In the essay "On the Power of Love," to which I have referred in
another place, Lichtenberg bluntly declared he did not believe that
sentimental love could make a sensible adult person so extravagantly
happy or unhappy as the poets would have us think, whereas he was
ready to concede that the sexual appetite may become irresistible.
Schopenhauer, on the contrary, held that sentimental love is the more
powerful of the two passions. However this may be, either is strong
enough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole in
literature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, "speaking in a
perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love." "The major part
of lovers," writes Robert Burton,

"are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason
counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace,
danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow;
yet this furious lust precipitates, counterpoiseth, weighs
down on the other."

Professor Bain, discussing all the human emotions in a volume of 600
pages, declares, regarding love (138), that

"the excitement at its highest pitch, in the torrent of
youthful sensations and ungratified desires is probably
the most furious and elated experience of human
nature."

In whatever sense we take this, as referring to sensual or sentimental
love, or a combination of the two, it explains why erotic writers of
all times make such lavish use of superlatives and exaggerations.
Their strong feelings can only be expressed in strong language.
"Beauty inflicts a wound sharper than any arrow," quoth Achilles
Tatius. Meleager declares: "Even the winged Eros in the air became
your prisoner, sweet Timarion, because your eye drew him down;" and in
another place: "the cup is filled with joy because it is allowed to
touch the beautiful lips of Zenophila. Would that she drank my soul in
one draught, pressing firmly her lips on mine" (a passage which
Tennyson imitated in "he once drew with one long kiss my whole soul
through my lips"). "Not stone only, but steel would be melted by
Eros," cried Antipater of Sidon. Burton tells of a cold bath that
suddenly smoked and was very hot when Coelia came into it; and an
anonymous modern poet cries:

Look yonder, where
She washes in the lake!
See while she swims,
The water from her purer limbs
New clearness take!

The Persian poet, Saadi, tells the story of a young enamoured Dervish
who knew the whole Koran by heart, but forgot his very alphabet in
presence of the princess. She tried to encourage him, but he only
found tongue to say, "It is strange that with thee present I should
have speech left me;" and having said that he uttered a loud groan and
surrendered his soul up to God.

To lovers nothing seems impossible. They "vow to weep seas, live in
fire, eat rocks, tame tigers," as Troilus knew. Mephistopheles
exclaims:

So ein verliebter Thor verpufft
Euch Sonne, Mond und alle Sterne
Zum Zeitvertreib dem Liebchen in die Luft.

(Your foolish lover squanders sun and moon and all the stars to
entertain his darling for an hour.) Romantic hyperbole is the realism
of love. The lover is blind as to the beloved's faults, and
color-blind as to her merits, seeing them differently from normal
persons and all in a rosy hue. She really seems to him superior to
every one in the world, and he would be ready any moment to join the
ranks of the mediaeval knights who translated amorous hyperbole into
action, challenging every knight to battle unless he acknowledged the
superior beauty of his lady. A great romancer is the lover; he
retouches the negative of his beloved, in his imagination, removes
freckles, moulds the nose, rounds the cheeks, refines the lips, and
adds lustre to the eyes until his ideal is realized and he sees
Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.

... For to be wise and love
Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above.


VII. PRIDE

I dare not ask a kiss,
I dare not beg a smile,
Lest having that or this
I might grow proud the while.
--_Herrick_.

Let fools great Cupid's yoke disdain,
Loving their own wild freedom better,
Whilst proud of my triumphant chain
I sit, and court my beauteous fetter.
--_Beaumont_.



COMIC SIDE OF LOVE

"There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the
lover doth of the person beloved," said Bacon; "and therefore it is
well said that it is impossible to love and be wise."

Like everything else in this world, love has its comic side. Nothing
could be more amusing, surely, than the pride some men and women
exhibit at having secured for life a mate whom most persons would not
care to own a day. The idealizing process just described is
responsible for this comedy; and a very useful thing it is, too; for
did not the lover's fancy magnify the merits and minify the faults of
the beloved, the number of marriages would not be so large as it is.
Pride is a great match-maker. "It was a proud night with me," wrote
Walter Scott,

"when I first found that a pretty young woman could think it
worth her while to sit and talk with me hour after hour in a
corner of the ball-room, while all the world were capering
in our view."

