ABSENCE OF MASCULINE JEALOUSY…

ABSENCE OF MASCULINE JEALOUSY

It is the knowledge, or suspicion, that he has not a monopoly of his wife that tortures Shakspere's Othello, and constitutes the essence of his jealousy, whereas a savage is his exact antipode in that respect; he cares not a straw if the whole camp shares the embraces of his wife--provided he knows it and is rewarded for it. Wounded pride, violated chastity, and broken conjugal vows--pangs which goad us into jealousy--are considerations unknown to him. In other words, his "jealousy" is not a solicitude for marital honor, for wifely purity and affection, but simply a question of lending his property and being paid for it. Thus, in the case of the Blackfeet Indians referred to a moment ago, the author declares that while they mutilated erring wives by cutting off their noses (the Comanches and other tribes, down to the Brazilian Botocudos, did the same thing), they eagerly offered their wives and daughters in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. In this respect, too, this case is typical. Sutherland found (I., 184) that in regard to twenty-one tribes of Indians out of thirty-eight there was express record of unlimited intercourse before marriage and the loaning or exchanging of wives. In seventeen he could not get express information, and in only four was it stated that a chaste girl was more esteemed than an unchaste one. In the chapter on Indifference to Chastity I cited testimony showing that in Australia, the Pacific Islands, and among aborigines in general, chastity is not valued as a virtue. There are plenty of tribes that attempt to enforce it, but for commercial, sensual, or at best, genealogical reasons, not from a regard for personal purity; so that among all these lower races jealousy in our sense of the word is out of the question.

Care must be taken not to be imposed on by deceptive facts and inaccurate testimony. Thus Westermarck says (119) that

"in the Pelew Islands it is forbidden even to speak about another man's wife or mention her name. In short, the South Sea Islanders are, as Mr. Macdonald remarks, generally jealous of the chastity of their wives."

Nothing could be more misleading than these two sentences. The men are not jealous of the women's chastity, for they unhesitatingly lend them to other men; they are "jealous" of them simply as they are of their other movable property. As for the Pelew Islanders in particular, what Westermarck cites from Ymer is quite true; it is also true that if a man beats or insults a woman he must pay a fine or suffer the death penalty; and that if he approaches a place where women are bathing he must put them on their guard by shouting. But all these things are mere whimsicalities of barbarian custom, for the Pelew Islanders are notoriously unchaste even for Polynesians. They have no real family life; they have club-houses in which men consort promiscuously with women; and no moral restraint of any sort is put upon boys and girls, nor have they any idea of modesty or decency.[17] (Ploss, II., 416; Kotzebue, III., 215.)

A century ago Alexander Mackenzie wrote (66) regarding the Knistenaux or Cree Indians of the Northwest:

"It does not appear ... that chastity is considered by them as a virtue; or that fidelity is believed to be essential to the happiness of wedded life; though it sometimes happens that the infidelity of a wife is punished by the husband with the loss of her hair, nose, and perhaps life; such severity proceeds from its having been practised without his permission; for a temporary exchange of wives is not uncommon; and the offer of their persons is considered as a necessary part of the hospitality due to strangers."

Of the Natchez Indians Charlevoix wrote (267): "There is no such thing as jealousy in these marriages; on the contrary the Natchez, without any ceremony, lend one another their wives." Concerning the Eskimos we read in Bancroft:

"They have no idea of morality, and the marriage relation sits so loosely as to hardly excite jealousy in its abuse. Female chastity is held a thing of value only as men hold property in it." "A stranger is always provided with a female companion for the night, and during the husband's absence he gets another man to take his place" (I., 81, 80).

The evidence collected by him also shows that the Thlinkeets and Aleuts freely exchanged or lent their wives. Of the coast Indians of Southern Alaska and British Columbia, A.P. Niblack says (Smithson. Rep., 1888, 347):

"Jealousy being unknown amongst the Indians, and sanctioned prostitution a common evil, the woman who can earn the greatest number of blankets or the largest sum of money wins the admiration of others for herself and a high position for her husband by her wealth."

In the same government reports (1886, Pt. I.) C. Willoughby writes of the Quinault Agency Washington Indians: "In their domestic relations chastity seems to be almost unknown." Of the Chippewayans Hearne relates (129) that it is a very common custom among the men to exchange a night's lodging with each other's wives. But this is so far from being considered as an act which is criminal, that it is esteemed by them as one of the strongest ties of friendship between two families.[18] The Hurons and many other tribes from north to south had licentious festivals at which promiscuous intercourse prevailed betraying the absence of jealousy. Of the Tupis of Brazil Southey says (I., 241): "The wives who found themselves neglected, consoled themselves by initiating the boys in debauchery. The husbands seem to have known nothing of jealousy." The ancient inhabitants of Venezuela lived in houses big enough to hold one hundred and sixty persons, and Herrera says of them:

"They observed no law or rule in matrimony, but took as many wives as they would, and they as many husbands, quitting one another at pleasure, without reckoning any harm done on either part. There was no such thing as jealousy among them, all living as best pleased them, without taking offence at one another."

The most painstaking research has failed to reveal to me a single Indian tribe in North or South America that showed a capacity for real jealousy, that is, anguish based on a sense of violated wifely chastity and alienated affection. The actions represented as due to jealousy are always inspired by the desire for revenge, never by the anguish of disappointed affection; they are done in hate, not in love. A chief who kills or mutilates one of his ten wives for consorting with another man without his consent, acts no more from jealousy, properly so called, than does a father who shoots the seducer of his daughter, or a Western mob that lynches a horse-thief. Among the Australian aborigines killing an intriguing wife is an every-day occurrence, though "chastity as a virtue is absolutely unknown amongst all the tribes of which there are records," as one of the best informed authorities, J.D. Wood, tells us (403). Detailed evidence that the same is true of the aborigines of all the continents will be given in later chapters. The natives usually share their females both before and after marriage; monopoly of body and soul--of which true jealousy is the guardian--is a conception beyond their moral horizon. A few more illustrations may be added.

Burton (T.T.G.L., II., 27) cites a writer who says that the natives of São Paulo had a habit of changing wives for a time, "alleging, in case of reproof, that they are not able to eat always of the same dish." Holub testifies (II., 83) that in South Africa jealousy "rarely shows itself very prominently;" and he uses the word in the widest sense. The fierce Masai lend their wives to guests. The Mpongwe of the Gaboon River send out their wives--with a club if necessary--to earn the wages of shame (Campiègne, 192). In Madagascar Ellis (137) found sensuality gross and universal, though concealed. Unchastity in either sex was not regarded as a vice, and on the birth of the king's daughter "the whole capital was given up to promiscuous debauchery." According to Mrs. French Sheldon (Anth. Inst., XXL, 360), all along the east coast of Africa no shame attaches to unchastity before marriage. It is needless to add that in all such cases punishment of a wife cannot be prompted by real jealousy for her "chastity." It is always a question of proprietorship. Cameron relates (Across Africa, II., Chap. IV.) that in Urua the chief boasted that he exercised a right to any woman who might please his fancy, when on his journeys about the country.

"Morals are very lax throughout the country, and wives are not thought badly of for being unfaithful; the worst they may expect being severe chastisement from the injured husband. But he never uses excessive violence for fear of injuring a valuable piece of household furniture."

When Du Chaillu travelled through Ashango Land King Quenqueza rose to receive him.

"With the figurative politeness of a negro chief, he assured me that his town, his forests, his slaves, his wives, were mine (he was quite sincere with regard to the last") (19).

Asia affords many instances of the absence of jealousy. Marco Polo already noted that in Thibet, when travellers arrived at a place, it was customary to distribute them in the houses, making them temporary masters of all they contained, including the women, while their husbands meanwhile lodged elsewhere. In Kamtschatka it was considered a great insult if a guest refused a woman thus offered him. Most astounding of all is what G.E. Robertson relates of the Kaffirs of Hindu-Kush (553):

"When a woman is discovered in an intrigue, a great outcry is made, and the neighbors rush to the scene with much laughter. A goat is sent for on the spot for a peace-making feast between the gallant and the husband. Of course the neighbors also partake of the feast; the husband and wife both look very happy, and so does every one else except the lover, who has to pay for the goat, and in addition will have to pay six cows later on."

Here we see a great value attached apparently to conjugal fidelity, but in reality an utter and ludicrous indifference to it.

Asia is also the chief home of polyandry, though, as we saw in the preceding chapter, this custom has prevailed on other continents too. The cases there cited to show the absence of monopoly also prove the absence of jealousy. The effect of polyandry is thus referred to by Colonel King (23):

"A Toda woman often has three or four husbands, who are all brothers, and with each of whom she cohabits a month at a time. What is more singular, such men as, by the paucity of women among the tribe, are prevented from obtaining a share in a wife, are allowed, with the permission of the fraternal husbands, to become temporary partners with them. Notwithstanding these singular family arrangements, the greatest harmony appears to prevail among all parties--husbands, wives, and lovers."

Whatever may have been the causes leading to the strange custom of marrying one woman to several men--poverty, the desire to reduce the population in mountainous regions, scarcity of women due to female infanticide, the need of protection of a woman during the absence of one husband--the fact stares us in the face that a race of men who calmly submit to such a disgusting practice cannot know jealousy. So, too, in the cases of jus primae noctis (referred to in the chapter on Indifference to Chastity), where the men not only submitted to an outrage so damnable to our sense of honor, affection, and monopoly, but actually coveted it as a privilege or a religious blessing and paid for it accordingly. Note once more how the sentiments associated with women and love change and grow.

Petherick says (151) that among the Hassangeh Arabs, marriages are valid only three or four days, the wives being free the rest of the time to make other alliances. The married men, far from feeling this a grievance,

"felt themselves highly flattered by any attentions paid to their better halves during their free-and-easy days. They seem to take such attentions as evidence that their wives are attractive."

A readiness to forgive trespasses for a consideration is widely prevalent. Powers says that with the California Indians "no adultery is so flagrant but the husband can be placated with money, at about the same rate that would be paid for murder." The Tasmanians illustrate the fact that the same tribes that are the most ferocious in the punishment of secret amours--that is, infringements on their property rights--are often the most liberal in lending their wives. As Bonwick tells us (72), they felt honored if white men paid attention to them. A circumstance which seems to have puzzled some naïve writers: that Australians and Africans have been known to show less "jealousy" of whites than of their own countrymen, finds an easy explanation in the greater ability of the white man to pay for the husband's complaisance. In some cases, in the absence of a fine, the husband takes his revenge in other ways, subjecting the culprit's wife to the same outrage (as among natives of Guiana and New Caledonia) or delivering his own guilty (or rather disobedient) wife to young men (as among the Omahas) and then abandoning her. The custom of accepting compensation for adultery prevailed also among Dyaks, Mandingoes, Kaffirs, Mongolians, Pahari and other tribes of India, etc. Falkner says (126) that among the Patagonians in cases of adultery the wife is not blamed, but the gallant is punished

"unless he atones for the injury by some valuable present. They have so little decency in this respect, that oftentimes, at the command of the wizards, they superstitiously send their wives to the woods to prostitute themselves to the first person they meet."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

PERSIAN AND GREEK JEALOUSY

Enough has been said to prove the incorrectness of Westermarck's assertion (515) that the lack of jealousy is "a rare exception in the human race." Real jealousy, as a matter of fact, is unknown to the lower races, and even the feeling of revenge that passes by that name is commonly so feeble as to be obliterated by compensations of a more or less trifling kind. When we come to a stage of civilization like that represented by Persians and other Orientals, or by the ancient Greeks, we find that men are indeed no longer willing to lend their wives. They seem to have a regard for chastity and a desire for conjugal monopoly. Other important traits of modern jealousy are, however, still lacking, notably affection. The punishments are hideously cruel; they are still inflicted "in hate, not in love." In other words, the jealousy is not yet of the kind which may form an ingredient of love. Its essence is still "bloody thoughts and revenge."

Reich cites (256) a typical instance of Oriental ferocity toward an erring wife, from a book by J.J. Strauss, who relates that on June 9, 1671, a Persian avenged himself on his wife for a trespass by flaying her alive, and then, as a warning to other women, hanging up her skin in the house. Strauss saw with his own eyes how the flayed body was thrown into the street and dragged out into a field. Drowning in sacks, throwing from towers, and other fiendish modes of vengeance have prevailed in Persia as far back as historic records go; and the women, when they got a chance, were no better than the men. Herodotus relates how the wife of Xerxes, having found her husband's cloak in the house of Masista, cut off his wife's breasts and gave them to the dogs, besides mutilating her otherwise, as well as her daughter.

The monogamous Greeks were not often guilty of such atrocities, but their custom (nearly universal and not confined to Athens, as is often erroneously stated) of locking up their women in the interior of the houses, shutting them off from almost everything that makes life interesting, betrays a kind of jealousy hardly less selfish than that of the savages who disposed of their wives as they pleased. It practically made slaves and prisoners of them, quite in the Oriental style. Such a custom indicates an utter lack of sympathy and tenderness, not to speak of the more romantic ingredients of love, such as adoration and gallantry; and it implies a supreme contempt for and distrust of, character in wives, all the more reprehensible because the Greeks did not value purity per se but only for genealogical reason, as is proved by the honors they paid to the disreputable hetairai. There are surprisingly few references to masculine jealousy in Greek erotic literature. The typical Greek lover seems to have taken rivalry as blandly as the hero of Terence's play spoken of in the last chapter, who, after various outbursts of sentimentality, is persuaded, in a speech of a dozen lines, to share his mistress with a rich officer. Nor can I see anything but maudlin sentimentality in such conceits as Meleager utters in two of his poems (Anthology, 88, 93) in which he expresses jealousy of sleep, for its privilege of closing his mistress's eyes; and again of the flies which suck her blood and interrupt her slumber. The girl referred to is Zenophila, a common wanton (see No. 90). This is the sensual side of the Greek jealousy, chastity being out of the question.

The purely genealogical side of Greek masculine jealousy is strikingly revealed in the Medea of Euripides. Medea had, after slaying her own brother, left her country to go with Jason to Corinth. Here Jason, though he had two children by her, married the daughter of the King Creon. With brutal frankness, but quite in accordance with the selfish Greek ideas, he tries to explain to Medea the motives for his second marriage: that they might all dwell in comfort instead of suffering want,

"and that I might rear my sons as doth befit my house; further, that I might be the father of brothers for the children thou hast borne, and raise these to the same high rank, uniting the family in one--to my lasting bliss. Thou, indeed, hast no need of more children, but me it profits to help my present family by that which is to be. Have I miscarried here? Not even thou wouldst say so unless a rival's charms rankled in thy bosom. No, but you women have such strange ideas, that you think all is well so long as your married life runs smooth; but if some mischance occur to ruffle your love, all that was good and lovely erst you reckon as your foes. Yea, men should have begotten children from some other source, no female race existing; thus would no evil ever have fallen on mankind."

Jason, Greek-fashion, looked upon a woman's jealousy as mere unbridled lust, which must not be allowed to stand in the way of the men's selfish desire to secure filial worship of their precious shades after death. As Benecke remarks (56): "For a woman to wish to keep her husband to herself was a sign that she was at once unreasonable and lascivious." The women themselves were trained and persuaded to take this view. The chorus of Corinthian women admonishes Medea: "And if thy lord prefers a fresh love, be not angered with him for that; Zeus will judge 'twixt thee and him herein." Medea herself says to Jason: "Hadst thou been childless still, I could have pardoned thy desire for this new union." And again: "Hadst thou not had a villain's heart, thou shouldst have gained my consent, then made this match, instead of hiding it from those who loved thee"--a sentiment which would seem to us astounding and inexplicable had we not became familiar with it in the preceding pages relating to savages and barbarians, by whom what we call infidelity was considered unobjectionable, provided it was not done secretly.

By her subsequent actions Medea shows in other ways that her jealousy is entirely of the primitive sort--fiendish revenge proceeding from hate. Of the chorus she asks but one favor: "Silence, if haply I can some way or means devise to avenge me on my husband for this cruel treatment;" and the chorus agrees: "Thou wilt be taking a just vengeance on thy husband, Medea." Creon, having heard that she had threatened with mischief not only Jason but his bride and her father, wants her to leave the city. She replies, hypocritically:

"Fear me not, Creon, my position scarce is such that I should seek to quarrel with princes. Why should I, for how hast thou injured me? Thou hast betrothed thy daughter where thy fancy prompted thee. No, 'tis my husband I hate."

But as soon as the king has left her, she sends to the innocent bride a present of a beautifully embroidered robe, poisoned by witchcraft. As soon as the bride has put it on she turns pale, foam issues from her mouth, her eyeballs roll in their sockets, a flame encircles her, preying on her flesh. With an awful shriek she sinks to the earth, past all recognition save to the eye of her father, who folds her in his arms, crying, "Who is robbing me of thee, old as I am and ripe for death? Oh, my child! would I could die with thee!" And his wish is granted, for he

"found himself held fast by the fine-spun robe...and then ensued a fearful struggle. He strove to rise but she still held him back; and if ever he pulled with all his might, from off his bones his aged flesh he tore. At last he gave it up, and breathed forth his soul in awful suffering; for he could no longer master the pain."

Not content with this, Medea cruelly slays Jason's children--her own flesh and blood--not in a frenzied impulse, for she has meditated that from the beginning, but to further glut her revengeful spirit. "I did it," she says to Jason, "to vex thy heart." And when she hears of the effect of the garment she had sent to his bride, she implores the messenger, "Be not so hasty, friend, but tell the manner of her death, for thou wouldst give me double joy, if so they perished miserably."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

PRIMITIVE FEMININE JEALOUSY

A passion of which such horrors are a possible outcome may well have led Euripides to write: "Ah me! ah me! to mortal man how dread a scourge is love!" But this passion is not love, or part of love. The horrors of such "jealousy" are often witnessed in modern life, but not where true love--affection--ever had its abode. It is the jealousy of the savage, which still survives, as other low phases of sexual passion do. The records of missionaries and others who have dwelt among savages contain examples of deeds as foul, as irrational, as vindictive as Medea's; deeds in which, as in the play of Euripides, the fury is vented on innocent victims, while the real culprit escapes with his life and sometimes even derives amusement from the situation. In Oneota (187-90), Schoolcraft relates the story of an Indian's wife who entered the lodge when his new bride was sitting by his side and plunged a dagger in her heart. Among the Fuegians Bove found (131) that in polygamous households many a young favorite lost her life through the fury of the other wives. More frequently this kind of jealousy vents itself in mutilations. Williams, in his book on the Fijians (152), relates that one day a native woman was asked, "How is it that so many of you women are without a nose?" The answer was: "It grows out of a plurality of wives. Jealousy causes hatred, and then the stronger tries to cut or bite off the nose of the one she hates," He also relates a case where a wife, jealous of a younger favorite, "pounced on her, and tore her sadly with nails and teeth, and injured her mouth by attempting to slit it open," A woman who had for two years been a member of a polygamous family told Williams that contentions among the women were endless, that they knew no comfort, that the bitterest hatred prevailed, while mutual cursings and recriminations were of daily occurrence. When one of the wives is so unfortunate as to fall under the husband's displeasure too, the others "fall upon her, cuffing, kicking, scratching, and even trampling on the poor creature, so unmercifully as to leave her half dead." Bourne writes (89), that Patagonian women sometimes "fight like tigers. Jealousy is a frequent occasion. If a squaw suspects her liege lord of undue familiarity with a rival, she darts upon the fair enchantress with the fury of a wild beast; then ensues such a pounding, scratching, hair-pulling, as beggars description." Meanwhile the gay deceiver stands at a safe distance, chuckling at the fun. The licentiousness of these Indians, he says, is equal to their cruelty. Powers (238) gives this graphic picture of a domestic scene common among the Wintun Indians of California. A chief, he says, may have two or more wives, but the attempt to introduce a second frequently leads to a fight.

