Part 16 (2/2)

”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. Lobel (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-gorudschu 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. Lobel remarks seriously that this disproves the slanderous a.s.sertion 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), ”a.s.signed 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 pa.s.sions, 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 n.i.g.g.ardly 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 _n.o.blesse 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 l.u.s.t. 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 unb.u.t.toned, 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 j.a.pan 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

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