being buried. The husband is lying by the side of the grave,
apparently in an agony of grief; he sobs and cries as if his heart
would break." Then he jumps into the grave and whispers into the ears
of the corpse--what? a last farewell? Oh, no! "He is asking the spirit
of his wife to go with him when he goes fishing, and make him
successful also when he goes hunting, or goes to battle," etc.; his
last request being, "_And please don't be angry if I get another
wife_!"

The simple truth is that in their grief, as in everything else,
savages are nothing but big children, crying one moment, laughing the
next. Whatever feelings they may have are shallow and without
devotion. If the widows of Mandans, Arawaks, Patagonians, etc., do not
marry until a year after the death of their husband this is not on
account of affectionate grief, but, as we have seen, because they are
not allowed to. Where custom prescribes a different course, they
follow that with the same docility. When a Kansas or Osage wife finds,
on the return of a war-party, that she is a widow, she howls dismally,
but forthwith seeks an avenger in the shape of a new husband. "After
the death of a husband, the sooner a squaw marries again, the greater
respect and regard she is considered to show for his memory." (Hunter,
246.) The Australian custom for women, especially widows, is to mourn
by scratching the face and branding the body. As for the grief itself,
its quality may be inferred from the fact that these women sit day
after day by the grave or platform, howling their monotonous dirge,
but, as soon as they are allowed to pause for a meal they indulge in
the merriest pranks. (K.E. Jung, 111.)


MOURNING FOR ENTERTAINMENT

In many cases the mourning of savages, instead of being an expression
of affection and grief, appears to be simply a mode of gratifying
their love of ceremonial and excitement. That is, they mourn for
entertainment--I had almost said for fun; and it is easy to see too,
that vanity and superstition play their rôle here as in their
"ornamenting" and everything else they do. By the Abipones "women are
appointed to go forward on swift steeds to dig the grave, and _honor_
the funeral with lamentations." (Dobrizhoffer II., 267.) During the
ceremony of making a skeleton of a body the Patagonians, as Falkner
informs us (119), indulge in singing in a mournful tone of voice, and
striking the ground, to _frighten away_ the Valichus or Evil Beings.
Some of the Indians also visit the relatives of the dead, indulging in
antics 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 tore
their hair, rent their garments, and cut themselves with shark's teeth
or knives in a most shocking manner." That this was less an expression
of genuine grief than a result of the barbarous love of excitement,
follows from what he adds: that in a milder form, this loud wailing
and cutting with shark's teeth was "an expression of joy as well as of
grief." (_Pol. Res_., I., 527.) The same writer relates in his book on
Hawaii (148) that when a chief or king died on that island,

"the people ran to and fro without their clothes,
appearing and acting more like demons than human
beings; every vice was practised and almost every
species of crime perpetrated."

J.T. Irving tells a characteristic story (226-27) of an Indian girl
whom he found one day lying on a grave singing a song "so despairing
that it seemed to well out from a broken heart." A half-breed friend,
who thoroughly understood the native customs, marred his illusion by
informing him that he had heard the girl say to her mother that as she
had nothing else to do, she believed she would go and take a bawl over
her brother's grave. The brother had been dead five years!

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


THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDOW-BURNING

Instructive, from several points of view, is an incident related by
McLean (I., 254-55): A carrier Indian having been killed, his widow
threw herself on the body, shrieking and tearing her hair. The other
females "evinced all the external symptoms of extreme grief, chanting
the death-song in a most lugubrious tone, the tears streaming down
their cheeks, and beating their breasts;" yet as soon as the rites
were ended, these women "were seen as gay and cheerful as if they had
returned from a wedding." The widow alone remained, being "obliged by
custom" to mourn day and night.

