women. The Abipones think it beneath a manto take any part in female quarrels, and this too is a general trait.(Dobrizhoffer, II., 155.)[221] Mrs. Eastman relates (XVII.) that

  "among the Dakotas the men think it undignified for them to steal, so they send their wives thus unlawfully to procure what they want--and woe be to them if they are found out."

  Horse-stealing alone is considered worthy of superior man. But themost eloquent testimony to the Indian's utter contempt for woman iscontributed in an unguarded moment by his most ardent champion. Catlinrelates (_N.A.I._, I., 226) how he at one time undertook to paint theportraits of the chiefs and such of the warriors as the chiefs deemedworthy of such an honor. All was well until, after doing the men, heproposed also to paint the pictures of some of the squaws:

  "I at once got myself into a serious perplexity, being heartily laughed at by the whole tribe, both by men and by women, for my exceeding and (to them) unaccountable condescension in seriously proposing to paint a woman, conferring on her the same honor that I had done the chiefs and braves. Those whom I had honored were laughed at by the hundreds of the jealous, who had been decided unworthy the distinction, and were now amusing themselves with the _very enviable honor_ which the _great white medicine man_ had conferred _especially_ on them, and was now to confer equally upon the _squaws!_"

  CHOOSING A HUSBAND

  It might be inferred _a priori_ that savages who despise and abusetheir women as the Indians do would not allow girls to choose theirown husbands except in cases where no selfish reason existed to forcethem to marry the choice of their parents. This inference is borne outby the facts. Westermarck, indeed, remarks (215) that "among theIndians of North America, numberless instances are given of woman'sliberty to choose her husband." But of the dozen or so cases he cites,several rest on unreliable evidence, some have nothing to do with thequestion at issue,[222] and others prove exactly the contrary of whathe asserts; while, _more suo_, he placidly ignores the mass of factswhich disprove his assertion that "women are not, as a rule, marriedwithout having any voice of their own in the matter." There are, nodoubt, some tribes who allow their women more or less freedom. Apachecourtship appears to be carried on in two ways, in each of which thegirl has the power to refuse. In both cases the proposal is made bypantomime, without a word being spoken. According to Cremony (245).the lover stakes his horse in front of the girl's "roost." Should shefavor his suit, she takes his horse, gives it food and water, andsecures it in front of his lodge. Four days comprise the term allowedfor an answer. Dr. J.W. Hoffman relates[223] that a Coyotero Apache,having selected the girl he wants, watches to find out the trail sheis apt to frequent when she goes to pick berries or grass seed. Havingdiscovered it, he places a row of stones on both sides of it for adistance of ten or fifteen paces:

  "He then allows himself to be seen by the maiden before she leaves camp, and running ahead, hides himself in the immediate vicinity of the row of stones. If she avoids them by passing to the outside, it is a refusal, but should she continue on her trail, and pass between the two rows, he immediately rushes out, catches her and ... carries her triumphantly to camp."

  Lewis and Clarke relate (441) that among the Chinooks the women "havea rank and influence very rarely found among Indians." They areallowed to speak freely before the men, their advice is asked, and themen do not make drudges of them. The reason for this may be found in asentence from Ross's book on Oregon (90): "Slaves do all the laboriouswork." Among such Indians one might expect that girls would have theirinclinations consulted when it came to choosing a husband. In thetwelfth chapter of his _Wa-Kee-Nah_, James C. Strong gives a graphicdescription of a bridal chase which he once witnessed among theMountain Chinooks. A chief had an attractive daughter who was desiredby four braves. The parents, having no special choice in the matter,decided that there should be a race on h
orseback, the girl being thewinner's prize. But if the parents had no preference, the girl had;she indulged in various ingenious manoeuvres to make it possible forthe Indian on the bay horse to overtake her first. He succeeded, puthis arm round her waist, lifted her from her horse to his own, andmarried her the next day.

  Here the girl had her way, and yet it was only by accident, for whileshe had a preference, she had no liberty of choice. It was the parentswho ordered the bridal race, and, had another won it, she would havebeen his. It is indeed difficult to find real instances of liberty ofchoice where the daughter's desire conflicted with the wishes of theparents or other relatives. Westermarck claims that the Creeksendeavored to gain the girl's consent, but no such fact can begathered from the passage he refers to (Schoolcraft, V., 269).Moreover, among the Creeks, unrestrained license prevailed beforemarriage, and marriage was considered only as a temporary convenience,not binding on the party more than a year; and finally, Creeks whowanted to marry had to gain the consent of the young woman's uncles,aunts, and brothers. Westermarck also says that among the Thlinketsthe suitor had to consult the wishes of the "young lady;" yet on page511 he tells us that among these Indians, "when a husband dies, hissister's son _must_ marry the widow." It does not seem likely thatwhere even widows are treated so unceremoniously, any deference ispaid to the wishes of the "young ladies." From Keating Westermarckgathers the information that although with the Chippewas the mothersgenerally settle the preliminaries to marriage without consulting thechildren, the parties are not considered husband and wife till theyhave given their consent. A reference to the original passage gives,however, a different impression, showing that the parents always havetheir own way, unless the girl elopes. The suitor's mother arrangesthe matter with the parents of the girl he wants, and when the termshave been agreed upon her property is removed to his lodge. "Thedisappearance of the property is the first intimation which shereceives of the contemplated change in her condition." If one or bothare unwilling, "the parents, who have a great influence, generallysucceed in bringing them to second their views."

  COMPULSORY "FREE CHOICE"

  A story related by C.G. Murr, a German missionary, warns us thatassertions as to the girls being consulted must always be acceptedwith great caution. His remarks relate to several countries of SpanishAmerica. He was often urged to find husbands for girls only thirteenyears old, by their mothers, who were tired of watching them. "Muchagainst my will," he writes,

  "I married such young girls to Indians fifty or sixty years old. At first I was deceived, because the girls said it was their free choice, whereas, in truth, they had been persuaded by their parents with flatteries or threats. Afterwards I always asked the girls, and they confessed that their father and mother had threatened to beat them if they disobeyed."

  In tribes where some freedom seems to be allowed the girls at presentthere are stories or traditions indicating that such a departure fromthe natural state of affairs is resented by the men. Sometimes, writesDorsey (260) of the Omahas,

  "when a youth sees a girl whom he loves, if she be willing, he says to her, 'I will stand in that place. Please go thither at night.' Then after her arrival he enjoys her, and subsequently asks her of her father in marriage. But it was different with a girl who had been petulant, one who had refused to listen to the suitor at first. He might be inclined to take his revenge. After lying with her, he might say, 'As you struck me and hurt me, I will not marry you. Though you think much of yourself, I despise you.' Then would she be sent away without winning him for her husband; and it was customary for the man to make songs about her. In these songs the woman's name was not mentioned unless she had been a 'minckeda,' or dissolute woman."[224]

  A BRITISH COLUMBIA STORY

  An odd story about a man who was so ugly that no girl would have himis related by Boas.[225] This man was so distasteful to the girls thatif he accidentally touched the blanket of one of them she cut out thepiece he had touched. Ten times this had happened, and each time hehad gathered the piece that had been cut out, giving it to his motherto save. Besides being so ugly, he was also very poor, having gambledaway everything he possessed, and being reduced to the necessity ofswallowing pebbles to allay the pangs of hunger. A sorcerer, however,put a fine new head on him and told him where he would find two lovelygirls who had refused every suitor, but who would accept him. He didso and the girls were so pleased with his beauty that they became hiswives at once and went home with him. He resumed his gambling and lostagain, but his wives helped him to win back his losses. They also saidto him:

  "All the girls who formerly would have nothing to do with you will now be eager to be yours. Pay no attention to them, however, but repel them if they touch you."

  The girls did come to his mother, and they said they would like to behis wives. When the mother told him this, he replied: "I suppose theywant to get back the pieces they cut out of their blankets." He tookthe pieces, gave them to the girls, with taunting words, and drovethem away.

  THE DANGER OF COQUETRY

  The moral of this sarcastic conclusion obviously was intended to bethat girls must not show independence and refuse a man, though he be areckless gambler, so poor that he has to eat pebbles, and so ugly thathe needs to have a new head put on him. Another story, the moral ofwhich was "to teach girls the danger of coquetry," is told bySchoolcraft (_Oneota_, 381-84). There was a girl who refused all hersuitors scornfully. In one case she went so far as to put together herthumb and three fingers, and, raising her hand gracefully toward theyoung man, deliberately open them in his face. This gesticulatory modeof rejection is an expression of the highest contempt, and it galledthe young warrior so much that he was taken ill and took to his beduntil he thought out a plan of revenge which cured him. He carried itout with the aid of a powerful spirit, or personal Manito. They made aman of rags and dirt, cemented it with snow and brought it to life.The girl fell in love with this man and followed him to the marshes,where the snow-cement melted away, leaving nothing but a pile of ragsand dirt. The girl, unable to find her way back, perished in thewilderness.

  THE GIRL MARKET

  In the vast majority of instances the Indians did not simply try tocurb woman's efforts to secure freedom of choice by intimidating heror inventing warning stories, but held the reins so tightly that awoman's having a will of her own was out of the question. It may besaid that there are three principal stages in the evolution of thecustom of choosing a wife. In the first and lowest stage a man castshis eyes on a woman and tries to get her, utterly regardless of herown wishes. In the second, an attempt is made to win at least hergood-will, while in the third--which civilized nations are justentering--a lover would refuse to marry a girl at the expense of herhappiness. A few Indian tribes have got as far as the second stage,but most of them belong to the first. Provided a warrior coveted agirl, and provided her parents were satisfied with the payment heoffered, matters were settled without regard to the girl's wishes. Toavoid needless friction it was sometimes deemed wise to first gain thegirl's good-will; but this was a matter of secondary importance. "Itis true," says Smith in his book on the Indians of Chili (214),

  "that the Araucanian girl is not regularly put up for sale and bartered 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 highest bidder. The purchase effected, the successful s
uitor 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 their eagerness for that wealth which will enable them to throw away their old wives and buy new ones."[226]

  A favorable soil for the growth of romantic and conjugal love! TheOmahas have a proverb that an old man cannot win a girl, he can onlywin her parents; nevertheless if the old man has the ponies he getsthe girl. The Indians insist on their rights, too. Powers tells (318)of a California (Nishinam) girl who loathed the man that had a claimon her. She took refuge with a kind old widow, who deceived thepursuers. When the deception was discovered, the noble warriors drewtheir arrows and shot the widow to death in the middle of the villageamid general approval. I myself once saw a poor Arizona girl who hadtaken refuge with a white family. When I saw the man to whom she hadbeen sold--a dirty old tramp whom a decent person would not want inthe same tribe, much less in the same wigwam--I did not wonder shehated him; but he had paid for her and she was ultimately obliged tolive with him.

  Of the Mandans, Catlin says (I., 119) that wives "are mostly treatedfor with the father, as in all instances they are regularly bought andsold." Belden relates (32) how he married a Sioux girl. One eveninghis Indian friend Frombe came to his lodge and said he would take himto see his sweetheart.

  "I followed him and we went out of the village to where some girlswere watching the Indian boys play at ball. Pointing to a good-lookingIndian 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 ofproceeding?'

  "'The presents you are expected to make them will be more acceptablethan the girl,' he answered."

  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), thatin former times,

  "when a chief desired to marry, he caused all the marriageable girls in the village to come together 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 arenever consulted."'

  The Pueblos, who treat their women exceptionally well, neverthelessget their wives by purchase. With the Navajos "courtship is simple andbrief; the wooer pays for his bride and takes her home." (Bancroft, L,511.) Among the Columbia River Indians, "to give a wife away without aprice is in the highest degree disgraceful to her family." (Bancroft,I., 276.) "The Pawnees," says Catlin,[227] "marry and unmarry atpleasure. Their daughters are held as legitimate merchandise.... Thewomen, 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 are regarded as valuable property to be sold to thehighest bidder, in later times by preference to a white man, though itis known that he will probably soon abandon his wife. In Oregon andWashington "wives, particularly the later ones, are often sold ortraded off.... A man sends his wife away, or sells her, at his will."(Gibbs, 199.)

  OTHER WAYS OF THWARTING FREE CHOICE

  Besides this commercialism, which was so prevalent that, as Dr.Brinton says (_A.R._, 48), "in America marriage was usually bypurchase," there were various other obstacles to free choice. "In anumber of tribes," as the same champion of the Indian remarks, "thepurchase of the eldest daughter gave a man a right to buy all theyounger daughters as they reached nubile age." Concerning theBlackfeet--who were among the most advanced Indians--Grinnell says(217) that

  "all the younger sisters of a man's wife were regarded as his potential wives. If he was not disposed to marry 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 weredisposed of in bunches; and in all such cases liberty of choice is ofcourse out of the question. Indeed the wide prevalence of so utterlybarbarous and selfish a custom shows us vividly how far from theIndian's mind in general was the thought of seriously consulting thechoice of girls.

  Furthermore, to continue Dr. Brinton's enumeration, "the selection ofa wife was often regarded as a concern of the gens rather than of theindividual. Among the Hurons, for instance, the old women of the gensselected the wives for the young men, and united them with painfuluniformity to women several years their senior." "Thus," writes Morgan(_L. of I._, 320),

  "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 notreferred to by Dr. Brinton, the most important being the custom ofwrestling 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. Richardson, it has always beenthe custom of northern Indians to wrestle for the women they want, thestrongest one carrying off the prize, and a weak man being "seldompermitted to keep a wife that a stronger man thinks worth his notice."It is needless to say that this custom, which "prevails throughout alltheir tribes," puts the woman's freedom of choice out of question ascompletely as if she were a slave sold in the market. Richardson says(II., 24) that

  "the bereaved husband meets his loss with the resignation which custom 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,Paraguay, Brazil and other countries.[228]

  Among the Comanches "the parents exercise full control in giving theirdaughters in marriage," and they are frequently married before the ageof puberty. (Schoolcraft, II., 132.) Concerning the customs of earlybetrothal and marriage enough has been said in preceding pages. Itprevailed widely among the Indians and, of course, utterly frustratedall possibility of choice. In fact, apart from this custom, Indianmarriage, being in the vast majority of cases with girls underfifteen,[229] made choice, in any rational sense of the word, entirelyout of the question.

  CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICAN EXAMPLES

  It has long been fashionable among historians to attribute to certainIndians of Central and South America a very high degree of culture.This tendency has received a check in these critical days.[230] Wehave seen that morally the Mexicans, Central Americans, and Peruvianswere hardly above other Indians. In the matter of allowing females tochoose their mates we likewise find them on the same low level. InGuatemala even the men wore obliged to accept wives selected for themby their parents, and Nicaraguan parents usually arranged the matches.In Peru the Incas fixed the conditions under which matrimony mighttake 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 less than twenty-four years of age, the latter eighteen. The consent of the parents and chiefs of the tribes was indispensible." (Tschudi, 184.)

  Unless the consent of the parents had been obtained the marriage wasconsidered invalid and the children illegitimate. (Garcilasso de laVeg
a, I., 207.) As regards the Mexicans, Bandelier shows (612, 620)that the position of woman was "little better than that of a costlyanimal," and he cites evidence indicating that as late as 1555 it wasordained at a _concile_ that since it is customary among the Indians"not to marry without permission of their principals ... and themarriage among free persons is not as free as it should be," etc.

  As for the other Indians of the Southern Continent it is needless toadd that they too are habitually guided by the thought that daughtersexist for the purpose of enriching their parents. To the instancespreviously cited I may add what Schomburgk says in his book onGuiana--that if the girl to whom the parents betroth their son is tooyoung to marry, they give him meanwhile a widow or an older unmarriedwoman to live with. This woman, after his marriage, becomes hisservant. Musters declares (186) that among the Tehuelches(Patagonians) "marriages are always those of inclination." ButFalkner'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 youngwomen seek for husbands is surprising, but even more surprising is thefact that they nearly always attain their ends." More careful study ofthe pages of the writer referred to[231] and a moment's unbiassedreflection would have made it clear to Westermarck that there is noquestion here either of choice or of marriage in our sense of thewords. The "husbands" the girls hunted for were boys of fourteen tosixteen, and the girls themselves began at twelve to thirteen years ofage, or five years before they became mothers, and Fuegian marriage"is not regarded as complete until the woman has become a mother," asWestermarck knew (22, 138). In reality the conduct of these girls wasnothing but wantonness, in which the men, as a matter of course,acquiesced. The missionaries were greatly scandalized at the state ofaffairs, but their efforts to improve it were strongly resented by thenatives.[232]

  WHY INDIANS ELOPE

  With the Abipones of Paraguay "it frequently happens," according toDobrizhoffer (207),

  "that the girl rescinds what has been _settled and agreed upon between the parents and the bridegroom_, obstinately rejecting the very mention of marriage. 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 untried nuptials."

  The italics are mine; they make it obvious that the choice of thegirls is not taken into account and that they can escape parentaltyranny only by running away. Among the Indians in general it oftenhappens that merely to escape a hated suitor a girl elopes withanother man. Such cases are usually referred to as love-matches, butall they indicate is a (comparative) preference, while proving thatthere was no liberty of choice. A girl whose parents try to force heron a much-married warrior four or five times her age must be only tooglad to run away with any young man who comes along, love or nolove.[233]

  In the chapter on Australia I commented on Westermarck's topsy-turvydisposition to look upon elopements as indications of the liberty ofchoice. He repeats the same error in his references to Indians. "It isindeed," he says,

  "common in America for a girl to run away from a bridegroom _forced upon her by the parents_, 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 chagrin of the parents_.'"

  The italics again indicate that denial of choice is thecustom, while the elopement indicates the same thing, for if therewere liberty of choice there would be no need of eloping. Moreover, anIndian elopement does not at all indicate a romantic preference on thepart of an eloping couple. If we examine the matter carefully we findthat an Indian elopement is usually a very prosaic affair indeed. Ayoung 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 forher which the suitor may not have; therefore the two ran away. Inother words, an Indian elopement is a purely commercial transaction,and one of a very shady character too, being nothing less than adesire to avoid paying the usual price for a girl. It is in fact akind of theft, an injustice to the parents; for while paying for abride may be evidence of savagery, it is the custom among Indians, andparents naturally resent its violation, though ultimately they mayforgive the elopers. Dodge relates (202) that among the Indians of thegreat plains parents prefer a rich suitor, though he may have severalwives already. If the daughter prefers another man the only thing todo is to elope. This is not easy, for a careful watch is kept onsuspicious cases. But the girl may manage to step out while the familyis 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. Suchelopements, Dodge adds, are frequent in the reservations where youngmen are poor and cannot afford ponies. Moreover, the concentration oflarge numbers of Indians of different bands and tribes on thereservations has increased the opportunities of acquaintance andlove-making among the young people.

  In an article on Love-Songs among the Omaha Indians,[234] Miss AliceFletcher calls attention to the fact that the individual is littleconsidered in comparison with the tribal organization: "Marriage wastherefore an affair of the gentes, and not the free union of a man andwoman as we understand the relation." But side by side with the formalmarriage sanctioned by the tribe grew up the custom of secretcourtship and elopement; so the saying among the Omahas is: "An oldman 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 Blackfootgirl elopes her parents feel very bitter against the man.

  "The girl has been stolen. The union is no marriage at all. The old people are ashamed and disgraced for their daughter. Until the father has been pacified by satisfactory payments, there is no marriage." (Grinnell, 215.)

  The Nez Perces so bitterly resent elopements that they consider thebride in such a case as a prostitute and her parents may seize uponthe man's property. (Bancroft, I., 276.)

  Indian elopements, I repeat, are nothing but attempts to dodge paymentfor a bride, and therefore do not afford the least evidence of exaltedsentiments, _i.e._, of romantic love, however romantic they may be asincidents. Read, for instance, 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 hundred miles, with the grass for their pillow, the canopy of heaven for their curtains, and the bright stars to watch over them. When 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 theelopers' feelings--whether they are refined and sentimental or purelysensual and frivolous? Nothing whatever. But the last sentence of Mrs.Eastman's description--photographed from life--indicates the absenceof at least four of the most elementary and important ingredients ofromantic love. If he adored his bride, if he sympathized with herfeelings, if he felt the faintest impulse toward gallantry orsacrifice of his selfish comforts, he would not allow her to c
hop woodwhile he loafed and smoked. Moreover, if he had an appreciation ofpersonal beauty he would not permit his wife to sacrifice hers beforeshe is out of her teens by making her do all the hard work. But whyshould he care? Since all his marriage customs are on a commercialbasis, why should he not discard a wife of thirty and take two newones of fifteen each?

  SUICIDE AND LOVE

  Having thus disposed of elopements, let us examine another phenomenonwhich has always been a mainstay of those who would fain make out thatin matters of love there is no difference between us and savages.Waitz (III., 102) accepts stories of suicide as evidence of genuineromantic love, and Westermarck follows his example (358, 530), whileCatlin (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 operaticembellishments indulged in by his guide (I., 280). Reduced to itssimplest 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 who wished to marry her, but her parents refused their consent, 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 exploits. 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 preparations, 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 implored 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 precipice and fell a corpse at the feet of her friends.

  Mrs. Eastman also relates the story of Winona's leap (65-70). "Theincident is well known," she writes. "Almost everyone has read it adozen times, _and always differently told_." It is needless to saythat a story told in a dozen different ways and embellished byhalf-breed guides and white collectors of legends has no value asscientific evidence.[235] But even if we grant that the incidentshappened just as related, there is nothing to indicate the presence ofexalted sentiments. The girl preferred the hunter because he would bemore frequently with her than the warrior (one of the versions saysshe wanted to wed "the successful hunter")[236]--which leaves us indoubt as to the utilitarian or sentimental quality of her attachment.Apparently she was not very eager to marry the hunter, for had shebeen, why did she refuse to live when they told her she would not beforced to marry the warrior? But the most important consideration isthat she did not commit suicide for _love_ at all, but from_aversion_--to escape being married to a man she disliked. Aversion isusually the motive which leads Indian women to what are called"suicides for love." As Griggs remarks (_l.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 her 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 suicidein which the assertion was made that, as is well known, savages nevertake their own lives. W.W. Westcott, in his otherwise excellent bookon suicide, which is based on over a hundred works relating to hissubject, makes the same astounding assertion. I have shown inpreceding pages that many Africans and Polynesians commit suicide, andI may now add that Indians seem still more addicted to this idioticpractice. Sometimes, indeed, they have cause for it. I have alreadycited the words of Belden that suicide is very common among Indianwomen, and that "considering the treatment they receive, it is awonder there is not more of it." Keating says (II., 172) that "amongthe women suicide is far more frequent [than among men], and is theresult of jealousy, or of disappointments in love; sometimes extremegrief at the loss of a child will lead to it." "Not a season passesaway," 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 already the husband of one of her sisters."

  It cannot be denied that in some of these cases (which might bemultiplied indefinitely) there is a strong provocation to self-murder.But as a rule suicide among Indians, as among other savages andbarbarians, and among civilized races, is not proof of strong feeling,but of a weak intellect. The Chippewas themselves hold it to be afoolish thing (Keating, II., 168); and among the Indians in general itwas usually 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 revenge."

  (Schoolcraft, V., 272.) Krauss (222) found that suicide was frequentamong the Alaskan Thlinket Indians. Men sometimes resorted to it whenthey saw no other way of securing revenge, for a person who causes asuicide is fined and punished as if he were a murderer. One woman cuther throat because a shahman accused her of having by sorcery causedanother one's illness. A favorite mode of committing suicide is to goout into the sea, cast away oar and rudder, and deliver themselves towind and waves. Sometimes they change their mind. A man, whose facehad been all scratched up by his angry wife, left home to end hislife; but after spending the night with a trader he concluded to gohome and make up the quarrel. Mrs. Eastman (48) tells of an old squawwho wanted to hang herself because she was angry with her son; butwhen, "after having doubled the strap four times to prevent itsbreaking, she found herself choking, her courage gave way--she yelledfrightfully." They cut her down and in an hour or two she was quitewell again. Another squaw, aged ninety, attempted to hang herselfbecause the men would not allow her to go with a war-party. Her objectin wanting to go was to have the pleasure of mutilating the corpses ofenemies! Keating says that Sank men sometimes kill themselves becausethey are envious of the power of others. Neill (85) records the casesof a Dakota wife who hanged herself because her husband had floggedher for hiding his whiskey; of a woman who hanged herself because herson-in-law refused to give her whiskey; of an old woman who flew intoa passion and committed suicide because her pet granddaughter had beenwhipped by her father.

  If a storm in a tea-kettle is accepted as a true storm, then we mayinfer from these suicides the existence of deep feeling and profounddespair. As a matter of fact, a savage's feelings are no deeper than atea-kettle, and for that very reason they boil up and overflow morereadily than if they were deeper. Loskiel tells us (74-75), thatDelaware Indians, both men and women, have committed suicide ondiscovering that their spouse was unfaithful; these are the sameIndians among whom husbands used to abandon their wives when they hadbabes, and wives their husbands when there were no more presents toreceive. Yet even if we admitted such feelings to have been deep,suicide would not prove the existence of genuine affection.Heckewelder reports instances of Indians who took their own livesbecause the girls they loved and were engaged to jilted them andmarried other men. Was the love which led to these suicides meresensual passion or was it refined sentiment, devoted affection? Thereis nothing to tell us, and the inference from everything we know aboutIndians is that it was purely sensual. Gibbs, who understood Indiannature tho
roughly, took this view when he wrote (198) that among theIndians of Oregon and Washington "a strong sensual attachment" notrarely leads young women to destroy themselves on the death of alover. And the writer who refers in Schoolcraft (V., 272) to thefrequent suicides among the Creeks declares that genuine love isunknown to any of them. Had the young men referred to by Heckewelderlost their lives in trying to save the lives of the girls in question,it might be permissible to infer the existence of affection, but noIndian has ever been known to commit such an act. If a savage commitssuicide 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. Maudsley, has well said that

  "any poor creature from the gutter can put an end to himself; 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 "romantic,"A complete dime-novel is condensed in a few remarks which Squiermakes[237] anent a quaint Nicaraguan custom.

  Poor girls, he says, would often get their marriage portion by havingamours with several young men. Having collected enough for a "dowry,"the girl would assemble all her lovers and ask them to build a housefor her and the one she intended to choose for a husband. She thenselected the one she liked best, and the others had their pains andtheir past for their love. Sometimes it happened that one of thediscarded lovers committed suicide from grief. In that case thespecial honor was in store for him of being eaten up by his formerrivals and colleagues. The bride also, I presume, partook of thefeast--at least after the men had had all they wanted.

  LOVE-CHARMS

  Indians indulge not only in elopements and suicide, but in the use oflove-charms--powders, potions, and incantations. Inasmuch as thedistinguished anthropologist Waitz mentions (III., 102) the use ofsuch charms among the things which show that "genuine romantic love isnot rare among Indians," it behooves us to investigate the matter.

  The ancient Peruvians had, according to Tschudi,[238] a special classof 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 inclination 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 Chippawas appear to havebeen especially addicted to the use of love-powders. Keating writes(II., 163):

  "There are but few young men or women among the Chippewas 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, bidding them to requite their affection. Married women are likewise provided with powders, which they rub over the heart of their husbands while asleep, in order to secure themselves against any infidelity."

  Hoffman says[239] of these same powders that they are held in greathonor, and that their composition is a deep secret which is revealedto others only in return for high compensation. Nootka maidenssometimes sprinkle love-powders into the food intended for theirlovers, and await their coming. The Menomini[240] have a charm called_takosawos_, "the powder that causes people to love one another." Itis composed of vermilion and mica laminae, ground very fine and putinto a thimble which is carried suspended from the neck or from somepart of the wearing apparel. It is also necessary to secure from theone whose inclination is to be won a hair, a nail-paring, or a smallscrap of clothing, which must also be put into the thimble.

  The Rev. Peter Jones says (155) that the Ojibway Indians have a charmmade of red ochre and other ingredients, with which they paint theirfaces, believing it to possess a power so irresistible as to cause theobject of their desire to love them. But the moment this medicine istaken away, and the charm withdrawn, the person who before was almostfrantic with love hates with a perfect hatred. The Sioux also havegreat faith in spells.

  "A lover will take gum," says Mrs. Eastman, "and, after putting somemedicine in it, will induce the girl of his choice to chew it, or putit in her way so that she will take it up of her own accord." Burtonthought (160) that an Indian woman "will administer 'squaw medicine,'a love philter, to her husband, but rather for the purpose ofretaining his protection than his love."

  Quite romantic are all these things, no doubt; but I fail to see thatthey throw any light whatever on the problem whether Indians can lovesentimentally. Waitz refers particularly to the Chippewa custom ofputting powders into the images of coveted persons as a symptom of"romantic love," forgetting that a superstitious fool may resort tosuch a procedure to evoke any kind of love, sensual or sentimental,and that unless there are other and more specific symptoms there isnothing to indicate the quality of the lover's feelings or the ethicalcharacter of his desires.

  CURIOSITIES OF COURTSHIP

  Some of the Indian courtship customs are quite romantic; perhaps wemay find evidence of romantic love in this direction. Those of theApaches have been already referred to. Pawnee courtship is thusdescribed by Grinnell.[241]

  "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 resorted to for gathering wood. The lover, wrapped in his robe or blanket, which covered 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 amongthe Indians of the great plains described by Colonel Dodge (193-223).The lover, wrapped in a blanket, approaches the girl's lodge and sitsbefore it. Though in plain view of everybody, it is etiquette not tosee a lover under such circumstances. After more or less delay thegirl may give signs and come out, but not until she has taken certainprecautions against the Indian's "romantic" love which have beenalready referred to. He seizes her and carries her off a littledistance. At first they sit under two blankets, but later on onesuffices. Thus they remain as long as they please, and no one disturbsthem. If there is more than one suitor the girl cries out if seized bythe wrong one, who at once lets go. In these cases it may seem as ifthe girl had her own choice. But it does not at all follow thatbecause she favors a certain suitor she will be allowed to marry him.If her father prefers another she will have to take him, unless herlover is ready to risk an elopement.

  The Piutes of the Pacific slope, like some eastern Indians, appear tohave indulged in a form of nocturnal courtship strikingly resemblingthat of the Dyaks of Borneo. The Indian woman (Sarah W. Hopkins) whowrote _Life Among the Piutes_ declares that the lover never speaks tohis 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 ful
l dress after the family has retired for the night, and seats himself at her feet. If she 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 describedby Powers (317):

  "The Nishinam may be said to set up and dissolve the conjugal estate almost as easily as do the brute beasts. No stipulated payment is made for the wife. A man seeking to become a son-in-law is bound to cater (_ye-lin_) or make presents to the family, which is to say, he will come along some day with a deer on his shoulder, perhaps fling it off on the ground before the wigwam, and go his way without a single 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 _ha-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 tomarry to love him. He simply buys her of her parents, and as for thegirl, 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 common to white girls, leaves her home, and goes to the lodge of her master,"

  where she is henceforth his wife and "willing slave." Among theBlackfoot Indians, too, there was apparently no form of courtship, andyoung men seldom spoke to girls unless they were relatives. (Grinnell,216.) It was a common thing among these Indians for a youth and a girlnot to know about each other until they were informed of theirimpending marriage.

  The Araucanian maidens of Chili are disposed of with even lessceremony. In the choice of husbands, as we have seen, they have nomore freedom than a Circassian slave. Our informant (E.R. Smith, 214)adds, however, that attachments do sometimes spring up, and, thoughthe lovers have little opportunity to communicate freely, they resortoccasionally to amatory songs, tender glances, and other tricks whichlovers understand. "Matrimony may follow, but such a preliminarycourtship is by no means considered necessary." When a man wants agirl he calls on her father with his friends. While the friends talkwith the parent, he seizes the bride

  "by the hair or by the heel, as may be most convenient, 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 dashes into the tangled thickets, while the friends considerately 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 withoutfurther ceremony live as man and wife. This is the usual way; butsometimes

  "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 amorous 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 Patagonian courtship is amusingly described by Bourne (91). Thechief of the tribe that held him a captive several months would notallow anyone to marry without his consent. In his opinion

  "no Indian who was not an accomplished rogue--particularly in the horse-stealing line--an expert 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, aquasi-widow, but the chief repulsed him because he had no horses. As alast resort the suitor appealed to the young woman herself, promising,if she favored him, that he would give her plenty of grease. Thisgrease argument she was unable to resist, so she entreated her fatherto give his consent. At this he broke out in a towering passion, threwcradle and other chattels out of the door and ordered her to follow atonce. The girl's mother now interceded, whereupon "seizing her by thehair, he hurled her violently to the ground and beat her with hisclenched fists till I thought he would break every bone in her body."The next morning, however, he went to the lodge of the newly marriedcouple, made up, and they returned, bag and baggage, to his tent.

  Grease appears to play a role in the courtship of northern Indianstoo. Leland relates (40) that the Algonquins make sausages from theentrails of bears by simply turning them inside out, the fat whichclings to the outside of the entrails filling them when they are thusturned. These sausages, dried and smoked, are considered a greatdelicacy. The girls show their love by casting a string of them roundthe neck of the favored youth.

  PANTOMIMIC LOVE-MAKING

  It is noticeable in the foregoing accounts that courtship and evenproposal are apt to be by pantomime, without any spoken words. Theyoung Piute who visits his girl while she is in bed with hergrandmother "does not speak to her." The Nishinam hunter leaves hispresents and they are accepted "without a word being spoken;" and theApaches, as we saw, "pop the question" with stones or ponies. Why thissilent courtship? Obviously because the Indian is not used to playingso humble a role as that of suitor to so inferior a being as a woman.He feels awkward, and has nothing to say. As Burton has remarked_(C.S._, 144), "in savage and semi-barbarous societies the separationof the sexes is the general rule, because, as they have no ideas incommon, each prefers the society of its own." "Between the sexes,"wrote Morgan (322)

  "there was but little sociality, as this term is understood in polished society. Such a thing as formal visiting was entirely unknown. When the unmarried of opposite sexes were casually brought together there was little or no conversation 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."

  HONEYMOON

  It is needless to say that where there is no mental intercourse therecan be no choice and union of souls, but only of bodies; that is,there can be no sentimental love. The honeymoon, where there isone,[242] is in this respect no better than the period of courtship.Parkman gives this realistic sketch from life among the OgallallaIndians (_O.T._, ch. XI.):

  "The happy pair had just entered upon the honeymoon. They would stretch a buffalo robe upon poles, so as to protect 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 itto play a role in the taciturn courtship of Indians. One of themaidens described by Mrs. Eastman (85) "had many lovers, who worethemselves out playing the flute, to as little purpose as they braidedtheir hair and painted their faces," Gila Indians court and pop thequestion with their flutes, according to the description by Bancroft(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."

  In Chili, among the Araucanians, every lover carries with him anamatory Jew's-harp, which is played almost entirely by inhaling.According to Smith

  "they have ways of expressing various emotions by different 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 gesturing, 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 whichit is used in this book. There is nothing in winking, rolling theeyes, and playing the Jew's-harp, either by inhalation or exhalation,to indicate whether the youth's feelings toward the girl are refined,sympathetic, and devoted, or whether he merely longs for an amorousintrigue. That these Indian lovers _may_ convey definite _ideas_ tothe minds of the girls is quite possible. Even birds have theirlove-calls, and savages in all parts of the world use "leadingmotives" _a la_ Wagner, i.e., musical phrases with a definitemeaning.[243]

  Chippewayan medicine men make use of music-boards adorned withdrawings which recall special magic formulae to their minds. On one ofthese (Schoolcraft, V., 648) there is the figure of a young man in thefrenzy of love. His head is adorned with feathers, and he has a drumin 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 isprincipally used in love-affairs to attract the attention of themaiden and reveal the presence of the lover," says Miss AliceFletcher, who has written some entertaining and valuable treatises onIndian music and love-songs.[244] Mirrors, too, are used to attractthe attention of girls, as appears from a charming idyl sketched byMiss Fletcher, which I will reproduce here, somewhat condensed.

  One day, while dwelling with the Omahas, Miss Fletcher was wandering in quest of spring flowers near a creek 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, advanced 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 her friend, and the man recrossed the brook, where he and his friend flung themselves on the grass and examined the necklace. Then 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 girllives, about the only chance an Omaha has to woo is at the creek wherethe girl fetches water, as in the above idyl. Hence courting is alwaysdone in secret, the girls never telling the elders, though they maycompare 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 Wa-oo-wa-an, or woman songs, are a sort of ballad relating theexperiences of young men and women. "They are sung by young men whenin each other's company, and are seldom overheard by women, almostnever by women of high character;" they "belong to that season in aman's career when 'wild oats' are said to be sown." Some of them arevulgar, 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 watching for the maiden to emerge from the tent and go to the spring. They belong to the secret courtship, and are sometimes 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, the emotion 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 Icome to you" and the like any sign of real sentiment or the faintestsymptom differentiating the two kinds of love. Moreover, as MissFletcher herself remarks:

  "The Omahas as a tribe have ceased to exist. The young men and women are being educated in English speech, and imbued with English thought; their directive emotion will hereafter take the lines of our artistic forms."

  Even if traces of sexual sentiment were to be found among Indians likethe Ornahas, who have been subjected for some generations tocivilizing influences, they would allow no inference as to thelove-affairs of the real, wild Indian.

  Miss Fletcher makes the same error as Professor Fillmore, who assistedher in writing _A Study of Omaha Indian Music_. He took the wildIndian tunes and harnessed them to modern German harmonies--aprocedure as unscientific as it would be unhistoric to make Cicerorecord his speeches in a phonograph. Miss Fletcher takes simple Indiansongs and reads into them the feelings of a New York or Boston woman.The following is an instance. A girl sings to a warrior (I give onlyMiss Fletcher's translation, omitting the Indian words): "War; whenyou returned; die; you caused me; go when you did; God; I appealed;standing," This literal version our author explains and translatesfreely, as follows:

  "No. 82 is the confession of a woman to the man she loves, that he had conquered her heart before he had achieved a valorous reputation. The song opens upon the scene. The warrior had returned victorious and passed through the rites of the Tent of War, so he is entitled to wear his honors publicly; 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 pages15-17 of the same treatise. What makes this procedure the moreinexplicable is that both these
songs are classed by Miss Fletcheramong the Wa-oo-wa-an or "woman songs," concerning which she has toldus that "they are in no sense love-songs," and that usually they arenot even the effusions of a woman's own feelings, but the compositionsof frivolous and vain young men put into the mouth of wanton women.The honorable secret courtships were never talked of or sung about.

  Regarding the musical and poetic features of Dakota courtship,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 his 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."

  Or he may commend his good qualities as a hunter by singing this song:

  Cling fast to me, and you'll ever have plenty, Cling fast to me, and you'll ever have plenty, Cling fast to me...."

