Part 90 (2/2)

Anthrop.,_ 1894 (153-57).

[245] Dr. Brinton published in 1886 an interesting pamphlet ent.i.tled _The Conception of Love in Some American Languages_, which was afterward reprinted in his _Essays of an Americanist_. It forms the philological basis for his a.s.sertion, already quoted, that the languages of the Algonquins of North America, the Nahuas of Mexico, the Mayas of Yucatan, the Quichas of Peru, and the Tupis and Guaranis of Brazil ”supply us with evidence that the sentiment of love was awake among them.” I have read this learned paper half a dozen times, and have come to the conclusion that it proves exactly the contrary.

I. In the Algonkin, as I gather from the professor's explanations, there is one form of the word ”love” from which are derived the expressions ”to tie,” ”to fasten,” ”and also some of the coa.r.s.est words to express the s.e.xual relation.” For the feebler ”sentiment” of merely liking a person there is a word meaning ”he or it _seems good to me_.” Expressions relating to the highest form of love, ”that which embraces all men and all beings” are derived from a root indicative of ”_what gives joy_.” The italics are mine. I can find here no indication of altruistic sentiment, but quite the reverse.

II. It was among the Mexicans that Dr. Brinton found the ”delicate”

poems. Yet he informs us that they had ”only one word...to express every variety of love, human and divine, carnal and chaste, between men and between the s.e.xes.” This being the case, how are we ever to know which kind of love a Mexican poem refers to? Dr. Brinton himself feels that one must not credit the Aztecs ”with finer feelings than they deserve;” and with reference to a certain mythic conception he adds, ”I gravely doubt that they felt the shafts of the tender pa.s.sion, with any such susceptibility as to employ this metaphor.”

Moreover, as he informs us, the Mexican root of the word is not derived from the primary meaning of the root, but from a secondary and later signification. ”This hints ominously,” he says,

”at the probability that the ancient tongue had for a long time no word at all to express this, the highest and n.o.blest emotion of the human heart, and that consequently this emotion itself had not risen to consciousness in the national mind.”

In its later development the capacity of the language for emotional expression was greatly enlarged. Was this before the European missionaries appeared on the scene? Missionaries, it is important to remember, had a good deal to do with the development of the language, as well as the birth of the n.o.bler conceptions and emotions among the lower races. Many fatal blunders in comparative psychology and sociology can be traced to the ignoring of this fact.

III. Dr. Otto Stoll, in his work _Zur Ethnographie der Rep.

Guatemala,_ declares that the Cakchiquel Indians of that country ”are strangers to the mere conception of that kind of love which is expressed by the Latin verb _amare_.” _Logoh_, the Guatemalan word for love, also means ”to buy,” and according to Stoll the only other word in the pure original tongue for the pa.s.sion of love is _ah_, to want, to desire. Dr. Brinton finds it used also in the sense of ”to like,”

”to love” [in what way?]. But the best he can do is to ”think that 'to buy' and 'to love' may be construed as developments of the same idea of _prizing highly_” which tells us nothing regarding altruism. All that we know about the customs of Guatemalans points to the conclusion that Dr. Stoll was right in declaring that they had no notion of true love.

IV. Of the Peruvian expressions relating to love in the comprehensive sense of the word, Dr. Brinton specifies five. Of one of them, _munay_, there were, according to Dr. Anch.o.r.ena, nearly six hundred combinations. It meant originally ”merely a sense of want, an appet.i.te, and the accompanying desire to satisfy it.” In songs composed in the nineteenth century _cenyay_, which originally meant pity, is preferred to _munay_ as the most appropriate term for the love between the s.e.xes. The blind, unreasoning, absorbing pa.s.sion is expressed by _huaylluni_, which is nearly always confined to s.e.xual love, and ”conveys the idea of the sentiment showing itself in action by those sweet signs and marks of devotion which are so highly prized by the loving heart.” The verb _lluyllny_ (literally to be soft or tender, as fruit) means to

”love with tenderness, to have as a darling, to caress lovingly. It has less of s.e.xuality in it than the word last mentioned, and is applied by girls to each other and as a term of family fondness.”

