[129]Princ. of Soc., American Edition, pp. 756, 772, 784, 787.
[130] The proofs of man's universal contempt for woman are to be found in the chapter on "Adoration," and everywhere in this book. Many additional illustrations are contained in several articles by Crawley in theJour. Anthrop. Inst., Vol. XXIV.
[131]Cf. Ploss-Bartels, I., 471-87, where this topic of infant marriage is treated with truly German thoroughness and erudition.
[132] To demonstrate the recklessness (to use a mild word) of Darwin and Westermarck in this matter I will quote the exact words of Burchell in the passage referred to (II., 58-59): "These men generally take a second wife as soon as the first becomes somewhat advanced in years." "Most commonly" the girls are betrothed when about seven years old, and in two or three years the girl is given to the man. "These bargains are made with her parents only, andwithout ever consulting the wishes (even if she had any) of the daughter. When it happens, which is not often the case, that a girl has grown up to womanhood without having been betrothed, her lover must gain her approbationas well as that of her parents."
[133] Darwin was evidently puzzled by the queer nature of Reade's evidence in other matters (D.M., Chap. XIX.); yet he naïvely relies on him as an authority. Reade told him that the ideas of negroes on beauty are "on the whole, the same as ours." Yet in several other pages of Darwin we see it noted that according to Reade, the negroes have a horror of a white skin and admire a skin in proportion to its blackness; that "they look on blue eyes with aversion, and they think our noses too long and our lips too thin." "He does not think it probable," Darwin adds, "that negroes would ever prefer the most beautiful European woman, on the mere ground of physical admiration, to a good-looking negress." How extraordinarily like our taste! If a man had talked to Darwin about corals or angleworms as foolishly and inconsistently as Reade did about negroes, he would have ignored him. But in matters relating to beauty or love all rubbish is accepted, and every globe-trotter and amateur explorer who wields a pen is treated as an authority.
[134] See McLennan'sStudies in Ancient History, first and second series; Spencer'sPrinciples of Sociology, I., Part 3, Chap. 4; Westermarck, Chap. XIV., etc.
[135] Westermarck, 364-66, where many other striking cases of racial prejudice are given.
[136] For instance omal-win-yuk-un-der, illpoogee, loityo, kernoo, ipamoo, badjeerie, mungaroo, yowerda, yowada, yoorda, yooada, yongar, yunkera, wore, yowardoo, marloo, yowdar, koolbirra, madooroo, oggra, arinva, oogara, augara, uggerra, bulka, yshuckuru, koongaroo, chookeroo, thaldara, kulla, etc.
[137] See also Merensky'sSüd Afrika, 68.
[138] As Fritsch says (306) "Kolben found them most excellent specimens of mankind and invested them with the most manifold virtues" (see also 312 and 328). A person thus biased is under suspicion when he praises, but not when he exposes shady sides. My page references are to the French edition of Kolben. The italics are mine.
[139] Gathered from Hahn'sTsuniand Krönlein'sWortschatz der Namaqua Hottentotten.
[140] The details given by the Rev. J. MacDonald (Journal Anthrop. Soc., XX., 1890, 116-18) cannot possibly be cited here. Our argument is quite strong enough without them. Westermarck devotes ten pages to an attempt to prove that immorality is not characteristic of uncivilized races in general. He leads off with that preposterous statement of Barrow that "a Kaffir woman is chaste and extremely modest;" and most of his other instances are based on equally flimsy evidence. I shall recur to the subject repeatedly. It is hardly necessary to call the reader's attention to the unconscious humor of the assertion of Westermarck's friend Cousins that "between their various feasts the Kaffirs have to live in strict continence"—which is a good deal like saying of a toper that "between drinks he is strictly sober."
[141] It may seem inconsistent to condemn Barrow on one page as unreliable and then quote him approvingly on another. But in the first case his assertion was utterly opposed to the unanimous testimony of those who knew the Kaffirs best, while in this instance his remarks are in perfect accordance with what we would expect under the circumstances and with the testimony of the standard authorities.
[142] Vid. Mantegazza,Geschlechtsverhältnisse des Menschen, 213.
[143] From an article in theHumanitarian, March, 1897, it appears that this "leap-year" custom still prevails among Zulus; but the dawn of civilization has introduced a modification to the effect that when the girl is refused, a present is usually given her "to ease her feelings." At least that is the way Miss Colenso puts it. Wood (80) relates a story of a Kaffir girl who persistently wooed a young chief who did not want her; she had to be removed by force and even beaten, but kept returning until, to save further bother, the chief bought her.
[144] Ignorant sentimentalists who have often argued that the absence of illegitimate offspring argues moral purity will do well to ponder what Thomson says on page 580, and compare with it the remarks of the Rev. J. Macdonald, who lived twelve years among the tribes between Cape Colony and Natal, regarding their use of herbs. (Journal Anthrop. Soc., XIX., 264.) See also Johnston (413).
[145] To what almost incredible lengths sentimental defenders of savages will go, may be seen in an editorial article with which the LondonDaily Newsof August 4, 1887, honored my first book. I was informed therein that "savages are not strangers to love in the most delicate and noble form of the passion…. The wrong conclusion must not be drawn from Monteiro's remark, 'I have never seen a negro put his arm around a negro's waist.' It is the uneducated classes who may be seen to exhibit in the parks those harmless endearments which negroes have too much good taste to practise before the public." To one who knows the African savage as he is, such an assertion is worth a whole volume ofPunch.
[146] Westermarck (358), as usual, accepts Johnston's statement about poetic love on the Congo as gospel truth, without examining it critically.
[147] Bleek credits these tales to Schön'sGrammar of the Hausa Language, Schlenker'sCollection of Temne Traditions, and Kölle'sAfrican Native Literature, where the original Bornu text may be found.
[148]Folk Lore Journal, London, 1888, 119-22.
[149] Compare this with what I said on page 340 about the behavior of girls in the New Britain Group.
[150]Revue d'Anthropologie,1883.
[151] See an elaborate discussion of this question by the Rev. John Mathew in theJournal of the Royal Society of N.S. Wales,Vol. XXIII., 335-449.
[152] See,e.g., the hideous pictures of Australian women enclosed in G.W. Earl'sThe Papuans. Spencer and Gillen's admirable volume also contains pictures of "young women" who look twice their age. After the age of twenty, the authors write, the face becomes wrinkled, the breasts pendulous, the whole body shrivelled. At fifty they reach "a stage of ugliness which baffled description" (40,40).
[153]Royal Geogr. Soc of Australasia, 1887, Vol. V., 29.