Such an experience was enough to attune the heart-strings to
love. The youth felt flattered, and flattery is the food of love.


A MYSTERY EXPLAINED

Pride explains some of the greatest mysteries of love. "How _could_
that woman have married such a manikin?" is a question one often
hears. Money, rank, opportunity, lack of taste, account for much, but
in many instances it was pride that first opened the heart to love;
that is, pride was the first of the ingredients of love to capitulate,
and the others followed suit. Probably that manikin was the first
masculine being who ever showed her any attentions. "He appreciates
me!" she mused. "I admire his taste--he is not like other men--I like
him--I love him."

The compliment of a proposal touches a girl's pride and may prove the
entering-wedge of love; hence the proverbial folly of accepting a
girl's first refusal as final. And if she accepts, the thought that
she, the most perfect being in the world, prefers him above all men,
inflates his pride to the point of exultation; thenceforth he can talk
and think only in "three pil'd hyperboles." He wants all the world to
know how he has been distinguished. In a Japanese poem translated by
Lafcadio Hearn (_G.B.F._, 38) a lover exclaims:

I cannot hide in my heart the happy knowledge that fills it;
Asking each not to tell, I spread the news all round.


IMPORTANCE OF PRIDE

To realize fully how important an ingredient in love pride is, we need
only consider the effect of a refusal. Of all the pangs that make up
its agony none is keener than that of wounded pride or vanity. Hence
the same lover who, if successful, wants all the world to know how he
has been distinguished, is equally anxious, in case of a refusal, to
keep it a secret. Schopenhauer went so far as to assert that both in
the pain of unrequited love and the joy of success, vanity is a more
important factor than the thwarting of sensual desires, because only a
psychic disturbance can stir us so deeply.

Shakspere knew that while there are many kinds of pride, the best and
deepest is that which a man feels in his love. Some, he says, glory in
their birth, some in their skill, some in their wealth, some in their
body's force, or their garments, or horses; but

All these I better in one general best,
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost,
Of more delight than hawks and horses be
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast.
--_Sonnet XCI_.


VARIETIES AND GERMS

While amorous pride has also an altruistic aspect in so far as the
lover is proud not only of being chosen but also of another's
perfections, it nevertheless belongs, in the main, in the egoistic
group, and there is therefore no reason why we should not look for it
in the lower stages of erotic evolution. Pride and vanity are feelings
which characterize all grades of human beings from the highest to the
lowest. As regards amorous pride, however, it is obvious that the
conditions for its existence are not favorable among such aboriginals,
_e.g._, as the Australians. What occasion is there for pride on the
part of a man who exchanges his sister or daughter for another man's
sister or daughter, or on the part of the female who is thus
exchanged? An American Indian's pride consists not in having won the
favor of one particular girl, but in having been able to buy or steal
as many women as possible, married or unmarried; and the bride's pride
is proportionate to her lover's prowess in this direction. I need not
add that the pride at being a successful squaw-stealer differs not
only in degree but in kind from the exultation of a white American
lover at the thought that the most beautiful and perfect girl in the
world has chosen him above all men as her sole and exclusive
sweetheart.

Gibbs says (I., 197-200) of the Indians of Western Washington and
Northwestern Oregon that they usually seek their wives among other
tribes than their own.

"It seems to be a matter of pride, in fact, to unite
the blood of several different ones in their own
persons. The expression, I am half Snokwalmu, half
Klikatat, or some similar one, is of every-day
occurrence. With the chiefs, this is almost always the
case."

This feeling, however, is of a tribal kind, lacking the individuality
of amorous pride. It would approach the latter if a chief won another
chiefs daughter in the face of rivalry and felt elated at this feat.
Such cases doubtless occur among the Indians.

Shooter gives an amusing account of how the African Kaffirs, when a
girl is averse to a marriage, attempt to influence her feelings before
resorting to compulsion.