  "A Dacota girl soon learns to adorn her fingers with rings, her earswith tin dangles, her neck with beads. Perhaps an admirer gives her aring, 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 thepoems of the semi-civilized Mexicans and Peruvians of the South ratherthan to the savage and barbarous Indians of the North. Dr. Brinton(_E. of A_., 297) has found the Mexican songs the most delicate. Hequotes two Aztec love-poems, the first being from the lips of anIndian 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 Northern Kioways as"a song of true love in the ordinary sense:"

  I sat and wept on the hillside, I wept till the darkness fell; I wept for a maiden afar off, A maiden who loves me well.

  The moons are passing, and some moon, I shall see my 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 haveneither rhyme nor metre to adorn it," says Schoolcraft (_Oneota,_ 14).The preceding poem has both; what guarantee is there that thetranslator has not embellished the substance of it as he did its form?Yet, granting he did not embroider the substance, we know that weepingand longing for an absent one are symptoms of sensual as well as ofsentimental love, and cannot, therefore, be accepted as a criterion.As for the Mexican and other poems cited, they give evidence of adesire to be near the beloved, and of the all-absorbing power ofpassion (monopoly) which likewise are characteristic of both kinds oflove. Of the true criteria of love, the altruistic sentiments ofgallantry, self-sacrifice, sympathy, adoration, there is no sign inany of these poems. Dr. Brinton admits, too, that such poems as theabove 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 danceand celebration when a girl reaches the age of puberty. The songs sungon this occasion "sometimes are grossly licentious." Evidences of thissort might be supplied by the page.[245]

  An interesting collection of erotic songs sung by the Klamath Indiansof Southern Oregon has been made by A.S. Gatschet.[246] "With theIndians," he says,

  "all these and many other erotic songs pass under the name of puberty songs. They include lines on courting, love-sentiments, disappointments in love, marriage fees paid to the parents, on marrying and on conjugal life."

  From this collection I will cite those that are pertinent to ourinquiry. Observe that usually it is the girl that sings or does thecourting.

  1. I have passed into womanhood.

  3. Who comes there riding toward me?

  4. My little pigeon, fly right into the dovecot!

  5. This way follow me before it is full daylight.

  9. I want to wed you for you are a chief's son.

  7. Very much I covet you as a husband, for in times to come you will live in affluence.

  8. She: And when will you pay for me a wedding gift? He: A canoe I'll give for you half filled with water.

  9. He spends much money on women, thinking to obtain them easily.

  11. It is not that black fellow that I am striving to secure.

  14. That is a pretty female that follows me up.

  16. That's because you love me that rattle around the lodge.

  27. Why have you become so estranged to me?

  37. I hold you to be an innocent girl, though I have not lived with you yet.

  38. Over and over they tell me, That this scoundrel has insulted me.

  52. Young chaps tramp around; They are on the lookout for women.

  54. Girls: Young man, I will not love you, for you run around with no blanket on; I do not desire such a husband. Boys: And I do not like a frog-shaped woman with swollen eyes.[247]

  Most of these poems, as I have said, were composed and sung by women.The same is true of a collection of Chinook songs (Northern Oregon andadjacent country) made by Dr. Boas.[248] The majority of his poems, hesays, "are songs of love and jealousy, such as are made by Indianwomen living in the cities, or by rejected lovers." These songs arerather pointless, and do not tell us much about the subject of ourinquiry. Here are a few samples:

  1. Yaya, When you take a wife, Yaya, Don't become angry with me. I do not care.

  2. Where is Charlie going now? Where is Charlie going now? He comes back to see me, I think.

  3. Good-by, oh, my dear Charlie! When you take a wife Don't forget me.

  4. I don't know how I feel Toward Johnny. That young man makes a foe of me.

  5. My dear Annie, If you cast off Jimmy Star, Do not forget How much he likes You.

  Of much greater interest are the "Songs of the Kwakiutl Indians," ofVancouver Island, collected by Dr. Boas.[249] One of them is tooobscene to quote. The following lines evidence a pretty poetic fancy,suggesting New Zealand poetry:

  1. Y[=i]! Yawa, wish I could----and make my true love happy, haigia, hay[=i]a.

  Y[=i]! Yawa, wish I could arise from under the ground right next to my true love, haigia hay[=i]a.

  Y[=i]! Yawa, wish I could alight from the heights, from the heights of the air right next to my true love, haigia, hay[=i]a.

  Y[=i]! Yawa, wish I could sit among the clouds and fly with them to my true love.

  Y[=i]! Yawa, I am downcast on account of my true love.

  Y[=i]! Yawa, I cry for pain on account of my true love, my dear.

  Dr. Boas confesses that this song is somewhat freely translated. Themore's the pity. An expression like "my true love," surely is utterlyun-Indian.

  2. An[=a]ma! Indeed my strong-hearted, my dear. An[=a]ma! Indeed, my strong hearted, my dear. An[=a]ma! Indeed my truth toward my dear. Not pretend I I know having master my dear. Not pretend I I know for whom I a
m gathering property, my dear. Not pretend I I know for whom I am gathering blankets, my dear.

  3. Like pain of fire runs down my body my love to you, my dear! 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. I am afraid of your love, my dear. O pain! O pain! 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.[250]

  MORE LOVE-STORIES

  Apart from "free translations" and embellishments, the greatdifficulty with poems like these, taken down at the present day, isthat one never knows, though they may be told by a pure Indian, howfar they may have been influenced by the half-breeds or themissionaries who have been with these Indians, in some cases for manygenerations. The same is true of not a few of the stories attributedto Indians.

  Powers had heard among other "Indian" tales one of a lover's leap, andanother of a Mono maiden who loved an Awani brave and was imprisonedby her cruel father in a cave until she perished. "But," says Powers(368), "neither Choko nor any other Indian could give me anyinformation touching them, and Choko dismissed them all with thecontemptuous remark, '_White man too much lie_.'" I have shown in thischapter how large is the number of white men who "too much lie" inattributing to Indians stories, thoughts, and feelings, which noIndian ever dreamt of.[251]

  The genuine traditional literature of the Indians consists, as Powersremarks (408), almost entirely of petty fables about animals, andthere is an almost total lack of human legends. Some there are, and afew of them are quite pretty. Powers relates one (299) which may wellbe Indian, the only suspicious feature being the reference to a"beautiful" cloud (for Indians 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, 'O 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-hammer'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-ueh (Red Cloud) who was 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 considerable time there upon the ground. But when the man returned 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 theesthetic or scientific, both of which are as much beyond his mentalcapacity as the faculty for sentimental love) is also illustrated bythe following Dakota tale, showing how two girls got married.[252]

  "There were two women lying out of doors and looking up to the shining stars. One of them said to the other, 'I wish that very large and bright shining star was my husband,' The other said, 'I wish that star that shines so brightly were my husband.' Thereupon they both were immediately 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 husband, and one became with child."

  Fear and superstition are, as we know, among the obstacles whichprevent an Indian from appreciating the beauties of nature. The storyof 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 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 year of her life."

  Such tales as these may well have originated in an Indian'simagination. Their local color is correct and charming, and they donot attribute to a savage notions and emotions foreign to his mind andcustoms.

  "WHITE MAN TOO MUCH LIE"

  It is otherwise with a class of Indian tales of which Schoolcraft'sare samples, and a few more of which may here be referred to. With theunquestioning trust of a child the learned Waitz accepts as a specimenof genuine romantic love a story[253] of an Indian maiden who, when anarrow was aimed at her lover's heart, sprang before him and receivedthe barbed shaft in her own heart; and another of a Creek Indian whojumped into a cataract with the girl he loved, meeting death with herwhen he found he could not escape the tomahawk of the pursuers. Thesolid facts of the first story will be hinted at presently in speakingof Pocahontas; and as for the second story it is, reduced to Indianrealism, simply an incident of an elopement and pursuit such as mayhave easily happened, though the motive of the elopement was nothingmore than the usual desire to avoid paying for the girl. Suchsentences as "she loved him with an intensity of passion that only thenoblest souls know," and "they vowed eternal love; they vowed to liveand die with each other," ought to have opened Waitz's eyes to thefact that he was not reading an actual Indian story, but a storysentimentalized and embellished in the cheapest modern dime-novelstyle. The only thing such stories tell us is that "white man too muchlie."

  White woman, too, is not always above suspicion. Mrs. Eastman assuresus that she got her Sioux legends from the Indians themselves. One ofthese stories is entitled "The Track Maker" (122-23). During aninterval of peace between the Chippewas and Dakotas, she relates, aparty of Chippewas visited a camp of the Dakotas. A young Dakotawarrior fell in love with a girl included in the Chippewa party."_Though he would have died to save her from sorrow_, yet he knew thatshe could never be his wife," for the tribes were ever at war. HereMrs. Eastman, with the recklessness of a newspaper reporter, puts intoan Indian's head a sentiment which no Indian ever dreamt of. All thefacts cited in this chapter prove this, and, moreover, the sequel ofher own story proves it. After exchanging vows of love (!) with theDakotan brave, the girl departed with her Chippewa friends. Shortlyafterward two Dakotas were murdered. The Chippewas were suspected, anda party of warriors at once broke up in pursuit of the innocent andunsuspecting party. The girl, whose name was Flying Shadow, saw herlover among the pursuers, who had already commenced to slaughter andscalp the other women, though the maidens clasped their hands in a"vain appeal to the merciless wretches, who see neither beauty norgrace when rage and revenge are in their hearts." Throwing herself inhis arms she cried, "Save me! save me! Do not let them slay me beforeyour eyes; make me your prisoner! You said that you loved me, spare mylife!" He did spare her life; he simply touched her with his spear,then passed on, and a moment later the girl was slain and scalped byhis companions. And why did the gallant and self-sacrificing lovertouch her with his spear before he left her
to be murdered? Becausetouching an enemy--male or female--with his spear entitles the noblered 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 favoriteBlackfoot tale recorded by Grinnell (39-42). A squaw was pickingberries 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 the squaw, they mounted their horses and took to flight.The wife's horse, not being a good one, soon tired out and the husbandhad to take her on his. But this was too much of a load even for hispowerful animal. The enemy gained on them constantly. Presently hesaid to his wife: "Get off. The enemy will not kill you. You are tooyoung and pretty. Some one of them will take you, and I will get a bigparty of our people and rescue you." But the woman cried "No, no, Iwill die here with you." "Crazy person," cried the man, and with aquick jerk he threw the woman off and escaped. Having reached thelodge safely, he painted himself black and "walked all through thecamp crying." Poor fellow! How he loved his wife! The Indian, asCatlin truly remarked, "is not in the least behind us in conjugalaffection." The only difference--a trifling one to be sure--is that awhite man, under such circumstances, would have spilt his last drop ofblood in defence of his wife's life and her honor.

  THE STORY OF POCAHONTAS

  The rescue of John Smith by Pocahontas is commonly held to prove thatthe young Indian girl, smitten with sudden love for the white man,risked her life for him. This fanciful notion has however, beenirreparably damaged by John Fiske (_O.V._, I., 102-111). It is truethat "the Indians debated together, and presently two big stones wereplaced before the chiefs, and Smith was dragged thither and his headlaid upon them;" and that

  "even while warriors were standing with clubs in hand, to beat his brains out, the chief's young daughter Pocahontas rushed up and embraced him, whereupon her father spared his life."

  It is true also that Smith himself thought and wrote that "Pocahontashazarded the beating out of her own brains to save" his. But she didno such thing. Smith simply was ignorant of Indian customs:

  "From the Indian point of view there was nothing romantic or extraordinary in such a rescue: it was simply a not uncommon matter of business. The romance with which readers have always invested it is the outcome of a misconception no less complete than that which led the 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 admiration 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 benumbed with unspeakable terror, while the firebrands were heating for his torment, has been rescued from the jaws of death and adopted as brother or lover by some laughing young squaw, or as a son by some grave 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 notdiscovered a trace of sentiment, or even of sentimentality. The notionthat there is any refinement of passion or morality in the sexualrelations of the American aborigines has been fostered chiefly by thestories and poems of the whites--generally such as had only asuperficial acquaintance with the red men. "The less we see and knowof real Indians," wrote G.E. Ellis (111), "the easier will it be tomake and read poems about them." General Custer comments on Cooper'sfalse 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 American savageas of the African, yet he had no difficulty in taking the American'scorrect measure. In his _Early Travels and Adventures_ (41-43), hepokes fun at the romantic ideas that poets and novelists have givenabout Indian maidens and their loves, and then tells in unadornedterms what he saw with his own eyes--Indian girls with "coarse blackhair, low foreheads, blazing coal-black eyes, faces of a dirty, greasycolor"--and the Indian young man whose romance of wooing is comprisedin the question, "How much is she worth?'"

  One of the keenest and most careful observers of Indian life, thenaturalist Bates, after living several years among the natives ofBrazil, wrote concerning them (293):

  "Their phlegmatic, apathetic temperament; coldness of desire and deadness of feeling; want of curiosity and slowness of intellect, make the Amazonian Indians very uninteresting 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, enthusiasm. These are characteristics of the whole race,"

  In Schoolcraft (V., 272) we read regarding the Creeks that "therefined passion of love is unknown to any of them, although they applythe word _love_ to rum or anything else they wish to be possessed of."A capital definition of Indian love! I have already quoted the opinionof the eminent expert George Gibbs that the attachment existing amongthe Indians of Oregon and Washington, though it is sometimes so strongas to lead to suicide, is too sensual to deserve the name of love.Another eminent traveller, Keating, says (II., 158) concerning theChippewas:

  "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, inwriting of the Nascopies (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 fact, the tender passion seems unknown to the savage breast."

  From his observations of Canadian Indians Heriot came to theconclusion (324) that "The passion of love is of too delicate a natureto admit of divided affections, and its real influence can scarcely befelt in a society where polygamy is tolerated." And again (331): "Thepassion of love, feeble unless aided by imagination, is of a naturetoo refined to acquire a great degree of influence over the mind ofsavages." He thinks that their mode of life deadens even the physicalardor for the sex, but adds that the females appear to be "much moresensible of tender impressions." Even Schoolcraft admits implicitlythat Indian love cannot have been sentimental and esthetic, but onlysensual, when he says (_Travels_, etc., 231) that Indian women are"without either mental resources or personal beauty."

  But the most valuable and weighty evidence on this point is suppliedby 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 spentnearly forty years of his life, thus having unequalled opportunitiesfor observation and study. He was moreover a man of scientifictraining and a thinker, whose contributions to some branches ofanthropology are of exceptional value. His bias, moreover, is ratherin favor of the Indians than against them, which doubles the weight ofhis testimony. This testimony has already been cited in part, but insumming up the subject I will repeat it with more detail. He tells usthat marri
age among these Indians "was not founded on the affections... 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. Remonstrance or objections on their part was never attempted; they received each other as the gift of their parents."

  There was no visiting or courting, little or no conversation betweenthe unmarried, no attempts were made to please each other, and the manregarded the woman as his inferior and servant. The result of such astate 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 unknown among them. Affections 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 the cultivation of the affections between the sexes they were entirely ignorant. 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 entirely unknown; so also were promises of marriage."

  Morgan regrets that his remarks "may perhaps divest the mind of somepleasing impressions" created by novelists and poets concerning theattachments which spring up in the bosom of Indian society; but these,he adds, are "entirely inconsistent with the marriage institution asit existed among them, and with the facts of their social history." Imay add that another careful observer who had lived among the Indians,Parkman, cites Morgan's remarks as to their incapacity for love withapproval.

  There is one more important conclusion to be drawn from Morgan'sevidence. The Iroquois were among the most advanced of all Indians."In intelligence," says Brinton (_A.R._, 82), "their position must beplaced among the highest." As early as the middle of the fifteenthcentury the great chief Hiawatha completed the famous political leagueof the Iroquois. The women, though regarded as inferiors, had morepower and authority than among most other Indians. Morgan speaks ofthe "unparallelled generosity" of the Iroquois, of their love oftruth, their strict adherence to the faith of treaties, theirignorance of theft, their severe punishment for the infrequent crimesand offences that occurred among them. The account he gives of theirvarious festivals, their eloquence, their devout religious feeling andgratitude to the Great Spirit for favors received, the thanksaddressed to the earth, the rivers, the useful herbs, the moving windwhich banishes disease, the sun, moon, and stars for the light theygive, shows them to be far superior to most of the red men. And yetthey were "below the passion of love in its simplest forms." Thus wesee once more that refinement of sexual feeling, far from being, asthe sentimentalists would have us believe, shared with us by thelowest savages, is in reality one of the latest products ofcivilization--if not the very latest.

  THE UNLOVING ESKIMO

  Throughout this chapter no reference has been made to the Eskimos, whoare popularly considered a race apart from the Indians. The bestauthorities now believe that they are a strictly American race, whoseprimal home was to the south of the Hudson Bay, whence they spreadnorthward to Labrador, Greenland, and Alaska.[254] I have reservedthem for separate consideration because they admirably illustrate thegrand truth just formulated, that a race may have made considerableprogress in some directions and yet be quite below the sentiment oflove. Westermarck's opinion (516) that the Eskimos are "a ratheradvanced race" is borne out by the testimony of those who have knownthem well. They are described as singularly cheerful and good-naturedamong themselves. Hall says "their memory is remarkably good, andtheir intellectual powers, in all that relates to their native land,its inhabitants, its coasts, and interior parts, is of a surprisinglyhigh order" (I., 128). But what is of particular interest is the greataptitude Eskimos seem to show for art, and their fondness for poetryand music. King[255] says that "the art of carving is universallypractised" by them, and he speaks of their models of men, animals, andutensils as "executed in a masterly style." Brinton indeed says theyhave a more artistic eye for picture-writing than any Indian racenorth of Mexico. They enliven their long winter nights withimaginative tales, music, and song. Their poets are held in highhonor, and it is said they get their notion of the music of verse bysleeping by the sound of running water, that they may catch itsmysterious notes.

  Yet when we look at the Eskimos from another point of view we findthem horribly and bestially unaesthetic. Cranz speaks of "their filthyclothes swarming with vermin." They make their oil by chewing sealblubber and spurting the liquid into a vessel. "A kettle is seldomwashed except the dogs chance to lick it clean." Mothers washchildren's faces by licking them all over.[256]

  Such utter lack of delicacy prepares us for the statement that theEskimos are equally coarse in other respects, notably in theirtreatment of women and their sexual feelings. It would be a stigmaupon an Eskimo's character, says Cranz (I., 154), "if he so much asdrew a seal out of the water." Having performed the pleasantlyexciting part of killing it, he leaves all the drudgery and hard workof hauling, butchering, cooking, tanning, shoe-making, etc., to thewomen. They build the houses, too, while the men look on with thegreatest insensibility, not stirring a finger to assist them incarrying the heavy stones. Girls are often "engaged" as soon as born,nor are those who grow up free allowed to marry according to their ownpreference. "When friendly exhortations are unavailing she iscompelled by force, and even blows, to receive her husband." (Cranz,I., 146.) They consider children troublesome, and the race is dyingout. Women are not allowed to eat of the first seal of the season. Thesick are left to take care of themselves. (Hall, II., 322, I., 103.)In years of scarcity widows "are rejected from the community, andhover about the encampments like starving wolves ... until hunger andcold terminate their wretched existence." (M'Lean, II., 143.) Men andwomen alike are without any sense of modesty; in their warm hovelsboth sexes divest themselves of nearly all their clothing. Nor,although they fight and punish jealousy, have they any regard forchastity _per se_. Lending a wife or daughter to a guest is arecognized duty of hospitality. Young couples live together on trial.When the husband is away hunting or fishing the wife has herintrigues, and often adultery is committed _sans gene_ on either side.Unnatural vices are indulged in without secrecy, and altogether thepicture is one of utter depravity and coarseness.[257]

  Under such circumstances we hardly needed the specific assurance ofRink, who collected and published a volume of _Tales and Traditions ofthe Eskimo_, and who says that "never is much room given in thispoetry to the almost universal feeling of love." He refers, of course,to any kind of love, and he puts it very mildly. Not only is there notrace of altruistic affection in any of these tales and traditions,but the few erotic stories recorded (_e.g._, pp. 236-37) are toocoarse to be cited or summarized here. Hall, too, concluded that"love--if it come at all--comes after marriage." He also informs us(II., 313) that there "generally exists between husband and wife asteady but not very demonstrative affection;" but here he evidentlywrongs the Eskimos; for, as he himself remarks (126), they

  "always summarily punish their wives for any real or imaginary offence. 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 "demonstrative" than such "steady affection?"

  INDIA--WILD TRIBES AND TEMPLE GIRLS

  India, it has been aptly said, "forms a great museum of races in whichwe can study man from his lowest to his highest stages of culture." Itis this multiplicity of races and their lack of patriotic co-operationthat explains the conquest of the hundreds of millions of India by thetens of millions
of England. Obviously it would be impossible to makeany general assertion regarding love that would apply equally to the10,000,000 educated Brahmans, who consider themselves little inferiorto gods, the 9,000,000 outcasts who are esteemed and treatedinfinitely worse than animals, and the 17,000,000 of the aboriginaltribes who are comparable in position and culture to our AmericanIndians. Nevertheless, we can get an approximately correct compositeportrait of love in India by making two groups and studying first, theaboriginal tribes, and then the more or less civilized Hindoos (usingthis word in the most comprehensive sense), with their peculiarcustoms, laws, poetic literature, and bayaderes, or temple girls.

  In Bengal and Assam alone, which form but a small corner of this vastcountry, the aborigines are divided into nearly sixty distinct races,differing from each other in various ways, as American tribes do. Theyhave not been described by as many and as careful observers as ourAmerican Indians have, but the writings of Lewin, Galton, Rowney, Man,Shortt, Watson and Kaye, and others supply sufficient data to enableus to understand the nature of their amorous feelings.

  "WHOLE TRACTS OF FEELING UNKNOWN TO THEM"

  Lewin gives us the interesting information (345-47) that with theChittagong hill-tribes

  "women enjoy perfect freedom of action; they go unveiled, they would seem to have equal rights of heritage with men, while their power of selecting 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 isalmost unknown; so also harlots and courtesans are held in abhorrenceamongst them."

  On reading these lines our hopes are raised that at last we may havecome upon a soil favorable to the growth of true love. But Lewin'sfurther 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 connection for procreating their species and getting their dinner cooked. They have no idea of tenderness, nor of the chivalrous devotion 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 PROMISCUITY

  One of the most important details of my theory is that while there canbe no romantic love without opportunity for genuine courtship and freechoice, nevertheless the existence of such opportunity and choice doesnot guarantee the presence of love unless the other conditions for itsgrowth--general refinement and altruistic impulses--coexist with them.Among the Chittagong hill-tribes these conditions--constituting "wholetracts of mind, and thought, and feeling"--do not coexist with theliberty of choice, hence it is useless to look for love in our senseof the word. Moreover, when we further read in Lewin that the reasonwhy there are no harlots is that they "are rendered unnecessary by thefreedom of intercourse indulged in and allowed to both sexes beforemarriage," we see that what at first seemed a virtue is really a markof lower degradation. Some of the oldest legislators, like Zoroasterand Solon, already recognized the truth that it was far better tosacrifice a few women to the demon of immorality than to expose themall to contamination. The wild tribes of India in general have not yetarrived at that point of view. In their indifference to chastity theyrank with the lowest savages, and usually there is a great deal ofpromiscuous indulgence before a mate is chosen for a union ofendurance. Among the Oraons, as Dalton tells us (248), "liaisonsbetween boys and girls of the same village seldom end in marriage;"and he gives strange details regarding the conduct of the young peoplewhich may not be cited here, and in which the natives see "noimpropriety." Regarding the Butias Rowney says (142):

  "The marriage tie is so loose that 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 Rowney says (139) that "chastity in adult girlsprevious to marriage is neither to be met with nor cared for." Of theMishmees he says (163): "Wives are not expected to be chaste, and arenot thought worse off when otherwise," and of the Kookies (186): "Allthe women of a village, married or unmarried, are available to thechief at his will, and no stigma attaches to those who are favored byhim." In some tribes wives are freely exchanged. Dalton says of theButan (98) that "the intercourse between the sexes is practicallypromiscuous." Rhyongtha girls indulge in promiscuous intercourse withseveral lovers before marriage. (Lewin, 121.) With the Kurmuba, "nosuch ceremony as marriage exists." They "live together like the brutecreation." (W.R. King, 44.)

  My theory that in practice, at any rate, if not in form, promiscuitywas the original state of affairs among savages, in India aselsewhere, is supported by the foregoing facts, and also by whatvarious writers have told us regarding the licentious festivalsindulged in by these wild tribes of India. "It would appear," saysDalton (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 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 arrangement with the parents of the maiden."

  Dalton gives a vivid description of these festivals as practised bythe Hos in January, when the granaries are full of wheat and thenatives "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 Magh feast. Their natures appear to undergo a temporary change. Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross language, and parents their children; men and women become almost like animals in the indulgence 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"

  Nor are these festivals of rare occurrence. They last three or fourdays and are held at the different villages at different dates, so theinhabitants of each may take part in "a long succession of theseorgies." When Dalton declares (206) regarding these coarse anddissolute Hos, who thus spend a part of each year in "a longsuccession of orgies," in which their own wives and daughtersparticipate, that they are nevertheless capable of the higheremotions--though he admits they have no words for them--he merelyproves that long intercourse with such savages blunted his ownsensibilities, or what is more probable--that he himself neverun
derstood the real nature of the higher emotions--those "tracts offeeling" which Lewin found missing among the hill-tribes. We areconfirmed in this suspicion by noticing Dalton's ecstatic delight overthe immoral courtship customs 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 Darbar; 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 bassa,' or house for maidens, which, strange to say, they are allowed to occupy without anyone to look after them. They appear to have very great liberty, and slips of morality, as long as they are confined 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 interference 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 young 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 proclaim their arrival loudly by beating their drums and tambourines. The girls of that village immediately join them. Their male relations and neighbors must keep entirely out of view, leaving the field clear for the guests. The offerings of the visitors are now gallantly presented and graciously 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 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 dancing and playing on the drums, move out of the village followed 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 raillery 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."

  LIBERTY OF CHOICE

  All this may indeed be "marvellously pretty and romantic," but I failto see the least indication of the "higher emotions." Nor can I findthem in some further interesting remarks regarding the Hos made by thesame author (192-93). Thirty years ago, he says, a girl of the betterclass cost forty or fifty head of cattle. Result--a decrease in thenumber of marriages and an increase of immoral intimacies. Sometimes agirl runs away with her lover, but the objection to this is thatelopements 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 pathetically bewailing their want of success. They make themselves as attractive as they can, flirt in the most demonstrative manner, and are not too coy to receive in public attentions from those they admire. They may be often seen in well-assorted pairs returning from market with arms interlaced, 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, without anyreference to "higher emotions." In this tribe, too, the girls are notallowed the liberty of choice. Indeed, when we examine this point wefind that Westermarck is wrong, as usual, in assigning such aprivilege to the girls of most of these tribes. He himself is obligedto admit (224) that

  "in many of the uncivilized tribes of India parents are in the habit of betrothing their sons.... The paternal authority approaches the _patria potestas_ of the ancient Aryan nations."

  The Kisans, Mundas, Santals, Marias, Mishmis, Bhils, and YoonthalinKarens are tribes among whom fathers thus reserve the right ofselecting wives for their sons; and it is obvious that in all suchcases daughters have still less choice than sons. Colonel Macphersonthrows 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."_[258]

  Rowney reports (103) that the Khond boys are married at the age of tenand twelve to girls of fifteen to sixteen; and among the Reddies it iseven customary to marry boys of five or six years to women of sixteento twenty. The "wife," however, lives with an uncle or relation, whobegets 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 someother boy's "wife".[259] The young folks are obviously in the habit ofobeying implicitly, for as Dalton says (132) of the Kisans, "There isno instance on record of a youth or maiden objecting to thearrangement made for them." With the Savaras, Boad Kandhs, Hos, andKaupuis, the prevalence of elopements shows that the girls are notallowed their own choice. Lepcha marriages are often made on credit,and are breakable if the payment bargained for is not made to theparent within the specified time. (Rowney, 139.)[260]

  SCALPS AND FIELD-MICE

  While among the Nagas, as already stated, the women must do all thehard work, they have one privilege: tribal custom allows them torefuse a suitor until he has put in their hands a human skull orscalp; and the gentle maidens make rigorous use of this privilege--somuch so that in consequence of the difficulty of securing these "gorytokens of love" marriages are contracted late in life. The head neednot be that of an enemy: "A skull may be acquired by the blackesttreachery, but so long as the victim was not a member of the clan,"says Dalton (39), "it is accepted as a chivalrous offering of a trueknight to his lady," Dalton gives another and less grewsome instanceof "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 subsequently return the compliment, it is concluded that she desires a continuance of his attention. The next step may be an offering 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-TURVY CUSTOM

  Coyness as well as primitive gallantry has its amusing phases amongthese wild tribes. The following description seems so much like anextravaganza that the reader may suspect it to be an abstract of astory by Frank Stockton or a libretto by Gilbert; but it is a seriouspage from Dalton's _Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal_ (63-64). Itrelates 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 go
od-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 restrain 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 girlsenjoy a privilege rare in India or elsewhere of making the firstadvances.

  "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 opportunity 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 initiative 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 girlbut to the whole tribe, resulting in fines. But let us hear the restof the topsy-turvy story.

  "The marriage ceremony chiefly consists of dancing, singing, and feasting. The 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 away, but is caught and subjected to a similar ablution, and then taken, in spite of the resistance and the counterfeited grief and lamentation of his parents, to the bride's house."

  It is true that this inversion of the usual process of proposing andacting a comedy of sham coyness occurs only in the case of the poorgirls, the wealthy ones being betrothed by their parents in infancy;but it would be interesting to learn the origin of this quaint customfrom someone who has had a chance to study this tribe. Probably thegirl's poverty furnishes the key. The whole thing seems like apractical joke raised to the dignity of an institution. The perversionof all ordinary rules is consistently carried out in this, too, that"if the old people refuse they can be beaten into compliance!" Thatthe loss of female coyness is not a gain to the cause of love or ofvirtue is self-evident.

  PAHARIA LADS AND LASSES

  Thus, once more, we are baffled in our attempts to find genuineromantic love. Of its fourteen ingredients the altruistic ones aremissing entirely. What Dalton writes (248) regarding the Oraons,

  "Dhumkuria 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 touch 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, characteristically shallow here; for, as Dalton has told us, these village flirtations "seldom end in marriage."

  The other ingredients that primitive love shares with romanticlove--monopoly, jealousy, coyness, etc., are also, as we saw, weakamong the wild tribes of India. Westermarck (503) indeed fancied hehad discovered the occurrence among them of "the absorbing passion forone." "Colonel Dalton," he says, "represents the Paharia lads andlasses as forming very romantic attachments; 'if separated only for anhour,' he says, 'they are miserable.'" In reality Dalton does not"represent them" thus; he says "they are represented;" that is, hegives his information at second-hand, without naming his authority,who, to judge by some of his remarks, was apparently a facetiousglobe-trotter. It is of course possible that these young folks aremuch attached to each other. Even sheep are "miserable if separatedonly for an hour;" they bleat pathetically and are disconsolate,though there is no question of an "absorbing passion for one." Whatkind of love unites these Paharia lads and lasses may be inferred fromthe further information given in Dalton's book that "they worktogether, 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 nothingbut a vulgar case of reprehensible free lust.

  And yet, though we have found no indications of true love, I can seereasons 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 theiramorous customs than the more or less civilized Hindoos to whom we nowturn our attention, the reader will be able to decide for himselfafter 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 respect. The chief cause of thisdisparity is the habitual slaughter of girl babies. The unwelcomebabes are killed with opium pills or exposed to wild beasts. ThePundita Ramabai Sarasvati, in her agonizing book, _The High CasteHindu Woman_, writes with bitter sarcasm, that

  "even the wild animals 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 haveoccasion to congratulate themselves therefor. Usually a fate worsethan death awaits them. Long before they are old enough, physically ormentally, to marry, they are either delivered bodily or betrothed tomen old enough to be their grandfathers. A great many girls aremarried literally in the cradle, says the authoress just quoted (31)."From five to eleven years is the usual period for this marriage amongthe Brahmans all over India." Manu made twenty-four the minimum agefor men to marry, but "popular custom defies the law. Boys of ten andtwelve are now doomed to be married to girls of seven to eight yearsof age." This early marriage system is "at least five hundred yearsolder than the Christian era." As superstitious custom compels poorparents to marry off their daughters by a given age "it veryfrequently happens that girls of eight or nine are given to men ofsixty or seventy, or to men utterly unworthy of the maidens."[261]

  MONSTROUS PARENTAL SELFISHNESS

  In an article on "Child Marriages in Bengal,"[262] D.N. Singhaexplains the superstition to which so many millions of poor girls arethus ruthlessly sacrificed. "It is," he says,

  "a well-nigh universal conviction among 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."[263] 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 daughter to remain unmarried till she is thirteen or fourteen years old is "subjected to endless annoyances, beset with stinging remarks, unpleasant whisperings 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 customis 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 she 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 Ramabai Sarasvati (22) gives some further grewsome detailswhich would seem like the inventions of a burlesque writer were theynot attested by such unbiassed authority. "Religions enjoin that everygirl must be given in marriage; the neglect of this duty means for thefather unpardonable sin, public ridicule, and caste excommunication."

  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 certain.Female infanticide is often the result, but even if the girls areallowed to grow up there is a way for the father to escape. There is aspecial high class of Brahmans who make it their business to marrythese girls. They go up and down the land marrying ten, twenty,sometimes as many as one hundred and fifty of them, receiving presentsfrom the bride's parents and immediately thereafter bidding good-by toher, going home never to see their "wife" again. The parents have nowdone their duty; they have escaped religious and social ostracism atthe expense, it is true, of their daughters, who remain at home tomake themselves useful. These poor girls can never marry again, andwhether or not they become moral outcasts, their life is ruined; butthat, to a Hindoo, is a trifling matter; girls, in his opinion, werenot created for their own sake, but for the pleasure, comfort, andsalvation of man.

  HOW HINDOO GIRLS 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 fallat once into the clutches of their degraded husbands.[264] In eithercase they have absolutely no choice in the selection of alife-partner. As Dubois remarks (I., 198):

  "In negotiating marriage the inclinations of the future spouses are never attended to. Indeed, it would be ridiculous 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 (148), "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 previous 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 thegirl's own preference--should any such exist--is rendered impossibleby a superstitious custom which demands that a horoscope must in allcases be taken to see if the signs are propitious, as RamabaiSarasvati informs us (35), adding that if the signs are not propitiousanother girl is chosen. Sometimes a dozen are thus rejected, and thenumber may rise to three hundred before superstition is satisfied anda suitable match is found! The same writer gives the followingpathetic instance of the frivolous way in which the girls are disposedof. A father is bathing in the river; a stranger comes in, the fatherasks him to what caste he belongs, and finding that all right, offershim his nine-year-old daughter. The stranger accepts, marries thechild the next day, and carries her to his home nine hundred milesaway. These poor child brides, she says, are often delighted to getmarried, because they are promised a ride on an elephant!

  But the most extraordinary revelation made by this doctor is containedin the following paragraph which, I again beg the reader to remember,was not written by a humorous globetrotter or by the librettist of_Pinafore_, but by a native Hindoo woman who is bitterly in earnest, awoman who left her country to study the condition of women in Englandand America, and who then returned to devote her life to the attemptto 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 barber_ 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

  A more complete disregard of the real object of marriage and of theexistence of love could hardly be found among clams and oysters. Intheir sexual relations the civilized Hindoos are, indeed, far beneaththe lowest of animals. Young animals are never prevented by theirparents from mating according to their choice; they never unite tillthey have reached maturity; they use their procreative instinct onlyfor the purpose for which it was designed, whereas the Hindoos--liketheir wild neighbors--indulge in a perpetual carnival of lust; theynever kill their offspring, and they never maltreat their females asthe Hindoos do.[265] On this last point some more details must begiven:

  "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 reverse 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 languages 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, duringher long connection with the Woman's Hospital of Hyderabad, Sindh, hadthe best of opportunities for observing the natives of all classes,both at the hospital and in their homes, to which she was oftensummoned. In her book _Within the Purdah_ she throws light on thepopular delusion that Hindoos must be kind to each other since theyare kind to animals. In Bombay there is even a hospital for diseasedand aged animals: but that is a result of religious superstition, notof real sympathy, for the same Brahman who is afraid to bring a curseupon his soul by killing an animal "will beat his domestic animalsmost cruelly, and starve and torture them in many ways, thusexhibiting his lack of kindness." And the women fare infinitely worsethan the animals. The wealthiest are perpetually confined in roomswithout table or chairs, without a carpet on the mud floor or pictureon the mud walls--and this in a country where fabulous sums are spenton fine architecture. All girl babies are neglected, or dosed withopium if they cry; the mother's milk--which an animal would give tothem--being reserved for their brothers, though these brothers bealready several years old. Unless a girl is married before her twelfthyear she is considered a disgrace to the family, is stripped of allher finery and compelled to do the drudgery of her fathers household,receiving

  "kicks and abuses from any and all its members, and often upon the slightest provocation. Should she fall ill, no physician is consulted and no effort is made to restore her health or to prolong life." "The expression of utter hopelessness, despair, and misery" on such a girl's face "beggars description."

  Nor are matters any better for those who get married. Not only arethey bestowed in infancy on any male--from an infant boy to an old manwith many wives--whom the father can secure[266]--but thedaughter-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 isvery arduous labor, and the slight little women sometimes faint awaywhile engaged in the task", yet by a satanic refinement of crueltythey are compelled to sing a grinding song while the work lasts andnever stop, on penalty of being beaten. And though they prepare allthe food for the family and serve the others, they get only what isleft--which often is nothing at all, and many literally starve todea
th. No wonder these poor creatures--be they little girls orwomen--all wear "the same look of hopeless despair and wretchedness,"making an impression on the mind more pitiable than any disease. Thewriter had among her patients some who tried by the most agonizing ofdeaths--voluntary starvation--to escape their misery.

  CONTEMPT IN PLACE OF LOVE

  No one can read these revelations without agreeing with the writerthat "the Hindu is of all people the most cowardly and the mostcruel," and that he cannot know what real love of any kind is. TheAbbe Dubois, who lived many years among the Hindoos, wearing theirclothes and adopting their customs so far as they did not conflictwith his Christian conscience, wrote (I., 51) that

  "the affection and attachment between brothers and sisters, never very ardent, almost entirely 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, declared (I., 21,302-303):

  "During the long period of my observation 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 paysher any, even in familiar intercourse." He looks on her "merely as hisservant, and never as his companion." "We have said enough of women ina country where they are considered as scarcely forming a part of thehuman species." And Ramabai herself confesses (44) that at home "menand women have almost nothing in common." "The women's court issituated at the back of the houses, where darkness reignsperpetually." Even after the second ceremony the young couple seldommeet and talk.

