MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN GALLANTRY
How different this from the modern chivalry which in face of womanhood makes a gentleman even out of a rough California miner. Joaquin Miller relates how the presence of even an Indian girl--"a bud that in another summer would unfold itself wide to the sun," affected the men in one of the camps. Though she seldom spoke with the miners, yet the men who lived near her hut dressed more neatly than others, kept their beards in shape, and shirt-bosoms buttoned up when she passed by:
"On her face, through the tint of brown, lay the blush and flush of maidenhood, the indescribable sacred something that makes a maiden holy to every man of a manly and chivalrous nature; that makes a man utterly unselfish and perfectly content to love and be silent, to worship at a distance, as turning to the holy shrines of Mecca, to be still and bide his time; caring not to possess in the low, coarse way that characterizes your common love of to-day, but choosing rather to go to battle for her--bearing her in his heart through many lands, through storms and death, with only a word of hope, a smile, a wave of the hand from a wall, a kiss, blown far, as he mounts his steed below and plunges into the night. That is love to live for. I say the knights of Spain, bloody as they were, were a noble and a splendid type of men in their day."[34]
While the knights of Spain and other parts of mediaeval Europe doubtless professed sentiments of chivalry like those uttered by Joaquin Miller, there was as a rule nearly as much sham in their pretensions as in Ovid's rules for gallant conduct. In the days of militant chivalry, in the midst of deeds of extravagant homage to individual ladies, women in general were as much despised and maltreated as at any other time. "The chivalrous spirit is above all things a class spirit," as Freeman wrote (V., 482):
"The good knight is bound to endless fantastic courtesies toward men, and still more toward women, of a certain rank; he may treat all below that rank with any degree of scorn and cruelty."
This is still very far removed from the modern ideal; the knight may be considered to stand half-way between the boor and the gentleman: he is polite, at least, to some women, while the gentleman is polite to all, kind, gentle, sympathetic, without being any the less manly. Nevertheless there was an advantage in having some conception of gallantry, a determination and vow to protect widows and orphans, to respect and honor ladies. Though it was at first only a fashion, with all the extravagances and follies usual to fashions, it did much good by creating an ideal for later generations to live up to. From this point of view even the quixotic pranks of the knights who fought duels in support of their challenge that no other lady equalled theirs in beauty, were not without a use. They helped to enforce the fashion of paying deference to women, and made it a point of honor, thus forcing many a boor to assume at least the outward semblance and conduct of a gentleman. The seed sown in this rough and stony soil has slowly grown, until it has developed into true civilization--a word of which the last and highest import is civility or disinterested devotion to the weak and unprotected, especially to women.
In our days chivalry includes compassion for animals too. I have never read of a more gallant soldier than that colonel who, as related in Our Animal Friends (May, 1899), while riding in a Western desert at the head of five hundred horsemen, suddenly made a slight detour--which all the men had to follow--because in the direct path a meadow lark was sitting on her nest, her soft brown eyes turned upward, watching, wondering, fearing. It was a nobler deed than many of the most gallant actions in battle, for these are often done from selfish motives--ambition, the hope of promotion--while this deed was the outcome of pure unselfish sympathy.
"Five hundred horses had been turned aside, and five hundred men, as they bent over the defenceless mother and her brood, received a lesson in that broad humanity which is the essence of higher life."
To this day there are plenty of ruffians--many of them in fine clothes--who are strangers to chivalrous feelings toward defenceless women or animals--men who behave as gentlemen only under compulsion of public opinion. The encouraging thing is that public opinion has taken so strong a stand in favor of women; that it has written Place aux Dames on its shield in such large letters. While the red American squaw shared with the dogs the bones left by her contemptuous ungallant husband, the white American woman is served first at table and gets the choicest morsels; she receives the window-seat in the cars, the lower berth in the sleeper; she has precedence in society and wherever she is in her proper place; and when a ship is about to sink, the captain, if necessary (which is seldom the case), stands with drawn revolver prepared to shoot any man who would ungallantly get into a boat before all the women are saved.
"AN INSULT TO WOMAN"
This change from the primitive selfishness described in the preceding pages, this voluntary yielding by man of the place of honor and of the right of the strongest, is little less than a miracle; it is the grandest triumph of civilization. Yet there are viragoes who have had the indecency to call gallantry an "insult to woman." There is indeed a kind of gallantry--the Ovidian--which is an insult to women; but true masculine gallantry is woman's chief glory and conquest, indicating the transformation of the savage's scorn for woman's physical weakness into courteous deference to her as the nobler, more virtuous and refined sex. There are some selfish, sour, disappointed old maids, who, because of their lack of feminine traits, repel men and receive less than their share of gallant courtesy. But that is their own fault. Ninety-nine per cent. of all women have a happier lot to-day than at any previous time in history, and this change is due to the growth of the disinterested courtesy and sympathy known as gallantry. At the same time the change is strikingly illustrated in the status of old maids themselves. No one now despises an unselfish woman simply because she prefers to remain single; but formerly old maids were looked on nearly everywhere with a contempt that reached its climax among the Southern Slavs, who, according to Krauss (Ploss, II., 491), treated them no better than mangy dogs. No one associated with them; they were not tolerated in the spinning-room or at the dances; they were ridiculed and derided; were, in short, regarded as a disgrace to the family.
SUMMARY
To sum up: among the lower races man habitually despises and maltreats woman, looking on her as a being made, not for her own sake, but for his comfort and pleasure. Gallantry is unknown. The Australian who fights for his family shows courage, not gallantry, for he is simply protecting his private property, and does not otherwise show the slightest regard for his women. Nor does the early custom of serving for a wife imply gallantry; for here the suitor serves the parents, not the maid; he simply adopts a primitive way of paying for a bride. Sparing women in battle for the purpose of making concubines or slaves of them is not gallantry. One might as well call a farmer gallant because, when he kills the young roosters for broilers, he saves the young hens. He lets these live because he needs eggs. The motive in both cases is utilitarian and selfish. Ovidian gallantry does not deserve such a name, because it is nothing but false flattery for the selfish purpose of beguiling foolish women. Arabic flatteries are of a superior order because sincere at the time being and addressed to girls whom the flatterer desires to marry. But this gallantry, too, is only skin deep. Its motives are sensual and selfish, for as soon as the girl's physical charm begins to fade she is contemptuously discarded.
Our modern gallantry toward women differs radically from all those attitudes in being unselfish. It is synonymous with true chivalry--disinterested devotion to those who, while physically weaker, are considered superior morally and esthetically. It treats all women with polite deference, and does so not because of a vow or a code, but because of the natural promptings of a kind, sympathetic disposition. It treats a woman not as a toper does a whiskey bottle, applying it to his lips as long as it can intoxicate him with pleasure and then throwing it away, but cherishes her for supersensual attributes that survive the ravages of time. To a lover, in particular, such gallantry is not a duty, but a natural impulse. He lies awake nights devising plans for pleasing the object of his devotion. His gallantry is an impulse to sacrifice himself for the beloved--an instinct so inbred by generations of practice that now even a child may manifest it. I remember how, when I was six or seven years old, I once ran out the school-house during recess to pick up some Missouri hailstones, while others, large as marbles, were falling about me, threatening to smash my skull. I gave the trophies to a dark-eyed girl of my age--not with a view to any possible reward, but simply because I loved her more than all the other girls combined and wanted to please her.
A SURE TEST OF LOVE
Black relates in his Things Chinese, that after the wedding ceremony
"the bride tries hard ... to get a piece of her husband's dress under her when she sits down, for if she does, it will insure her having the upper hand of him, while he tries to prevent her and to do the same thing himself."
Similar customs prevail in other parts of the world, as among the Esthonians. (Schroeder, 234.) After the priest has united the couple they walk toward the wagon or sleigh, and in doing so each of the two tries to be first to step on the other's foot, because that will decide who is to rule at home. Imagine such petty selfishness, such a disgraceful lack of gallantry, on the very wedding-day! In our own country, when we hear of a bride objecting to the word "obey" in the wedding ceremony, we may feel absolutely sure that the marriage is not a love-match, at least as far as she is concerned. A girl truly in love with a man laughs at the word, because she feels as if she would rather be his slave than any other man's queen; and as for the lover, the bride's promise to "obey" him seems mere folly, for he is determined she shall always remain the autocratic queen of his heart and actions. Conjugal disappointments may modify that feeling, to be sure, but that does not alter the fact that while romantic love exists, one of its essential ingredients is an impulse of gallant devotion and deference on both sides--an impulse which on occasion rises to self-sacrifice, which is simply an extreme phase of gallantry.
XI. ALTRUISTIC SELF-SACRIFICE
In the very olden time, if we may confide in the ingenious Frank Stockton, there lived a semi-barbaric king who devised a highly original way of administering justice, leaving the accused man's fate practically in his own hands. There was an arena with the king's throne on one side and galleries for the people all around. On a signal by the king a door beneath him opened and the accused subject stepped out into the amphitheatre. Directly opposite the throne were two doors, exactly alike, and side by side. The person on trial had to walk to those doors and open either of them. If he opened one, there sprang out a fierce tiger who immediately tore him to pieces; if the other, there came forth a beautiful lady, to whom he was forthwith married. No one ever knew behind which of the doors was the tiger, so that the audience no more than the prisoner knew whether he was to be devoured or married.
This semi-barbaric king had a daughter who fell in love with a handsome young courtier. When the king discovered this love-affair he cast the youth into prison and had his realm searched for the fiercest of tigers. The day came when the prisoner had to decide his own fate in the arena by opening one of the doors. The princess, who was one of the spectators, had succeeded, with the aid of gold, in discovering the secret of the doors; she knew from which the tiger, from which the lady, would issue. She knew, too, who the lady was behind the other door--one of the loveliest of the damsels of the court--one who had dared to raise her eyes to her loved one and had thereby aroused her fiercest jealousy. She had thought the matter over, and was prepared for action. The king gave the signal, and the courtier appeared. He had expected the princess to know on which side lay safety for him, nor was he wrong. To his quick and anxious glance at her, she replied by a slight, quick movement of her arm to the right. The youth turned, and without the slightest hesitation opened the door on the right. Now, "which came out of the opened door--the lady or the tiger?"
THE LADY AND THE TIGER
With that question Stockton ends his story, and it is generally supposed that he does not answer it. But he does, on the preceding page, in these words:
"Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded, semi-barbaric princess, her soul at white heat beneath the combined fires of despair and jealousy. She had lost him, but who should have him?"
In these words the novelist hints plainly enough that the question was decided by a sort of dog-in-the-manger jealousy. If the princess could not have him, certainly her hated rival should never enjoy his love. The tiger, we may be sure, was behind the door on the right.
In allowing the tiger to devour the courtier, the princess showed that her love was of the primitive, barbarous type, being in reality self-love, not other-love. She "loved" the man not for his own sake, but only as a means of gratifying her desires. If he was lost to her, the tiger might as well dine on him. How differently an American girl would have acted, under the impulse of romantic love! Not for a moment could she have tolerated the thought of his dying, through her fault--the thought of his agony, his shrieks, his blood. She would have sacrificed her own happiness instead of her beloved's life. The lady would have come out of the door opened by him. Suppose that, overcome by selfish jealousy, she acted otherwise; and suppose that an amphitheatre full of cultured men and women witnessed her deed: would there not be a cry of horror, condemning her as worse than the tiger, as absolutely incapable of the feeling of true love? And would not this cry of horror reveal on the part of the spectators an instinctive perception of the truth which this chapter, this whole book, is written to enforce, that voluntary self-sacrifice, where called for, is the supreme, the infallible, test of love?