"The two women dispute for the supremacy, often in a desperate pitched battle with sharp stones, seconded by their respective friends. They maul each other's faces with savage violence, and if one is knocked down her friends assist her to regain her feet, and the brutal combat is renewed until one or the other is driven from the wigwam. The husband stands by and looks placidly on, and when all is over he accepts the situation, retaining in his lodge the woman who has conquered the territory."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

ABSENCE OF FEMININE JEALOUSY

As a rule, however, there is more bark than bite in the conduct of the wives of a polygamous household, as is proved by the ease with which the husband, if he cares to, can with words or presents overcome the objections of his first wife to new-comers; even, for instance, in the case of such advanced barbarians as the Omaha Indians, who are said to have actually allowed a wife to punish a faithless husband--an exception so rare as to be almost incredible. Dorsey says of the Omahas (26):

"When a man wishes to take a second wife he always consults his first wife, reasoning thus with her: 'I wish you to have less work to do, so I think of taking your sister, your aunt, or your brother's daughter for my wife. You can then have her to aid you with your work.' Should the first wife refuse, the man cannot marry the other woman. Generally no objection is offered, if the second woman be one of the kindred of the first wife. Sometimes the wife will make the proposition to her husband: 'I wish you to marry my brother's daughter, as she and I are one flesh.'"

Concerning the inhabitants of the Philippine island of Mindanao, a German writer says (Zeit. für Ethn., 1885, 12):

"The wives are in no way jealous of one another; on the contrary, they are glad to get a new companion, as that enables them to share their work with another."

Schwaner says of the Borneans that if a man takes a second wife he pays to the first the batu saki, amounting to from sixty to one hundred guilders, and moreover he gives her presents, consisting of clothes, "in order to appease her completely," In reference to the tribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon, Gibbs says (198):

"The accession of a new wife in the lodge very naturally produces jealousy and discord, and the first often returns for a time in dudgeon to her friends, to be reclaimed by her husband when he chooses, perhaps after propitiating her by some presents."

Such instances might be multiplied ad libitum.

In a still larger number of cases primitive woman's objection to rivals is easily overcome by the desire for the social position, wealth, and comfort which polygamy confers. I have already cited, in the chapter on Honorable Polygamy, a number of typical incidents showing how vanity, the desire to belong to a man who can afford several wives, or the wish to share the hard domestic or field work with others, often smothers the feeling of jealousy so completely that wives laugh at the idea of having their husbands all to themselves, beg them to choose other companions, or even use their own hard-earned money to buy them for their husbands. As this point is of exceptional importance, as evidencing radical changes in the ideas relating to sexual relations--and the resulting feelings themselves--further evidence is admissible.

Of the Plains Indians in general Colonel Dodge remarks (20):

"Jealousy would seem to have no place in the composition of an Indian woman, and many prefer to be, even for a time, the favorite of a man who already has a wife or wives, and who is known to be a good husband and provider, rather than tempt the precarious chances of an untried man."

And again:

"I have known several Indians of middle age, with already numerous wives and children, who were such favorites with the sex that they might have increased their number of wives to an unlimited extent had they been so disposed, and this, too, from among the very nicest girls of the tribe."

E.R. Smith, in his book on the Araucanians (213-14) tells of a Mapuché wife who, when he saw her,

"was frequently accompanied by a younger and handsomer woman than herself, whom she pointed out, with evident satisfaction, as her 'other self'--that is, her husband's wife number two, a recent addition to the family. Far from being dissatisfied, or entertaining any jealousy toward the newcomer, she said that she wished her husband would marry again; for she considered it a great relief to have someone to assist her in her household duties and in the maintenance of her husband."

McLean, who spent twenty-five years among the Tacullies and other Indians of the Hudson Bay region, says (301) that while polygamy prevails "the most perfect harmony seems to subsist among them." Hunter, who knew the Missouri and Arkansas Indians well, says (255) that "jealousy is a passion but little known, and much less indulged, among the Indians." In cases of polygamy the wives have their own lodges, separated by a short distance. They "occasionally visit each other, and generally live on the most friendly terms." But even this separation is not necessary, as we see from Catlin, who relates (I., 119) that among the Mandans it is common to see six or eight wives of a chief or medicine man "living under one roof, and all apparently quiet and contented."

In an article on the Zulus (Humanitarian, March, 1897), Miss Colenso refers to the fact that while polygamy is the custom, each wife has her own hut, wherefore

"you have none of the petty jealousies and quarrelling which distinguish the harems of the East, among the Zulu women, who, as a rule, are most friendly to each other, and the many wives of a great chief will live in a little colony of huts, each mistress in her own house and family, and interchanging friendly visits with the other ladies similarly situated."

But in Africa, too, separation is not essential to secure a peaceful result. Paulitschke (B.E.A.S., 30) reports that among the Somali polygamy is customary, two wives being frequent, and he adds that "the wives live together in harmony and have their household in common." Among the Abyssinian Arabs, Sir Samuel Baker found (127) that "concubinage is not considered a breach of morality; neither is it regarded by the legitimate wives with jealousy." Chillié (Centr. Afr., 158), says of the Landamas and Nalous: "It is very remarkable that good order and perfect harmony prevail among all these women who are called to share the same conjugal couch." The same writer says of the polygamous Foulahs (224):

"In general the women appear very happy, and by no means jealous of each other, except when the husbands make a present to one without giving anything to the rest."

Note the last sentence; it casts a strong light on our problem. It suggests that even where a semblance of jealousy is manifested by such women it may often be an entirely different thing from the jealousy we associate with love; envy, greed, or rivalry being more accurate terms for it. Here is another instance in point. Drake, in his work on the Indians of the United States has the following (I., 178):

"Where there is a plurality of wives, if one gets finer goods than the others, there is sure to be some quarrelling among the women; and if one or two of them are not driven off, it is because the others have not strength enough to do so. The man sits and looks on, and lets the women fight it out. If the one he loves most is driven off, he will go and stay with her, and leave the others to shift for themselves awhile, until they can behave better, as he says."

The Rev. Peter Jones gives this description (81) of a fight he witnessed between the two wives of an Ojibway chief:

"The quarrel arose from the unequal distribution of a loaf of bread between the children. The husband being absent, the wife who had brought the bread to the wigwam gave a piece of it to each child, but the best and largest portion to her own. Such partiality immediately led to a quarrel. The woman who brought the bread threw the remainder in anger to the other; she as quickly cast it back again; in this foolish way they kept on for some time, till their fury rose to such a height that they at length sprang at one another, catching hold of the hair of the head; and when each had uprooted a handful their ire seemed satisfied."

To make clear the difference between such ebullitions of temper and the passion properly called jealousy, let us briefly sum up the contents of this chapter. In its first stage it is a mere masculine rage in presence of a rival. An Australian female in such a case calmly goes off with the victor. A savage looks upon his wife, not as a person having rights and feelings of her own, but as a piece of property which he has stolen or bought, and may therefore do with whatever he pleases. In the second stage, accordingly, women are guarded like other movable property, infringement on which is fiercely resented and avenged, though not from any jealous regard for chastity, for the same husband who savagely punishes his wife for secret adultery, willingly lends her to guests as a matter of hospitality, or to others for a compensation. In some cases the husband's "wounded feelings" may be cured by the payment of a fine, or subjecting the culprit's wife to indignities. At a higher stage, where some regard is paid to chastity--at least in the women reserved for genealogical purposes--masculine jealousy is still of the sensual type, which leads to the life-long imprisonment of women in order to enforce a fidelity which in the absence of true love could not be secured otherwise. As for the wives in primitive households, they often indulge in "jealous" squabbles, but their passion, though it may lead to manifestations of rage and to fierce and cruel fights, is after all only skin deep, for it is easily overcome with soft words, presents, or the desire for the social position and comfort which can be secured in the house of a man who is wealthy enough to marry several women--especially if the husband is rich and wise enough to keep the women in separate lodges; though even that is often unnecessary.

There is no difficulty in understanding why primitive feminine "jealousy," despite seeming exceptions, should have been so shallow and transient a feeling. Everything conspired to make it so. From the earliest times the men made systematic efforts to prevent the growth of that passion in women because it interfered with their own selfish desires. Hearne says of the women of the Northern Indians that "they are kept so much in awe of their husbands, that the liberty of thinking is the greatest privilege they enjoy" (310); and A.H. Keane (Journ. of Anthrop. Inst., 1883) remarks that while the Botocudos often indulge in fierce outbreaks of jealousy, "the women have not yet acquired the right to be jealous, a sentiment implying a certain degree of equality between the sexes." Everywhere the women were taught to subordinate themselves to the men, and among the Hindoos as among the Greeks, by the ancient Hebrews as well as by the mediaeval Arabs freedom from jealousy was inculcated as a supreme virtue. Rachel actually fancied she was doing a noble thing in giving her handmaids to Jacob as concubines. Lane (246) quotes the Arab historian El-Jabartee, who said of his first wife:

"Among her acts of conjugal piety and submission was this that she used to buy for her husband beautiful slave girls, with her own wealth, and deck them with ornaments and apparel, and so present them to him confidently looking to the reward and recompense which she should receive [in Paradise] for such conduct."

"In case of failure of an heir," says Griffis, in his famous work on Japan (557), "the husband is fully justified, often strongly advised even by his wife, to take a handmaid to raise up seed to preserve their ancestral line." A Persian instance is given by Ida Pfeiffer (261), who was introduced at Tabreez to the wives of Behmen-Mirza, concerning whom she writes:

"They presented to me the latest addition to the harem--a plump brown little beauty of sixteen; and they seemed to treat their new rival with great good nature and told me how much trouble they had been taking to teach her Persian."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

JEALOUSY PURGED OF HATE

Casting back a glance over the ground traversed, we see that women as well as men--primitive, ancient, oriental--were either strangers to jealousy of any kind, or else knew it only as a species of anger, hatred, cruelty, and selfish sensuality; never as an ingredient of love. Australian women, Lumholtz tells us (203), "often have bitter quarrels about men whom they love[19] and are anxious to marry. If the husband is unfaithful, the wife frequently becomes greatly enraged." As chastity is not by Australians regarded as a duty or a virtue, such conduct can only be explained by referring to what Roth, for instance, says (141) in regard to the Kalkadoon. Among these, where a man may have as many as four or five wives,

"the discarded ones will often, through jealousy, fight with her whom they consider more favored; on such occasions they may often resort to stone-throwing, or even use fire-sticks and stone-knives with which to mutilate the genitals."

Similarly, various cruel disfigurements of wives by husbands or other wives, previously referred to as customary among savages, have their motive in the desire to mar the charms of a rival or a disobedient conjugal slave. The Indian chief who bites off an intriguing wife's nose or lower lip takes, moreover, a cruel delight at sight of the pain he inflicts--a delight of which he would be incapable were he capable of love. To such an Indian, Shakspere's lines

But O, what damned minutes tells he o'er Who dotes yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves,

would be as incomprehensible as a Beethoven symphony. With his usual genius for condensation, Shakspere has in those two lines given the essentials of true jealousy--suspicion causing agony rather than anger, and proceeding from love, not from hate. The fear, distress, humiliation, anguish of modern jealousy are in the mind of the injured husband. He suffers torments, but has no wish to torment either of the guilty ones. There are, indeed, even in civilized countries, husbands who slay erring wives; but they are not civilized husbands: like Othello, they still have the taint of the savage in them. Civilized husbands resort to separation, not to mutilation or murder; and in dismissing the guilty wife, they punish themselves more than her--for she has shown by her actions that she does not love him and therefore cannot feel the deepest pang of the separation. There is no anger, no desire for revenge.

How comes this gentle concord in the world, That hatred is so far from jealousy?

It comes in the world through love--through the fact that a man--or a woman--who truly loves, cannot tolerate even the thought of punishing one who has held first place in his or her affections. Modern law emphasizes the essential point when it punishes adultery because of "alienation of the affections."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

A VIRTUOUS SIN

Thus, whereas the "jealousy" of the savage who is transported by his sense of proprietorship to bloody deeds and to revenge is a most ignoble passion, incompatible with love, the jealousy of modern civilization has become a noble passion, justified by moral ideals and affection--"a kind of godly jealousy which I beseech you call a virtuous sin."

Where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy Doth call himself Affection's sentinel.

And let no one suppose that by purging itself of bloody violence, hatred, and revenge, and becoming the sentinel of affection, jealousy has lost any of its intensity. On the contrary, its depth is quintupled. The bluster and fury of savage violence is only a momentary ebullition of sensual passion, whereas the anguish of jealousy as we feel it is

Agony unmix'd, incessant gall, Corroding every thought, and blasting all Love's paradise.

Anguish of mind is infinitely more intense than mere physical pain, and the more cultivated the mind, the deeper is its capacity for such "agony unmix'd." Mental anguish doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw the inwards, and create a condition in which "not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever medicine" the victim to that sleep which he enjoyed before. His heart is turned to stone; he strikes it and it hurts his hand. Trifles light as air are proofs to him that his suspicions are realities, and life is no longer worth living.

O now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars That make ambition virtue!

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

ABNORMAL STATES

The assertion that modern jealousy is a noble passion is of course to be taken with reservations. Where it leads to murder or revenge it is a reversion to the barbarous type, and apart from that it is, like all affections of the mind, liable to abnormal and morbid states. Harry Campbell writes in the Lancet (1898) that

"the inordinate development of this emotion always betokens a neurotic diathesis, and not infrequently indicates the oncoming of insanity. It is responsible for much useless suffering and not a little actual disease."

Dr. O'Neill gives a curious example of the latter, in the same periodical. He was summoned to a young woman who informed him that she wished to be cured of jealousy: "I am jealous of my husband, and if you do not give me something I shall go out of my mind." The husband protested his innocence and declared there was no cause whatever for her accusations:

"The wife persisted in reiterating them and so the wrangle went on till suddenly she fell from her chair on the floor in a fit, the spasmodic movements of which were so strange and varied that it would be almost impossible to describe them. At one moment the patient was extended at full length with her body arched forward in a state of opisthotonos. The next minute she was in a sitting position with the legs drawn up, making, while her hands clutched her throat, a guttural noise. Then she would throw herself on her back and thrust her arms and legs about to the no small danger of those around her. Then becoming comparatively quiet and supine she would quiver all over while her eyelids trembled with great rapidity. This state perhaps would be followed by general convulsive movements in which she would put herself into the most grotesque postures and make the most unlovely grimaces. At last the fit ended, and exhausted and in tears she was put to bed. The patient was a lithe, muscular woman and to restrain her movements during the attack with the assistance at hand was a matter of impossibility, so all that could be done was to prevent her injuring herself and to sprinkle her freely with cold water. The after-treatment was more geographical than medical. The husband ceased doing business in a certain town where the object of his wife's suspicions lived."

I have been told by a perfectly healthy married woman that when jealous of her husband she felt a sensation as of some liquid welling up in her throat and suffocating her. Pride came into play in part; she did not want others to think that her husband preferred an ignorant girl to her--a woman of great physical and mental charm.

Such jealousy, if unfounded, may be of the "self-harming" kind of which one of Shakspere's characters exclaims "Fie! beat it hence!" Too often, however, women have cause for jealousy, as modern civilized man has not overcome the polygamous instincts he has inherited from his ancestors since time immemorial. But whereas cause for feminine jealousy has existed always, the right to feel it is a modern acquisition. Moreover, while Apache wives were chaste from fear and Greek women from necessity, modern civilized women are faithful from the sense of honor, duty, affection, and in return for their devotion they expect men to be faithful for the same reasons. Their jealousy has not yet become retrospective, like that of the men; but they justly demand that after marriage men shall not fall below the standard of purity they have set up for the women, and they insist on a conjugal monopoly of the affections as strenuously as the men do. In due course of time, as Dr. Campbell suggests, "we may expect the monogamous instinct in man to be as powerful as in some of the lower animals; and feminine jealousy will help to bring about this result; for if women were indifferent on this point men would never improve."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

JEALOUSY IN ROMANTIC LOVE

The jealousy of romantic love, preceding marriage, differs from the jealousy of conjugal love in so far as there can be no claim to a monopoly of affection where the very existence of any reciprocated affection still remains in doubt. Before the engagement the uncertain lover in presence of a rival is tortured by doubt, anxiety, fear, despair, and he may violently hate the other man, though (as I know from personal experience) not necessarily, feeling that the rival has as much claim to the girl's attention as he has. Duels between rival lovers are not only silly, but are an insult to the girl, to whom the choice ought to be submitted and the verdict accepted manfully. A man who shoots the girl herself, because she loves another and refuses him, puts himself on a level below the lowest brute, and cannot plead either true love or true jealousy as his excuse. After the engagement the sense of monopoly and the consciousness of plighted troth enter into the lover's feelings, and intruders are properly warded off with indignation. In romantic jealousy the leading role is played by the imagination; it loves to torture its victim by conjuring visions of the beloved smiling on a rival, encircled by his arm, returning his kisses. Everything feeds his suspicions; he is "dwelling in a continual 'larum of jealousy." Oft his jealousy "shapes faults that are not" and he taints his heart and brain with needless doubt. "Ten thousand fears invented wild, ten thousand frantic views of horrid rivals, hanging on the charms for which he melts in fondness, eat him up." Such passion inflames love but corrodes the soul. In perfect love, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, jealousy is potential only, not actual.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. COYNESS

When a man is in love he wears his heart on his sleeve and feels eager to have the beloved see how passionately it throbs for her. When a girl is in love she tries to conceal her heart in the innermost recesses of her bosom, lest the lover discover her feelings prematurely. In other words, coyness is a trait of feminine love--the only ingredient of that passion which is not, to some extent, common to both sexes. "The cruel nymph well knows to feign, ... coy looks and cold disdain," sang Gay; and "what value were there in the love of the maiden, were it yielded without coy delay?" asks Scott.

'Tis ours to be forward and pushing; 'Tis yours to affect a disdain,

Lady Montagu makes a man say, and Richard Savage sings:

You love; yet from your lover's wish retire; Doubt, yet discern; deny, and yet desire. Such, Polly, are your sex--part truth, part fiction, Some thought, much whim, and all a contradiction.

"Part truth, part fiction;" the girl romances regarding her feelings; her romantic love is tinged with coyness. "She will rather die than give any sign of affection," says Benedick of Beatrice; and in that line Shakspere reveals one of the two essential traits of genuine modern coyness--dissemblance of feminine affection.

Was coyness at all times an attribute of femininity, or is it an artificial product of modern social conditions and culture? Is coyness ever manifested apart from love, or does its presence prove the presence of love? These two important questions are to be answered in the present section.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

WOMEN WHO WOO

The opinion prevails that everywhere and always the first advances were made by the men, the women being passive, and coyly reserved. This opinion--like many other notions regarding the relations of the sexes--rests on ignorance, pure ignorance. In collecting the scattered facts bearing on this subject I have been more and more surprised at the number of exceptions to the rule, if, indeed, rule it be. Not only are there tribes among whom women must propose--as in the Torres Straits Islands, north of Australia, and with the Garos of India, concerning whom interesting details will be given in later chapters; but among many other savages and barbarians the women, instead of repelling advances, make them.