[154]Trans. Ethn. Soc., New Ser., III., 248, 288; cited by Spencer,D.S., 26.
[155] He adds in a foot-note (320) "Foeminae sese per totam paene vitam prostituunt. Apud plurimas tribus juventutem utriusque sexus sine discrimine concumbere in usu est. Si juvenis forte indigenorum coetum quendam in castris manentem adveniat ubi quaevis sit puella innupta, mos est nocte veniente et cubantibus omnibus, illam ex loco exsurgere et juvenem accedentem cum illo per noctem manere unde in sedem propriam ante diem redit. Cui femina est, eam amicis libenter praebet."
[156] F. Müller (212-13) gives the details of West Australian corrobborees which are too obscene to be cited here. See also the testimony in Hellwald (134-35) based on the observations of Oldfield, Koler, M'Combie, etc., and a number of other authorities cited by Waitz-Gerland, VI., 754-55. Curr says (I., 128) that at the corrobborees men of different tribes lend their wives to each other.
[157]Journal Anthrop. Inst., XXIV., 169. See also Waitz, VI., 774; Macgillivray, II., 8; Hasskarl, 82. They have a peculiar rattle with mystic sculpturing, and Eyre says that its sound libertatem coeundi juventuti esse tum concessam omnibus indicat. Maclennan (287) cites G.S. Lang, who cites the fact that the old men get most of the young women. Connubium profecto valde est liberum. Conjuges, puellae,puellulaecum adolescentibus venantur. Pretium corporis poene nullius est. Vendunt se vel columbae vel canis vel piscis pretio. Inter Anglos et aborigines nihil distat.
[158]Journal Anthrop. Inst., XX., 53.
[159]Revue d'Anthropologie. 1882, p. 376.
[160] A.W. Howitt,Jour. Anthr. Hist.XX., 60-61. Fison and Howitt, 289;Smithsonian Reports, 1883, p. 67. Details are given which cannot be reproduced here. Boys participate in these orgies.
[161] The details given by Roth are too disgusting for reproduction here. They vie with the loathsome practices of the Kaffirs and the most debauched Roman emperors, while some of them are so vile that it seems as if they could have been suggested only by the diseased brain of an erotomaniac. The most degraded white criminal that ever took up his abode among savages would turn away from them with horror and nausea, yet we are asked to believe that the savages learned all their vices from the whites!
[162]Mittheil des Ver. für Erdkunde zu Halle, 1883, 54.
[163] Westermarck overlooks these vital facts when he calmly assumes (64, 65) that the guarding of girls, or punishment of intruders, argues a regard for chastity. His entire ignoring of the superabundant and unimpeachable testimony proving the contrary is extraordinary, to put it mildly. Dawson's assertion (33) that "illegitimacy is rare" and the mother severely punished, which Westermarck cites (65), is as foolish as most of the gossip printed by that utterly untrustworthy writer. As the details given in these pages regarding licentiousness before marriage and wife-lending after it show, there is no possible way of proving illegitimacy unless the child has a white father. In that case it is killed; but that is nothing remarkable, as the Australians kill most of their children anyway. That a regard for chastity or fidelity has nothing to do with these actions is proved by the fact cited from Curr (I., 110) by Westermarck himself (on another page—131—of course!) that "husbands display much less jealousy of white men than of those of their own color," and that they will more commonly prostitute their wives to strangers visiting the tribe than to their own people. I have no doubt that the simple reason of this is that the whites are better able to pay, in rum and trinkets.
[164]South Australia, Adelaide, 1804, p. 403. The part author, part editor of this valuable book is not to be confounded with J.S. Wood, the compiler of theNatural History of Man.
[165] See also the account he gives (I., 180) of the report as to aboriginal morals made in the early days of Victoria by a commission of fourteen settlers, missionaries, and protectors of the aborigines. The explorer Sturt (I., 316) even found that the natives became indignant if the whites rejected their addresses.
[166] See also a very important paper on this subject by Howitt in theJournal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. XX., 1890, demonstrating that "in Australia at the present day group marriage does exist in a well-marked form, which is evidently only the modified survival of a still more complete social communism" (104). Regarding the manner in which group marriage gradually passed into individual proprietorship, a suggestive hint may be found in this sentence from Brough Smyth (II., 316): When women are carried off from another tribe, "they are common property till they are gradually annexed by the best warriors of the tribe."
[167] In my mind the strongest argument against Westermarck's views as regards promiscuity is that all his tributary theories, so to speak, which I have had occasion to examine in this volume have proved so utterly inconsistent with facts. The question of promiscuity itself I cannot examine in detail here, as it hardly comes within the scope of this book. In view of the confusion Westermarck has already created in recent scientific literature by his specious pleading, I need not apologize for the frequency of my polemics against him. His imposing erudition and his cleverness in juggling with facts by ignoring those that do not please him (ase.g., in case of the morality of the Kaffirs and Australians, and the "liberty of choice" of their women) make him a serious obstacle to the investigation of the truth regarding man's sexual history, wherefore it is necessary to expose his errors promptly and thoroughly.
[168]Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 1890, 53.
[169] Would our friend Stephens be fearless enough to claim that this custom also was taught the natives by the degraded whites? Apart from the diabolical cruelty to a woman of which no white man except a maniac would ever be individually guilty—whereas this is a tribal custom—note the unutterable masculine selfishness of this "jealousy," which, while indifferent to chastity and fidelity,per se, punishes by proxy, leaving the real culprit untouched and happy at having not only had his intrigue but a chance to get rid of an undesired wife!
[170]Jour. Anthr. Inst., XII., 282.
[171] Grey might have made a valuable contribution to the comparative psychology of passion by noting down the chant of the rivals in their own words. Instead of that, for literary effect, he cast them into European metre and rhyme, with various expressions, like "bless" and "caress," which of course are utterly beyond an Australian's mental horizon. This absurd procedure, which has made so many documents of travellers valueless for scientific purposes, is like filling an ethnological museum with pictures of Australians, Africans, etc., all clothed in swallow-tail coats and silk hats.Cf. Grosse (B.A., 236), and Semon (224). Real Australian "poems" are like the following:
"The peas the white man eats—I wish I had some,I wish I had some."
Or this:
"The kangaroo ran very fastBut I ran faster;The kangaroo was fat;I ate him."
[172]Roy. Geogr. Soc. of Australasia, Vol. V., 29.