"The bodies were formerly burned; the relatives of the
deceased, as well as those of the widow, being present, all
armed; a funeral pile was erected, and the body placed upon
it. The widow then set fire to the pile, and was compelled
to stand by it, anointing her breast with the fat that oozed
from the body, until the heat became insupportable; when the
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 simply
a mild survival of this former torture, which, in turn, was a survival
of the still earlier practice of actually burning the widows alive, or
otherwise killing them, which used to prevail in various parts of the
world, as in India, among some Chinese aboriginal tribes, the old
Germans, the Thracians and Scythians, some of the Greeks, the
Lithuanians, the Basutos, the natives of Congo and other African
countries, the inhabitants of New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, New
Hebrides, Fiji Islands, the Crees, Comanches, Caribs, and various
other Indian tribes in California, Darien, Peru, etc.[126]

Some writers have advanced the opinion that jealousy prompted the men
to compel their wives to follow them into death. But the most widely
accepted opinion is that expressed long ago by St. Boniface when he
declared regarding the Wends that

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

In the monumental work of Ploss and Bartels (II., 514), the opinion is
advanced that the custom of slaughtering widows on the death of their
husbands is the result of the grossly materialistic view the races in
question hold in regard to a future world. It is supposed that a
warrior will reappear with all his physical attributes and wants; for
which reason he is arranged in his best clothes, his weapons are
placed by his side, and often animals and slaves are slaughtered to be
useful to him in his new existence. His principal servant and provider
of home comforts, however, is his wife, wherefore she, too, is
expected to follow him.

This, no doubt, is the truth about widow-burning; but it is not the
whole truth. To comprehend all the horrors of the situation we must
realize clearly that it was the fiendish selfishness of the men,
extending even beyond death, which thus subjected their wives to a
cruel death, and that the widows, on their part, did not follow them
because of the promptings of affection, but either under physical
compulsion or in consequence of a systematic course of moral
reprobation and social persecution which made death preferable to
life. In Peru, for instance, where widows were not killed against
their will, but were allowed to choose between widowhood and being
buried alive,

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

The consequence of this was that

"generally the wives and servants offered 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 widows
docile. 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 of
voluntary wifely devotion one must read Abbé Dubois's account of the
matter (I., chap. _21_). He explains that, however chaste and devoted
a wife may have been during her husband's life, she is treated worse
than the lowest outcast if she wants to survive him. By a "voluntary"
death, on the contrary, she becomes "an illustrious victim of conjugal
attachment," and is "considered in the light of a deity." On the way
to the funeral pyre the accompanying multitude stretch out their hands
toward her in token of admiration. They behold her as already
translated into the paradise of Vishnu and seem to envy her happy lot.
The women run up to her to receive her blessing, and she knows that
afterward crowds of votaries will daily frequent her shrine. The
Brahmans compliment her on her heroism. (Sometimes drugs are
administered to stifle her fears.) She knows, too, that it is useless
to falter at the last moment, as a change of heart would be an eternal
disgrace, not only to herself but to her relatives, who, therefore,
stand around with sabres and rifles to _intimidate_ her. In short,
with satanic ingenuity, every possible appeal is made to her family
pride, vanity, longing for future bliss and divine honors after life,
enforced by the knowledge that if she lives earth will be a hell to
her, so that refusal is next to impossible. And this is the
much-vaunted "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 ox
in the butcher's stall is proof of his gastronomic devotion to man. In
reality it is, as I have said, simply the most diabolical aspect of
man's aboriginal disposition to look on woman as made solely for his
own comfort and pleasure, here and hereafter. Now it is very
instructive to note that whenever there is a story of conjugal
devotion in Oriental or ancient classical literature it is nearly
always inspired by the same spirit--the idea that the woman, as an
inferior being, should subject herself to any amount of suffering if
she can thereby save her sacred lord and master the slightest pang.
For instance, an old Arabic writer (Kamil Mobarrad, p. 529) relates
how a devoted wife whose husband was condemned to death disfigured her
beautiful face in order to let him die with the consoling feeling that
she would not marry again. The current notion that such stories are
proof of conjugal devotion is the fifth of the mistakes to be
corrected in this chapter. These stories were written by men, selfish
men, who intended them as lessons to indicate to the women what was
expected of them. Were it otherwise, why should not the men, too, be
represented, at least occasionally, as devoted and self-sacrificing?
Hector is tender to Andromache, and in the Sanscrit drama, _Kanisika's
Wrath,_ the King and the Queen contend with one another as to who
shall be the victim of that wrath; but these are the only instances of
the kind that occur to me. This interesting question will be further
considered in the chapters on India and Greece, where corroborative
stories will be quoted. Here I wish only to emphasize again the need
of caution and suspicion in interpreting the evidence relating to the
human feelings.