A GREEK LOVE-STORY
If we imagine the situation reversed--a man delivering his "beloved" into the clutches of a tiger rather than to the legitimate caresses of a rival--our horror at his loveless selfishness would be doubled. Yet this is the policy habitually followed by savages and barbarians. In later chapters instances will be given of such wooers killing coveted girls with their own spears as soon as they find that the rival is the winner. After what has been said about the absence of unselfish gallantry among the lower races it would, of course, be useless to look for instances of altruistic self-sacrifice for a woman's sake, since such sacrifice implies so much more than gallantry. As for the Greeks, in all my extensive reading I have come across only one author who seemingly appreciates the significance of self-sacrifice for a woman loved. Pausanias, in his Description of Greece (Bk. VII., chap. 21), relates this love-story:
"When Calydon still existed there was among the priests of Dionysus one named Coresus, whom love made, without any fault of his own, the most wretched of mortals. He loved a girl Callirrhoe, but as great as his love for her was her hatred of him. When all his pleadings and offerings of presents failed to change the girl's attitude, he at last prostrated himself before the image of Dionysus, imploring his help. The god granted the prayers of his priest, for suddenly the Calydonians began to lose their senses, like drunkards, and to die in fits of madness. They appealed to the oracle of Dodona ... which declared that the calamity was due to the wrath of the god Dionysus, and that it would not cease until Coresus had sacrificed to Dionysus either Callirrhoe or anyone else willing to die for her. Now when the girl saw no way of escaping, she sought refuge with her former educators, but when they too refused to receive her, nothing remained for her but death. When all the preparations for the sacrifice had been made in accordance with the precepts of the oracle of Dodona, she was brought to the altar, adorned like an animal that is to be sacrificed; Coresus, however, whose duty it was to offer the sacrifice, let love prevail in place of hate, and slew himself instead of Callirrhoe, thus proving by his deed that he had been animated by the purest love. But when Callirrhoe saw Coresus as a corpse, overcome by pity and repentance for her treatment of him, she went and drowned herself in the fountain not far from the Calydonian harbor, which since that time is known as the fountain of Callirrhoe."
If a modern lover, desiring to possess a girl, got her into a predicament which culminated in the necessity of his either slaying her with his own hands or killing himself, and did not choose the latter alternative, we should regard him as more contemptible than the vilest assassin. To us self-sacrifice in such a case would seem not a test of love, nor even of honor so much as of common decency, and we should expect a man to submit to it even if his love of the poor girl had been a mere infatuation of the senses. However, in view of the contempt for women, and for love for women, prevalent among the Greeks in general, we may perhaps discover at least a gleam of better things in this legend of masculine self-sacrifice.
PERSIAN LOVE
A closer approximation to our ideal may be found in a story related by the Persian poet Saadi (358):
"There was a handsome and well-disposed young man, who was embarked in a vessel with a lovely damsel: I have read that, sailing on the mighty deep, they fell together into a whirlpool: When the pilot came to offer him assistance; God forbid that he should perish in that distress; he was answering, from the midst of that overwhelming vortex, Leave me and take the hand of my beloved! The whole world admired him for this speech, which, as he was expiring, he was heard to make; learn not the tale of love from that faithless wretch who can neglect his mistress when exposed to danger. In this manner ended the lives of those lovers; listen to what has happened, that you may understand; for Saadi knows the ways and forms of courtship, as well as the Tazi, or modern Arabic, is understood at Baghdad."
How did this Persian poet get such a correct and modern notion about love into his head? Obviously not from his experiences and observations at home, for the Persians, as the scholarly Dr. Polak observes in his classical work on them (I., 206), do not know love in our sense of the word. The love of which their poets sing has either a symbolical or an entirely carnal meaning. Girls are married off without any choice of their own at the early age of twelve or thirteen; they are regarded as capital and sold for cash, and children are often engaged in the cradle. When a Persian travels, he leaves his wife at home and enters into a temporary marriage with other women in the towns he visits. In rural districts if the traveller is a person of rank, the mercenary peasants eagerly offer their daughters for such "marriages." (Hellwald, 439.) Like the Greek poets the Persians show their contempt for women by always speaking of boy-favorites when their language rises above the coarsest sensuality. Public opinion regarding Persian stories and poems has been led astray by the changes of sex and the expurgations made freely by translators. Burton, whose version of the Thousand and One Nights was suppressed in England, wrote (F.F., 36), that "about one-fifth is utterly unfit for translation, and the most sanguine Orientalist would not dare to render literally more than three-quarters of the remainder."
Where, then, I repeat, did Saadi get that modern European idea of altruistic self-sacrifice as a test of love? Evidently from Europe by way of Arabia. His own language indicates this--his suspicious boast of his knowledge of real love as of one who has just made a strange discovery, and his coupling it with the knowledge of Arabic. Now it is well known that ever since the ninth century the Persian mind had been brought into a contact with the Arabic which became more and more intimate. The Arabs had a habit of sacrificing their lives in chivalrous efforts to save the life or honor of maidens whom the enemy endeavored to kidnap. The Arabs, on their part, were in close contact with the European minds, and as they helped to originate the chivalrous spirit in Europe, so they must have been in turn influenced by the developments of the troubadour spirit which culminated in such maxims as Montagnogout's declaration that "a true lover desires a thousand times more the happiness of his beloved than his own." As Saadi lived in the time of the troubadours--the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--it was easy for him to get a knowledge of the European "ways and forms of courtship." In Persia itself there was no courtship or legitimate lovemaking, for the "lover" hardly ever had met his bride before the wedding-day. Nevertheless, if we may believe William Franklin,[35] a Persian woman might command a suitor to spend all day in front of her house reciting verses in praise of her beauty; and H.C. Trumbull naïvely cites, as evidence that Orientals love just as we do, the following story:
"Morier tells ... of a large painting in a pleasure-house in Shiraz, illustrative of the treatment of a loyal lover by a heartless coquette, which is one of the popular legends of Persia. Sheik Chenan, a Persian of the true faith, and a man of learning and consequence, fell in love with an Armenian lady of great beauty who would not marry him unless he changed his religion. To this he agreed. Still she would not marry him unless he would drink wine. This scruple also he yielded. She resisted still, unless he consented to eat pork. With this also he complied. Still she was coy, and refused to fulfil her engagement, unless he would be contented to drive swine before her. Even this condition he accepted. She then told him that she would not have him at all, and laughed at him for his pains. The picture represents the coquette at her window, laughing at Sheik Chenan as he is driving his pigs before her."
This story suggests and may have been invented in imitation of the foolish and capricious tests to which mediaeval dames in Europe put their quixotic knights. Few of these knights, as I have said elsewhere (R.L.P.B., 100), "were so manly as the one in Schiller's ballad, who, after fetching his lady's glove from the lion's den, threw it in her face," to show how his feelings toward her had changed. If the Persian in Trumbull's story had been manly and refined enough to be capable of genuine love, his feelings toward a woman who could wantonly subject him to such persistent insults and degradation, would have turned into contempt. Ordinary sensual infatuation, on the other hand, would be quite strong enough and unprincipled enough to lead a man to sacrifice religion, honor, and self-respect, for a capricious woman. This kind of self-sacrifice is not a test of true love, for it is not altruistic. The sheik did not make his sacrifice to benefit the woman he coveted, but to benefit himself, as he saw no other way of gratifying his own selfish desires.[36]
HERO AND LEANDER
Very great importance attaches to this distinction between selfish and altruistic self-sacrifice. The failure to make this distinction is perhaps more than anything else responsible for the current belief that romantic love was known to the ancients. Did not Leander risk and sacrifice his life for Hero, swimming to her at night across the stormy Hellespont? Gentle reader, he did not. He risked his life for the purpose of continuing his illicit amours with a priestess of Venus in a lonely tower. As we shall see in the chapter devoted to Greek romances, there is in the story told by Musaeus not a single trait rising above frank sensuality. In his eagerness to gratify his appetite, Leander risked Hero's life as well as his own. His swimming across the strait was, moreover, no more than any animal would do to meet its mate on the other side of a river. It was a romantic thing to do, but it was no proof of romantic love. Bearing in mind what Westermarck says (134)--
"With wild animals sexual desire is not less powerful as an incentive to strenuous exertion than hunger and thirst. In the rut-time, the males, even of the most cowardly species, engage in mortal combats"
--we see that Hero's risking of death for the sake of his intrigue was not even a mark of exceptional courage; and regarding the quality and nature of his "love" it tells us nothing whatever.
THE ELEPHANT AND THE LOTOS
In the Hindoo drama Malavika and Agnimitra, Kalidasa represents the king as seeking an interview with a new flame of his. When his companion warns him that the queen might surprise them, the king answers:
When the elephant sees the lotos leaves He fears no crocodile.
Lotos leaves being the elephant's favorite food, these lines admirably sum up the Hindoo idea of risking life for "love"--cupboard love. But would the elephant risk his life to save the beautiful lotos flowers from destruction? Foolish question! Was not the lotos created to gratify the elephant's appetite just as beautiful women were created to subserve man's desires?
Fighting crocodiles for the sake of the sweet lotos is a characteristic of primitive "love" in all its various strata. "Nothing is more certain," writes M'Lean (135), "than that the enamoured Esquimau will risk life and limb in the pursuit of his object." Women, he says, are the main cause of all quarrels among the Esquimaux; and the same is true of the lower races in general. If an Australian wants to run away with another man's wife, the thought of risking his life--and hers too--does not restrain him one moment. Ascending to the Greeks, we may cite Robert Burton's summing up of one of their legends:
"Thirteen proper young men lost their lives for that fair Hipodamia's sake, the daughter of Onomaus, King of Elis: when that hard condition was proposed of death or victory [in a race], they made no account of it, but courageously for love died, till Pelops at last won her by a sleight."
What is this but another version of the story of the lotos and the elephant? The prize was great, and worth the risk. Men risk their lives daily for gold, and for objects infinitely less attractive to the senses and the selfish ambitions than a beautiful princess. In the following, which Burton quotes from Hoedus, the sensual and selfish basis of all such confronting of death for "love's" sake is laid bare to the bone:
"What shall I say of the great dangers they undergo, single combats they undertake, how they will venture their lives, creep in at windows, gutters, climb over walls to come to their sweethearts, and if they be surprised, leap out at windows, cast themselves headlong down, bruising or breaking their legs or arms, and sometimes losing life itself, as Calisto did for his lovely Meliboea?"
I have known rich young Americans and Europeans risk their lives over and over again in such "gallant" adventures, but if I had asked them if they loved these women, i.e., felt such a disinterested affection for them (like a mother's for her child) that they would have risked their lives to benefit them when there was nothing to gain for themselves--they would have laughed in my face. Whence we see how foolish it is to infer from such instances of "gallantry" and "self-sacrifice" that the ancients knew romantic love in our sense of the word. It is useless to point to passages like this (again from Burton):
"Polienus, when his mistress Circe did but frown upon him, in Petronius, drew his sword, and bade her kill, stab, or whip him to death, he would strip himself naked and not resist."
Such fine talk occurs in Tibullus and other poets of the time; but where are the actions corresponding to it? Where do we read of these Romans and Greeks ever braving the crocodile for the sake of preserving the purity of the lotos herself? Or of sparing a lotos belonging to another, but at their mercy? Perseus himself, much vaunted for his chivalry, did not undertake to save the rock-chained Andromeda from the sea monster until he had extorted a promise that she should be his prize. Fine sort of chivalry, that!
SUICIDE IS SELFISH
One more species of pseudo-self-sacrifice remains to be considered. When Hero finds Leander's dead body on the rocks she commits suicide. Is not this self-sacrifice for love's sake? It is always so considered, and Eckstein, in his eagerness to prove that the ancient Greeks knew romantic love,[37] gives a list of six legendary suicides from hopeless or foiled love. The question of suicide is an interesting one and will be considered in detail in the chapter on the American Indians, who, like other savages, were addicted to it, in many cases for the most trivial reasons. In this place I will content myself with noting that if Eckstein had taken the pains to peruse the four volumes of Ramdohr's Venus Urania (a formidable task, I admit), he would have found an author who more than a hundred years ago knew that suicide is no test of true love. There are indeed, he says (III., 46), plenty of old stories of self-sacrifice, but they are all of the kind where a man risks comfort and life to secure possession of a coveted body for his own enjoyment, or else where he takes his own life because he feels lonely after having failed to secure the desired union. These actions are no index of love, for they "may coexist with the cruelest treatment" of the coveted woman. Very ambitious persons or misers may commit suicide after losing honor or wealth, and
"a coarse negro, in face of the danger of losing his sweetheart, is capable of casting himself into the ocean with her, or of plunging his dagger into her breast and then into his own."