"The first step is to speak well of the man in her
presence; the Kraal conspire to praise him--her mother
praises him--all the admirers of his cattle praise
him--he was never so praised before."

If these praises make her feel proud at the thought of marrying such a
man, all is well; if not, she has to suffer the consequences. It is
not likely that this praising practice would prevail were it not
sometimes successful.

If it ever is, we would have here a germ of amorous pride. Others may
be found in Hindoo literature, as in _Malati and Madhava_, where the
intermediary speaks of having dwelt on the lover's merits and rank in
the presence of the heroine, in the hope of influencing her.
"Extolling the lover's merits" is mentioned as one of the ten stages
of love in the Hindoo _ars amandi_.

In Oriental countries in general, where it is difficult or impossible
for young men and women to see one another before the wedding-day, the
praising of candidates by and to intermediaries has been a general
custom. Dr. T. Löbel (9-14) relates that before a Turk reaches the age
of twenty-two his parents look about for a bride for him. They send
out female friends and intermediaries who "praise and exaggerate the
accomplishments of the young man" in houses where they suspect the
presence of eligible girls. These female intermediaries are called
kyz-görüdschü or "girl-seers." Having found a maiden that appears
suitable, they exclaim, "What a lovely girl! She resembles an angel!
What beautiful eyes! True gazelle-eyes! And her hair! Her teeth are
like pearls." When the young man hears the reports of this beauty, he
forthwith falls in love with her, and, although he has never seen her,
declares he "will marry her and no other." A sense of humor is not
given to every man: Dr. Löbel remarks seriously that this disproves
the slanderous assertion so often made that the Turks are incapable of
true love!

In their treatment and estimate of women the ancient Greeks resembled
the modern Turks. The poets joined the philosophers in declaring that
"nature herself," as Becker sums them up (Ill., 315), "assigned to
woman a position far beneath man." As there is little occasion for
pride in having won the favor of so inferior a being, the erotic
literature of the Greeks is naturally not eloquent on this subject.
Such evidence of amorous pride as we find in it, and in Roman poetry,
is usually in connection with mercenary women. The poets, being poor,
had only one way of winning the favor of these wantons: they could
celebrate their charms in verse. This aroused the pride of the
hetairai, and their grateful caresses made the poets proud at having a
means of winning favor more powerful even than money. But with genuine
love these feelings have nothing to do.


NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS OF LOVE

In common with ambition and other strong passions, love has the power
of changing a man's character for the time being. One of the speakers
in Plutarch's dialogue on love ([Greek: Erotikos], 17) declares that
every lover becomes generous and magnanimous, though he may have been
niggardly before; but, characteristically enough, it is the love for
boys, not for women, that is referred to. A modern lover is affected
that way by love for women. He feels proud of being distinguished by
the preference of such a girl, and on the principle of _noblesse
oblige_, he tries to become worthy of her. This love makes the
cowardly brave, the weak strong, the dull witty, the prosy poetic, the
slouches tidy. Burton glows eloquent on this subject (Ill., 2),
confounding, as usual, love with lust. Ovid notes that when Polyphemus
courted Galatea the desire to please made him arrange his hair and
beard, using the water as a mirror; wherein the Roman poet shows a
keener sense of the effect of infatuation than his Greek predecessor,
Theocritus, who (Id., XIV.) describes the enamoured Aischines as going
about with beard neglected and hair dishevelled; or than Callimachus,
concerning whose love-story of Acontius and Cydippe Mahaffy says (_G.
L. and T.,_ 239):

"The pangs of the lover are described just as they are
described in the case of his [Shakspere's]
Orlando--dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes,
disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit
of writing the girl's name on every tree--symptoms
which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which
many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because
they found them in literature, and thought them the
spontaneous expression of the grief of love, while they
were really the artificial invention of Callimachus and
his school, who thus fathered them upon human nature."