WIVES ESTEEMED AS MOTHERS ONLY

So much for the feminine aspect of conjugal devotion. In regard to the
masculine aspect something must be added to what was said in preceding
pages (307-10). We saw there that primitive man desires wives chiefly
as drudges and concubines. It was also indicated briefly that wives
are valued as mothers of daughters who can be sold to suitors. As a
rule, sons are more desired than daughters, as they increase a man's
power and authority, and because they alone can keep up the
superstitious rites which are deemed necessary for the salvation of
the father's selfish old soul. Now the non-existence or extreme rarity
of conjugal attachment--not to speak of affection--is painfully
indicated by the circumstance that wives were, among many races,
valued (apart from grossly utilitarian and sensual motives) as mothers
only, and that the men had a right, of which they commonly availed
themselves, of repudiating a wife if she proved barren. On the lower
Congo, says Dupont (96), a wife is not respected unless she has at
least three children. Among the Somali, barren women are dieted and
dosed, and if that proves unavailing they are usually chased away.
(Paulitschke, _B.E.A.S_., 30.) If a Greenlander's wife did not bear
him 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, the
Chinese and Japanese, could divorce a wife on account of barrenness.
For a Hindoo the laws of Manu indicate that "a barren wife may be
dispensed with in the eighth year; one whose children all die, in the
tenth; one who bears only daughters, in the eleventh." The tragic
import of such bare statements is hardly realized until we come upon
particular instances like those related by the Indian authoress
Ramabai (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 warned
her not to give birth to a girl, the first time, or he would never see
her 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 this
chapter is that genuine conjugal love--the affection for a wife _for
her own sake_--is, like romantic love, a product chiefly of modern
civilization.

I say chiefly, because I am convinced that conjugal love was known
sooner than romantic love, and for a very simple reason. Among those
of the lower races where the sexes were not separated in youth, a
license prevailed which led to shallow, premature, temporary alliances
that precluded all idea of genuine affection, even had these folk been
capable of such a sentiment; while among those tribes and peoples that
practised the custom of separating the boys and girls from the
earliest age, and not allowing them to become acquainted till after
marriage, the growth of real, prematrimonial affection was, of course,
equally impossible. In married life this was different. Living
together for years, having a common interest in their children,
sharing the same joys and sorrows, husband and wife would learn the
rudiments of sympathy, and in happy cases there would be an
opportunity for the growth of liking, attachment, fondness, or even,
in exceptional instances, of affection. I cannot sufficiently
emphasize the fact that my theory is psychological or cultural, not
chronological. The fact that a man lives in the year 1900 makes it no
more self-evident that he should be capable of sexual affection than
the fact that a man lived seven centuries before Christ makes it
self-evident that he could not love affectionately. Hector and
Andromache existed only in the brain of Homer, who was in many
respects thousands of years ahead of his contemporaries. Whether such
a couple could really have existed at that time among the Trojans, or
the Greeks, we do not know, but in any case it would have been an
exception, proving the rule by the painful contrast of the surrounding
barbarism.