  "Being cut off from the chief means of forming attachment, the youngcouple are almost strangers, and in many cases ... a feeling kindredto hatred takes root between them." There is "no such thing as thefamily having pleasant times together."

  Dr. Ryder thinks that for "one kind husband there are one hundredthousand cruel ones," and she gives the following illustration amongothers:

  "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.'"[267]

  Though the lawgiver Manu wrote "where women are honored there the godsare pleased," he was one of the hundreds of Sanscrit writers, who, asRamabai Sarasvati relates, "have done their best to make woman ahateful being in the world's eye." Manu speaks of their "naturalheartlessness," their "impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, andbad conduct." Though mothers are more honored than other women, yeteven 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 women."

  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 show disrespect to a husband who is diseased,addicted to evil passions, or a drunkard. If she does she shall bedeserted for three months and deprived of her ornaments andfurniture.[268] Even British rule has not been able to improve thecondition of woman, for the British Government is bound by treatiesnot to interfere with social and religious customs; hence manypathetic cases are witnessed in the courts of unwilling girls handedover, in accordance with national custom, to the loathed husbandsselected for them. "The gods and justice always favor the men." "Manywomen 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 aHindoo maiden or wife it is the thought that, after all, she is muchbetter off than if she were a widow--though, to be sure, she runsevery risk of becoming one ere she is old enough to be consideredmarriageable in any country where women are regarded as human beings.In considering the treatment of Hindoo widows we reach the climax ofinhuman cruelty--a cruelty far exceeding that practised by AmericanIndians toward female prisoners, because more prolonged and involvingmental as well as physical agonies.

  In 1881 there were in British India alone 20,930,000 widows, 669,000of whom were under nineteen, and 78,976 _under nine_ years ofage.[269] Now a widow's life is naturally apt to be one of hardshipbecause she has lost her protector and bread-winner; but in India thetragedy of her fate is deepened a thousandfold by the diabolicalill-treatment of which she is made the innocent victim. A widow whohas borne sons or who is aged is somewhat less despised than the childwidow; on her falls the worst abuse and hatred of the community,though she be as innocent of any crime as an angel. In the eyes of aHindoo the mere fact of being a widow is a crime--the crime ofsurviving her husband, though he may have been seventy and the wifeseven.

  All women love their soft glossy hair; and a Hindoo woman, saysRamabai Sarasvati (82), "thinks it worse than death to lose her hair";yet "among the Brahmans of Deccan the heads of all widows must beshaved regularly every fortnight." "Shaved head" is a term of derisioneverywhere applied to the widows. All their ornaments are taken fromthem 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 aharlot." One poor woman wrote to a missionary:

  "O great Lord, our name is written with drunkards, with 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:[270] "While our husbands live we aretheir slaves, when they die we are still worse off." The husband'sfuneral, she says, may last all day in a broiling sun, and while theothers are refreshed, she alone is denied food and water. Afterreturning she is reviled by her own relatives. Her mother says:"Unhappy creature! I can't bear the thought of anyone so vile. I wishshe 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 escapethis fate by marrying again. The bare mention of remarriage by awidow, though she be only eight or nine years old, would be regarded,says Dubois (I., 191), "as the greatest of insults." Should she marryagain "she would be hunted out of society, and no decent person wouldventure at any time to have the slightest intercourse with her."

  Attempts have been made in recent times by liberal-minded men to marrywidows; but they were subjected to so much odium and persecutiontherefor 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 aresuicide or a life of shame. To a Hindoo widow, says Ramabai Sarasvati,death is "a thousand times more welcome than her miserable existence."It is for this reason that the suttee or "voluntary" burning of widowson the husband's funeral pyre--the climax of inhuman atrocity--lostsome of its horrors to the victims until the moment of agony arrived.I have already (p. 317) refuted the absurd whim that this voluntarydeath of Hindoo widows was a proof of their conjugal devotion. It wasproof, on the contrary, of the unutterably cruel selfishness of themale Hindoos, who actually forged a text to make the suttee seem areligious duty--a forgery which during two thousand years caused thedeath of countless innocent women. Best was told that the real causeof 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(Reich, _212_). However that may be, the suttee in all probability wasdue to the shrewd calculation that the fear of being burned alive, orbeing more despised and abused than the lowest outcasts, would makewomen more eager to follow obediently the code which makes of themabject slaves of their husbands, living only for them and never havinga 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 priestswere so anxious to prevent them from marrying again was to insure anabundant supply of victims for their immoral purposes. Thehypocritical Brahmans were not only themselves notorious libertines,but they shrewdly calculated that the simplest way to win the favorand secure control of the Indian populace was by pandering to theirsensual appetites and supplying abundant opportunities and excuses fortheir gratification--making these opportunities, in fact, part andparcel of their religious ceremonies. Their temples and their sacredcarts which traversed the streets were decorated with obscene picturesof a peculiarly disgusting kind,[271] which were freely exposed to thegaze of old and young of both sexes; their temples were little morethan nurseries for the rearing of bayaderes, a special class of"sacred prostitutes;" while scenes of promiscuous debauchery sometimesformed part of the religious ceremony, usually under some hypocriticalpretext.

  It would be unjust, however, to make the Brahman priests entirelyresponsible for Hindoo depravity. It has indeed been maintained thatthere was a time when the Hindoos were free from all the vices whichnow afflict them; but that is one of the silly myths of ignorantdreamers, on a level with the notion that savages were corrupted bywhites. One of the oldest Hindoo documents, the _Mahabharata_, givesus the native traditions concerning these "good old times" in twosentences:

  "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 that whichprevailed in Australia. Civilization did not teach the Hindooslove--for that comes last--but merely the refinements of lust, such aseven the Greeks and Romans hardly knew. Ovid's _Ars Amandi_ is a modelof purity compared with the Hindoo "Art of Love," the_K[=a]mas[=u]tram_ (or _Kama Soutra_) of V[=a]tsy[=a]yana, which isnothing less than a handbook for libertines, of which it would beimpossible even to print the table of contents. Whereas the translatorof Ovid into a modern language need not omit more than a page of thetext, the German translator of the _K[=a]mas[=u]tram_, Dr. RichardSchmidt, who did his work in behalf of the Kgl. Akademie derWissenschaften zu Berlin, felt it incumbent on him to turn more thanfifty pages out of four hundred and seventy into Latin. Yet the authorof this book, who lived about two thousand years ago, recommends thatevery one, including young girls, should study it. In India, as hisFrench translator, Lamairesse, writes, "everything is done to awakencarnal desires even in young children of both sexes." The naturalresult is that, as the same writer remarks (186):

  "Les categories des femmes faciles sont si nombreuses qu'elles doivent comprendre presque toutes les personnes du sexe. Aussi un ministre protestant ecrivait-il au milieu de notre siecle qu'il n'existait presque point de femmes vertueuses dans l'Inde."

  The Rev. William Ward wrote (162) in 1824:

  "It is a fact which greatly perplexes many of the well-informed 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 regard, 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."[272]

  TEMPLE GIRLS

  The Brahman priests, who certainly knew their people well, had solittle faith in their virtue that they would not accept a girl to bebrought up for temple service if she was over five years old. She hadto be not only pure but physically flawless and sound in health. Yether purity was not valued as a virtue, but as an article of commerce.The Brahmans utilized the charms of these girls for the purpose ofsupporting the temples with their sinful lives, their gains beingtaken from them as "offerings to the gods." As soon as a girl was oldenough she was put up at auction and sold to the highest bidder. Ifshe was specially attractive the bids would sometimes reach fabuloussums, it being a point of honor and eager rivalry among Rajahs andother wealthy men, young and old, to become the possessors of bayaderedebutantes. Temporarily only, of course, for these girls were neverallowed to marry. While they were connected with the temple they couldgive themselves to anyone they chose, the only condition being thatthey must never refuse a Brahman (Jacolliot, 169-76). The bayaderes,says Dubois, call themselves Deva-dasi, servants or slaves of thegods, "but they are known to the public by the coarser name ofstrumpets." They are, next to the sacrificers, the most importantpersons about the temples. While the poor widows who had beenrespectably married are deprived of all ornaments and joys of life,these wantons are decked with fine clothes, flowers, and jewelry; andgold is showered upon them. The bayaderes Vasantasena is described bythe poet Cudraka as always wearing a hundred gold ornaments, living inher own palace, which has eight luxurious courts, and on one occasionrefusing an unwelcome suitor though he sent 100,000 gold pieces.

  Bayaderes are supposed to be originally descendants of the apsaras, ordancing girls of the god Indra, the Hindoo Jupiter. In reality theyare recruited from various castes, some parents making it a point tooffer their third daughter to the Brahmans. Bands of the bayaderes areengaged by the best families to provide dancing and music, especiallyat weddings. To have dealings with bayaderes is not only in good form,but is a meritorious thing, since it helps to support the temples. Andyet, when one of these girls dies she is not cremated in the sameplace as other women, and her ashes are scattered to the winds. Insome provinces of Bengal, Jacolliot says, she is only half burnt, andthe body then thrown to the jackals and vultures.

  The temple of Sunnat had as many as five hundred of these priestessesof Venus, and a Rajah has been known to entertain as many as twothousand of them. Bayaderes, or Nautch girls, as they are often calledin a general way, are of many grades. The lowest go about the countryin bands, while the highest may rise to the rank and dignity of anAspasia. To the former class belong those referred to by Lowrie(148)--a band of twenty girls, all unveiled and dressed in theirrichest finery, who wanted to dance for his party and were greatlydisappointed when refused. "Most of them were very young--about ten oreleven years old." Their course is brief; they soon lose their charms,are discarded, and end their lives as beggars.

  AN INDIAN ASPASIA

  A famous representative of the superior class of bayaderes is theheroine of King Cudraka's drama just referred to--Vasantasena. She hasamassed immense wealth--the description of her palace takes up severalpages--and is one of the best known personages in town, yet that doesnot prevent her from being spoken of repeatedly as "a noble woman, thejewel of the city."[273] She is, indeed, represented as differing inher love from other bayaderes, and, as she herself remarks, "abayaderes is not reprehensible in the eyes of the world if she givesher heart to a poor man." She sees the Brahman Tscharudatta in thetemple garden of Kama, the god of love, and forthwith falls in lovewith him, as he does with her, though he is married. One afternoon sheis accosted in the street by a relative of the king, who annoys herwith his unwelcome attentions. She takes refuge in her lover's houseand, on the pretext that she has been pursued on account of herornaments, leaves her jewelry in his charge. The jewels are stolenduring the night, and this mishap leads to a series of others whichfinally culminate in Tscharudatta being
led out to execution for thealleged murder of Vasantasena. At the last moment Vasantasena, who hadbeen strangled by the king's relative, but has been revived, appearson 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 ofIndia, probably lived in one of the first centuries of the Christianera. 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 toascribe to the heroine a delicacy of feeling to which women of herclass are naturally strangers. She hesitates to make advances toTscharudatta, and at first wonders whether it would be proper toremain in his house. See informs her pursuer that "love is won bynoble character, not by importunate advances." Tscharudatta says ofher: "There is a proverb that 'money makes love--the treasurer has thetreasure,' But no! she certainly cannot be won with treasures." She isin fact represented throughout as being different from the typicalbayaderes, who are thus described by one of the characters:

  "For money they laugh or weep; they win a man's confidence 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 loud, no scattered barley grows up as rice; so no wanton ever becomes a respectable woman."

  Vasantasena, however, does become a respectable woman. In the lastscene the king confers on her a veil, whereby the stain on her birthand life is wiped away and she becomes Tscharudatta's legitimatesecond wife.

  But how about the first wife? Her actions show how widely in Indiaconjugal love may differ from what we know as such, by the absence ofmonopoly and jealousy. When she first hears of the theft ofVasantasena's jewels in her husband's house she is greatly distressedat the impending loss of his good name, but is not in the leastdisturbed by the discovery that she has a rival. On the contrary, shetakes a string of pearls that remains from her dowry, and sends it toher husband to be given to Vasantasena as an equivalent for her lostjewels. Vasantasena, on her part, is equally free from jealousy.Without knowing whence they came, she afterward sends the pearls toher lover's wife with these words addressed to her servants:

  "Take these pearls and give them to my sister, Tscharudatta's wife, the honorable woman, and say to her: 'Conquered by Tscharudatta'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 herhusband by hastening to get ready for the funeral pyre to be burntalive with his corpse. And when, after expressing her joy at hisrescue and kissing him, she turns and sees Vasantasena, she exclaims:"O this happiness! How do you do, my sister?" Vasantasena replies:"Now I am happy," and the two embrace!

  The translator of Cudraka's play notes in the preface that there is acurious lack of ardor in the expression of Tscharudatta's love forVasantasena, and he naively--though quite in the Hindoospirit--explains this as showing that this superior person (who is amodel of altruistic self-sacrifice in every respect), "remainsuntouched by coarse outbursts of sensual passion." The only time hewarms up is when he hears that the bayaderes prefers him to herwealthy persecutor; he then exclaims, "Oh, how this girl deserves tobe worshipped like a goddess." Vasantasena is much the more ardent ofthe two. It is she who goes forth to seek him, repeatedly, dressed inpurple and pearls, as custom prescribes to a girl who goes to meet herlover. It is she who exclaims: "The clouds may rain, thunder, or sendforth lightning: women who go to meet their lovers heed neither heatnor cold." And again: "may the clouds tower on high, may night comeon, may the rain fall in torrents, I heed them not. Alas, my heartlooks only toward the lover." It is she who is so absent-minded,thinking of him, that her maid suspects her passion; she who, when aroyal suitor is suggested to her, exclaims, "'Tis love I crave tobestow, not homage."

  SYMPTOMS OF FEMININE LOVE

  This portrayal of the girl as the chief lover is quite the custom inHindoo literature, and doubtless mirrors life as it was and is. Like adog that fawns on an indifferent or cruel master, these women of Indiawere sometimes attached to their selfish lovers and husbands. They hadbeen trained from their childhood to be sympathetic, altruistic,devoted, self-sacrificing, and were thus much better prepared than themen for the germs of amorous sentiment, which can grow only in such asoil of self-denial. Hence it is that Hindoo love-poems are usually ofthe feminine gender. This is notably the case with the _Saptacatakam_of Hala, an anthology of seven hundred Prakrit verses made from acountless number of love-poems that are intended to be sung--"songs,"says Albrecht Weber, "such as the girls of India, especially perhapsthe bayaderes or temple girls may have been in the habit ofsinging."[274] Some of these indicate a strong individual preferenceand 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, O child."

  No. 92: "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. 202: "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 my hand)."

  No. 299: "She stares, without having an object, gives vent to long sighs, laughs into vacant space, mutters unintelligible 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?"

  No. 368: "Like illness without a doctor--like living with relatives if one is poor, like the sight of an enemy's prosperity--so difficult is it to endure separation from you."

  No. 378: "Whatever you do, whatever you say, and wherever 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 be
fore me, as if 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 bayaderes, there areothers which obviously give expression to the legitimate feelings ofmarried women. This is especially true of the large number which voicethe sorrows of women at the absence of their husbands after the rainshave set in. The rainy season is in India looked on as the season oflove, and separation from the lover at this time is particularlybewailed, all the more as the rains soon make the roads impassable.

  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 wanderer 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."

  These twenty-one poems are the best samples of everything contained inHala's anthology illustrating the serious side of love among thebayaderes and married women of India. Careful perusal of them mustconvince the reader that there is nothing in them revealing thealtruistic phases of love. There is much ardent longing for theselfish gratification which the presence of a lover would give; deepgrief at his absence; indications that a certain man could afford hermuch more pleasure by his presence than others--and that is all. Whena girl wails that she is dying because her lover is absent she isreally thinking of her own pleasure rather than his. None of thesepoems expresses the sentiment, "Oh, that I could do something to make_him_ happy!" These women are indeed taught and _forced_ to sacrificethemselves 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 ofOriental love is, on the other hand, abundantly illustrated in Hala'spoems, as the following samples show:

  No. 40: "O you pitiless man! You 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, O 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 issuppressed in India, of which we have had some instances before andshall have others presently. Coyness seems to be not much moredeveloped, 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."

  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: "Though disconsolate at the death of her relatives, the captive girl looked lovingly upon the young kidnapper, 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 fickle and transient:

  No. 240: "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: "O 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 persons 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 fanthe flame, but put it out:

  "Love which, once dissolved, is united again, after unpleasant things have been revealed, tastes flat, like water that has been boiled."

  The commercial element is conspicuous in this kind of love; it cannotpersist without a succession of presents:

  No. 67: "When the festival is over nothing gives pleasure. So also with the full moon late in the morning--and of love, which at last becomes insipid--and with gratification, that does not manifest itself in the form of presents."

  The illicit, impure aspect of Oriental love is hinted at in many ofthe poems collected by Hala. There are frequent allusions torendezvous in temples, which are so quiet that the pigeons are scaredby the footsteps of the lovers; or in the high grain of the harvestfields; or on the river banks, so deserted that the monkeys there filltheir paunches with mustard leaves undisturbed.

  No. 19: "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." (_Cf._ also Nos. 223 and 491.)

  No. 628: "O summer time! you who give good opportunities for rendezvous by drying the small ditches and covering 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, which they share with the Japanese, ofbringing a whole scene or episode vividly before the eyes with asentence or two, as all the foregoing selections show. Sometimes awhole 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.)

  SYMPTOMS OF MASCULINE LOVE

  Since Hindoo women, in spite of their altruistic training, areprevented by their lack of culture or virtue (the domestic virtuouswomen have no culture and the cultured bayaderes have no virtue) fromrising to the heights of sentimental love, it would be hopeless toexpect the amazingly selfish, unsympathetic and cruel men to do so,despite their intellectual culture. Among all the seven hundred poemsculled by Hala there are only two or three which even hint at thehigher phases of love in masculine bosoms. Inasmuch as No. 383 tellsus that even "the male elephant, though tormented by great hunger,thinking of his beloved wife, allows the juicy lotos-stalk to witherin his trunk," one could hardly expect of man less than the sentimentexpressed in No. 576: "He who has a faithful love considers himselfcontented even in misfortune, whereas without his love he is unhappythough he possess the
earth." Another poem indicating that Hindoo menmay 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 thanthe women. A frequent complaint of the girls is that the men forgetwhom they happen to be caressing and call them by another girl's name.More frequent still are the complaints of neglect or desertion. One ofthese, No. 46, suggests the praises of night sung in the mediaevallegend of Tristan and Isolde:

  "To-morrow morning, my beloved, the hard-hearted goes away--so people say. O sacred night! do lengthen so that there will be no morning for him."

  At first sight the most surprising and important of Hala's sevenhundred poems seems to be No. 567:

  "Only over me, the iron-hearted, thunder, O cloud, and with all your might; be sure that you do not kill my poor one with the hanging locks."

  Here, for once, we have the idea of self-sacrifice--only the idea, itis true, and not the act; but it indicates a very exceptional andexalted state for a Hindoo even to think of such a thing. Theself-reproach of "iron-hearted" tells us, however, that the man hasbeen behaving selfishly and cruelly toward his sweetheart or wife, andis feeling sorry for a moment. In such moments a Hindoo notinfrequently becomes human, especially if he expects new favors of themaltreated 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."

  References to such prostrations to secure forgiveness for inconstancyor cruelty are frequent in Hindoo poems and dramas, and it is needlessto say that they are a very different thing from the disinterestedprostrations and homage of modern gallantry. True gallantry being oneof the altruistic ingredients of love, it would be useless to seek forit among the Hindoos. Not so with hyperbole, which being simply amagnifying of one's own sensations and an expression of extravagantfeeling of any kind, forms, as we know, a phase of sensual as well asof sentimental love. The eager desire for a girl's favor makes herbreath and all her attributes seem delicious not only to man but toinanimate things. The following, with the finishing touches applied bythe German translator, approaches modern poetic sentiment more closelythan any other of Hala's songs:

  No. 13: "O 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 fromthe sublime to the ridiculous. The author of No. 153 had a happythought when he sang that his beloved was so perfect a beauty that noone had ever been able to see her whole body because the eye refusedto leave whatever part it first alighted on. This pretty notion isturned into unconscious burlesque by the author of No. 274, whocomplains,

  "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 asbrightly as the beloved's face. It is easier for us to sympathize withthe Hindoo poets when they express their raptures over the eyes orlocks 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."

  No. 77: "I think of her countenance with her locks floating loosely about it as she shook her head when I seized her lip--like unto a lotos flower surrounded by a swarm of (black) bees attracted by its fragrance."

  Yet even these two references to personal beauty are not purelyesthetic, and in all the others the sensual aspect is more emphasized:

  No. 556: "The brown girl's hair, which had succeeded in touching her 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 exaggeratedbusts and hips, often in disgustingly coarse comparisons--lines whichcannot be quoted here.[275]

  LYRICS AND DRAMAS

  In his _History of Indian Literature_ (209), Weber says that

  "the erotic lyric commences for us with certain of the poems attributed to Kalidasa." "The later Kavyas are to be ranked with the erotic poems rather than with the epic. In general this love-poetry is of the most unbridled and extravagantly sensual description; yet examples of deep and truly romantic tenderness are not wanting."

  Inasmuch as he attributes the same qualities to some of the Hala poemsin which we have been unable to find them, it is obvious that hisconception of "deep and truly romantic tenderness" is different fromours, and it is useless to quarrel about words. Hala's collection,being an anthology of the best love-songs of many poets, is much morerepresentative and valuable than if the verses were all by the samepoet. If Hindoo bards and bayaderes had a capacity for true altruisticlove-sentiment, these seven hundred songs could hardly have failed toreveal it. But to make doubly sure that we are not misrepresenting aphase of the history of civilization, let us examine the Hindoo dramasmost noted as love-stories, especially those of Kalidasa, whose_Sakuntala_ in particular was triumphantly held up by some of mycritics as a refutation of my theory that none of the ancientcivilized nations knew romantic love. I shall first briefly summarizethe love-stories told in these dramas, and then point out what theyreveal in regard to the Hindoo conception of love as based,presumably, on their experiences.

  I. THE STORY OF SAKUNTALA

  Once upon a time there lived on the banks of the Gautami River ahermit named Kaucika. He was of royal blood and had made so muchprogress with his saintly exercises of penitence that he was on thepoint of being able to defy the laws of Nature, and the godsthemselves began to fear his power. To deprive him of it they sentdown a beautiful _apsara_ (celestial bayaderes) to tempt him. He couldnot resist her charms, and broke his vows. A daughter was born whoreceived the name of Sakuntala, and was given in charge of anothersaint, named Kanva, who brought her up lovingly as if she had been hisown daughter. She has grown up to be a maiden of more than humanbeauty, when one day she is seen by the king, who, while hunting, hasstrayed within the sacred precincts while the saint is away on a holyerrand. He is at once fascinated by her beauty--a beauty, as he saysto himself, such as is seldom found in royal chambers--a wild vinemore lovely than any garden-plant--and she, too, confesses to hercompanions that since she has seen him she is overcome by a feelingwhich seems out of place in this abode of penitence.

  The king cannot bear the idea of returning to his palace, but encampsnear the grove of the penitents. He fears that he may not be able towin the girl's love, and she is tortured by the same doubt regardinghim. "Did Brahma first paint her and then infuse life into her, or didhe in his spirit fashion her out of a number of spirits?" he exclaims.He wonders what excuse he can have for lingering in the grove. Hiscompanion suggests gathering the tithe, but the king retorts: "What Iget 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 shoo
tthis arrow at the gazelles who have lived with her, and who taught thebeloved to gaze so innocently." He grows thin from loss of sleep.Unable to keep his feelings locked up in his bosom, he reveals them tohis companion, the jester, but afterward, fearing he might tell hiswives about this love-affair, he says to him:

  "Of course there is no truth in the notion that I coveted this girl Sakuntala. 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 hisbracelet, 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 timidityproper to the girls of penitents, has done several things thatencouraged 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 pretendedthat her foot had been cut by a blade of kusagrass--but it was merelyan excuse for turning her face. Thus, while her love is not franklydiscovered, it is not covered either. She doubts whether the kingloves her, and her agony throws her into a feverish state which hercompanions try in vain to allay by fanning her with lotos leaves. Theking is convinced that the sun's heat alone could not have affectedher thus. He sees that she has grown emaciated and seems ill. "Hercheeks," 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 withher friends, who are fanning her. He hears her say: "Since the hourwhen he came before my eyes ... the royal sage, ah, since that hour Ihave become as you see me--from longing for him;" and he wonders, "howcould she fear to have any difficulty in winning her lover?" "Thelittle hairs on her cheek reveal her passion by becoming erect," headds 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 knownot; me love burns day and night, you cruel one, because I think ofyou alone."[276] Encouraged by this confession, the king steps fromhis place of concealment and exclaims: "Slender girl, the glowing heatof love only burns you, but me it consumes, and incessant is the greattorture." Sakuntala tries to rise, but is too weak, and the king bidsher dispense with ceremony. While he expresses his happiness at havingfound his love reciprocated, one of the companions mutters somethingabout "Kings having many loves," and Sakuntala herself exclaims: "Whydo you detain the royal sage? He is quite unhappy because he isseparated from his wives at court." But the king protests that thoughhe 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? Shall 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 forbid that I should be so indiscreet with a man that commandsrespect," replies Sakuntala. She tries to escape, and when the kingholds her, she says: "Son of Puru! Observe the laws of propriety andcustom! I am, indeed, inflamed by love, but I cannot dispose ofmyself." The king urges her not to fear her foster father. Many girls,he says, have freely given themselves to kings without incurringparental disapproval; and he tries to kiss her. A voice warns themthat night approaches, and, hearing her friends returning, Sakuntalaurges the king to conceal himself in the bushes.

  Sakuntala now belongs to the king; they are united according to one ofthe eight forms of Hindoo marriage known as that of free choice. Afterremaining with her a short time the king returns to his other wives atcourt. Before leaving he puts a seal ring on her finger and tells herhow she can count the days till a messenger shall arrive to bring herto his palace. But month after month passes and no messenger arrives."The king has acted abominably toward Sakuntala," says one of herfriends; "he has deceived an inexperienced girl who put faith in him.He has not even written her a letter, and she will soon be a mother."She feels convinced, however, that the king's neglect is due to theaction of a saint who had cursed Sakuntala because she had not waitedon him promptly. "Like a drunkard, her lover shall forget what hashappened," was his curse. Relenting somewhat, he added afterward thatthe force of the curse could be broken by bringing to the king someornament that he might have left as a souvenir. Sakuntala has herring, and relying on that she departs with a retinue for the royalabode. On the way, in crossing a river, she loses the ring, and whenshe confronts the king he fails to remember her and dismisses herignominiously. A fisherman afterward finds the ring in the stomach ofa fish, and it gets into the hands of the king, who, at sight of it,remembers Sakuntala and is heartbroken at his cruel conduct towardher. But he cannot at once make amends, as he has chased her away, andit is not till some years later, and with supernatural aid, that theyare reunited.

  II. THE STORY OF URVASI

  The saint Narayana had spent so many years in solitude, addicted toprayers and ascetic practices, that the gods dreaded his growingpower, which was making him like unto them, and to break it they sentdown to him some of the seductive apsaras. But the saint held aflower-stalk to his loins, and Urvasi was born, a girl more beautifulthan the celestial bayaderes who had been sent to tempt him. He gavethis girl to the apsaras to take as a present to the god Indra, whoseentertainers they were. She soon became the special ornament of heavenand Indra used her to bring the saints to fall.

  One day King Pururavas, while out driving, hears female voices callingfor help. Five apsaras appear and implore him, if he can drive throughthe air, to come to the assistance of their companion Urvasi, who hasbeen seized and carried away, northward, by a demon. The kingforthwith orders his charioteer to steer in that direction, anderelong he returns victorious, with the captured maiden on hischariot. She is still overcome with terror, her eyes are closed, andas the king gazes at her he doubts that she can be the daughter of acold and learned hermit; the moon must have created her, or the god oflove himself. As the chariot descends, Urvasi, frightened, leansagainst the king's shoulder, and the little hairs on his body stand upstraight, so much is he pleased thereat. He brings her back to theother apsaras, who are on a mountain-top awaiting their return.Urvasi, too much overcome to thank him for her rescue, begs one of herfriends to do it for her, whereupon the apsaras, bidding him good-by,rise into the air. Urvasi lingers a moment on the pretence that herpearl necklace has got entangled in a vine, but in reality to getanother peep at the king, who addresses fervent words of thanks to thebush for having thus given him another chance to look on her face."Rising into the air," he exclaims, "this girl tears my heart from mybody and carries it away with her."

  The queen soon notices that his heart has gone away with another. Shecomplains of this estrangement to her maid, to whom she sets the taskof discovering the secret of it. The maid goes at it slyly. Addressingthe king's viduschaka (confidential adviser), she informs him that thequeen is very unhappy because the king addressed her by the name ofthe girl he longs for. "What?" retorts the viduschaka--"the kinghimself has revealed the secret? He called her Urvasi?" "And who, yourhonor, is Urvasi?" says the maid. "She is one of the apsaras," hesays. "The sight of her has infatuated the king's senses so that hetortures not only the queen but me, the Brahman, too, for he no longerthinks of eating." But he expresses his conviction that the folly willnot last long, and the maid departs.

  Urvasi, tortured, like the king, by love and doubt, suppresses herbashfulness and asks one of her friends to go with her to get herpearl necklace which she had left entangled in the vine. "Then you arehurrying down, surely, to see Pururavas, the king?" says the friend;"and whom h
ave you sent in advance?" "My heart," replied Urvasi. Sothey fly down to the earth, invisible to mortals, and when they seethe king, Urvasi declares that he seems to her even more beautifulthan at their first meeting. They listen to the conversation betweenhim and the viduschaka. The latter advises his master to seekconsolation by dreaming of a union with his love, or by painting herpicture, but the king answers that dreams cannot come to a man who isunable to sleep, nor would a picture be able to stop his flood oftears. "The god of love has pierced my heart and now he tortures me bydenying my wish." Encouraged by these words, but unwilling to makeherself visible, Urvasi takes a piece of birch-bark, writes on it amessage, and throws it down. The king sees it fall, picks it up andreads:

  "I love you, O master; you did not know, nor I, that you burn with love for me. No longer do I find rest on my coral couch, and the air of the celestial grove burns me like fire."

  "What will he say to that?" wonders Urvasi, and her friend replies,"Is there not an answer in his limbs, which have become like witheredlotos stalks?" The king declares to his friend that the message on theleaf has made him as happy as if he had seen his beloved's face.Fearing that the perspiration on his hand (the sign of violent love)might wash away the message, he gives the birch-bark to theviduschaka. Urvasi's friend now makes herself visible to the king, whowelcomes her, but adds that the sight of her delights him not as itdid when Urvasi was with her. "Urvasi bows before you," the apsaraanswers, "and sends this message: 'You were my protector, O master,when a demon offered me violence. Since I saw you, god Kama hastortured me violently; therefore you must sometime take pity on me,great king!'" And the king retorts: "The ardor of love is here equallygreat on either side. It is proper that hot iron be welded with hotiron." After this Urvasi makes herself visible, too, but the king hashardly had time to greet her, when a celestial messenger arrives tosummon her hastily back to heaven, to her own great distress and theking's.

  Left alone, the king wants to seek consolation in the message writtenon the birch-bark. But to their consternation, they cannot find it. Ithad dropped from the viduschaka's hand and the wind had carried itoff. "O 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 hundred 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 thebackground. They come across the birch-bark, see the message on it,and the maid reads it aloud. "With this gift of the celestial girl letus now meet her lover," says the queen, and stepping forward, sheconfronts the king with the words: "Here is the bark, my husband. Youneed not search for it longer." Denial is useless; the king prostrateshimself at her feet, confessing his guilt and begging her not to beangry at her slave. But she turns her back and leaves him. "I cannotblame her," says the king; "homage to a woman leaves her cold unlessit is inspired by love, as an artificial jewel leaves an expert whoknows the fire of genuine stones." "Though Urvasi has my heart," headds, "yet I highly esteem the queen. Of course, I shall meet her withfirmness, since she has disdained my prostration at her feet."

  The reason why Urvasi had been summoned back to heaven so suddenly wasthat Indra wanted to hear a play which the celestial manager hadrehearsed with the apsaras. Urvasi takes her part, but her thoughtsare so incessantly with the king that she blunders repeatedly. Sheputs passion into lines which do not call for it, and once, when sheis 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 similarsound called for in the play. For these mistakes her teacher cursesher and forbids her remaining in heaven any longer. Then Indra says tothe abashed maiden: "I must do a favor to the king whom you love andwho aids me in battle. Go and remain with him at your will, until youhave borne him a son."

  Ignorant of the happiness in store for him, the king meanwhilecontinues to give utterance to his longings and laments. "The day hasnot passed so very sadly; there was something to do, no time forlonging. But how shall I spend the long night, for which there is nopastime?" The viduschaka counsels hope, and the king grants that eventhe tortures of love have their advantage; for, as the force of thetorrent is increased a hundredfold if a rock is interposed, so is thepower of love if obstacles retard the blissful union. The twitching ofhis right arm (a favorable sign) augments his hope. At the moment whenhe remarks: "The anguish of love increases at night," Urvasi and herfriend came down from the air and hover about him. "Nothing can coolthe 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 Urvasi boldly steps before the king, but he pays noattention to her. "The great king," she complains to her friend,"remains cold though I stand before him." "Impetuous girl," is theanswer, "you are still wearing your magic veil; he cannot see you."

  At this moment voices are heard and the queen appears with herretinue. She had already sent a message to the king to inform him thatshe was no longer angry and had made a vow to fast and wear no fineryuntil the moon had entered the constellation of Rohini, in order toexpress her penitence and conciliate her husband. The king, greetingher, expresses sorrow that she should weaken her body, delicate aslotos root, by thus fasting. "What?" he adds, "you yourself conciliatethe slave who ardently longs to be with you and who is anxious to winyour indulgence!" "What great esteem he shows her!" exclaims Urvasi,with a confused smile; but her companion retorts: "You foolish girl, aman of the world is most polite when he loves another woman." "Thepower of my vow," says the queen, "is revealed in his solicitude forme." Then she folds her hands, and, bowing reverently, says:

  "I call to witness these two gods, the Moon and his Rohini, 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 himself to hisyearning for his beloved. "Would that she came from behind and put herlotos hands over my eyes." Urvasi hears the words and fulfils hiswish. He knows who it is, for every little hair on his body stands upstraight. "Do not consider me forward if now I embrace his body," saysUrvasi to her friend; "for the queen has given him to me." "You takemy body as the queen's present," says the king; "but who, you thief,allowed you before that to steal my heart?" "It shall always be yoursand I your slave alone," he continues. "When I took possession of thethrone I did not feel so near my goal as now when I begin my serviceat your feet." "The moon's rays which formerly tortured me now refreshmy body, and welcome are Kama's arrows which used to wound me." "Didmy delaying do you harm?" asks Urvasi, and he replies: "Oh, no! Joy issweeter when it follows distress. He who has been exposed to the sunis cooled by the tree's shade more than others;" and he ends the samewith the words: "A night seemed to consist of a hundred nights ere mywish was fulfilled; may it be the same now that I am with you, Obeauty! how glad I should be!"

  Absorbed by his happy love, the king hands over the reins ofgovernment to his ministers and retires with Urvasi to a forest. Oneday he looks for a moment thoughtfully at another girl, whereat Urvasigets so jealous that she refuses to accept his apology, and in heranger 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 goesout of his mind from grief; he roams all over the forest, alternatelyfainting and raving, calling upon peacock and cuckoo, bee, swan, andelephant, antelope, mountain, and river to give him tidings of hisbeloved, her with the antelope eyes and the big breasts, and the
hipsso broad that she can only walk slowly. At last he sees in a cleft alarge red jewel and picks it up. It is the stone of union whichenables lovers to find one another. An impulse leads him to embracethe vine before him and it changes to Urvasi. A son is afterward bornto her, but she sends him away before the king knows about it, and hashim brought up secretly lest she be compelled to return at once toheaven. But Indra sends a messenger to bring her permission to remainwith the king as long as he lives.

  III. MALAVIKA AND AGNIMITRA

  Queen Dharini, the head wife of King Agnimitra, has received from herbrother a young girl named Malavika, whom he has rescued from robbers.The queen is just having a large painting made of herself and herretinue, and Malavika finds a place on it at her side. The king seesthe picture and eagerly inquires: "Who is that beautiful maiden?" Thesuspicious queen does not answer his question, but takes measures tohave the girl carefully concealed from him and kept busy with dancinglessons. But the king accidentally hears Malavika's name and makes uphis mind that he must have her. "Arrange some stratagem," he says tohis viduschaka, "so I may see her bodily whose picture I beheldaccidentally." The viduschaka promptly stirs up a dispute between thetwo dancing-masters, which is to be settled by an exhibition of theirpupils before the king. The queen sees through the trick too late toprevent its execution and the king's desire is gratified. He seesMalavika, and finds her more beautiful even than her picture--her facelike the harvest moon, her bosom firm and swelling, her waist smallenough to span with the hand, her hips big, her toes beautifullycurved. She has never seen the king, yet loves him passionately. Herleft eye twitches--a favorable sign--and she sings: "I must obey thewill of others, but my heart desires you; I cannot conceal it." "Sheuses her song as a means of offering herself to you," says theviduschaka to the king, who replies: "In the presence of the queen herlove saw no other way." "The Creator made her the poisoned arrow ofthe god of love," he continues to his friend after the performance isover and they are alone. "Apply your mind and think out other plansfor meeting her." "You remind me," says the viduschaka, "of a vulturethat hovers over a butcher's shop, filled with greed for meat but alsowith fear. I believe the eagerness to have your will has made youill." "How were it possible to remain well?" the king retorts. "Myheart no longer desires intimacies with any woman in all my harem. Toher with the beautiful eyes, alone shall my love be devotedhenceforth."