"In all Polynesia," says Gerland (VI., 127), "it was a common occurrence that the women wooed the men." "A proposal of marriage," writes Gill (Savage Life in Polynesia, II.), "may emanate with propriety from a woman of rank to an equal or an inferior." In an article on Fijian poetry (731-53), Sir Arthur Gordon cites the following native poem:

The girls of Vunivanua all had lovers, But I, poor I, had not even one. Yet I fell desperately in love one day, My eye was filled with the beauty of Vasunilawedua. She ran along the beach, she called the canoe-men. She is conveyed to the town where her beloved dwells. Na Ulumatua sits in his canoe unfastening its gear. He asks her, "Why have you come here, Sovanalasikula?" "They have been falling in love at Vunivanua," she answers; "I, too, have fallen in love. I love your lovely son, Vasunilawedua." Na Ulumatua rose to his feet. He loosened a tambua whale's tooth from the canoe. "This," he said, presenting it to her, "is my offering to you for your return. My son cannot wed you, lady." Tears stream from her eyes, they stream down on her breast. "Let me only live outside his house," she says; "I will sleep upon the wood-pile. If I may only light his seluka [cigarrette] for him, I shall rejoice. If I may only hear his voice from a distance, it will suffice. Life will be pleasant to me." Na Ulumatua replied, "Be magnanimous, lady, and return. We have many girls of our own. Return to your own land. Vasunilawedua cannot wed a stranger." Sovanalasikula went away crying. She returned to her own town, forlorn. Her life was sadness. Ia nam bosulu.

Tregear (102) describes the "wooing house" in which New Zealand girls used to stand up in the dark and say: "I love so-and-so, I want him for a husband;" whereupon the chosen lover, if willing, would say yes, or cough to signify his assent. Among the Pueblo Indians

"the usual order of courtship is reversed; when a girl is disposed to marry, she does not wait for a young man to propose to her, but selects one to her own liking and consults her father, who visits the parents of the youth and acquaints them with his daughter's wishes. It seldom happens that any objections to the match are made" (Bancroft, I., 547);

and concerning the Spokane Indians the same writer says (276) that a girl "may herself propose if she wishes." Among the Moquis, "instead of the swain asking the hand of the fair one, she selects the young man who is to her fancy, and then her father proposes the match to the sire of the lucky youth" (Schoolcraft, IV., 86). Among the Dariens, says Heriot (325), "it is considered no mark of forwardness" in a woman "openly to avow her inclination," and in Paraguay, too, women were allowed to propose (Moore, 261). Indian girls of the Hudson River region

"were not debarred signifying their desire to enter matrimonial life. When one of them wished to be married, she covered her face with a veil and sat covered as an indication of her desire. If she attracted a suitor, negotiations were opened with parents or friends, presents given, and the bride taken" (Ruttenber).

A comic mode of catching a husband is described in an episode from the tale "Owasso and Wayoond" (Schoolcraft, A.R. II., 210-11):

"Manjikuawis was forward in her advances toward him. He, however, paid no attention to it, and shunned her. She continued to be very assiduous in attending to his wants, such as cooking and mending his mocassins. She felt hurt and displeased at his indifference, and resolved to play him a trick. Opportunity soon offered. The lodge was spacious, and she dug a hole in the ground, where the young man usually sat, covering it very carefully. When the brothers returned from the chase the young man threw himself down carelessly at the usual place, and fell into the cavity, his head and feet remaining out, so that he was unable to extricate himself. 'Ha! ha!' cried Manjikuawis, as she helped him out, 'you are mine, I have caught you at last, and I did it on purpose.' A smile came over the young man's face, and he said, 'So be it, I will be yours;' and from that moment they lived happily as man and wife."

It was a common thing among various Indian tribes for the women to court distinguished warriors; and though they might have no choice in the matter, they could at any rate place themselves temptingly in the way of these braves, who, on their part, had no occasion to be coy, since they could marry all the squaws they pleased. The squaws, too, did not hesitate to indulge, if not in two husbands, in more than one lover. Commenting on the Mandans, for instance, Maximilian Prinz zu Wied declares (II., 127) that "coyness is not a virtue of the Indian women; they often have two or three lovers at a time." Among the Pennsylvania Indians it was a common thing for a girl to make suit to a young man.

"Though the first address may be by the man, yet the other is the most common. The squaws are generally very immodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young men to the blush. The men commonly appear to be possessed of much more modesty than the women." (Bancroft, II., 140.)

Even a coating of culture does not seem to curb the young squaw's propensity to make the first advances. Captain R.H. Pratt (U.S. Geol. and G.S., IX., 260), of the Carlisle School, relates an amusing story of a Kiowa young man who, under a variety of circumstances, "never cared for girl. 'But when Laura say she love me, then I began to care for girl.'"

In his First Footsteps (85, 86) Burton gives a glimpse of the "coyness" of Bedouin women:

"We met a party of Esa girls, who derided my color and doubted the fact of my being a Moslem. The Arabs declared me to be a shaykh of shaykhs, and translated to the prettiest of the party an impromptu proposal of marriage. She showed but little coyness and stated her price to be an Andulli or necklace, a couple of Tobes--she asked one too many--a few handfuls of beads, and a small present for her papa. She promised, naïvely enough, to call next day and inspect the goods. The publicity of the town did not deter her, but the shamefacedness of my two companions prevented our meeting again."

In his book on Southern Abyssinia Johnston relates how, while staying at Murroo, he was strongly recommended to follow the example of his companions and take a temporary wife. There was no need of hunting for helpmates--they offered themselves of their own accord. One of the girls who presented herself as a candidate was stated by her friends to be a very strong woman, who had already had four or five husbands. "I thought this a rather strange recommendation," he adds, "but it was evidently mentioned that she might find favor in my eyes." He found that the best way out of such a dilemma was to engage the first old hag that came along and leave it to her to ward off the others. Masculine coyness under such conditions has its risks. Johnston mentions the case of an Arab who, in the region of the Muzeguahs, scorned a girl who wanted to be his temporary wife; whereupon "the whole tribe asserted he had treated them with contempt by his haughty conduct toward the girl, and demanded to know if she was not good enough for him." He had to give them some brass wire and blue sood before he could allay the national indignation aroused by his refusal to take the girl. Women have rights which must be respected, even in Africa!

In Dutch Borneo there is a special kind of "marriage by stratagem" called matep. If a girl desires a particular man he is inveigled into her house, the door is shut, the walls are hung with cloth of different colors and other ornaments, dinner is served up and he is informed of the girl's wish to marry him. If he declines, he is obliged to pay the value of the hangings and the ornaments. (Roth, II., CLXXXI.)

"Uncertain, coy, and hard to please" obviously cannot be sung of such women.

In one of the few native Australian stories on record the two wives of a man are represented as going to his brother's hut when he was asleep, and imitating the voice of an emu. The noise woke him, and he took his spear to kill them; but as soon as he ran out the two women spoke and requested him to be their husband. (Wood's Native Tribes, 210.)

The fact that Australian women have absolutely no choice in the assignment of husbands, must make them inclined to offer themselves to men they like, just as Indian girls offer themselves to noted warriors in the hope of thus calling attention to their personal attractions. As we shall see later, one of the ways in which an Australian wins a wife is by means of magic. In this game, as Spencer and Gillen tell us (556), the women sometimes take the initiative, thus inducing a man to elope with them.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

WERE HEBREW AND GREEK WOMEN COY?

The English language is a queer instrument of thought. While coyness has the various meanings of shyness, modest reserve, bashfulness, shrinking from advances or familiarity, disdainfulness, the verb "to coy" may mean the exact opposite--to coax, allure, entice, woo, decoy. It is in this sense that "coyness" is obviously a trait of primitive maidens. What is more surprising is to find in brushing aside prejudice and preconceived notions, that among ancient nations too it is in this second sense rather than in the first that women are "coy." The Hebrew records begin with the story of Adam and Eve, in which Eve is stigmatized as the temptress. Rebekah had never seen the man chosen for her by her male relatives, yet when she was asked if she would go with his servant, she answered, promptly, "I will go." Rachel at the well suffers her cousin to kiss her at first sight. Ruth does all the courting which ends in making her the wife of Boaz. There is no shrinking from advances, real or feigned, in any of these cases; no suggestion of disguised feminine affection; and in two of them the women make the advances. Potiphar's wife is another biblical case. The word coy does not occur once in the Bible.

The idea that women are the aggressors, particularly in criminal amours, is curiously ingrained in the literature of ancient Greece. In the Odyssey we read about the fair-haired goddess Circe, decoying the companions of Odysseus with her sweet voice, giving them drugs and potions, making them the victims of swinish indulgence of their appetites. When Odysseus comes to their rescue she tries to allure him too, saying, "Nay, then, pat up your blade within its sheath, and let us now approach our bed that there we too may join in love and learn to trust each other." Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the Sirens, who are always "casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow," in order to decoy passing sailors. Charybdis is another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymph Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home "because the nymph pleased him no more." Nor does the human Nausicäa manifest the least coyness when she meets Odysseus at the river. Though he has been cast on the shore naked, she remains, after her maids have run away alarmed, and listens to his tale of woe. Then, after seeing him bathed, anointed, and dressed, she exclaims to her waiting maids: "Ah, might a man like this be called my husband, having his home here and content to stay;" while to him later on she gives this broad hint: "Stranger, farewell! when you are once again in your own land, remember me, and how before all others it is to me you owe the saving of your life."

Nausicäa is, however, a prude compared with the enamoured woman as the Greek poets habitually paint her. Pausanias (II., Chap. 31), speaking of a temple of Peeping Venus says:

"From this very spot the enamoured Phaedra used to watch Hippolytus at his manly exercises. Here still grows the myrtle with pierced leaves, as I am told. For being at her wit's ends and finding no ease from the pangs of love, she used to wreak her fury on the leaves of this myrtle."

Professor Rohde, the most erudite authority on Greek erotic literature, writes (34):

"It is characteristic of the Greek popular tales which Euripides followed, in what might be called his tragedies of adultery, that they always make the woman the vehicle of the pernicious passion; it seems as if Greek feeling could not conceive of a man being seized by an unmanly soft desire and urged on by it to passionate disregard of all human conventions and laws."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

MASCULINE COYNESS

Greek poets from Stesichorus to the Alexandrians are fond of representing coy men. The story told by Athenaeus (XIV., ch. 11) of Harpalyke, who committed suicide because the youth Iphiclus coyly spurned her, is typical of a large class. No less significant is the circumstance that when the coy backwardness happens to be on the side of a female, she is usually a woman of masculine habits, devoted to Diana and the chase. Several centuries after Christ we still find in the romances an echo of this thoroughly Greek sentiment in the coy attitude, at the beginning, of their youthful heroes.[20]

The well-known legend of Sappho--who flourished about a thousand years before the romances just referred to were written--is quite in the Greek spirit. It is thus related by Strabo:

"There is a white rock which stretches out from Leucas to the sea and toward Cephalonia, that takes its name from its whiteness. The rock of Leucas has upon it a temple of Apollo, and the leap from it was supposed to stop love. From this it is said that Sappho first, as Menander says somewhere, in pursuit of the haughty Phaon, urged on by maddening desire, threw herself from its far-seen rocks, imploring thee [Apollo], lord and king."

Four centuries after Sappho we find Theocritus harping on the same theme. His Enchantress is a monologue in which a woman relates how she made advances to a youth and won him. She saw him walking along the road and was so smitten that she was prostrated and confined to her bed for ten days. Then she sent her slave to waylay the youth, with these instructions: "If you see him alone, say to him: 'Simaitha desires you,' and bring him here." In this case the youth is not coy in the least; but the sequel of the story is too bucolic to be told here.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

SHY BUT NOT COY

It is well-known that the respectable women of Greece, especially the virgins, were practically kept under lock and key in the part of the house known as the gynaikonitis. This resulted in making them shy and bashful--but not coy, if we may judge from the mirror of life known as literature. Ramdohr observes, pertinently (III., 270):

"Remarkable is the easy triumph of lovers over the innocence of free-born girls, daughters of citizens, examples of which may be found in the Eunuchus and Adelphi of Terence. They call attention to the low opinion the ancients had of a woman's power to guard her sensual impulses, and of her own accord resist attacks on her honor."

The Abbé Dubois says the same thing about Hindoo girls, and the reason why they are so carefully guarded. It is hardly necessary to add that since no one would be so foolish as to call a man honest who refrains from stealing merely because he has no opportunity, it is equally absurd to call a woman honest or coy who refrains from vice only because she is locked up all the time. The fact (which seems to give Westermarck (64-65) much satisfaction), that some Australians, American Indian and other tribes watch young girls so carefully, does not argue the prevalence of chaste coyness, but the contrary. If the girls had an instinctive inclination to repel improper advances it would not be necessary to cage and watch them. This inclination is not inborn, does not characterize primitive women, but is a result of education and culture.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

MILITARISM AND MEDIAEVAL WOMEN

Greatly as Greeks and Indians differ in some respects, they have two things in common--a warlike spirit and contempt for women. "When Greek meets Greek then comes a tug of war," and the Indian's chief delight is scalp hunting. The Greeks, as Rohde notes (42),

"depict their greatest heroes as incited to great deeds only by eagerness for battle and desire for glory. The love of women barely engages their attention transiently in hours of idleness."

Militarism is ever hostile to love except in its grossest forms. It brutalizes the men and prevents the growth of feminine qualities, coyness among others. Hence, wherever militarism prevails, we seek in vain for feminine reserve. An interesting illustration of this may be found in a brochure by Theodor Krabbes, Die Frau im Altfranzösischen Karls-Epos (9-38). The author, basing his inferences on an exhaustive study and comparison of the Chansons de Geste of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, draws the following general conclusions:

"Girlish shyness is not a trait of the daughters, least of all those of heathen origin. Masculine tendencies characterize them from childhood. Fighting pleases them and they like to look on when there is a battle.... Love plays an important role in nearly all the Chansons de Geste.... The woman wooes, the man grants: nearly always in these epics we read of a woman who loves, rarely of one who is loved.... In the very first hour of their acquaintance the girl is apt to yield herself entirely to the chosen knight, and she persists in her passion for him even if she is entirely repulsed. There is no more rest for her. Either she wooes him in person, or chooses a messenger who invites the coveted man to a rendezvous. The heathen woman who has to guard captured Franks and who has given her heart to one of them, hies herself to the dungeon and offers him her love. She begs for his love in return and seeks in every way to win it. If he resists, she curses him, makes his lot less endurable, withholds his food or threatens him with death until he is willing to accede to her wishes. If this has come to pass she overwhelms him with caresses at the first meeting. She is eager to have them reciprocated; often the lover is not tender enough to please her, then she repeatedly begs for kisses. She embraces him delightedly even though he be in full armor and in presence of all his companions. Girlish shyness and modest backwardness are altogether foreign to her nature.... She never has any moral scruples.... If he is unwilling to give up his campaign, she is satisfied to let him go the next morning if he will only marry her.

"The man is generally described as cold in love. References to a knight's desire for a woman's love are very scant, and only once do we come across a hero who is quite in love. The young knight prefers more serious matters; his first desire is to win fame in battle, make rich booty.[21] He looks on love as superfluous, indeed he is convinced that it incapacitates him from what he regards as his proper life-task. He also fears the woman's infidelity. If he allows her to persuade him to love, he seeks material gain from it; delivery from captivity, property, vassals.... The lover is often tardy, careless, too deficient in tenderness, so that the woman has to chide him and invite his caresses. A rendezvous is always brought about only through her efforts, and she alone is annoyed if it is disturbed too soon. Even when the man desires a woman, he hardly appears as a wooer. He knows he is sure of the women's favor; they make it easy for him; he can have any number of them if he belongs to a noble family.... Even when the knight is in love--which is very rare--the first advances are nearly always made by the woman; it is she who proposes marriage.

"Marriage as treated in the epics is seldom based on love. The woman desires wedlock, because she hopes thereby to secure her rights and better her chances of protection. It is for this reason that we see her so often eagerly endeavoring to secure a promise of marriage."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

WHAT MADE WOMEN COY?

Sufficient evidence has now been adduced to make it clear that the first of the two questions posed at the outset of this chapter must be answered in the negative. Coyness is not an innate or universal trait of femininity, but is often absent, particularly where man's absorption in war and woman's need of protection prevent its growth and induce the females to do the courting. This being the case and war being the normal state of the lower races, our next task is to ascertain what were the influences that induced woman to adopt the habit of repelling advances instead of making them. It is one of the most interesting questions in sexual psychology, which has never been answered satisfactorily; it and gains additional interest from the fact that we find among the most ancient and primitive races phenomena which resemble coyness and have been habitually designated as such. As we shall see in a moment, this is an abuse of language, confounding genuine resistance or aversion with coyness.

Chinese maidens often feel so great an aversion to marriage as practised in their country that they prefer suicide to it. Douglas says (196) that Chinese women often ask English ladies, "Does your husband beat you?" and are surprised if answered "No." The gallant Chinaman calls his wife his "dull thorn," and there are plenty of reasons apart from Confucian teachings why "for some days before the date fixed, the bride assumes all the panoply of woe, and weeps and wails without ceasing." She is about to face the terrible ordeal of being confronted for the first time with the man who has been chosen for her, and who may be the ugliest, vilest wretch in the world--possibly even a leper, such cases being on record. Douglas (124) reports the case of six girls who committed suicide together to avoid marriage. There exist in China anti-matrimonial societies of girls and young widows, the latter doubtless, supplying the experience that serves as the motive for establishing such associations.

Descending to the lowest stratum of human life as witnessed in Australia, we find that, as Meyer asserts (11), the bride appears "generally to go very unwillingly" to the man she has been assigned to. Lumholtz relates that the man seizes the woman by the wrists and carries her off "despite her screams, which can be heard till she is a mile away." "The women," he says, "always make resistance; for they do not like to leave their tribe, and in many instances they have the best of reasons for kicking their lovers." What are these reasons? As all observers testify, they are not allowed any voice in the choice of their husbands. They are usually bartered by their father or brothers for other women, and in many if not most cases the husbands assigned to them are several times their age. Before they are assigned to a particular man the girls indulge in promiscuous intercourse, whereas after marriage they are fiercely guarded. They may indeed attempt to elope with another man more suited to their age, but they do so at the risk of cruel injury and probable death. The wives have to do all the drudgery; they get only such food as the husbands do not want, and on the slightest suspicion of intrigue they are maltreated horribly. Causes enough surely for their resistance to obligatory marriage. This resistance is a frank expression of genuine unwillingness, or aversion, and has nothing in common with real coyness, which signifies the mere semblance of unwillingness on the part of a woman who is at least half-willing. Such expressions as Goldsmith's "the coy maid, half willing to be pressed," and Dryden's

When the kind nymph would coyness feign, And hides but to be found again,

indicate the nature of true coyness better than any definitions. There are no "coy looks," no "feigning" in the actions of an Australian girl about to be married to a man who is old enough to be her grandfather. The "cold disdain" is real, not assumed, and there is no "dissemblance of feminine affection."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

CAPTURING WOMEN

The same reasoning applies to the customs attending wife-capturing in general, which has prevailed in all parts of the world and still prevails in some regions. To take one or two instances of a hundred that might be cited from books of travel in all parts of the world: Columbus relates that the Caribs made the capture of women the chief object of their expeditions. The California Indians worked up their warlike spirit by chanting a song the substance of which was, "let us go and carry off girls" (Waitz, IV., 242). Savages everywhere have looked upon women as legitimate spoils of war, desirable as concubines and drudges. Now even primitive women are attached to their homes and relatives, and it is needless to say their resistance to the enemy who has just slain their father and brothers and is about to carry them off to slavery, is genuine, and has no more trace of coyness in it than the actions of an American girl who resists the efforts of unknown kidnappers to drag her from her home.