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

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

In his work on the Indians of 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 any
indication in them of affection? The Cherokee squaw mourns the
impending death of her husband, which is a selfish feeling. The
Californian, similarly, laments the loss of his spouse. The only thing
he does is to "tar his face in mourning," and even this is regarded by
the other Indians as "extraordinary" and "unprecedented." As for the
woman in the third story, it is to be noted that her act is one of
selfish despair, not of self-sacrifice for her husband's sake. We
shall see in later chapters that women of her grade abandon themselves
to suicidal impulses, not only where there is occasion for real
distress, but often on the most trivial pretexts. A few days later, in
all probability, that same woman would have been ready to marry
another man. There is no evidence of altruistic action--action for
another's benefit--in any of these incidents, and altruism is the only
test of genuine affection as distinguished from mere liking,
attachment, and fondness, which, as was explained in the chapter on
Affection, are the products of selfishness, more or less disguised. If
this distinction had been borne in mind a vast amount of confusion
could have been avoided in works of exploration and the
anthropological treatises based on them. Westermarck, for instance,
cites on page 357 a number of authors who asserted that sexual
affection, or even the appearance of it, was unknown to the Hovas of
Madagascar, the Gold Coast, and Winnabah natives, the Kabyles, the
Beni-Amer, the Chittagong Hill Tribes, the Ponape islanders, the
Eskimo, the Kutchin, the Iroquois, and North American Indians in
general; while on the next pages he cites approvingly authors who
fancied they had discovered sexual affection among tribes some of whom
(Australians, Andamanese, Bushmans) are far below the peoples just
mentioned. The cause of this discrepancy lies not in these races
themselves, but in the inaccurate use of words, and the different
standards of the writers, some accepting the rubbing of noses or other
sexual caresses as evidence of "affection," while others take any acts
indicating fondness, attachment, or a suicidal impulse as signs of it.
In a recent work by Tyrrell (165), I find it stated that the Eskimo
marriage is "purely a love union;" and in reading on I discover that
the author's idea of a "love union" is the absence of a marriage
ceremony! Yet I have no doubt that Tyrrell will be cited hereafter as
evidence that love unions are common among the Eskimos. So, again,
when Lumholtz writes (213) that an Australian woman

"may happen to change husbands many times in her life, but
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" is
meant--sensual or sentimental, liking, attachment, fondness, or real
affection. Surely it is time to put an end to such confusion, at least
in scientific treatises, and to acquire in psychological discussions
the precision which we always employ in describing the simplest weeds
or insects.

Morgan, the great authority on the Iroquois--the most intelligent of
North American Indians--lived long enough among them to realize
vaguely that there must be a difference between sexual attachment
before and after marriage, and that the latter is an earlier
phenomenon in human evolution. After declaring that among the Indians
"marriage was not founded on the affections ... but was regulated
exclusively 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 marriage
were "in their temperaments" below affectionate love "in its simplest
forms"; but, that being so, it is difficult to see how they could have
acquired real affection after marriage. As a matter of fact we know
that they treated their wives with a selfishness which is entirely
incompatible with true affection. The Rev. Peter Jones, moreover, an
Indian himself, tells us in his book on the Ojibwas:

"I have scarcely ever seen anything like social
intercourse between husband and wife, and it is
remarkable that the women say little in presence of the
men."

Obviously, at the beginning of the passage quoted, Morgan should have
used the word attachment in place of affection. Bulmer (by accident, I
suspect) uses the right word when he says (Brough Smyth, 77) that
Australians, notwithstanding their brutal forms of marriage, often
"get much attached to each other." At the same time it is easy to show
that, if not among Australians or Indians, at any rate with such a
people as the ancient Greeks, conjugal affection may have existed
while romantic love was still impossible. The Greeks looked down on
their women as inferior beings. Now one can feel affection--conjugal
or friendly--toward an inferior, but one cannot feel adoration--and
adoration is absolutely essential to romantic love. Before romantic
love could be born it was necessary that women should not only be
respected as equal to man but worshipped as his superior. This was not
done by any of the lower or ancient races; hence romantic love is a
peculiarly modern sentiment, later than any other form of human
affection.


OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE

When Shakspere wrote that "The course of true love never did run
smooth" he had in mind individual cases of courtship. But what is true
of individuals also applies to the story of love itself. For many
thousands of years savagery and barbarism "proved an unrelenting foe
to love," and it was with almost diabolical ingenuity that obstacles
to its birth and growth were maintained and multiplied. It was
crushed, balked, discountenanced, antagonized, discredited,
disheartened so persistently that the wonder is not that there should
be so little true love even at the present day, but that there is any
at all. A whole volume might be written on the Obstacles to Love; my
original plan for this book included a long chapter on this matter;
but partly to avoid repetition, partly to save space, I will condense
my material to a few pages, considering briefly the following
obstacles: I. Ignorance and stupidity. II. Coarseness and obscenity.
III. War. IV. Cruelty. V. Masculine selfishness. VI. Contempt for
women. VII. Capture and sale of brides. VIII. Infant marriages. IX.
Prevention of free choice. X. Separation of the sexes. XI. Sexual
taboos. 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. Dogs
are the most intelligent of all animals, but they know nothing of
love; the most intelligent nations of antiquity--the Greeks, Romans
and Hebrews--were strangers to this feeling; and in our times we have
seen that such intelligent persons as Tolstoi, Zola, Groncourt,
Flaubert have been confessedly unable to experience real love such as
Turgenieff held up to them. On the other hand, there can be no genuine
love without intelligence. It is true that maternal love exists among
the lowly, but that is an instinct developed by natural selection,
because without it the race could not have persisted. Conjugal
attachment also was, as we have seen, necessary for the preservation
of the race; whereas romantic love is not necessary for the
preservation of the race, but is merely a means for its improvement;
wherefore it developed slowly, keeping pace with the growth of the
intellectual powers of discrimination, the gradual refinement of the
emotions, and the removal of diverse obstacles created by selfishness,
coarseness, foolish taboos, and prejudices. A savage lives entirely in
his senses, hence sensual love is the only kind he can know. His love
is as coarse and simple as his music, which is little more than a
monotonous rhythmic noise. Just as a man, unless he has musical
culture, cannot understand a Schumann symphony, so, unless he has
intellectual culture, he cannot love a woman as Schumann loved Clara
Wieck.

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


II. COARSENESS AND OBSCENITY

Kissing and other caresses are, as we have seen, practices unknown to
savages. Their nerves being too coarse to appreciate even the more
refined forms of sensualism, it follows of necessity that they are too
coarse to experience the subtle manifestations of imaginative
sentimental love. Their national addiction to obscene practices and
conversation proves an insuperable obstacle to the growth of refined
sexual feelings. Details given in later chapters will show that what
Turner says of the Samoans, "From their childhood their ears are
familiar with the most obscene conversation;" and what the Rev. George
Taplan writes of the "immodest and lewd" dances of the Australians,
applies to the lower races in general. The history of love is, indeed,
epitomized in the evolution of the dance from its aboriginal obscenity
and licentiousness to its present function as chiefly a means of
bringing young people together and providing innocent opportunities
for courtship; two extremes differing as widely as the coarse drum
accompaniment 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 coarseness
in 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 by
their fanciful and impossible pastoral lovers. The remark made in my
first book, that "only an educated mind can feel romantic love," led
one of its reviewers to remark, half indignantly, half mournfully,
"There goes the pastoral poetry of the world at a single stroke of the
pen." Well, let it go. I am quite sure that if these poetic dreamers
had ever come across a shepherdess in real life--dirty, unkempt,
ignorant, coarse, immoral--they would themselves have made haste to
disavow their heroines and seek less malodorous "maidens" for
embodiments of their exalted fancies of love[128]. Richard Wagner was
promptly disillusioned when he came across some of those modern
shepherdesses, the Swiss dairy-maids. "There are magnificent women
here in the Oberland," he wrote to a friend, "but only so to the eye;
they are all tainted with rabid vulgarity."