  In the royal gardens stands an asoka tree whose bloom is retarded. Tohasten it, the tree must be touched by the decorated foot of abeautiful woman. The queen was to have done this, but an accident hasinjured her foot and she has asked Malavika to take her place. Whilethe king and his adviser are walking in the garden they see Malavikaall alone. Her love has made her wither like a jasmine wreath blightedby frost. "How long," she laments, "will the god of love make meendure this anguish, from which there is no relief?" One of thequeen's maids presently arrives with the paints and rings fordecorating Malavika's feet. The king watches the proceeding, and afterthe 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 thetree, has long had no occasion to bloom, and begs her to make himalso, who loves only her, happy with the nectar of her touch.Unluckily this whole scene has also been secretly witnessed byIravati, the second of the king's wives, who steps forward at thismoment and sarcastically tells Malavika to do his bidding. Theviduschaka tries to help out his confused master by pretending thatthe meeting was accidental, and the king humbly calls himself herloving husband, her slave, asks her pardon, and prostrates himself;but she exclaims: "These are not the feet of Malavika whose touch youdesire to still your longing," and departs. The king feels quite hurtby 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 prostration. 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 commonhusband's new escapade. When the king hears of this he is astonishedat "such persistent anger," and dismayed on learning further thatMalavika is now confined in a dungeon, under lock and key, whichcannot be opened unless a messenger arrives with the queen's own sealring. But once more the viduschaka devises a ruse which puts him inpossession of the seal ring. The maiden is liberated and brought tothe water-house, whither the king hastens to meet her with theviduschaka, who soon finds an excuse for going outside with the girl'scompanion, leaving the lovers alone. "Why do you still hesitate, Obeauty, to unite yourself with one who has so long longed for yourlove?" exclaims the king; and Malavika answers: "What I should like todo I dare not; I fear the queen." "You need not fear her." "Did I notsee the master himself seized with fear when he saw the queen?" "Oh,that," replies the king, "was only a matter of good breeding, asbecomes princes. But you, with the long eyes, I love so much that mylife depends on the hope that you love me too. Take me, take me, wholong have loved you." With these words he embraces her, while shetries to resist. "How charming is the coyness of young girls!" heexclaims.

  "Trembling, she tries to restrain my hand, 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 disturbthe king's bliss. Her object is to go to the king's picture in thewater-house and beg its pardon for having been disrespectful, thisbeing better, in her opinion, than appearing before the king himself,since he has given his heart to another, while in that picture he haseyes for her alone (as Malavika, too, had noticed when she entered thewater-house). The viduschaka has proved an unreliable sentinel; he hasfallen asleep at the door of the house. The queen's maid perceivesthis and, to tease him, touches him with a crooked staff. He awakescrying that a snake has bitten him. The king runs out and isconfronted again by Iravati. "Well, well!" she exclaims, "this couplemeet in broad daylight and without hindrance to gratify their wishes!""An unheard-of greeting is this, my dear," said the king. "You aremistaken; I see no cause for anger. I merely liberated the two girlsbecause this is a holiday, on which servants must not be confined, andthey came here to thank me." But he is glad to escape when a messengerarrives opportunely to announce that a yellow ape has frightened theprincess.

  "My heart trembles when I think of the queen," says Malavika, leftalone with her companion. "What will become of me now?" But the queenknows her duty, according to Hindoo custom. She makes her maids arrayMalavika in marriage dress, and then sends a message to the kingsaying that she awaits him with Malavika and her attendants. The girldoes not know why she has been so richly attired, and when the kingbeholds her he says to himself: "We are so near and yet apart. I seemto myself like the bird Tschakravaka;[277] and the name of the nightwhich does not allow me to be united with my love is Dharini." At thatmoment two captive girls are brought before the assemblage, and toeveryone's surprise they greet Malavika as "Princess." A princess sheproves to be, on inquiry, and the queen now carries out the plan shehad had in her mind, with the consent also of the second queen, whosends her apologies at the same time. "Take her," says Dharini to theking, and at a hint of the viduschaka she takes a veil and by puttingit on the new bride makes her a queen and spouse of equal rank withherself. And the king answers:

  "I am not surprised at your magnanimity. 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 blessedwith offspring, and this made him unhappy.[278] He curbed all hisappetites and for eighteen years lived a life of devotion to hisreligious duties. At the expiration of these years Savitri, thedaughter of the sun-god, appeared to him and offered to reward him bygranting a favor. "Sons I crave, many sons, O goddess, sons topreserve my family," he answered. But Savitri promised him a daughter;and she was born to him by his oldest wife and was named after thegoddess Savitri. She grew up to be so beautiful, so broad-hipped, likea golden statue, that she seemed of divine origin, and, abashed, noneof the men came to choose her as his wife. This saddened her fatherand he said:

  "Daughter, it is time 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 shevisited all the groves of the saints and at last found a man after herheart, whose name was Satyavant. Then she returned to her father--whowas just conversing with the divine sage Narada--and told him of herchoice. But Narada exclaimed: "Woe and alas, you have chosen one whois, indeed, endowed with all the virtues, but who is doomed to die ayear from this day." Thereupon the king begged Savitri to chooseanother for her husband, but she replied: "May his life be long orshort, may he have merits or no merits, I have selected him as myhusband, and a second I shall not choose." Then the king and Naradaagreed not to oppose her, and she went with her father to the grovewhere she had seen Satyavant, the man of her choice. The king spoke tothis man's father and said: "Here, O royal saint, is my lovelydaughter, Savitri; take her as your daughter-in-law in accordance withyour duty as friend." And the saint replied: "Long have I desired sucha bond of relationship; but I have lost my royal dignity, and howcould your daughter endure the hardships of life in the forest?" Butthe king replied that they heeded not such things and their mind wasmade up. So all the Brahmans were called together and the king gavehis daughter to Satyavant, who was pleased to win a wife endowed withso many virtues.

  When her father had departed, Savitri put away all her ornaments andassumed the plain garb of the saints. She was modest, self-contained,and strove to make herself useful and to fulfil the wishes of all. Butshe counted the days, and the time came when she had to say toherself, "In three days he must die." And she made a vow and stood inone 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 wentinto the primeval forest to get some wood and fruits. For the firsttime 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 flamesof sadness. He called her attention, as they walked on, to the limpidrivers and noble trees decked with flowers of many colors, but she hadeyes only for him, following his every movement; for she looked on himas a dead man from that hour. He was filling his basket with fruitswhen suddenly he was seized with violent headache and longing forsleep. 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 arope in his hand. And she said: "Who are you?" "You," he replied, "area woman faithful to your husband and of good deeds, therefore will Ianswer you. I am Yama, and I have come to take away your husband,whose life has reached its goal." And with a mighty jerk he drew fromthe husband's body his spirit, the size of a thumb, and forthwith thebreath of life departed from the body. Having carefully tied the soul,Yama departed toward the south. Savitri, tortured by anguish, followedhim. "Turn back, Savitri," he said; "you owe your husband nothingfurther, and you have gone as far as you can go." "Wherever my husbandgoes or is taken, there I must go; that is an eternal duty." ThereuponYama offered to grant any favor she might ask--except the life of herhusband. "Restore the sight of the blind king, my father-in-law," shesaid; and he answered: "It is done already." He offered a second favorand she said: "Restore his kingdom to my father-in-law;" and it wasgranted, as was also the third wish: "Grant one hundred sons to myfather, who has none." Her fourth wish, too, he agreed to: that sheherself might have a hundred sons; and as he made the fifth and lastwish unconditional, she said:

  "Let Satyavant return to life; for, bereft of him, I desire not happiness; 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 them shall be mighty kings."

  With these words he went his way. Life returned to the body ofSatyavant, and his first feeling was distress lest his parents grieveover his absence. Thinking him too weak to walk, Savitri wanted tosleep in the forest, surrounded by a fire to keep off wild beasts, buthe replied:

  "My father and mother are distressed even in the daytime when I am away. Without them I could not live. As long as they live I live only for them. Rather than let anything happen to them, I give up my own life, you woman with the beautiful hips; truly I shall kill myself sooner."

  So she helped him to rise, and they returned that very night, to thegreat joy of their parents and friends; and all the promises of Yamawere fulfilled.

  V. NALA AND DAMAYANTI

  Once upon a time there was a king by the name of Nala, a man handsomeas the god of love, endowed with all the virtues, a favorite of menand women. There was also another king, named Bhima, the Terrible. Hewas renowned as a warrior and endowed with many virtues; yet he wasdiscontented, for he had no offspring. But it happened that he wasvisited by a saint, whom he entertained so hospitably that the Brahmangranted him in return a favor: a daughter and three sons were born tohim. The daughter, who received the name of Damayanti, soon becamefamed for her beauty, her dignity, and her gracious manners. Sheseemed, amid her companions, like lightning born in a rain-cloud. Herbeauty was so much vaunted in the hearing of King Nala, and his meritswere so much extolled in her presence, that the two conceived anardent passion for one another, though they had never met. Nala couldhardly endure his yearnings of love; near the apartments of the womenthere was a forest; into that he retired, living in solitude. One dayhe came across some gold-decked geese. He caught one of them and shesaid to him: "Spare my life and I promise to praise you in Damayanti'spresence 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 mannamed Nala; he is like the celestial knights; no human being equalshim. Yes, if you could become _his_ wife, it would be worth while thatyou 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 goand speak to Nala similarly about her, and the goose said "Yes" andflew away.

  From that moment Damayanti was always in spirit with Kala. Sunk inreverie, sad, with pale face, she visibly wasted away, and sighing washer only, her favorite, occupation. If anyone saw her gazing upward,absorbed in her thoughts, he might have almost fancied herintoxicated. Often of a sudden her whole face turned pale; in short,it was plain that love-longing held her senses captive. Lying in bed,sitting, eating, everything is distasteful to her; neither at nightnor by day does sleep come to her. Ah and alas! thus her wailsresound, 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 mydaughter no longer well?" and it occurred to him that she had reachedthe marriageable age, and it became clear to him that he must withoutdelay give her a chance to choose a husband. So he invited all thekings to assemble at his court for that purpose on a certain day. Soonthe roads were filled with kings, p
rinces, elephants, horses, wagons,and warriors, for she, the pearl of the world, was desired of menabove all other women. King Nala also had received the message and setout on his journey hopefully. Like the god of love incarnate helooked. Even the ruling gods heard of the great event and went to jointhe worldly rulers. As they approached the earth's surface they beheldKing Nala. Pleased with his looks, they accosted him and said: "We areimmortals journeying on account of Darnayanti. As for you, go you andbring Damayanti this message: 'The four gods, Indra, Agni, Yama,Varuna, desire to have you for a wife. Choose one of these four godsas your wedded husband.'"

  Folding his hands humbly, Nala 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, because he had promised toserve them before he knew what they wanted. They endowed him withpower to enter the carefully guarded apartments of the princess, andpresently he found himself in her presence. Her lovely face, hercharmingly moulded limbs, her slender body, her beautiful eyes,diffused a splendor that mocked the light of the moon and increasedhis pangs of love; but he resolved to keep his promise. When the youngmaidens beheld him they could not utter a word; they were dazed by thesplendor of his appearance, and abashed, the beautiful virgins. Atlast the astonished Damayanti began to speak and said with a sweetsmile:

  "Who are you, you with the faultless form, who increase the yearnings of my love? Like an immortal you came here, O hero! I would like to know you better, noble, 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, O 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 shelaughed 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 firebrand. It was for your sake, O hero, that all these kings were in reality called together so hastily. Should you ever, O my pride, be able to scorn me, who is so devoted to you, I 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. Remember, too, that a mortal who does something to displease 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-borntears: "My reverence to the gods! As husband I choose you, mightyruler on earth. What I say to you is immutable truth." "I am here nowas messenger of the gods, and cannot, therefore, plead my own cause.Later I shall have a chance to speak for myself," said Nala; andDamayanti 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."

  Returning to the gods, Nala told them just what happened, not omittingher promise that she would choose him in presence of the gods. The daynow was approaching when the kings, who, urged by love-longings, hadassembled, were to appear before the maiden. With their beautifulhair, noses, eyes, and brows, these royal personages shone like thestars in heaven. They fixed their gaze on the maiden's limbs, andwherever the eyes first rested there they remained fixed immovably.But the four gods had all assumed the exact form and appearance ofNala, and when Damayanti was about to choose him she saw five men allalike. How could she tell which of them was the king, her beloved?After a moment's thought she uttered an invocation to the gods callingupon them to assume the characteristics by which they differ frommortals. The gods, moved by her anguish, her faith in the power oftruth, her intelligence and passionate devotion, heard her prayer andforthwith they appeared to her free from perspiration, with fixedgaze, ever fresh wreath, free from dust; and none of them, whilestanding, touched the floor; whereas King Nala betrayed himself bythrowing a shadow, by having dust and perspiration on his body, awithered wreath, and eyelids that winked.

  Thereupon the big-eyed maiden timidly seized him by the hem of hisgarment and put a beautiful wreath on his shoulders. Thus did shechoose him to be her husband; and the gods granted them specialfavors.[279]

  According to Schroeder, the Hindoos are "the romantic nation" amongthe ancients, as the Germans are among the moderns; and Albrecht Webersays that when, a little more than a century ago, Europe first becameacquainted with Sanscrit literature, it was noticed that in theamorous poetry of India in particular the sentimental qualities ofmodern verse were traced in a much higher degree than they had beenfound in Greek and Roman literature. All this is doubtless true. TheHindoos appear to have been the only ancient people that took delightin forests, rivers, and mountains as we do; in reading theirdescriptions of Nature we are sometimes affected by a mysteriousfeeling of awe, like a reminiscence of the time when our ancestorslived in India. Their amorous hyperbole, too, despite its frequentgrotesqueness, affects us perhaps more sympathetically than that ofthe Greeks. And yet the essentials of what we call romantic love areso entirely absent from ancient Hindoo literature that such amoroussymptoms as are noted therein can all be readily brought under thethree heads of artificiality, sensuality, 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 everything the Hindoos do. A bayaderes straying to Paris and making use of them would be a curiosity so extraordinary that she would certainly enjoy a succes de vogue pour rire."

  Nail-marks on various parts of the body, blows, bites, meaninglessexclamations are prescribed or described in the diverse love-scenes.In Hindoo dramas several of the artificial symptoms--pure figments ofthe poetic fancy--are incessantly referred to. One of the mostludicrous of them is the drops of perspiration on the cheeks or otherparts of the body, which are regarded as an infallible and inevitablesign of love. Urvasi's royal lover is afraid to take her birch-barkmessage in his hand lest his perspiration wipe away the letters. InBhavabhuti's drama, _Malati and Madhava_, the heroine's feet perspireso profusely from excess of longing, that the lacquer of her couch ismelted; and one of the stage directions in the same drama is:"Perspiration appears on Madayantika, with other things indicatinglove."

  Another of these grotesque symptoms is the notion that the touch ormere thought of the beloved makes the small hairs all over the bodystand erect. No love-scene seems to be complete without this detail.The drama just referred to, in different scenes, makes the hairs onthe cheeks, on the arms, all over the body, rise "splendidly," theauthor says in one line.[280] A Hindoo lover always has twitching ofthe right or left arm or eye to indicate what kind of luck he is goingto have; and she is equally favored. Usually the love is mutual and atfirst sight--nay, preferably _before_ first sight. The mere hearsaythat a certain man or maiden is very beautiful suffices, as we saw inthe story of Nala and Damayanti, to banish sleep and appetite, and tomake the lover pale and wan and most wretched. Sakuntala's royal loverwastes away so rapidly that in a few days his bracelet falls from hisattenuated arm, and Sakuntala herself becomes so weak that she cannotrise,
and is supposed to have sunstroke! Malati dwindles until herform resembles the moon in its last quarter; her face is as pale asthe moon at morning dawn. Always both the lovers, though he be aking--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 thesesymptoms the poets prescribe as regularly as a physician makes out aprescription for an apothecary.

  A peculiar stare--which must be sidelong, not direct at thebeloved--is another conventional characteristic of Hindoo amorousfiction. The gait becomes languid, the breathing difficult, the heartstops beating or is paralyzed with joy; the limbs or the whole bodywither like flower-stalks after a frost; the mind is lamed, the memoryweakened; cold shivers run down the limbs and fever shakes the body;the arms hang limp at the side, the breast heaves, words stick in thethroat; pastimes no longer entertain; the perfumed Malayan wind crazesthe mind; the eyelids are motionless, sighs give vent to anguish,which may end in a swoon, and if things take an unfavorable turn thethought of suicide is not distant. Attempts to cure this ardent loveare futile; Madhava tries snow, and moonlight, and camphor, and lotosroots, and pearls, and sandal oil rubbed on his skin, but all in vain.

  THE HINDOO GOD OF LOVE

  Quite as artificial and unsentimental as the notions of the Hindoosconcerning the symptoms of love is their conception of their god oflove, Kama, the husband of Lust. His bow is made of sugar-cane, itsstring a row of bees, and his arrow-tips are red flower-buds. Springis his bosom friend, and he rides on a parrot or the sea-monsterMakara. He is also called Ananga--the bodiless--because Siwa onceburned him up with the fire that flashed from his third eye fordisturbing him in his devotions by awakening in him love for Parwati.Sakuntala's lover wails that Kama's arrows are "not flowers, but hardas diamond." Agnimitra declares that the Creator made his beloved "thepoison-steeped arrow of the God of Love;" and again, he says: "Thesoftest and the sharpest things are united in you, O Kama." Urvasi'sroyal lover complains that his "heart is pierced by Kama's arrow," andin _Malati and Madhava_ we are told that "a cruel god no doubt isKama;" while No. 329 of Ilala'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, insufferably hot; and though piercing, yet causing delight."

  Our familiarity with Greek and Roman literature has made us soaccustomed to the idea of a Cupid awakening love by shooting arrowsthat we fail to realize how entirely fanciful, not to say whimsical,this conceit is. It would be odd, indeed, if the Hindoo poets hadhappened on the same fancy as the Greeks of their own accord; butthere is no reason to suppose that they did. Kama is one of the latergods of the Indian Pantheon, and there is every reason to believe thatthe Hindoos borrowed him from the Greeks, as the Romans did. In_Sakuntala_ (27) there is a reference to the Greek women who form theking's body-guard; in _Urvasi_ (70) to a slave of Greek descent; andthere are many things in the Hindoo drama that betray Greek influence.

  Besides being artificial and borrowed, Kama is entirely sensual. Kamameans "gratification of the senses,"[281] and of all the epithetsbestowed on their god of love by the Hindoos none rises distinctlyabove sensual ideas. Dowson (147) has collated these epithets; theyare: "the beautiful," "the inflamer," "lustful," "desirous," "thehappy," "the gay, or wanton," "deluder," "the lamp of honey, or ofspring," "the bewilderer," "the crackling fire," "the stalk ofpassion," "the weapon of beauty," "the voluptuary," "remembrance,""fire," "the handsome."[282]

  The same disregard of sentimental, devotional, and altruistic elementsis shown in the Ten Stages of Love-Sickness as conceived by theHindoos: (1) desire; (2) thinking of her (his) beauty; (3) reminiscentrevery; (4) boasting of her (his) excellence; (5) excitement; (6)lamentations; (7) distraction; (8) illness; (9) insensibility; (10)death.[283]

  DYING FOR LOVE

  The notion that the fever of love may become so severe as to lead todeath plays an important role in Hindoo amorous sophistry. "Hindoocasuists," says Lamairesse (151, 179), "always have a peremptoryreason, in their own eyes, for dispensing with all scruples inlove-affairs: the necessity of not dying for love." "It ispermissible," says the author of _Kama Soutra_, "to seduce anotherman's wife if one is in danger of dying from love for her;" upon whichLamairesse comments:

  "This principle, liberally interpreted by those interested, excuses all intrigues; in theory it is capable of accommodating 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 superstition tofoster that national licentiousness by which they themselves profitedmost. Small wonder that the _Hitopadesa_ declared (92) that "there isperhaps in all the world not a man who covets not his neighbor'swife;" or that the same collection of wise stories and maxims shouldtake 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 whohave no opportunity to meet a lover." "A woman's lust can no more besatisfied 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 themare a caressing wife and a devoted sweetheart beside her--upon whichthe editor, Johannes Hertel, comments: "To a Hindoo there is nothingobjectionable in such a sentiment."

  WHAT HINDOO POETS ADMIRE IN WOMEN

  The Hindoo's inability to rise above sensuality also manifests itselfin his admiration of personal beauty, which is purely carnal. No. 217of 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 ofthe teeth to the lotos, there is nothing in the amorous hyperbole ofHindoo poets that rises above the voluptuous into the neighborhood ofesthetic admiration. Hindoo statues embodying the poets' ideal ofwomen's waists so narrow that they can be spanned by the hand, showhow infinitely inferior the Hindoos were to the Greeks in theirappreciation of human beauty. The Hindoo poet's ideal of femininebeauty is a wasp-waist and grossly exaggerated bust and hips.Bhavabhuti allows his heroine Malati to be thus addressed (by agirl!):

  "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 bythe enamored men. Kalidasa makes King Pururavas, crazed by the loss ofUrvasi, exclaim:

  "Have you seen the divine beauty, who is compelled by the weight of her hips to walk slowly, and who never sees the flight of youth, whose bosom is high and swelling, whose gait is as the swan's?"

  In another place he refers to her footsteps "pressed in deeper behindby the weight of the beloved's hips," Satyavant has no other epithetfor Savitri than "beautiful-hipped." It is the same with Sakuntala'slover (who has been held up as an ancient embodiment of modernethereal sentiment). What does he admire in Sakuntala? "Here," hesays, "in the yellow sand are a number of fresh footsteps; they arehigher in front, but depressed behind by the weight of her hips." "Howslow was her gait--and naturally so, considering the weight of herhips." Compare also the poet's remarks on her bodily charms when theking first sees her.[284] Among all of the king's hyperboliccompliments and remarks there is not one that shows him to befascinated by anything but the purely bodily charms of the young girl,charms of a coarse, voluptuous kind, calculated to increase _his_pleasure should he succeed in winning her, while there is not a
traceof a desire on his part to make _her_ happy. Nor is there anything inSakuntala's symptoms rising above selfish distress at her uncertainty,or selfish longing to possess her lover. In a word, there is noromantic love, in our sense of the word, in the dramas of the mostromantic poet of the most romantic nation of antiquity.[285]

  THE OLD STORY OF SELFISHNESS

  It might be maintained that the symptoms of true affection--altruisticdevotion to the verge of self-sacrifice--are revealed, at any rate, inthe _conjugal_ love of Savitri and of Damayanti. Savitri follows thegod of death as he carries away her husband's spirit, and by herdevotion and entreaties persuades Yama to restore him to life; whileDamayanti (whose story we did not finish) follows her husband, afterhe has gambled away all his kingdom, into the forest to suffer withhim. One night, while she sleeps, he steals half of her only garmentand deserts her. Left alone in the terrible forest with tigers andsnakes, she sobs aloud and repeatedly faints away from fear. "Yet I donot weep for myself," she exclaims; "my only thought is, how will youfare, my royal master, being left thus all alone?" She is seized by ahuge snake, which coils its body around her; yet "even in thissituation she thinks not so much of herself as she bewails the fate ofthe king." A hunter saves her and proceeds to make improper advances,but she, faithful to her lord, curses the hunter and he falls deadbefore her. Then she resumes her solitary roaming in the gloomyforest, "_distressed by grief for her husband's fate_," unmindful ofhis cruelty, or of her own sad plight.

  It is needless to continue the tale; the reader cannot be so obtuse asnot to notice the _moral_ of it. The stories of Savitri and ofDamayanti, far from exemplifying Hindoo conjugal devotion, simplyafford fresh proof of the hoggish selfishness of the male Hindoo. Theyare intended to be _object-lessons_ to wives, teaching them--like thelaws of Manu and the custom of widow burning--that they do not existfor their own sakes, but for their husbands. Reading the stories inthe light of this remark, we cannot fail to note everywhere the subtlecraft of the sly men who invented them. If further evidence wereneeded to sustain my view it would be found in the fact related by F.Reuleaux, that to this day the priests arrange an annual"prayer-festival" of Hindoo women at which the wife must in every wayshow her subjection to her husband and master. She must wash his feet,dry them, put a wreath around his neck, and bring offerings to thegods, praying that _he_ may prosper and live long. Then follows a mealfor which she has prepared all _his_ favorite dishes. And as a climax,_the story of Savitri is read_, a story in which the wife lives onlyfor the husband, while he, as he rudely tells her--after all herdevotion--_lives only for his parents_!

  If these stories were anything else than slyly planned object-lessonscalculated to impress and subjugate the women, why is it that the_husband_ is never chosen to act the self-sacrificing part? He does,indeed, sometimes indulge in frantic outbursts of grief and maudlinsentimentality, but that is because he has lost the young woman whopleased his senses. There is no sign of soul-love here; the husbandnever dreams of devoting his life to her, of sacrificing it for hersake, 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 yourlife," we read in the _Hitopadesa_ (25); and No. 4112 of Boehtlingk's_Hindu Maxims_ declares bluntly that a wife exists for the purpose ofbearing sons, and a son for the purpose of offering sacrifices afterhis father's death. There we have masculine selfishness in a nutshell.Another maxim declares that a wife can atone for her lack or loss ofbeauty by faithful subjection to her husband. And in return for allthe devotion expected of her she is utterly despised--consideredunworthy of an education, unfit even to profess virginity--in a word,looked on "as scarcely forming a part of the human species." In themost important event in her life--marriage--her choice is neverconsulted. The matter is, as we have seen, left to the family barber,or to the parents, to whom questions of caste and wealth are ofinfinitely more importance than personal preferences. When thosematters are arranged the man satisfies himself concerning theinclinations of the chosen girl's _kindred_, and when assured that hewill not "suffer the affront of a refusal" from _them_ he proceedswith the offer and the bargaining. "To marry or to buy a girl aresynonymous terms in this country," says Dubois (I., 198); and heproceeds, to give an account of the bargaining and the disgracefulquarrels this leads to.

  BAYADERES AND PRINCESSES AS HEROINES

  Under such circumstances the Hindoo playwrights must have foundthemselves in a curious dilemma. They were sufficiently versed in thepoetic art to build up a plot; but what chance for an amorous plot wasthere in a country where there was no courtship, where women weresold, ignored, maltreated, and despised? Perforce the poets had toneglect realism, give up all idea of mirroring respectable domesticlife, and take refuge in the realms of tradition, fancy, or liaisons.It is interesting to note how they got around the difficulty. Theyeither made their heroines bayaderes, or princesses, or girls willingto be married in a way allowing them their own choice, but not reputedrespectable. Bayaderes, though not permitted to marry, were at libertyto choose their temporary companions. Cudraka indulges in the poeticlicense of making Vasantasena superior to other bayaderes andrewarding her in the end by a regular marriage as the hero's wifenumber two. By way of securing variety, apsaras, or celestialbayaderes, 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 heroines, for various reasons, one ofwhich was the tradition concerning 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 usfamiliar with a similar meeting of kings, at which the princesschooses the lover she has determined on beforehand, though she hasnever seen him. Apart from the fantasticality of this episode, it isobvious that even if the Svayamvara was once a custom in royal circlesit did not really insure to the princesses free choice of a rationalkind. Brought up in strict seclusion, a king's daughter could neverhave seen any of the men competing for her. The victor might be theleast sympathetic to her of all, and even if she had a large number ofsuitors to choose from, her selection could not be based on anythingbut the momentary and superficial judgment; of the eye. But fordramatic purposes the Svayamvara was useful.

  VOLUNTARY UNIONS NOT RESPECTABLE

  In _Sakuntala_, Kalidasa resorts to the third of the expedients I havementioned. The king weds the girl whom he finds in the grove of thesaints in accordance with a form which was not regarded asrespectable--marriage based on mutual inclination, without theknowledge of the parents. The laws of Mann (III., 20-134) recognizedeight kinds of marriage:

  (1) gift of a daughter to a man learned in the Vedas, (2) 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 imbecile.

  In other words, of the eight kinds of marriage recognized by Hindoolaw and custom only one is based on free choice, and of that Mannsays: "The voluntary connection of a maiden and a man is to be knownas a Gandharva union, which arises from lust." It is classed among theblamable marriages. Even this appears not to have been a legal formbefore Mann. It is blamable because contracted without the consent orknowledge of the parents, and because, unless the sacred fire has beenobtained from a Brahman to sanctify it, such a marriage is merely atemporary union. Gandharvas, after whom it is named, are singers andother musicians in Indra's heaven, who, like the apsaras, enter intounions that are not intended to be enduring, but are dissoluble atwill. Such marriages (liaisons we call them) are frequently mentionedin Hindoo literature (_e.g., Hitopadesa_, p. 85). Malati (30) chidesher friend for advising her to make a secret marriage, and later onexclaims (75): "I am lost! What a girl mu
st not do, my friend counselsme." The orthodox view is 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 commendedas models." In _Sakuntala_, too, the king feels it incumbent on him toapologize to the girl he covets, when she bids him not to transgressthe laws of propriety, by exclaiming that many other girls have thusbeen taken by kings without incurring parental disapproval. Thedirections for this form of courtship given in the _Kama Soutra_indicate that Sakuntala had every reason to appeal to the rules ofpropriety, social and moral. Kalidasa spares us the details.

  The king's desertion of Sakuntala after he had obtained hisself-indulgent object was quite in accordance with the spirit of aGandharva marriage. Kalidasa, for dramatic purposes, makes it a resultof a saint's curse, which enables him to continue his storyinterestingly. A poet has a right to such license, even though ittakes him out of the realm of realism. Hindoo poets, like others, knowhow to rise above sordid reality into a more ideal sphere, and forthis reason, even if we had found in the dramas of India a portrayalof true love, it would not prove that it existed outside of a poet'sglowing and prophetic fancy. There is a Hindoo saying, "Do not strikea woman, even with a flower;" but we have seen that these Hindoosoften do physically abuse their wives most cruelly, besides subjectingthem to indescribable mental anguish, and mental anguish is much morepainful and more prolonged than bodily torture. Fine words do not makefine feelings. From this point of view Dalton was perhaps right whenhe asserted that the wild tribes of India come closer to us in theirlove-affairs than the more cultured Hindoos, with their "unromanticheart-schooling." We have seen that Albrecht Weber's high estimate ofthe Hindoo's romantic sentiment does not bear the test of a closepsychological analysis.

  The Hindoo may have fewer uncultivated traits of emotion than the wildtribesmen, but they are in the same field. Hindoo civilization rose tosplendid heights, in some respects, and even the great moral principleof altruism was cultivated; but it was not applied to the relationsbetween the sexes, and thus we see once more that the refinement ofthe affections--especially the sexual affections--comes last in theevolution of civilization. Masculine selfishness and sensuality haveprevented the Hindoo from entering the Elysian fields of romanticlove. He has always allowed, and still allows, the minds of women tolie fallow, being contented with their bodily charms, and unaware thatthe most delightful of all sexual differences are those of mind andcharacter. To quote once more the Abbe Dubois (I., 271), the mostminute and philosophic 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 IGNORE ROMANTIC LOVE?

  My assertion that there are no cases of romantic love recorded in theBible naturally aroused opposition, and not a few critics lifted uptheir voices in loud protest against such ignorant audacity. The casefor the defence was well summed up in the Rochester _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 Rachel. Leah was tender-eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well-favored. And Jacob loved Rachel; 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 Rachel; 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 certainly his pre-matrimonial passion was self-sacrificing, enduring, 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 themoment 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 tocall romantic love has been substantially one and the same thing....Has this writer never heard of Isaac and Rebekah; of Jacob andRachel?" A Philadelphia reviewer doubted whether I believed in my owntheory because I ignored in my chapter on love among the Hebrews "thestory of Jacob and Rachel and other similar instances of what deservesto be called romantic love among the Hebrews." Professor H.O. Trumbullemphatically repudiates my theory in his _Studies in Oriental SocialLife_ (62-63); 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 afresh 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 deathbed in Egypt [Gen. 48: 1-7]. In all the literature of romantic love in all the ages there can be found no more touching exhibit 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 confirms the abiding force of that sentiment. There are, certainly, gleams of romantic love from out of the clouds of degraded 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 l'Amour dans l'Antiquite_with Adam and Eve, declares (28-31) that the episode of Jacob andRachel marks the birth of perfect love in the world, the beginning ofits triumph, followed, however, by relapses in days of darkness anddegradation. If all these writers are correct then my theory falls tothe ground and romantic love must be conceded to be at least fourthousand years old, instead of less than one thousand. But let us lookat the facts in detail and see whether there is really no differencebetween 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 their part in the founding of the Jewish race, but their stories, as we have them, are as entirely legendary as those of Arthur or Siegfried, of Agamemnon or Charlemagne."

  This consideration would bring the date of the storyfrom the time when Jacob is supposed to have lived down to the muchlater time when the legend was elaborated. I have no desire, however,to seek refuge behind such chronological uncertainties, nor toreassert that my theory is a question of evolution rather than ofdates, and that, therefore, if Jacob and Rachel, during theirprolonged courtship, had the qualities of mind and character to feelthe exalted sentiment of romantic love, we might concede in their casean exception which, by its striking isolation, would only prove therule. I need no such refuge, for I can see no reason whatever foraccepting the story of Jacob and Rachel as an exceptional instance ofromantic love.

  THE STORY OF JACOB AND RACHEL

  Nothing could be more charmingly poetic than this story as told by theold Hebrew chronicler. The language is so simple yet so pictorial thatwe fancy we can actually see Jacob as he accosts the shepherds at thewell to ask a
fter his uncle Laban, and they reply "Behold, Rachel hisdaughter cometh with the sheep." We see him as he rolls the stone fromthe well's mouth and waters his uncle's flocks; we see him as hekisses Rachel and lifts up his voice and weeps. He kisses her ofcourse by right of being a relative, and not as a lover; for we cannotsuppose that even an Oriental shepherd girl could have been so devoidof maidenly prudence and coyness as to give a love-kiss to a strangerat their first meeting. Though apparently her cousin (Gen. 28: 2;29:10), Jacob tells her he is her uncle; "and Jacob told Rachel thathe was her father's brother."[286] There was the less impropriety inhis kissing her, as she was probably a girl of fifteen or sixteen andhe old enough to be her grandfather, or even great-grandfather, hisage at the time of meeting her being seventy-seven.[287] But as menare reported to have aged slowly in those days, this did not preventhim from desiring to marry Rachel, for whose sake he was willing toserve her father. Strange to say, the words "And Jacob served sevenyears for Rachel" have been accepted as proof of self-sacrifice byseveral writers, including Dr. Abel, who cites those words asindicating that the ancient Hebrews knew "the devotion of love, whichgladly _serves the beloved_ and shuns no toil in her behalf." Inreality Jacob's seven years of service have nothing whatever to dowith self-sacrifice. He did not "serve his beloved" but her father;did not toil "in her behalf" but on his own behalf. He was simplydoing that very unromantic thing, paying for his wife by working astipulated time for her father, in accordance with a custom prevalentamong primitive peoples the world over. Our text is very explicit onthe subject; after Jacob had been with his relative a month Laban hadsaid unto him: "Because thou art my brother shouldst thou thereforeserve me for naught? tell me what shall thy wages be?" And Jacob hadchosen Rachel for his wages. Rachel and Leah themselves quiteunderstood the commercial nature of the matrimonial arrangement; forwhen, years afterward, they are prepared to leave their father theysay: "Is there yet any portion or inheritance for us in our father'shouse? Are we not counted of him strangers? for he hath sold us, andhath also quite devoured the price paid for us."

  Instead of the sentimental self-sacrifice of a devoted lover for hismistress 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 sentence, which declares thatJacob's seven years of service "seemed to him but a few days for thelove 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 amconvinced that none of them can have ever been in love or they wouldhave known that a lover is so impatient and eager to call his belovedirrevocably his own, so afraid that someone else might steal away heraffection from him, that Jacob's seven years, instead of shrinking toa few days, would have seemed to him like seven times seven years.

  A minute examination of the story of Jacob and Rachel thus revealsworld-wide differences between the ancient Hebrew and the modernChristian conceptions of love, corresponding, we have no reason todoubt, to differences in actual feeling. And as we proceed, thesedifferences 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 Rachel? Wherefore then hast thou 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 thou 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 factsand conditions abhorrent to the Christian conception of the sanctityof love than is done in this passage. Can anyone deny that in a modernChristian country Laban's breach of contract with Jacob, hisfraudulent substitution of the wrong daughter, and Jacob's meekacceptance of two wives in eight days would not only arouse a storm ofmoral indignation, but would land both these men in a police court andin jail? I say this not in a flippant spirit, but merely to bring outas vividly as possible the difference between the ancient Hebrew andmodern Christian ideals of love. Furthermore, what an utter ignoranceor disregard of the rights of personal preference, sympathy, and allthe higher ingredients of love, is revealed in Laban's remark that itwas not customary to give the younger daughter in marriage before theolder had been disposed of! And how utterly opposed to the modernconception of love is the sequel of the story, in which we are toldthat "because" Leah was _hated_ by her husband "therefore" she wasmade fruitful, and she bore him four sons, while the beloved Rachelremained barren! Was personal preference thus not only to be repressedby marrying off girls according to their age, but even punished? Nodoubt it was, according to the Hebrew notion; in their patriarchalmode of life the father was the absolute tyrant in the household, whoreserved the right to select spouses for both his sons and daughters,and felt aggrieved if his plans were interfered with. The object ofmarriage was not to make a happy, sympathetic couple, but to raisesons; wherefore the hated Leah naturally exclaims, after she has borneReuben, her first son, "Now my husband will love me." That is not thekind of love we look for in our marriages. We expect a man to love hiswife for her own sake.

  This notion, that the birth of sons is the one object of marriage, andthe source of conjugal love, is so preponderant in the minds of thesewomen that it crowds out all traces of monopoly or jealousy. Leah andRachel not only submit to Laban's fraudulent substitution on thewedding-night, but each one meekly accepts her half of Jacob'sattentions. The utter absence of jealousy is strikingly revealed inthis passage:

  "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 Jacob a son.... And Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid, conceived again, and bare Jacob a second son.... When Leah saw she had left bearing, she took Zilpah her handmaid, 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 ofcourse, but as a cause for divine reward! It might be said that theredoes exist a sort of jealousy between Leah and Rachel: a rivalry as towhich of the two shall bear their husband the more sons, either byherself or by proxy. But how utterly different this rivalry is fromthe jealousy of a modern Christian wife, the very essence of whichlies in the imperative insistence on the exclusive affection andchaste fidelity of her husband! And as modern Christian jealousydiffers from ancient Hebrew jealousy, so does modern romantic love ingeneral differ from Hebrew love. There is not a line in the story ofJacob and Rachel indicating the existence of monopoly, jealousy,coyness, hyperbole, mixed moods, pride, sympathy, gallantry,self-sacrifice, adoration, purity. Of the thirteen essentialingredients of romantic love only two are implied--individualpreference and admiration of personal beauty. Jacob preferred Rachelto Leah, and this preference was based on her bodily charms: she was"beautiful and well-favored." Of the higher mental phases of personalbeauty not a word is said.