But besides real capture of women there has existed, and still exists in many countries, what is known as sham-capture--a custom which has puzzled anthropologists sorely. Herbert Spencer illustrates it (P.S., I., § 288) by citing Crantz, who says, concerning the Eskimos, that when a damsel is asked in marriage, she

"directly falls into the greatest apparent consternation, and runs out of doors tearing her hair; for single women always affect the utmost bashfulness and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they should lose their reputation for modesty."

Spencer also quotes Burckhardt, who describes how the bride among Sinai Arabs defends herself with stones, even though she does not dislike the lover; "for according to custom, the more she struggles, bites, kicks, cries, and strikes, the more she is applauded ever after by her own companions." During the procession to the husband's camp "decency obliges her to cry and sob most bitterly." Among the Araucanians of Chili, according to Smith (215) "it is a point of honor with the bride to resist and struggle, however willing she may be."

While conceding that "the manners of the inferior races do not imply much coyness," Spencer, nevertheless, thinks "we cannot suppose coyness to be wholly absent." He holds that in the cases just cited coyness is responsible for the resistance of the women, and he goes so far as to make this coyness "an important factor," in accounting for the custom of marriage by capture which has prevailed among so many peoples in all parts of the world. Westermarck declares (388) that this suggestion can scarcely be disproved, and Grosse (105) echoes his judgment. To me, on the contrary, it seems that these distinguished sociologists are putting the cart before the horse. They make the capture a sequence of "coyness," whereas in truth the coyness (if it may be so called) is a result of capture. The custom of wife capture can be easily explained without calling in the aid of what we have seen to be so questionable a thing as primitive female coyness. Savages capture wives as the most coveted spoils of war. They capture them, in other instances, because polygamy and female infanticide have disturbed the equilibrium of the sexes, thus compelling the young men to seek wives elsewhere than in their own tribes; and the same result is brought about (in Australia, for instance), by the old men's habit of appropriating all the young women by a system of exchange, leaving none for the young men, who, therefore, either have to persuade the married women to elope--at the risk of their lives--or else are compelled to steal wives elsewhere. In another very large number of cases the men stole brides--willing or unwilling--to avoid paying their parents for them.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

THE COMEDY OF MOCK CAPTURE

Thus the custom of real capture is easily accounted for. What calls for an explanation is the sham capture and resistance in cases where both the parents and the bride are perfectly willing. Why should primitive maidens who, as we have seen, are rather apt than not to make amorous advances, repel their suitors so violently in these instances of mock capture? Are they, after all, coy--more coy than civilized maidens? To answer this question let us look at one of Spencer's witnesses more carefully. The reason Crantz gives for the Eskimo women's show of aversion to marriage is that they do it, "lest they lose their reputation for modesty." Now modesty of any kind is a quality unknown to Eskimos. Nansen, Kane, Hayes, and other explorers have testified that the Eskimos of both sexes take off all their clothes in their warm subterranean homes. Captain Beechey has described their obscene dances, and it is well-known that they consider it a duty to lend their wives and daughters to guests. Some of the native tales collected by Rink (236-37; 405) indicate most unceremonious modes of courtship and nocturnal frolics, which do not stop even at incest. To suppose that women so utterly devoid of moral sensibility could, of their own accord and actuated by modesty and bashfulness manifest such a coy aversion to marriage that force has to be resorted to, is manifestly absurd. In attributing their antics to modesty, Crantz made an error into which so many explorers have fallen--that of interpreting the actions of savages from the point of view of civilization--an error more pardonable in an unsophisticated traveller of the eighteenth century than in a modern sociologist.

If we must therefore reject Herbert Spencer's inference as to the existence of primitive coyness and its consequences, how are we to account for the comedy of mock capture? Several writers have tried to crack the nut. Sutherland (I., 200) holds that sham capture is not a survival of real capture, but "the festive symbolism of the contrast in the character of the sexes--courage in the man and shyness in the woman"--a fantastic suggestion which does not call for discussion, since, as we know, the normal primitive woman is anything but shy. Abercromby (I., 454) is another writer who believes that sham capture is not a survival of real capture, but merely a result of the innate general desire on the part of the men to display courage--a view which dodges the one thing that calls for an explanation--the resistance of the women. Grosse indulges in some curious antics (105-108). First he asks: "Since real capture is everywhere an exception and is looked on as punishable, why should the semblance of capture have ever become a general and approved custom?" Then he asks, with a sneer, why sociology should be called upon to answer such questions anyhow; and a moment later he, nevertheless, attempts an answer, on Spencerian lines. Among inferior races, he remarks, women are usually coveted as spoils of war. The captured women become the wives or concubines of the warriors and thus represent, as it were, trophies of their valor. Is it not, therefore, inevitable that the acquisition of a wife by force should be looked on, among warlike races, as the most honorable way of getting her, nay, in course of time, as the only one worthy of a warrior? But since, he continues, not all the men can get wives in that way, even among the rudest tribes, these other men consoled themselves with investing the peaceful home-taking of a bride also with the show of an honorable capture.

In other words, Grosse declares on one page that it is absurd to derive approved sham capture from real capture because real capture is everywhere exceptional only and is always considered punishable; yet two pages later he argues that sham capture is derived from real capture because the latter is so honorable! As a matter of fact, among the lowest races known, wife-stealing is not considered honorable. Regarding the Australians, Curr states distinctly (I., 108) that it was not encouraged because it was apt to involve a whole tribe in war for one man's sake. Among the North American Indians, on the other hand, where, as we saw in the chapter on Honorable Polygamy, a wife-stealer is admired by both men and women, sham capture does not prevail. Grosse's argument, therefore, falls to the ground.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

WHY THE WOMEN RESIST

Prior to all these writers Sir John Lubbock advanced (98) still another theory of capture, real and sham. Believing that men once had all their wives in common, he declares that

"capture, and capture alone, could originally give a man the right to monopolize a woman to the exclusion of his fellow-clansmen; and that hence, even after all necessity for actual capture had long ceased, the symbol remained; capture having, by long habit, come to be received as a necessary preliminary to marriage."

This theory has the same shortcoming as the others. While accounting for the capture, it does not explain the resistance of the women. In real capture they had real reasons for kicking, biting, and howling, but why should they continue these antics in cases of sham capture? Obviously another factor came into play here, which has been strangely overlooked--parental persuasion or command. Among savages a father owns his daughter as absolutely as his dog; he can sell or exchange her at pleasure; in Australia, "swapping" daughters or sisters is the commonest mode of marriage. Now, stealing brides, or eloping to avoid having to pay for them, is of frequent occurrence everywhere among uncivilized races. To protect themselves against such loss of personal property it must have occurred to parents at an early date that it would be wise to teach their daughters to resist all suitors until it has become certain that their intentions are honorable--that is, that they intend to pay. In course of time such teaching (strengthened by the girls' pride at being purchased for a large sum) would assume the form of an inviolable command, having the force of a taboo and, with the stubbornness peculiar to many social customs, persisting long after the original reasons have ceased to exist.

In other words, I believe that the peculiar antics of the brides in cases of sham capture are neither due to innate feminine coyness nor are they a direct survival of the genuine resistance made in real capture; but that they are simply a result of parental dictation which assigns to the bride the rôle she must play in the comedy of "courtship." I find numerous facts supporting this view, especially in Reinsberg-Düringsfeld's Hochzeitsbuch and Schroeder's Hochzeitsgebräuche der Esten.

Describing the marriage customs of the Mordvins, Mainow says that the bridegroom sneaks into the bride's house before daybreak, seizes her and carries her off to where his companions are waiting with their wagons. "Etiquette," he adds, "demands she should resist violently and cry loudly, even if she is entirely in favor of the elopement." Among the Votyaks girl-stealing (kukem) occurs to this day. If the father is unwilling or asks too much, while the young folks are willing, the girl goes to work in the field and the lover carries her off. On the way to his house she is cheerful, but when they reach the lover's house she begins to cry and wail, whereupon she is locked up in a cabin that has no window. The father, having found out where she is, comes and demands payment. If the lover offers too little, the parent plies his whip on him. Among the Ostyaks such elopements, to avoid payment, are frequent. Regarding the Esthonians, Schroeder says (40): "When the intermediary comes, the girl must conceal herself in some place until she is either found, with her father's consent, or appears of her own accord."

In the old epic "Kalewipoeg," Salme hides in the garret and Linda in the bath-room, and refuse to come out till after much coaxing and urging.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

QUAINT CUSTOMS

The words I have italicized indicate the passive rôle played by the girls, who simply carry out the instructions given to them. The parents are the stage-managers, and they know very well what they want--money or brandy. Among the Mordvins, as soon as the suitor and his friends are seen approaching the bride's house, it is barricaded, and the defenders ask, "Who are you?" The answer is, "Merchants." "What do you wish?" "Living goods." "We do not trade!" "We shall take her by force." A show of force is made, but finally the suitors are admitted, after paying twenty kopeks. In Little Russia it is customary to barricade the door of the bride's house with a wheel, but after offering a bottle of brandy as a "pass" the suitor's party is allowed to enter.

Among the Esthonians custom demands (Schroeder, 36), that a comedy like the following be enacted. The intermediary comes to the bride's house and pretends that he has lost a cow or a lamb, and asks permission to hunt for it. The girl's relatives at first stubbornly deny having any knowledge of its whereabouts, but finally they allow the suitors to search, and the bride is usually found without much delay. In Western Prussia (Berent district), after the bridegroom has made his terms with the bride and her parents, he comes to their house and says: "We were out hunting and saw a wounded deer run into this house. May we follow its tracks?" Permission is granted, whereupon the men start in pursuit of the bride, who has hidden away with the other village maidens. At last the "hound"--one of the bridegroom's companions--finds her and brings her to the lover.

Similar customs have prevailed in parts of Russia, Roumania, Servia, Sardinia, Hungary, and elsewhere. In Old Finland the comedy continues even after the nuptial knot has been tied. The bridal couple return each to their home. Soon the groom appears at the bride's house and demands to be admitted. Her father refuses to let him in. A "pass" is thereupon produced and read, and this, combined with a few presents, finally secures admission. In some districts the bride remains invisible even during the wedding-dinner, and it is "good form" for her to let the guests wait as long as possible, and not to appear until after considerable coaxing by her mother. When a Votyak bridegroom comes after the bride on the wedding-day she is denied to him three times. After that she is searched for, dragged from her hiding-place, and her face covered with a cloth, while she screams and struggles. Then she is carried to the yard, placed on a blanket with her face down, and the bridegroom belabors her with a stick on a pillow which has been tied on her back. After that she becomes obedient and amiable. A Mordvin bride must try to escape from the wagon on the way to the church. In Old Finland the bride was barricaded in her house even after the wedding, and the Island Swedes have the same custom. This burlesque of bridal resistance after marriage occurs also among the wild tribes of India. "After remaining with her husband for ten days only," writes Dalton (192), "it is the correct thing for the wife to run away from him, and tell all her friends that she loves him not and will see him no more." The husband's duty is to seek her eagerly.

"I have seen a young wife thus found and claimed, and borne away, screeching and struggling in the arms of her husband, from the midst of a crowded bazaar. No one interferes on these occasions."

More than enough has now been said to prove that in cases of sham capture the girls simply follow their village customs blindly. Left to themselves they might act very differently, but as it is, all the girls in each district must do the same thing, however silly. About the real feelings of the girls these comedies tell us nothing whatever. With coyness--that is, a woman's concealment of her feelings toward a man she likes--these actions have no more to do than the man in the moon has with anthropology. Least of all do they tell us anything about love, for the girls must all act alike, whether they favor a man or not. Regarding the absence of love we have, moreover, the direct testimony of Dr. F. Kreutzwald (Schroeder, 233). That marriages are made in heaven is, he declares, true in a certain sense, so far as the Esthonians are concerned; for "the parties concerned usually play a passive rôle.... Love is not one of the requisites, it is an unknown phenomenon." Utilitarianism, he adds, is the basis of their marriages. The suitor tries to ascertain if the girl he wants is a good worker; to find this out he may even watch her secretly while she is spinning, thrashing, or combing flax.

"Most of the men proceed at random, and it is not unusual for a suitor who has been refused in one place and another to proceed at once to a third or fourth.... Many a bridegroom sees his bride for the first time at the ceremony of the priestly betrothal, and he cannot therefore be blamed for asking: 'Which of these girls is my bride?'"

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

GREEK AND ROMAN MERCENARY COYNESS

So far our search for that coyness which is an ingredient of modern love has been in vain. At the same time it is obvious that since coyness is widely prevalent at the present day it must have been in the past of use to women, else it would not have survived and increased. The question is: how far down in the scale of civilization do we find traces of it? The literature of the ancient Greeks indicates that, in a certain phase and among certain classes, it was known to them. True, the respectable women, being always locked up and having no choice in the selecting of their partners, had no occasion for the exercise of any sort of coyness. But the hetairai appear to have understood the advantages of assumed disdain or indifference in making a coveted man more eager in his wooing. In the fifteenth of Lucian's [Greek: Etairikoi dialogoi] we read about a wanton who locked her door to her lover because he had refused to pay her two talents for the privilege of exclusive possession. In other cases, the poets still feel called upon to teach these women how to make men submissive by withholding caresses from them. Thus in Lucian, Pythias exclaims:

"To tell the truth, dear Joessa, you yourself spoiled him with your excessive love, which you even allowed him to notice. You should not have made so much of him: men, when they discover that, easily become overweening. Do not weep, poor girl! Follow my advice and keep your door locked once or twice when he tries to see you again. You will find that that will make him flame up again and become frantic with love and jealousy."

In the third book of his treatise on the Art of Love, Ovid advises women (of the same class) how to win men. He says, in substance:

"Do not answer his letters too soon; all delay inflames the lover, provided it does not last too long.... What is too readily granted does not long retain love. Mix with the pleasure you give mortifying refusals, make him wait in your doorway; let him bewail the 'cruel door;' let him beg humbly, or else get angry and threaten. Sweet things cloy, tonics are bitter."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

MODESTY AND COYNESS

Feigned unwillingness or indifference in obedience to such advice may perhaps be called coyness, but it is only a coarse primitive phase of that attitude, based on sordid, mercenary motives, whereas true modern coyness consists in an impulse, grounded in modesty, to conceal affection. The germs of Greek venal coyness for filthy lucre may be found as low down as among the Papuan women who, as Bastian notes (Ploss, I., 460) exact payment in shell-money for their caresses. Of the Tongans, highest of all Polynesians, Mariner says (Martin, II., 174):

"It must not be supposed that these women are always easily won; the greatest attentions and fervent solicitations are sometimes requisite, even though there be no other lover in the way. This happens sometimes from a spirit of coquetry, at other times from a dislike to the party, etc."

Now coquetry is a cousin of coyness, but in whatever way this Tongan coquetry may manifest itself (no details are given) it certainly lacks the regard for modesty and chastity which is essential to modern coyness; for, as the writer just referred to attests, Tongan girls are permitted to indulge in free intercourse before marriage, the only thing liable to censure being a too frequent change of lovers.

That the anxious regard for chastity, modesty, decorum, which cannot be present in the coquetry of these Tongan women, is one of the essential ingredients of modern coyness has long been felt by the poets. After Juliet has made her confession of love which Romeo overhears in the dark, she apologizes to him because she fears that he might attribute her easy yielding to light love. Lest he think her too quickly won she "would have frowned and been perverse, and said him nay." Then she begs him trust she'll "prove more true than those that have more cunning to be strange." Wither's "That coy one in the winning, proves a true one being won," expresses the same sentiment.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

UTILITY OF COYNESS

Man's esteem for virtues which he does not always practise himself, is thus responsible, in part at least, for the existence of modern coyness. Other factors, however, aided its growth, among them man's fickleness. If a girl did not say nay (when she would rather say yes), and hold back, hesitate, and delay, the suitor would in many cases suck the honey from her lips and flit away to another flower. Cumulative experience of man's sensual selfishness has taught her to be slow in yielding to his advances. Experience has also taught women that men are apt to value favors in proportion to the difficulty of winning them, and the wisest of them have profited by the lesson. Callimachus wrote, two hundred and fifty years before Christ, that his love was "versed in pursuing what flies (from it), but flits past what lies in its mid path"--a conceit which the poets have since echoed a thousand times. Another very important thing that experience taught women was that by deferring or withholding their caresses and smiles they could make the tyrant man humble, generous, and gallant. Girls who do not throw themselves away on the first man who happens along, also have an advantage over others who are less fastidious and coy, and by transmitting their disposition to their daughters they give it greater vogue. Female coyness prevents too hasty marriages, and the girls who lack it often live to repent their shortcomings at leisure. Coyness prolongs the period of courtship and, by keeping the suitor in suspense and doubt, it develops the imaginative, sentimental side of love.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

HOW WOMEN PROPOSE

Sufficient reasons, these, why coyness should have gradually become a general attribute of femininity. Nevertheless, it is an artificial product of imperfect social conditions, and in an ideal world women would not be called upon to romance about their feelings. As a mark of modesty, coyness will always have a charm for men, and a woman devoid of it will never inspire genuine love. But what I have elsewhere called "spring-chicken coyness"--the disposition of European girls to hide shyly behind their mammas--as chickens do under a hen at the sight of a hawk--is losing its charm in face of the frank confidingness of American girls in the presence of gentlemen; and as for that phase of coyness which consists in concealing affection for a man, girls usually manage to circumvent it in a more or less refined manner. Some girls who are coarse, or have little control of their feelings, propose bluntly to the men they want. I myself have known several such cases, but the man always refused. Others have a thousand subtle ways of betraying themselves without actually "giving themselves away." A very amusing story of how an ingenious maiden tries to bring a young man to bay has been told by Anthony Hope. Dowden calls attention to the fact that it is Juliet "who proposes and urges on the sudden marriage." Romeo has only spoken of love; it is she who asks him, if his purpose be marriage, to send her word next day. In Troilus and Cressida (III., 2), the heroine exclaims:

But, though I loved you well, I woo'd you not; And yet, good faith, I wished myself a man, Or that we women had men's privilege Of speaking first.

In his Old Virginia (II., 127) John Fiske tells a funny story of how Parson Camm was wooed. A young friend of his, who had been courting Miss Betsy Hansford of his parish, asked him to assist him with his eloquence. The parson did so by citing to the girl texts from the Bible enjoining matrimony as a duty. But she beat him at his own game, telling him to take his Bible when he got home and look at 2 Sam. xii. 7, which would explain her obduracy. He did so, and found this: "And Nathan said to David, thou art the man." The parson took the hint--and the girl.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

V. HOPE AND DESPAIR--MIXED MOODS

She never told her love; But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought; And, with a green and yellow melancholy, She sat, like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

asks Viola in As You Like It. It was love indeed; but only two phases of it are indicated in the lines quoted--coyness ("She never told her love") and the mixture of emotions ("smiling at grief"), which is another characteristic of love. Romantic love is a pendulum swinging perpetually between hope and despair. A single unkind word or sign of indifference may make a lover feel the agony of death, while a smile may raise him from the abyss of despair to heavenly heights of bliss. As Goethe puts it:

Himmelhoch jauchzend Zum Tode betrübt, Glücklich allein Ist die Seele die liebt.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

AMOROUS ANTITHESES

When a Marguerite plucks the petals of a marguerite, muttering "he loves me--he loves me not," her heart flutters in momentary anguish with every "not," till the next petal soothes it again.