[173] The reason why Westermarck is so eager to prove liberty of choice on the part of Australian women is because he has set himself the hopeless task of proving that the lower we go the more liberty woman has, and that "under more primitive conditions she was even more free in that respect than she is now amongst most of the lower races." "As man in the earliest times," he asserts (222), "had no reason … to retain his full-grown daughter, she might go away and marry at her pleasure." Quite the contrary; an Australian, than whom we know no more "primitive" man, had every reason for not allowing her to go away and marry whom she pleased. He looked on his daughter, as we have seen, chiefly as a desirable piece of property to exchange for some other man's daughter or sister.
[174] As distinguished from the more common sham elopement, at which the parents are consulted as usual. In the Kunandaburi tribe, for instance, as Howitt himself tells us (Jour. Anthr. Inst., XX., 60-61) the suitor asks permission of the girl's parents to take her away. "She resists all she can, biting and screaming, while the other women look on laughing." The whole thing is obviously a custom ordered by the parents, and tells us nothing regarding the presence or absence of choice. See the remarks on sham capture in my chapter on Coyness (125).
[175] The reader will note that here are some additional objects usually supposed to be "ornamental," but which, as in all the cases examined in the chapter on Personal Beauty, are seen on close examination to serve other than esthetic purposes. Theseareintended tocharmthe women, not, however, as things of beauty, but by their magic qualities and by attracting their attention.
[176] With his usual conscientious regard for facts Westermarck declares (70) that in a savage condition of life "every full-grown man marries as soon as possible."
[177] We are occasionally warned not to underrate the intelligence of the aboriginal Australian. As a matter of fact, there is more danger of its being overrated. Thus it was long believed that what was known as the "terrible rite" (finditur usque ad urethram membrum virile)—see Curr I., 52, 72—was practised as a check to population; but surgeon-general Roth (179) has exploded this idea, and made it seem probable that this rite is merely a senseless counterpart of certain useless mutilations inflicted on females.
[178]Trans. Eth. Soc., New Ser., III, 248.
[179] Gerland (VI., 756) makes the same mistake here as Westermarck. He also refers to Petermann'sMittheilungenfor another case of "romantic love." On consulting that periodical (1856, 451) I find that the proof of such love lay in the circumstance that in the quarrels so common in Australian camps, wives would not hesitate to join in and help their husbands!
[180] Surgeon-General Roth of Queensland does not indulge in any illusions regarding love in Australia. He uses quotation marks when he speaks of a man being in "love" (180), and in another place he speaks of the native woman "whose love, such as it is." etc. He evidently realizes that Australian lovers are only "lewd fellows of the baser sort."
[181]Journal of the Anthrop. Inst., 1889.
[182] Macgillivray says (II., 8) that the females of the Torres Islands are in most cases betrothed in infancy. "When the man thinks proper he takes his wife to live with him without any further ceremony, but before this she has probably had promiscuous intercourse with the young men, such, if conducted with a moderate degree of secrecy, not being considered as an offence…. Occasionally there are instances of strong mutual attachment and courtship, when, if the damsel is not betrothed, a small present made to the father is sufficient to procure his consent; at the Prince of Wales Islands a knife or a glass is considered as a sufficient price for the hand of a 'fair lady,' and are the articles mostly used for that purpose." I cite this passage chiefly because it is another one of those to which Gerland refers as evidence of genuine romantic love!
[183] I am indebted for many of the following facts to H. Ling Roth's splendid compilation and monograph entitledThe Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo. London, 1896.
[184] The Ida'an are the aboriginal population; in dress, habitations, manners, and customs they are essentially the same as the Dyaks in general.
[185] The above details are culled from Williams, pp. 145, 144, 38, 345, 148, 152, 43, 114, 179, 180, 344. The editor declares, in a foot-note (182), that he has repressed or softened some of the more horrible details in Williams's account.
[186] See Westermarck, 67, and footnotes on that page.
[187] If sentimentalists were gifted with a sense of humor it would have occurred to them how ludicrous and illogical it is to suppose that savages and barbarians, the world over, should in each instance have been converted by a few whites from angels to monsters of depravity with such amazing suddenness. We know, on the contrary, that in no respect are these races so stubbornly tenacious of old customs as in their sexual relations.
[188] See Mariner (Martin) Introduction and Chap. XVI.
[189]Jour. Anthr. Inst., 1889, p. 104.
[190] Supposed to mean a beautiful flower that grows on the tops of the mountains, where sea and land breezes meet.
[191] According to Erskine (50) when a Samoan felt a violent passion for another he would brand his arm, to symbolize his ardor. (Waitz-Gerland, VI., 125.)
[192] SeeSchopenhauer's Gespräche(Grisebach), 1898, p. 40, and the essay on love, in Lichtenberg'sAusgewählte Schriften(Reclam). Lichtenberg seems, indeed, to have doubted whether anything else than sensual love actually exists.
[193] It is said that, under favorable circumstances, a distance of 3,000 miles might thus be covered in a month.
[194] There is much reason to suspect, too, that Grey expurgated and whitewashed these tales. See, on this subject, the remarks to be made in the next chapter regarding the Indian love-stories of Schoolcraft, bearing in mind that Polynesians are, if possible, even more licentious and foul-mouthed than Indians.
[195] Considerations of space compel me here, as in other cases, to condense the stories; but I conscientiously and purposely retain all the sentimental passages and expressions.
[196]Algic Researches, 1839, I., 43. From this work the first five of the above stories are taken, the others being from the same author'sOneota(54-57; 15-16). The stories inAlgic Researcheswere reprinted in 1856 under the titleThe Myth of Hiawatha and Other Oral Legends.
[197] I have taken the liberty of giving to most of the stories cited more attractive titles than Schoolcraft gave them. He himself changed some of the titles in his later edition.
[198] In another of these tales (A.R., II., 165-80) Schoolcraft refers to a girl who went astray in the woods "while admiring the scenery."
[199] Schoolcraft's volumes include, however, a number of reliable and valuable articles on various Indian tribes by other writers. These are often referred to in anthropological treatises, including the present volume.
[200] In theZeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1891, especially pages 546, 554, 555, 556, 557, 558, 559, 567-69, 640, 643; in the vol. for 1892, pages 36, 42, 44, 324, 330, 340, 386, 392, 434, 447; and in the vol. for 1894, 283, 303, 304. It is impossible even to hint here at the details of these stories. Some are licentious, others merely filthy. Powers, in his great work on the California Indians (348), refers to "the unspeakable obscenity of their legends."
[201] Ehrenreich says (Zeitschr. für Ethnol., 1887, 31) that among the Botocudos cohabitatio coram familia et vicinibus exagitur; and of the Machacares Indians Feldner tells us (II., 143, 148) that even the children behave lewdly in presence of everybody. Parentes rident, appellunt eos canes, et usque ad silvam agunt. Some extremely important and instructive revelations are made in von den Steinen's classic work on Brazil (195-99), but they cannot be cited here. The author concludes that "a feeling of modesty is decidedly absent among the unclothed Indians."