  In the case of the women, not even their individual preference ishinted at, and this is eminently characteristic of the ancient Hebrewnotions and practices in regard to ma
rriage. Did Rachel and Leah marryJacob because they preferred him to all other men they knew? To Labanand his contemporaries such a question would have seemed absurd. Theyknew nothing of marriage as a union of souls. The woman was notconsidered at all. The object of marriage, as in India, was to raisesons, in order that there might be someone to represent the departedfather. Being chiefly for the father's benefit, the marriage wasnaturally arranged by him. As a matter of fact, even Jacob did notselect 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 mothers father; and take thee a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban thy mother's brother."

  And Jacob did as ordered. His choice was limited to the two sisters.

  THE COURTING OF REBEKAH

  Isaac himself had even less liberty of choice than Jacob. He courtedRebekah by proxy--or rather his father courted her through her father,for him, by proxy! When Abraham was stricken with age he said to hisservant, the elder of his house, that ruled over all that he had, andenjoined 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 cityof Mesopotamia where Abraham's brother Nahor and his descendantsdwelt. As he lingered at the well, Rebekah came out with her pitcherupon her shoulder. "And the damsel was very fair to look upon, avirgin, neither had any man known her." And she filled her pitcher andgave him drink and then drew water and filled the trough for all hiscamels. And he gave her a ring and two bracelets of gold. And she ranand told her mother's house what had happened. And her brother Labanran out to meet the servant of Abraham and brought him to the house.Then the servant delivered his message to him and to Rebekah's father,Bethuel; and they answered: "Behold, Rebekah is before thee, take her,and go, and let her be thy master's son's wife." And he wanted to takeher next day, but they wished her to abide with them at the least tendays longer. "And they said, We will call the damsel, and inquire ather mouth. And they called Rebekah, and said unto her, wilt thou gowith this man? And she said, I will go. And they sent away Rebekahtheir sister, and her nurse, and Abraham's servant, and his men." AndIsaac was in the field meditating when he saw their camels comingtoward him. Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac shelighted off her camel, and asked the servant who was the man coming tomeet them; and when he said it was his master, she took her veil andcovered herself. And Isaac brought her into her mother's tent and shebecame his wife, and he loved her.

  Such is the story of the courting of Rebekah. It resembles a story ofmodern courtship and love about as much as the Hebrew languageresembles the English, and calls for no further comment. But there isanother story to consider; my critics accused me of ignoring the threeR's of Hebrew love--Rachel, Rebekah, and Ruth. "The courtship of Ruthand 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 essentialpoint.

  HOW RUTH COURTED BOAZ

  It came to pass during a famine that a certain man went to sojourn inthe country of Moab with his wife, whose name was Naomi, and two sons.The husband died there and the two sons also, having married, diedafter ten years, leaving Naomi a widow with two widoweddaughters-in-law, whose names were Orpah and Ruth. She decided toreturn to the country whence she had come, but advised the youngerwidows to remain and go back to the families of their mothers. I amtoo old, she said, to bear again husbands for you, and even if I coulddo so, would you therefore tarry till they were grown? Orpah thereuponkissed her mother-in-law and went back to her people; but Ruth claveunto her and said "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thoulodgest, I will lodge.... Where thou diest, will I die." So the twowent until they came to Bethlehem, in which place Naomi had a kinsmanof her husband, a mighty man of wealth, whose name was Boaz. Theyarrived in the beginning of the barley harvest, and Ruth went andgleaned in the field after the reapers. Her hap was to light on theportion of the field belonging to Boaz. When he saw her he asked thereapers "Whose damsel is this?" And they told him. Then Boaz spoke toRuth and told her to glean in his field and abide with his maidens,and when athirst drink of that which the young men had drawn; and hetold the young men not to touch her. At meal-time he gave her bread toeat and vinegar to dip it in, and he told his young men to let herglean even among the sheaves and also to pull out some for her fromthe bundles, and leave it, and let her glean and rebuke her not. Andhe did all this because, as he said to her,

  "It hath been shewed me, all that them 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 shehad gleaned and took it to Naomi and told her all that had happened.And Naomi said unto her,

  "My daughter, 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 lieth 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 Ruth did as her mother-in-law bade her. And when Boaz had eatenand drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end ofthe heap of corn; and she came softly and uncovered his feet, and laidher 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 thinehandmaid; spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou arta 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 onecould discern another. For he said, "Let it not be known that thewoman came to the threshing-floor." Then he gave her six measures ofbarley and went into the city. He sat at the gate until the otherkinsman 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 Imar 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 b
rethren, and from the gate of his place."

  So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife.

  How anyone can read this charmingly told, frank, and realistic tale ofancient Hebrew life and call it a love-story, passeth allunderstanding. There is not the slightest suggestion of love, eithersensual or sentimental, on the part of either Ruth or Boaz. Ruth, atthe suggestion of her mother-in-law, spends a night in a way whichwould convict a Christian widow, to say the least, of an utter lack ofthat modesty and coy reserve which are a woman's great charm, andwhich, even among the pastoral Hebrews, cannot have been approved,inasmuch as Boaz did not want it to be known that she had come to thethreshing-floor. He praises Ruth for following "not young men, whetherrich or poor." She followed him, a wealthy old man. Would love haveacted thus? What she wanted was not a lover but a protector ("rest forthee that it may be well for thee," as Naomi said frankly), and aboveall a son in order that her husband's name might not perish. Boazunderstands 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 otherrelative, and on his refusal, buys her for himself, without the leastshow of emotion indicating that he was doing anything but his duty. Hewas simply fulfilling the law of the Levirate, as written inDeuteronomy (25:5), ordaining that if a husband die without leaving ason his brother shall take the widow to him to wife and perform theduty of an husband's brother unto her; that is, to beget a son (thefirst-born) who shall succeed in the name of his dead brother, "thathis name be not blotted out of Israel." How very seriously the Hebrewstook this law is shown by the further injunction that if a brotherrefuses 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 OR SENTIMENT

  The three R's of Hebrew love thus show how these people arranged theirmarriages with reference to social and religious customs orutilitarian considerations, buying their wives by service orotherwise, without any thought of sentimental preferences andsympathies, such as underlie modern Christian marriages of the higherorder. It might be argued that the ingredients of romantic loveexisted, but simply are not dwelt on in the old Hebrew stories. But itis impossible to believe that the Bible, that truly inspired andwonderfully realistic transcript of life, which records the minutestdetails, should have neglected in its thirty-nine books, making overseven hundred pages of fine print, to describe at least one case ofsentimental infatuation, romantic adoration, and self-sacrificingdevotion in pre-matrimonial love, had such love existed. Why should ithave neglected to describe the manifestations of sentimental love,since it dwells so often on the symptoms and results of sensualpassion? Stories of lust abound in the Hebrew Scriptures; Genesisalone has five. The Lord repented that he had made man on earth anddestroyed even his chosen people, all but Noah, because everyimagination in the thoughts of man's heart "was only evilcontinually." But the flood did not cure the evil, nor did thedestruction of Sodom, as a warning example. It is after those eventsthat the stories are related of Lot's incestuous daughters, theseduction of Dinah, the crime of Judah and Tamar, the lust ofPotiphar's wife, of David and Bath-sheba, of Amnon and Tamar, ofAbsalom on the roof, with many other references to such crimes.[288]

  A MASCULINE IDEAL OF WOMANHOOD

  There is every reason to conclude that these ancient Jews, unlike manyof their modern descendants, knew only the coarser phases of theinstinct which draws man to woman. They knew not romantic love for thesimple reason that they had not discovered the charm of refinedfemininity, or even recognized woman's right to exist for her ownsake, and not merely as man's domestic servant and the mother of hissons. "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule overthee," Eve was told in Eden, and her male descendants administeredthat punishment zealously and persistently; whereas the same lack ofgallantry which led Adam to put all the blame on Eve impelled hisdescendants to make the women share his part of the curse too--"In thesweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread"; for they were obliged to donot 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 lastchapter of the Proverbs (31:10-31) is instructive. It is oftenreferred to as a portrait of a perfect woman, but in reality it islittle more than a picture of Hebrew masculine selfishness. Of theforty-five lines making up this chapter, nine are devoted to praise ofthe feminine virtues of fidelity to a husband, kindness to the needy,strength, dignity, wisdom, and fear of the Lord; while the rest of thechapter goes to show that the Hebrew woman indeed "eateth not thebread of idleness," and that the husband "shall have no lack ofgain"--or spoil, as the alternative reading is:

  "She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchant ships: she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and their task to the maidens. She considereth a field and buyeth 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 amongthe elders of the land," which is an easy and pleasant thing to do;hardly in accordance with the curse the Lord pronounced on Adam andhis male descendants. The wife being thus the maid of all work, asamong Indians and other primitive races, it is natural that theancient Hebrew ideal of femininity should he masculine: "She girdethher loins with strength, and maketh strong her arms;" while thefeminine charms are sneered at: "Favor is deceitful, and beauty isvain."

  NOT THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LOVE

  Not only feminine charms, but the highest feminine virtues aresometimes strangely, nay, shockingly disregarded, as in the story ofLot (Gen. 19:1-12), who, when besieged by the mob clamoring for thetwo 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 villainousthan the wickedness of the Sodomites who were destroyed with brimstoneand fire. In Judges (19: 22-30) we read of a man offering his maidendaughter and his concubine to a mob to prevent an unnatural crimebeing committed against his guest: "Seeing that this man is come intomy house, do not this folly." This case is of extreme sociologicalimportance as showing that notwithstanding the strict laws of Moses(Levit. 20: 10; Deut. 22: 13-30) on sexual crimes, the law ofhospitality seems to have been held more sacred than a father's regardfor his daughter's honor. The story of Abraham shows, too, that he didnot hold his wife's honor in the same esteem as a modern Christiandoes:

  "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 houseand he was treated well for her sake; and he had sheep, and oxen, a
ndother presents. When he went to sojourn in Gerar (Gen. 20:1-15)Abraham tried to repeat the same stratagem, taking refuge, when foundout, in the double excuse that he was afraid he would be slain for hiswife's sake, and that she really was his sister, the daughter of hisfather, but not the daughter of his mother. Isaac followed hisfather's example in Gerar:

  "The man of the place asked him of his wife; and he said, She is my sister: for he feared to say, My wife; lest (said he) the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah; 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 remind one of the Blackfoot Indiantale told on page 631 of this volume. An American army officer wouldnot only lay down his own life, but shoot his wife with his own pistolbefore he would allow her to fall into the enemy's hands, because tohim her honor is, of all things human, the most sacred.

  UNCHIVALROUS 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 soradically different from ours it logically follows that they cannothave known the emotions of love as we know them. The only symptom oflove referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures is Amnon's getting lean fromday to day and feigning sickness (II. Sam. 13: 1-22); and the storyshows what kind of love that was. It would be contrary to all reasonand psychological consistency to suppose that modern tenderness ofromantic feeling toward women could have existed among a people whosegreatest and wisest man could, for any reason whatever, chide areturning victorious army, as Moses did (Numbers 31: 9-19), for savingall 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 Hebrewshad not risen to that chivalrous stage of civilization. Joshua (8:26)destroyed Ai and slew 12,000, "both of men and women:" and in Judges(21:10-12) we read how the congregation sent an army of 12,000 men andcommanded them, saying,

  "Go and smite the inhabitants 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 weregiven to the tribe of Benjamin, "that a tribe be not blotted out fromIsrael;" and when it was found that more were needed they lay in waitin the vineyards, and when the daughters of Shiloh came out to dance,they caught them and carried them off as their wives; whence we seethat these Hebrews had not advanced beyond the low stage of evolution,when wives are secured by capture or killed after battle. Among suchseek not for romantic love.

  FOUR MORE BIBLE STORIES

  Dr. Trumbull's opinion has already been cited that there are certainly"gleams of romantic love from out of the clouds of degraded humanpassions in the ancient East," in the stories of Shechem and Dinah,Samson and the damsel of Timnah, David and Abigail, Adonijah andAbishag. But I fail to find even "gleams" of romantic love in thesestories. Shechem said he loved Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah,but he humbled her and dealt with her "as with an harlot," as herbrothers said after they had slain him for his conduct toward her.Concerning Samson and the Timnah girl we are simply told that he sawher and told his father, "Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well"(literally, "she is right in my eyes"). And this is evidence ofromantic love! As for Abigail, after her husband has refused to feedDavid's shepherds, and David has made up his mind therefore to slayhim and his offspring, she takes provisions and meets David andinduces him not to commit that crime; she does this not from love forher husband, for when David has received her presents he says to her,"See, I have hearkened 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 atransaction this was, the next sentence tells us that "David also tookAhinoam of Jezreel; and they became both of them his wives."

  ABISHAG THE SHUNAMMITE

  The last of the stories referred to by Dr. Trumbull, though as farfrom proving his point as the others, is of peculiar interest becauseit introduces us to the maiden who is believed by some commentators tobe the same as the Shulamite, the heroine of the _Song of Songs_.After Solomon had become king his elder brother, Adonijah, went to themother of Solomon, Bath-sheba, and said:

  "Thou knowest thy kingdom 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 hadspoken that word against his own life; and he sent a man who fell onhim and killed him.

  Who was this Abishag, the Shunammite? The opening lines of the FirstBook 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 Shunam or Shulam(a town north of Jerusalem) was the same as the Shulamite of the _Songof Songs_, and that in the lines 6:11-12 she tells how she waskidnapped and brought to court.

  I 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 [desire] set me Among the chariots of my princely people.

  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 thevineyards." The added words "mine own vineyard have I not kept" areinterpreted by some as an apology for her neglected personalappearance, but Renan (10) more plausibly refers them to herconsciousness of some indiscretion, which led to her capture. We maysuppose that, attracted by the glitter and the splendor of the royalcavalcade, she for a moment longed to enjoy it, and her desire wasgratified. Brought to court to comfort the old king, she remainedafter his death at the palace, and Solomon, who wished to add her tohis harem, killed his own brother when he found him coveting her. Themaiden soon regrets her indiscretion in having exposed herself tocapture. She is "a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley," and shefeels like a wildflower transplanted to a palace hall. While Solomonin all his glory urges his suit, she, tormented by homesickness,thinks only of her vineyard, her orchards, and the young shepherdwhose love she enjoyed in them. Absent-minded, as one in a revery, ordreaming aloud, she answers the addresses of the king and his women inwords that ever refer to her shepherd lover:[289]

  "Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest 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 pl
easant: Also our couch is green." "As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved 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 I give thee my love."

  The home-sick country girl, in a word, has found out that thesplendors of the palace are not to her taste, and the thought of beinga young shepherd's darling is pleasanter to her than that of being anold king's concubine. The polygamous rapture with which Solomonaddresses her: "There are three-score queens and four-scoreconcubines, and maidens without number," does not appeal to her ruraltaste. She has no desire to be the hundred and forty-first piece ofmosaic inlaid in Solomon's palanquin (III., 9-10), and she stubbornlyresists his advances until, impressed by her firmness, and unwillingto force her, the king allows her to return to her vineyard and herlover.

  The view that the gist of the _Song of Songs_ is the Shulamite's loveof a shepherd and her persistent resistance to the advances ofSolomon, was first advanced in 1771 by J.F. Jacobi, and is nowuniversally accepted by the commentators, the overwhelming majority ofwhom have also given up the artificial and really blasphemousallegorical interpretation of this poem once in vogue, but ignored inthe Revised Version, as well as the notion that Solomon wrote thepoem. Apart from all other arguments, which are abundant, it is absurdto suppose that Solomon would have written a drama to proclaim his ownfailure to win the love of a simple country girl. In truth, it is veryprobable that, as Renan has eloquently set forth (91-100), the _Songof Songs_ was written practically for the purpose of holding upSolomon to ridicule. In the northern part of his kingdom there was astrong feeling against him on account of his wicked ways and viciousinnovations, especially his harem, and other expensive habits thatimpoverished 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 vividshortly after his death, when the _Song of Songs_ is believed to havebeen written (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 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 isfurther shown by the famous lines near the close:

  "For love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave [literally: 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 toprove that the ancient Hebrews knew romantic love and its power. Theydoubtless did know the power of love; all the ancient civilizednations knew it as a violent sensual impulse which blindly sacrificeslife to attain its object. The ancient Hindoos embodied their idea ofirresistible power in the force and fury of an amorous elephant. Amonganimals in general, love is even stronger than death. Male animals ofmost species engage in deadly combat for the females. "For mostinsects," says Letourneau, "to love and to die are almost synonymousterms, and yet they do not even try to resist the amorous frenzy thaturges them on." Yet no one would dream of calling this romantic love;from that it differs as widely as the insect mind in general differsfrom the human mind. Waters cannot quench any kind of love oraffection nor floods drown it. What we are seeking for are _actions orwords describing the specific symptoms of sentimental love_, and theseare not to be found in this passage any more than elsewhere in theBible. An old man may buy a girl's body, but he cannot, with all hiswealth and splendor, awaken her love, either sentimental or sensual;love, whatever its nature, will always prefer the apple-tree and theshepherd lover to the vain desires and a thousand times dividedattentions of a decrepit king, though he be a Solomon.

  It would be strange if this purely profane poem, which was added tothe Scriptural collection only by an unusual stretch ofliberality,[290] and in which there is not one mention of God or ofreligion, should give a higher conception of sexual love than thebooks which are accepted as inspired, and which paint manners,emotions, and morals as the writers found them. As a matter of factthe _Song of Songs_ was long held to be so objectionable that theTalmudists did not allow young people to read it before theirthirtieth year. Whiston denounced it as foolish, lascivious, andidolatrous. "The excessively amative character of some passages isdesignated as almost blasphemous when supposed to be addressed byChrist to his Church,"[291] as it was by the allegorists. On the otherhand there is a class of commentators to whom this poem is the idealof 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 Rev. W.E. Griffis declaresrapturously (166, 63, 21, 16, 250) that "the purest-minded virgin maysafely read the _Song of Songs_, in which is no trace of immoralthought." In it "sensuality is scorned and pure love glorified;" it"sets forth the eternal romance of true love," and is "chastely purein word and delicate in idea throughout." "The poet of the Canticleshows us how to love." "An angel might envy such artless love dwellingin a human heart."

  The truth, as usual in such cases, lies about half-way between theseextreme views. There is only one passage which is objectionably coarsein the English version and in the Hebrew original obscene;[292] yet,on the other hand, I maintain that the whole poem is purely Orientalin its exclusively sensuous and often sensual character, and thatthere is not a trace of romantic sentiment such as would color asimilar love-story if told by a modern poet. The _Song of Songs_ is soconfused in its arrangement, its plan so obscure, its repetitions andrepeated denouements so puzzling,[293] that commentators are notalways agreed as to what character in the drama is to be heldresponsible for certain lines; but for our purpose this difficultymakes no difference. Taking the lines just as they stand, I find thatthe following:--1: 2-4, 13 (in one version), 17; 2: 6; 4: 16; 5: 1; 8:2, 3--are indelicate in language or suggestion, as every student ofOriental amorous poetry knows, and no amount of specious argumentationcan alter this. The descriptions of the beauty and charms of thebeloved or the lover, are, moreover, invariably sensuous and oftensensual. Again and again are their bodily charms dwelt on rapturously,as is customary in the poems of all Orientals with all sorts of quainthyperbolic comparisons, some of which are poetic, others grotesque. Nofewer than five times are the external charms thus enumerated, but notonce in the whole poem is any allusion made to the spiritualattractions, the mental and moral charms of femininity which are thefood of romantic love. Mr. Griffis, who cannot help commenting (223)on this frequent description of the human body, makes a desperateeffort 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 courttemptations. He praises her inward ornaments, her soul's charms." Whatare these ornaments? The possible reference to her chastity in thelines: "A garden shut up is my sister, my bride. A spring shut up, afountain sealed"--a reference which, if so intended, would be regardedby a Christian maiden not as a compliment, but an insult; while everystudent of Eastern manners knows that an Oriental makes of his wife "agarden shut up," and "a fount
ain sealed" not by way of complimentingher chastity, but because he has no faith in it whatever, knowing thatso far as it exists it is founded on fear, not on affection. Mr.Griffis knows this himself when he does not happen to be idealizing animpossible 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."[294]

  Supersensual charms are not alluded to in the _Song of Songs_, for thesimple reason that Orientals never did, and do not now, care for suchcharms 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 always to things that are good to eat or drink or smell.Hence such ecstatic expressions as "How much better is thy love thanwine! 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, comfort 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 thegarden, my sister, my bride: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice: Ihave eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with mymilk."

  Modern love does not express itself in such terms; it is more mentaland sentimental, more esthetic and sympathetic, more decorous anddelicate, more refined and supersensual. While it is possible that, asRenan suggests (143), the author of the Canticles conceived hisheroine as a saint of her time, rising above sordid reality, it isclear from all we have said that the author himself was not able torise above Orientalism. The manners of the East, both ancient andmodern, are incompatible with romantic love, because they suppress theevolution of feminine refinement and sexual mentality. The documentsof the Hebrews, like those of the Hindoos and Persians, Greeks, andRomans, prove that tender, refined, and unselfish affection betweenthe sexes, far from being one of the first shoots of civilization, isits last and most beautiful flower.

  GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS

  The most obstinate disbeliever in the doctrine that romantic love,instead of being one of the earliest products of civilization, is oneof the latest, will have to capitulate if it can be shown that eventhe Greeks, the most cultivated and refined nation of antiquity, knewit only in its sensual and selfish side, which is not true love, butself-love. In reality I have already shown this to be the caseincidentally in the sections in which I have traced the evolution ofthe fourteen ingredients of love. In the present chapter, therefore,we may confine ourselves chiefly to a consideration of the stories andpoems which have fostered the belief I am combating. But first we musthear what the champions of the Greeks have to say in their behalf.

  CHAMPIONS OF GREEK LOVE

  Professor Rohde declares emphatically (70) that "no one would be sofoolish as to doubt the existence of pure and strong love" among theancient Greeks. Another eminent German scholar, Professor Ebers,sneers at the idea that the Greeks were not familiar with the love weknow and celebrate. Having been criticised for making the lovers inhis ancient historic romances act and talk and express their feelingsprecisely as modern lovers in Berlin or Leipsic do, he wrote for thesecond edition of his _Egyptian Princess_ a preface in which he triesto defend his position. He admits that he did, perhaps, after all, puttoo warm colors on his canvas, and frankly confesses that when heexamined in the sunshine what he had written by lamplight, he made uphis mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend. Headmits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between thesexes; yet he thinks it "quite conceivable that a Greek heart shouldhave felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart," and herefers to a number of romantic stories invented by the Greeks as proofthat they knew love in our sense of the word--such stories asApuleius'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 regardingthe absence of romantic love in ancient Greek literature having thusfailed to convince even his own countrymen, it was natural that myrevival of that suggestion, as a detail of my general theory of theevolution of love, should have aroused a chorus of critical dissent.Commenting on my assertion that there are no stories of romantic lovein Greek literature, an editorial writer in the London _Daily News_exclaimed: "Why, it would be less wild to remark that the Greeks hadnothing but love-stories." After referring to the stories of Orpheusand Eurydice, Meleager and Atalanta, Alcyone and Ceyx, Cephalus andProcris, the writer adds,

  "It is no exaggeration to say that any school-girl could tell Mr. Finck 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 tomy book, in which it remarked that if romantic love is, as I claim, anexclusively 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 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 mostidyllic love-stories ever written." "The love story of Hero andLeander upsets this author's theory completely," said a Rochesterreviewer, while a St. Louis critic declared boldly that "in the pagesof Achilles Tatius and Theodorus, inventors of the modern novel, theyoung men and maidens loved as romantically as in Miss Evans'slatest." 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, Theoeritus 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 courage than of facts, notwithstanding his evident training in a scientific atmosphere."

  GLADSTONE ON THE WOMEN OF HOMER

  The divers specifications of my ignorance and stupidity contained inthe foregoing criticisms will be attended to in their proper place inthe chronological order of the present chapter, which naturally beginswith Homer's epics, as nothing definite is known of Greek literaturebefore them. Homer is now recognized as the first poet of antiquity,not only in the order of time; but it took Europe many centuries todiscover that fact. During the Middle Ages the second-rate Virgil washeld to be a much greater genius than Homer, and it was in England, asProfessor Christ notes (69), that the truer estimate originated.Pope's translation of the Homeric poems, with all its faults, helpedto dispel the mists of ignorance, and in 1775 appeared Robert Wood'sbook, _On the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_, which combatedthe foolish prejudice against the poet, due to the coarseness of themanners he depicts. Wood admits (161) that "most of Homer's heroeswould, in the present age, be capitally convicted, in any country inEurope, on the poet's evidence;" but this, he explains, does notdetract from the greatness of Homer, who, upon an impartial view,"will appear to excel his own state of society, in point of decencyand delicacy, as much
as he has surpassed more polished ages in pointof genius."

  In this judicious discrimination between the genius of Homer and therealistic coarseness of his heroes, Wood forms an agreeable contrastto many modern Homeric scholars, notably the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone,who, having made this poet his hobby, tried to persuade himself andhis readers that nearly everything relating not only to Homer, but tothe characters he depicts, was next door to perfection. Confiningourselves to the topic that concerns us here, we read, in his _Studieson Homer_ (II., 502), that "we find throughout the poems those signsof the overpowering force of conjugal attachments which ... we mightexpect." And in his shorter treatise on Homer he thus sums up hisviews as to the position and estimate of woman in the heroic age, asrevealed 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 Odysseus to Penelope 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 saving the world from yet worse evil is unknown or unrecorded. Concubinage prevails in the camp before Troy, but only simple concubinage. Some of the women, attendants in the Ithacan 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 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 she may be borne away by the Harpies than remain to 'glad the heart of a meaner man' (_Od_. XX., 82) than her husband, still away from her."

  Only a careful student of Homer can quite realize the diplomaticastuteness which inspired this sketch of Homeric morals. Its amazingsophistry can, however, be made apparent even to one who has neverread the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

  ACHILLES AS A LOVER

  The Trojan War lasted ten years. Its object was to punish Paris, sonof the King of Troy, for eloping with Helen, the wife of Menelaus,King of Sparta, and taking away a shipload of treasures to boot. Thesubject of Homer's _Iliad_ is popularly supposed to be this TrojanWar; in reality, however, it covers less than two months (fifty-twodays) 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 hadspent much of the intervening time in ravaging twelve cities of AsiaMinor, carrying away treasures and captive women, after the piraticalGreek custom. One of these captives was Briseis, a high priest'sdaughter, whose husband and three brothers he had slain with his ownhand, and who became his favorite concubine. King Agamemnon, the chiefcommander of the Greek forces, also had for his favorite concubine ahigh priest's daughter, named Chryseis. Her father came to ransom thecaptive girl, but Agamemnon refused to give her up because, as heconfessed with brutal frankness, he preferred her to his wife.[295]For this refusal Apollo brings a pestilence on the Greek army, whichcan be abated only by restoring Chryseis to her father. Agamemnon atlast consents, on condition that some other prize of honor be given tohim--though, as Thersites taunts him (II, 226-228), his tents arealready full of captive women, among whom he always has had firstchoice. Achilles, too, informs him that he shall have all the women hewants when Troy is taken; but what really hurts Agamemnon's feelingsis not so much the loss of his favorite as the thought that the hatedAchilles should enjoy Briseis, while his prize, Chryseis, must bereturned to her father. So he threatens to retaliate on Achilles bytaking Briseis from his tent and keeping her for himself. "I woulddeserve the name of coward," retorts Achilles

  "were I to yield to you in everything.... But this let me say--Never 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 distinctionbetween his two kinds of property--yielding Briseis, but threateningmurder if aught else belonging to him be touched--Achilles goes andorders his friend Patroclus to take the young woman from the tent andgive her to the king. She leaves her paramour--her husband's andbrothers' murderer--unwillingly, and he sits down and weeps--why?because, as he tells his mother, he has been insulted by Agamemnon,who has taken away his prize of honor. From that moment Achillesrefuses to join the assemblies, or take a part in the battles, thusbringing "woes innumerable" on his countrymen. He refuses to yieldeven after Agamemnon, alarmed by his reverses, seeks to conciliate himby offering him gold and horses and women in abundance; telling him heshall have back his Briseis, whom the king swears he has nevertouched, and, besides her, seven Lesbian women of more than humanbeauty; also, the choice of twenty Trojan women as soon as the citycapitulates; 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 the seizureof his concubine have been deeply in love with her? He himself remarksto Odysseus, who comes to attempt 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 [Greek: alochos] "wife," though, asfar as Achilles is concerned, it means concubine. Of course it wouldhave been awkward for England's Prime Minister to make Achilles saythat "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 tonotice the moral beauty of this sentiment and the "dignity" of therelation between Achilles and Briseis! Yet no one seems to havedenounced him for this transgression against ethics, philology, andcommon sense. On the contrary, a host of translators and commentatorshave done the same thing, to the obscuration of the truth.

  Nor is this all. When we examine what the Achilles of Homer means bythe fine phrase "every man loves his bedfellow as I love mine," wecome across a grotesque parody even of sensual infatuation, not tospeak of romantic love. If Achilles had been animated by the strongindividual preference which sometimes results even from animalpassion, he would not have told Agamemnon, "take Briseis, but don'tyou dare to touch any of my other property or I will smash yourskull." If he had been what _we_ understand by a lover, he would nothave been represented by the poet, after Briseis was taken away fromhim, as having "his heart consumed by grief" because "he yearned for_the battle_." He would, instead, have yearned for the girl. And whenAgamemnon offered to give her back untouched, Achilles, had he been areal lover, would have thrown pride and wrath to the winds andaccepted the offer with eagerness and alacrity.

  But the most amazing part of the story is reached when we ask whatAchilles means when he says that every good and sensible man [Greek:phileei kai kaedetai]--loves and cherishes--his concubine, as heprofesses to love his own. _How_ does he love Briseis? Patroclus hadpromised her (XIX., 297-99), probably for reasons of his own (she isrepresented as being extremely fond of him), to see to it thatAchilles would ultimately make her his legitimate wife,
but Achilleshimself never dreams of such a thing, as we see in lines 393-400, bookIX. After refusing the offer of one of Agamemnon's daughters, he goeson 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 [Greek: mnaestaen alochon], 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 afew lines later (663) where the poet naively tells us, as a matter ofcourse, 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 inthe "love" of these "heroes," and we may well share the significantsurprise of Ajax (638) that Achilles should persist in his wrath whenseven girls were offered him for one. Evidently the tent of Achilles,like that of Agamemnon, was full of women (in line 366 he especiallyrefers to his assortment of "fair-girdled women" whom he expects totake home when the war is over); yet Gladstone had the audacity towrite that though concubinage prevailed in the camp before Troy, itwas "only single concubinage." In his larger treatise he goes so faras to apologize for these ruffians--who captured and traded off womenas they would horses or cows--on the ground that they were away fromtheir wives and were indulging in the "mildest and least licentious"of all forms of adultery! Yet Gladstone was personally one of thepurest and noblest of men. Strange what somersaults a hobby ridden toohard may induce a man to make in his ethical attitude!

  ODYSSEUS, LIBERTINE AND RUFFIAN

  If we now turn from the hero of the _Iliad_ to the hero of the_Odyssey_, we find the same Gladstone declaring (II., 502) that "whileadmitting the superior beauty of Calypso as an immortal, Ulyssesfrankly owns to her that his heart is pining 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 Odysseus, 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 thefirst place by the fact that he voluntarily remained away from her tenyears, fighting to recover, for another king, a worthless, adulterouswench. Before leaving on this expedition, from which he feared hemight never return, he spoke to his wife, as she herself relates(XVIII., 269), begging her to be mindful of his father and mother,"and when you see our son a bearded man, then marry whom you will, andleave the house now yours"--namely for the benefit of the son, forwhose welfare he was thus more concerned than for a monopoly of hiswife's love.

  After the Trojan war was ended he embarked for home, but suffered aseries of shipwrecks and misfortunes. On the island of Aeaea he spenta whole year sharing the hospitality and bed of the beautifulsorceress Circe, with no pangs of conscience for such conduct, northought of home, till his comrades, in spite of the "abundant meat andpleasant wine," longed to depart and admonished him in these words:"Unhappy man, it is time to think of your native land, if you aredestined ever to be saved and to reach your home in the land of yourfathers." Thus they spoke and "persuaded his manly heart." In view ofthe ease with which he thus abandoned himself for a whole year to alife of indulgence, till his comrades prodded his conscience, we mayinfer that he was not so very unwilling a prisoner afterward, of thebeautiful nymph Calypso, who held him eight years by force on herisland. We read, indeed, that, at the expiration of these years,Odysseus was always weeping, and his sweet life ebbed away in longingfor his home. But all the sentiment is taken out of this by the wordswhich follow: [Greek: epei ouketi aendane numphae] "_because the nymphpleased him no more_!" Even so Tannhaeuser tired of the pleasures inthe grotto of Venus, and begged to be allowed to leave.

  While thus permitting himself the unrestrained indulgence of hispassions, without a thought of his wife, Odysseus has the barbarian'sstern notions regarding the duties of women who belong to him. Thereare fifty young women in his palace at home who ply their hard tasksand bear the servant's lot. Twelve of these, having no one to marry,yield to the temptations of the rich princes who sue for the hand ofPenelope in the absence of her husband.

  Ulysses, on his return, hears of this, and forthwith takes measures toascertain who the guilty ones are. Then he tells his son Telemachusand 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 maidsto a place whence there was no escape and exclaiming:

  "'By no honorable death would I take away the lives of those who poured reproaches on my head and on my mother, 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 the 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 humanliterature, yet the instigator of it, Odysseus, is always the "wise,""royal," "princely," "good," and "godlike," and there is not theslightest hint that the great poet views his assassination of the poormaidens as the act of a ruffian, an act the more monstrous andunpardonable because Homer (XXII., 37) makes Odysseus himself say tothe suitors that they outraged his maids by force ([Greek: biaios]).What world-wide difference in this respect between the greatest poetof antiquity and Jesus of Nazareth who, when the Scribes and Phariseesbrought 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, saidunto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast astone at her;" whereupon, being convicted by their own consciences,they went out one by one. And Jesus said, "Where are those thineaccusers? Hath no man condemned thee?" She said, "No man, Lord." AndJesus 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 thanHomer's. He preaches that "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust afterher hath committed adultery with her already in his heart;" whereasHomer's ideas of sexual morality are, in the last analysis, hardlyabove those of a savage. The dalliance of Odysseus with the nymphs,and the licentious treatment of women captives by all the "heroes," donot, any more than the cowardly murder of the twelve maids, evoke aword of censure, disgust, or disapproval from his lips.

  His gods are on the same low level as his heroes, if not lower. Whenthe spouse of Zeus, king of the gods, wishes to beguile him, she knowsno other way than borrowing the girdle of Aphrodite. But this scene(_Iliad_, XIV., 153 _seq_.) is innocuous compared with the shamelessdescription of the adulterous amours of Ares and Aphrodite in theOdyssey (VIII., 266-365), in presence of the gods, who treat thematter as a great joke. For a parallel to this passage we would haveto descend to the Botocudos or the most degraded Australians. All ofwhich proves that the severity of the punishment inflicted on thetwelve maids of Odysseus does not indicate a high regard for chastity,but is simply another illustration of typical barbarous fury againstwomen for
presuming to do anything without the consent of the manwhose private property they are.

  WAS PENELOPE A MODEL WIFE?

  If the real Odysseus, unprincipled, unchivalrous, and cruel, isanything but a hero who "adorns his age and race," must it not beconceded, at any rate, that "the unwearied fidelity of Penelope,awaiting through the long revolving years the return of herstorm-tossed husband," presents, as Lecky declares (II., 279), and asis commonly supposed, a picture of perennial beauty "which Rome andChristendom, chivalry and modern civilization, have neither eclipsednor transcended?"

  We have seen that the fine words of Achilles regarding his "love" ofBriseis are, when confronted with his actions, reduced to emptyverbiage. The same result is reached in the case of Penelope, if wesubject her actions and motives to a searching critical analysis.Ostensibly, indeed, she is set up as a model of that feminineconstancy which men at all times have insisted on while theythemselves preferred to be models of inconstancy. As usual in suchcases, the feminine model is painted with touches of almost grotesqueexaggeration. After the return of Odysseus Penelope informed her nurse(XXIII., 18) that she has not slept soundly all this time--twentyyears! Such phrases, too, are used as "longing for Odysseus, I wastemy 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 inseveral places by three different persons--the goddess of wisdom,Telemachus, and Penelope herself. Athene urges Telemachus to makehaste that he may find his blameless mother still at home instead ofthe bride of one of the suitors.

  "But let her not against your will take treasure from your home. You know a woman's way; she strives to enrich his house who marries her, while of her former children and the husband of her 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 Achaians who woos her in the hall with largest gifts."

  And a little later (126) he exclaims, "She neither declines the hatedsuit nor has she power to end it, while they with feasting impoverishmy home."

  These words of Telcinachus are endorsed in full by Penelope herself,whose remarks (XIX., 524-35) to the disguised Odysseus give us the keyto the whole situation and explain why she lies abed so much weepingand 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, my maids, and my great high-roofed house--and thus revere my husband and _heed the public 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 marrying_ and departing from 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 Achaiians waste."

  If these words mean anything, they mean that what kept Penelope frommarrying again was not affection for her husband but the desire tolive up to the demands of "the public voice" and the fact that herson--who, according to Greek usage, was her master--would not permither to do so. This, then, was the cause of that proverbial constancy!But a darker shadow still is cast on her much-vaunted affection by hercold and suspicious reception of her husband on his return. While thedog recognized him at once and the swineherd was overjoyed, she, thewife, held him aloof, fearing that he might be some man who had cometo cheat her! At first Odysseus thought she scorned him because he"was foul and dressed in sorry clothes;" but even after he had bathedand put on his princely attire she refused to embrace him, because shewished to "prove her husband!" No wonder that her son declared thather "heart is always harder than a stone," and that Odysseus himselfthus 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 conjugal love thanthe attachment between Odysseus and Penelope with the "heart of iron,"may be found in the scene describing Hector's leave-taking ofAndromache before he goes out to fight the Greeks, fearing he maynever return. The serving-women inform him that his wife, hearing thatthe Trojans were hard pressed, had gone in haste to the wall, likeunto one frenzied. He goes to find her and when he arrives at theSkaian gates, she comes running to meet him, together with the nurse,who holds his infant boy on her bosom. Andromache weeps, recalls tohis mind that she had lost her father, mother, and seven brothers,wherefore he is to her a father, mother, brothers, as well as ahusband. "Have pity and abide here upon the tower, lest thou make thychild an orphan and thy wife a widow." Though Hector cannot think ofshrinking from battle like a coward, he declared that her fate, shouldthe city fall and he be slain, troubles him more than that of hisfather, mother, and brothers--the fate of being led into captivity andslavery by a Greek, doomed to carry water and to be pointed at as theformer wife of the brave Hector. He expresses the wish that hisboy--who at first is frightened by the horse-hair crest on hishelmet--may become greater than his father, bringing with himblood-stained spoils from the enemy he has slain, and gladdening hismother's heart; then caressing his wife with his hand, he begs her notto sorrow overmuch, but to go to her house and see to her own tasks,the loom and the distaff. Thus he spake, and she departed for herhome, oft looking back and letting fall big tears.