I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe; Under love's heavy burden do I sink,

wails Romeo; and again:

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O anything, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

* * * * *

Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears; What is it else? a madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

In commenting on Romeo, who in his love for Rosaline indulges in emotion for emotion's sake, and "stimulates his fancy with the sought-out phrases, the curious antitheses of the amorous dialect of the period," Dowden writes:

"Mrs. Jameson has noticed that in All's Well that Ends Well (I., 180-89), Helena mockingly reproduces this style of amorous antithesis. Helena, who lives so effectively in the world of fact, is contemptuous toward all unreality and affectation."

Now, it is quite true that expressions like "cold fire" and "sick health" sound unreal and affected to sober minds, and it is also true that many poets have exercised their emulous ingenuity in inventing such antitheses just for the fun of the thing and because it has been the fashion to do so. Nevertheless, with all their artificiality, they were hinting at an emotional phenomenon which actually exists. Romantic love is in reality a state of mind in which cold and heat may and do alternate so rapidly that "cold fire" seems the only proper expression to apply to such a mixed feeling. It is literally true that, as Bailey sang, "the sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love;" literally true that "the sweets of love are washed with tears," as Carew wrote, or, as H.K. White expressed it, "'Tis painful, though 'tis sweet to love." A man who has actually experienced the feeling of uncertain love sees nothing unreal or affected in Tennyson's

The cruel madness of love The honey of poisoned flowers,

or in Drayton's

'Tis nothing to be plagued in hell But thus in heaven tormented,

or in Dryden's

I feed a flame within, which so torments me That it both pains my heart, and yet enchants me: 'Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it, That I had rather die than once remove it,

or in Juliet's

Good-night! good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.

This mysterious mixture of moods, constantly maintained through the alternations of hope and doubt, elation and despair,

And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng

as Coleridge puts it; or

Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet; Where pleasures mixed with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear

as Swift rhymes it, is thus seen to be one of the essential and most characteristic ingredients of modern romantic love.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

COURTSHIP AND IMAGINATION

Here, again, the question confronts us, How far down among the strata of human life can we find traces of this ingredient of love? Do we find it among the Eskimos, for instance? Nansen relates (II., 317), that

"In the old Greenland days marriage was a simple and speedy affair. If a man took a fancy to a girl, he merely went to her home or tent, caught her by the hair or anything else which offered a hold, and dragged her off to his dwelling without further ado."

Nay, in some cases, even this unceremonious "courtship" was perpetrated by proxy! The details regarding the marriage customs of lower races already cited in this volume, with the hundreds more to be given in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader that primitive courtship--where there is any at all--is habitually a "simple and speedy affair"--not always as simple and speedy as with Nansen's Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and play of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains. Fancy the difference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I., 161), "thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn," and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the inferno because a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him so happy that he would not change places with a king, unless his beloved were to be queen. Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguish and rapture, because they have no imagination. It is only when the imagination comes into play that we can look for the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, that help to make up the sum and substance of romantic love.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

EFFECTS OF SENSUAL LOVE

At the same time it would be a great mistake to assume that the manifestation of mixed moods proves the presence of romantic love. After all, the alternation of hope and despair which produces those bitter-sweet paradoxes of the varying and mixed emotions, is one of the selfish aspects of passion: the lover fears or hopes for himself, not for the other. There is, therefore, no reason why we should not read of troubled or ecstatic lovers in the poems of the ancient writers, who, while knowing love only as selfish lust, nevertheless had sufficient imagination to suffer the agonies of thwarted purpose and the delights of realized hopes. As a boat-load of shipwrecked sailors, hungry and thirsty, may be switched from deadly despair to frantic joy by the approach of a rescuing vessel, so may a man change his moods who is swayed by what is, next to hunger and thirst, the most powerful and imperious of all appetites. We must not, therefore, make the reckless assumption that the Greek and Sanscrit writers must have known romantic love, because they describe men and women as being prostrated or elated by strong passion. When Euripides speaks of love as being both delectable and painful; when Sappho and Theocritus note the pallor, the loss of sleep, the fears and tears of lovers; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim, at sight of Leucippe: "I was overwhelmed by conflicting feelings: admiration, astonishment, agitation, shame, assurance;" when King Pururavas, in the Hindoo drama, Urvasi is tormented by doubts as to whether his love is reciprocated by the celestial Bayadère (apsara); when, in Malati, a love-glance is said to be "anointed with nectar and poison;" when the arrows of the Hindoo gods of love are called hard, though made of flowers; burning, though not in contact with the skin; voluptuous, though piercing--when we come across such symptoms and fancies we have no right as yet to infer the existence of romantic love; for all these things also characterize sensual passion, which is love only in the sense of self-love, whereas, romantic love is affection for another--a distinction which will be made more and more manifest as we proceed in our discussion of the ingredients of love, especially the last seven, which are altruistic. It is only when we find these altruistic ingredients associated with the hopes and fears and mixed moods that we can speak of romantic love. The symptoms referred to in this paragraph tell us about selfish longings, selfish pleasures and selfish pains, but nothing whatever about affection for the person who is so eagerly coveted.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VI. HYPERBOLE

As long as love was supposed to be an uncompounded emotion and no distinction was made between appetite and sentiment--that is between the selfish desire of eroticism and the self-sacrificing ardor of altruistic affection--it was natural enough that the opinion should have prevailed that love has been always and everywhere the same, inasmuch as several of the traits which characterize the modern passion--stubborn preference for an individual, a desire for exclusive possession, jealousy toward rivals, coy resistance and the resulting mixed moods of doubt and hope--were apparently in existence in earlier and lower stages of human development. We have now seen, however, that these indications are deceptive, for the reason that lust as well as love can be fastidious in choice, insistent on a monopoly, and jealous of rivals; that coyness may spring from purely mercenary motives, and that the mixed moods of hope and despair may disquiet or delight men and women who know love only as a carnal appetite. We now take up our sixth ingredient--Hyperbole--which has done more than any other to confuse the minds of scholars as regards the antiquity of romantic love, for the reason that it presents the passion of the ancients in its most poetic and romantic aspects.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

GIRLS AND FLOWERS

Amorous hyperbole may be defined as obvious exaggeration in praising the charms of a beloved girl or youth; Shakspere speaks of "exclamations hyperbolical ... praises sauced with lies." Such "praises sauced with lies" abound in the verse and prose of Greek and Roman as well as Sanscrit and other Oriental writers, and they assume as diverse forms as in modern erotic literature. The commonest is that in which a girl's complexion is compared to lilies and roses. The Cyclops in Theocritus tells Galatea she is "whiter than milk ... brighter than a bunch of hard grapes." The mistress of Propertius has a complexion white as lilies; her cheeks remind him of "rose leaves swimming on milk."

Lilia non domina sunt magis alba mea; Ut Moeotica nix minio si certet Eboro, Utque rosae puro lacte natant folia. (II., 2.)

Achilles Tatius wrote that the beauty of Leucippe's countenance

"might vie with the flowers of the meadow; the narcissus was resplendent in her general complexion, the rose blushed upon her cheek, the dark hue of the violet sparkled in her eyes, her ringlets curled more closely than do the clusters of the ivy--her face, therefore, was a reflex of the meadows."

The Persian Hafiz declares that "the rose lost its color at sight of her cheeks and the jasmines silver bud turned pale." A beauty in the Arabian Nights, however, turns the tables on the flowers. "Who dares to liken me to a rose?" she exclaims.

"Who is not ashamed to declare that my bosom is as lovely as the fruit of the pomegranate-tree? By my beauty and grace! by my eyes and black hair, I swear that any man who repeats such comparison shall be banished from my presence and killed by the separation; for if he finds my figure in the ban-tree and my cheeks in the rose, what then does he seek in me?"

This girl spoke more profoundly than she knew. Flowers are beautiful things, but a spot red as a rose on a cheek would suggest the hectic flush of fever, and if a girl's complexion were as white as a lily she would be shunned as a leper. In hyperbole the step between the sublime and the ridiculous is often a very short one; yet the rose and lily simile is perpetrated by erotic poets to this day.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

EYES AND STARS

The eyes are subjected to similar treatment, as in Lodge's lines

Her eyes are sapphires set in snow Resembling heaven by every wink.

Thomas Hood's Ruth had eyes whose "long lashes veiled a light that had else been all too bright." Heine saw in the blue eyes of his beloved the gates of heaven. Shakspere and Fletcher have:

And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn!

When Romeo exclaims:

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. ... her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night,

he excels, both in fancy and in exaggeration, all the ancient poets; but it was they who began the practice of likening eyes to bright lights. Ovid declares (Met., I., 499) that Daphne's eyes shone with a fire like that of the stars, and this has been a favorite comparison at all times. Tibullus assures us (IV., 2) that "when Cupid wishes to inflame the gods, he lights his torches at Sulpicia's eyes." In the Hindoo drama Malati and Madhava, the writer commits the extravagance of making Madhava declare that the white of his mistresses eyes suffuses him as with a bath of milk!

Theocritus, Tibullus ("candor erat, qualem praefert Latonia Luna"), Hafiz, and other Greek, Roman, and Oriental poets are fond of comparing a girl's face or skin to the splendors of the moon, and even the sun is none too bright to suggest her complexion. In the Arabian Nights we read: "If I look upon the heaven methinks I see the sun fallen down to shine below, and thee whom I desire to shine in his place." A girl may, indeed, be superior to sun and moon, as we see in the same book: "The moon has only a few of her charms; the sun tried to vie with her but failed. Where has the sun hips like those of the queen of my heart?" An unanswerable argument, surely!

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

LOCKS AND FRAGRANCE

When William Allingham wrote: "Her hair's the brag of Ireland, so weighty and so fine," he followed in the wake of a hundred poets, who had made a girl's tresses the object of amorous hyperbole. Dianeme's "rich hair which wantons with the love-sick air" is a pretty conceit. The fanciful notion that a beautiful woman imparts her sweetness to the air, especially with the fragrance of her hair, occurs frequently in the poems of Hafiz and other Orientals. In one of these the poet chides the zephyr for having stolen its sweetness while playing with the beloved's loose tresses. In another, a youth declares that if he should die and the fragrance of his beloved's locks were wafted over his grave, it would bring him back to life. Ben Jonson's famous lines to Celia:

I sent thee late a rosy wreath, Not so much honoring thee As giving it a hope that there It could not withered be; But thou thereon did'st only breathe And sent'st it back to me; Since when it grows, and smells, I swear, Not of itself but thee!

are a free imitation of passages in the Love Letters (Nos. 30 and 31) of the Greek Philostratus: "Send me back some of the roses on which you slept. Their natural fragrance will have been increased by that which you imparted to them." This is a great improvement on the Persian poets who go into raptures over the fragrant locks of fair women, not for their inherent sweetness, however, but for the artificial perfumes used by them, including the disgusting musk! "Is a caravan laden with musk returning from Khoten?" sings one of these bards in describing the approach of his mistress.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

POETIC DESIRE FOR CONTACT

Besides such direct comparisons of feminine charms to flowers, to sun and moon and other beautiful objects of nature, amorous hyperbole has several other ways of expressing itself. The lover longs to be some article of dress that he might touch the beloved, or a bird that he might fly to her, or he fancies that all nature is love-sick in sympathy with him. Romeo's

See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O, that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek!

is varied in Heine's poem, where the lover wishes he were a stool for her feet to rest on, a cushion for her to stick pins in, or a curl-paper that he might whisper his secrets into her ears; and in Tennyson's dainty lines:

It is the miller's daughter, And she is grown so dear, so dear, That I would be the jewel That trembles at her ear; For hid in ringlets day and night I'd touch her neck so warm and white.

And I would be the girdle About her dainty, dainty waist, And her heart would beat against me In sorrow and in rest; And I should know if it beat right, I'd clasp it round so close and tight.

And I would be the necklace, And all day long to fall and rise Upon her balmy bosom With her laughter or her sighs, And I would be so light, so light, I scarce should be unclasped at night.

Herein, too, our modern poets were anticipated by the ancients. Anacreon wishes he were a mirror that he might reflect the image of his beloved; or the gown she wears every day; or the water that laves her limbs; or the balm that anoints her body; or the pearl that adorns her neck; or the cloth that covers her breast; or the shoes that are trodden by her feet.

The author of an anonymous poem in the Greek Anthology wishes he were a breath of air that he might be received in the bosom of his beloved; or a rose to be picked by her hand and fastened on her bosom. Others wish they were the water in the fountain from which a girl drinks, or a dolphin to carry her on its back, or the ring she wears. After the Hindoo Sakuntala has lost her ring in the river the poet expresses surprise that the ring should have been able to separate itself from that hand. The Cyclops of Theocritus wishes he had been born with the gills of a fish so that he might dive into the sea to visit the nymph Galatea and kiss her hands should her mouth be refused. One of the goatherds of the same bucolic poet wishes he were a bee that he might fly to the grotto of Amaryllis. From such fancies it is but a short step to the "were I a swallow, to her I would fly" of Heine and other modern poets.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

NATURE'S SYMPATHY WITH LOVERS

In the ecstasy of his feeling Rosalind's lover wants to have her name carved on every tree in the forest; but usually the lover assumes that all things in the forests, plants or animals, sympathize with him even without having his beloved's name thrust upon them.

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And, thou away, the very birds are mute; Or if they sing, 't is with so dull a cheer, That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.

"Why are the roses so pale?" asks Heine.

"Why are the violets so dumb in the green grass? Why does the lark's song seem so sad, and why have the flowers lost their fragrance? Why does the sun look down upon the meadows so cold and morose, and why is the earth so gray and desolate? Why am I ill and melancholy, and why, my love, did you leave me?"

In another poem Heine declares:

"If the flowers knew how deeply my heart is wounded, they would weep with me. If the nightingales knew how sad I am, they would cheer me with their refreshing song. If the golden stars knew my grief, they would come down from their heights to whisper consolation to me."

This phase of amorous hyperbole also was known to the ancient poets. Theocritus (VII., 74) relates that Daphnis was bewailed by the oaks that stood on the banks of the river, and Ovid (151) tells us, in Sappho's epistle to Phaon, that the leafless branches sighed over her hopeless love and the birds stopped their sweet song. Musaeus felt that the waters of the Hellespont were still lamenting the fate which overtook Leander as he swam toward the tower of Hero.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

ROMANTIC BUT NOT LOVING

If a romantic love-poem were necessarily a poem of romantic love, the specimens of amorous hyperbole cited in the preceding pages would indicate that the ancients knew love as we know it. In reality, however, there is not, in all the examples cited, the slightest evidence of genuine love. A passion which is merely sensual may inspire a gifted poet to the most extravagantly fanciful expressions of covetous admiration, and in all the cases cited there is nothing beyond such sensual admiration. An African Harari compares the girl he likes to "sweet milk fresh from the cow," and considers that coarse remark a compliment because he knows love only as an appetite. A gypsy poet compares the shoulders of his beloved to "wheat bread," and a Turkish poem eulogizes a girl for being like "bread fried in butter." (Ploss, L, 85, 89.)

The ancient poets had too much taste to reveal their amorous desires quite so bluntly as an appetite, yet they, too, never went beyond the confines of self-indulgence. When Propertius says a girl's cheeks are like roses floating on milk; when Tibullus declares another girl's eyes are bright enough to light a torch by; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim: "Surely you must carry about a bee on your lips, they are full of honey, your kisses wound"--what is all this except a revelation that the poet thinks the girl pretty, that her beauty gives him pleasure, and that he tries to express that pleasure by comparing her to some other object--sun, moon, honey, flowers--that pleases his senses? Nowhere is there the slightest indication that he is eager to give her pleasure, much less that he would be willing to sacrifice his own pleasures for her, as a mother, for instance, would for a child. His hyperboles, in a word, tell us not of love for another but of a self-love in which the other figures only as a means to an end, that end being his own gratification.

When Anacreon wishes he were the gown worn by a girl, or the water that laves her limbs, or the string of pearls around her neck, he does not indicate the least desire to make her happy, but an eagerness to please himself by coming in contact with her. The daintiest poetic conceit cannot conceal this blunt fact. Even the most fanciful of all forms of amorous hyperbole--that in which the lover imagines that all nature smiles or weeps with him--what is it but the most colossal egotism conceivable?

The amorous hyperbole of the ancients is romantic in the sense of fanciful, fictitious, extravagant, but not in the sense in which I oppose romantic love to selfish sensual infatuation. There is no intimation in it of those things that differentiate love from lust--the mental and moral charms of the women, or the adoration, sympathy, and affection, of the men. When one of Goethe's characters says: "My life began at the moment I fell in love with you;" or when one of Lessing's characters exclaims: "To live apart from her is inconceivable to me, would be my death"--we still hear the note of selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the result of a change in the way of regarding women. Where women are looked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbole cannot be sincere; it is either nothing but "spruce affectation" or else an illustration of the power of sensual love. No ancient author could have written what Emerson wrote in his essay on Love, of the visitations of a power which

"made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage.... When the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on.... When all business seemed an impertinence, and all men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

THE POWER OF LOVE

In the essay "On the Power of Love," to which I have referred in another place, Lichtenberg bluntly declared he did not believe that sentimental love could make a sensible adult person so extravagantly happy or unhappy as the poets would have us think, whereas he was ready to concede that the sexual appetite may become irresistible. Schopenhauer, on the contrary, held that sentimental love is the more powerful of the two passions. However this may be, either is strong enough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole in literature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, "speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love." "The major part of lovers," writes Robert Burton,

"are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace, danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow; yet this furious lust precipitates, counterpoiseth, weighs down on the other."

Professor Bain, discussing all the human emotions in a volume of 600 pages, declares, regarding love (138), that

"the excitement at its highest pitch, in the torrent of youthful sensations and ungratified desires is probably the most furious and elated experience of human nature."

In whatever sense we take this, as referring to sensual or sentimental love, or a combination of the two, it explains why erotic writers of all times make such lavish use of superlatives and exaggerations. Their strong feelings can only be expressed in strong language. "Beauty inflicts a wound sharper than any arrow," quoth Achilles Tatius. Meleager declares: "Even the winged Eros in the air became your prisoner, sweet Timarion, because your eye drew him down;" and in another place: "the cup is filled with joy because it is allowed to touch the beautiful lips of Zenophila. Would that she drank my soul in one draught, pressing firmly her lips on mine" (a passage which Tennyson imitated in "he once drew with one long kiss my whole soul through my lips"). "Not stone only, but steel would be melted by Eros," cried Antipater of Sidon. Burton tells of a cold bath that suddenly smoked and was very hot when Coelia came into it; and an anonymous modern poet cries:

Look yonder, where She washes in the lake! See while she swims, The water from her purer limbs New clearness take!

The Persian poet, Saadi, tells the story of a young enamoured Dervish who knew the whole Koran by heart, but forgot his very alphabet in presence of the princess. She tried to encourage him, but he only found tongue to say, "It is strange that with thee present I should have speech left me;" and having said that he uttered a loud groan and surrendered his soul up to God.

To lovers nothing seems impossible. They "vow to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers," as Troilus knew. Mephistopheles exclaims:

So ein verliebter Thor verpufft Euch Sonne, Mond und alle Sterne Zum Zeitvertreib dem Liebchen in die Luft.

(Your foolish lover squanders sun and moon and all the stars to entertain his darling for an hour.) Romantic hyperbole is the realism of love. The lover is blind as to the beloved's faults, and color-blind as to her merits, seeing them differently from normal persons and all in a rosy hue. She really seems to him superior to every one in the world, and he would be ready any moment to join the ranks of the mediaeval knights who translated amorous hyperbole into action, challenging every knight to battle unless he acknowledged the superior beauty of his lady. A great romancer is the lover; he retouches the negative of his beloved, in his imagination, removes freckles, moulds the nose, rounds the cheeks, refines the lips, and adds lustre to the eyes until his ideal is realized and he sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.