All this is selfish. The only true index of love, Ramdohr continues, lies in the sacrifice of one's own happiness for another's sake; in resigning one's self to separation from the beloved, or even to death, if that is necessary to secure her happiness or welfare. Of such self-sacrifice he declares he cannot find a single instance in the records and stories of the ancients; nor can I.
The suicide of Dido after her desertion by Aeneas is often cited as proof of love, but Ramdohr insists (338) that, apart from the fact that "a woman really in love would not have pursued Aeneas with curses," such an act as hers was the outcome of purely selfish despair, on a par with the suicide of a miser after the loss of his money. It is needless to add to this that Hero's suicide was likewise selfish; for of what possible benefit was it to the dead Leander that she took her own life in a cowardly fit of despondency at having lost her chief source of delight? Had she lost her life in an effort to save his, the case would have been different.
Instances of women sacrificing themselves for men's sake abound in ancient literature, though I am not so sure that they abounded in life, except under compulsion, as in the Hindoo suttee.[38] As we shall see in the chapter on India, tales of feminine self-sacrifice were among the means craftily employed by men to fortify and gratify their selfishness. Still, in the long run, just as man's fierce "jealousy" helped to make women chaster than men, so the inculcation in women of self-sacrifice as a duty, gradually made them naturally inclined to that virtue--an inclination which was strengthened by inveterate, deep-rooted, maternal love. Thus it happened that self-sacrifice assumed rank in course of time as a specifically feminine virtue; so much so that the German metaphysician Fichte could declare that "the woman's life should disappear in the man's without a remnant," and that this process is love. No doubt it is love, but love demands at the same time that the man's life should disappear in the woman's.
It is interesting to note the sexual aspects of gallantry and self-sacrifice. Women are prevented by custom, etiquette, and inbred coyness from showing gallant attentions to men before marriage, whereas the impulse to sacrifice happiness or life for love's sake is at least as strong in them as in men, and of longer standing. If a girl of affectionate impulses on hearing that the man she loved--though he might not have proposed to her--lay wounded, or ill of yellow fever, in a hospital, threw away all reserve, coyness, and fear of violating decorum, and went to nurse him day and night, at imminent risk of her own life, all the world would applaud her, convinced that she had done a more feminine thing than if she had allowed coyness to suppress her sympathetic and self-sacrificing impulses.
XII. AFFECTION
A German poem printed in the Wunderhorn relates how a young man, after a long absence from home, returns and eagerly hastens to see his former sweetheart. He finds her standing in the doorway and informs her that her beauty pleases his heart as much as ever:
Gott grüss dich, du Hübsche, du Feine, Von Herzen gefallst du mir.
To which she retorts: "What need is there of my pleasing you? I got a husband long ago--a handsome man, well able to take care of me." Whereupon the disappointed lover draws his knife and stabs her through the heart.
In his History of German Song (chap, v.), Edward Schuré comments on this poem in the following amazing fashion:
"How necessary yet how tragic is this answer with the knife to the heartless challenge of the former sweetheart! How fatal and terrible is this sudden change of a passionate soul from ardent love to the wildest hatred! We see him taking one step back, we see how he trembles, how the flush of rage suffuses his face, and how his love, offended, injured, and dragged in the dust, slakes its thirst with the blood of the faithless woman."
EROTIC ASSASSINS
It seems almost incredible that such a villanous sentiment should have been allowed to appear in a book without sending its author to prison. "Necessary" to murder a sweetheart because she has changed her mind during a man's long absence! The wildest anarchist plot never included a more diabolical idea. Brainless, selfish, impulsive young idiots are only too apt to act on that principle if their proposals are not accepted; the papers contain cases nearly every week of poor girls murdered for refusing an unwelcome suitor; but the world is beginning to understand that it is illogical and monstrous to apply the sacred word of love to the feeling which animates these cowardly assassins, whose only motives are selfish lust and a dog-in-the-manger jealousy. Love never "slakes its thirst" with the blood of a woman. Had that man really loved that woman, he would have been no more capable of murdering her than of murdering his father for disinheriting him.
Schuré is by no means the only author who has thus confounded love with murderous, jealous lust. A most astounding instance occurs in Goethe's Werther--the story of a common servant who conceived a passion for a well-to-do widow.
He lost his appetite, his sleep, forgot his errands; an evil spirit pursued him. One day, finding her alone in the garret, he made an improper proposal to her, and on her refusing he attempted violence, from which she was saved only through the timely arrival of her brother. In defending his conduct the servant, in a most ungallant, unmanly, and cowardly way, tried to fasten the guilt on the widow by saying that she had previously allowed him to take some liberties with her. He was of course promptly ejected from the house, and when subsequently another man was engaged to take his place, and began to pay his addresses to the widow, the discharged servant fell upon him and assassinated him. And this disgusting exhibition of murderous lust and jealousy leads Goethe to exclaim, rapturously:
"This love, this fidelity(!), this passion, is thus seen to be no invention of the poets(!). It lives, it is to be found in its greatest purity(!) among that class of people whom we call uneducated and coarse."
In view of the sensual and selfish attitude which Goethe held toward women all his life, it is perhaps not strange that he should have written the silly words just quoted. It was probably a guilty conscience, a desire to extenuate selfish indulgence at the expense of a poor girl's virtue and happiness, that led him to represent his hero, Werther, as using every possible effort in court to secure the pardon of that erotomaniac who had first attempted rape and then finished up by assassinating his rival.
If Werther's friend had murdered the widow herself, Goethe would have been logically bound to see in his act still stronger evidence of the "reality," "fidelity," and "purity" of love among "people whom we call uneducated and coarse." And if Goethe had lived to read the Rev. W.W. Gill's Savage Life in Polynesia, he might have found therein (118) a story of cannibal "love" still more calculated to arouse his rapturous enthusiasm--
"An ill-looking but brave warrior of the cannibal tribe of Ruanae, named Vete, fell violently in love with a pretty girl named Tanuau, who repelled his advances and foolishly reviled him for his ugliness. His only thought now was how to be revenged for this unpardonable insult. He could not kill her, as she wisely kept to the encampment of Mantara. After some months Tanuau sickened and died. The corpse was conveyed across the island to be let down the chasm of Raupa, the usual burial-place of her tribe."
Vete chose this as the time for revenge. Arrangements were made to intercept the corpse secretly, and he had it carried away. It was too decomposed to be eaten, so they cut it in pieces and burned it--burning anything belonging to a person being the greatest injury one can inflict on a native.
THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON
But what have all these disgusting stories to do with affection, the subject of this chapter? Nothing whatever--and that is why I have put them here--to show in a glaring light that what Goethe and Schuré, and doubtless thousands of their readers accepted as love is not love, since there is no affection in it. A true patriot, a man who feels an affection for his country, lays down his life for it without a thought of personal advantage; and if his country treats him ungratefully he does not turn traitor and assassin--like the German and Polynesian "lovers" we have just read about. A real lover is indeed overjoyed to have his affection returned; but if it is not reciprocated he is none the less affectionate, none the less ready to lay down his life for the other, and, above all, he is utterly incapable of taking hers. What creates this difference between lust and love is affection, and, so far at least as maternal love is concerned, the nature of affection was known thousands of years ago. When two mothers came before King Solomon, each claiming the same child as her own, the king sent for a sword and said, "Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other." To this the false claimant agreed, but the real mother exclaimed, "O my lord, give her the living child and in no wise slay it." Then the king knew that she was the child's mother and gave him to her. "And all Israel saw that the wisdom of God was in Solomon, to do judgment."
If we ask why this infallible test of love was not applied to the sexual passion, the answer is that it would have failed, because ancient love between the sexes was, as all the testimony collected in this book shows, too sensual and selfish to stand such a test. Yet it is obvious that if we to-day are to apply the word love to the sexual relations, we must use the same test of disinterested affection that we use in the case of maternal love or love of country; and that love is not love before affection is added to all the other ingredients heretofore considered. In that servant's "love" which so excited the wonder of Goethe, only three of the fourteen ingredients of love were present--individual preference, monopoly, and jealousy--and those three, as we have seen, occur also in plain lust. Of the tender, altruistic, loving traits of love--sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection--there is not a trace.
STUFF AND NONSENSE
When a great poet can blunder so flagrantly in his diagnosis of love, we cannot wonder that minor writers should often be erratic. For instance, in The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (45-46), Captain J.D. Bourke exclaims:
"So much stuff and nonsense has been written about the entire absence of affection from the Indian character, especially in the relations between the sexes, that it affords me great pleasure to note this little incident"
--namely, a scene between an Indian and a young squaw:
"They had evidently only lately had a quarrel, for which each was heartily sorry. He approached, and was received with a disdain tempered with so much sweetness and affection that he wilted at once, and, instead of boldly asserting himself, dared do nothing but timidly touch her hand. The touch, I imagine, was not disagreeable, because the girl's hand was soon firmly held in his, and he, with earnest warmth, was pouring into her ear words whose purport it was not difficult to conjecture."
That the simplest kind of a sensual caress--squeezing a young woman's hand and whispering in her ear--should be accepted as evidence of affection is naïve, to say the least, and need not be commented on after what has just been said about the true nature of affection and its altruistic test. Unfortunately many travellers who came in contact with the lower races shared Bourke's crude conception of the nature of affection, and this has done much to mislead even expert anthropologists; Westermarck, for instance, who is induced by such testimony to remark (358) that conjugal affection has among certain uncivilized peoples "reached a remarkably high degree of development." Among those whom he relies on as witnesses is Schweinfurth, who says of the man-eating African Niam-Niam that "they display an affection for their wives which is unparalleled among natives of so low a grade. ... A husband will spare no sacrifice to redeem an imprisoned wife" (I., 472).
SACRIFICES OF CANNIBAL HUSBANDS
This looks like strong evidence, but when we examine the facts the illusion vanishes. The Nubians, it appears, are given to stealing the wives of these Niam-Niam, to induce them to ransom them with ivory. A case occurred within Dr. Schweinfurth's own experience (II., 180-187). Two married women were stolen, and during the night
"it was touching, through the moaning of the wind, to catch the lamentations of the Niam-Niam men bewailing the loss of their captured wives; cannibals though they were, they were evidently capable of true conjugal affection. The Nubians remained quite unaffected by any of their cries, and never for a moment swerved from their purpose of recovering the ivory before they surrendered the women."
Here we see what the expression that the Niam-Niam "spare no sacrifice to redeem their imprisoned women" amounts to: the Nubians counted on it that they would rather part with their ivory than with their wives! This, surely, involved no "sacrifice"; it was simply a question of which the husbands preferred, the useless ivory or the useful women--desirable as drudges and concubines. Why should buying back a wife be evidence of affection any more than the buying of a bride, which is a general custom of Africans? As for their howling over their lost wives, that was natural enough; they would have howled over lost cows too--as our children cry if their milk is taken away when they are hungry. Actions which can be interpreted in such sensual and selfish terms can never be accepted as proof of true affection. That the captured wives, on their part, were not troubled by conjugal affection is evident from Schweinfurth's remark that they "were perfectly composed and apparently quite indifferent."
INCLINATIONS MISTAKEN FOR AFFECTION
Let us take one more case. There are plenty of men who would like to kiss every pretty girl they see, and no one would be so foolish as to regard a kiss as proof of affection. Yet Lyon (another of the witnesses on whom Westermarck relies) accepts, with a naïveté equalling Captain Bourke's, the rubbing together of noses, which among the Eskimos is an equivalent of our kissing, as a mark of "affection." In the case of unscientific travellers, such a loose use of words may perhaps be pardonable, but a specialist who writes a history of marriage should not put the label of "affection" on everything that comes into his drag-net, as Westermarck does (pp. 358-59); a proceeding the less excusable because he himself admits, a few pages later (362), that affection is chiefly provoked by "intellectual, emotional, and moral qualities" which certainly could not be found among some of the races he refers to. I have investigated a number of the alleged cases of conjugal "affection" in books of travel, and found invariably that some manifestation of sensual attachment was recklessly accepted as an indication of "affection."
