Part 18 (2/2)
Ouida speaks of ”the graceful hypocrisies of courts.h.i.+p,” and no doubt there are many such; but in romantic love there is no hypocrisy; its devotion and adoration are absolutely sincere.
The romantic lover adores not only the girl herself but everything a.s.sociated with her. This phase of love is poetically delineated in Goethe's _Werther_:
”To-day,” Werther writes to his friend, ”I could not go to see Lotta, being unavoidably detained by company.
What was there to do? I sent my valet to her, merely in order to have someone about me who had been near her.
With what impatience I expected him, with what joy I saw him return! I should have liked to seize him by the hand and kiss him, had I not been ashamed.
”There is a legend of a Bononian stone which being placed in the sun absorbs his rays and emits them at night. In such a light I saw that valet. The knowledge that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, the b.u.t.tons and the collar of his coat, made all these things valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand dollars, so happy was I in his presence. G.o.d forbid that you should laugh at this. William, are these things phantasms if they make us happy?”
Fielding wrote a poem on a half-penny which a young lady had given to a beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half-crown. Sir Richard Steele wrote to Miss Scurlock:
”You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have worn, or I cannot live; otherwise you must expect that I'll kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your handkerchief.”
Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fair s.e.x. The lover wors.h.i.+ps the very ground she trod on, and is enraptured at the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her.
To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, in perpetual hyperbole:
It's a year almost that I have not seen her; Oh! last summer green things were greener, Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer.
--_C.G. Rossetti_.
PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN
The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being universal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345): ”Among ourselves woman-wors.h.i.+p nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost, if not entirely, absent among the peasantry.” Still less would we expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor wors.h.i.+p, which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--or rather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.
A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt for women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by the lower races in all parts of the world. But as the att.i.tude of Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be fully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to a few sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss, II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to and fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored. If an Indian refuses to quarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains (VI., 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of a warrior, as she is too far beneath him. In Tahiti the head of a husband or father was sacred from a woman's touch. Offerings to the G.o.ds would have been polluted if touched by a woman. In Siam the wife had to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband's, to remind her of her inferiority. No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maori chief. Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in any corner of the tent except her own; after pitching the tent she was obliged to fumigate it before the men would enter. The Zulus regard their women ”with haughty contempt.” Among Mohammedans a woman has a definite value only in so far as she is related to a husband; unmarried she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her.
(Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls by elders and priests is the insulting
”Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive thee.” ”On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that she is an unwelcome guest in the family.” (Ramabai Saravasti, 13.)
William Jameson Reid, who visited some of the unexplored regions of Northeastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness and misery of woman's lot among the Pa-Urgs:
”Although, owing to the scarcity, a woman is a valuable commodity, she is treated with the utmost contempt, and her existence is infinitely worse than the very animals of her lord and master. Polyandry is generally practised, increasing the horror of her position, for she is required to be a slave to a number of masters, who treat her with the most rigorous harshness and brutality. From the day of her birth until her death (few Pa-Urg women live to be fifty) her life is one protracted period of degradation. She is called upon to perform the most menial and degrading of services and the entire manual labor of the community, it being considered base of a male to engage in other labor than that of warfare and the chase....
”When a child is to be born the mother is driven from the village in which she lives, and is compelled to take up her abode in some roadside hut or cave in the open country, a scanty supply of food, furnished by her husbands, being brought to her by the other women of the tribe. When the child is born the mother remains with it for one or two months, and then leaving it in a cave, returns to the village and informs her eldest husband of its birth and the place where she has left it. If the child is a male, some consideration is shown to her; should it be a female, however, her lot is frightful, for aside from the severe beating to which she is subjected by her husband, she suffers the scorn and contumely of the rest of the tribe. If a male child, the husband goes to the cave and brings it back to the village; if it is of the opposite s.e.x he is left to his own volition; sometimes he returns with the female infant; as often he ignores it entirely and allows it to perish, or may dispose of it to some other man as a prospective wife.”[26]
In Corea women are so little esteemed that they do not even receive separate names, and a husband considers it an act of condescension to speak to his wife. When a young man of the ruling cla.s.ses marries, he spends three or four days with his bride, then returns to his concubine, ”in order to prove that he does not care much for the bride.” (Ploss, II., 434.) ”The condition of Chinese women is most pitiable,” writes the Abbe Hue:
”Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and accompany her to the tomb. Her birth is commonly regarded as a humiliation and a disgrace to the family--an evident sign of the malediction of heaven.
If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is regarded and treated as a creature radically despicable, and scarcely belonging to the human race.”
He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for the bride is to commit suicide. Even the j.a.panese, so highly civilized in some respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likening themselves to heaven and the women to earth. There are ten stations on the way up the sacred mount Fuji. Formerly no woman was allowed to climb above the eighth. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of the University of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his _Things j.a.panese_ (274) in which he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the _Kojiki_ he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women in ancient as in modern j.a.pan. Some years afterward six of the chief literati of the old school translated this introduction into j.a.panese.
They patted the author on the head for many things, but when they reached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrath exploded:
”The subordination of women to men,” so ran their commentary, ”is an extremely correct custom. To think the contrary is to harbor European prejudice.... For the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand law of heaven and earth. To ignore this, and to talk of the contrary as barbarous, is absurd.”
The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated by the men, Chamberlain says on another page,
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