III. WAR

Herbert Spencer has devoted some eloquent pages[129] to showing that
along with chronic militancy there goes a brutal treatment of women,
whereas industrial tribes are likely to treat their wives and
daughters well. To militancy is due the disregard of women's claims
shown in stealing or buying them, the inequality of status between the
sexes entailed by polygamy; the use of women as laboring slaves, the
life-and-death power over wife and child. To which we may add that war
proves an obstacle to love, by fostering cruelty and smothering
sympathy, and all the other tender feelings; by giving the coarsest
masculine qualities of aggressiveness and brute prowess the aspect of
cardinal virtues and causing the feminine virtues of gentleness,
mercy, kindness, to be despised, and women themselves to be esteemed
only in so far as they appropriate masculine qualities; and by
fostering rape and licentiousness in general. When Plutarch wrote that
"the most warlike nations are the most addicted to love," he meant, of
course, lust. In wars of the past no incentive to brutal courage
proved so powerful as the promise that the soldiers might have the
women of captured cities. "Plunder if you succeed, and paradise if you
fall. Female captives in the one case, celestial houris in the
other"--such was, according to Burckhardt, the promise to their men
given 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 and
war-like races is manifested only toward enemies; but this is an
error. Some of the instances cited under "Sentimental Murder" and
"Sympathy" show how often superstitious and utilitarian considerations
smother all the family feelings. Three or four more illustrations may
be added here. Burton says of the East Africans, that "when childhood
is past, the father and son become natural enemies, after the manner
of wild beasts." The Bedouins are not compelled by law or custom to
support their aged parents, and Burckhardt (156) came across such men
whom their sons would have allowed to perish. Among the Somals it
frequently occurs that an old father is simply driven away and exposed
to distress and starvation. Nay, incredible cases are related of
fathers being sold as slaves, or killed. The African missionary,
Moffat, one day came across an old woman who had been left to die
within an enclosure. He asked her why she had been thus deserted, and
she replied:

"I am old, you see, and no longer able to serve them [her
grown children]. When they kill game, I am too feeble to aid
in carrying home the flesh; I am incapable of gathering wood
to make fire, and I cannot carry their children on my back
as I used to do."


V. 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 of
his illness, and fancying that his recovery would follow her
disappearance. Fijians have been known to kill and eat their wives,
when they had no other use for them. Carl Bock (275) says of the
Malays of Sumatra, that the men are extremely indolent and make the
women their beasts of burden (as the lower races do in general).

"I have," he says,

"continually met a file of women 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 hundreds
given in other parts of this volume, revealing uncivilized man's
disposition to regard woman as made for his convenience, both in this
world and the next. Nor is it necessary to add that such an attitude
is an insuperable obstacle to love, which in its essence is
altruistic.


VI. CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN

As late as the sixth century the Christian Provincial Council of Macon
debated the question whether women have souls. I know of no early
people, savage, barbarous, semi-civilized or civilized--from the
Australian to the Greek--in which the men did not look down on the
women as inferior beings. Now contempt is the exact opposite of
adoration, and where it prevails there can of course be no romantic
love.[130]


VII. CAPTURE AND SALE OF BRIDES

In the Homeric poems we read much about young women who were captured
and forced to become the concubines of the men who had slain their
fathers, brothers, and husbands. Other brides are referred to as
[Greek: alphesiboiai], wooed with rich presents, literally "bringing
in oxen." Among other ancient nations--Assyrians, Hebrews,
Babylonians, Chaldeans, etc., brides had to be bought with property or
its equivalent in service (as in the case of Jacob and Rachel).
Serving for a bride until the parents feel repaid for their selfish
trouble in bringing her up, also prevails among savages as low as the
African Bushman and the Fuegian Indians, and is not therefore, as
Herbert Spencer holds, a higher or later form of "courtship" than
capture or purchase. But it is less common than purchase, which has
been 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 sufficient
compensation for a wife. A Tartar parent will sell his daughter for a
certain number of sheep, horses, oxen, or pounds of butter; and so on
in 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 general
application. They are, he says, "sold in matrimony by their fathers
_to the highest bidders_; a circumstance that frequently causes the
most mean and unfeeling transactions."

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


VIII. INFANT MARRIAGES

Of the diabolical habit of forcing girls into marriage before they had