In part, it is true, the English language is to be blamed for this state of affairs. The word affection has been used to mean almost any disposition of the mind, including passion, lust, animosity, and a morbid state. But in good modern usage it means or implies an altruistic feeling of devotion which urges us to seek the welfare of another even at the expense of our own. We call a mother affectionate because she willingly and eagerly sacrifices herself for her child, toils for it, loses sleep and food and health for its sake. If she merely cared for it [note the subtle double sense of "caring for"] because it is pretty and amusing, we might concede that she "liked" it, was "attached" to it, or "fond" of it; but it would be incorrect to speak of affection. Liking, attachment, and fondness differ from affection not only in degree but in kind; they are selfish, while affection is unselfish; they occur among savages, while affection is peculiar to civilized persons and perhaps some animals.
SELFISH LIKING AND ATTACHMENT
Liking is the weakest kind of inclination toward another. It "never has the intensity of love." To say that I like a man is to indicate merely that he pleases me, gives me selfish pleasure--in some way or other. A man may say of a girl who pleases him by her looks, wit, vivacity, or sympathy, "I like her," though he may have known her only a few minutes; while a girl who will rather die than give any sign of affection, may be quite willing to confess that she likes him, knowing that the latter means infinitely less and does not betray her; that is, it merely indicates that he pleases her and not that she is particularly anxious to please him, as she would be if she loved him. Girls "like" candy, too, because it gives them pleasure, and cannibals may like missionaries without having the least affection for them.
Attachment is stranger than liking, but it also springs from selfish interests and habits. It is apt to be similar to that gratitude which is "a lively sense of favors to come." Mrs. Bishop (Isabella Bird) eloquently describes (II, 135-136) the attachment to her of a Persian horse, and incidentally suggests the philosophy of the matter in one sentence: "To him I am an embodiment of melons, cucumbers, grapes, pears, peaches, biscuits, and sugar, with a good deal of petting and ear-rubbing thrown in." Cases of attachment between husband and wife no doubt abound among savages, even when the man is usually contemptuous and rude in his treatment of the wife. The Niam-Niam husbands of Schweinfurth did not, as we saw, give any evidence of unselfish affection, but they were doubtless attached to their wives, for obvious reasons. As for the women among the lower races, they are apt, like dogs, to cling to their master, no matter how much he may kick them about. They get from him food and shelter, and blind habit does the rest to attach them to his hearth. What habit and association can do is shown in the ease with which "happy families" of hostile animals can be reared. But the beasts of prey must be well fed; a day or two of fasting would result in the lamb lying down inside the lion. The essential selfishness of attachment is shown also in the way a man becomes attached to his pipe or his home, etc. At the same time, personal attachment may prove the entering wedge of something higher. "The passing attachments of young people are seldom entitled to serious notice; although sometimes they may ripen by long intercourse into a laudable and steady affection" (Crabb).
FOOLISH FONDNESS
The word fondness is sometimes used in the sense of a tender, loving disposition; yet there is nearly always an implication of silly extravagance or unseemly demonstrativeness, and in the most accurate usage it means a foolish, doting indulgence, without discriminating intelligence, or even common-sense. As Crabb puts it in his English Synonyms, "A fond parent does not rise above a fool." Everybody knows fathers and mothers whose fondness induces them to indulge all the appetites, desires, and whims of their children, thereby ruining their health and temper, making them greedy and selfish, and laying the foundation for a wretched life for the children themselves and all who are unfortunate enough to come into contact with them. This irrational fondness is what travellers and anthropologists have so often mistaken for genuine affection in the cases of savages and barbarians who were found to be fondling their babes, doting upon them, playing with them, and refusing to punish them for any naughtiness. But it is far from being affection, because it is not only foolish, but selfish. To some of my readers this may seem a strange accusation, but it is a fact recognized in the best literary usage, for, as Crabb remarks, "a person is fond, who caresses an object or makes it a source of pleasure to himself." Savages fondle their children because in doing so they please and amuse themselves. Their pranks entertain the fathers, and as for the mothers, nature (natural selection) has implanted in them an unconscious instinct of race preservation which, recognizing the selfishness of primitive man, has brought it about that it gives the mother a special pleasure to suckle and fondle her infant. The essential selfishness of this fondness is revealed when there is a conflict between the mother's comfort and the child's welfare. The horrible prevalence among many of the lower races, of infanticide--merely to save trouble--of which many examples are given in various parts of this book (see index)--shows not only how selfish, but how shallow, fondness is. There are thousands of mothers in our modern cities who have not risen above this condition. An Italian, Ferriani, has written a book on degenerate mothers (Madri Snaturate), and I have in my note-books a statement of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children referring to a record of 2,141 cases of proved cruelty in the one month of August, 1898; which would make at least 25,000 cases a year, in one city alone, or possibly double that number, for many cases are never found out, or else consist of mental torture which is worse than bodily maltreatment. Yet there can be no doubt that all, or nearly all, of these mothers were fond of their babies--i.e., fondled them at first, till the animal instinct implanted in them was overcome by the desire for personal comfort. This animal instinct, given to them by nature, is no virtue, for it is unconscious. A tigress has it, but we do not call it a virtue in her any more than we call her cruelty to her prey a vice; she is acting unconsciously in either case, knowing no distinction between good and evil. Fondness, in a word, is not an ethical virtue. In addition to all its enumerated shortcomings, it is, moreover, transient. A dog mother will care for her young for a few months with the watchfulness and temporary ferocity implanted in her by natural selection, but after that she will abandon them and recognize them no more as her own. Sometimes this instinctive fondness ceases with startling rapidity. I remember once in a California yard, how a hen flew in my face angrily because I had frightened her chicks. A few days later she deserted them, before they were really quite old enough to take care of themselves, and all my efforts to make her return and let them sleep again under her warm feathers failed. She even pecked at them viciously. Some of the lower savages similarly abandon their young as soon as they are able to get along, while those who care for them longer, do so not from affection, but because sons are useful assistants in hunting and fighting, and daughters can be sold or traded off for new wives. That they do not keep them from affection is proved by the fact that in all cases where any selfish advantage can be gained they marry them off without reference to their wishes or chances of happiness.[39]
UNSELFISH AFFECTION
While the fondness of savages, which has been so often mistaken for affection, is thus seen to be foolish, unconscious, selfish, shallow, and transient, true affection is rational, conscious, unselfish, deep, and enduring. Being rational, it looks not to the enjoyment or comfort of the moment, but to future and enduring welfare, and therefore does not hesitate to punish folly or misdeeds in order to avert future illness or misfortune. Instead of being a mere instinctive impulse, liable to cease at any moment, like that of the California hen referred to, it is a conscious altruism, never faltering in its ethical sense of duty, utterly incapable of sacrificing another's comfort or well-being to its own. While fondness is found coexisting with cruelty and even with infanticide and cannibalism (as in those Australian mothers, who feed their children well and carry them when tired, but when a real test of altruism comes--during a famine--kill and eat them,[40] just as the men do their wives when they cease to be sensually attractive), affection is horrified at the mere suggestion of such a thing. No man into whose love affection enters as an ingredient would ever injure his beloved merely to gratify himself. Crabb is utterly wrong when he writes that
"love is more selfish in its nature than friendship; in indulging another it seeks its own, and when this is not to be obtained, it will change into the contrary passion of hatred."
This is a definition of lust, not of love--a definition of the passion as known to the Greek Euripides, of whose lovers Benecke says (53):
"If, or as soon as, they fail in achieving the gratification of their sensual desires, their 'love' immediately turns to hate. The idea of devotion or self-sacrifice for the good of the beloved person, as distinct from one's own, is absolutely unknown. 'Love is irresistible,' they say, and, in obedience to its commands, they set down to reckon how they can satisfy themselves, at no matter what cost to the objects of their passion."
How different this unaffectionate "love" from the love of which our poets sing! Shakspere knew that absorbing affection is an ingredient of love: Beatrice loves Benedick "with an enraged affection," which is "past the infinite of the night." Rosalind does not know how many fathom deep she is in love: "It cannot he sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal." Dr. Abel has truly said that
"affection is love tested and purified in the fire of the intellect. It appears when, after the veil of fancy has dropped, a beloved one is seen in the natural beauty with various human limitations, and is still found worthy of the warmest regards. It comes slowly, but it endures; gives more than it takes and has a tinge of tender gratitude for a thousand kind actions and for the bestowal of enduring happiness. According to English ideas, a deep affection, through whose clear mirror the gold of the old love shimmers visibly, should be the fulfilment of marriage."
Of romantic love affection obviously could not become an ingredient till minds were cultured, women esteemed, men made altruistic, and opportunities were given for youths and maidens to become acquainted with each other's minds and characters before marriage; as Dr. Abel says, affection "comes slowly--but it endures." The love of which affection forms an ingredient can never change to hatred, can never have any murderous impulses, as Schuré and Goethe believed. It survives time and sensual charms, as Shakspere knew:
Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds.
* * * * *
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:--
If this be error, and upon me proved; I never writ nor no man ever loved.
XIII. MENTAL PURITY
Romantic love has worked two astounding miracles. We have seen how, with the aid of five of its ingredients--sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, and affection--it has overthrown the Goliath of selfishness. We shall now see how it has overcome another formidable foe of civilization--sensualism--by means of two other modern ingredients, one of which I will call mental purity (to distinguish it from bodily purity or chastity) and the other esthetic admiration of personal beauty.
GERMAN TESTIMONY
Modern German literature contains many sincere tributes, in prose and verse, to the purity and nobility of true love and its refining influence. The psychologist Horwicz refers briefly (38) to the way in which
"love, growing up as a mighty passion from the substratum of sexual life, has, under the repressing influence of centuries of habits and customs, taken on an entirely new, supersensual, ethereal character, so that to a lover every thought of naturalia seems indelicate and improper." "I feel it deeply that love must ennoble, not crush me,"
wrote the poet Korner; and again,
"Your sweet name was my talisman, which led me undefiled through youth's wild storms, amid the corruption of the times, and protected my inner sanctum." "O God!" wrote Beethoven, "let me at last find her who is destined to be mine, and who shall strengthen me in virtue."
According to Dr. Abel, while love longs ardently to possess the beloved, to enjoy her presence and sympathy, it has also a more or less prominent mental trait which ennobles the passion and places it at the service of the ideal of its fancy. It is accompanied by an enthusiasm for the good and the beautiful in general, which comes to most people only during the brief period of love. "It is a temporary self-exaltation, purifying the desires and urging the lover to generous deeds."
Des höchste Glück hat keine Lieder, Der Liebe Lust ist still und mild; Ein Kuss, ein Blicken hin und wieder, Und alle Sehnsucht ist gestillt. --Geibel.
Schiller defined love as an eager "desire for another's happiness." "Love," he adds, "is the most beautiful phenomenon in all animated nature, the mightiest magnet in the spiritual world, the source of veneration and the sublimest virtues." Even Goethe had moments when he appreciated the purity of love, and he confutes his own coarse conception that was referred to in the last section when he makes Werther write: "She is sacred to me. All desire is silent in her presence."[41]
The French Edward Schuré exclaims, in his History of German Song:
"What surprises us foreigners in the poems of this people is the unbounded faith in love, as the supreme power in the world, as the most beautiful and divine thing on earth, ... the first and last word of creation, its only principle of life, because it alone can urge us to complete self-surrender."
Schuré's intimation that this respect for love is peculiar to the Germans is, of course, absurd, for it is found in the modern literature of all civilized countries of Europe and America; as for instance in Michael Angelo's
The might of one fair face sublimes my love, For it hath weaned my heart from low desires.
ENGLISH TESTIMONY
English literature, particularly, has been saturated with this sentiment for several centuries. Love is "all purity," according to Shakspere's Silvius. Schlegel remarked that by the manner in which Shakspere handled the story of Romeo and Juliet, it has become
"a glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul and gives to it its highest sublimity, and which elevates even the senses themselves into soul;"
--which reminds one of Emerson's expression that the body is "ensouled" through love. Steele declared that "Love is a passion of the mind (perhaps the noblest), which was planted in it by the same hand that created it;" and of Lady Elizabeth Hastings he wrote that "to love her was a liberal education." In Steel's Lover (No. 5) we read:
"During this emotion I am highly elated in my Being, and my every sentiment improved by the effects of that Passion.... I am more and more convinced that this Passion is in lowest minds the strongest Incentive that can move the Soul of Man to laudable Accomplishments."