Professor Mahaffy overlooks, however, an important distinction which
Shakspere makes. The witty Rosalind declares to Orlando, in her
bantering way, that

"there is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our
young plants with carving 'Rosalind' on their barks;
hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all,
forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind ... _he seems
to have the quotidian of love upon him_."

And when Orlando claims that he is that man, she replies, "There is
none of my uncle's marks upon you; he taught me to know a man in
love."

Orlando: "What were his marks?"

Rosalind:

"A lean cheek, _which you have not_, a blue eye and sunken,
_which you have not_ ... a beard neglected, _which you have
not_ ... Then your hose _should be_ ungartered, your bonnet
unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and
everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation."

Shakspere knew that love makes a man tidy, not untidy, hence Rosalind
fails to find the artificial Greek symptoms of love in Orlando, while
she admits that he carves her name on trees and hangs poems on them;
acts of which lovers are quite capable. In Japan it is a national
custom to hang love-poems on trees.


VIII. SYMPATHY

"Egotism," wrote Schopenhauer

"is a colossal thing; it overtops the world. For, if every
individual had the choice between his own destruction and
that of every other person in the world, I need not say what
the decision would be in the vast majority of cases."

"Many a man," he declares on another page,[22] "would be capable of
killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The
grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as
a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration
after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he
would have been fully justified in this doubt. An Australian has been
known to bait his fish-hook with his own child when no other meat was
at hand; and murders committed for equally trivial and selfish reasons
are every-day affairs among wild tribes.


EGOTISM, NAKED OK MASKED

Egoism manifests itself in a thousand different ways, often in subtle
disguise. Its greatest triumph lies in its having succeeded up to the
present day in masquerading as love. Not only many modern egotists,
but ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans,
barbarians and savages, have been credited with love when in reality
they manifested nothing but sexual self-love, the woman in the case
being valued only as an object without which the beloved Ego could not
have its selfish indulgence. By way of example let us take what Pallas
says in his work on Russia (III., 70) of the Samoyedes:

"The wretched women of this nomadic people are obliged
not only to do all the house-work, but to take down and
erect the huts, pack and unpack the sleigh, and at the
same time perform slavish duties for their husbands,
who, except on a few amorous evenings, hardly bestow on
them a look or a pleasant word, while expecting them to
anticipate all their desires."

The typical shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much to
prevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if he
happened to see a Samoyede on one of these "amorous evenings," that he
"loved" his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse that
he loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means of
gratifying his selfish appetites. In the preceding pages I endeavored
to show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman,
individual preference, monopolism, jealousy, hope and despair and
hyperbolic expression of feeling, yet without giving the slightest
indication of love--that is, of affection--for her. It is all egoism,
and egoism is the antipode of love, which is a phase of altruism. Not
that these selfish ingredients are absent in genuine love. Romantic
love embraces both selfish and altruistic elements, but the former are
subdued and overpowered by the latter, and sexual passion is not love
unless the altruistic ingredients are present. It is these altruistic
ingredients that we must now consider, beginning with sympathy, which
is the entering wedge of altruism.


DELIGHT IN THE TORTURE OF OTHERS

Sympathy means sharing the pains and pleasures of another--feeling the
other's joys and sorrows as if they were our own, and therefore an
eagerness to diminish the other's pains and increase the pleasures.
Does uncivilized man exhibit this feeling? On the contrary, he gloats
over another's anguish, while the other's joys arouse his envy. Pity
for suffering men and animals does not exist in the lower strata of
humanity. Monteiro says (_A. and C._, 134) that the negro

"has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or
compassion for suffering. A fellow-creature, or animal,
writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highly
provocative of merriment and enjoyment. I have seen a
number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children,
stand round, roaring with laughter, at seeing a poor
mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and
roll about in agony on the ground till a white man put
it out of its misery."