There was also a term, _mayhuay_, referring to words of tenderness or acts of endearment which may be merely simulated signs of emotion. I cannot find in any of these definitions evidence of altruistic affection, unless it be in the ”marks of devotion,” which expression, however, I suspect, is Philadelphian rather than Peruvian.

V. The Tupi-Guarani have one word only to express all the varieties of love known to them--_aihu_. Dr. Brinton thinks he ”cannot be far wrong” in deriving this from _ai_, self, or the same, and _hu_ to find or be present; and from this he infers that ”to love,” in Guarani, means ”to find oneself in another,” or ”to discover in another a likeness to oneself.” I submit that this is altogether too airy a fabric of fanciful conjecture to allow the inference that the sentiment of love was known to these Brazilian Indians, whose morals and customs were, moreover, as we have seen, fatal obstacles to the growth of refined s.e.xual feeling. Both the Tupis and Guaranis were cannibals, and they had no regard for chast.i.ty. One of their ”sentimental” customs was for a captor to make his prisoner, before he was eaten, cohabit with his (the captor's) sister or daughter, the offspring of this union being allowed to grow up and then was devoured too, the first mouthful being given to the mother. (Southey, I., 218.) I mention this because Dr. Brinton says that the evidence that the sentiment of love was awake among these tribes ”is corroborated by the incidents we learn of their domestic life.”

[246] _U.S. Geogr. and Geol Survey Rocky Mt. Region_, Pt. I., 181-89.

[247] It is of the Modocs of this region that Joaquin Miller wrote that ”Indians have their loves, and as they have but little else, these fill up most of their lives.” The above poems indicate the quality of this Indian love. In Joaquin Miller's narrative of his experience with the Modocs, the account of his own marriage is of special interest. At a Modoc marriage a feast is given by the girl's father, ”to which all are invited, but the bride and bridegroom do not partake of food. ... Late in the fall, the old chief made the marriage feast, and at that feast neither I nor his daughter took meat, or any part.” It is a pity that the rest of this writer's story is, by his own confession, part romance, part reality. A lifelike description of his Modoc experience would have done more to ensure immortality for his book than any amount of romancing.

[248] _Journal of Amer. Folklore_, 1888, 220-26.

[249] _Internat. Archiv. fur Ethnogr., Supplement zu Bd._ IX. 1896, pp. 1-6.

[250] These lines by their fervid eroticism quite suggest the existence of a masculine Indian Sappho. See the comments on Sappho in the chapter on Greek love.

[251] Such a procedure does well enough if the object is to amuse idle readers; and when a writer confesses, as Cornelius Mathews did in the _Indian Fairy Book_, that he bestowed on the stories ”such changes as similar legends most in vogue in other countries have received to adapt them to the comprehension and sympathy of general readers,” no harm is done. But for scientific purposes it is necessary to sift down all alleged Indian stories and poems to the solid bed-rock of facts.

It is significant that in the stories collected by men of science and recorded literally in anthropological journals all romantic and sentimental features are conspicuously absent, being often replaced by the Indian's abounding obscenity. Rand's _Legends of the Micmacs_ and Grinnell's _Blackfoot Lodge Tales_ are on the whole free from the errors of Schoolcraft and his followers. It ought to be obvious to every collector of aboriginal folk-lore that Indian tales, like the Indians themselves, are infinitely more interesting in war paint and buffalo robes than in ”boiled s.h.i.+rts” and ”store-clothes.”

[252] _U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Survey of Rocky Mt. Region_, IX., 90.

[253] Related in G. White's _Historical Collection of Georgia_, 571.

[254] See Brinton's _The American Race_, 59-67, for an excellent summary of our present knowledge of the Eskimos (on the favorable side).

[255] _Journal Ethnol. Soc_., I., 299.

[256] Cranz, I., 155, 134; Hall, II., 87, I., 187; Hearne, 161.

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