[202] Published in thePapers of the American Archaeological Institute, III.
[203]Works, in Hakluyt Soc. Publ., London, 1847, II., 192.
[204] What Parkman says regarding the cruelty of the Indians perhaps applies also to their sexual morality, though to a less extent. In speaking of the early missionary intercourse with the Indians he remarks (Jes in Can., 319):
"In the wars of the next century we do not often find these examples of diabolic atrocity with which the earlier annals were crowded. The savage burned his enemies alive still, it is true, but he rarely ate them; neither did he torment them with the same deliberation and persistency. He was a savage still, but not so often a devil. The improvement was not great, but it was distinct; and it seems to have taken place wherever Indian tribes were in close relations with any respectable community of white men."
[205] Herrera relates (III., 340) that Nicaraguan fathers used to send out their daughters to roam the country and earn a marriage portion in a shameful way.
[206] See also the remarks of Dr. W.J. Hoffmann regarding the dances of the Coyotero Apaches.U.S. Geol. and Geogr. Survey, Colorado, 1876, 464.
[207] Pizarro says (Relacion, 266) that "the virgins of the sun feigned to preserve virginity and to be chaste. In this they lied, as they cohabited with the servants and guards of the Sun, who were numerous." Regarding Peruvians in general Pizarro (1570) and Cieza (Travels, 1532-40) agree that parents did not care about the conduct of their daughters, and Cieza speaks of the promiscuity at festivals. Brinton (M.N.W., 149) is obliged to admit that "there is a decided indecency in the remains of ancient American art, especially in Peru, and great lubricity in many ceremonies."
[208]Indian Rights Assoc., Philadelphia, 1885.
[209]Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 1892, 427.
[210]Indian Com. Rep., 1854, p. 179.
[211] Bristol inInd. Aff. Rep. Spec. Com., 1867, p. 357.
[212]Rep. Com. Ind. Aff., 1892, p. 607.
[213] Even the wives of chiefs were treated no better than slaves. Catlin himself tells us of the six wives of a Mandan chief who were "not allowed to speak, though they were in readiness to obey his orders." (Smithson. Rep.. 1885, Pt. II., 458.)
[214] Such cruel treatment of women argues a total lack of sympathy in Indians, and without sympathy there can be no love. The systematic manner in which sympathy is crushed among Indians I have described in a previous chapter. Here let me add a few remarks by Theodore Roosevelt (I., 86) which coincide with what John Hance, the famous Arizona guide, told me:
"Anyone who has ever been in an encampment of wild Indians and has had the misfortune to witness the delight the children take in torturing little animals will admit that the Indian's love of cruelty for cruelty's sake cannot possibly be exaggerated. The young are so trained that when old they shall find their keenest pleasure in inflicting pain in its most appalling form. Among the most brutal white borderers a man would be instantly lynched if he practiced on any creature the fiendish torture which in the Indian camp either attracts no notice at all, or else excites merely laughter."
(See also Roosevelt's remarks—87, 831, 335 on Helen Hunt Jackson'sCentury of Dishonor.) The Indian was much wronged by unprincipled agents and others, but the border ruffians served him only as he served others of his race, the weaker being always driven out. Nor was there any real sympathy within the tribes themselves. "These people," wrote the old Jesuit missionary Le Jeune (VI., 245), "are very little moved by compassion. They give a sick person food and drink, but show otherwise no concern for him; to coax him with love and tenderness is a language which they do not understand. When he refuses food they kill him, partly to relieve him from suffering, partly to relieve themselves of the trouble of taking him with them when they go to some other place."
[215]Smithsonian Rep., 1885, Pt. II., 108.
[216] The humor of Catlin's assertions becomes more obvious still when we read how readily Indians dissolve their marriages, through love of change, caprice, etc. See cases in Westermarck, 518.
[217] Cited by Schoolcraft,Oneota, 57.
[218]Transactions of the American Philosophical Society.Philadelphia, 1819.
[219]Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 1884, p. 251.
[220] Brinton'sLibrary of Aborig. Amer. Lit., II, 65.
[221] The only way the women could secure any consideration was by overawing the men. Thus Southey says (III., 411) regarding the Abipones that the old women "were obdurate in retaining superstitions that rendered them objects of fear, and therefore of respect." Smith in his book on the Araucanians of Chili, notes (238), that besides the usual medicine men there was an occasional woman "who had acquired the most unbounded influence by shrewdness, joined to a hideous personal appearance and a certain mystery with which she was invested."
[222] As when he says, "The Atkha Aleuts occasionally betrothed their children to each other, but the marriage was held to be binding only after the birth of a child." What evidence of choice is there here?
[223]U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Survey of Colorado,etc., 1876, p. 465.
[224] Miss Alice Fletcher gives in theJournal of the American Folk Lore Society(1889, 219-26) an amusing instance of how far a present-day Omaha girl may go in resenting a man's unwelcome advances. A faint-hearted lover had sent a friend as go-between to ask for the girl's favor. As he finished his speech the girl looked at him with flashing eyes and said: "I'll have nothing to do with your friend or you either." The young man hesitated a moment, as if about to repeat his request, when a dangerous wave of her water-bucket made him leap to one side to escape a deluge.
[225]Zeitschrift für Ethnologie,1891, p. 545.
[226] How California marriages were made in the good old times we may see from the account in Hakluyt'sCollection of Early Voyages, 1810, III., 513:
"If any man had a daughter to marry he went where the people kept, and said, I have a daughter to marry, is there any man here that would have her? And if there were any that would have her, he answered that he would have her, and so the marriage was made."
[227]Smithsonian Rep., 1885, Pt. II., p. 71.
[228] Schoolcraft, IV., 224; Powers, 221; Waitz, IV., 132; Azara (Voyages), II., 94; von Martius, I.,412, 509.
[229] A table relating to sixty-five North American Indian girls given in Ploss, I., 476, shows that all but eight of them had their first child before the end of the fifteenth year; the largest number (eighteen), having it in the fourteenth.
[230] See John Fiske'sDiscovery of America, I., 21, and E.J. Payne'sHistory of the New World.
[231] Giacomo Bove,Patagonia. Cf.Ploss, I., 476;Globus, 1883, 158. Hyades'sMission Scientifique du Cap Horn, VII., 377.