... For to be wise and love Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VII. PRIDE

I dare not ask a kiss, I dare not beg a smile, Lest having that or this I might grow proud the while. --Herrick.

Let fools great Cupid's yoke disdain, Loving their own wild freedom better, Whilst proud of my triumphant chain I sit, and court my beauteous fetter. --Beaumont.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

COMIC SIDE OF LOVE

"There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person beloved," said Bacon; "and therefore it is well said that it is impossible to love and be wise."

Like everything else in this world, love has its comic side. Nothing could be more amusing, surely, than the pride some men and women exhibit at having secured for life a mate whom most persons would not care to own a day. The idealizing process just described is responsible for this comedy; and a very useful thing it is, too; for did not the lover's fancy magnify the merits and minify the faults of the beloved, the number of marriages would not be so large as it is. Pride is a great match-maker. "It was a proud night with me," wrote Walter Scott,

"when I first found that a pretty young woman could think it worth her while to sit and talk with me hour after hour in a corner of the ball-room, while all the world were capering in our view."

Such an experience was enough to attune the heart-strings to love. The youth felt flattered, and flattery is the food of love.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

A MYSTERY EXPLAINED

Pride explains some of the greatest mysteries of love. "How could that woman have married such a manikin?" is a question one often hears. Money, rank, opportunity, lack of taste, account for much, but in many instances it was pride that first opened the heart to love; that is, pride was the first of the ingredients of love to capitulate, and the others followed suit. Probably that manikin was the first masculine being who ever showed her any attentions. "He appreciates me!" she mused. "I admire his taste--he is not like other men--I like him--I love him."

The compliment of a proposal touches a girl's pride and may prove the entering-wedge of love; hence the proverbial folly of accepting a girl's first refusal as final. And if she accepts, the thought that she, the most perfect being in the world, prefers him above all men, inflates his pride to the point of exultation; thenceforth he can talk and think only in "three pil'd hyperboles." He wants all the world to know how he has been distinguished. In a Japanese poem translated by Lafcadio Hearn (G.B.F., 38) a lover exclaims:

I cannot hide in my heart the happy knowledge that fills it; Asking each not to tell, I spread the news all round.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IMPORTANCE OF PRIDE

To realize fully how important an ingredient in love pride is, we need only consider the effect of a refusal. Of all the pangs that make up its agony none is keener than that of wounded pride or vanity. Hence the same lover who, if successful, wants all the world to know how he has been distinguished, is equally anxious, in case of a refusal, to keep it a secret. Schopenhauer went so far as to assert that both in the pain of unrequited love and the joy of success, vanity is a more important factor than the thwarting of sensual desires, because only a psychic disturbance can stir us so deeply.

Shakspere knew that while there are many kinds of pride, the best and deepest is that which a man feels in his love. Some, he says, glory in their birth, some in their skill, some in their wealth, some in their body's force, or their garments, or horses; but

All these I better in one general best, Thy love is better than high birth to me, Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost, Of more delight than hawks and horses be And having thee, of all men's pride I boast. --Sonnet XCI.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VARIETIES AND GERMS

While amorous pride has also an altruistic aspect in so far as the lover is proud not only of being chosen but also of another's perfections, it nevertheless belongs, in the main, in the egoistic group, and there is therefore no reason why we should not look for it in the lower stages of erotic evolution. Pride and vanity are feelings which characterize all grades of human beings from the highest to the lowest. As regards amorous pride, however, it is obvious that the conditions for its existence are not favorable among such aboriginals, e.g., as the Australians. What occasion is there for pride on the part of a man who exchanges his sister or daughter for another man's sister or daughter, or on the part of the female who is thus exchanged? An American Indian's pride consists not in having won the favor of one particular girl, but in having been able to buy or steal as many women as possible, married or unmarried; and the bride's pride is proportionate to her lover's prowess in this direction. I need not add that the pride at being a successful squaw-stealer differs not only in degree but in kind from the exultation of a white American lover at the thought that the most beautiful and perfect girl in the world has chosen him above all men as her sole and exclusive sweetheart.

Gibbs says (I., 197-200) of the Indians of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon that they usually seek their wives among other tribes than their own.

"It seems to be a matter of pride, in fact, to unite the blood of several different ones in their own persons. The expression, I am half Snokwalmu, half Klikatat, or some similar one, is of every-day occurrence. With the chiefs, this is almost always the case."

This feeling, however, is of a tribal kind, lacking the individuality of amorous pride. It would approach the latter if a chief won another chiefs daughter in the face of rivalry and felt elated at this feat. Such cases doubtless occur among the Indians.

Shooter gives an amusing account of how the African Kaffirs, when a girl is averse to a marriage, attempt to influence her feelings before resorting to compulsion.

"The first step is to speak well of the man in her presence; the Kraal conspire to praise him--her mother praises him--all the admirers of his cattle praise him--he was never so praised before."

If these praises make her feel proud at the thought of marrying such a man, all is well; if not, she has to suffer the consequences. It is not likely that this praising practice would prevail were it not sometimes successful.

If it ever is, we would have here a germ of amorous pride. Others may be found in Hindoo literature, as in Malati and Madhava, where the intermediary speaks of having dwelt on the lover's merits and rank in the presence of the heroine, in the hope of influencing her. "Extolling the lover's merits" is mentioned as one of the ten stages of love in the Hindoo ars amandi.

In Oriental countries in general, where it is difficult or impossible for young men and women to see one another before the wedding-day, the praising of candidates by and to intermediaries has been a general custom. Dr. T. Löbel (9-14) relates that before a Turk reaches the age of twenty-two his parents look about for a bride for him. They send out female friends and intermediaries who "praise and exaggerate the accomplishments of the young man" in houses where they suspect the presence of eligible girls. These female intermediaries are called kyz-görüdschü or "girl-seers." Having found a maiden that appears suitable, they exclaim, "What a lovely girl! She resembles an angel! What beautiful eyes! True gazelle-eyes! And her hair! Her teeth are like pearls." When the young man hears the reports of this beauty, he forthwith falls in love with her, and, although he has never seen her, declares he "will marry her and no other." A sense of humor is not given to every man: Dr. Löbel remarks seriously that this disproves the slanderous assertion so often made that the Turks are incapable of true love!

In their treatment and estimate of women the ancient Greeks resembled the modern Turks. The poets joined the philosophers in declaring that "nature herself," as Becker sums them up (Ill., 315), "assigned to woman a position far beneath man." As there is little occasion for pride in having won the favor of so inferior a being, the erotic literature of the Greeks is naturally not eloquent on this subject. Such evidence of amorous pride as we find in it, and in Roman poetry, is usually in connection with mercenary women. The poets, being poor, had only one way of winning the favor of these wantons: they could celebrate their charms in verse. This aroused the pride of the hetairai, and their grateful caresses made the poets proud at having a means of winning favor more powerful even than money. But with genuine love these feelings have nothing to do.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS OF LOVE

In common with ambition and other strong passions, love has the power of changing a man's character for the time being. One of the speakers in Plutarch's dialogue on love ([Greek: Erotikos], 17) declares that every lover becomes generous and magnanimous, though he may have been niggardly before; but, characteristically enough, it is the love for boys, not for women, that is referred to. A modern lover is affected that way by love for women. He feels proud of being distinguished by the preference of such a girl, and on the principle of noblesse oblige, he tries to become worthy of her. This love makes the cowardly brave, the weak strong, the dull witty, the prosy poetic, the slouches tidy. Burton glows eloquent on this subject (Ill., 2), confounding, as usual, love with lust. Ovid notes that when Polyphemus courted Galatea the desire to please made him arrange his hair and beard, using the water as a mirror; wherein the Roman poet shows a keener sense of the effect of infatuation than his Greek predecessor, Theocritus, who (Id., XIV.) describes the enamoured Aischines as going about with beard neglected and hair dishevelled; or than Callimachus, concerning whose love-story of Acontius and Cydippe Mahaffy says (G. L. and T., 239):

"The pangs of the lover are described just as they are described in the case of his [Shakspere's] Orlando--dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes, disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit of writing the girl's name on every tree--symptoms which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because they found them in literature, and thought them the spontaneous expression of the grief of love, while they were really the artificial invention of Callimachus and his school, who thus fathered them upon human nature."

Professor Mahaffy overlooks, however, an important distinction which Shakspere makes. The witty Rosalind declares to Orlando, in her bantering way, that

"there is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving 'Rosalind' on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind ... he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him."

And when Orlando claims that he is that man, she replies, "There is none of my uncle's marks upon you; he taught me to know a man in love."

Orlando: "What were his marks?"

Rosalind:

"A lean cheek, which you have not, a blue eye and sunken, which you have not ... a beard neglected, which you have not ... Then your hose should be ungartered, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation."

Shakspere knew that love makes a man tidy, not untidy, hence Rosalind fails to find the artificial Greek symptoms of love in Orlando, while she admits that he carves her name on trees and hangs poems on them; acts of which lovers are quite capable. In Japan it is a national custom to hang love-poems on trees.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VIII. SYMPATHY

"Egotism," wrote Schopenhauer

"is a colossal thing; it overtops the world. For, if every individual had the choice between his own destruction and that of every other person in the world, I need not say what the decision would be in the vast majority of cases."

"Many a man," he declares on another page,[22] "would be capable of killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he would have been fully justified in this doubt. An Australian has been known to bait his fish-hook with his own child when no other meat was at hand; and murders committed for equally trivial and selfish reasons are every-day affairs among wild tribes.

EGOTISM, NAKED OK MASKED

Egoism manifests itself in a thousand different ways, often in subtle disguise. Its greatest triumph lies in its having succeeded up to the present day in masquerading as love. Not only many modern egotists, but ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans, barbarians and savages, have been credited with love when in reality they manifested nothing but sexual self-love, the woman in the case being valued only as an object without which the beloved Ego could not have its selfish indulgence. By way of example let us take what Pallas says in his work on Russia (III., 70) of the Samoyedes:

"The wretched women of this nomadic people are obliged not only to do all the house-work, but to take down and erect the huts, pack and unpack the sleigh, and at the same time perform slavish duties for their husbands, who, except on a few amorous evenings, hardly bestow on them a look or a pleasant word, while expecting them to anticipate all their desires."

The typical shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much to prevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if he happened to see a Samoyede on one of these "amorous evenings," that he "loved" his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse that he loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means of gratifying his selfish appetites. In the preceding pages I endeavored to show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman, individual preference, monopolism, jealousy, hope and despair and hyperbolic expression of feeling, yet without giving the slightest indication of love--that is, of affection--for her. It is all egoism, and egoism is the antipode of love, which is a phase of altruism. Not that these selfish ingredients are absent in genuine love. Romantic love embraces both selfish and altruistic elements, but the former are subdued and overpowered by the latter, and sexual passion is not love unless the altruistic ingredients are present. It is these altruistic ingredients that we must now consider, beginning with sympathy, which is the entering wedge of altruism.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

DELIGHT IN THE TORTURE OF OTHERS

Sympathy means sharing the pains and pleasures of another--feeling the other's joys and sorrows as if they were our own, and therefore an eagerness to diminish the other's pains and increase the pleasures. Does uncivilized man exhibit this feeling? On the contrary, he gloats over another's anguish, while the other's joys arouse his envy. Pity for suffering men and animals does not exist in the lower strata of humanity. Monteiro says (A. and C., 134) that the negro

"has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or compassion for suffering. A fellow-creature, or animal, writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highly provocative of merriment and enjoyment. I have seen a number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children, stand round, roaring with laughter, at seeing a poor mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and roll about in agony on the ground till a white man put it out of its misery."

Cozzens relates (129-30) an instance of Indian cruelty which he witnessed among the Apaches. A mule, with his feet tied, was thrown on the ground. Thereupon two of these savages advanced and commenced with knives to cut the meat from the thighs and fleshy parts of the animal in large chunks, while the poor creature uttered the most terrible cries. Not till the meat had been cut clean to the bone did they kill the beast. And this hideous cruelty was inflicted for no other reason than because meat cut from a live animal "was considered more tender," Custer, who knew the Indian well, describes him as "a savage in every sense of the word; one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds that of any wild beast of the desert." In the Jesuit Relations (Vol. XIII., 61) it takes ten pages to describe the tortures inflicted by the Hurons on a captive. Theodore Roosevelt writes in his Winning of the West (I., 95):

"The nature of the wild Indians has not changed. Not one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot so much as look another in the face and speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out--these tortures can be mentioned, but there are others, equally normal and customary, which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims."

In his famous book, The Jesuits in North America, the historian Parkman gives many harrowing details of Indian cruelty toward prisoners; harmless women and children being subjected to the same fiendish tortures as the men. On one occasion he relates of the Iroquois (285) that

"they planted stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace, and bound to them those of their prisoners whom they meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old age to infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side. Then, as they retreated, they set the town on fire, and laughed with savage glee at the shrieks of anguish that rose from the blazing dwellings."

On page 248 he relates another typical instance of Iroquois cruelty. Among their prisoners

"were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt, their captors took the infants from them, tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter."

Later on all the prisoners were subjected to further tortures

"designed to cause all possible suffering without touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, cutting off their fingers with clamshells, scorching them with firebrands, and other indescribable tortures."

They cut off the breasts of one of the women and compelled her to eat them. Then all the women were stripped naked, and forced to dance to the singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of the crowd.

If anyone in this hostile crowd had shown the slightest sympathy with the victims of this satanic cruelty, he would have been laughed at and insulted; for to the American Indians ferocity was a virtue, while "pity was a cowardly weakness at which their pride revolted." They were deliberately trained to cruelty from infancy, children being taught to break the legs of animals and otherwise to torture them. Nor were the women less ferocious than the men; indeed, when it came to torturing prisoners, the squaws often led the men. In the face of such facts, it seems almost like mockery to ask if these Indians were capable of falling in love. Could a Huron to whom cruelty was a virtue, a duty, and whose chief delight was the torture of men and women or animals, have harbored in his mind such a delicate, altruistic sentiment as romantic love, based on sympathy with another's joys and sorrows? You might as well expect a tiger to make romantic love to the Bengal maiden he has carried into the jungle for his supper. Cruelty is not incompatible with appetite, but it is a fatal obstacle to love based on affection. Facts prove this natural inference. The Iroquois girls were coarse wantons who indulged in free lust before marriage, and for whom the men felt such passion as is possible under the circumstances.

The absurdity of the claim that these cruel Indians felt love is made more glaringly obvious if we take a case nearer home; imagining a neighbor guilty of torturing harmless captive women with the obscene cruelty of the Indians, and yet attributing to him a capacity for refined love! The Indians would honor such a man as a colleague and hero; we should send him to the penitentiary, the gallows, or the madhouse.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING

It would be foolish to retort that the savage's delight in the torture of others is manifested only in the case of his enemies, for that is not true; and where he does not directly exult over the sufferings of others, he still shows his lack of sympathy by his indifference to those sufferings, often even in the case of his nearest relatives. The African explorer Andersson (O.R., 156) describes the "heart-rendering sorrow--at least outwardly," of a Damara woman whose husband had been killed by a rhinoceros, and who wailed in a most melancholy way:

"I heartily sympathized with her, and I am sure I was the only person present of all the members assembled ... who at all felt for her lonely condition. Many a laugh was heard, but no one looked sad. No one asked or cared about the man, but each and all made anxious inquiries after the rhinoceros--such is the life of barbarians. Oh, ye sentimentalists of the Rousseau school--for some such still remain--witness what I have witnessed, and do witness daily, and you will soon cease to envy and praise the life of the savages."

"A sick person," writes Galton (190), "meets with no compassion; he is pushed out of his hut by his relations away from the fire into the cold; they do all they can to expedite his death, and when he appears to be dying, they heap oxhides over him till he is suffocated. Very few Damaras die a natural death."

In his book on the Indian Tribes of Guiana (151, 225) the Rev. W.H. Brett gives two typical instances of the lack of sympathy in the New World. The first is that of a poor young girl who was dreadfully burnt by lying in a hammock when it caught fire:

"She seemed a very meek and patient child, and her look of gratitude for our sympathy was most affecting. Her friends, however, took no trouble about her, and she probably died soon after."

The second case is that of an Arawak boy who, during a canoe voyage, was seized with cholera. The Indians simply cast him on the edge of the shore, to be drowned by the rising tide.

Going to the other end of the continent we find Le Jeune writing of the Canadian Indians (in the Jesuit Relations, VI., 245): "These people are very little moved by compassion. They give the sick food and drink, but otherwise show no regard for them." In the second volume of the Relations (15) the missionary writer tells of a sick girl of nine, reduced to skin and bone. He asked the permission of the parents to baptize her, and they answered that he might take her and keep her, "for to them she was no better than a dead dog." And again (93) we read that in case of illness "they soon abandon those whose recovery is deemed hopeless."

Crossing the Continent to California we find in Powers (118) a pathetic account of the lack of filial piety, or sympathy with old age, which, he says, is peculiar to Indians in general. After a man has ceased to be useful as a warrior, though he may have been a hero of a hundred battles, he is compelled to go with his sons into the forest and bear home on his poor old shoulders the game they have killed. He totters along behind them "almost crushed to earth beneath a burden which their unencumbered strength is greatly more able to support, but they touch it not with so much as one of their fingers."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

EXPOSING THE SICK AND AGED

"The Gallinomeros kill their aged parents in a most coldblooded manner," says Bancroft (I., 390), and this custom, too, prevails on both sides of the Continent. The Canadians, according to Lalemant (Jesuit Relations, IV., 199),

"kill their fathers and mothers when they are so old that they can walk no longer, thinking that they are thus doing them a good service; for otherwise they would be compelled to die of hunger, as they have become unable to follow others when they change their location."

Henry Norman, in his book on the Far East, explains (553) why so few deaf, blind, and idiots are found among savages: they are destroyed or left to perish. Sutherland, in studying the custom of killing the aged and diseased, or leaving them to die of exposure, found express testimony to the prevalence of this loveless habit in twenty-eight different races of savages, and found it denied of only one. Lewis and Clarke give a list of Indian tribes by whom the aged were abandoned to starvation (II., Chap. 7), adding:

"Yet in their villages we saw no want of kindness to the aged: on the contrary, probably because in villages the means of more abundant subsistence renders such cruelty unnecessary, old people appeared to be treated with attention."

But it is obvious that kindness which does not go beyond the point where it interferes with our own comfort, is not true altruism. If one of two men who are perishing of thirst in the desert finds a cupful of water and shares it with the other, he shows sympathy; but if he finds a whole spring and shares it with the companion, his action does not deserve that name. It would be superfluous to make this remark were it not that the sentimentalists are constantly pointing to such sharing of abundance as evidence of sympathetic kindness. There is a whole volume of philosophy in Bates's remark (293) concerning Brazilian Indians: "The good-fellowship of our Cucámas seemed to arise, not from warm sympathy, but simply from the absence of eager selfishness in small matters." The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune devotes a whole chapter (V., 229-31) to such good qualities as he could find among the Canadian Indians. He is just to the point of generosity, but he is compelled to end with these words: "And yet I would not dare to assert that I have seen one act of real moral virtue in a savage. They have nothing but their own pleasure and satisfaction in view."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

BIRTH OF SYMPATHY

Schoolcraft relates a story of an Indian girl who saved her aged father's life by carrying him on her back to the new camping-place (Oneota, 88). Now Schoolcraft is not a witness on whom one can rely safely, and his case could be accepted as an illustration of an aboriginal trait only if it had been shown that the girl in question had never been subject to missionary influences. Nevertheless, such an act of filial devotion may well have occurred on the part of a woman. It was in a woman's heart that human sympathy was first born --together with her child. The helpless infant could not have survived without her sympathetic care, hence there was an important use for womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow, while man, immersed in wars and selfish struggles, remained hard of heart and knew not tenderness.

