Part 85 (1/2)

A great mistake was made by the Greeks when they distinguished celestial from earthly love. The distinction itself was all right, but their application of it was all wrong. Had they known romantic love as we know it, they could not have made the grievous blunder of calling the love between men and women worldly, reserving the word celestial for the friends.h.i.+p between men. Equally mistaken were those mediaeval sages who taught that the celestial s.e.xual virtues are celibacy and virginity--a doctrine which, if adopted, would involve the suicide of the human race, and thus stands self-condemned. No, _celestial love is not asceticism; it is altruism_. Romantic love is celestial, for it is altruistic, yet it does not preach contempt of the body, and its goal is marriage, the chief pillar of civilization. The admiration of a beautiful, well-rounded, healthy body is as legitimate and laudable an ingredient of romantic love as the admiration of that mental beauty which distinguishes it from sensual love. It is not only that the lovers themselves are ent.i.tled to partners with healthy, attractive bodies; it is a duty they owe to the next generation not to marry anyone who is likely to transmit bodily or mental infirmities to the next generation. It is quite as reprehensible to marry for spiritual reasons alone as to be guided only by physical charms.

Love is nature's radical remedy for disease, whereas marriage, as practised in the past, and too often in the present, is little more than a legalized crime. ”One of the last things that occur to a marrying couple is whether they are fit to be represented in posterity,” writes Dr. Harry Campbell (_Lancet_, 1898).

”Theft and murder are considered the blackest of crimes, but neither the law nor the church has raised its voice against the marriage of the unfit, for neither has realized that worse than theft and well-nigh as bad as murder is the bringing into the world, through disregard of parental fitness, of individuals full of disease-tendencies.”

On this point the public conscience needs a thorough rousing. If a mother deliberately gave her daughter a draught which made her a cripple, or an invalid, or an imbecile, or tuberculous, everybody would cry out with horror, and she would become a social outcast. But if she inflicts these injuries on her granddaughter, by marrying her daughter to a drunkard, in the hope of reforming him, or to a wealthy degenerate, or an imbecile baron, no one says a word, provided the marriage law has been complied with.

It is owing to these persistent crimes against grandchildren that the human race as a whole is still such a miserable rabble, and that recruiting offices and insurances companies tell such startling tales of degeneracy. Love would cure this, if there were more of the right kind. Until there is, much good may be done by accepting it as a guide, and building up a sentiment in favor of its instinctive object and ideal. I have described in one chapter the obstacles which r.e.t.a.r.ded the growth of love, and in another I have shown how sentiments change and grow. Most of those obstacles are being gradually removed, and public opinion is slowly but surely changing in favor of love. Building up a new sentiment is a slow process. At first it may be a mere hut for a hermit thinker, but gradually it becomes larger and larger as thousands add their mite to the building fund, until at last it stands as a sublime cathedral admonis.h.i.+ng all to do their duty. When the Cathedral of Love is finished the horror of disease and vice will have become as absolute a bar to marriage as the horror of incest is now; and it will be acknowledged that the only true marriage of reason is a marriage of love.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Albrecht Weber and other German scholars, while practically agreeing with Hegel regarding the Greeks and Romans, claim, that the amorous poetry of the ancient Hindoo has the sentimental qualities of modern European verse.

[2] In the New York _Nation_ of September 22, and the _Evening Post_ of September 24, 1887. My reasons for not agreeing with these two distinguished professors will be dwelt on repeatedly in the following pages. If they are right, then literature is not, as it is universally held to be, a mirror of life.

[3] No important truth is ever born full fledged. The Darwinian theory was conceived simultaneously by Wallace and Darwin, and both were antic.i.p.ated by other writers. Nay, a German professor has written a treatise on the ”Greek Predecessors of Darwin.”

[4] _Studien uber die Libido s.e.xualis_, I., Pt. I., 28.

[5] In the last chapter of _Lotos-Time in j.a.pan_.

[6] An amusing instance of this trait may be found in Johnston's account of his ascent of the Kilima-Njaro (271-276).

[7] Roth's sumptuous volume, _British North Borneo_, gives a life-like picture of the Dyaks from every point of view, with numerous ill.u.s.trations.

[8] See the chapter on Nudity and Bathing in my _Lotos-Time in j.a.pan_.

[9] Bancroft, II., 75; Wallace, 357; Westermarck, 195; Humboldt, III., 230.

[10] See especially the ninth chapter of Westermarck's _History of Human Marriage_, 186-201.

[11] Westermarck (74) devotes half a page in fine type to an enumeration of the peoples among whom many such customs prevailed, and his list is far from being complete.

[12] See Westermarck, Chap. XX., for a list of monogamous peoples.

[13] The vexed question of promiscuity hinges on this distinction. As a matter of _form_ promiscuity may not have been the earliest phase of human marriage, but as a matter of _fact_ it was. Westermarck's ingeniously and elaborately built up argument against the theory of promiscuity is a leaning tower which crashes to the ground when weighted by this one consideration. See the chapter on Australia.

[14] For a partial list of peoples who practised trial marriage and frequent divorce see Westermarck, 518-521, and C. Fischer, uber die Probennachte der deutschen Bauernmadchen_. Leipzig, 1780.

[15] For the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality see the chapter on Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment.

[16] Johnston states (in Schoolcraft, IV., 224) that the wild Indians of California had their rutting season as regularly as have the deer and other animals. See also Powers (206) and Westermarck (28). In the Andaman Islands a man and woman remained together only till their child was weaned, when they separated to seek new mates (_Trans.

Ethnol. Soc_., V., 45).

[17] The other cases of ”jealousy” cited by Westermarck (117-122) are all negatived by the same property argument; to which he indeed alludes, but the full significance of which he failed to grasp. It is a pity that language should be so crude as to use the same word jealousy to denote three such entirely different things as rage at a rival, revenge for stolen property, and anguish at the knowledge or suspicion of violated chast.i.ty and outraged conjugal affection.

Anthropologists have studied only the lower phases of jealousy, just as they have failed to distinguish clearly between l.u.s.t and love.

[18] All these facts, it is hardly necessary to add, serve as further ill.u.s.trations to the chapter How Sentiments Change and Grow.