[232] Equally inconclusive is Westermarck's reference (216) to what Azara says regarding the Guanas. Azara expressly informs us that, as summed up by Darwin (D.M., Chap. XIX.) among the Guanas "the men rarely marry till twenty years old or more, as before that age they cannot conquer their rivals." Where girls are literally wrestled for, they have, of course, no choice.
[233] Keating says (II., 153) that among the Chippewas "where the antipathy is great, one or the other elopes from the lodge."
[234]Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropologists, 1894, 153-57.
[235] Laurence Oliphant realized the absurdity of attributing such tales to Indians, assigning to them feelings and motives like our own. He kindly supplies some further details, insisting that the girl was told to "return and all would be forgiven;" that the "fast young Sioux hunter" whom Winona wanted to marry ("her heart could never be another's"), had "no means of his own." He is believed to have been "utterly disconsolate at the time," and "subsequently to have married an heiress." See the amusing satire in hisMinnesota, 287-89.
[236] S.R. Riggs inU.S. Geogr. and Geol. Soc., IX., 206.
[237]Trans. Amer. Ethnol. Soc., Vol. III, Pt. I.
[238]Denkschriften der Kaiserl. Akad. d. Wissensch. in Wien, Bd. XXXIX., S. 214.
[239]Report of Bureau of Ethnol., Wash., 1892.
[240] Ibid., 1896, Pt. 1, p. 154.
[241]American Anthropologist, IV., 276.
[242] The Chippewas have bridal canoes which they fill with stores to last a betrothed pair for a month's excursion, this being the only marriage ceremony. (Kane, 20.)
[243] Army bugle calls, telling the soldiers what to do, are "leading motives." See my article on "The Utility of Music,"Forum, May, 1898; or Wallaschek'sPrimitive Music.
[244]A Study of Omaha Indian Music(14, 15, 44, 52). Cambridge, 1893;Journal Amer. Folklore, 1889 (219-26);Memoirs Intern. Congr. Anthrop.,1894 (153-57).
[245] Dr. Brinton published in 1886 an interesting pamphlet entitledThe Conception of Love in Some American Languages, which was afterward reprinted in hisEssays of an Americanist. It forms the philological basis for his assertion, 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 coarsest words to express the sexual relation." For the feebler "sentiment" of merely liking a person there is a word meaning "he or itseems 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 sexes." 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 passion, 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 noblest 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 nobler 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 workZur 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 verbamare."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 passion of love isah, 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 ofprizing 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. Anchorena, nearly six hundred combinations. It meant originally "merely a sense of want, an appetite, and the accompanying desire to satisfy it." In songs composed in the nineteenth centurycenyay, which originally meant pity, is preferred tomunayas the most appropriate term for the love between the sexes. The blind, unreasoning, absorbing passion is expressed byhuaylluni, which is nearly always confined to sexual 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 verblluyllny(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 sexuality 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 fromai, self, or the same, andhuto 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 sexual feeling. Both the Tupis and Guaranis were cannibals, and they had no regard for chastity. 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 theIndian 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'sLegends of the Micmacsand Grinnell'sBlackfoot Lodge Talesare 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 shirts" and "store-clothes."
[252]U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Survey of Rocky Mt. Region, IX., 90.
[253] Related in G. White'sHistorical Collection of Georgia, 571.
[254] See Brinton'sThe 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.
[257] Hall,Narrat. of Second Arctic Exp., 102; Cranz, I, 207-12 (German ed.); Letourneau,E.d.M., 72.
[258] Among the Nagas, we read in Dalton (43), "maidens are prized for their physical strength more than for their beauty and family;" and the reason is not far to seek. "The women have to work incessantly, while the men bask in the sun."
[259] Shortt inTrans. Ethnol. Soc.,N.S., VII., 464.
[260] For our purposes it is needless to continue this list; but I may add that of the very few tribes Westermarck ventured to claim specifically for his side, three at any rate—the Miris, Todas, and Kols (Mundas) do not belong there. The state of mind prevalent among the Miris is indicated by Dalton's observation (33) that "two brothers will unite and from the proceeds of their joint labor buy a wife between them." In regard to the Todas, Westermarck apparently forgot what he himself had written about them on a previous page (53), after Shortt:
"When a man marries a girl, she becomes the wife of his brothers as they successively reach manhood, and they become the husbands of all her sisters, when they are old enough to marry."
To speak of "liberty of choice" in such cases, or of the marriage being only "ostensibly" arranged by the parents, is nonsense. As for the Kols, what Dalton says about the Mundas (194) not only indicates that parental interference is more than "ostensible," but makes clear that what these girls enjoy is not free choice but what is euphemistically called "free love," before marriage:
"Among Mundas having any pretensions to respectability the young people are not allowed to arrange these affairs [matrimonial] for themselves. Their parents settle it all for them, French fashion, and after the liberty they have enjoyed, and the liaisons they are sure to have made, this interference on the part of the old folk must be very aggravating to the young ones."
If the dissolute or imbecile advocates of "free love" had their way, we should sink to the level of these wild tribes of India; but there is no danger of our losing again the large "tracts of mind, and thought, and feeling" we have acquired since our ancestors, who came from India, were in such a degraded state as these neighbors of theirs.
[261] Statistics have shown that twenty-eight per cent of the females were married before their fourth year. The ancientSutrasordained the age of six to seven the best for girls to marry, and declared that a father who waits till his daughter is twelve years old must go to hell. The evils are aggravated by the fact noted by Dr. Ryder (who gives many pathetic details) that a Hindoo girl of ten often appears like an European child of six, owing to the weak physique inherited from these girl mothers. Yet Mrs. Mansell relates:
"Many pitiable child-wives have said to me, 'Oh, Doctor mem Sahib, I implore you, do give me medicine that I may become a mother.' I have looked at their innocent faces and tender bodies, and asked, 'Why?' The reply has invariably been, 'My husband will discard me if I do not bear a child.'"
[262]Journal of Nat. Indian Assoc., 1881, 543-49.
[263] The roots of this superstition, which has created such unspeakable misery in India, go back to the oldest times of which there are records. The Vedas say, "Endless are the worlds for those men who have sons; but there is no place for those who have no male offspring."
[264] Dr. S. Armstrong-Hopkins writes in her recent volumeWithin the Purdah(51-52): "A few years ago the English Government passed a law to the effect that no bride should go to the house of her mother-in-law before she arrived at the age of twelve years. I am witness, however, as is every practising physician in India, that this law is utterly ignored…. Often and often have I treated little women patients of five, six, seven, eight, nine years, who were at that time living with their husbands."
