Part 2 (1/2)
”the licenses of that court did not only make the Love which the Vulgar call Romantick, the object of Jest and Ridicule, but even common Decency and Modesty were almost abandoned as formal and unnatural.”
Here there is an obvious ant.i.thesis between romantic and sensual. The same ant.i.thesis was used by Hegel in contrasting the sensual love of the ancient Greeks and Romans with what he calls modern ”romantic”
love. Waitz-Gerland, too, in the six volumes of their _Anthropologie der Naturvolker_, repeatedly refer to (alleged) cases of ”romantic love” among savages and barbarians, having in all probability adopted the term from Hegel. The peculiar appropriateness of the word romantic to designate imaginative love will be set forth later in the chapter ent.i.tled Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment. Here I will only add an important truth which I shall have occasion to repeat often--that _a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love_; for it is obvious, for instance, that an elopement prompted by the most frivolous sensual pa.s.sion, without a trace of real love, may lead to the most romantic incidents.
In the chapters on affection, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, I shall make it clear even to a Sat.u.r.day Reviewer that the gross sensual infatuation which leads a man to shoot a girl who refuses him, or a tramp to a.s.sault a woman on a lonely road and afterward to cut her throat in order to hide his crime, is absolutely antipodal to the refined, ardent, affectionate Romantic Love which impels a man to sacrifice his own life rather than let any harm or dishonor come to the beloved.
ANIMALS HIGHER THAN SAVAGES
Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin, in his second treatise on s.e.xual anomalies,[4] takes occasion to express his disbelief in my view that love before marriage is a sentiment peculiar to modern man. He declares that traits of such love occur even in the courts.h.i.+p of animals, particularly birds, and implies that this upsets my theory.
On the same ground a reviewer in a New York evening paper accused me of being illogical. Such criticisms ill.u.s.trate the vague ideas regarding evolution that are still current. It is a.s.sumed that all the faculties are developed step by step simultaneously as we proceed from lower to higher animals, which is as illogical as it would be to a.s.sume that since birds have such beautiful and convenient things as wings, and dogs belong to a higher genus of animals, therefore dogs ought to have better wings than birds. Most animals are cleaner than savages; why should not some of them be more romantic in their love-affairs? I shall take occasion repeatedly to emphasize this point in the present volume, though I alluded to it already in my first book (55) in the following pa.s.sage, which my critics evidently overlooked:
”In pa.s.sing from animals to human beings we find at first not only no advance in the s.e.xual relations, but a decided retrogression. Among some species of birds, courts.h.i.+p and marriage are infinitely more refined and n.o.ble than among the lowest savages, and it is especially in their treatment of females, both before and after mating, that not only birds but all animals show an immense superiority over primitive man; for male animals fight only among themselves and never maltreat the females.”
LOVE THE LAST, NOT THE FIRST, PRODUCT OF CIVILIZATION
Notwithstanding this striking and important fact, there is a large number of sentimental writers who make the extraordinary claim that the lower races, however savage they may be in everything else, are like ourselves in their amorous relations; that they love and admire personal beauty just as we do. The main object of the present volume is to demolish this doctrine; to prove that s.e.xual refinement and the sense of personal beauty are not the earliest but the latest products of civilization. I have shown elsewhere[5] that j.a.panese civilization is in many important respects far superior to ours; yet in their treatment of women and estimate of love, this race has not yet risen above the barbarous stage; and it will be shown in this volume that if we were to judge the ancient Greeks and the Hindoos from this point of view, we should have to deny them the epithet of civilized. Morgan found that the most advanced of American Indians, the Iroquois, had no capacity for love. His testimony in detail will be found in its proper place in this volume, together with that of competent observers regarding other tribes and races. Some of this evidence was known to the founders of the modern science of sociology. It led Spencer to write _en pa.s.sant_ (_Pr. Soc_., I., -- 337, --339) that ”absence of the tender emotion ... habitually characterizes men of low types;” and that the ”higher sentiments accompanying union of the s.e.xes ... do not exist among primitive men.” It led Sir John Lubbock to write (50) regarding the lowest races that ”love is almost unknown among them; and marriage, in its lowest phases, is by no means a matter of affection and companions.h.i.+p.”
PLAN OF THIS VOLUME
These are casual adumbrations of a great truth that applies not only to the lowest races (savages) but to the more advanced barbarians as well as to ancient civilized nations, as the present volume will attempt to demonstrate. To make my argument more impressive and conclusive, I present it in a twofold form. First I take the fourteen ingredients of love separately, showing how they developed gradually, whence it follows necessarily that love as a whole developed gradually. Then I take the Africans, Australians, American Indians, etc., separately, describing their diverse amorous customs and pointing out everywhere the absence of the altruistic, supersensual traits which const.i.tute the essence of romantic love as distinguished from sensual pa.s.sion. All this will be preceded by a chapter on ”How Sentiments Change and Grow,” which will weaken the bias against the notion that so elemental a feeling as s.e.xual love should have undergone so great a change, by pointing out that other seemingly instinctive and unalterable feelings have changed and developed.