Yet in woman, too, the growth of sympathy was painfully slow. The practice of infanticide, for selfish reasons, was, as we shall see in later chapters, horribly prevalent among many of the lower races, and even where the young were tenderly reared, the feeling toward them was hardly what we call affection--a conscious, enduring devotion--but a sort of animal instinct which is shared by tigers and other fierce and cruel animals, and which endures but a short time. In Agassiz's book on Brazil we read (373), that the Indians "are cold in their family affections; and though the mothers are very fond of their babies, they seem comparatively indifferent to them as they grow up." As an illustration of this trait Agassiz mentions a sight he witnessed one day. A child who was to be taken far away to Rio stood on the deck crying, "while the whole family put off in a canoe, talking and laughing gaily, without showing him the least sympathy."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

WOMEN CRUELER THAN MEN

Apart from instinctive maternal love, sympathy appears to be as far to seek in the savage women as in the men. Authorities agree that in respect of cruelty the squaws even surpass the warriors. Thus Le Jeune attests (Jes. Rel., VI., 245), that among the Canadians the women were crueler toward captives than the men. In another place (V., 29), he writes that when prisoners were tortured the women and girls "blew and drove the flames over in their direction to burn them." In every Huron town, says Parkman (Jes. in N.A., XXXIV.), there were old squaws who "in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the men." The same is asserted of the Comanche women, who "delight in torturing the male prisoners." Concerning Chippewa war captives, Keating says (I., 173): "The marriageable women are reduced to servitude and are treated with great cruelty by the squaws." Among the Creeks the women even used to pay a premium of tobacco for the privilege of whipping prisoners of war (Schoolcraft, V., 280). These are typical instances. In Patagonia, writes Falkner (97), the Indian women follow their husbands, armed with clubs, sometimes and swords, and ravage and plunder the houses of everything they can find. Powers relates that when California Indians get too old to fight they have to assist the women in their drudgery. Thereupon the women, instead of setting them a good example by showing sympathy for their weakness, take their revenge and make them feel their humiliation keenly. Obviously among these savages, cruelty and ferocity have no sex, wherefore it would be as useless in one sex as in the other to seek for that sympathy which is an ingredient and a condition of romantic love.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

PLATO DENOUNCES SYMPATHY

From a Canadian Indian to a Greek philosopher it seems a far cry; yet the transition is easy and natural. To the Indian, as Parkman points out, "pity was a cowardly weakness," to be sternly repressed as unworthy of a man. Plato, for his part, wanted to banish poetry from his ideal republic because it overwhelms our feelings and makes us give way to sympathies which in real life our pride causes us to repress and which are "deemed the part of a woman" (Repub., X., 665). As for the special form of sympathy which enters into the nobler phases of the love between men and women--fusing their hearts and blending their souls--Plato's inability to appreciate such a thing may be inferred from the fact that in this same ideal republic he wanted to abolish the marriage even of individual bodies. Of the marriage of souls he, like the other Greeks, knew nothing. To him, as to his countrymen in general, love between man and woman was mere animal passion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, or friendship, or to filial, parental, or brotherly love.

From the point of view of sympathy, the difference between ancient passion and modern love is admirably revealed in Wagner's Tannhäuser. As I have summed it up elsewhere[23]:

"Venus shares only the joys of Tannhäuser, while Elizabeth is ready to suffer with him. Venus is carnal and selfish, Elizabeth affectionate and self-sacrificing. Venus degrades, Elizabeth ennobles; the depth of her love atones for the shallow, sinful infatuation of Tannhäuser. The abandoned Venus threatens revenge, the forsaken Elizabeth dies of grief."

There are stories of wifely devotion in Greek literature, but, like Oriental stories of the same kind (especially in India) they have a suspicious appearance of having been invented as object-lessons for wives, to render them more subservient to the selfish wishes of the husbands. Plutarch counsels a wife to share her husband's joys and sorrows, laugh when he laughs, weep when he weeps; but he fails to suggest the virtue of reciprocal sympathy on the husband's part; yet Plutarch had much higher notions regarding conjugal life than most of the Greeks. An approximation to the modern ideal is found only when we consider the curious Greek adoration of boys. Callicratides, in Lucian's [Greek: Erotes], after expressing his contempt for women and their ways, contrasts with them the manners of a well-bred youth who spends his time associating with poets and philosophers, or taking gymnastic and military exercises. "Who would not like," he continues,

"to sit opposite such a boy, hear him talk, share his labors, walk with him, nurse him in illness, go to sea with him, share darkness and chains with him if necessary? Those who hated him should be my enemies, those who loved him my friends. When he dies, I too should wish to die, and one grave should cover us."

Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism. Callicratides does not say he will die for the other, or that the other's pleasures are to him more important than his own.[24]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

SHAM ALTRUISM IN INDIA

India is generally credited with having known and practised altruism long before Christ came to preach it. Kalidasa anticipates a modern idea when he remarks, in Sakuntala, that "Among persons who are very fond of each other, grief shared is grief halved." India, too, is famed for its monks or penitents, who were bidden to be compassionate to all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless those that cursed them (Mann, VI., 48). But in reality the penitents were actuated by the most selfish of motives; they believed that by obeying those precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they would get such power that even the gods would dread them; and the Sanscrit dramas are full of illustrations of the detestably selfish use they made of the power thus acquired. In Sakuntala we read how a poor girl's whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one of these "saints," for the trivial reason that, being absorbed in thoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to his personal comforts at once; while Kausika's Rage illustrates the diabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes a king and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations. It is possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest and having no other companions, learned to love the animals that came to see them; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos in general is merely a matter of superstition and not an outcome of sympathy. He has not even a fellow-feeling for suffering human beings. How far he was from realizing Christ's "blessed are the merciful," may be inferred from what the Abbé Dubois says:

"The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his heart. He will see an unhappy being perish on the road, or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste; and will not stir to help him to a drop of water, though it were to save his life."

"To kill a cow," says the same writer (I., 176), "is a crime which the Hindoo laws punish with death;" and these same Hindoos treat women, especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd to suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be actuated by sympathy in their devout attitude toward some animals. Superstition is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person who kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive. In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally. What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such superstitions:

"The enraged multitude did not wait for the slow process of law, but put the offender to death with their own hands." At the same time some animals "which were deemed divinities in one home, were treated as nuisances and destroyed in others." (Kendrick, II., I-21.)

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

EVOLUTION OF SYMPATHY

If we study the evolution of human sympathy we find that it begins, not in reference to animals but to human beings. The first stage is a mother's feeling going out to her child. Next, the family as a whole is included, and then the tribe. An Australian kills, as a matter of course, everyone he comes across in the wilderness not belonging to his tribe. To the present day race hatred, jingoism, and religious differences obstruct the growth of cosmopolitan sympathy such as Christ demanded. His religion has done much, however, to widen the circle of sympathy and to make known its ravishing delights. The doctrine that it is more blessed to give than to receive is literally true for those who are of a sympathetic disposition. Parents enjoy the pleasures of their children as they never did their own egotistic delights. In various ways sympathy has continued to grow, and at the present day the most refined and tender men and women include animals within the range of their pity and affection. We organize societies for their protection, and we protest against the slaughter of birds that live on islands, thousands of miles away. Our imagination has become so sensitive and vivid that it gives us a keen pang to think of the happy lives of these birds as being ruthlessly cut short and their young left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation. If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom Burton wrote in his Two Trips to Gorilla Land, that "Cruelty seems to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death"--we need no other argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic love, because that implies a capacity for the tenderest and subtlest sympathy. I would sooner believe a tiger capable of such love than a savage, for the tiger practises cruelty unconsciously and accidentally while in quest of food, whereas the primitive man indulges in cruelty for cruelty's sake, and for the delight it gives him. We have here one more illustration of the change and growth of sentiments. Man's emotions develop as well as his reasoning powers, and one might as well expect an Australian, who cannot count five, to solve a problem in trigonometry as to love a woman as we love her.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

AMOROUS SYMPATHY

In romantic love altruism reaches its climax. Turgenieff did not exaggerate when he said that "it is in a man really in love as if his personality were eliminated." Genuine love makes a man shed egoism as a snake sheds its skin. His one thought is: "How can I make her happy and save her from grief" at whatever cost to his own comfort. Amorous sympathy implies a complete self-surrender, an exchange of personalities:

My true love hath my heart, and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given. --Sidney.

It is the secret sympathy, The silver link, the silken tie, Which heart to heart, and mind to mind, In body and in soul can bind. --Scott.

To a woman who wishes to be loved truly and permanently, a sympathetic disposition is as essential as modesty, and more essential than beauty. The author of Love Affairs of Some Famous Men has wittily remarked that "Love at first sight is easy enough; what a girl wants is a man who can love her when he sees her every day." That, he might have added, is impossible unless she can enter into another's joys and sorrows. Many a spark of love kindled at sight of a pretty face and bright eyes is extinguished after a short acquaintance which reveals a cold and selfish character. A man feels instinctively that a girl who is not a sympathetic sweetheart will not be a sympathetic wife and mother, so he turns his attention elsewhere. Selfishness in a man is perhaps a degree less offensive, because competition and the struggle for existence necessarily foster it; yet a man who does not merge his personality in that of his chosen girl is not truly in love, however much he may be infatuated. There can be sympathy without love, but no love without sympathy. It is an essential ingredient, an absolute test, of romantic love.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IX. ADORATION

Silvius, in As You Like It, says that love is "all adoration," and in Twelfth Night, when Olivia asks: "How does he love me?" Viola answers: "With adorations." Romeo asks: "What shall I swear by?" and Juliet replies:

Do not swear at all; Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, Which is the god of my idolatry, And I'll believe thee.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

DEIFICATION OF PERSONS

Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the "deification of persons," and that women adore as well as men. Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well, says of her love for Bertram:

Thus, Indian-like Religious in mine error, I adore The sun that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more.

"Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modern lover is like a sculptor who takes an ordinary block of marble and carves a goddess out of it. His belief that his idol is a living goddess is, of course, an illusion, but the feeling is real, however fantastic and romantic it may seem. He is so thoroughly convinced of the incomparable superiority of his chosen divinity that "it is marvellous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is in a panic when he thinks of it," as Charles Dudley Warner puts it. Ouida speaks of "the graceful hypocrisies of courtship," 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 associated 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 buttons 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. God 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 sex. The lover worships 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.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

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-worship 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 worship, 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 attitude 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 gods 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 sex 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 classes 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 Abbé 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 Japanese, 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 Japanese (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 Japan. Some years afterward six of the chief literati of the old school translated this introduction into Japanese. 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,

"has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any generous European heart.... At the present moment the greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still her husband's drudge. She fetches and carries for him, bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth on his walks abroad, waits upon him at meals, may be divorced at his good pleasure."

This testimony regarding a nation which in some things--especially aesthetic culture and general courteousness--surpasses Europe and America, is of special value, as it shows that love, based on sympathy with women's joys and sorrows, and adoration of their peculiar qualities, is everywhere the last flower of civilization, and not, as the sentimentalists claim, the first. If even the advanced Japanese are unable to feel romantic love--for you cannot adore what you egotistically look down on--it is absurd to look for it among barbarians and savages, such as the Fuegians, who, in times of necessity, eat their old women, or the Australians, among whom not many women are allowed to die a natural death, "they being generally despatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good food may not be lost."[27]

There are some apparent exceptions to the universal contempt for females even among cannibals. Thus it is known that the Peruvian Casibos never eat women. It is natural to jump to the conclusion that this is due to respect for the female sex. It is, however, as Tschudi shows, assignable to exactly the opposite feeling:

"All the South American Indians, who still remain under the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated to injure them. Among a few of the less rude nations this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a certain unconquerable contempt of females. With the anthropophagi the feeling extends, fortunately, to their flesh, which is held to be poisonous."

The Caribs had a different reason for making it unlawful to eat women. "Those who were captured," says P. Martyr, "were kept for breeding, as we keep fowl, etc," Sir Samuel Baker relates (A.N., 240), that among the Latookas it was considered a disgrace to kill a woman--not, however, because of any respect felt for the sex, but because of the scarcity and money value of women.

HOMAGES TO PRIESTESSES

Equally deceptive are all other apparent exceptions to the customary contempt for women. While the women of Fiji, Tonga, and other islands of the Pacific were excluded from all religious worship, and Papuan females were not even allowed to approach a temple, it is not uncommon among the inferior races for women to be priestesses. Bosnian relates (363) that on the African Slave Coast the women who served as priestesses enjoyed absolute sway over their husbands, who were in the habit of serving them on their knees. This, however, was contrary to the general rule, wherefore it is obvious that the homage was not to the woman as such, but to the priestess. The feeling inspired in such cases is, moreover, fear rather than respect; the priestess among savages is a sorceress, usually an old woman whose charms have faded, and who has no other way of asserting herself than by assuming a pretence to supernatural powers and making herself feared as a sorceress. Hysterical persons are believed by savages to be possessed of spirits, and as women are specially liable to hysteria and to hallucinations, it was natural that they should be held eligible for priestly duties. Consequently, if there was any respect involved here at all, it was for an infirmity, not for a virtue--a result of superstition, not of appreciation or admiration of special feminine qualities.[28]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

KINSHIP THROUGH FEMALES ONLY

Dire confusion regarding woman's status has been created in many minds by three distinct ethnologic phenomena, which are, moreover, often confounded: (1) kinship and heredity through females; (2) matriarchy, or woman's rule in the family (domestic); (3) gynaicocracy, or woman's rule in the tribe (political).

(1) It is a remarkable fact that among many tribes, especially in Australia, America, and Africa, children are named after their mother, while rank and property, too, are often inherited in the female line of descent. Lafitau observed this custom among American Indians more than a century ago, and in 1861 a Swiss jurist, Bachofen, published a book in which he tried to prove, with reference to this "kinship through mothers only," that it indicated that there was a time when women everywhere ruled over men. A study of ethnologic data shows, however, that this inference is absolutely unwarranted by the facts. In Australia, for instance, where children are most commonly named after their mother's clan, there is no trace of woman's rule over man, either in the present or the past. The man treats the woman as a master treats his slaves, and is complete master of her children. Cunow, an authority on Australian relationships, remarks (136):

"Nothing could be more perverse than to infer from the custom of reasoning kinship through females, that woman rules there, and that a father is not master of his children. On the contrary, the father regards himself everywhere, even in tribes with a female line of descent, as the real procreator. He is considered to be the one who plants the germ and the woman as merely the soil in which it grows. And as the wife belongs to him, so does the child that comes from her womb. Therefore he claims also those children of his wife concerning whom he knows or assumes that he did not beget them; for they grew on his soil."

Similarly with the American Indians. Grosse has devoted several pages (73-80) to show that with the tribes among which kinship through females prevails woman's position is not in the least better than with the others. Everywhere woman is bought, obliged to submit to polygamy, compelled to do the hardest and least honorable work, and often treated worse than a dog. The same is true of the African tribes among whom kinship in the female line prevails.

If, therefore, kinship through mothers does not argue female supremacy, how did that kinship arise? Le Jeune offered a plausible explanation as long ago as 1632. In the Jesuit Relations (VI., 255), after describing the immorality of the Indians, he goes on to say:

"As these people are well aware of this corruption, they prefer to take the children of their sisters as heirs, rather than their own, or than those of their brothers, calling in question the fidelity of their wives, and being unable to doubt that these nephews come from their own blood. Also among the Hurons--who are more licentious than our Montagnais, because they are better fed--it is not the child of a captain but his sister's son, who succeeds the father."

The same explanation has been advanced by other writers and by the natives of other countries where kinship through females prevails;[29] and it doubtless holds true in many cases.

In others the custom of naming children after their mothers is probably simply a result of the fact that a child is always more closely associated with the mother than with the father. She brings it into the world, suckles it, and watches over it; in the primitive times, even if promiscuity was not prevalent, marriages were of short duration and divorces frequent, wherefore the male parentage would be so constantly in doubt that the only feasible thing was to name the children after their mothers. For our purposes, fortunately, this knotty problem of the origin of kinship through females, which has given sociologists so much trouble,[30] does not need to be solved. We are concerned solely with the question, "Does kinship in the female line indicate the supremacy of women, or their respectful treatment?" and that question, as we have seen, must be answered with a most emphatic No. There is not a single fact to bear out the theory that man's rule was ever preceded by a period when woman ruled. The lower we descend, the more absolute and cruelly selfish do we find man's rule over woman. The stronger sex everywhere reduces the weaker to practical slavery and holds it in contempt. Primitive woman has not yet developed these qualities in which her peculiar strength lies, and if she had, the men would be too coarse to appreciate them.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

WOMAN'S DOMESTIC RULE

(2) As we ascend in the scale we find a few cases where women rule or at least share the rule with the men; but these occur not among savages but with the lower and higher barbarians, and at the same time they are, as Grosse remarks (161), "among the scarcest curiosities of ethnology." The Garos of Assam have women at the head of their clans. Dyak women are consulted in political matters and have equal rights with the men. Macassar women in Celebes also are consulted as regards public affairs, and frequently ascend the throne. A few similar cases have been noted in Africa, where, e.g., the princesses of the Ashantees domineer over their husbands; but these apply only to the ruling class, and do not concern the sex as a whole. Some strange tales of masculine submission in Nicaragua are told by Herrera. But the best-known instance is that of the Iroquois and Hurons. Their women, as Lafitau relates (I., 71), owned the land, and the crops, they decided upon peace or war, took charge of slaves, and made marriages. The Huron Wyandots had a political council consisting of four women. The Iroquois Seneca women could chase lazy husbands from the premises, and could even depose a chief. Yet these cases are not conclusive as to the real status of the women in the tribe. The facts cited are, as John Fiske remarks (Disc. Amer., I., 68), "not incompatible with the subjection of women to extreme drudgery and ill-treatment." Charlevoix, one of the eye-witnesses to these exceptional privileges granted to some Indian women, declares expressly that their domination was illusory; that they were, at home, the slaves of their husbands; that the men despised them thoroughly, and that the epithet "woman" was an insult.[31] And Morgan, who made such a thorough study of the Iroquois, declares (322) that "the Indian regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man, and, from nature and habit, she actually considered herself to be so." The two honorable employments among Indians were war and hunting, and these were reserved for the men. Other employments were considered degrading and were therefore gallantly reserved for the women.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

WOMAN'S POLITICAL RULE

Comanche Indians, who treated their squaws with especial contempt, nevertheless would not hesitate on occasion to submit to the rule of a female chief (Bancroft, I., 509); and the same is true of other tribes in America, Africa, etc. (Grosse, 163). In this respect, barbarians do not differ from civilized races; queenship is a question of blood or family and tells us nothing whatever about the status of women in general. As regards the "equal rights" of the Dyak women just referred to, if they really have them, it is not as women, but as men, that is, in so far as they have become like men. This we see from what Schwaner says (I., 161) of the tribes in the Southeast:

"The women are allowed great privileges and liberties. Not infrequently they rule at home and over whole tribes with manly power, incite to war, and often personally lead the men to battle."