[265] If Darwin had dwelt on such facts in hisDescent of Man, and contrasted man's vileness with the devotion, sympathy, and self-sacrifice shown by birds and other animals, he would have aroused less indignation among his ignorant contemporaries. In these respects it was the animals who had cause to resent his theory.
[266] Dr. Ryder says in her pathetic book,Little Wives of India: "A man may be a vile and loathsome creature; he may be blind, a lunatic, an idiot, a leper, or diseased in any form; he may be fifty, sixty, or seventy years old, and may be married to a child of five or ten, who positively loathes his presence; but if he claims her she must go. There is no other form of slavery equal to it on the face of the earth."
[267] The LondonTimesof November 11, 1889, had the following in its column about India:
"Two shocking cases of wife killing lately came before the courts, in both cases the result of child marriage. In one a child aged ten was strangled by her husband. In the second case a child of tender years was ripped open with a wooden peg. Brutal sexual exasperation was the sole apparent reason in both instances. Compared with the terrible evils of child marriage, widow cremation is of infinitely inferior magnitude."
[268] Manu's remark that "where women are honored there the gods are pleased" is one of those expressions of unconscious humor which naturally escaped him, but should not have escaped European sociologists. What he understands by "honoring women" may be gathered from many maxims in his volume like the following (the references being to the pages of Burnell and Hopkins's version):
"This is the nature of women, to seduce men here" (40);
"One should not be seated in a secluded place with a mother, sister, or daughter; the powerful host of the senses compels even a wise man" (41).
"No act is to be done according to (her) own will by a young girl, a young woman, or even by an old woman, though in (their own) houses."
"In her childhood (a girl) should be under the will of her father; in (her) youth, of (her) husband; her husband being dead, of her sons; a woman should never enjoy her own will" (130).
"Though of bad conduct or debauched, or even devoid of good qualities, a husband must always be worshipped like a god by a good wife."
"For women there is no separate sacrifice, nor vow, nor even fast; if a woman obeys her husband, by that she is exalted in heaven" (131).
"Day and night should women be kept by the male membersof the family in a state of dependence" (245)….
"Women being weak creatures, and having no share in themantras, are falsehood itself" (247).
Quite in the spirit of these ordinances of the great Manu are the directions for wives given in thePadma Purana, one of the books of highest authority, whose rules are, as Dubois informs us (316), kept up in full vigor to this day. A wife, we read therein, must regard her husband as a god, though he be a very devil. She must laugh if he laughs, eat after him, abstain from food whichhedislikes, burn herself after his death. If he has another wife she must not interfere, must always keep her eyes on her master, ready to receive his commands; she must never be gloomy or discontented in his presence; and though he abuse or even beat her she must return only meek and soothing words.
[269] In Calcutta nearly one-half the females—42,824 out of 98,627—were widows. In India in general one-fifth of the women (or, excluding the Mohammedans, one-third) are widows.
[270]Journal of the National Indian Assoc., 1881, 624-30.
[271] Ploss-Bartels, I., 385-87; Lamairesse, 18, 95, XX., etc.
[272] Here again we must guard against the naïve error of benevolent observers of confounding chastity with an assumption of modest behavior. In describing the streets of Delhi Ida Pfeiffer says (L.V.R.W., 148):
"The prettiest girlish faces peep modestly out of these curtained bailis, and did one not know that in India an unveiled face is never an innocent one, the fact certainly could not be divined from their looks or behavior." It happens to be the fashion even for bayadères to preserve an appearance of great propriety in public.
[273] Pp. 143 and 160 of Kellner's edition of this drama (Reclam). The extent to which indifference to chastity is sometimes carried in India may be inferred from the facts that in the famous city of Vasali "marriage was forbidden, and high rank attached to the lady who held office as the chief of courtesans;" and that the same condition prevails in British India to this day in a town in North Canara (Balfour,Cyclop. of India, II., 873).
[274] Hâla's date is somewhat uncertain, but he flourished between the third and fourth centuries A.D. Professor Weber's translation of his seven hundred poems, with the professor's comments, takes up no fewer than 1,023 pages of theAbhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vols. V. and VII. I have selected all those which throw light on the Hindoo conception of love, and translated them carefully from Weber's version. Hâla's anthology served as prototype, about the twelfth century, to a similar collection of âryâ verses, the erotic Saptacati of Govardhana, also seven hundred in number, but written in Sanskrit. Of these I have not been able to find a version in a language that I can read, but the other collection is copious and varied enough to cover all the phases of Hindoo love. The verses were intended, as already indicated, to be sung, for the Hindoos, too, knew the power of music as a pastime and a feeder of the emotions. "If music be the food of love, play on," says the English Shakespere, and the "Hindoo Shakespere" wrote more than a thousand years before him:
"Oh, how beautifully our master Rebhila has sung! Yes, indeed, the zither is a pearl, only it does not come from the depths of the sea. How its tones accord with the heart that longs for love, how it helps to while away time at a rendezvous, how it assuages the grief of separation, and augments the delights of the lovers!" (Vasantasena, Act III., 2.)
[275] The disadvantage of arguing against the believers in primitive, Oriental, and ancient amorous sentiment is that some of the strongest evidence against them cannot be cited in a book intended for general reading. Professor Weber declares in his introduction to Hâla's anthology that these poems take us through all phases of sentimental love (innigen Liebeslebens) to the most licentious situations. He is mistaken, as I have shown, in regard to the sentiment, but there can be no doubt about the licentiousness. Numbers 5, 23, 62, 63, 65, 71, 72, 107, 115, 139, 161, 200, 223, 237, 241, 242, 300, 305, 336, 338, 356, 364, 369, 455, 483, 491, 628, 637, depict or suggest improper scenes, while 61, 213, 215, 242, 278, 327, 476, 690 are frankly obscene. Lower and higher things are mixed in these poems with a naïveté that shows the absence of any idea of refinement.
[276] I have here followed Kellner, though Boehtlingk's version is more literal and Oriental: "Mir aber brennt Liebe, O Grausamer, Tag und Nacht gewaltig die Glieder, deren Wünsche auf dich gerichtet sind."
[277]Anas Casarea, a species of duck which, in Hindoo poetry, is allowed to be with his mate only in the daytime and must leave her at night, in consequence of a curse; thereupon begin mutual lamentations.
[278] For a Hindoo, unless he has a son to make offerings after his death, is doomed to live over again his earthly life with all its sorrows. A daughter will do, provided she has a son to attend to the rites.