Cozzens relates (129-30) an instance of Indian cruelty which he
witnessed among the Apaches. A mule, with his feet tied, was thrown on
the ground. Thereupon two of these savages advanced and commenced with
knives to cut the meat from the thighs and fleshy parts of the animal
in large chunks, while the poor creature uttered the most terrible
cries. Not till the meat had been cut clean to the bone did they kill
the beast. And this hideous cruelty was inflicted for no other reason
than because meat cut from a live animal "was considered more tender,"
Custer, who knew the Indian well, describes him as "a savage in every
sense of the word; one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds
that of any wild beast of the desert." In the _Jesuit Relations_ (Vol.
XIII., 61) it takes _ten_ pages to describe the tortures inflicted by
the Hurons on a captive. Theodore Roosevelt writes in his _Winning of
the West_ (I., 95):

"The nature of the wild Indians has not changed. Not
one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes
torments which a civilized man cannot so much as look
another in the face and speak of. Impalement on charred
stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints
chewed off, eyes burned out--these tortures can be
mentioned, but there are others, equally normal and
customary, which cannot even be hinted at, especially
when women are the victims."

In his famous book, _The Jesuits in North America_, the historian
Parkman gives many harrowing details of Indian cruelty toward
prisoners; harmless women and children being subjected to the same
fiendish tortures as the men. On one occasion he relates of the
Iroquois (285) that

"they planted stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace,
and bound to them those of their prisoners whom they
meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old age to
infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side.
Then, as they retreated, they set the town on fire, and
laughed with savage glee at the shrieks of anguish that
rose from the blazing dwellings."

On page 248 he relates another typical instance of Iroquois cruelty.
Among their prisoners

"were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who
had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the
first halt, their captors took the infants from them,
tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly
before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of
the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and
frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were
met with mockery and laughter."

Later on all the prisoners were subjected to further tortures

"designed to cause all possible suffering without
touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and
cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, cutting off
their fingers with clamshells, scorching them with
firebrands, and other indescribable tortures."

They cut off the breasts of one of the women and compelled her to eat
them. Then all the women were stripped naked, and forced to dance to
the singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of
the crowd.

If anyone in this hostile crowd had shown the slightest sympathy with
the victims of this satanic cruelty, he would have been laughed at and
insulted; for to the American Indians ferocity was a virtue, while
"pity was a cowardly weakness at which their pride revolted." They
were deliberately trained to cruelty from infancy, children being
taught to break the legs of animals and otherwise to torture them. Nor
were the women less ferocious than the men; indeed, when it came to
torturing prisoners, the squaws often led the men. In the face of such
facts, it seems almost like mockery to ask if these Indians were
capable of falling in love. Could a Huron to whom cruelty was a
virtue, a duty, and whose chief delight was the torture of men and
women or animals, have harbored in his mind such a delicate,
altruistic sentiment as romantic love, based on sympathy with
another's joys and sorrows? You might as well expect a tiger to make
romantic love to the Bengal maiden he has carried into the jungle for
his supper. Cruelty is not incompatible with appetite, but it is a
fatal obstacle to love based on affection. Facts prove this natural
inference. The Iroquois girls were coarse wantons who indulged in free
lust before marriage, and for whom the men felt such passion as is
possible under the circumstances.

The absurdity of the claim that these cruel Indians felt love is made
more glaringly obvious if we take a case nearer home; imagining a
neighbor guilty of torturing harmless captive women with the obscene
cruelty of the Indians, and yet attributing to him a capacity for
refined love! The Indians would honor such a man as a colleague and
hero; we should send him to the penitentiary, the gallows, or the
madhouse.


INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING

It would be foolish to retort that the savage's delight in the torture
of others is manifested only in the case of his enemies, for that is
not true; and where he does not directly exult over the sufferings of
others, he still shows his lack of sympathy by his indifference to
those sufferings, often even in the case of his nearest relatives. The
African explorer Andersson (_O.R._, 156) describes the
"heart-rendering sorrow--at least outwardly," of a Damara woman whose
husband had been killed by a rhinoceros, and who wailed in a most
melancholy way:

"I heartily sympathized with her, and I am sure I was
the only person present of all the members assembled
... who at all felt for her lonely condition. Many a
laugh was heard, but no one looked sad. No one asked or
cared about the man, but each and all made anxious
inquiries after the rhinoceros--such is the life of
barbarians. Oh, ye sentimentalists of the Rousseau
school--for some such still remain--witness what I have
witnessed, and do witness daily, and you will soon
cease to envy and praise the life of the savages."