GREEK SENTIMENTALITY
The inclusion of the civilized Greeks in a treatise on Primitive Love will naturally cause surprise; but I cannot attribute a capacity for anything more than primitive sensual love to a nation which, in its prematrimonial customs, manifested none of the essential _altruistic_ traits of Romantic Love--sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, adoration, and purity. As a matter of course, the sensualism of a Greek or Roman is a much less coa.r.s.e thing than an Australian's, which does not even include kisses or other caresses.
While Greek love is not a sentiment, it may be sentimental, that is, an _affectation of sentiment_, differing from real sentiment as adulation does from adoration, as gallantry or the risking of life to secure favors do from genuine gallantry of the heart and self-sacrifice for the benefit of another. This important point which I here superadd to my theory, was overlooked by Benecke when he attributed a capacity for real love to the later Greeks of the Alexandrian period.
IMPORTANCE OF LOVE
One of the most important theses advanced in _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ (323, 424, etc.), was that love, far from being merely a pa.s.sing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the reign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to perish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals and saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, and hand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediator between these two agencies, love comes in; for Cupid, as I have said, ”does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of health and beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of single-blessedness;” which in these days is not such a hards.h.i.+p as it used to be. This thought will be enlarged in the last chapter of the present volume, on the ”Utility and Future of Love,” which will indicate how the amorous sense is becoming more and more fastidious and beneficial. In the same chapter attention will be called, for the first time, to the three great strata in the evolution of parental love and morality. In the first, represented by savages, parents think chiefly of their own comfort, and children get the minimum of attention consistent with their preservation. In the second, which includes most of the modern Europeans and Americans, parents exercise care that their children shall make an advantageous marriage--that is a marriage which shall secure them wealth or comfort; but the frequency with which girls are married off to old, infirm, or unworthy men, shows how few parents as yet have a thought of their _grandchildren_. In the next stage of moral evolution, which we are now entering, the grandchildren's welfare also will be considered. In consequence of the persistent failure to consider the grandchildren, the human race is now anything but a model of physical, intellectual, and moral perfection. Luckily love, even in its sensual stages, has counteracted this parental selfishness and myopia by inducing young folks to marry for health, youth, and beauty, and creating an aversion to old age, disease, and deformity. As love becomes more and more fastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moral beauty--that is becomes Romantic Love--its sway becomes greater and greater, and the time will come when questions relating to it will form the most important chapters in treatises on moral philosophy, which now usually ignore them altogether.
HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW
In conversation with friends I have found that the current belief that love must have been always and everywhere the same, because it is such a strong and elemental pa.s.sion, is most easily shaken in this _a priori_ position by pointing out that there are other strong feelings in our minds which were lacking among earlier and lower races. The love of grand, wild scenery, for instance--what we call romantic scenery--is as modern as the romantic love of men and women. Ruskin tells us that in his youth he derived a pleasure from such scenery ”comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near a n.o.ble and kind mistress.”
NO LOVE OF ROMANTIC SCENERY
Savages, on the other hand, are prevented from appreciating snow mountains, avalanches, roaring torrents, ocean storms, deep glens, jungles, and solitudes, not only by their lack of refinement, but by their fears of wild animals, human enemies, and evil spirits. ”In the Australian bush,” writes Tylor (_P.C._, II., 203), ”demons whistle in the branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the trunks to seize the wayfarer;” and Powers (88) writes in regard to California Indians that they listen to night noises with unspeakable horror:
”It is difficult for us to conceive of the speechless terrors which these poor wretches suffer from the screeching of owls, the shrieking of night-hawks, the rustling of the trees ... all of which are only channels of poison wherewith the demons would smite them.”
To the primitive mind, the world over, a high mountain is the horror of horrors, the abode of evil spirits, and an attempt to climb it certain death. So strong is this superst.i.tion that explorers have often experienced the greatest difficulty in getting natives to serve as porters of provisions in their ascents of peaks.[6] Even the Greeks and Romans cared for landscape only in so far as it was humanized (parks and gardens) and habitable. ”Their souls,” says Rohde (511),
”could never have been touched by the sublime thrills we feel in the presence of the dark surges of the sea, the gloom of a primeval forest, the solitude and silence of sunlit mountain summits.”
And Humboldt, who first noted the absence in Greek and Roman writings of the admiration of romantic scenery, remarked (24):
”Of the eternal snow of the Alps, glowing in the rosy light of the morning or evening sun, of the loveliness of the blue glacier ice, of the stupendous grandeur of Swiss landscape, no description has come down to us from them; yet there was a constant procession over these Alps, from Helvetia to Gallia, of statesmen and generals with literary men in their train. All these travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical treatise 'De a.n.a.logia.'”