  This scene, which takes up four pages of the _Iliad_ (VI., 370-502),is the most touching, the most inspired, the most sentimental andmodern passage not only in the Homeric poems, but in all Greekliterature. Benecke has aptly remarked (10) that the relation betweenHector and Andromache is unparalleled in that literature; and he adds:

  "At the same time, how little really sympathetic to the Greek of the period was this wonderful and unique passage is sufficiently 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; better, too, perhaps than did her creator himself."

  Benecke should have written Hector in place of Andromache. There wasno difficulty, even for a Greek, in understanding Andromache. She hadevery reason, even from a purely selfish point of view, to dreadHector's battling with the savage Greeks; for while he lived she was aprincess, with all the comforts of life, whereas his fall and the fallof Troy meant her enslavement and a life of misery. What makes thescene in question so modern is the attitude of Hector--his dividinghis caresses equally between his wife and his son, and assuring herthat he is more troubled about her fate and anguish than about whatmay befall his father, mother, and brothers. That is an utterlyun-Greek sentiment, and that is the reason why the passage was notimitated. It was not a realistic scene from life, but a mere productof Homer's imagination and glowing genius--like the pathetic scene inwhich Odysseus wipes away a tear on noting that his faithful dog Argosrecognized him and wagged his tail. It is extremely improbable that aman who could behave so cruelly toward women as Odysseus did couldhave thus sympathized with a dog.

  Certainly no one else did, not even his "faithful" Penelope. As longas Argos was useful in the chase, the poet tells us, he was well takencare of; but now that he was old, he "lay neglected upon a pile ofdung," doomed to starve, for he had not strength to move. Homer alone,with the prophetic insight of a genius, could have conceived such atouch of modern sentiment toward
animals, so utterly foreign toancient ideas; and he alone could have put such a sentiment ofwife-love into the mouth of the Trojan Hector--a barbarian whose idealof manliness and greatness consisted in "bringing home blood-stainedspoils of the enemy."

  BARBAROUS TREATMENT OF GREEK WOMEN

  It seems like a touch of sarcasm that Homer incarnates his isolatedand un-Greek ideal of devotion to a wife in a _Trojan_, as if toindicate that it must not be accepted as a touch of _Greek_ life. Fromour point of view it is a stroke of genius. On the other hand it isobvious that attributing such a sentiment to a Trojan likewise cannotbe anything but a poetic license; for these Trojans were quite aspiratical, coarse, licentious, and polygamous as the Greeks, Hector'sown father having had fifty children, nineteen of whom were borne byhis wife, thirty-one by various concubines. Many pages of the _Iliad_bear witness to the savage ferocity of Greeks and Trojans alike--aferocity utterly incompatible with such tender emotions as Homerhimself was able to conceive in his imagination. The ferocity ofAchilles is typical of the feelings of these heroes. Not content withslaughtering an enemy who meets him in honorable battle, defending hiswife and home, he thrust thongs of ox-hide through the prostrateHector'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 hisvictim. This he repeated several times, aggravating the atrocity ahundredfold by his intention--in spite of the piteous entreaties ofthe dying Hector--to throw his corpse to be eaten by the dogs, thusdepriving even his spirit of rest, and his family of religiousconsolation. Nay, Achilles expresses the savage wish that his ragemight lead him so far as to carve and eat raw Hector's flesh. TheHomeric "hero," in short, is almost on a level in cruelty with the redIndian.

  But it is in their treatment of women--which Gladstone commends sohighly--that the barbarous nature of the Greek "heroes" is revealed inall its hideous nakedness. The king of their gods set them the examplewhen he punished his wife and queen by hanging her up amid the cloudswith two anvils suspended from her feet; clutching and throwing to theearth any gods that came to her rescue. (_Iliad,_ XV., 15-24.) Rankdoes not exempt the women of the heroic age from slavish toil.Nausicaea, though a princess, does the work of a washerwoman and drivesher own chariot to the laundry on the banks of the river, her onlyadvantage over her maids being that they have to walk.[296] Hermother, too, queen of the Phoeaceans, spends her time sitting amongthe waiting maids spinning yarn, while her husband sits idle and "sipshis wine like an immortal." The women have to do all the work to makethe men comfortable, even washing their feet, giving them their bath,anointing them, and putting their clothes on them again (_Odyssey,_XIX., 317; VIII., 454; XVII., 88, etc.),[297] even a princess likePolycaste, daughter of the divine Nestor, being called upon to performsuch menial service (III., 464-67). As for the serving-maids, theygrind corn, fetch water, and do other work, just like red squaws; andin the house of Odysseus we read of a poor girl, who, while the otherswere sleeping, was still toiling at her corn because her weakness hadprevented her from finishing her task (XX., 110).

  Penelope was a queen, but was very far from being treated like one.Gladstone found "the strongest evidence of the respect in which womenwere held" in the fact that the suitors stopped short of violence toher person! They did everything but that, making themselves at home inher house, unbidden and hated guests, debauching her maidservants, andconsuming her provisions by wholesale. But her own son's attitude ishardly less disrespectful and insulting than that of the ungallant,impertinent suitors. He repeatedly tells his mother to mind her ownbusiness--the loom and the distaff--leaving words for men; and eachtime the poet recommends this rude, unfilial speech as a "wise saying"which the queen humbly "lays to heart." His love of property farexceeds his love of his mother, for as soon as he is grown up he begsher to go home and get married again, "so troubled is he for thesubstance which the suitors waste." He urges her at last to "marrywhom she will," offering as an extra inducement "countless gifts" ifshe will only go.

  To us it seems topsy-turvy that a mother should have to ask her son'sconsent 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 leastregard to their wishes, as when Agamemnon offers Achilles the choiceof one of his three daughters (IX., 145). Big sums are sometimes paidfor a girl--by Iphidamas, for instance, who fell in battle, "far fromhis 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 againthat among the suitors the one who has the richest gifts to offershould take the bride. How much this mercenary, unceremonious, andoften cruel treatment of women was a matter of course among theseGreeks is indicated by Homer's naive epithet for brides, [Greek:parthenoi alphesiboiai], "virgins who bring in oxen." And this is thestate of affairs which Gladstone sums up by saying "there is a certainauthority of the man over the woman; but it does not destroy freedom"!

  The early Greeks were always fighting, and the object of their wars,as among the Australian savages, was usually woman, as Achillesfrankly informs us when he speaks of having laid waste twelve citiesand passed through many bloody days of battle, "_warring with folk fortheir women's sake_." (_Iliad,_ IX., 327.) Nestor admonishes theGreeks to "let no man hasten to depart home till each have lain bysome Trojan's wife" (354-55). The leader of the Greek forces issuesthis command regarding the Trojans:

  "Of them let not one escape sheer estruction 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 acaptured 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 behind, 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.)[298]

  LOVE IN SAPPHO'S POEMS

  Having failed to find any traces of romantic love, and only one ofconjugal affection, in the greatest poet of the Greeks, let us nowsubject their greatest poetess to a critical examination.

  Sappho undoubtedly had the divine spark. She may have possiblydeserved the epithet of the "tenth Muse," bestowed on her by ancientwriters, or of "the Poetess," as Homer was "the Poet." Among the onehundred and seventy fragments preserved some are of great beauty--thefollowing, for example, which is as delightful as a Japanese poem andin much the same style--suggesting a picture in a few words, with thedistinctness 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."[299] It is otherwise in her love-poems, or rather fragments of such, comprising the following:

  "Now love masters my limbs, and shakes me, fatal creature, bitter-sweet." "Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain falling 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 someexpressions of Sappho's preserved by Maximus Tyrius; and Libanius, therhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying "that nightmight be doubled for her." But the most important of her love-poems,and the one on which her adulators chiefly base their praises, is thefollowing fragment addressed [Greek: Pros Gunaika Eromenaen] ("to abeloved woman"):

  "That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits i
n thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter; 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 bathes me, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead. But I must dare all, since one so poor ..."

  The Platonist Longinus (third century) said that this ode was "not onepassion, but a congress of passions," and declared it the most perfectexpression in all ancient literature of the effects of love. A Greekphysician is said to have copied it into his book of diagnoses "as acompendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotion." F.B. Jevons, inhis history of Greek literature (139), speaks of the "marvellousfidelity in her representation of the passion of love." Long beforehim Addison had written in the _Spectator_ (No. 223) that Sappho "feltthe passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms."Theodore Watts wrote: "Never before these songs were sung, and neversince, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a crylike 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 us that "Nowhere, except, perhaps, in somePersian or Provencal love-songs, can be found more ardent expressionsof overmastering passion."

  I have read this poem a score of times, in Greek, in the Latin versionof Catullus, and in English, German, and French translations. The moreI read it and compare with it the eulogies just quoted, the more Imarvel at the power of cant and conventionality in criticism andopinion, and at the amazing current ignorance in regard to thepsychology of love and of the emotions in general. I have made a longand minute study of the symptoms of love, in myself and in others; Ihave found that the torments of doubt and the loss of sleep may make alover "paler than grass"; that his heart is apt to "flutter in hisbosom," 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, trembling 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 woods when she saw something that made 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!" Intruth, Sappho's famous "symptoms of love" are laughably like thesymptoms of fear which we find described in the books of Bain, Darwin,Mosso, and others--"a cold sweat," "deadly pallor," "voice becominghusky or failing altogether," "heart beating violently," "dizzinesswhich will blind him," "trembling of all the muscles of the body," "afainting fit." Nor is fear the only emotion that can produce thesesymptoms. Almost any strong passion, anger, extreme agony or joy, maycause them; so that what Sappho described was not love in particular,but the physiologic effects of violent emotions in general. I am gladthat the Greek physician who copied her poem into his book ofdiagnoses is not my family doctor.

  Sappho's love-poems are not psychologic but purely physiologic. Of theimaginative, sentimental, esthetic, moral, altruistic, sympathetic,affectional symptoms of what we know as romantic love they do not giveus the faintest hint. Hegel remarked truly that "in the odes of Sapphothe language of love rises indeed to the point of lyrical inspiration,yet what she reveals is rather the slow consuming flame of the bloodthan the inwardness of the subjective heart and soul." Nor was Byrondeceived: "I don't think Sappho's ode a good example." The historianBender had an inkling of the truth when he wrote (183):

  "To us who are accustomed to spiritualized 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 romanticlove but sensual passion. Nor is this the worst of it. Sappho'sabsurdly overrated love-poems are not even good descriptions of normalsensual passion. I have just said that they are purely physiologic;but that is too much praise for them. The word physiologic impliessomething healthy and normal, but Sappho's poems are not healthy andnormal; they are abnormal, they are pathologic. Had they been writtenby a man, this would not be the case; but Sappho was a woman, and herfamous ode is addressed to a woman. A woman, too, is referred to inher 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, however loth."

  In the five fragments above quoted there are also two at least whichrefer to girls. Now I have not the slightest desire to discuss themoral character of Sappho or the vices of her Lesbian countrywomen.She had a bad reputation among the Romans as well as the Greeks, andit is a fact that in the year 1073 her poems were burnt at Rome andConstantinople, "as being," in the words of Professor Gilbert Murray,"too much for the shaky morals of the time." Another recent writer,Professor Peck of Columbia University, says that

  "it is difficult 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 modern apologists would have her."

  The following lament alone would prove this:

  [Greek: Deduke men a Selana kai Plaeiades, mesai de nuktes, para d' erxet ora ego de mona katheudo.]

  MASCULINE MINDS IN FEMALE BODIES

  Several books and many articles have been written on this topic,[300]but the writers seem to have overlooked the fact that in the light ofthe researches of Krafft-Ebing and Moll it is possible to vindicatethe character of Sappho without ignoring the fact that her passionateerotic poems are addressed to women. These alienists have shown thatthe abnormal state of a masculine mind inhabiting a female body, or_vice versa_, is surprisingly common in all parts of the world. Theylook on it, with the best of reasons, as a diseased condition, whichdoes not necessarily, in persons of high principles, lead to viciousand unnatural practices. In every country there are thousands of girlswho, from childhood, would rather climb trees and fences and playsoldiers with the boys than fondle dolls or play with the other girls.When they get older they prefer tobacco to candy; they love tomasquerade in men's clothes, and when they hear of a girl'slove-affair they cannot understand what pleasure there can be indancing with a man or kissing him, while they themselves may long tokiss a girl, nay, in numerous cases, to marry her.[301] Many suchmarriages are made between women whose brains and bodies are ofdifferent sexes, and their love-affairs are often characterized byviolent jealousy and other symptoms of intersexual passion. Not a fewprominent persons have been innocent victims of this distressingdisease; it is well-known what strange masculine proclivities severaleminent female novelists and artists have shown; and whenever a womanshows great creative power or polemic aggressiveness the chances arethat her brain is of the masculine type. It is therefore quitepossible that Sappho may have been personally a pure woman, her mentalmasculinity ("mascula Sappho" Horace calls her) being her misfortune,not her fault. But even if we give her the benefit of the doubt andtake for granted that she had enough character to resist the abnormalimpulses and passions which she describes in her poems, and which theGreeks easily pardoned and even praised, we cannot and must notoverlook the fact that these poems are the result of a diseasedbrain-centre, and that what
they describe is not love, but a phase oferotic pathology. Normal sexual appetite is as natural a passion asthe hunger for food; it is simply a hunger to perpetuate the species,and without it the world would soon come to an end; but Sapphicpassion is a disease which luckily cannot become epidemic because itcannot perpetuate itself, but must always remain a freak.[302]

  ANACREON AND OTHERS

  There is considerable uncertainty regarding the dates of the earliestGreek poets. By dint of ingenious conjectures and combinationsphilologists have reached the conclusion that the Homeric poems, withtheir interpolations, originated between the dates 850 and 720B.C.--say 2700 years ago. Hesiod probably flourished near the end ofthe seventh century, to which Archilochus and Alcman belong, while inthe sixth and fifth centuries a number of names appear--little morethan names, it is true, since of most of them fragments only have comedown to us--Alcaeus, Mimnermus, Theognis, Sappho, Stesichorus,Anacreon, Ibycus, Bacchylides, Pindar, and others. Best known of allthese, as a poet of love, is Anacreon, though in his case no one hasbeen so foolish as to claim that the love described in his poems (orthose of his imitators) is ever supersensual. Professor Anthon hasaptly characterized him as "an amusing voluptuary and an elegantprofligate," and Hegel pointed out the superficiality of Anacreonticlove, in which there is no conception of the tremendous importance toa lover of having this or that particular girl and no other, or what Ihave called individual preference. Benecke puts this graphically whenhe remarks (25) regarding Mimnermus: "'What is life without love?' hesays; he does not say, 'What is life without your love?'" Even inSappho, I may add here, in spite of the seeming violence of herpassion, this quality of individual preference is really lacking orweak, for she is constantly transferring her attention from one girlto another. And as Sappho's poems are addressed to girls, so areAnacreon's and those of the other poets named, to boys, in most cases.The following, preserved by Athenaeus (XIII., 564D), is a goodspecimen:

  [Greek: "O pai parthenion blepon, dixemai se, su d' ou koeis, ouk eidos hoti taes emaes psuchaes haeniocheueis."]

  Such a poem, even if addressed properly, would indicate nothing morethan simple admiration and a longing which is specified in thefollowing:

  [Greek: Alla propine radinous, o phile, maerous.]

  It would hardly be worth while, even if the limitations of spacepermitted, to subject the fragments of the other poets of this periodto analysis. The reader has the key in his hands now--the altruisticand supersensual ingredients of love pointed out in this volume; andif he can find those ingredients in any of these poems, he will beluckier than I have been. We may therefore pass on to the great tragicpoets of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.

  WOMAN AND LOVE IN AESCHYLUS

  In the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes, Aeschylus is made to declare that hehad never introduced a woman in love into any of his plays--[Greek:ouk oid' oudeis haentin erosan popt' epoiaesa gunaika]. He certainlyhas not done so in any one of the seven plays which have survived ofthe ninety that he wrote, according to Suidas; and Aristophanes wouldnot have put that expression in his mouth had it not been true of theothers, too. To us it seems extraordinary that an author should boastof having kept out of his writings the element which constitutes thegreatest fascination of modern literature; but after reading his sevensurviving tragedies we do not wonder that Aeschylus should not haveintroduced a woman in love, or a man either, in plays wherewith hecompeted for the state prize on the solemn occasions of the greatfestivals at Athens; for love of an exalted kind, worthy of such anoccasion, could not have existed in a community where such ideasprevailed about women as Aeschylus unfolds in the few places where hecondescends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of sexuallove of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in theremarks of Prometheus and Io regarding the designs of Zeus on thelatter.

  An apparent exception seems at first sight to exist in the cordialreception Clytaemnestra accords to her husband, King Agamemnon, whenhe returns from the Trojan war. She calls the day of his return themost joyous of her life, asserts her complete fidelity to him duringhis long absence, declares she is not ashamed to tell her fondfeelings for her spouse in public, and adds that she has wept for himtill 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 abarbaric monarch.... I bid thee reverence me as a man, not a god." Butere long we discover (as in the case of Achilles), that all this finetalk of Clytaemnestra is mere verbiage, and worse--deadly hypocrisy.In reality she has been living with a paramour, and the genuinenessand intensity of her "fond feelings" for her husband may be inferredfrom the fact that hardly has he returned when she makes a murderousassault on him by throwing an artfully woven circular garment overhim, 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 "haslong since been meditated."

  Agamemnon, for his part, not only brought back with him from Troy anew concubine, Cassandra, and installed her in his home with the usualGreek indifference to the feelings of his legitimate wife, but hereally was no better than his murderous wife, since he had beenwilling to kill her daughter and his own, Iphigenia, to please hisbrother, curb a storm, and expedite the Trojan war. In the words ofthe Chorus,

  "Thus he dared to become the sacrificer of his daughter to promote a war undertaken for the avenging of a woman, and 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 with 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, butit is a myth which doubtless had many counterparts in Greek life.Aeschylus did not live so very long after Homer, and in his age it wasstill a favorite pastime of the Greeks to ravage cities, a process ofwhich Aeschylus gives us a vivid picture in a few lines, in his _Sevenagainst Thebes_:

  "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 confused 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."

  For women of rank alone is there any consideration--so long as theyare 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 _ThePersians_ the Chorus salutes Atossa in terms every one of whichemphasizes this point: "O queen, supreme of Persia's deep-waistedmatrons, aged mother of Xerxes, hail to thee! spouse to Darius,consort of the Persians, god and mother of a god thou art," whileClytaemnestra is saluted by the chorus in _Agamemnon_ in these words:"I have came revering thy majesty, Clytaemnestra; for it is right tohonor the consort of a chieftain hero, when the monarch's throne hasbeen left empty."

  We read in these plays of such unsympathetic things as a"man-detesting host of Amazons;" of fifty virgins fleeing fromincestuous wedlock and all but one of them cutting their husbands'throats at night with a sword; of the folly of marrying out of one'sown rank. In all Aeschylus there is on the other hand only onenoticeable reference to a genuine womanly quality--the injunction ofDanaus to his daughters to honor modesty more than life while they aretravelling among covetous men; an admonition much needed, since, asDanaus adds--characterizing the coarseness and lack of chivalry of themen--violence is sure to threaten them everywhere, "and on thefair-formed beauty
of virgins everyone that passes by sends forth amelting dart from his eyes, overcome by desire." Masculine coarsenessand lack of chivalry are also revealed in such abuse of woman asAeschylus--in the favorite Greek manner, puts in the mouth ofEteocles:

  "O 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 affrighted 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 any one of theseven plays which alone remain of the one hundred and twenty-three heis said to have written. But there are in existence some fragments ofhis _Phaedra_, which Rohde (31) and others are inclined to look on asthe "first tragedy of love." It has, however, nothing to do with whatwe know as either romantic or conjugal love, but is simply the storyof the adulterous and incestuous infatuation of Phaedra for herstepson Hippolytus. It is at the same time one of the many storiesillustrating the whimsical, hypocritical, and unchivalrous attitude ofthe early Greeks of always making woman the sinful aggressor andrepresenting man as being coyly reserved (see Rohde, 34-35). Theinfatuation of Phaedra is correctly described (_fr_., 611, 607 Dind.)as a [Greek: Theaelatos nosos]--a maddening disease inflicted by anangry goddess.

  Among the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles there are three whichthrow some light on the contemporary attitude toward women and thedifferent kinds of domestic attachment--the _Ajax_, the _Trachiniae_and _Antigone_. When Ajax, having disgraced himself by slaughtering aflock of sheep and cattle in the mad delusion that they were hisenemies, wishes he might die, Tecmessa, his concubine, declares, "Thenpray for my death, too, for why should I live if you are dead?" Shehas, however, plenty of egotistic reasons for dreading his death, forshe knows that her fate will be slavery. Moreover, instead of beingedified by her expression of attachment, we are repelled when we bearin mind that Ajax slew her father when he made her his concubine. TheGreeks were too indelicate in their ideas about concubines to bedisturbed by such a reflection. Nor were they affected disagreeably bythe utter indifference toward his concubine which Ajax displays. Hetells her to attend to her own affairs and remember that silence is awoman's greatest charm, and before committing suicide he utters amonologue in which he says farewell to his parents and to his country,but has no last message for Tecmessa. She was only a woman, forsooth.

  Only a woman, too, was Deianira, the heroine of the _Trachiniae_, andthough of exalted rank she fully realized this fact. When Herculesfirst took her to Tiryns, he was still sufficiently interested in herto shoot a hydra-poisoned arrow into the centaur Nessus, who attemptedto assault her while carrying her across the river Evenus. But aftershe had borne him several children he neglected her, going off onadventures to capture other women. She weeps because of his absence,complaining that for fifteen months she has had no message from him.At last information is brought to her that Hercules, inflamed withviolent love for the Princess Iole, had demanded her for a secretunion, and when the king refused, had ravaged his city and carried offIole, to be unto him more than a slave, as the messenger gives her tounderstand distinctly. On receiving this message; Deianira is at firstgreatly agitated, but soon remembers what the duty of a Greek wife is."I am well aware," she says in substance, "that we cannot expect a manto be always content with one woman. To antagonize the god of love, orto blame my husband for succumbing to him, would be foolish. Afterall, what does it amount to? Has not Hercules done this sort of thingmany times before? Have I ever been angry with him for so oftensuccumbing to this malady? His concubines, too, have never received anunkind word from me, nor shall Iole; for I freely confess, resentmentdoes not become a woman. Yet I am distressed, for I am old and Iole isyoung, and she will hereafter be his actual wife in place of me." Atthis thought jealousy sharpens her wit and she remembers that thedying centaur had advised her to save some of his blood and, if everoccasion should come for her to wish to bring back her husband's love,to anoint his garment with it. She does so, and sends it to him,without knowing that its effect will be to slowly burn the flesh offhis body. Hearing of the deadly effect of her gift, she commitssuicide, while Hercules spends the few remaining hours of his lifecursing her who murdered him, "the best of all men," and wishing shewere suffering in his place or that he might mutilate her body. Norwas his latest and "violent love" for Iole more than a passingappetite quickly appeased; for at the end he asks his son to marryher!

  This drama admirably illustrates the selfish view of the maritalrelation entertained by Greek men. Its moral may be summed up in thisadvice to a wife:

  "If your husband falls in love with a younger woman and brings her home, let him, for he is a victim of Cupid and cannot help it. Display no jealousy, and do not even try to win back his love, for that might annoy him or cause mischief."

  In other words, _The Trachiniae_ is an object-lesson to Greek wives,telling us what the men thought they ought to be. Probably some of thewives tried to live up to that ideal; but that could hardly beaccepted as genuine, spontaneous devotion deserving the name ofaffection. Most famous among all the tragedies of the Greeks, anddeservedly so, is the _Antigone_. Its plot can be told in such a wayas to make it seem a romantic love-story, if not a story of romanticlove. Creon, King of Thebes, has ordered, under penalty of death, thatno one shall bestow the rites of burial on Prince Polynices, who hasfallen after bearing arms against his own country. Antigone, sister ofPolynices, resolves to disobey this cruel order, and having failed topersuade her sister, Ismene, to aid her, carries out her plan alone.Boldly visiting the place where the body is exposed to the dogs andvultures, she sprinkles dust on it and pours out libations, repeatingthe process the next day on finding that the guards had meanwhileundone her work. This time she is apprehended in the act and broughtbefore the king, who condemns her to be immured alive in a tomb,though she is betrothed to his son Haemon. "Would you murder the brideof your own son?" asks Ismene; but the king replies that there aremany other women in the world. Haemon now appears and tries to movehis father to mercy, but in vain, though he threatens to slay himselfif his bride is killed. Antigone is immured, but at last, moved by theadvice of the Chorus and the dire predictions of the seer Tiresias,Creon changes his mind and hastens with men and tools to liberate thevirgin. When he arrives at the tomb he sees his son in it, clinging tothe corpse of Antigone, who had hanged herself. Horrified, the kingbegs his son to come out of the tomb, but Haemon seizes his sword andrushes forward to slay his father. The king escapes the danger byflight, whereupon Haemon thrusts the sword into his own body, andexpires, clasping the corpse of his bride.

  If we thus make Haemon practically the central figure of the tragedy,it resembles a romantic love-story; but in reality Haemon is littlemore than an episode. He has a quarrel with his father (who goes sofar as to threaten to kill his bride in his presence), rushes off in arage, and the tomb scene is not enacted, but merely related by amessenger, in forty lines out of a total of thirteen hundred andfifty. Much less still have we here a story of romantic love. Not oneof the fourteen ingredients of love can be found in it exceptself-sacrifice, and that not of the right kind. I need not explainonce more that suicide from grief over a lost bride does not benefitthat bride; that it is not altruistic, but selfish, unmanly, andcowardly, and is therefore no test whatever of love. Moreover, if weexamine the dialogue in detail we see that the motive of Haemon'ssuicide is not even grief over his lost bride, but rage at his father.When on first confronting Creon, he is thus accosted: "Have you heardthe sentence pronounced on your bride?" He answers meekly: "I have, myfather, and I yield to your superior wisdom, which no marriage canequal in excellence;" and it is only gradually that his ire is arousedby his father's abusive attitude; while at the end his first intentionwas to slay his father, not himself. Had Sophocles understood love aswe understand it, he would have repres
ented Haemon as drawing hissword at once and moving heaven and earth to prevent his bride frombeing buried alive.

  But it is in examining the attitude of Antigone that we realize mostvividly how short this drama falls of being a love-story. She nevereven mentions Haemon, has no thought of him, but is entirely absorbedin the idea of benefiting the spirit of her dead brother by performingthe forbidden funeral rites. As if to remove all doubt on that point,she furthermore tells us explicitly (lines 904-912) that she wouldhave never done such a deed, in defiance of the law, to save a husbandor a child, but only for a brother; and why? because she might easilyfind another husband, and have new children by him, but anotherbrother she could never have, as her parents were dead.[303]

  WOMAN AND LOVE IN EURIPIDES

  Of Euripides it cannot be said, as of his two great predecessors, thatwoman plays an insignificant role in his dramas. Most of the nineteenplays which have come down to us of the ninety-two he wrote are namedafter women; and Bulwer-Lytton was quite right when he declared that"he is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us_intellectually_ in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes."But I cannot agree with him when he says that with Euripides commences"the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment."There is true sentiment in Euripides, as there is in Sophocles, in therelations between parents and children, friends, brothers and sisters;but in the attitude of lovers, or of husband and wife, there is onlysensuality or at most sentimentality; and this sentimentality, or shamsentiment, does not begin with Euripides, for we have found instancesof it in the fond words of Clytaemnestra regarding the husband sheintended to murder, and did murder, and even in the Homeric Achilles,whose fine words regarding conjugal love contrast so ludicrously withhis unloving actions. These, however, are mere episodes, whileEuripides has written a whole play which from beginning to end is anexposition of sentimentality.

  The Fates had granted that when the Thessalian King Admetus approachedthe ordained end of his life it should be prolonged if another personvoluntarily consented to die in his place. His aged parents had noheart to "plunge into the darkness of the tomb" for his sake. "It isnot the custom in Greece for fathers to die for children," his fatherinforms him; while Adinetus indulges in coarse abuse: "By heaven, thouart the very pattern of cowards, who at thy age, on the borderland oflife, would'st not, nay, could'st not find the heart to die for thyown son; but ye, my parents, left to this stranger, whom henceforth Ishall justly hold e'en as mother and as father too, and none but her."This "stranger" is his wife Alcestis, who has volunteered to die forhim, exclaiming:

  "Thee I set before myself, and instead of living have ensured thy life, and so I die, though I need not have died for thee, but might have taken for my husband whom I would of the Thessalians, and have had a home blest with royal power; reft of thee, with my children orphans, I cared not to live."

  The world has naively accepted this speech and the sacrifice ofAlcestis as belonging to the region of sentiment; but in reality it isnothing more than one of those stories shrewdly invented by selfishmen to teach women that the object of their existence is to sacrificethemselves for their husbands. The king's father tells us this in somany words: "By the generous deed she dared, hath she made her life _anoble example for all her sex_;" adding that "such marriages I declareare gain to man, else to wed is not worth while." If these stories,like those manufactured by the Hindoos, were an indication of existingconjugal sentiment, would it be possible that the self-sacrifice wasinvariably on the woman's side? Adinetus would have never dreamt ofsacrificing _his_ life for his wife. He is not even ashamed to haveher die for him. It is true that he has one moment when he fancies hisfoe deriding him thus:

  "Behold him living in his shame, a wretch who quailed at death himself, but of his coward heart gave up his wedded wife instead, and escaped from Hades; doth he deem himself a man after that?"

  It is true also that his father taunts him contemptuously,

  "Dost thou then speak of cowardice in me, thou craven heart!... A clever scheme hast thou devised to stave off death forever, if thou canst persuade each new wife to die instead of thee."

  Yet Admetus is constantly assuring everyone of his undying attachmentto his wife. He holds her in his arms, imploring her not to leave him."If thou die," he exclaims,

  "I can no longer live; my life, my death, are in thy hands; thy love is what I worship.... Not a year only, but all my life will I mourn for thee.... In my bed thy figure shall be laid full length, by cunning artists fashioned; thereon will I throw myself and, folding my arms about thee, call upon thy name, and think I hold my dear wife in my embrace.... Take me, O take me, I beseech, with thee 'neath the earth;"

  and so on, _ad nauseam_--a sickening display of sentimentality,_i.e._, fond words belied by cowardly, selfish actions.

  The father-in-law of Alcestis, in his indignation at his son'simpertinence and lack of filial pity, exclaims that what made Alcestissacrifice herself was "want of sense;" which is quite true. But inpainting such a character, Euripides's chief motive appears to havebeen to please his audience by enforcing a maxim which the Greeksshared with the Hindoos and barbarians that "a woman, though bestowedupon a worthless husband, must be content with him." These words areactually put by him into the mouth of Andromache in the play of thatname. Andromache, once the wife of the Trojan Hector, now theconcubine of Achilles's son, is made to declare to the Chorus that "itis not beauty but virtuous acts that win a husband's heart;" whereuponshe proceeds to spoil this fine maxim by explaining what the Greeksunderstood by "virtuous acts" in a wife--namely, subordinating herselfeven to a "worthless husband." "Suppose," she continues, "thou hadstwedded a prince of Thrace... where one lord shares his affections witha host of wives, would'st thou have slain them? If so, thou would'sthave set a stigma of insatiate lust on all our sex." And she proceedsto relate how she herself paid no heed in Troy to Hector's amours withother women: "Oft in days gone by I held thy bastard babes to my ownbreast, to spare thee any cause for grief. By this course I bound myhusband to me by virtue's chains." To spare _him_ annoyance, no matterhow much his conduct might grieve _her_--that was the Greek idea ofconjugal devotion--all on one side. And how like the Hindoos, andOrientals, and barbarians in general, is the Greek seen to be in theremarks made by Hermione, the legitimate wife, to Andromache, theconcubine--accusing the latter of having by means of witchcraft madeher barren and thus caused her husband to hate her.

  With the subtle ingenuity of masculine selfishness the Greek dramatistdoubles the force of all his fine talk about the "virtuous acts" ofwives by representing the women themselves as uttering these maximsand admitting that their function is self-denial--that woman isaltogether an inferior and contemptible being. "How strange it is,"exclaims Andromache,

  "that, though some god has devised cures for mortals against the venom of reptiles, no man ever yet hath discovered aught to cure a woman's venom, which is far worse than viper's sting or scorching flame; so terrible a curse are we to mankind."

  Hermione declares:

  "Oh! never, never--this truth will I repeat--should men of sense, who have wives, allow women-folks to visit them in their homes, for they teach them mischief; one, to gain some private end, helps to corrupt their honor; another having made a slip herself, wants a companion in misfortune, while many are wantons; and hence it is men's houses are tainted. Wherefore keep strict guard upon the portals of your houses with bolts and bars."

  Bolts and bars were what the gallant Greek men kept their wives under,hence this custom too is here slyly justified out of a woman's mouth.And thus it goes on throughout the pages of Euripides. Iphigenia, inone of the two plays devoted to her, declares: "Not that I shrink fromdeath, if die I must,--when I have saved thee; no, indeed! for a man'sloss from his family is felt, while a woman's is of little moment." Inthe other she declares that one man is worth a my
riad ofWomen--[Greek: heis g' anaer kreisson gunaikon murion]--wherefore, assoon as she realizes the situation at Aulis, she expresses herwillingness to be immolated on the altar in order that the war againstTroy may no longer be delayed by adverse minds. She had, however, comefor a very different purpose, having been, with her queen mother,inveigled from home under the pretext that Achilles was to make herhis wife. Achilles, however, knew as little of the plot as she did,and he is much surprised when the queen refers to his impendingmarriage. A modern poet would have seen here a splendid, seeminglyinevitable, opportunity for a story of romantic love. He would havemade Achilles fall in love at sight of Iphigenia and resolve to saveher life, if need be at the cost of his own. What use does Euripidesmake of this opportunity? In his play Achilles does not see the girltill toward the close of the tragedy. He promises her unhappy motherthat "never shall thy daughter, after being once called my bride, dieby her father's hand;" But his reason for this is not love for a girlor a chivalrous attitude toward women in distress, but offendedvanity. "It is not to secure a bride that I have spoken thus," heexclaims; "there be maids unnumbered, eager to have my love--no! butKing Agamemnon has put an insult on me; he should have asked my leaveto use my name as a means to catch the child." In that case he "wouldnever have refused" to further his fellow-soldiers' common interest byallowing the maiden to be sacrificed.

  It is true that after Iphigenia has made her brave speech declaringthat a woman's life was of no account anyway, and that she hadresolved to die voluntarily for the army's sake, Achilles assumes adifferent attitude, declaring,

  "Some god was bent on blessing me, could I but have won thee for my wife.... But now that I have looked into thy noble nature, I feel still more a fond desire to win thee for my bride,"

  and promising to protect her against the whole army. But what was itin Iphigenia that thus aroused his admiration? A feminine trait, suchas would impress a modern romantic lover? Not in the least. He admiredher because, like a man, she offered to lay down her life in behalf ofthe manly virtue of patriotism. Greek men admired women only in so faras they resembled men; a truth to which I shall recur on another page.

  It would be foolish to chide Euripides for not making of this tragedya story of romantic love; he was a Greek and could not lift himselfabove his times by a miracle. To him, as to all his contemporaries,love was not a sentiment, "an illumination of the senses by the soul,"an impulse to noble actions, but a common appetite, apt to become aspecies of madness, a disease. His _Hippolytus_ is a study of thisdisease, unpleasant but striking; it has for its subject the lawlesspathologic love of Phaedra for her step-son. She is "seized with wilddesire;" she "pines away in silence, moaning beneath love's cruelscourge;" she "wastes away on a bed of sickness;" denies herself allfood, eager to reach death's cheerless bourn; a canker wastes herfading charms; she is "stricken by some demon's curse;" from her eyesthe tear-drops stream, and for very shame she turns them away; on hersoul "there rests a stain;" she knows that to yield to her "sicklypassion" would be "infamous;" yet she cannot suppress her wantonthoughts. Following the topsy-turvy, unchivalrous custom of the Greekpoets, Euripides makes a woman--"a thing the world detests"--thevictim of this mad passion, opposing to it the coy resistance of aman, a devotee of the chaste Diana. And at the end he makes Phaedra,before committing suicide, write an infamous letter which, to save herreputation, dooms to a cruel death the innocent victim of herinfatuation.

  To us, this last touch alone would demonstrate the worldwidedifference between lust and love. But Euripides knows no suchdifference. To him there is only one kind of love, and it varies onlyin being moderate in some cases, excessive in others. Love is "at oncethe sweetest and the bitterest thing," according as it is one or theother of the two. Phaedra's nurse deplores her passion, chieflybecause of its violence. The chorus in _Medea_ (627 _seqq_.) sings:

  "When in excess and past all limits Love doth come, he brings not glory or repute to man; but if the Cyprian queen in moderate might approach, no goddess is so full of charm as she."

  And in _Iphigenia at Aulis_ the chorus declares:

  "Happy they who find the goddess come in moderate might, sharing with self-restraint in Aphrodite's gift of marriage and enjoying calm and rest from frenzied passions.... Be mine delight in moderate and hallowed [Greek: hosioi] desires, and may I have a share in love, but shun excess therein."

  To Euripides, as to all the Greeks, there is no difference in theloves of gods and goddesses or kings and queens on the one hand, andthe lowest animals on the other. As the chorus sings in _Hippolytus_:

  "O'er the land and booming deep, on golden pinion borne, flits the god of love, maddening the heart and beguiling the senses of all whom he attacks, savage whelps on mountains bred, ocean's monsters, creatures of this sun-warmed earth, and man; thine, O Cypris, thine alone, the sovereign power to rule them all."[304]

  ROMANTIC LOVE, GREEK STYLE

  The Greeks, instead of confuting my theory that romantic love is thelast product of civilization, afford the most striking confirmation ofit. While considering the love-affairs of Africans, Australians, andother uncivilized peoples, we were dealing with races whose lack ofintelligence and delicacy in general made it natural to expect thattheir love, too, must be wanting in psychic qualities and refinement.But the Greeks were of a different calibre. Not only their men ofaffairs--generals and statesmen--but their men of thought andfeeling--philosophers and poets--were among the greatest the world hasever seen; yet these philosophers and poets--who, as everywhere, _musthave been far above the emotional level of their countrymen ingeneral_--knew nothing of romantic love. What makes this the moreremarkable is that, so far as their minds were concerned, they werequite capable of experiencing such a feeling. Indeed, they wereactually familiar with the psychic and altruistic ingredients of love;sympathy, devotion, self-sacrifice, affection, are sometimesmanifested in their dramas and stories when dealing with the lovebetween parents and children, brothers and sisters, or pairs offriends like Orestes and Pylades. And strangest of all, they actuallyhad a kind of romantic love, which, except for one circumstance, ismuch like modern romantic love.