[279] The sequel of the story, relating to the misfortunes of Nala and Damayanti after marriage, will be referred to presently. The famous tale herewith briefly summarized occurs in theMahâbhârata, the great epic or mythological cyclopaedia of India, which embraces 220,000 metric lines, and antedates in the main the Christian era. The story of Savitri also occurs in theMahâbhârata; and these two episodes have been pronounced by specialists the gems not only of that great epic, but of all Hindoo literature. I have translated from the edition of H.C. Kellner, which is based on the latest and most careful revisions of the Sanscrit text. I have also followed Kellner's edition of Kalidasa'sSakuntalaand Otto Fritze's equally critical versions of the same poet'sUrvasiandMalavika and Agnimitra. Some of the earlier translators, notably Rückert, permitted themselves unwarranted poetic licenses, modernizing and sentimentalizing the text, somewhat as Professor Ebers did the thoughts and feelings of the ancient Egyptians. I will add that while I have been obliged to greatly condense the stories of the above dramas, I have taken great care to retain all the speeches and details that throw light on the Hindoo conception of love, reserving a few, however, for comment in the following paragraphs.
[280] Our poets speak of fright making the hair stand on end—but only on the head. Can the alleged Hindoo phenomenon be identical with what we call goose flesh—French frisson? That would make it none the less artificial as a symptom of love. Hertel says, in his edition of theHitopadesa(26):
"With the Hindoos it is a consequence of great excitement, joy as well as fear, that the little hairs on the body stand erect. The expression has become conventional."
[281]Hitopadesa(25). This gratification the Hindoos regard as one of the four great objects of life, the other three being liberty (emancipation of the soul), wealth, and the performance of religious duties.
[282] Robert Brown has remarked that "moral and intellectual qualities seem to be entirely omitted from the seven points which, according to Manu, make a good wife." And Ward says (10) that no attention is paid to a bride's mind or temper, the only points being the bride's person, her family, and the prospect of male offspring.
[283] This is the list, as given by the eminent Sanscrit scholar, Professor Albrecht Weber in theAbhandlungen für die Kunde des Abendlandes, Vol. V., 135. Burton, in his original edition of theArabian Nights(III., 36), gives the stages thus: love of the eyes; attraction of the manos or mind; birth of desire; loss of sleep; loss of flesh; indifference to objects of sense; loss of shame; distraction of thought; loss of consciousness; death.Cf. Lamairesse, p. 179.
[284] Preferably in Boehtlingk's literal version, which I have followed whenever Kellner idealizes. In this case Kellner speaks of covering "den Umfang des Brüstepaars," while Boethlingk has "das starke Brüstepaar," which especially arouse the king's "love."
[285] It would hardly be surprising if Kalidasa had had some conception of true love sentiment, for not only did he possess a delicate poetic fancy, but he lived at a time when tidings of the chivalrous treatment and adoration of women might have come to him from Arabia or from Europe. The tradition that he flourished as early as the first century of our era was demolished by Professor Weber (Ind. Lit. Ges., 217). Professor Max Müller (91) found no reason to place him earlier than our sixth century; and more recent evidence indicates that he lived as late as the eleventh. Yet he had no conception of supersensual love; marriage was to him, as to all Hindoos, a union of bodies, not of souls. He had not learned from the Arabs (like the Persian poet Saadi, of the thirteenth century, whom I referred to on p. 199) that the only test of true love is self-sacrifice. It is true that Bhavabhuti, the Hindoo poet, who is believed to have lived at the end of our seventh century, makes one of the lovers inMalati and Madhavaslay a tiger and save his beloved's life; but that is also a case of self-defence. The other lover—the "hero" of the drama—faints when he sees his friend in danger! Generally speaking, there is a peculiar effeminacy, a lack of true manliness, about Hindoo lovers They are always moping, whining, fainting; the kings—the typical lovers—habitually neglect the affairs of state to lead a life of voluptuous indulgence. Hindoo sculpture emphasizes the same trait: "Even in the conception of male figures," says Lübke (109), "there is a touch of this womanly softness;" there is "a lack of an energetic life, of a firm contexture of bone and muscle." It is not of such enervated stuff that true lovers are made.
[286] An explanation of this discrepancy may be found in A.K. Fiske's suggestion (191) that there is a double source for this story. The reader will please bear in mind that all my quotations are from the revised version of the Bible. I do not believe in retaining inaccurate translations simply because they were made long ago.
[287] McClintock and Strong'sEncyclop. of Biblical Literaturesays: "It must be borne in mind that Jacob himself had now reached the mature age of seventy-seven years, as appears from a comparison of Joseph's age… with Jacob's." That Rachel was not much over fifteen may be assumed because among Oriental nomadic races shepherd girls are very seldom unmarried after that age, or even an earlier age, for obvious reasons.
[288] Gen. 19: 1-9; 19: 30-38; 34: 1-31; 38: 8-25; 39: 6-20; Judges 19: 22-30; II. Sam. 3: 6-9; 11: 2-27; 13: 1-22; 16: 22; etc.
[289] For whom the Hebrew poet has a special word(dodi)different from that used when Solomon is referred to.
[290] See Renan, Preface, p. iv. It is of all Biblical books, the one "pour lequel les scribes qui ont décidé du sort des écrits hébreux ont le plus élargi leurs règles d'admission."
[291] McClintock and Strong.
[292] In the seventh chapter there are lines where, as Renan points out (50), the speaker, in describing the girl, "vante ses charmes les plus intimes," and where the translator was "obligé à des attenuations."
[293] Renan says justly that it is the most obscure of all Hebrew poems. According to the old Hebrew exegesis, every passage in the Bible has seventy different meanings, all of them equally true; but of this Song a great many more than seventy interpretations have been given: the titles of treatises on the Canticles fill four columns of fine print in McClintock and Strong's Cyclopaedia. Griffis declares that it is, "probably, the most perfect poem in any language," but in my opinion it is far inferior to other books in the Bible. The adjective perfect is not applicable to a poem so obscure that more than half its meaning has to be read between the lines, while its plan, if plan it has, is so mixed up and hindmost foremost that I sometimes feel tempted to accept the view of Herder and others that theSong of Songsis not one drama, but a collection of unconnected poems.