And in No. 29: "Nothing can mend the Heart better than an honorable Love, except Religion." Thomas Otway sang:
O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee To temper man: we had been brutes without you. There's in you all that we believe of heaven, Amazing brightness, purity, and truth, Eternal joy, and everlasting love.
"Love taught him shame," said Dryden, and Spenser wrote a Hymn in Honor of Love, in which he declared that
Such is the power of that sweet passion That it all sordid baseness doth expel, And the refined mind doth newly fashion Unto a fairer form, which now doth dwell In his high thought, that would itself excel.
Leigh Hunt wrote: "My love has made me better and more desirous of improvement than I have been."
Love, indeed, is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire, With angels shared, by Allah given, To lift from earth our low desire. Devotion wafts the mind above, But heaven itself descends in love. --Byron.
Why should we kill the best of passions, love? It aids the hero, bids ambition rise To nobler heights, inspires immortal deeds, Ev'n softens brutes, and adds a grace to virtue. --Thomson.
Dr. Beddoe, author of the Browning Cyclopaedia, declares that "the passion of love, throughout Mr. Browning's works, is treated as the most sacred thing in the human soul." How Browning himself loved we know from one of his wife's letters, in which she relates how she tried to discourage his advances:
"I showed him how he was throwing away into the ashes his best affections--how the common gifts of youth and cheerfulness were behind me--how I had not strength, even of heart, for the ordinary duties of life--everything I told him and showed him. 'Look at this--and this--and this,' throwing down all my disadvantages. To which he did not answer by a single compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose, and that I might be right or he might be right, he was not there to decide; but that he loved me and should to his last hour. He said that the freshness of youth had passed with him also, and that he had studied the world out of books and seen many women, yet had never loved one until he had seen me. That he knew himself, and knew that, if ever so repulsed, he should love me to his last hour--it should be first and last."
No poet understood better than Tennyson that purity is an ingredient of love:
For indeed I know Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden passion for a maid, Not only to keep down the base in man, But teach high thoughts and amiable words, And courtliness, and the desire of fame And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
MAIDEN FANCIES
Bryan Waller Proctor fell in love when he was only five years old: "My love," he wrote afterward, "had the fire of passion, but not the clay which drags it downward; it partook of the innocence of my years, while it etherealized me."
Such ethereal love too is the prerogative of a young maiden, whose imagination is immaculate, ignorant of impurity.
Her feelings have the fragrancy, The freshness of young flowers.
No, no, the utmost share Of my desire shall be, Only to kiss that air That lately kissed thee.
In high school, when sentimental impulses first manifest themselves in a girl, she is more likely than not to transfer them to a girl. Her feelings, in these cases, are not merely those of a warm friendship, but they resemble the passionate, self-sacrificing attitude of romantic love. New York schoolgirls have a special slang phrase for this kind of love--they call it a "crush," to distinguish it from a "mash," which refers to an impression made on a man. A girl of seventeen told me one day how madly she was in love with another girl whose seat was near hers; how she brought her flowers, wiped her pens, took care of her desk; "but I don't believe she cares for me at all," she added, sadly.
PATHOLOGIC LOVE
Such love is usually as innocent as a butterfly's flirtation with a flower.[42] It has a pathologic phase, in some cases, which need not be discussed here. But I wish to call attention to the fact that even in abnormal states modern love preserves its purity. The most eminent authority on mental pathology, Professor Krafft-Ebing, says, concerning erotomania:
"The kernel of the whole matter is the delusion of being singled out and loved by a person of the other sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social class. And it should be noted that the love felt by the patient toward this person is a romantic, ecstatic, but entirely 'Platonic' affection."
I have among my notes a remarkable case, relating to that most awful of diseases that can befall a woman--nymphomania.[43] The patient relates:
"I have also noticed that when my affections are aroused, they counteract animal passion. I could never love a man because he was a man. My tendency is to worship the good I find in friends. I feel just the same toward those of my own sex. If they show any regard for me, the touch of a hand has power to take away all morbid feelings."
A MODERN SENTIMENT
There are all sorts and conditions of love. To those who have known only the primitive (sensual) sort, the conditions described in the foregoing pages will seem strange and fantastic if not fictitious--that is, the products of the writers' imaginations. Fantastic they are, no doubt, and romantic, but that they are real I can vouch for by my own experience whenever I was in love, which happened several times. When I was a youth of seventeen I fell in love with a beautiful, black-eyed young woman, a Spanish-American of Californian stock. She was married, and I am afraid she was amused at my mad infatuation. Did I try to flirt with her? A smile, a glance of her eyes, was to me the seventh heaven beyond which there could be no other. I would not have dared to touch her hand, and the thought of kissing her was as much beyond my wildest flights of fancy as if she had been a real goddess. To me she was divine, utterly unapproachable by mortal. Every day I used to sit in a lonely spot of the forest and weep; and when she went away I felt as if the son had gone out and all the world were plunged into eternal darkness.
Such is romantic love--a supersensual feeling of crystalline purity from which all gross matter has been distilled. But the love that includes this ingredient is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old, and not to be found among savages, barbarians, or Orientals. To them, as the perusal of past and later chapters must convince the reader, it is inconceivable that a woman should serve any other than sensual and utilitarian purposes. The whole story is told in what Dodge says of the Indians, who, "animal-like, approach a woman only to make love to her"; and of the squaws who do not dare even go with a beau to a dance, or go a short distance from camp, without taking precautions against rape--precautions without which they "would not be safe for an instant" (210, 213).
PERSIANS, TURKS, AND HINDOOS
We shall read later on of the obscene talk and sights that poison the minds of boys and girls among Indians, Polynesians, etc., from their infancy; in which respect Orientals are not much better than Hurons and Botocudos. "The Persian child," writes Mrs. Bishop (I., 218),
"from infancy is altogether interested in the topics of adults; and as the conversation of both sexes is said by those who know them best to be without reticence or modesty, the purity which is one of the greatest charms of childhood is absolutely unknown."
Of the Turks (at Bagdad) Ida Pfeiffer writes (L.J.R.W., 202-203) that she found it
"very painful to notice the tone of the conversation that goes on in these harems and in the baths. Nothing can exceed the demureness of the women in public; but when they come together in these places, they indemnify themselves thoroughly for the restraint. While they were busy with their pipes and coffee, I took the opportunity to take a glance into the neighboring apartments, and in a few minutes I saw enough to fill me at once with disgust and compassion for these poor creatures, whom idleness and ignorance have degraded almost below the level of humanity. A visit to the women's baths left a no less melancholy impression. There were children of both sexes, girls, women, and elderly matrons. The poor children! how should they in after life understand what is meant by modesty and purity, when they are accustomed from their infancy to witness such scenes, and listen to such conversation?"
These Orientals are too coarse-fibred to appreciate the spotless, peach-down purity which in our ideal is a maiden's supreme charm. They do not care to prolong, even for a year what to us seems the sweetest, loveliest period of life, the time of artless, innocent maidenhood. They cannot admire a rose for its fragrant beauty, but must needs regard it as a thing to be picked at once and used to gratify their appetite. Nay, they cannot even wait till it is a full-blown rose, but must destroy the lovely bud. The "civilized" Hindoos, who are allowed legally to sacrifice girls to their lusts before the poor victims have reached the age of puberty, are really on a level with the African savages who indulge in the same practice. An unsophisticated reader of Kalidasa might find in the King's comparison of Sakuntala to "a flower that no one has smelt, a sprig that no one has plucked, a pearl that has not yet been pierced," a recognition of the charm of maiden purity. But there is a world-wide difference between this and the modern sentiment. The King's attitude, as the context shows, is simply that of an epicure who prefers his oysters fresh. The modern sentiment is embodied in Heine's exquisite lines:
DU BIST WIE EINE BLUME.
E'en as a lovely flower So fair, so pure, thou art; I gaze on thee and sadness Comes stealing o'er my heart.
My hands I fain had folded Upon thy soft brown hair, Praying that God may keep thee So lovely, pure, and fair. --Trans, of Kate Freiligrath Kroeker.
It is not surprising that this intensely modern poem should have been set to music--the most modern of all the arts--more frequently than any other verses ever written. To Orientals, to savages, to Greeks, it would be incomprehensible--as incomprehensible as Ruskin's "there is no true conqueror of lust but love," or Tennyson's
'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
To them the love between men and women seems not a purifying, ennobling emotion, a stimulus to self-improvement and an impulse to do generous, unselfish deeds, but a mere animal passion, low and degrading.
LOVE DESPISED IN JAPAN AND CHINA
The Japanese have a little more regard for women than most Orientals, yet by them, too, love is regarded as a low passion--as, in fact, identical with lust. It is not considered respectable for young folks to arrange their own marriages on a basis of love.
"Among the lower classes, indeed," says Küchler,[44] "such direct unions are not infrequent; but they are held in contempt, and are known as yago (meeting on a moor), a term of disrespect, showing the low opinion entertained of it." Professor Chamberlain writes, in his Things Japanese (285):
"One love marriage we have heard of, one in eighteen years! But then both the young people had been brought up in America. Accordingly they took the reins in their own hands, to the great scandal of all their friends and relations."
On another page (308) he says:
"According to the Confucian ethical code, which the Japanese adopted, a man's parents, his teacher, and his lord claim his life-long service, his wife standing on an immeasurably lower plane."[45]
Ball, in his Things Chinese comments on the efforts made by Chinamen to suppress love-matches as being immoral; and the French author, L.A. Martin, says, in his book on Chinese morals (171):
"Chinese philosophers know nothing of Platonic love; they speak of the relations between men and women with the greatest reserve, and we must attribute this to the low esteem in which they generally hold the fair sex; in their illustrations of the disorders of love, it is almost always the woman on whom the blame of seduction is laid."
GREEK SCORN FOR WOMAN-LOVE
The Greeks were in the same boat. They did indeed distinguish between two kinds of love, the sensual and the celestial, but--as we shall see in detail in the special chapter devoted to them--they applied the celestial kind only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love between men and women. That love was considered impure and degrading, a humiliating affliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable to the friendship between men or the feelings that unite parents and children. This is the view taken in Plato's writings, in Xenophon's Symposium and everywhere. In Plutarch's Dialogue on Love, written five hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faint protest against the current notion that "there is no gust of friendship or heavenly ravishment of mind," in the love for women; but this is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which is thus brutally expressed by one of the interlocutors in the same dialogue:
"True love has nothing to do with women, and I assert that you who are passionately inclined toward women and maidens do not love any more than flies love milk or bees honey, or cooks the calves and birds whom they fatten in the dark.... The passion for women consists at the best in the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty."
Another interlocutor sums up the Greek attitude in these words: "It behooves respectable women neither to love nor to be loved."
Goethe had an aperçu of the absence of purity in Greek love when he wrote, in his Roman Elegies:
In der heroischen Zeit, da Götter und Göttinnen liebten. Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.
PENETRATIVE VIRGINITY
The change in love from the barbarian and ancient attitude to the modern conception of it as a refining, purifying feeling is closely connected with the growth of the altruistic ingredients of love--sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, and especially adoration. It is one of the points where religion and love meet. Mariolatry greatly affected men's attitude toward women in general, including their notions about love. There is a curious passage in Burton worth citing here (III., 2):
"Christ himself, and the Virgin Mary, had most beautiful eyes, as amiable eyes as any persons, saith Baradius, that ever lived, yet withal so modest, so chaste, that whosoever looked on them was freed from that passion of burning lust, if we may believe Gerson and Bonaventure; there was no such antidote against it as the Virgin Mary's face."
Mediaeval theologians had a special name for this faculty--Penetrative Virginity--which McClintock and Strong's Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature defines as
"such an extraordinary or perfect gift of chastity, to which some have pretended that it overpowered those by whom they have been surrounded, and created in them an insensibility to the pleasures of the flesh. The Virgin Mary, according to some Romanists, was possessed of this gift, which made those who beheld her, notwithstanding her beauty, to have no sentiments but such as were consistent with chastity."
In the eyes of refined modern lovers, every spotless maiden has that gift of penetrative virginity. The beauty of her face, or the charm of her character, inspires in him an affection which is as pure, as chaste, as the love of flowers. But it was only very gradually and slowly that human beauty gained the power to inspire such a pure love; the proof of which assertion is to be unfolded in our next section.
