Part 3 (1/2)
Besides the growing complexity of the religious sentiment and its gradual enn.o.blement, there are two points I wish to emphasize. One is that there are among us to-day thousands of intelligent and refined agnostics who are utter strangers to all religious emotions, just as there are thousands of men and women who have never known and never will know the emotions of sentimental love. Why, then, should it seem so very unlikely that whole nations were strangers to such love (as they were strangers to the higher religious sentiment), even though they were as intelligent as the Greeks and Romans? I offer this consideration not as a conclusive argument, but merely as a means of overcoming a preconceived bias against my theory.
The other point I wish to make clear is that our emotions change with our ideas. Obviously it would be absurd to suppose that a man whose ideas in regard to the nature of his G.o.ds do not prevent him from flogging them angrily in case they refuse his requests are the same as those of a pious Christian, who, if his prayers are not answered, says to his revered Creator: ”Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven,” and humbly prostrates himself. And if emotions in the religious sphere are thus metamorphosed with ideas, why is it so unlikely that the s.e.xual pa.s.sion, too, should ”suffer a sea change into something rich and strange?”
The existence of the wide-spread prejudice against the notion that love is subject to the laws of development, is owing to the fact that the comparative psychology of the emotions and sentiments has been strangely neglected. Anthropology, the Klondike of the comparative psychologist, reveals things seemingly much more incredible than the absence of romantic love among barbarians and partly civilized nations who had not yet discovered the n.o.bler super-sensual fascinations which women are capable of exerting. The nuggets of truth found in that science show that every virtue known to man grew up slowly into its present exalted form. I will ill.u.s.trate this a.s.sertion with reference to one general feeling, the horror of murder, and then add a few pages regarding virtues relating to the s.e.xual sphere and directly connected with the subject of this book.
MURDER AS A VIRTUE
The committing of wilful murder is looked on with unutterable horror in modern civilized communities, yet it took eons of time and the co-operation of many religious, social, and moral agencies before the idea of the sanct.i.ty of human life became what it is now when it might be taken for an instinct inherent in human nature itself. How far it is from being such an instinct we shall see by looking at the facts.
Among the lowest races and even some of the higher barbarians, murder, far from being regarded as a crime, is honored as a virtue and a source of glory.
An American Indian's chief pride and claim to tribal honor lies in the number of scalps he has torn from the heads of men he has killed. Of the Fijian, Williams says (97):
”Shedding of blood is to him no crime, but a glory. Whoever may be the victim--whether n.o.ble or vulgar, old or young, man, woman, or child--whether slain in war or butchered by treachery, to be somehow an acknowledged murderer, is the object of a Fijian's restless ambition.”
The Australian feels the same irresistible impulse to kill every stranger he comes across as many of our comparatively civilized gentlemen feel toward every bird or wild animal they see. Lumholtz, while he lived among these savages, took good care to follow the advice ”never have a black fellow behind you;” and he relates a story of a squatter who was walking in the bush with his black boy hunting brush monkeys, when the boy touched him on the shoulder from behind and said, ”Let me go ahead.” When the squatter asked why he wished to go before him, the native answered, ”Because I feel such an inclination to kill you.”
Dalton (266) says of the Oraons in India: ”It is doubtful if they see any moral guilt in murder.” But the most astounding race of professional murderers are the Dyaks of Borneo. ”Among them,” says Earl, ”the more heads a man has cut off, the more he is respected.”
”The white man reads,” said a Dyak to St. John: ”_we_ hunt heads instead.” ”Our Dyaks,” says Charles Brooke, ”were eternally requesting to be allowed to go for heads, and their urgent entreaties often bore resemblance to children crying after sugar-plums.” ”An old Dyak,”
writes Dalton, ”loves to dwell upon his success on these hunting excursions, and the terror of the women and children taken affords a fruitful theme of amus.e.m.e.nt at their meetings.” Dalton speaks of one expedition from which seven hundred heads were brought home. The young women were carried off, the old ones killed and all the men's heads were cut off. Not that the women always escaped. Among the Dusun, as a rule, says Preyer,
”the heads were obtained in the most cowardly way possible, a woman's or child's being just as good as a man's ... so, as easier prey, the cowards seek them by lying in ambush near the plantations.”
Families are sometimes surprised while asleep and their heads cut off.
Brooke tells of a man who for awhile kept company with a countrywoman, and then slew her and ran off with her head. ”It ought to be called _head-stealing_ not _head-hunting,”_ says Hatton; and Earl remarks:
”The possession of a human head cannot be considered as a proof of the bravery of the owner for it is not necessary that he should have killed the victim with his own hands, his friends being permitted to a.s.sist him or even to perform the act themselves.”