Honors paid to such viragoes are honors to masculinity, not to femininity.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

GREEK ESTIMATE OF WOMEN

Here again the transition from the barbarian to the Greek is easy and natural. The ancient Greek looked down on women as women. "One man," exclaims Iphigenia in Euripides, "is worth more than ten thousand women." There were, of course, certain virtues that were esteemed in women, but these, as Becker has said, differed but little from those required of an obedient slave. It is only in so far as women displayed masculine qualities that they were held worthy of higher honor. The heroines of Plutarch's essay on "The Virtues of Women" are women who are praised for patriotic, soldier-like qualities, and actions. Plato believed that men who were bad in this life would, on their next birth, be women. The elevation of women, he held, could be best accomplished by bringing them up to be like men. But this matter will be discussed more fully in the chapter on Greece, as will that of the adulation which was paid to wanton women by Greek and Roman poets, and which has been often mistaken for adoration. George Eliot speaks of "that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself." No Greek ever felt a woman to be "greater and better than himself," wherefore true adoration--the deification of persons--was out of the question. But there was no reason why a Greek or Roman should not have indulged in servile flattery and hypocritical praise for the selfish purpose of securing the carnal favors of a mercenarily coy courtesan. He was capable of adulation but not of adoration, for one cannot adore a slave, a drudge or a wanton. The author of the Lover's Lexicon claims, indeed, that "love can and does exist without respect," but that is false. Infatuation of the senses may exist without respect, but refined, sentimental love is blighted by the discovery of impurity or vulgarity. Adoration is essential to true love, and adoration includes respect.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

MAN-WORSHIP AND CHRISTIANITY

If we must, therefore, conclude that man in primitive and ancient times was unable to feel that love of which adoration is an essential ingredient, how is it with women? From the earliest times, have they not been taught, with club and otherwise, to look up to man as a superior being, and did not this enable them to adore him with true love? No, for primitive women, though they might fear or admire man for his superior power, were too coarse, obscene, ignorant, and degraded--being as a rule even lower than the men--to be able to share even a single ingredient of the refined love that we experience. At the same time it may be said (though it sounds sarcastic) that woman had a natural advantage over man in being gradually trained to an attitude of devotion. Just as the care of her infants taught her sympathy, so the daily inculcated duty of sacrificing herself for her lord and master fostered the germs of adoration. Consequently we find at more advanced stages of civilization, like those represented by India, Greece, and Japan, that whenever we come across a story whose spirit approaches the modern idea of love, the embodiment of that love is nearly always a woman. Woman had been taught to worship man while he still wallowed in the mire of masculine selfishness and despised her as an inferior. And to the present day, though it is not considered decorous for young women to reveal their feelings till after marriage or engagement, they adore their chosen ones:

For love's insinuating fire they fan With sweet ideas of a god like man.

In this respect, as in so many others, woman has led civilization. Man, too, gradually learned to doff his selfishness, and to respect and adore women, but it took many centuries to accomplish the change, which was due largely to the influence of Christ's teachings. As long as the aggressive masculine virtues alone were respected, feminine gentleness and pity could not but be despised as virtues of a lower grade, if virtues at all. But as war became less and less the sole or chief occupation of the best men, the feminine virtues, and those who exercised them, claimed and received a larger share of respect.

Christianity emphasized and honored the feminine virtues of patience, meekness, humility, compassion, gentleness, and thus helped to place women on a level with man, and in the noblest of moral qualities even above him. Mariolatry, too, exerted a great influence. The worship of one immaculate woman gradually taught men to respect and adore other women, and as a matter of course, it was the lover who found it easiest to get down on his knees before the girl he worshipped.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

X. UNSELFISH GALLANTRY

One day while lunching at an African foudak, half way between Tangier and Tetuan, I was led to moralize on the conjugal superiority of Mohammedan roosters to Mohammedan men. Noticing a fine large cock in the yard, I threw him a handful of bread-crumbs. He was all alone at the moment and might have easily gobbled them all up. Instead of doing such a selfish thing, he loudly summoned his harem with that peculiar clucking sound which is as unmistakable to fowls as is the word dinner or the boom of a gong to us. In a few seconds the hens had gathered and disposed of the bread, leaving not a crumb to their gallant lord and master. I need not add that the Sultan of a human harem in Morocco would have behaved very differently under analogous circumstances.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

THE GALLANT ROOSTER

The dictionary makers derive the word gallant from all sorts of roots in divers languages, meaning gay, brave, festive, proud, lascivious, and so on. Why not derive if from the Latin gallus, rooster? A rooster combines in himself all the different meanings of the word gallant. He is showy in appearance, brave, daring, attentive to females, and, above all, chivalrous, that is, inclined to show disinterested courtesy to the weaker sex, as we have just seen. In this last respect, it is true, the rooster stands not alone. It is a trait of male animals in general to treat their females unselfishly in regard to feeding and otherwise.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

UNGALLANT LOWER RACES OF MEN

If we now turn to human beings, we have to ascend many strata of civilization before we come across anything resembling the unselfish gallantry of the rooster. The Australian savage, when he has speared a kangaroo, makes his wife cook it, then selects the juiciest cuts for himself and the other men, leaving the bones to the women and dogs.

Ascending to the much higher Polynesians and American Indians we still find that the women have to content themselves with what the men leave. A Hawaiian even considers it a disgrace to eat at the same place as his wife, or with the same utensils.

What Kowney says (173) of the Nagas of India--"she does everything the husband will not, and he considers it effeminate to do anything but fight, hunt, and fish"--is true of the lower races in general. An African Kaffir, says Wood (73), would consider it beneath his dignity to as much as lift a basket of rice on the head of even his favorite wife; he sits calmly on the ground and allows some woman to help his busy wife. "One of my friends," he continues,

"when rather new to Kaffirland, happened to look into a hut and there saw a stalwart Kaffir sitting and smoking his pipe, while the women were hard at work in the sun, building huts, carrying timber, and performing all kinds of severe labor. Struck with a natural indignation at such behavior, he told the smoker to get up and work like a man. This idea was too much even for the native politeness of the Kaffir, who burst into a laugh at so absurd a notion. 'Women work,' said he, 'men sit in the house and smoke.'"

MacDonald relates (in Africana, I., 35) that "a woman always kneels when she has occasion to talk to a man." Even queens must in some cases go on their knees before their husbands. (Ratzel, I., 254.) Caillé gives similar testimony regarding the Waissulo, and Mungo Park (347) describes the return of one of his companions to the capital of Dentila, after an absence of three years:

"As soon as he had seated himself upon a mat, by the threshold of his door, a young woman (his intended bride) brought a little water in a calabash, and kneeling down before him, desired him to wash his hands; when he had done this, the girl, with a tear of joy sparkling in her eyes, drank the water; this being considered as the greatest proof she could possibly give him of her fidelity and attachment."

An Eskimo, when building a house, looks on lazily while his women carry stones "almost heavy enough to break their backs." The ungallant men not only compel the women to be their drudges, but slyly create a sentiment that it is disgraceful for a man to assist them. Of the Patagonian Indians Falkner asserts that the women are so rigidly "obliged to perform their duty, that their husbands cannot help them on any occasion, or in the greatest distress, without incurring the highest ignominy," and this is the general feeling, of which other illustrations will be given in later chapters. Foolish sentimentalists have tried to excuse the Indians on the ground that they have no time to attend to anything but fighting and hunting. But they always make the squaws do the hard work, whether there be any war and hunting or not. A white American girl, accustomed to the gallant attentions of her lover, would not smile on the red Dacota suitor of whom Riggs writes (205):

"When the family are abed and asleep, he often visits her in her mother's tent, or he finds her out in the grove in the day time gathering fuel. She has the load of sticks made up, and when she kneels down to take it on her back, possibly he takes her hand and helps her up and then walks home by her side. Such was the custom In the olden time."

Still, there is a germ of gallantry here. The Dacota at least helps to load his human donkey, while the Kaffir refuses to do even that.

Colonel James Smith, who had been adopted by the Indians, relates (45) how one day he helped the squaws to hoe corn. They approved of it, but the old men afterward chid him for degrading himself by hoeing corn like a squaw. He slyly adds that, as he was never very fond of work, they had no occasion to scold him again. We read in Schoolcraft (V., 268) that among the Creeks, during courtship, the young man used to help the girl hoe the corn in her field, plant her beans and set poles for them to run upon. But this was not intended as an act of gallant assistance; it had a symbolic meaning. The running up of the beans on the poles and the entwining of their vines was "thought emblematical of their approaching union and bondage." Morgan states expressly in his classical work on the Iroquois (332) that "no attempts by the unmarried to please or gratify each other by acts of personal attention were ever made." In other words the Indians knew not gallantry in the sense of disinterested courtesy to the weaker sex--the gallantry which is an essential ingredient of romantic love.

Germs of gallantry may perhaps be found in Borneo where, as St. John relates (I., 161), a young Dyak may help the girl he wants to marry in her farm work, carrying home her load of vegetables or wood, or make her presents of rings, a petticoat, etc. But such a statement must be interpreted with caution.

The very fact that they make the women do the field work and carry the wood habitually, shows that the Dyaks are not gallant. Momentary favors for the sake of securing favors in return, or of arranging an ephemeral Bornean "marriage," are not acts of disinterested courtesy to the weaker sex. The Dyaks themselves clearly understand that such attentions are mere bids for favors. As a missionary cited by Ling Roth (1., 13.1) remarks:

"If a woman handed to a man betel-nut and sirah to eat, or if a man paid her the smallest attention, such as we should term only common politeness, it would be sufficient to excuse a jealous husband for striking a man."

It is the same in India.

"The politeness, attention, and gallantry which the Europeans practise toward the ladies, although often proceeding from esteem and respect, are invariably ascribed by the Hindoos to a different motive."

(Dubois, I., 271.) Here, as everywhere in former times, woman existed not for her own sake but for man's convenience, comfort, and pleasure; why, therefore, should he bother to do anything to please her? In the Kaniasoutram there is a chapter on the duties of a model wife, in which she is instructed to do all the work not only at home but in garden, field, and stable. She must go to bed after her husband and get up before him. She must try to excel all other wives in faithfully serving her lord and master. She must not even allow the maid-servant to wash his feet, but must do it with her own hands. The Laws of Manu are full of such precepts, most of them amazingly ungallant. The horrible maltreatment of women in India, which it would be an unpardonable euphuism to call simply ungallant, will be dwelt on in a later chapter.

It has been said a thousand times that the best measure of a nation's civilization is its treatment of women. It would be more accurate to say that kind, courteous treatment of women is the last and highest product of civilization. The Greeks and Hindoos had reached a high level of culture in many respects, yet, judged by their treatment of women, the Greeks were barbarians and the Hindoos incarnate fiends. Scholars are sometimes surprisingly reckless in their assumptions. Thus Hommel (1., 417) declares that woman must have held an honored position in Babylonia,[32] because in the ancient texts that have come down to us the words mother and wife always precede the words father and husband. Yet, as Dubois mentions incidentally, the Brahmin texts also place the feminine word before the masculine, and the Brahmins treat women more cruelly than the lowest savages treat them.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

EGYPTIAN LOVE

I have not been able to find evidence of a gallant, chivalrous, magnanimous attitude toward women in the records of any ancient nation, and as romantic love is inconceivable without such an attitude, and a constant interchange of kindnesses, we may infer from this alone that these nations were strangers to such love. Professor Ebers makes a special plea for the Egyptians. Noting the statements of Herodotus and Diodorus regarding the greater degree of liberty enjoyed by their women as compared with the Greek, he bases thereon the inference that in their treatment of women the Egyptians were superior to all other nations of antiquity. Perhaps they were; it is not claiming much. But Professor Kendrick notes (I., 46) that although it may be true that the Egyptian women went to market and carried on trades while the men remained at home working at the loom, this is capable of receiving quite a different interpretation from that given by Ebers. The Egyptians regarded work at the loom more as a matter of skill than the Greeks did; and if they allowed the women to do the marketing, that may have been because they preferred to have them carry the heavy burdens and do the harder work, after the fashion of savages and barbarians.

If the Egyptians ever did show any respect for women they have carefully wiped out all traces of it in modern life. To-day,

"among the lower classes and in rural districts the wife is her husband's servant. She works while he smokes and gossips. But among the higher classes, too, the woman actually stands far below the man. He never chats with her, never communicates to her his affairs and cares. Even after death she does not rest by his side, but is separated from him by a wall." (Ploss, II., 450.)

Polygamy prevails, as in ancient times, and polygamy everywhere indicates a low position of woman. Ebers comments on the circumspection shown by the ancient Egyptians in drawing up their marriage contracts, adding that "in many cases there were even trial marriages"--a most amazing "even" in view of what he is trying to prove. A modern lover, as I have said before, would reject the very idea of such a trial marriage with the utmost scorn and indignation, because he feels certain that his love is eternal and unalterable. Time may show that he was mistaken, but that does not affect his present feeling. That sublime confidence in the eternity of his passion is one of the hall-marks of romantic love. The Egyptian had it not. He not only sanctioned degrading trial marriages, but enacted a barbarous law which enabled a man to divorce any wife at pleasure by simply pronouncing the words "thou art expelled." In modern Egypt, says Lane (I., 247-51), there are many men who have had twenty, thirty, or more wives, and women who have had a dozen or more husbands. Some take a new wife every month. Thus the Egyptians are matrimonially on a level with the savage and barbarian North American Indians, Tasmanians, Samoans, Dyaks, Malayans, Tartars, many negro tribes, Arabs, etc.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

ARABIAN LOVE

Arabia is commonly supposed to be the country in which chivalry originated. This belief seems to rest on the fact that the Arabs spared women in war. But the Australians did the same, and where women are saved only to be used as slaves or concubines we cannot speak of chivalry. The Arabs treated their own women well only when they were able to capture or buy slaves to do the hard work for them; in other cases their wives were their slaves. To this day, when the family moves, the husband rides on the camel while the wife trudges along on foot, loaded down with kitchen utensils, bedding, and her child on top. If a woman happens to ride on a camel she must get off and walk if she meets a man, by way of showing her respect for the superior sex. (Niebuhr, 50.) The birth of a daughter is regarded as a calamity, mitigated only by the fact that she will bring in some money as a bride. Marriage is often little more than a farce. Burckhardt knew Bedouins who, before they were fifty years old, had been married to more than fifty different women. Chavanne, in his book on the Sahara (397-401), gives a pathetic picture of the fate of the Arab girls:

"Usually wedded very young (the marriage of a youth of fourteen to a girl of eleven is nothing unusual), the girl finds in most cases, after five or six years, that her conjugal career is at an end. The husband tires of her and sends her back, without cogent reasons, to her parents. If there are no parents to return to, she abandons herself, in many cases, to the vice of prostitution."

If not discarded, her fate is none the less deplorable. "While young she receives much attention, but when her charms begin to fade she becomes the servant of her husband and of his new wife."

Chavanne gives a glowing description of the ravishing but short-lived beauty of the Arab girl; also a specimen of the amorous songs addressed to her while she is young and pretty. She is compared to a gazelle; to a palm whose fruits grow high up out of reach; she is equal in value to all Tunis and Algiers, to all the ships on the ocean, to five hundred steeds and as many camels. Her throat is like a peach, her eyes wound like arrows. Exaggerations like these abound in the literature of the Arabs, and are often referred to as proof that they love as we do. In truth, they indicate nothing beyond selfish, amorous desires. The proof of unselfish affection lies not in words, however glowing and flattering, but in kind actions; and the actions of the Arabs toward their women are disgustingly selfish, except during the few years that they are young and pretty enough to serve as toys. The Arabs, with all their fine talk, are practically on a level with the Samoyedes who, as we saw, ignore or maltreat their wives, "except on an occasional amorous evening"; on a level with the Sioux Indian, of whom Mrs. Eastman remarks that a girl is to him an object of contempt and neglect from her birth to her grave, except during the brief period when he wants her for his wife and may have a doubt of his success.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

THE UNCHIVALROUS GREEKS

A few pages back I cited the testimony of Morgan, who lived many years among the Indians and studied them with the intelligence of an expert ethnologist, that "no attempts by the unmarried to please or gratify each other by acts of personal attention were ever made." From this we can, once more, make a natural transition from the aboriginal American to the ancient Greek. The Greek men, says the erudite Becker (III., 335), "were quite strangers to that considerate, self-sacrificing courtesy and those minute attentions to women which we commonly call gallantry," Greek literature and all that we know of Greek life, bear out this assertion fully. It is true the Alexandrian poets and their Roman imitators frequently use the language of sentimental gallantry; they declare themselves the slaves of their mistresses, are eager to wear chains, to go through fire, to die for them, promising to take their love to the next world. But all these things are mere "words, words, words"--adulation the insincerity of which is exposed as soon as we examine the actions and the motives of these poets, of whom more will be said in a later chapter. Their flatteries are addressed invariably to hetairai; they are conceived and written with the selfish desire to tickle the vanity of these wantons in the hope and expectation of receiving favors for which the poets, who were usually poor, were not able to pay in any other way. Thus these poets are below the Arabs, for these sons of the desert at least address their flatteries to the girls whom they are eager to marry, whereas the Greek and Roman poets sought merely to beguile a class of women whose charms were for sale to anyone. One of these profligate men might cringe and wail and cajole, to gain the good will of a capricious courtesan, but he never dreamed of bending his knees to win the honest love of the maid he took to be his wife (that he might have male offspring.) Roman love was not romantic, nor was Greek. It was frankly sensual, and the gallantry of the men was of a kind that made them erect golden images in public places to honor Phryne and other prostitutes. In a word, their gallantry was sham gallantry; it was gallantry not in the sense of polite attentions to women, springing from unselfish courtesy and esteem, but in the sinister sense of profligacy and amorous intrigue. There were plenty of gallants, but no real gallantry.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

OVID'S SHAM GALLANTRY

While it is undoubtedly true that Ovid exercised a greater influence on mediaeval bards, and through them on modern erotic writers, than any other ancient poet, and while I still maintain that he anticipated and depicted some of the imaginative phases of modern love (see my R.L.P.B., 90-92), a more careful study of the nature of gallantry has convinced me that I erred in finding the "morning dawn of romantic love" in the counsels regarding gallant behavior toward women given in the pages of Ovid.[33] He does, indeed, advise a lover never to notice the faults of a woman whose favor he wishes to win, but to compliment her, on the contrary, on her face, her hair, her tapering fingers, her pretty foot; to applaud at the circus whatever she applauds; to adjust her cushion and put the footstool in its place; to keep her cool by fanning her; and at dinner, when she has put her lips to the wine-cup to seize the cup and put his lips to the same place. But when Ovid wrote this, nothing was farther from his mind than what we understand by gallantry--an eagerness to perform acts of disinterested courtesy and deference for the purpose of pleasing a respected or adored woman. His precepts are, on the contrary, grossly utilitarian, being intended not for a man who wishes to win the heart and hand of an honest girl, but for a libertine who has no money to buy the favors of a wanton, and therefore must rely on flatteries and obsequious fawning.

The poet declares expressly that a rich man will not need his Ars Amandi, but that it is written for the poor, who may be able to overcome the greed of the hetairai by tickling their vanity. He therefore teaches his readers how to deceive such a girl with false flattery and sham gallantry. The Roman poet uses the word domina, but this domina, nevertheless, is his mistress, not in the sense of one who dominates his heart and commands his respect and affection, but of a despised being lower than a concubine, on whom he smiles only till he has beguiled her. It is the story of the cat and the mouse.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us