XIV. ADMIRATION OF PERSONAL BEAUTY
"When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind," exclaimed Dryden; and Romeo asks:
Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
In full-fledged romantic love of the masculine type the admiration of a girl's personal beauty is no doubt the most entrancing ingredient. But such love is rare even to-day, while in ordinary love-affairs the sense of beauty does not play nearly so important a role as is commonly supposed. In woman's love, as everybody knows, the regard for masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient; and a man's love, provided sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, and purity enter into it, may be of the genuine romantic type, even though he has no sense of beauty at all. And this is lucky for the prospects of love, since, even among the most civilized races to-day, the number of men and women who, while otherwise refined and estimable, have no real appreciation of beauty, personal or otherwise, is astonishingly large.
DARWIN'S UNFORTUNATE MISTAKE
This being true of the average man and woman among the most cultured races, we ought to be able to conclude, as a matter of course and without the necessity of argumentation, that the admiration of personal beauty has still less to do with the motives that lead a savage to marry this or that girl, or a savage girl to prefer this or that suitor. Strange to say, this simple corollary of the doctrine of evolution has been greatly obscured by Darwin himself, by his theory of sexual selection, which goes so far as to attribute the beauty of the male animals to the continued preference by the females of the more showy males, and the consequent hereditary transmission of their colors and other ornaments. When we bear in mind how unimportant a role the regard for personal beauty plays even among the females of the most advanced human beings, the idea that the females of the lower animals are guided in their pairing by minute subtle differences in the beauty of masculine animals seems positively comic. It is an idea such as could have emanated only from a mind as unesthetic as Darwin's was.
So far as animals are concerned, Alfred Russell Wallace completely demolished the theory of sexual selection,[46] after it had created a great deal of confusion in scientific literature. In regard to the lower races of man this confusion still continues, and I therefore wish to demonstrate here, more conclusively than I did in my first book (60, 61, 327-30), that among primitive men and women, too, the sense of beauty does not play the important rôle attributed to it in their love-affairs. "The Influence of Beauty in determining the Marriages of Mankind" is one of the topics discussed in the Descent of Man. Darwin tries to show that, "especially" during the earlier period of our long history, the races of mankind were modified by the continued selection of men by women and women by men in accordance with their peculiar standards of beauty. He gives some of the numerous instances showing how savages "ornament" or mutilate their bodies; adding:
"The motives are various; the men paint their bodies to make themselves appear terrible in battle; certain mutilations are connected with religious rites, or they mark the age of puberty, or the rank of the man, or they serve to distinguish the tribes. Among savages the same fashions prevail for long periods, and thus mutilations, from whatever cause first made, soon come to be valued as distinctive marks. But self-adornment, vanity, and the admiration of others seem to be the commonest motives."
Among those who were led astray by these views of Darwin is Westermarck, who declares (257, 172) that "in every country, in every race, beauty stimulates passion," and that
"it seems to be beyond doubt that men and women began to ornament, mutilate, paint, and tattoo themselves chiefly in order to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex--that they might court successfully, or be courted"
--an opinion in which Grosse follows him, in his interesting treatise on the Beginnings of Art (111, etc.), thereby marring his chapter on "Personal Decoration." In the following pages I shall show, on the contrary, that when we subject these primitive customs of "ornamentation" and mutilation to a critical examination we find in nearly every case that they are either not at all or only indirectly (not esthetically), connected with the relations of the sexes; and that neither does personal beauty exist as a rule among savages, nor have they the esthetic sense to appreciate its exceptional occurrence. They nearly always paint, tattoo, decorate, or mutilate themselves without the least reference to courtship or the desire to please the other sex. It is the easiest thing in the world to fill page after page--as Darwin, Westermarck, Grosse, and others have done--with the remarks of travellers regarding the addiction of savages to personal "ornamentation"; but this testimony rests, as we shall see, on the unwarranted assumptions of superficial observers, who, ignorant of the real reasons why the lower races paint, tattoo, and otherwise "adorn" themselves, recklessly inferred that they did it to "make themselves beautiful." The more carefully the customs and traditions of these races are studied, the more obvious becomes the non-esthetic and non-erotic origin of their personal "decorations." In my extensive researches, for every single fact that seemed to favor the sexual selection theory I have found a hundred against it; and I have become more and more amazed at the extraordinary sang froid with which its advocates have ignored the countless facts that speak against it while boosting into prominence the very few that at first sight appear to support it. In the following pages I shall attempt to demolish the theory of sexual selection in reference to the lower races of man as Wallace demolished it in reference to animals; premising that the mass of cumulative evidence here presented is only a very small part of what might be adduced on my side. Let us consider the different motives for personal "decoration" in succession.
"DECORATION" FOR PROTECTION
Many of the alleged personal "decorations" of inferior races are merely measures to protect themselves against climate, insects, etc. The Maoris of New Zealand besmear themselves with grease and red ochre as a defence against the sand-flies.[47] The Andaman islanders plaster themselves with a mixture of lard and colored earth to protect their skins from heat and mosquitoes.[48] Canadian Indians painted their faces in winter as a protection against frost-bite. In Patagonia
"both sexes smear their faces, and occasionally their bodies with paint, the Indians alleging as the reasons for using this cosmetic that it is a protection against the effects of the wind; and I found from personal experience that it proved a complete preservative from excoriation or chapped skin."[49]
C. Bock notes that in Sumatra rice powder is lavishly employed by many of the women, but "not with the object of preserving the complexion or reducing the color, but to prevent perspiration by closing the pores of the skin."[50] Baumann says of the African Bakongo that many of their peculiar ways of arranging the hair "seem to be intended less as ornamental head-dresses than as a bolster for the burdens they carry on their heads;"[51] and Squier says that the reason given by the Nicaraguans for flattening the heads of their children is that they may be better fitted in adult life to bear burdens.[52]
WAR "DECORATIONS"
Equally remote as the foregoing from all ideas of personal beauty or of courtship and the desire to inspire sexual passion is the custom so widely prevalent of painting and otherwise "adorning" the body for war. The Australians diversely made use of red and yellow ochre, or of white pigment for war paint.[53] Caesar relates that the ancient Britons stained themselves blue with woad to give themselves a more horrid aspect in war. "Among ourselves," as Tylor remarks, "the guise which was so terrific in the Red Indian warrior has comedown to make the circus clown a pattern of folly,"[54] Regarding Canadian Indians we read that
"some may be seen with blue noses, but with cheeks and eyebrows black; others mark forehead, nose, and cheeks with lines of various colors; one would think he beheld so many hobgoblins. They believe that in colors of this description they are dreadful to their enemies, and that otherwise their own line of battle will be concealed as by a veil; finally, that it hardens the skin of the body, so that the cold of the winter is easily borne."[55]
The Sioux Indians blackened their faces when they went on the warpath. They
"highly prize personal bravery, and therefore constantly wear the marks of distinction which they received for their exploits; among these are, especially, tufts of human hair attached to the arms and legs, and feathers on their heads."[56]
When Sioux warriors return from the warpath with scalps "the squaws as well as the men paint with vermilion a semicircle in front of each ear."[57] North Carolina Indians when going to war painted their faces all over red, while those of South Carolina, according to DeBrahm, "painted their faces red in token of friendship and black in expression of warlike intentions." "Before charging the foe," says Dorsey, "the Osage warriors paint themselves anew. This is called the death paint." The Algonquins, on the day of departure for war, dressed in their best, coloring the hair red and painting their faces and bodies red and black. The Cherokees when going to war dyed their hair red and adorned it with feathers of various colors.[58] Bancroft says (I., 105) that when a Thlinkit arms himself for war he paints his face and powders his hair a brilliant red. "He then ornaments his head with a white eagle feather as a token of stern, vindictive determination."
John Adair wrote of the Chickasaws, in 1720, that they "readily know achievements in war by the blue marks over their breasts and arms, they being as legible as our alphabetical characters are to us"--which calls attention to a very frequent use of what are supposed to be ornaments as merely part of a language of signs. Irving remarks in Astoria, regarding the Arikara warriors, that "some had the stamp of a red hand across their mouths, a sign that they had drunk the life-blood of an enemy." In Schoolcraft we read (II., 58) that among the Dakotas on St. Peter's River a red hand means that the wearer has been wounded by an enemy, while a black hand indicates "I have slain an enemy." The Hidatsa Indians wore eagle feathers "to denote acts of courage or success in war"; and the Dakotas and others indicated by means of special spots or colored bars in their feathers or cuts in them, that the wearer had killed an enemy, or wounded one, or taken a scalp, or killed a woman, etc. A black feather denoted that an Ojibwa woman was killed. The marks on their blankets had similar meanings.[59] Peter Carder, an Englishman captive among the Brazilians, wrote:
"This is to be noted, that how many men these savages doe kill, so many holes they will have in their visage, beginning first in the nether lippe, then in the cheekes, thirdly, in both their eye-browes, and lastly in their eares."[60]
Of the Abipones we read that,
"distrusting their courage, strength, and arms, they think that paint of various colors, feathers, shouting, trumpets, and other instruments of terror will forward their success."[61]
Fancourt(314) says of the natives of Yucatan that "in their wars, and when they went to their sacrificial dances and festivals, they had their faces, arms, thighs, and legs painted and naked." In Fiji the men bore a hole through the nose and put in a couple of feathers, nine to twelve inches long, which spread out over each side of the face like immense mustaches. They do this "to give themselves a fiercer appearance."[62] Waitz notes that in Tahiti mothers compressed the heads of their infant boys "to make their aspect more terrible and thus turn them into more formidable warriors." The Tahitians, as Ellis informs us, "went to battle in their best clothes, sometimes perfumed with fragrant oil, and adorned with flowers."[63] Of the wild tribes in Kondhistan, too, we read that "it is only, however, when they go out to battle ... that they adorn themselves with all their finery."[64]
AMULETS, CHARMS, MEDICINES
The African tribes along the Congo wear on their bodies
"the horn, the hoof, the hair, the teeth, and the bones of all manner of quadrupeds; the feathers, beaks, claws, skulls, and bones of birds; the heads and skins of snakes; the shells and fins of fishes, pieces of old iron, copper, wood, seeds of plants, and sometimes a mixture of all, or most of them, strung together."
Unsophisticated travellers speak of these things as "ornaments" indicating the strange "sense of beauty" of these natives. In reality, they have nothing to do with the sense of beauty, but are merely a manifestation of savage superstition. In Tuckey's Zaire, from which the above citation is made (375), they are properly classed as fetiches, and the information is added that in the choice of them the natives consult the fetich men. A picture is given in the book of one appendage to the dress "which the weaver considered an infallible charm against poison." Others are "considered as protection against the effects of thunder and lightning, against the attacks of the alligator, the hippopotamus, snakes, lions, tigers," etc., etc. Winstanley relates (II., 68) that in Abyssinia
"the Mateb, or baptismal cord, is de rigueur, and worn when nothing else is. It formed the only clothing of the young at Seramba, but was frequently added to with amulets, sure safeguards against sorcery."