"A sick person," writes Galton (190), "meets with no
compassion; he is pushed out of his hut by his
relations away from the fire into the cold; they do all
they can to expedite his death, and when he appears to
be dying, they heap oxhides over him till he is
suffocated. Very few Damaras die a natural death."

In his book on the Indian Tribes of Guiana (151, 225) the Rev. W.H.
Brett gives two typical instances of the lack of sympathy in the New
World. The first is that of a poor young girl who was dreadfully burnt
by lying in a hammock when it caught fire:

"She seemed a very meek and patient child, and her look of
gratitude for our sympathy was most affecting. Her friends,
however, took no trouble about her, and she probably died
soon after."

The second case is that of an Arawak boy who, during a canoe voyage,
was seized with cholera. The Indians simply cast him on the edge of
the shore, to be drowned by the rising tide.

Going to the other end of the continent we find Le Jeune writing of
the Canadian Indians (in the _Jesuit Relations_, VI., 245): "These
people are very little moved by compassion. They give the sick food
and drink, but otherwise show no regard for them." In the second
volume of the _Relations_ (15) the missionary writer tells of a sick
girl of nine, reduced to skin and bone. He asked the permission of the
parents to baptize her, and they answered that he might take her and
keep her, "for to them she was no better than a dead dog." And again
(93) we read that in case of illness "they soon abandon those whose
recovery is deemed hopeless."

Crossing the Continent to California we find in Powers (118) a
pathetic account of the lack of filial piety, or sympathy with old
age, which, he says, is peculiar to Indians in general. After a man
has ceased to be useful as a warrior, though he may have been a hero
of a hundred battles, he is compelled to go with his sons into the
forest and bear home on his poor old shoulders the game they have
killed. He totters along behind them "almost crushed to earth beneath
a burden which their unencumbered strength is greatly more able to
support, but they touch it not with so much as one of their fingers."


EXPOSING THE SICK AND AGED

"The Gallinomeros kill their aged parents in a most coldblooded
manner," says Bancroft (I., 390), and this custom, too, prevails on
both sides of the Continent. The Canadians, according to Lalemant
(_Jesuit Relations_, IV., 199),

"kill their fathers and mothers when they are so old that
they can walk no longer, thinking that they are thus doing
them a good service; for otherwise they would be compelled
to die of hunger, as they have become unable to follow
others when they change their location."

Henry Norman, in his book on the Far East, explains (553) why so few
deaf, blind, and idiots are found among savages: they are destroyed or
left to perish. Sutherland, in studying the custom of killing the aged
and diseased, or leaving them to die of exposure, found express
testimony to the prevalence of this loveless habit in twenty-eight
different races of savages, and found it denied of only one. Lewis and
Clarke give a list of Indian tribes by whom the aged were abandoned to
starvation (II., Chap. 7), adding:

"Yet in their villages we saw no want of kindness to the
aged: on the contrary, probably because in villages the
means of more abundant subsistence renders such cruelty
unnecessary, old people appeared to be treated with
attention."

But it is obvious that kindness which does not go beyond the point
where it interferes with our own comfort, is not true altruism. If one
of two men who are perishing of thirst in the desert finds a cupful of
water and shares it with the other, he shows sympathy; but if he finds
a whole spring and shares it with the companion, his action does not
deserve that name. It would be superfluous to make this remark were it
not that the sentimentalists are constantly pointing to such sharing
of abundance as evidence of sympathetic kindness. There is a whole
volume of philosophy in Bates's remark (293) concerning Brazilian
Indians: "The good-fellowship of our Cucámas seemed to arise, not from
warm sympathy, but simply from the absence of eager selfishness in
small matters." The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune devotes a whole chapter
(V., 229-31) to such good qualities as he could find among the
Canadian Indians. He is just to the point of generosity, but he is
compelled to end with these words: "And yet I would not dare to assert
that I have seen one act of real moral virtue in a savage. They have
nothing but their own pleasure and satisfaction in view."