It is to be noted that the Dyaks[7] are not in other respects a fierce and diabolical race, but are at home, as Doty attests, ”mild, gentle, and given to hospitality.” I call special attention to this by way of indirectly answering an objection frequently urged against my theory: ”How is it possible to suppose that a nation so highly civilized as the Greeks of Plato's time should have known love for women only in its lower, carnal phases?” Well, we have here a parallel case. The Dyaks are ”mild, gentle, and hospitable,” yet their chief delight and glory is murder! And as one of the main objects of this book is to dwell on the various obstacles which impeded the growth of romantic love, it will be interesting to glance for a moment at the causes which prevented the Dyaks from recognizing the sanct.i.ty of life.
Superst.i.tion is one of them; they believe that persons killed by them will be their slaves in the next world. Pride is another. ”How many heads did your father get?” a Dyak will ask; and if the number given is less than his own, the other will say, ”Well, then you have no occasion to be proud.” A man's rank in this world as in the next depends on the number of his skulls; hence the owner of a large number may be distinguished by his proud bearing. But the head hunter's strangest and strongest motive is _the desire to please women_! No Dyak maiden would condescend to marry a youth who has never killed a man, and in times when the chances for murder were few and far between, suitors have been compelled to wait a year or two before they could bag a skull and lead home their blus.h.i.+ng bride. The weird details of this mode of courts.h.i.+p will be given in the chapter on Island Love on the Pacific.
SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS.
In all these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of the sentiment relating to the sanct.i.ty of human life. But our horror at this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine myself to a few words regarding the maternal sentiment. The love of a mother for her offspring is by many philosophers considered the earliest and strongest of all sympathetic feelings; a feeling stronger than death. If we can find a wide-spread failure of this powerful instinct, we shall have one more reason for not a.s.suming as a matter of course, that the sentiment of love must have been always present.
In Australian families it has been the universal custom to bring up only a few children in each family--usually two boys and a girl--the others being destroyed by their own parents, with no more compunction than we show in drowning superfluous puppies or kittens. The Kurnai tribe did not kill new-born infants, but simply left them behind. ”The aboriginal mind does not seem to perceive the horrid idea of leaving an unfortunate baby to die miserably in a deserted camp” (Fison and Howitt, 14). The Indians of both North and South America were addicted to the practice of infanticide. Among the Arabs the custom was so inveterate that as late as our sixth century, Mohammed felt called upon, in various parts of the Koran, to discountenance it. In the words of Professor Robertson Smith (281):
”Mohammed, when he took Mecca and received the homage of the women in the most advanced centre of Arabian civilization, still deemed it necessary formally to demand from them a promise not to commit child-murder.”
Among the wild tribes of India there are some who cling to their custom of infanticide with the tenacity of fanatics. Dalton (288-90) relates that with the Kandhs this custom was so wide-spread that in 1842 Major Macpherson reported that in many villages not a single female child could be found. The British Government rescued a number of girls and brought them up, giving them an education. Some of these were afterward given in marriage to respectable Kandh bachelors,
”and it was expected that they at least would not outrage their own feeling as mothers by consenting to the destruction of their offspring. Subsequently, however, Colonel Campbell ascertained that these ladies had no female children, and, on being closely questioned, they admitted that at their husbands' bidding they had destroyed them.”
In the South Sea Islands ”not less than two-thirds of the children were murdered by their own parents.” Ellis (_P.R_., I., 196-202) knew parents who had, by their own confession, killed four, six, eight, even ten of their children, and the only reason they gave was that it was the custom of the country.
”_No sense of irresolution or horror appeared to exist_ in the bosoms of those parents, who deliberately resolved on the deed before the child was born.” ”The murderous parents often came to their (the missionaries') houses almost before their hands were cleansed from their children's blood, and spoke of the deed with worse than brutal insensibility, or with vaunting satisfaction at the triumph of their customs over the persuasions of their teachers.”
They refused to spare babies even when the missionaries offered to take care of them (II., 23). Neither Ellis, during a residence of eight years, nor Nott during thirty years' residence on the South Sea Islands, had known a single mother who was not guilty of this crime of infanticide. Three native women who happened to be together in a room one day confessed that between them they had killed twenty-one infants--nine, seven, and five respectively.
These facts have long been familiar to students of anthropology, but their true significance has been obscured by the additional information that many tribes addicted to infanticide, nevertheless displayed a good deal of ”affection” toward those whom they spared. A closer examination of the testimony reveals, however, that there is no true affection in these cases, but merely a shallow fondness for the little ones, chiefly for the sake of the selfish gratification it affords the parents to watch their gambols and to give vent to inherited animal instincts. True affection is revealed only in self-sacrifice; but the disposition to sacrifice themselves for their children is the one quality most lacking in these child-murderers.