Concerning the Bushmen, Mackenzie says:
"Certain marks on the face, or bits of wood on his hair, or tied around his neck, are medicines or charms to be taken in sickness, or proximity to lions, or in other circumstances of danger."[65]
Bastian relates that in many parts of Africa every infant is tattooed on the belly, to dedicate it thereby to a certain fetich.[66] The inland negroes mark all sorts of patterns on their skins, partly "to expel evil influences."[67] The Nicaraguans punctured and scarified their tongues because, as they explained to Oviedo, it would bring them luck in bargains. The Peruvians, says Cieza, pulled out three teeth of each jaw in children of very tender age because that would be acceptable to the gods; and Garcilassa notes that the Peruvians pulled out a hair of an eyebrow when making an offering. Jos. d'Acosta also describes how the Peruvians pulled out eyelashes and eyebrows and offered them to the deities. The natives of Yucatan, according to Fancourt, wore their hair long as "a sign of idolatry."[68] When Franklin relates that Chippewayan Indians "prize pictures very highly and esteem any they can get," we seem to have come across a genuine esthetic sense, till we read that it makes no difference how badly they are executed, and that they are valued "as efficient charms."[69] All Abipones of both sexes
"pluck up the hair from the forehead to the crown of the head, so that the forepart of the head is bald almost for the space of two inches; this baldness they ... account a religious mark of their nation."[70]
The Point Barrow Eskimos believe that clipping their hair on the back of the head in a certain way "prevents snow-blindness in the spring." These Eskimos painted their faces when they went whaling, and the Kadiaks did so before any important undertaking, such as crossing a wide strait, chasing the sea-otter, etc.[71] In regard to the amulets or charms worn by Eskimos, Crantz says:
"These powerful preventives consist in a bit of old wood hung around their necks, or a stone, or a bone, or a beak or claw of a bird, or else a leather strap tied round their forehead, breast, or arm."[72]
Marcano says that "the Indians of French Guiana paint themselves in order to drive away the devil when they start on a journey or for war."[73] In his treatise on the religion of the Dakotas, Lynd remarks:
"Scarlet or red is the religious color for sacrifices.... The use of paint, the Dakotas aver, was taught them by the gods. Unkteh taught the first medicine men how to paint themselves when they worshipped him and what colors to use. Takushkanshkan (the moving god) whispers to his favorites what colors to use. Heyoka hovers over them in dreams, and informs them how many streaks to employ upon their bodies and the tinge they must have. No ceremony of worship is complete without the wakan, or sacred application of paint."[74]
By the Tasmanians "the bones of relatives were worn around the neck, less, perhaps, as ornaments than as charms."[75] The Ainos of Japan and the Fijians held that tattooing was a custom introduced by the gods. Fijian women believed "that to be tattooed is a passport to the other world, where it prevents them from being persecuted by their own sex."[76] An Australian custom ordained that every person must have the septum of the nose pierced and must wear in it a piece of bone, a reed, or the stalks of some grass. This was not done, however, with the object of adorning the person, but for superstitious reasons: "the old men used to predict to those who were averse to this mutilation all kinds of evil." The sinner, they said, would suffer in the next world by having to eat filth. "To avoid a punishment so horrible, each one gladly submitted, and his or her nose was pierced accordingly." (Brough Smyth, 274.) Wilhelmi says that in the Northwest the men place in the head-band behind the ears pieces of wood decorated with very thin shavings and looking like plumes of white feathers. They do this "on occasions of rejoicings and when engaged in their mystic ceremonies." Nicaraguans trace the custom of flattening the heads of children to instructions from the gods, and Pelew Islanders believed that to win eternal bliss the septum of the nose must be perforated, while Eskimo girls were induced to submit to having long stitches made with a needle and black thread on several parts of the face by the superstitious fear that if they refused they would, after death, be turned into train tubs and placed under the lamps in heaven.[77] In order that the ghost of a Sioux Indian may travel the ghost road in safety, it is necessary for each Dakota during his life to be tattooed in the middle of the forehead or on the wrists. If found without these, he is pushed from a cloud or cliff and falls back to this world.[78] In Australia, the Kurnai medicine men were supposed to be able to communicate with ghosts only when they had certain bones thrust through the nose.[79] The American Anthropologist contains (July, 1889) a description of the various kinds of face-coloring to indicate degrees in the Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa. These Indians frequently tattooed temples, forehead, or cheeks of sufferers from headache or toothache, in the belief that this would expel the demons who cause the pain. In Congo, scarifications are made on the back for therapeutic reasons; and in Timor-Laut (Malay Archipelago), both sexes tattooed themselves "in imitation of immense smallpox marks, in order to ward off that disease."[80]
MOURNING LANGUAGE
Australian women of the Port Lincoln tribes paint a ring around each eye and a streak over the stomach, and men mark their breasts with stripes and paints in different patterns. An ignorant observer, or an advocate of the sexual selection theory, would infer that these "decorations" are resorted to for the purpose of ornamentation, to please individuals of the opposite sex. But Wilhelmi, who understood the customs of these tribes, explains that these divers stripes and paints have a practical object, being used to "indicate the different degrees of relationship between a dead person and the mourners."[81] In South Australia widows in mourning "shave their heads, cover them with a netting, and plaster them with pipe-clay"[82]. A white band around the brow is also used as a badge of mourning[83]. Taplin says that the Narrinyeri adorn the bodies of the dead with bright-red ochre, and that this is a wide-spread custom in Australia. A Dyeri, on being asked why he painted red and white spots on his skin, answered: "Suppose me no make-im, me tumble down too; that one [the corpse] growl along-a-me." A further "ornament" of the women on these occasions consists in two white streaks on the arm to indicate that they have eaten some of the fat of the dead, according to their custom. (Smyth, I., 120.) In some districts the mourners paint themselves white on the death of a blood relation, and black when a relative by marriage dies. The corpse is often painted red. Red is used too when boys are initiated into manhood, and with most tribes it is also the war-color. Hence it is not strange that they should undertake long journeys to secure fresh supplies of ochre: for war, mourning, and superstition are three of the strongest motives of savage activity. African Bushmen anoint the heads of the dead with a red powder mixed with melted fat. Hottentots, when mourning, shave their heads in furrows. Damaras wear a dark-colored skin-cap: a piece of leather round the neck, to which is attached a piece of ostrich egg-shell. Coast negroes bury the head of a family in his best clothes and ornaments, and Dahomans do the same[84]. Schweinfurth says that "according to the custom, which seems to belong to all Africa, as a sign of grief the Dinka wear a cord round the neck."[85] Mourning New Zealanders tie a red cloth round the head or wear headdresses of dark feathers. New Caledonians cut off their hair and blacken and oil their faces[85]. Hawaiians cut their hair in various forms, knock out a front tooth, cut the ears and tattoo a spot on the tongue[86]. The Mineopies use three coloring substances for painting their bodies; and by the way they apply them they let it be known whether a person is ill or in mourning, or going to a festival.[87] In California the Yokaia widows make an unguent with which they smear a white band two inches wide all around the edge of the hair[88]. Of the Yukon Indians of Alaska "some wore hoops of birch wood around the neck and waists, with various patterns of figures cut on them. These were said to be emblems of mourning for the dead."[89] Among the Snanaimuq "the face of the deceased is painted with red and black paint... After the death of husband or wife the survivor must paint his legs and his blanket red."[90] Numerous other instances may be found in Mallery, who remarks that "many objective modes of showing mourning by styles of paint and markings are known, the significance of which are apparent when discovered in pictographs."[91]
INDICATIONS OF TRIBE OR RANK
Among the customs which, in Darwin's opinion, show "how widely the different races of man differ in their taste for the beautiful," is that of moulding the skull of infants into various unnatural shapes, in some cases making the head "appear to us idiotic." One would think that before accepting such a monstrous custom as evidence of any kind of a sense of beauty, Darwin, and those who expressed the same opinion before and after him, would have inquired whether there is not some more rational way of accounting for the admiration of deformed heads by these races than by assuming that they approved of them for esthetic reasons. There is no difficulty in finding several non-esthetic reasons why peculiarly moulded skulls were approved of. The Nicaraguans, as I have already stated, believed that heads were moulded in order to make it easier to bear burdens, and the Peruvians also said they pressed the heads of children to make them healthier and able to do more work. But vanity--individual or tribal--and fashion were the principal motives. According to Torquemada, the kings were the first who had their heads shaped, and afterward permission to follow their example was granted to others as a special favor. In their classical work on Peruvian antiquities (31-32) Eivero and Tschudi describe the skulls they examined., including many varieties "artificially produced, and differing according to their respective localities."
"These irregularities were undoubtedly produced by mechanical causes, and were considered as the distinctive marks of families; for in one Huaca [cemetery] will always be found the same form of crania; while in another, near by, the forms are entirely different from those in the first."
The custom of flattening the head was practised by various Indian tribes, especially in the Pacific States, and Bancroft (I., 180) says that, "all seem to admire a flattened forehead as a sign of noble birth;" and on p. 228, he remarks:
"Failure properly to mould the cranium of her offspring gives the Chinook matron the reputation of a lazy and un-dutiful mother, and subjects the neglected children to the ridicule of their companions; so despotic is fashion."
The Arab races of Africa alter the shapes of their children's heads because they are jealous of their noble descent. (Bastian, D.M., II., 229.)
"The genuine Turkish skull," says Tylor (Anth., 240),
"is of the broad Tatar form, while the natives of Greece and Asia Minor have oval skulls, which gives the reason why at Constantinople it became the fashion to mould the babies' skulls round, so that they grew up with the broad head of the conquering race. Relics of such barbarism linger on in the midst of civilization, and not long ago a French physician surprised the world by the fact that nurses in Normandy were still giving the children's heads a sugar-loaf shape by bandages and a tight cap, while in Brittany they preferred to press it round."
Knocking out some of the teeth, or filing them into certain shapes, is another widely prevalent custom, for which it is inadmissible to invoke a monstrous and problematic esthetic taste as long as it can be accounted for on simpler and less disputable grounds, such as vanity, the desire for tribal distinction, or superstition. Holub found (II., 259), that in one of the Makololo tribes it was customary to break out the top incisor teeth, for the reason that it is "only horses that eat with all their teeth, and that men ought not to eat like horses." In other cases it is not contempt for animals but respect for them that accounts for the knocking out of teeth. Thus Livingstone relates (L. Tr., II., 120), in speaking of a boy from Lomaine, that "the
upper teeth extracted seemed to say that the tribe have cattle. The knocking out of the teeth is in imitation of the animals they almost worship." The Batokas also give as their reason for knocking out their upper front teeth that they wish to be like oxen. Livingstone tells us (Zamb., 115), that the Manganja chip their teeth to resemble those of the cat or crocodile: which suggests totemism, or superstitious respect for an animal chosen as an emblem of a tribe. That the Australian custom of knocking out the upper front teeth at puberty is part of a religious ceremonial, and not the outcome of a desire to make the boys attractive to the girls, as Westermarck naïvely assumes (174, 172), is made certain by the details given in Mallery (1888-89, 513-514), including an excerpt from a manuscript by A.W. Howitt, in which it is pointed out that the humming instrument kuamas, the bull-roarer, "has a sacred character with all the Australian tribes;" and that there are marked on it "two notches, one at each end, representing the gap left in the upper jaw of the novice after his teeth have been knocked out during the rites."[92] But perhaps the commonest motive for altering the teeth is the desire to indicate tribal connections. "Various tribes," says Tylor (Anthr. 240), "grind their front teeth to points, or cut them away in angular patterns, so that in Africa and elsewhere a man's tribe is often known by the cut of his teeth."
Peculiar arrangements of the hair also have misled unwary observers into fancying that they were made for beauty's sake and to attract the opposite sex, when in reality they were tribal marks or had other utilitarian purposes, serving as elements in a language of signs, etc. Frazer, e.g., notes (27) that the turtle clan of the Omaha Indians cuts off all the hair from a boy's head except six locks which hang down in imitation of the legs, head, and tail of a turtle; while the Buffalo clan arranges two locks of hair in imitation of horns. "Nearly all the Indian tribes," writes Mallery (419), "have peculiarities of the arrangement of the hair and of some article of apparel or accoutrement by which they can always be distinguished." Heriot relates (294) that among the Indians
"the fashion of trimming the hair varies in a great degree, and an enemy may by this means be discovered at a considerable distance." "The Pueblos generally, when accurate and particular in delineation [pictographs], designate the women of that tribe by a huge coil of hair over either ear. This custom prevails also among the Coyotèro Apaches, the woman wearing the hair in coil to denote a virgin or an unmarried person, while the coil is absent in the case of a married woman."
By the Mokis, maidenhood is indicated by wearing the hair as a disk on each side of the head. (Mallery, 231-32.) Similar usages on other continents might be cited.