  Euripides knew this kind of romantic love. Among the fragments thatremain to us of his lost tragedies is one from _Dictys_, in whichoccurs 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, continent, 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 interesting to note that Euripides was a friend ofSocrates, who often declared that his philosophy was the science oflove, and whose two pupils, Xenophon and Plato, elucidated thisscience in several of their works. In Xenophon's _Symposium_Critobulus declares that he would rather be blind to everything elsein the world than not to see his beloved; that he would rather _give_all he had to the beloved than _receive_ twice the amount fromanother; rather be the beloved's slave than free alone; rather workand dare for the beloved than live alone in ease and security. For, hecontinues, the enthusiasm which beauty inspires in lovers

  "makes them more generous, more eager to exert themselves, and more ambitious to overcome dangers, nay, it makes them purer and more continent, causing them to avoid even that to which the strongest appetite urges them."

  Several of Plato's dialogues, especially the _Symposium_ and_Phaedrus_, also bear witness to the fact that the Socratic conceptionof love resembled modern romantic love in its ideal of purity and itsaltruistic impulses. Especially notable in this respect are thespeeches of Phaedrus and Pausanius in the _Symposium_ (175-78), inwhich love is declared to be the source of the greatest benefits tous. There can be no greater blessing to a young person, we read, thana virtuous lover. Such a lover would rather die a thousand deaths thando a cowardly or dishon
orable deed; and love would make an inspiredhero out of the veriest coward. "Love will make men dare to die forthe beloved--love alone." "The actions of a lover have a grace whichennobles them." "From this point of view a man fairly argues that inAthens to love and be loved is a very honorable thing." "There is adishonor in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth, or ofpolitical power." "For when the lover and beloved come together ...the lover thinks that he is right in doing any service which he can tohis gracious loving one." And in the _Republic_ (VI., 485): "He whosenature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs oris akin to the object of his affections."[305]

  All this, as I have said, suggests romantic love, except for onecircumstance--a fatal one, however. Modern romantic love is anecstatic adoration of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman, whereasthe romantic love described by Xenophon and Plato--so-called "Platoniclove"--has nothing whatever to do with women. It is a passionate,romantic friendship between men and boys, which (whether it reallyexisted or not) the pupils of Socrates dilate upon as the only noble,exalted form of the passion that is presided over by Eros. On thispoint they are absolutely explicit. Of course it would not do for aGreek philosopher to deny that a woman may perform the noble act ofsacrificing her life for her husband--_that_ is her ideal function, aswe have seen--so Alcestis is praised and rewarded for giving up herlife; yet Plato tells us distinctly (_Symp_., 180) that this phase offeminine love is, after all, inferior to that which led Achilles togive his life for the purpose of avenging the death of his friendPatroclus.[306] What chiefly distinguishes the higher love from thelower is, in the opinion of the pupils of Socrates, purity; and thiskind of love does not exist, in their opinion, between men and women.In discussing this higher kind of love both Plato and Xenophonconsistently and persistently ignore women, and not only do theyignore them, but they deliberately distinguish between two goddessesof love, one of whom, the celestial, presides--not over refined lovebetween men and women, as we would say--but over the friendshipsbetween men only, while the feelings toward women are always inspiredby 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 derived 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 WOMEN

  In thus excluding women from the sphere of pure, super-sensualromantic love, Plato shows himself a Greek to the marrow. In the Greekview, to be a woman was to be inferior to man from every point ofview--even personal beauty. Plato's writings abound in passages whichreveal his lofty contempt for women. In the _Laws_ (VI., 781) hedeclares that "women are accustomed to creep into dark places, andwhen dragged out into the light they will exert their utmost powers ofresistance, and be far too much for the legislator." While unfolding,in _Timaeus_ (91), his theory of the creation of man, he saysgallantly that "of the men who came into the world, those who werecowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to havechanged into the nature of women in the second generation;" and onanother page (42) he puts the same idea even more insultingly bywriting 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 between a manand a brute. "Woman's nature," he says, "is inferior to that of men incapacity for virtue" (_Laws_, VI., 781); and his idea of ennobling awoman consists in making her resemble a man, giving her the sameeducation, the same training in athletics and warlike exercises, inwrestling naked with each other, even though the old and ugly would belaughed at (_Republic_, Bk. V.). Fathers, sons, mothers, 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, Platoproceeds to eliminate marriage and morality. "The brave man is to havemore wives than others, and he is to have first choice in such mattersmore than others" (_Republic_, V., 468). All wives, however, must bein common, no man having a monopoly of a woman. Nor must there be anychoice or preference for individuals. The mothers are to be arrangedby officials, who will see that the good pair with the good, the badwith the bad, the offspring of the latter being destroyed, just as isdone in the breeding of animals. Maternal and filial love also must beabolished, infants being taken from their mothers and educated incommon. Nor must husband and wife remain together longer than isnecessary for the perpetuation of the species. This is the only objectof marriage in Plato's opinion; for he recommends (_Laws_, VI., 784)that if a couple have no children after being married ten years, theyshould be "divorced for their mutual benefit."

  In all history there is not a more extraordinary spectacle than thatpresented by the greatest philosopher of Greece, proposing in hisideal republic to eliminate every variety of family affection, thusdegrading the relations of the sexes to a level inferior in somerespects even to that of Australian savages, who at least allowmothers to rear their own children. And this philosopher, the mostradical enemy love has ever known--practically a champion ofpromiscuity--has, by a strange irony of fate, lent his name to thepurest and most exalted form of love![307]

  SPARTAN OPPORTUNITIES FOR LOVE

  Had Plato lived a few centuries earlier he might have visited at leastone Greek state where his barbarous ideal of the sexual relations wasto a considerable extent realized. The Spartan law-maker Lycurgusshared his views regarding marriage, and had the advantage of beingable to enforce them. He, too, believed that human beings should bebred like cattle. He laughed, so Plutarch tells us in his biographicsketch, at those who, while exercising care in raising dogs andhorses, allowed unworthy husbands to have offspring. This, in itself,was a praiseworthy thought; but the method adopted by Lycurgus toovercome that objection was subversive of all morality and affection.He considered it advisable that among worthy men there should be acommunity of wives and children, for which purpose he tried tosuppress jealousy, ridiculing those who insisted on a conjugalmonopoly and who even engaged in fights on account of it. Elderly menwere urged to share their wives with younger men and adopt thechildren as their own; and if a man considered another's wifeparticularly prolific or virtuous he was not to hesitate to ask forher. Bridegrooms followed the custom of capturing their brides. Anattendant, after cutting off the bride's hair and putting a man'sgarment on her, left her alone in the dark, whereupon her bridegroomvisited her, returning soon, however, to his comrades. Formonths--sometimes until after children had been born--the husbandwould thus be unable to see his wife.

  Reading Greek literature in the light of modern science, it isinteresting to note that we have in the foregoing account unmistakableallusions to several primitive customs which have prevailed amongsavages and barbarians in all parts of the world.[308] The Greekwriters, ignorant of the revelations of anthropology regarding theevolution of human habits, assumed such customs to have beenoriginated by particular lawgivers. This was natural enough andpardonable under the circumstances; but how any modern writer canconsider such customs (whether aboriginal or instituted by lawgivers)especially favorable to love, passes my comprehension
. Yet one of thebest informed of my critics assured me that "in Sparta love was made apart of state policy, and opportunities were contrived for the youngmen and women to see each other at public games and become enamored."As usual in such cases, the writer ignores the details regarding theseSpartan opportunities for seeing one another and falling in love,which would have spoiled his argument by indicating what kind of"love" was in question here.

  Plutarch relates that Lycurgus made the girls strip naked and attendcertain festivals and dance in that state before the youths, who werealso naked. Bachelors who refused to marry were not allowed to attendthese dances, which, as Plutarch adds with characteristic Greeknaivete, were "a strong incentive to marriage." The erudite C.O.Mueller, in his history of the Doric race (II., 298), while confessingthat in all his reading of Greek books he had not come across a singleinstance of an Athenian in love with a free-born woman and marryingher because of a strong attachment, declares that Sparta was somewhatdifferent, personal attachments having been possible there because theyoung men and women were brought together at festivals and dances; buthe has the acumen to see that this love was "not of a romanticnature."[309]

  AMAZONIAN IDEAL OF GREEK WOMANHOOD

  Romantic love, as distinguished from friendship, is dependent onsexual differentiation, and the highest phases of romantic love arepossible only, as we have seen, where the secondary and tertiarysexual qualities, physical and mental, are highly developed. Now theSpartans, besides maintaining all the love-suppressing customs justalluded to, made special and systematic efforts to convert their womeninto Amazons devoid of all feminine qualities except such as wereabsolutely necessary for the perpetuation of the species. One of theavowed objects of making girls dance naked in the presence of men wasto destroy what they considered as effeminate modesty. The law whichforbade husbands to associate with their wives in the daytimeprevented the growth of any sentimental, sympathetic attachmentbetween husband and wife. Even maternal feeling was suppressed, as faras possible, Spartan mothers being taught to feel proud and happy iftheir sons fell in battle, disgraced and unhappy if they survived incase of defeat. The sole object, in brief, of Spartan institutionsrelating to women was to rear a breed of healthy animals for thepurpose of supplying the state with warriors. Not love, butpatriotism, was the underlying motive of these institutions. Topatriotism, the most masculine of all virtues, the lives of thesewomen were immolated, and what made it worse was that, while they werereared as men, these women could not share the honors of men. Broughtup as warriors, they were still despised by the warriors, who, whenthey wanted companionship, always sought it in association withcomrades of their own sex. In a word, instead of honoring the femalesex, the Spartans suppressed and dishonored it. But they brought ontheir own punishment; for the women, being left in charge of affairsat home during the frequent absence of their warlike husbands andsons, learned to command slaves, and, after the manner of the AfricanAmazons we have read about, soon tried to lord it over their husbandstoo.

  And this utter suppression of femininity, this glorification of theAmazon--a being as repulsive to every refined mind as an effeminateman--has been lauded by a host of writers as emancipation andprogress!

  "If your reputation for prowess and the battles you have fought weretaken away from you Spartans, in all else, be very sure, you have notyour inferiors," exclaims Peleus in the _Andromache_ of Euripides,thus summing up Athenian opinion on Sparta. There was, however, oneother respect in which the enemies of Sparta admired her. C.O. Muelleralludes 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 allother Greeks, patriotism was the supreme virtue, and women could becompared with men only in so far as they had the opportunity andcourage to participate in this masculine virtue. Aristotle appears tohave 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 indication that even he meant by this anything morethan the qualities in a woman of being a good nurse and a chastehousemaid.[310] Plato, as we have seen, considered woman inferior toman because she lacked the masculine qualities which he would haveliked to educate into her; and this remained the Greek attitude to theend, as we realize vividly on reading the special treatise ofPlutarch--who flourished nearly half a thousand years after Plato--_Onthe Virtues of Women_, in which, by way of proving "that the virtuesof a man and a woman do not differ," a number of stories are told ofheroic deeds, military, patriotic, and otherwise, performed by women.

  Greek ideas on womanhood are admirably symbolized in their theology.Of their four principal goddesses--using the more familiar Latinnames--Juno is a shrew, Venus a wanton, while Minerva and Diana areAmazons or hermaphrodites--masculine minds in female bodies. In Juno,as Gladstone has aptly said, the feminine character is stronglymarked; but, as he himself is obliged to admit, "by no means on itshigher side." Regarding Minerva, he remarks with equal aptness that"she is a goddess, not a god; but she has nothing of sex except thegender, nothing of the woman except the form." She is the goddess,among other things, of war. Diana spends all her time hunting andslaughtering animals, and she is not only a perpetual virgin butascetically averse to love and feminine tenderness--as unsympathetic abeing as was ever conceived by human imagination--as unnatural andludicrous as her devotee, the Hippolytus of Euripides. She is theAmazon of Amazons, and was represented dressed as an Amazon. Of courseshe is pictured as the tallest of women, and it is in regard to thequestion of stature that the Greeks once more betray theirultra-masculine inability to appreciate true femininity; as, forexample, in the stupid remark of Aristotle _(Eth. Nicom_., IV., 7),[Greek: to kallos en megalo somati, hoi mikroi d' asteioi kaisummetroi, kaloi d' ou.]--"beauty consists in a large body; the petiteare pretty and symmetrical, but not beautiful."[311]

  ATHENIAN ORIENTALISM

  Both Diana and Venus were brought to Greece from Asia. Indeed, when weexamine Greek life in the light of comparative _Culturgeschichte_, wefind a surprising prevalence of Oriental customs and ideas, especiallyin Athens, and particularly in the treatment of women. In this respectAthens is the antipode of Sparta. While at Sparta the women wrestlednaked with the men, in Athens the women were not even permitted towitness their games. The Athenians moreover had very decided opinionsabout the effect of Spartan customs. The beautiful Helen who causedthe Trojan war by her adulterous elopement was a Spartan, and theAthenian Euripides makes Peleus taunt her husband Menelaus in thesewords:

  "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 Spartan educatehis women in virtue. What he did was to compel them to be virtuous bylocking them up in the Oriental style. Unlike the Spartan, theAthenian had a regard for paternity and genealogy, and the only way heknew to insure it was the Asiatic. He failed to make the discoverythat the best safeguard of woman's virtue is education--as witnessAmerica; and to this failure is due to a large extent the collapse ofGreek civilization. Athenian women were more chaste than Spartansbecause they had to be, and they were superior also in being lessmasculine; but the topsy-turvy Athenian men looked down on thembecause they were _not_ more masculine and because they lacked theeducation which they themselves perversely refused to give them! FewAthenian women could read or write, nor had they much use for suchaccomplishments, being practically condemned to life-longimprisonment. The men indorsed t
he Oriental idea that educating awoman is an unwise and reprehensible thing.[312]

  Widely as the Athenian way of treating women differed from theSpartan, the result was the same--the frustration of pure love. Thegirls were married off in their early teens, before what little mindthey had was developed, to men whom they had never seen before, and inthe selection of whom they were not consulted; the result being, inthe words of a famous orator, that the men married respectable womenfor the sake of rearing legitimate offspring, keeping concubines forthe daily wants and care of the body, and associating with hetairaifor pleasant companionship. Hence, as Becker justly remarks (III.,337), though we come across stories of passionate love in the pages ofTerence (_i.e._ Menander) and other Greek writers, "sensuality wasalways the soil from which such passion sprang, and none other than asensual love between a man and a woman was even acknowledged."

  LITERATURE AND LIFE

  Although dogs are the most intelligent of all animals and at the sametime proverbial for their faithful attachment to their masters, theyare nevertheless, as I have before pointed out, in their sexualrelations utterly incapable of that approximation to conjugal lovewhich we find instinctive in some birds. Most readers of this book,too, are probably acquainted with men and women, who while highlyeducated and refined, as well as devoted to the members of theirfamily, are strangers to romantic love; and I have pointed out (302)that men of genius may in this respect be in the same boat as ordinarymortals. In view of these considerations, and of the rarity of truelove even in modern Europe and America, it surely is not unnatural orreckless to assume that there may have been whole nations in thispredicament, though they were as advanced in many other respects aswere the Greeks and as capable of other forms of domestic attachment.Yet, as I remarked on page 6, several writers, including so eminent athinker as Professor William James, have held that the Greeks couldhave differed from us only in their _ideas_ about love, and not intheir feelings themselves. "It is incredible," he remarks in thereview 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 paragraph he admits, however, that "no doubt theway in which we think about our emotions reacts on the emotionsthemselves, dampening or inflaming them, as the case may be;" and inthis admission he really concedes the whole matter. The main object ofmy 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 tothem, thus furnishing indirectly a complete answer to the objectionmade to my theory.[313]

  Now the ideas which the Greeks had about their women could not butdampen any elevated feelings of love that might otherwise have sprungup in them. Their literature attests that they considered love adegrading, sensual passion, 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 mindsthat women are in every respect the inferiors of men, how could theyhave experienced that _emotional_ state of ecstatic adoration andworship of the beloved which is the very essence of romantic love? Ofnecessity, purity and adoration were thus entirely eliminated fromsuch love as they were capable of feeling toward women. Nor can they,though noted for their enthusiasm for beautiful human forms, haverisen above sensualism in the admiration of the personal beauty ofwomen; for since their girls were left to grow up in utter ignorance,neither their faces nor their minds can have been of the kind whichinspires supersensual love. With boys it was different. They wereeducated mentally as well as physically, and hence asWinckelmann--himself a Greek in this respect--has remarked, "thesupreme beauty of Greek art is male rather than female." If thehealthy Greek mind could be so utterly different from the healthymodern mind in regard to the love of boys, why not in regard to thelove of women? The perverseness of the Greeks in this respect was sogreat that, as we have seen, they not only adored boys while despisingwomen, but preferred masculine women to feminine women.

  But the most serious oversight of the champions of Greek love is thatthey regard love as merely an emotion, or group of emotions, whereas,as I have shown, its most essential ingredients and only safe criteriaare the altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacrifice, alliedwith sympathy and affection. That there was no gallantry andself-sacrifice in Greek love of women I have already indicated (188,197, 203, 163); and that there was no sympathy in it is obvious fromthe heartless way in which the men treated the women--in life I mean,not merely in literature--refusing to allow them the least liberty ofmovement, or choice in marriage, or to give them an education whichwould have enabled them to enjoy the higher pleasures of life on theirown account. As for affection, it is needless to add that it cannotexist where there is no sympathy, no gallant kindness and courtesy,and no willingness to sacrifice one's selfish comfort or pleasures foranother.

  Of course we know all these things only on the testimony of Greekliterature; but it would surely be the most extraordinary thing in theworld if these altruistic impulses had existed in Greek life, andGreek literature had persistently and absolutely ignored them, whileon the other hand it is constantly harping on the other ingredients oflove which also accompany lust. If literature has any historic valueat all, if we can ever regard it as a mirror of life, we are entitledto the inference that romantic love was unknown to the Greeks ofEurope, whereas the caresses and refinements and ardent longings ofsensual love--including hyperbole and the mixed moods of hope anddespair---were familiar to them and are often expressed by them inpoetic language (see 137, 140-44, 295, 299). I say the Greeks ofEurope, to distinguish them from those of Greater Greece, whosecapacities for love we still have to consider.

  GREEK LOVE IN AFRICA

  It is amusing to note the difference of opinion prevailing among thechampions of Greek love as to the time when it began to be sentimentaland "modern." Some boldly go back to Homer, at the threshold ofliterature. Many begin with Sappho, some with Sophocles, and a hostwith Euripides. Menander is the starting-point to others, whileBenecke has written a book to prove that the credit of inventingmodern love belongs to Antimachus of Colophon. The majority hesitateto go back farther than the Alexandrian school of the fourth centurybefore Christ, while some modestly content themselves with theromancers of the fourth or fifth centuries after Christ--thus allowinga latitude of twelve or thirteen hundred years to choose from.

  We for our part, having applied our improved chemical test to suchlove as is recorded in the prose and verse of Classical Greece, andhaving found the elements of romantic sentiment missing, must nowexamine briefly what traces of it may occur in the much-vaunted eroticpoems and stories of Greater Greece, notably the capital of Egypt inthe third century before Christ.

  It is true that of the principal poets of the Alexandrianschool--Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius--only the last namedwas probably a native of Alexandria; but the others made it their homeand sphere of influence, being attracted by the great library, whichcontained all the treasures of Greek literature, and other inducementswhich the Ptolemies held out to men of letters. Thus it is permissibleto speak of an African or Alexandrian period of Greek literature, allthe more as the cosmopolitan influences at work at Alexandria gavethis literature a peculiar character of its own, erotically as well asotherwise, which tinged Greek writings from that time on.

  In reading Homer we are struck by the utter absence not only ofstories of romantic love but of romantic love-stories. Even therelations of Achilles and Briseis, which offered such fine romanticopportunities, are treated in an amazingly prosaic manner. An emphaticchange in this respect is hardly to be noted till we come toEuripides, who, though ignorant of romantic love, gave women and theirfeelings more attention than they ha
d previously received inliterature. Aristophanes, in several of his plays, gave vent to hisindignation at this new departure, but the tendency continued in theNew Comedy (Menander and others), which gave up the everlastingHomeric heroes and introduced everyday contemporary scenes and people.Thus the soil was prepared for the Alexandrians, but it was with themthat the new plant reached its full growth. Not content with followingthe example of the New Comedy, they took up the Homeric personagesagain, gods as well as heroes, but in a very different fashion fromthat of their predecessors, proceeding to sentimentalize them to theirhearts' content, the gods being represented as sharing all the amorousweaknesses of mortals, differing from them only, as Rohde remarks(107), in being even more fickle than they, eternally changing theirloves.

  The infusion of this romantic spirit into the dry old mythsundoubtedly brings the poems and stories of the Alexandrians and theirimitators a step nearer to modern conditions. The poets of theAlexandrian period must also be credited with being the first who madelove (sensual love, I mean)--which had played so subordinate a role inthe old epics and tragedies--the central feature of interest, thussetting a fashion which has continued without interruption to thepresent day. As Couat puts it, with the pardonable exaggeration of aspecialist (155): "Les Alexandrins n'ont pas invente l'amour dans lalitterature ... mais ils ont cree la litterature de l'amour." Theirway of treating love was followed in detail by the Roman poets,especially Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and by the Greeknovelists, Xenophon Ephesius, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Chariton,Longus, etc., up to the fourth or fifth centuries (dates areuncertain) of our era.

  There is a "suprising similarity" in the descriptions of love-affairsby 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 thesewritings, if the girl is represented as being respectable, (1) thelovers meet or see each other for the first time at religiousfestivals, as those were practically the only occasions where suchwomen could appear in public. (2) The love is sudden, at first sight,no other being possible under circumstances that permit of noprolonged courtship. (3) The youth is represented as having previouslyfelt a coy, proud aversion to the goddess of love, who now avengesherself by smiting him with a violent, maddening passion. (4) The loveis mutual, and it finds its way to the heart through the eyes. (5)Cupid with his arrows, urged on by Venus, is gradually relegated tothe background as a shadowy abstraction. (6) Both the youth and themaiden are extraordinarily beautiful. No attempt is made, however, todescribe the points of beauty in detail, after the dry fashion of theOriental and the later Byzantine authors. Hyperbole is used incomparing the complexion to snow, the cheeks to roses, etc; but thefavorite way of picturing a youth or maiden is to compare the same tosome one of the gods or goddesses who were types familiar to allthrough pictures and statues--a characteristically Greek device, goingback as far as Hesiod and Homer. (7) The passion of the lovers is agenuine disease, which (8) monopolizes their souls, and (9) makes themneglect the care of the body, (10) makes pallor alternate withblushes, (11) deprives them of sleep, or fills their dreams with thebeloved; (12) it urges them to seek solitude, and (13) to tell theirwoes to the trees and rocks, which (14) are supposed to sympathizewith them. (15) The passion is incurable, even wine, the remedy forother cares, serving only to aggravate it. (16) Like Orientals, thelovers may swoon away or fall into dangerous illness. (17) The lovercuts the beloved's name into trees, follows her footsteps, consultsthe flower oracle, wishes he were a bee so he could fly to her, and atthe banquet puts his lips to the spot where she drank from the cup.

  Having finished his list of erotic traits, Rohde confesses franklythat it "embraces, to be sure, only a limited number of the simplestsymptoms of love." But instead of drawing therefrom the obviousinference that love which has no other symptoms than those is very farfrom being like modern love, he adds perversely and illogically that"in its _essential_ traits, this passion _is presumably_ the same atall times and with all nations."[314]

  ALEXANDRIAN CHIVALRY.

  It is in the Alexandrian period of Greek literature and art that,according to Helbig (194), "we first meet traits that suggest theadoration of women (_Frauencultus_) and gallantry." This opinion iswidely prevalent, a special instance being that ecstatic exclamationof Professor Ebers: "Can we assume even the gallantry of love to havebeen unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, wastransferred as a constellation to the skies?" In reality this act wasinspired by selfish adulation and had not the remotest connection withlove.

  The story in brief is as follows: Shortly after his marriage toBerenice, Ptolemy went on an expedition into Syria. To insure his safereturn to Egypt Berenice vowed to consecrate her beautiful hair toVenus. On his return she fulfilled her vow in the temple; but on thefollowing day her hair could not be found. To console the king and thequeen, and to _conciliate the royal favor_, the astronomer Conondeclared that the locks of Berenice had been removed by divineinterposition and transferred to the skies in the form of aconstellation.[315]

  A still more amusing instance of Alexandrian "gallantry" is to befound in the case of the queen Stratonice, whose court-poets werecalled upon to compete with each other in singing of the beauty of herlocks. The fact that she was bald, did not, as a matter of course,make the slightest difference in this kind of homage.

  Unlike his colleagues, Rohde was not misled into accepting such_adulation of queens_ as evidence of _adoration of women in general_.In several pages of admirable erudition (63-69), which I commend toall students of the subject, he exposes the hollowness andartificiality of this so-called Alexandrian chivalry. Fashion ordainedthat 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;[316] 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 astronomer Conon."

  He then proceeds to explain that we must be carefulnot to infer from such a courtly custom that other women enjoyed thefreedom and influence of the queen or shared their compliments.

  "In actual life a certain chivalrous 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 "absolutelyno evidence" that women in general received the compliment and benefitof an education. The poems of Philetas and Callimachus, like those ofPropertius and Ovid, so far as they referred to women, appealed onlyto the wanton hetairai. As late as our first century Plutarch feltcalled upon to write a treatise, oti kai gunaikas paideuteon--"thatwomen too should be educated." Cornelius Nepos still speaks of thegynaikonitis as the place where women spend their time.

  "In particular, the emancipation of virgins from the seclusion of their jealous confinement would have implied a revolution in all social 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 regarding and treating women as inferiors andservants--a custom which precluded the possibility of true chivalryand adoration. That sympathy also--and consequently true, altruisticaffection--continued to be wanting in their emotional life isindicated by the fact, also pointed out by Rohde, that "t
he mostpalpable mark of a higher respect," an education, was withheld fromthe women to the end of the Hellenic period.[317]

  THE NEW COMEDY

  Another current error regarding the Alexandrian period both in Egyptand in Greece (Menander and the New Comedy) is that a regard forpurity enters as a new element into its literature. It does, in someinstances, less, however, as a virtue than as a _bonne bouche_ forepicures,[318] as is made most patent in that offshoot of theAlexandrian manner, the abominably _raffine_ story of Daphnis andChloe. There may also be traces of that "longing for an ennobling ofthe passion of love" of which Rohde speaks (though I have not foundany in my own reading, and the professor, contrary to his favoriteusage, gives no references); but apart from that, the later Greekliterature differs from the older not in being purer, but by itscoarse and shameless eroticism, both unnatural and natural. The oldepics and tragedies are models of purity in comparison, thoughEuripides set a bad example in his _Hippolytus_, and still more his_Aeolus_, the coarse incestuous passion of which was particularlyadmired and imitated by the later writers.[319] Aristophanes isproverbial for his unspeakable license and obscenity. Concerning theplays of Menander (more than a hundred, of which only fragments havecome down to us and Latin versions of several by Terence and Plautus),Plutarch tells us, indeed, that they were all tied together by onebond--love; but it was love in the only sense known to the Greeks, andalways involving a hetaira or at most a [Greek: pseudokorae] or_demie-vierge_, since respectable girls could not be involved inrealistic Greek love-affairs.

  Professor Gercke has well remarked (141) that the charm of elegancewith which Menander covers up his moral rottenness, and which made himthe favorite of the _jeunesse doree_ of his time, exerted a badinfluence on the stage through many centuries. There are a fewquasi-altruistic expressions in the plays of Terence and Plautus, butthey are not supported by actions and do not reach beyond the sphereof sentimentality into that of sentiment. Here again I may adduceRohde as an unbiassed witness. While declaring that there is "alonging for the ennobling of the passion in actual life" he admitsthat

  "really _sentimental effusions_ of love are strikingly rare in Plautus and Terence.[320] One might think the authors of the Latin versions had omitted the sentimental 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."[321]

  THEOCRITUS AND CALLIMACHUS

  Let us now return from Athens and Rome to Alexandria, to see whetherwe can find a purer and more genuinely romantic atmosphere in theworks of her leading poets. Of these the first in time and fame isTheocritus. He, like Sappho, has been lauded as a poet of love; and hedoes resemble Sappho in two respects. Like her, he often glorifiesunnatural passion in a way which, as in the twelfth and twenty-thirdIdyls, for example, tempts every normal person who can read theoriginal to throw the whole book away in disgust. Like Sappho and theHindoos (and some modern Critics) he also seems to imagine that thechief symptoms of love are emaciation, perspiration, and paralysis, aswe see in the absurdly overrated second Idyl, of which I have alreadyspoken (116). Lines 87-88 of Idyl I., lines 139-142 of Idyl II., andthe whole of Idyl XXVII., practically sum up the conception of loveprevailing in the bucolic school of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus,except that Theocritus has an idea of the value of coyness andjealousy as stimulants of passion, as Idyl VI. shows. Crude coynessand rude jealousy no doubt were known also to the rustic folk he singsabout; but when he makes that ugly, clumsy, one-eyed monster, theCyclops Polyphemus, fall in love with the sea-nymph Galatea (Idyl XI.)and lament that he was not born with fins that he might dive and kissher hand if his lips she refused, he applies Alexandrianpseudo-gallantry to pastoral conditions where they are ludicrously outof place. The kind of "gallantry" really to be expected under theseconditions is realistically indicated in Idyl XIV., where Aeschines,after declaring that he shall go mad some day because the beautifulCyniska flouted him, tells his friend how, in a fit of jealousy, hehad struck the girl on the cheek twice with clenched fist, while shewas sitting at his own table. Thereupon she left him, and now helaments: "If I could only find a cure for my love!"

  Another quaintly realistic touch occurs in the line (Idyl II.) inwhich Battis declares that Amaryllis, when she died, was as dear tohim as his goats. In this line, no doubt, we have the supreme ideal ofSicilian pastoral love; nor is there a line which indicates thatTheocritus himself knew any higher phases of love than those which heembodies in his shepherds. In a writer who has so many poeticcharms[322] this may seem strange, but it simply bears out my theorythat romantic love is one of the latest products of civilization--aslate as the love of romantic scenery, which we do not find inTheocritus, though he writes charmingly of other kinds of scenery--ofcool fountains, shady groves, pastures with cattle, apple trees, andother things that please the senses of man--as women do while they areyoung and pretty.

  Callimachus, the younger contemporary of Theocritus, is anotherAlexandrian whose importance in the history of love has beenexaggerated. His fame rests chiefly on the story of Acontius andCydippe which occurred in the collection of legends and tales he hadbrought together in his [Greek: Aitia]. His own version is now lost,like most of his other works; and such fragments of the story asremain would not suffice for the purpose of reconstruction were we notaided by the two epistles which the lovers exchange with each other inthe _Heroides_ of Ovid, and more still by the prose version ofAristaenetus, which appears to be quite literal, judging by thecorrespondence of the text with some of the extant fragments of theoriginal.[323] The story can be related in a few lines. Acontius andCydippe are both very beautiful and have both been coy to others ofthe opposite sex. As a punishment they are made to fall in love witheach other at first sight in the Temple of Diana. It is a law of thistemple that any vow made in it must be kept. To secure the girl,Acontius therefore takes an apple, writes on it a vow that she will behis bride and throws it at her feet. She picks it up, reads the vowaloud and thus pledges herself. Her parents, some time after, want tomarry her to another man; three times the wedding arrangements aremade, but each time she falls ill. Finally the oracle at Delphi isconsulted, which declares that the girl's illness is due to her notkeeping her vow; whereupon explanations follow and the lovers areunited.

  In the literary history of love this story may be allowed aconspicuous place for the reason that, as Mahaffy remarks (_G.L. &T._, 230), it is the first literary original of that sort of talewhich makes falling in love and happy marriage the beginning and theend, while the obstacles to this union form the details of the plot.Moreover, as Couat points out (145), the later Greek romances are mereimitations of this Alexandrian elegy--Hero and Leander, Leucippe andClitophon, and other stories all recall it. But from my point ofview--the evolutionary and psychological--I cannot see that the storytold by Callimachus marks any advance. The lovers see each other onlya moment in the temple; they do not meet afterward, there is no realcourtship, they have no chance to get acquainted with each other'smind and character, and there is no indication whatever ofsupersensual, altruistic affection. Nor was Callimachus the man fromwhom one would have expected a new gospel of love. He was a dry oldlibrarian, without originality, a compiler of catalogues and legends,etc.--eight hundred works all told--in which even the stories weremarred by details of pedantic erudition. Moreover, there is ampleevidence in the extant epigrams that he did not differ from hiscontemporaries and predecessors in the theory and practice of love.Instead of having the modern feeling of abhorrence toward anysuggestion of [Greek: paiderastia], he glorified it in the usual Greekstyle. The fame he enjoyed as an erotic poet among the coarse andunprincipled Roman bards does not redound to his credit, and hehimself tells us unmistakably what he means by love when he calls it a[Greek: philopaida noson] and declares that fasting is a sure remedyfor it (_Epigr._, 47).

  MEDEA AND JASON

  Another writer of this period who has been unduly extoll
ed for hisinsight into the mysteries of love, is Apollonius Rhodius, concerningwhom Professor Murray goes so far as to say (382), that "for romanticlove on the higher side he is without a peer even in the age ofTheocritus."(!) He owes this fame to the story of Medea and Jason,introduced in the third book of his version of the Argonauticexpedition (275 _seq_.). It begins in the old-fashioned way with Cupidshooting his arrow at Medea's heart, in which forthwith thedestructive passion glows. Blushes and pallor alternate in her face,and her breast heaves fast and deep as she incessantly stares at Jasonwith flaming eyes. She remembers afterwards every detail about hislooks and dress, and how he sat and walked. Unlike all other men heseemed to her. Tears run down her cheeks at the thought that he mightsuccumb in his combat with the two terrible bulls he will have to tamebefore he can recover the Golden Fleece. Even in her dreams shesuffers tortures, if she is able to sleep at all. She is distracted byconflicting desires. Should she give him the magic salve which wouldprotect his body from harm, or let him die, and die with him? Shouldshe give up her home, her family, her honor, for his sake and becomethe topic of scandalous gossip? or should she end it all by committingsuicide? She is on the point of doing so when the thought of all thejoys of life makes her hesitate and change her mind. She resolves tosee Jason alone and give him the ointment. A secret meeting isarranged in the temple of Hecate. She gets there first, and whilewaiting every sound of footsteps makes her bosom heave. At last hecomes and at sight of him her cheek flames red, her eyes grow dim,consciousness seems to leave her, and she is fixed to the groundunable to move forward or backward. After Jason has spoken to her,assuring her that the gods themselves would reward her for saving thelives of so many brave men, she takes the salve from her bosom, andshe would have plucked her heart from it to give him had he asked forit. The eyes of both are modestly turned to the ground, but when theymeet longing speaks from them. Then, after explaining to him the useof the salve, she seizes his hand and begs him after he shall havereached his home again, to remember her, as she will bear him in mind,even against her parents' wishes. Should he forget her, she hopesmessengers will bring news of him, or that she herself may be able tocross the seas and appear an unexpected guest to remind him how shehad saved him.

  Such was the love of Medea, which historians have proclaimed such anew thing in literature--"romantic love on the higher side." For mypart I cannot see in this description--in which no essential trait isomitted--anything different from what we have found in Homer, inSappho, and in Euripides. The unwomanly lack of coyness which Medeadisplays when she practically proposes to Jason, expecting him tomarry her out of gratitude, is copied after the Nausicaea of the_Odyssey_. The flaming cheeks, dim eyes, loss of consciousness, andparalysis are copied from Sappho; while the _Hippolytus_ of Euripidesfurnished the model for the dwelling on the subjective symptoms of the"pernicious passion of love." The stale trick too, of making this loveoriginate in a wound inflicted by Cupid's arrows is everlastinglyGreek; and so is the device of representing the woman alone as beingconsumed by the flames of love. For Jason is about as unlike a modernlover as a caricaturist could make him. His one idea is to save hislife and get the Fleece. "Necessity compels me to clasp your knees andask your aid," he exclaims when he meets her; and when she gives himthat broad hint "do not forget me; I shall never forget you," hisreply is a long story about his home. Not till after she hasthreatened to visit him does he declare "But _should you_ come to myhome, you would be honored by all ... _in that case_ I hope you maygrace my bridal couch." And again in the fourth book he relates thathe is taking Medea home to be his wife "in accordance with herwishes!" Without persiflage, his attitude may be summed up in thesewords: "I come to you because I am in danger of my precious life. Helpme to get back the Golden Fleece and I promise you that, on conditionthat I get home safe and sound, I will condescend to marry you." Isthis, perhaps, the "romantic love on the higher side" which ProfessorMurray found in this story? But there is more to come.

  Of the symptoms of love in Medea's heart described in the foregoingparagraph not one rises above that egotistic gloating over the pangsand joys of sensual infatuation which constitute one phase ofsentimentality; while the further progress of the story shows thatMedea had no idea whatever of sacrificing herself for Jason, but thatthe one motive of her actions was the eager desire to possess him.When the fugitives are being pursued closely, and the chivalrousArgonauts, afraid to battle with a superior number, propose to retainthe Golden Fleece, but to give up Medea and let some other king decidewhether she is to be returned to her parents, it never occurs to herthat she might save her beloved by going back home. She wants to havehim at any cost, or to perish with him; so she reproaches him bitterlyfor his ingratitude, and meditates the plan of setting fire to theships and burning him up with all the crew, as well as herself. Hetries to pacify her by protesting that he had not quite liked the planproposed himself, but had indorsed it only to gain time; whereupon shesuggests a way out of the dilemma pleasanter to herself, by advisingthe Argonauts to inveigle her brother, who leads the pursuers, intotheir power and assassinate him; which they promptly proceed to do,while she stands by with averted eyes. It is with unconscious sarcasmthat Apollonius exclaims on the same page where all these details of"romantic love on the higher side" are being unfolded: "Accursed Eros,the world's most direful plague."

  POETS AND HETAIRAI.