BIRTH OF SYMPATHY

Schoolcraft relates a story of an Indian girl who saved her aged
father's life by carrying him on her back to the new camping-place
(_Oneota,_ 88). Now Schoolcraft is not a witness on whom one can rely
safely, and his case could be accepted as an illustration of an
aboriginal trait only if it had been shown that the girl in question
had never been subject to missionary influences. Nevertheless, such an
act of filial devotion may well have occurred on the part of a woman.
It was in a woman's heart that human sympathy was first born
--together with her child. The helpless infant could not have survived
without her sympathetic care, hence there was an important use for
womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow, while man,
immersed in wars and selfish struggles, remained hard of heart and
knew not tenderness.

Yet in woman, too, the growth of sympathy was painfully slow. The
practice of infanticide, for selfish reasons, was, as we shall see in
later chapters, horribly prevalent among many of the lower races, and
even where the young were tenderly reared, the feeling toward them was
hardly what we call affection--a conscious, enduring devotion--but a
sort of animal instinct which is shared by tigers and other fierce and
cruel animals, and which endures but a short time. In Agassiz's book
on Brazil we read (373), that the Indians "are cold in their family
affections; and though the mothers are very fond of their babies, they
seem comparatively indifferent to them as they grow up." As an
illustration of this trait Agassiz mentions a sight he witnessed one
day. A child who was to be taken far away to Rio stood on the deck
crying, "while the whole family put off in a canoe, talking and
laughing gaily, without showing him the least sympathy."


WOMEN CRUELER THAN MEN

Apart from instinctive maternal love, sympathy appears to be as far to
seek in the savage women as in the men. Authorities agree that in
respect of cruelty the squaws even surpass the warriors. Thus Le Jeune
attests (_Jes. Rel._, VI., 245), that among the Canadians the women
were crueler toward captives than the men. In another place (V., 29),
he writes that when prisoners were tortured the women and girls "blew
and drove the flames over in their direction to burn them." In every
Huron town, says Parkman (_Jes. in N.A._, XXXIV.), there were old
squaws who "in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the
men." The same is asserted of the Comanche women, who "delight in
torturing the male prisoners." Concerning Chippewa war captives,
Keating says (I., 173): "The marriageable women are reduced to
servitude and are treated with great cruelty by the squaws." Among the
Creeks the women even used to pay a premium of tobacco for the
privilege of whipping prisoners of war (Schoolcraft, V., 280). These
are typical instances. In Patagonia, writes Falkner (97), the Indian
women follow their husbands, armed with clubs, sometimes and swords,
and ravage and plunder the houses of everything they can find. Powers
relates that when California Indians get too old to fight they have to
assist the women in their drudgery. Thereupon the women, instead of
setting them a good example by showing sympathy for their weakness,
take their revenge and make them feel their humiliation keenly.
Obviously among these savages, cruelty and ferocity have no sex,
wherefore it would be as useless in one sex as in the other to seek
for that sympathy which is an ingredient and a condition of romantic
love.


PLATO DENOUNCES SYMPATHY

From a Canadian Indian to a Greek philosopher it seems a far cry; yet
the transition is easy and natural. To the Indian, as Parkman points
out, "pity was a cowardly weakness," to be sternly repressed as
unworthy of a man. Plato, for his part, wanted to banish poetry from
his ideal republic because it overwhelms our feelings and makes us
give way to sympathies which in real life our pride causes us to
repress and which are "deemed the part of a woman" (_Repub._, X.,
665). As for the special form of sympathy which enters into the nobler
phases of the love between men and women--fusing their hearts and
blending their souls--Plato's inability to appreciate such a thing may
be inferred from the fact that in this same ideal republic he wanted
to abolish the marriage even of individual bodies. Of the marriage of
souls he, like the other Greeks, knew nothing. To him, as to his
countrymen in general, love between man and woman was mere animal