[294] Mr. Griffis' lucid, ingenious, and admirably written monograph entitled,The Lily among Thorns, is unfortunately marred in many parts by the author's attitude, which is not that of a critic or a judge, but of a lawyer who has a case to prove, that black and gray are really snow white. His sense of humor ought to have prevented him from picturing an Eastern shepherd complimenting a girl of his class on her "instinctive refinement". He carries this idealizing process so far that he arbitrarily divides the line "I am black but comely," attributing the first three words to the Shulamite, the other two to a chorus of her rivals in Solomon's harem! The latter supposition is inconceivable; and why should not the Shulamite call herself comely? I once looked admiringly at a Gypsy girl in Spain, who promptly opened her lips, and said, with an arch smile, "soy muy bonita"—"I am very pretty!"—which seemed the natural, naïve attitude of an Oriental girl. To argue away such a trifling spot on maiden modesty as the Shulamite's calling herself comely, while seeing no breach of delicacy in her inviting her lover to come into the garden and eat his precious fruits, though admitting (214) that "the maiden yields thus her heart and her all to her lover," is surely straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
[295] Which, however, evidently was not saying much, as he immediately added that he was ready to give her up provided they gave him another girl, lest he be the only one of the Greeks without a "prize of honor." Strong individual preference, as we shall see also in the case of Achilles, was not a trait of "heroic" Greek love.
[296] I have already commented (115) on Nausicäa's lack of feminine delicacy and coyness; yet Gladstone says (132) "it may almost be questioned whether anywhere in literature there is to be found a conception of the maiden so perfect as Nausicäa in grace, tenderness, and delicacy"!
[297] How Gladstone reconciled his conscience with these lines when he wrote (112) that "on one important and characteristic subject, the exposure of the person to view, the men of that time had a peculiar and fastidious delicacy," I cannot conceive.
[298] It will always remain one of the strangest riddles of the nineteenth century why the statesman who so often expressed his righteous indignation over the "Bulgarian atrocities" of his time should not only have pardoned, but with insidious and glaring sophistry apologized for the similar atrocities of the heroes whom Homer fancies he is complimenting when he calls them professional "spoilers of towns." I wish every reader of this volume who has any doubts regarding the correctness of my views would first read Gladstone's shorter work on Homer (a charmingly written book, with all its faults), and then the epics themselves, which are now accessible to all in the admirable prose versions of theIliadby Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers, and of theOdysseyby Professor George H. Palmer of Harvard—versions which are far more poetic than any translations in verse ever made and which make of these epics two of the most entertaining novels ever written. It is from these versions that I have cited, except in a few cases where I preferred a more literal rendering of certain words.
[299] In all the extracts here made I follow the close literal prose version made by H.T. Wharton, in his admirable book on Sappho, by far the best in the English language.
[300] P.B. Jevons refers to some of these as "mephitic exhalations from the bogs of perverted imaginings!" Welcker's defence of Sappho is a masterpiece of naïveté written in ignorance of mental pathology.
[301] The most elaborate discussion of this subject is to be found in Moll'sUntersuchungen, 314-440, where also copious bibliographic references are given. The most striking impression left by the reading of this book is that the differentiation of the sexes is by no means as complete yet as it ought to be. All the more need is there of romantic love, whose function it is to assist and accelerate this differentiation.
[302] As long ago as 1836-38 a Swiss author, Heinrich Hössli, wrote a remarkable book with the titleThe Unreliability of External Signs as Indications of Sex in Body and Mind. I may add here that if it were known how many of the "shrieking sisterhood" who are clamoring for masculine "rights" for women, are among the unfortunates who were born with male brains in female bodies, the movement would collapse as if struck by a ton of dynamite. These amazons often wonder why the great mass of women are so hard to stir up in this matter. The reason is that the great mass of women—heaven be thanked!—have feminine minds as well as feminine bodies.
[303] Probably no passage in any drama has ever been more widely discussed than the nine lines I have just summarized. As long ago as the sixteenth century the astronomer Petrus Codicillus pronounced them spurious. Goethe once remarked to Eckermann; (III., March 28, 1827) that he considered them a blemish in the tragedy and would give a good deal if some philologist would prove that Sophocles had not written them. A number of eminent philologists—Jacob, Lehrs, Hauck, Dindorf, Wecklein, Jebb, Christ, and others—have actually bracketed them as not genuine; but if they are interpolations, they must have been added within a century after the play was written, for Aristotle refers to them (Rhet. III., 16,9) in these words: "And should any circumstance be incredible, you must subjoin the reason; as Sophocles does. He furnishes an example in theAntigone, that she mourned more for her brother than for a husband and children; for these, if lost, might again be hers.
"'But father now and mother both being lost,A brother's name can ne'er be hailed again.'"
It is noticeable that Aristotle should pronounce Antigone's preference strange or incredible from a Greek point of view; that point of view being, as we have seen, that a woman's first duties are toward her husband, for whom she should ever sacrifice herself. It has been plausibly suggested that Sophocles borrowed the idea of those nine lines from his friend Herodotus, who (III., 118) relates the story of Darius permitting the wife of Intophernes to save one of her relatives from death and who chooses her brother, for reasons like those advanced by Antigone. It has been shown (Zeitschrift f. d. Oesterreich Gymn., 1898; see alsoFrankfurter Zeitung, July 22, 24, 27, 1899;Hermes, XXVIII.) that this idea occurs in old tales and poems of India, Persia, China, as well as among the Slavs, Scandinavians, etc. If Sophocles did introduce this notion into his tragedy (and there is no reason for doubting it except the unwarranted assumption that he was too great a genius to make such a blunder), he did it in a bungling way, for inasmuch as Antigone's brother is dead she cannot benefit her family by favoring him at the expense of her betrothed; and moreover, her act of sacrificing herself in order to secure the rest of a dear one's soul—which alone might have partly excused her heartless and unromantic ignoring and desertion of her lover—is bereft of all its nobility by her equally heartless declaration that she would not have thus given her life for a husband or a child. These Greek poets knew so little of true femininity that they could not draw a female character without spoiling it.
[304] The unduly extolled [Greek: Epos] chorus in theAntigoneexpresses nothing more than the universal power of love in the Greek conception of the term.
[305] In Müller's book on the Doric race we read (310) that the love of the Corinthian Philolaus and Diocles "lasted until death," and even their graves were turned toward one another, in token of their affection. Lovers in Athens carved the beloved's names on walls, and innumerable poems were addressed by the leading bards to their favorites.
[306] Compare Ramdohr, III., 191 and 124.
[307] I have before me a dictonary which defines Platonic love as it is now universally, and incorrectly, understood, as "a pure spiritual affection subsisting between the sexes, unmixed with carnal desires, a species of love for which Plato was a warm advocate." In reality Platonic (i.e. Socratic) love has nothing whatever to do with women, but is a fantastic and probably hypocritical idealization of a species of infatuation which in our day is treated neither in poems nor in dialogues, nor discussed in text-books of psychology or physiology, but relegated to treatises on mental diseases and abnormalities. In fact, the whole philosophy of Greek love may be summed up in the assertion that "Platonic love," as understood by us, was by Plato and the Greeks in general considered an impossibility.