  The one commendable feature which the stories of Acontius and Cydippeand of Medea and Jason have in common is that the heroine in each caseis a respectable and pure maiden (see _Argon._, IV., 1018-1025). But,although the later romance writers followed this example, it would bea great mistake to suppose, with Mahaffy (272), that this touch ofvirgin purity was felt by the Alexandrians to be "the necessarystarting-point of the love-romance in a refined society." Alexandriansociety was anything but refined in matters of love, and the traitreferred to stands out by reason of its novelty and isolation in aliterature devoted chiefly to the hetairai. We see this especiallyalso in the epigrams of the period. It is astonishing, writes Couat(173), how many of these are erotic; and "almost all," he adds, "areaddressed to courtesans or young boys." "Dans toutes l'auteur nechante que la beaute plastique et les plaisirs faciles; leur Cyprisest la Cypris [Greek: pandaemos], celle qui se vend a tout le monde."In these verses of Callimachus, Asclepiades, Poseidippus and others,he finds sentimentality but no sentiment; and on page 62 he sums upAlexandria with French patness as a place "ou l'on faisait assidumentdes vers sur l'amour sans etre amoureux"--"where they were everwriting love-poems without ever being in love." But what repels moderntaste still more than this artificiality and lack of inspiration isthe effeminate degradation of the masculine type most admired. Helbig,who, in his book on _Campanische Wandmalerei_, enforces the testimonyof literature with the inferences that can be drawn from muralpaintings and vases, remarks (258) that the favorite poetic ideals ofthe time are tender youths with milk-white complexion, rosy cheeks andlong, soft tresses. Thus is Apollo represented by Callimachus, thuseven Achilles by the bucolic poets. In later representationsindicating Alexandrian influences we actually see Polyphemus no longeras a rude giant, but as a handsome man, or even as a beardlessyouth.[324]

  That the Alexandrian period, far from marking the advent of purity andrefinement in literature and life, really represents the climax ofdegradation, is made most obvious when we regard the role which thehetairai played in social life. In Alexandria and at Athens they werethe centre of attraction at all the entertainments of the young men,and to some of them great honors were paid. In the time of Polybiusthe most beautiful houses in Alexandria were named after flute girls;portrait statues of such were placed in temples and other publicplaces, by the side of those of generals and statesmen, and there werefew prominent men whose names were not associated with thesecreatures.

  The opinion has been promulgated countless times that these [Greek:hetairai] were a mentally superior class of women, and on the strengthof this information I assumed, in _Romantic Love and Personal Beaut
y_(79), that, notwithstanding their frailty, they may have been able, insome cases, to inspire a more refined, spiritual sort of love than theuneducated domestic women. A study of the original sources has nowconvinced me that this was a mistake. Aspasia no doubt was aremarkable woman, but she stands entirely by herself, Theodota isvisited once by Socrates, but he excuses himself from calling again,and as for Diotima, she is a seeress rather than a hetaira. Athenaeusinforms us 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 their rejoinders and replies;"

  but the specimens he gives of these rejoinders and replies consistchiefly of obscene jokes, cheap puns on names or pointless witticisms.Here are two specimens of the better kind, relating to Gnathaena, whowas famed for 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 brass, 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 mattocks 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 degradation of the most famousof the hetairai--Leontium, Lais, Phryne, and others, drawn byAthenaeus, need not be transferred to these pages. Combined with therevelations made in Lucian's [Greek: Etairikoi dialogoi], theydemonstrate absolutely that these degraded, mercenary, mawkishcreatures could not have inspired romantic sentiment in the hearts ofthe men, even if the latter had been capable of it.

  It is to such vulgar persons that the poets of classical Greece andAlexandria addressed their verses. And herein they were followed bythose of the Latins who may be regarded as imitators of theAlexandrians--Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, the principalerotic poets of Rome. They wrote all their love-poems to, for, orabout, a class of women corresponding to the Greek hetairai. Of Ovid Ihave already spoken (189), and what I said of him practically appliesto the others. Propertius not only writes with the hetairai in hismind, but, like his Alexandrian models, he appears as one who isforever writing love-poems without ever being really in love. WithCatullus the sensual passion at least is sincere. Yet even ProfessorSellar, who declares that he is, "with the exception perhaps ofSappho, the greatest and truest of all the ancient poets of love," isobliged to admit that he "has not the romance and purity of modernsentiment" (349, 22). Like the Greeks, he had a vague idea that thereis something higher than sensual passion, but, like a Greek, inexpressing it, he ignores women as a matter of course. "There was atime," he writes to his profligate Lesbia, "when I loved you not as aman loves his mistress, but _as a father loves his son or hisson-in-law_"!

  Dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum, Lesbia, nee prae me velle tenere Iovem. Dilexi tum te non ut volgus amicam, Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.

  In Tibullus there is a note of tenderness which, however, is a mark ofeffeminacy rather than of an improved manliness. His passion isfickle, his adoration little more than adulation, and the expressionsof unselfish devotion here and there do not mean more than thealtiloquent words of Achilles about Briseis or of Admetus aboutAlcestis, for they are not backed up by altruistic actions. In a word,his poems belong to the region of sentimentality, not sentiment.Morally he is as rotten as any of his colleagues. He began his poeticcareer with a glorification of [Greek: paiderastia], and continued itas an admirer of the most abandoned women. A French author who wrote ahistory of prostitution in three volumes quite properly devoted achapter to Tibullus and his love-affairs.[325]

  SHORT STORIES

  A big volume might be filled with the short love-stories in prose orverse scattered through a thousand years of Greek literature. But,although some of them are quite romantic, I must emphaticallyreiterate what I said in my first book (76)--that romantic love doesnot appear in the writings of any Greek author and that the passion ofthe desperately enamoured young people so often portrayed sprangentirely from sensuality. One of the critics referred to at thebeginning of this chapter held me up to the ridicule of the Britishpublic because I ignored such romantic love-stories as Orpheus andEurydice, Alcyone and Ceyx, Atalanta and Meleager, Cephalus andProcris, and "a dozen others" which "any school girl" could tell me.To begin with the one last named, the critic asks: "What can be saidagainst Cephalus and Procris?" A great deal, I am afraid. As told byAntoninus Liberalis in No. 41 of his _Metamorphoses_ ([Greek:metamorphoseon synagogae]) it is one of the most abominable andobscene stories ever penned even by a Greek. Some of the disgustingdetails are omitted in the versions of Ovid and Hyginus, but in theleast offensive version that can be made the story runs thus:

  Cephalus, having had experience of woman's unbridled passion, doubts his wife's fidelity and, to test her, disguises himself and offers her a bag of gold. At first she refuses, but when he doubles the sum, she submits, whereupon he throws away his disguise and confronts her with her 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 being 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" ([Greek: Nephelae] 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 girlslearn by the dozen? Coarse as it is, the majority of these stories areno better, being absolutely unfit for literal translation, which isdoubtless the reason why no publisher has ever brought out acollection of Greek "love-stories." Of those referred to above none isso objectionable as the tale of Cephalus and Procris, nor, on theother hand, is any one of them in any way related to what we callromantic love. Atalanta was a sweet masculine maiden who could runfaster than any athlete. Her father was anxious to have her marry, andshe finally agreed to wed any man who could reach a certain goalbefore her, the condition being, however, that she should be allowedto transfix with her spear every suitor who failed. She had alreadyornamented the place of contest with the heads of many courageousyoung men, this tender-hearted, romantic maiden had, when her fun wasrudely spoiled by Meleager, who threw before her three golden appleswhich 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 tothis story an improper sequel was added.

  Alcyone and Ceyx is the story of a wife who committed suicide ondiscovering the body of her husband on the sea-beach; and the story ofOrpheus, who grieved so over the death of his wife Eurydice that hewent to the lower world to bring her up again, but lost her againbecause, contrary to his agreement with Pluto and Proserpina, helooked back to see if she was following, is known to everybody. Theconjugal attachment and grief at the loss of a spouse which these twolegends tell of, are things the existence of which in Greece no onehas ever denied. They are simple phenomena quite apart from thecomplex state of mind we call romantic love, and are shared by manwith many of the lower animals. In such attachment and grief there isno evidence of altruistic affection. Orpheus tried to bring backEurydice to please himself, not her, and Alcyone's suicide was of nopossible use to Ceyx.[326]

  The story of Panthea and Abradates, to which Professor Ebers refers sotriumphantly, is equally inconclusive as to the existence ofaltruistic affection. Abradates, having been urged by his wife Pantheato show himself worthy of the friendship of Cyrus by doing valorousdeeds, falls in a battle, whereat Panthea is so grieved at the resultof her advice that she commits suicide. From the modern Christianpo
int of view this was not a rational proof of affection, but afoolish and criminal act. But it harmonized finely with the Greekideal--the notion that patriotism is even a woman's first duty, andher life not worth living except in subservience to her husband. Thereis good reason to believe[327] that this story was a pure invention ofXenophon and deliberately intended to be an object lesson to womenregarding the ideal they ought to live up to. The whole of the book inwhich it appears--[Greek: Kyrou paideia]--is what the Germans call a_Tendenzroman_--a historic romance with a moral, illustrating theimportance of a correct education and glorifying a certain form ofgovernment.

  To a student of Greek love one of the most instructive documents isthe [Greek: erotika pathaemata] of Parthenius, who was a contemporaryof the most famous Roman poets (first century before Christ), and theteacher of Virgil. It is a collection of thirty-six short love-storiesin prose, made for him by his friend Cornelius Gallus, who was inquest of subjects which he might turn into elegies. It has beenremarked that these poems are peculiarly sad, but a better word forthem is coarse. Unbridled lust, incest, [Greek: _paiderastia_], andadultery are the favorite motives in them, and few rise above themephitic atmosphere which breathes from Cephalus and Procris or otherstories of crime, like that of Philomela and Procne, which were sopopular among Greek and Roman poets, and presumably suited theirreaders. With amusing naivete Eckstein pleads for these "specimens ofantique romance" on the ground that there is more lubricity inBandello and Boccaccio!--which is like declaring that a man whoassassinates another by simply hitting him on the head is virtuousbecause there are others who make murder a fine art. I commend thestories of Parthenius to the special attention of any one who may haveany lingering doubts as to the difference between Greek ideas of loveand modern ideals.[328]

  GREEK ROMANCES

  Parthenius is regarded as a connecting link of the Alexandrian schoolwith the Roman poets on one side, and on the other with the romanceswhich constitute the last phase of Greek erotic literature.[329] Inthese romances too, a number of my critics professed to discoverromantic love. The reviewer of my book in _Nature_ (London) asked meto see whether Heliodorus's account of the loves of Theagenes andChariclea does not come up to my standard. I am sorry to say it doesnot. Jowett perhaps dismisses this story somewhat too curtly as "sillyand obscene"; but it certainly is far from being a love-story in themodern sense of the word, though its moral tone is doubtless superiorto that of the other Greek romances. The notion that it indicates anadvance in erotic literature may no doubt be traced to the legend thatHeliodorus was a bishop, and that he introduced Christian ideas intohis romance--a theory which Professor Rohde has scuttled and sent tothe bottom of the sea.[330] The preservation of the heroine'svirginity amid incredible perils and temptations is one of the tricksof the Greek novelists, the real object of which is made most apparentin _Daphnis and Chloe_. The extraordinary emphasis placed on it onevery possible occasion is not only very indelicate, but it shows hownovel and remarkable such an idea was considered at the time. It wasone of the tricks of the Sophists (with whom Heliodorus must beclassed), who were in the habit of treating a moral question like amathematical problem. "Given a maiden's innocence, how can it bepreserved to the end of the story?" is the artificial, silly, andvulgar leading motive of this Greek romance, as of others. Huet,Villemain, and many other critics have been duped by thissophistico-mathematical aspect of the story into descanting on thepeculiar purity and delicacy of its moral tone; but one need only reada 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 subjectbeen romantic love: [Greek: _Hormaen gar, hos oistha, kratousaesepithumias machae men antitupos epipeinei, logos d' eikon kai pros toboulaema syntrechon taen protaen kai zeousan phoran esteile kai tokatoxu taes orezeos to haedei taes epaggelias kateunase.]

  The story of Heliodorus is full of such coarse remarks, and his ideaof love is plainly enough revealed when he moralizes that "a loverinclines to drink and one who is drunk is inclined to love."

  It is not only on account of this coarseness that the story ofTheagenes and Chariclea fails to come up to the standard of romanticlove. When Arsace (VIII., 9) imprisons the lovers together, with theidea that the sight of their chains will increase the sufferings ofeach, we have an intimation of crude sympathy; but apart from that thesymptoms of love referred to in the course of the romance are the samethat I have previously enumerated, as peculiar to Alexandrianliterature. The maxims, "dread the revenge that follows neglectedlove;" "love soon finds its end in satiety;" and "the greatesthappiness is to be free from love," take us back to the oldest Greektimes. Peculiarly Greek, too, is the scene in which the women, unableto restrain their feelings, fling fruits and flowers at a young manbecause he is so beautiful; although on the same page we are surprisedby 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 Heliodorusdiffers favorably from that of Achilles Tatius, which relates theadventures of Leucippe and Clitophon; but I need not dwell on thisamazingly obscene and licentious narrative, as its author's wholephilosophy of love, like that of Heliodorus, is summed up in thispassage:

  "As the wine produced its effect I cast lawless glances at Leucippe: for Love and Bacchus are violent gods, 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, orthe epic _Dionysiaca_ of Nonnus, as they yield us no new points ofview. The romance of Longus, however, calls for some remarks, as it isthe best known of the Greek novels and has often been pronounced astory of refined love worthy of a modern writer.

  DAPHNIS AND CHLOE

  Goethe found in _Daphnis and Chloe_ "a delicacy of feeling whichcannot be excelled." Professor Murray backs up the morals of Longus:"It needs an unintelligent reader or a morbid translator," he writes(403), "to find harm in the _History of Daphnis and Chloe_;" and aneditorial writer in the New York _Mail and Express_ accused me, asbefore intimated, of unexampled ignorance for not knowing that_Daphnis and Chloe_ is "as sweet and beautiful a love-story as everskipped in prose." This, indeed, is the prevalent opinion. How it everarose is a mystery to me. Fiction has always been the sphere of themost unrestrained license, yet Dunlop wrote in his _History ofFiction_ that there are in this story "particular passages soextremely reprehensible that I know nothing like them in almost anywork whatever." In collecting the material for the present volume Ihave been obliged to examine thousands of books referring to therelations of men and women, but I declare that of all the books I haveseen only the Hindoo _K[=a]masutr[=a]m_, 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 indownright obscenity or deliberate laciviousness. I have been able,without going beyond the latitude permissible to anthropologists, togive a fairly accurate idea of the love-affairs of savages andbarbarians; but I find it impossible, after several trials, to sum upthe story of Daphnis and Chloe without going beyond the limits ofpropriety. Among all the deliberate pictures of _moral depravity_painted by Greek and Roman authors not one is so objectionable as this"idyllic" picture of the _innocent_ shepherd boy and girl. Pastorallove is coarse enough, in all truth: but this story is infinitely moreimmoral than, for instance, the frank and natural sensualism of thetwenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus. Professor Anthon (755) describedthe 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 _Daphnis and Chloe_ delineated by a refined and cultivated mind, and spiritualized and purified by the influence of Christianity."

  This is true; but Anthon erred decidedly in saying that in the Greekstory "vice is advocated by no sophistry." On the contrary, what makesthis romance so peculiarly objectionable is that it is a master workof that kind of fiction which makes vice alluring under thesophistical veil of innocence. Longus knew very well that nothing isso tempting to libertines as purity and ignorant innocence; hence hemade purity and ignorant innocence the pivot of his prurient story.Professor Rohde (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 hypocritical _raffinement_[331] which reveals in the most disagreeable manner that the naivete of this idyllist is a premeditated artifice 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 romance of Longus, or could have discovered genuine naivete in this most artificial of all rhetorical productions. No attentive 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, trifling, or utterly silly in his affectation."[332]

  HERO AND LEANDER

  Our survey of Greek erotic literature may be brought to a close withtwo famous stories which are closely allied to the Greek romances,although one of them--_Hero and Leander_--was written in verse, andthe other--_Cupid and Psyche_--in Latin prose. While Apuleius was anAfrican and wrote his story in Latin, he evidently derived it from aGreek source.[333] He lived in the second century of our era, andMusaeus, the author of _Hero and Leander_, in the fifth. It is morethan probable that Musaeus did not invent the story, but found it as alocal legend and simply adorned it with his pen.

  On the shores of the Hellespont, near the narrowest part of thestrait, lay the cities of Sestos and Abydos. It was at Sestos thatXerxes undertook to cross with his vast armies, while Abydos claimedto be the true burial place of Osiris; yet these circumstance wereconsidered insignificant in comparison with the fact that it was fromAbydos to Sestos and back that Leander was fabled to have swum on hisnightly visits to his beloved Hero; for the coins of both the citieswere adorned with the solitary tower in which Hero was supposed tolive at the time. Why she lived there is not stated by any of thepoets who elaborated the legend, but it may be surmised that she didso in order to give them a chance to invent a romantic story. To thepresent day the Turks point out what they claim to be her tower, andit is well-known that in 1810, Lord Byron and Lieutenant Ekenhead, inorder to test the possibility of Leander's feat, swam from Europe toAsia at this place; it took them an hour and five and an hour and tenminutes respectively, and on account of the strong current thedistance actually traversed was estimated at more than four miles,while in a straight line it was only a mile from shore to shore.

  I have already pointed out (202, 204) that the action of Leander inswimming across this strait for the sake of enjoying the favor ofHero, and her suicide when she finds him dead on the rocks, havenothing so do with the altruistic self-sacrifice that indicates_soul_-love. Here I merely wish to remark that apart from that thereis not a line or word in the whole poem to prove that this story"completely upsets" my theory, as one critic wrote. The story is notmerely frivolous and cold, as W. von Humboldt called it; it is asunmitigatedly sensual as _Daphnis and Chloe_, though less offensivelyso because it does not add the vice of hypocrisy to its immodesty.From beginning to end there is but one thought in Leanders mind, asthere is in Hero's, whose words and actions are even more indelicatethan those of Leander; they are the words and actions of a priestessof Venus true to her function--a girl to whom the higher femininevirtues, which alone can inspire romantic love, are unknown. On theimpulse of the moment, in response to coarse flattery, she makes anassignation in a lonely tower with a perfect stranger, regardless ofher parents, her honor, her future. Details need not be cited, as thepoem is accessible to everybody. It is a romantic story, in Ovid'sversion even more so than in that of Musaeus; but of romanticlove--soul-love--there is no trace in either version. There aretouches of sentimentality in Ovid, but not of sentiment; a distinctionon which I should have dwelt in my first book (91).

  CUPID AND PSYCHE

  To a student of comparative literature the story of Cupid andPsyche[334] is one of those tales which are current in many countries(and of which _Lohengrin_ is a familiar instance), that wereoriginally intended as object lessons to enforce the moral that womenmust not be too inquisitive regarding their lovers or husbands, whomay seem monsters, but in reality are gods and should be accepted assuch. If most persons, nevertheless, fancy that _Cupid and Psyche_ isa story of "modern" romantic love, that is presumably due to the factthat most persons have never read it. It is not too much to say thathad Apuleius really known such a thing as modern romantic love--orconjugal affection either--it would have required great ingenuity onhis part to invent a plot from which those qualities are so rigorouslyexcluded. Romantic love means pre-matrimonial infatuation, based notonly on physical charms but on soul-beauty. The time when alone itflourishes with its mental purity, its minute sympathies, its gallantattentions and sacrifices, its hyperbolic adorations, and mixed moodsof agonies and ecstasies, is during the period of courtship. Now fromthe story of Cupid and Psyche this period is absolutely eliminated.Venus is jealous because divine honors are paid to the Princess Psycheon account of her beauty; so she sends her son Cupid to punish Psycheby making her fall in love violently (_amore flagrantissimo_) with thelowest, poorest, and most abject man on earth. Just at that timePsyche has been exposed by the king on a mountain top in obedience toan obscure oracle. Cupid sees her there, and, disobeying his mother'sorders, has her brought while asleep, by his servant Zephir, to abeautiful palace, where all the luxuries of life are provided for herby unseen hands; and at night, after she has retired, an unknown lovervisits her, disappearing again before dawn (_jamque aderat ignobilismaritus et torem inscenderat et uxorem sibi Psychen fecerat et antelucis exortum propere discesserat_).

  Now follow some months in which Psyche is neither maiden nor wife.Even if they had been properly married there would have been noopportunity for the development or manifestation of supersensualconjugal attachment, for all this time Psyche is never allowed even tosee her lover; and when an opportunity arises for her to show herdevotion to him she fails utterly to rise to the occasion. One nighthe informs her that her two sisters, who are unhappily married, aretrying to find her, and he warns her seriously not to heed them in anyway, should they succeed in their efforts. She promises, but spendsthe whole of the next day weeping and wailing because she is locked upin a beautiful prison, unable to see her sisters--very unlike a lovingmodern girl on her honeymoon, whose one desire is to be alone with herbeloved, giving him a monopoly of her affection and enjoying amonopoly of his, with no distractions or jealousies to mar theirhappiness. Cupid chides her for being sad and dissatisfied even amidhis caresses and he again warns her against her scheming sisters;whereat she goes so far as to threaten to kill herself unless heallows her to receive her sisters. He consents at last, after makingher promise not to let them persuade her to try to find out anythingabout his personal appearance, lest such forbidden curiosity make herlose him forever. Nevertheless, when, on their second visit, thesisters, filled with envy, try to persuade her that her unseen loveris a monster w
ho intends to eat her after she has grown fat, and thatto save herself she must cut off his head while he is asleep, sheresolves to follow their advice. But when she enters the room atnight, with a knife in one hand and a lamp in the other, and sees thebeautiful god Cupid in her bed, she is so agitated that a drop of hotoil falls from her lamp on his face and wakes him; whereupon, afterreproaching her, he rises on his wings and forsakes her.

  Overcome with grief, Psyche tries to end her life by jumping into ariver, but Zephir saves her. Then she takes revenge on her sisters bycalling on them separately and telling each one that Cupid haddeserted her because he had seen her with lamp and knife, and that hewas now going to marry one of them. The sisters hasten one after theother to the rock, but Zephir fails to catch them, and they are dashedto pieces. Venus meanwhile had discovered the escapade of her boy andlocked him up till his wound from the hot oil was healed. Her angernow vents itself on Psyche. She sets her several impossible tasks, butPsyche, with supernatural aid, accomplishes all of them safely. Atlast Cupid manages to escape through a window. He finds Psyche lyingon the road like a corpse, wakes her and Mercury brings her to heaven,where at last she is properly married to Cupid--_sic rite Psycheconvenit in manum Cupidinis et nascitur illis maturo partu filia, quamVoluptatem nominamus_.

  Such is the much-vaunted "love-story" of Cupid and Psyche!Commentators have found all sorts of fanciful and absurd allegories inthis legend. Its real significance I have already pointed out. But itmay be looked at from still another point of view. Psyche means soul,and in the story of Apuleius Cupid does not fall in love with a soul,but with a beautiful body. This sums up Hellenic love in general. _TheGreek Cupid_ NEVER _fell in love with a Psyche_.

  UTILITY AND FUTURE OF LOVE

  The Greek view that love is a disease and a calamity still prevailsextensively among persons who, like the Greeks, have never experiencedreal love and do not know what it is. In a book dated 1868 andentitled _Modern Women_ I find the following passage (325):

  "Already the great philosopher of the age has pronounced that the passion of love plays far too important a part in human existence, and that it is a terrible obstacle to human progress. The general temper of the times echoes the sentence of Mill."

  It is significant that this opinion should have emanated from a manwhose idea of femininity was as masculine as that of the Greeks--anideal which, by eliminating or suppressing the secondary and tertiary(mental) sexual qualities, necessarily makes love synonymous withlust.

  There is another large class of persons who likewise consider love adisease, but a harmless one, like the measles, or mumps, which it iswell to have as early as possible, so as to be done with it, and whichseldom does any harm. Others, still, regard it as a sort of juvenileholiday, like a trip to Italy or California, which is delightful whileit lasts and leaves pleasant memories thoughout life, but is otherwiseof no particular use.

  It shows a most extraordinary ignorance of the ways of nature tosuppose that it should have developed so powerful an instinct andsentiment for no useful purpose, or even as a detriment to the race.That is not the way nature operates. In reality love is the mostuseful thing in the world. The two most important objects of the humanrace are its own preservation and improvement, and in both of thesedirections love is the mightiest of all agencies. It makes the worldgo round. Take it away, and in a few years animal life will be asextinct on this planet as it is on the moon. And by preferring youthto age, health to disease, beauty to deformity, it improves the humantype, slowly but steadily.

  The first thinker who clearly recognized and emphatically asserted thesuperlative importance of love was Schopenhauer. Whereas Hegel (II.,184) parroted the popular opinion that love is peculiarly andexclusively the affair of the two individuals whom it directlyinvolves, having no concern with the eternal interests of family andrace, no universality (Allgemeinheit). Schopenhauer's keen mind on thecontrary saw that love, though the most individualized of allpassions, concerns the race even more than the individual. "DieZusammensetzung der naechsten Generation, e qua iterum pendentinnumerae generationes"--the very composition and essence of the nextgeneration and of countless generations following it, depends, as hesays, on the particular choice of a mate. If an ugly, vicious,diseased mate be chosen, his or her bad qualities are transmitted tothe following generations, for "the gods visit the sins of the fathersupon the children," as even the old sages knew, long before sciencehad revealed the laws of heredity. Not only the husband's and thewife's personal qualities are thus transmitted to the children andchildren's children, but those also of four grandparents, eightgreat-grandparents, and so on; and when we bear in mind the tremendousdifferences in the inheritable ancestral traits of families--virtuesor infirmities--we see of what incalculable importance to the futureof families is that individual preference which is so vital aningredient of romantic love.

  It is true that love is not infallible. It is still, as Browning putsit, "blind, oft-failing, half-enlightened." It may be said thatmarriage itself is not necessary for the maintenance of the species;but it is useful both for its maintenance and its improvement; hencenatural selection has favored it--especially the monogamous form--_inthe interest of coming generations._ Love is simply an extension ofthis process---making it efficacious before marriage and thusquintupling its importance. It makes many mistakes, for it is a younginstinct, and it has to do with a very complex problem, so that itsdevelopment is slow; but it has a great future, especially now thatintelligence is beginning to encourage and help it. But whileadmitting that love is fallible we must be careful not to decry it formistakes with which it has no concern. It is absurd to suppose thatevery self-made match is a love-match: yet, whenever such a marriageis a failure, love is held responsible. We must remember, too, thatthere are two kinds of love and that the lower kind does not choose aswisely as the higher. Where animal passion alone is involved, parentscannot be blamed for trying to curb it. As a rule, love of all kindscan be checked or even cured, and an effort to do this should be madein all cases where it is found to be bestowed on a person likely totaint the offspring with vicious propensities or serious disease. But,with all its liability to error, romantic love is usually the safestguide to marriage, and even sensual love of the more refined, esthetictype is ordinarily preferable to what are called marriages of reason,because love (as distinguished from abnormal, unbridled lust) alwaysis guided by youth and health, thus insuring a healthy, vigorousoffspring.

  If it be asked, "Are not the parents who arrange the marriages ofreason also guided as a rule by considerations of health, moral andphysical?" the answer is a most emphatic "No." Parental fondness,sufficing for the preservation and rearing of children, is a very oldthing, but parental affection, which is altruistically concerned forthe weal of children in after-life, is a comparatively moderninvention. The foregoing chapters have taught us that an Australianfather's object in giving his daughter in marriage was to get inexchange a new girl-wife for himself; what became of the daughter, orwhat sort of a man got her, did not concern him in the least. AmongAfricans and American Indians the object of bringing up daughters andgiving them in marriage was to secure cows or ponies in return forthem. In India the object of marriage was the rearing of sons ordaughters' sons for the purpose of saving the souls of their parentsfrom perdition; so they flung them into the arms of anyone who wouldtake them. The Greeks and the Hebrews married to perpetuate theirfamily name or to supply the state with soldiers. In Japan and Chinaancestral and family considerations have always been of infinitelymore importance than the individual inclinations or happiness of thebridal couple. Wherever we look we find this topsy-turvy state ofaffairs--marriages made to suit the parents instead of the bride andgroom; while the welfare of the grandchildren is of course neverdreamt of.

  This outrageous parental selfishness and tyranny, so detrimental tothe interests of the human race, was gradually mitigated ascivilization progressed in Europe. Marriages were no longer made forthe benefit of the parents al
one, but with a view to the comfort andworldly advantages of the couple to be wedded. But rank, money, dowry,continued--and continue in Europe to this day--to be the chiefmatchmakers, few parents rising to the consideration of the welfare ofthe grandchildren. The grandest task of the morality of the futurewill be to _make parental altruism extend to these grandchildren_;that is, to make parents and everyone else abhor and discountenanceall marriages that do not insure the health and happiness of futuregenerations. Love will show the way. Far from being useless ordetrimental to the human race, it is an instinct evolved by nature asa defence of the race against parental selfishness and criminal myopiaregarding future generations.

  Plato observed in his _Statesman_ (310) that

  "most persons form marriage connections without due regard to what is best for procreation of children." "They seek after wealth and power, which in matrimony are objects not worthy even of serious censure."

  But his remedy for this evil was, as we have seen (775), quite as badas the evil itself, since it involved promiscuity and the eliminationof chastity and family life. Love accomplishes the results that Platoand Lycurgus aimed at, so far as healthy offspring is concerned,without making the same sacrifices and reducing human marriage to thelevel of the cattle-breeder. It accomplishes, moreover, the sameresult that natural selection secures, and without its cruelty, bysimply excluding from marriage the criminal, vicious, crippled,imbecile, incurably diseased and all who do not come up to itsstandard of health, vigor, and beauty.

  While claiming that love is an instinct developed by nature as adefence against the short-sighted selfishness of parents who wouldsacrifice the future of the race to their own advantage or that oftheir children, I do not forget that in the past it has often securedits results in an illegitimate way. That, however, was no fault of itsown, being due to the artificial and foolish obstacles placed in itsway. Laws of nature cannot be altered by man, and if the safety valveis tied down the boiler is bound to explode. In countries wheremarriages are habitually arranged by the parents with reference torank or money alone, in defiance of love, the only "love-children" arenecessarily illegitimate. This has given rise to the notion thatillegitimate children are apt to be more beautiful, healthy, andvigorous than the issue of regular marriages: and, under thecircumstances, it was true. But for this topsy-turvyness, this folly,this immorality, we must not blame love, but those who persistentlythwarted love--or tried to thwart it. As soon as love was allowed avoice in the arrangement of marriages illegitimacy decreased rapidly.Had the rights of love been recognized sooner, it would have proved auseful ally of morality instead its craftiest enemy.[335]

  The utility of love from a moral point of view can be shown in otherways. Many tendencies--such as club life, the greater ease of securingdivorces, the growing independence of women and their disinclinationto domesticity--are undermining that family life which civilizationhas so slowly and laboriously built up, and fostering celibacy. Nowcelibacy is not only unnatural and detrimental to health andlongevity, but it is the main root of immorality. Its antidote islove, the most persuasive champion and promoter of marriage. No readerof the present volume can fail to see that man has generally managedto have a good time at the expense of woman and it is she who benefitsparticularly by the modern phases of love and marriage. Yet in recentyears the notion that family life is not good enough for women, andthat they should be brought up in a spirit of manly independence, hascome over society like a noxious epidemic. It is quite proper thatthere should be avenues of employment for women who have no one tosupport them; but it is a grievous error to extend this to women ingeneral, to give them the education, tastes, habits, sports, andpolitics of the men. It antagonizes that sexual differentiation of themore refined sort on which romantic love depends and tempts men toseek amusement in ephemeral, shallow amours. In plain English, whilethere are many charming exceptions, the growing masculinity of girlsis the main reason why so many of them remain unmarried; thusfulfilling the prediction: "Could we make her as the man, sweet lovewere slain." Let girls return to their domestic sphere, makethemselves as delightfully feminine as possible, not trying to begnarled oaks but lovely vines clinging around them, and the sturdyoaks will joyously extend their love and protection to them amid allthe storms of life. In love lies the remedy for many of the economicproblems of the day.

  There is not one of the fourteen ingredients of romantic love whichcannot be shown to be useful in some way. Of individual preference andits importance in securing a happy blend of qualities for the nextgeneration I have just spoken, and I have devoted nearly a page (131)to the utility of coyness. Jealousy has helped to develop chastity,woman's cardinal virtue and the condition of all refinement in loveand society. Monopolism has been the most powerful enemy of those twocolossal evils of savagery and barbarism--promiscuity and polygamy;and it will in future prove as fatal an enemy to all attempts to bringback promiscuity under the absurd name of "free love," which wouldreduce all women to the level of prostitutes and make men desert themafter their charms have faded. Two other ingredients of love--purityand the admiration of personal beauty--are of great value to the causeof morality as conquerors of lust, which they antagonize and suppressby favoring the higher (mental) sexual qualities; while the sense ofbeauty also co-operates with the instinct which makes for the healthof future generations; beauty being simply the flower of health, andinheritable.

  At first sight it may seem difficult to assign any use to the pride,the hyperbole, and the mixed moods which are component elements oflove; but they are of value inasmuch as they exalt the mind, and giveto the beloved such prominence and importance that the way is pavedfor the altruistic ingredients of romantic love, the utility of whichis so obvious that it hardly needs to be hinted at. If love werenothing more than a lesson in altruism--with many the first and onlylesson in their lives--it would be second in importance to no otherfactor of civilization. Sympathy lifts the lover out of the deepgroove of selfishness, teaching him the miracle of feeling another'spains and pleasures more keenly than his own. Man's adoration of womanas a superior being--which she really is, as the distinctivelyfeminine virtues are more truly Christian and have a higher ethicalvalue than the masculine virtues--creates an ideal which has improvedwomen by making them ambitious to live up to it. No one, again, whohas read the preceding pages relating to the treatment of women beforeromantic love existed, and compares it with their treatment atpresent, can fail to recognize the wonderful transformation broughtabout by gallantry and self-sacrifice--altruistic habits which havechanged men from ruffians to gentlemen. I do not say that love aloneis responsible for this improvement, but it has been one of the mostpotent factors. Finally, there is affection, which, in conjunctionwith the other altruistic ingredients of love, has changed it from anappetite like that of a fly for sugar to a self-oblivious devotionlike a mother's for her child, thus raising it to the highest ethicalrank as an agency of culture.

  We are still very far from the final stage in the evolution of love.There is no reason to doubt that it will continue to develop, as inthe past, in the direction of the esthetic, supersensual, andaltruistic. As a physician's eye becomes trained for the subtlediagnosis of disease, a clergyman's for the diagnosis of moral evil,so will the love-instinct become more and more expert, critical, andrefined, rejecting those who are vicious or diseased. Compare thelustrous eyes of a consumptive girl with the sparkling eyes of ahealthy maiden in buoyant spirits. Both are beautiful, but to adoctor, or to anyone else who knows the deadliness and horrors oftuberculosis, the beauty of the consumptive girl's eyes will seemuncanny, like the charm of a snake, and it will inspire pity, which inthis case is not akin to love, but fatal to it. Thus may superiorknowledge influence our sense of beauty and liability to fall in love.I know a man who was in love with a girl and had made up his mind topropose. He went to call on her, and as he approached the door heheard her abusing her mother in the most heartless manner. He did notring the bell, and never called again. His love was of t
he highesttype, but he suppressed his feelings.

  More important than the further improvement of romantic love is thetask of increasing the proportion of men and women who will be capableof experiencing it as now known to us. The vast majority are stillstrangers to anything beyond primitive love. The analysis made in thepresent volume will enable all persons who fancy themselves in love tosee whether their passion is merely self-love in a roundabout way ortrue romantic affection for another. They can see whether it is mereselfish liking, attachment, or fondness, or else unselfish affection.If adoration, purity, sympathy, and the altruistic impulses ofgallantry and self-sacrifice are lacking, they can be cultivated bydeliberate exercise:

  Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, Of habits devil, is angel yet in this.

  The affections can be trained as well as the muscles; and thus thelesson taught in this book may help to bring about a new era ofunselfish devotion and true love. No man, surely, can read theforegoing disclosures regarding man's primitive coarseness andheartlessness without feeling ashamed for his sex and resolving to bean unselfish lover and husband to the end of his life.

  A great mistake was made by the Greeks when they distinguishedcelestial from earthly love. The distinction itself was all right, buttheir application of it was all wrong. Had they known romantic love aswe know it, they could not have made the grievous blunder of callingthe love between men and women worldly, reserving the word celestialfor the friendship between men. Equally mistaken were those mediaevalsages who taught that the celestial sexual virtues are celibacy andvirginity--a doctrine which, if adopted, would involve the suicide ofthe human race, and thus stands self-condemned. No, _celestial love isnot asceticism; it is altruism_. Romantic love is celestial, for it isaltruistic, yet it does not preach contempt of the body, and its goalis marriage, the chief pillar of civilization. The admiration of abeautiful, well-rounded, healthy body is as legitimate and laudable aningredient of romantic love as the admiration of that mental beautywhich distinguishes it from sensual love. It is not only that thelovers themselves are entitled to partners with healthy, attractivebodies; it is a duty they owe to the next generation not to marryanyone who is likely to transmit bodily or mental infirmities to thenext generation. It is quite as reprehensible to marry for spiritualreasons alone as to be guided only by physical charms.

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

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

  On this point the public conscience needs a thorough rousing. If amother deliberately gave her daughter a draught which made her acripple, or an invalid, or an imbecile, or tuberculous, everybodywould cry out with horror, and she would become a social outcast. Butif she inflicts these injuries on her granddaughter, by marrying herdaughter to a drunkard, in the hope of reforming him, or to a wealthydegenerate, or an imbecile baron, no one says a word, provided themarriage law has been complied with.

  It is owing to these persistent crimes against grandchildren that thehuman race as a whole is still such a miserable rabble, and thatrecruiting offices and insurances companies tell such startling talesof degeneracy. Love would cure this, if there were more of the rightkind. Until there is, much good may be done by accepting it as aguide, and building up a sentiment in favor of its instinctive objectand ideal. I have described in one chapter the obstacles whichretarded the growth of love, and in another I have shown howsentiments change and grow. Most of those obstacles are beinggradually removed, and public opinion is slowly but surely changing infavor of love. Building up a new sentiment is a slow process. At firstit may be a mere hut for a hermit thinker, but gradually it becomeslarger and larger as thousands add their mite to the building fund,until at last it stands as a sublime cathedral admonishing all to dotheir duty. When the Cathedral of Love is finished the horror ofdisease and vice will have become as absolute a bar to marriage as thehorror of incest is now; and it will be acknowledged that the onlytrue marriage of reason is a marriage of love.