Besides these arbitrary modifications of the skull and the teeth, and the divers arrangements of the hair, there are various other ways in which the lower races indicate tribal connection, rank, or other conditions. Writing about negroes Burton says (Abeok., I., 106), that lines, welts, and all sorts of skin patterns are used, partly for superstitious reasons, partly to mark the different tribes and families. "A volume would not suffice to explain all the marks in detail." Of the Dahomans, Forbes says (I., 28), "that according to rank and wealth anklets and armlets of all metals, and necklaces of glass, coral, and Popae beads, are worn by both sexes." Livingstone relates (Mis. Trav., 276) that the copper rings worn on their ankles by the chiefs of Londa were so large and heavy that they seriously inconvenienced them in walking. That this custom was entirely an outcome of vanity and emulation, and not a manifestation of the esthetic sense, is made clear by the further observations of Livingstone. Men who could not afford so many of these copper rings would still, he found, strut along as if they had them. "That is the way," he was informed, "in which they show off their lordship in these parts." Among the Mojave Indians "nose-jewels designate a man of wealth and rank," and elaborate headdresses of feathers are the insignia of the chiefs[93]. Champlain says that among the Iroquois those who wore three large plumes were chiefs. In Thurn says (305) that each of the Guiana tribes makes its feather head-dresses of special colors; and Martins has the following regarding the Brazilian Indians: "Commonly all the members of a tribe, or a horde, or a family, agree to wear certain ornaments or signs as characteristic marks." Among these are various ornaments of feathers on the head, pieces of wood, stones, or shells, in the ears, the nose, and lips, and especially tattoo marks.
VAIN DESIRE TO ATTRACT ATTENTION
Thus we see that an immense number of mutilations of the body and alleged "decorations" of it are not intended by these races as things of beauty, but have special meanings or uses in connection with protection, war, superstition, mourning, or the desire to mark distinctions between the tribes, or degrees of rank within one tribe or horde. Usually the "ornamentations" are prescribed for all members of a tribe of the same sex, and their acceptance is rigidly enforced. At the same time there is scope for variety in the form of deviations or exaggerations, and these are resorted to by ambitious individuals to attract attention to their important selves, and thus to gratify vanity, which, in the realm of fashion, is a thing entirely apart from--and usually antagonistic to--the sense of beauty[94]. At Australian dances various colors are used with the object of attracting attention. Especially fantastic are their "decorations" at the corroborees, when the bodies of the men are painted with white streaks that make them look like skeletons. Bulmer believed that their object was to "make themselves as terrible as possible to the beholders and not beautiful or attractive," while Grosse thinks (65) that as these dances usually take place by moonlight, the object of the stripes is to make the dancers more conspicuous--two explanations which are not inconsistent with each other.
Fry relates[95] that the Khonds adorn their hair till they may be seen "intoxicated with vanity on its due decoration." Hearne (306) saw Indians who had a single lock of hair that "when let down would trail on the ground as they walked." Anderson expresses himself with scientific precision when he writes (136) that in Fiji the men "who like to attract the attention of the opposite sex, don their best plumage." The attention may be attracted by anything that is conspicuous, entirely apart from the question whether it be regarded as a thing of beauty or not. Bourne makes the very suggestive statement (69-70) that in Patagonia the beautiful plumage of the ostrich was not appreciated, but allowed to blow all over the country, while the natives adorned themselves with beads and cheap brass and copper trinkets. We may therefore assume that in those cases where feathers are used for "adornment" it is not because their beauty is appreciated but because custom has given them a special significance. In many cases they indicate that the wearer is a person of rank--chief or medicine man--as we saw in the preceding pages. We also saw that special marks in feathers among Dakotas indicated that the wearer had taken a human life, which, more than anything else, excites the admiration of savage women; so that what fascinates them in such a case is not the feather itself but the deed it stands for. Panlitzschke informs us (E.N.O.Afr., chap. ii.), that among the African Somali and Gallas every man who had killed someone, boastfully wore an ostrich feather on his head to call attention to his deed. The Danâkil wore these feathers for the same purpose, adding ivory rods in their ear-lobes and fastening a bunch of white horsehair to their shield. A strip of red silk round the forehead served the same purpose. Lumholtz, describing a festival dance in Australia (237), says that some of the men hold in their mouths tufts of talegalla feathers "for the purpose of giving themselves a savage look." By some Australians bunches of hawk's or eagle's feathers are worn "either when fighting or dancing, and also used as a fan" (Brough Smyth, I., 281-282), which suggests the thought that the fantastic head-dresses of feathers, etc., often seen in warm countries, may be worn as protection against the sun[96].
I doubt, too, whether the lower races are able to appreciate flowers esthetically as we do, apart from their fragrance, which endears them to some barbarians of the higher grades. Concerning Australian women we find it recorded by Brough Smyth (I., 270) that they seem to have no love of flowers, and do not use them to adorn their persons. A New Zealander explained his indifference to flowers by declaring that they were "not good to eat."[97] Other Polynesians were much given to wearing flowers on the head and body; but whether this was for esthetic reasons seems to me doubtful on account of the revelations made by various missionaries and others. In Ellis, e.g. (P.R., I., 114), we read that in Tahiti the use of flowers in the hair, and fragrant oil, has been in a great degree discontinued, "partly from the connection of these ornaments with the evil practices to which they were formerly addicted."
OBJECTS OF TATTOOING
So far tattooing has been mentioned only incidentally; but as it is one of the most widely prevalent methods of primitive personal "decoration" a few pages must be devoted to it in order to ascertain whether it is true that it is one of those ornamentations which, as Darwin would have us believe, help to determine the marriages of mankind, or, as Westermarck puts it, "men and women began to... tattoo themselves chiefly in order to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex--that they might court successfully, or be courted." We shall find that, on the contrary, tattooing has had from the earliest recorded times more than a dozen practical purposes, and that its use as a stimulant of the passion of the opposite sex probably never occurred to a savage until it was suggested to him by a philosophizing visitor.
Twenty-four centuries ago Herodotus not only noted that the Thracians had punctures on their skins, but indicated the reason for them: they are, he said, "a mark of nobility: to be without them is a testimony of mean descent."[98] This use of skin disfigurements prevails among the lower races to the present day, and it is only one of many utilitarian and non-esthetic functions subserved by them. In his beautifully illustrated volume on Maori tattooing, Major-General Robley writes:
"Native tradition has it that their first settlers used to mark their faces for battle with charcoal, and that the lines on the face thus made were the beginnings of the tattoo. To save the trouble of this constantly painting their warlike decorations on the face, the lines were made permanent. Hence arose the practice of carving the face and the body with dyed incisions. The Rev. Mr. Taylor ... assumes that the chiefs being of a lighter race, and having to fight side by side with slaves of darker hues, darkened their faces in order to appear of the same race."
TATTOOING ON PACIFIC ISLANDS
When Captain Cook visited New Zealand (1769) he was much interested in the tattooing of the Maoris, and noted that each tribe seemed to have a different custom in regard to it; thus calling attention to one of its main functions as a means to distinguish the tribes from each other. He described the different patterns on divers parts of the body used by various tribes, and made the further important observation that "by adding to the tattooing they grow old and honorable at the same time." The old French navigator d'Urville found in the Maori tattooing an analogy to European heraldry, with this difference: that whereas the coat-of-arms attests the merits of ancestors, the Maori moko illustrates the merits of the persons decorated with it. It makes them, as Robley wittily says, "men of mark." One chief explained that a certain mark just over his nose was his name; it served the purposes of a seal in signing documents. It has been suggested that the body of a warrior may have been tattooed for the sake of identification in case the head was separated from it; for the Maoris carried on a regular trade in heads. Rutherford, who was held for a long time as a captive, said that only the great ones of the tribe were allowed to decorate the forehead, upper lip, and chin. Naturally such marks were "a source of pride" (a sign of rank), and "the chiefs were very pleased to show the tattooing on their bodies." To have an untattooed face was to be "a poor nobody." Ellis (P.R., III., 263) puts the matter graphically by saying the New Zealander's tattooing answers the purpose of the particular stripe or color of the Highlander's plaid, marking the clan or tribe to which they belong, and is also said to be employed as "a means of enabling them to distinguish their enemies in battle."
In his great work on Borneo (II., 83), Roth cites Brooke Low, who said that tattooing was a custom of recent introduction: "I have seen a few women with small patterns on their breasts, but they were the exception to the rule and were not regarded with favor." Burns says that the Kayan men do not tattoo, but
"many of the higher classes have small figures of stars, beasts, or birds on various parts of their body, chiefly the arms, distinctive of rank. The highest mark is that of having the back of the hands colored or tattooed, which is only conferred on the brave in battle."
St. John says that "a man is supposed to tattoo one finger only, if he has been present when an enemy has been killed, but tattoos hand and fingers if he has taken an enemy's head." Among the Ida'an a man makes a mark on his arm for each enemy slain. One man was seen with thirty-seven such stripes on the arm. A successful head-hunter is also allowed to "decorate" his ears with the canine teeth of a Bornean leopard. "In some cases tatu marks appear to be used as a means of communicating a fact," writes Roth (II., 291). Among the Kayan it indicates rank. Slaughter of an enemy, or mere murder of a slave, are other reasons for tattooing. "A Murut, having run away from the enemy, was tatued on his back. So that we may justly conclude that tatuing among the natives of Borneo is one method of writing." Among the Dusun the men that took heads generally had a tattoo mark for each one on the arm, and were looked upon as very brave, though their victim might have been only a woman or a child (159).
In the fifth volume of Waitz-Gerland's Anthropologie (Pt. II., 64-67), a number of authors are cited testifying that in the Micronesian Archipelago the natives of each island had special kinds of tattoo marks on different parts of the body, to distinguish them from others. These marks were named after the islands. The Micronesians themselves attached also a religious significance to these marks. The natives of Tobi believed that their island would be destroyed if the English visitors who came among them were not at once tattooed. Only those completely marked could enter the temple. The men were more tattooed than the women, who were regarded as inferiors.
In the sixth volume of Waitz-Gerland (30-40) is gathered a large mass of evidence, all of which shows that on the Polynesian islands, too, tattooing was indulged in, not for aesthetic and amorous but for religious and practical reasons. In Tonga it was a mark of rank, not permitted to common people or to slaves. Not to be tattooed was considered improper. In the Marquesas the older and more distinguished a man, the more he was tattooed. Married women were distinguished by having marks on the right hand and left foot. In some cases tattoo marks were used as signs to call to mind certain battles or festivals. A woman in Ponapé had marks for all her successive husbands made on her arm--everything and anything, in fact, except the purpose of decorating for the sake of attracting the other sex. Gerland (33-40) makes out a very strong case for the religions origin of tattooing, which he aptly compares to our confirmation.
In Samoa the principal motive of tattooing seems to have been licentiousness. It was prohibited by the chiefs on account of the obscene practices always connected with it, and there is a legend of the incestuous designs of two divine brothers on their sister which was successful.
"Tattooing thus originated among the gods and was first practised by the children of Taaroa, their principal deity. In imitation of their example, and for the accomplishment of the same purpose, it was practised among men." (Ellis, P.R., I., 262.)
TATTOOING IN AMERICA
On the American continent we find tattooing practised from north to south, from east to west, for the most diverse reasons, among which the desire to facilitate courtship is never even hinted at. The Eskimos, about the age of puberty, apply paint and tattooing to their faces, cut holes and insert plugs or labrets. The object of these disfigurements is indicated by Bancroft (I., 48): "Different tribes, and different ranks of the same tribe, have each their peculiar form of tattooing." Moreover, "these operations are supposed to possess some significance other than that of mere ornament. Upon the occasion of piercing the lip, for instance, a religious feast is given." John Murdoch relates (Mallery, 396) that the wife of an Eskimo chief had "a little mark tattooed in each corner of her mouth, which she said were 'whale marks,' indicating that she was the wife of a successful whaleman." Of the Kadiaks Bancroft says (72): "The more the female chin is riddled with holes, the greater the respectability." Among the Chippewayan Indians Mackenzie found (85) that both sexes had "blue or black bars, or from one to four straight lines, on their cheeks or foreheads to distinguish the tribe to which they belong." Swan writes (Mallery, 1882-83, 67) that
"the tattoo marks of the Haidas are heraldic designs or the family totem, or crests of the wearers, and are similar to the carvings depicted in the pillars and monuments around the homes of the chiefs."
A Haida Indian remarked to Swan (69): "If you were tattooed with the design of a swan, the Indians would know your family name." It is at festivals and masquerade performances, says the same writer, that "the tatoo marks show with the best effect, and the rank and family connection [are] known by the variety of design," Lafitan reports (II., 43) regarding the Iroquois and Algonquins that the designs which they have tattooed on their faces and bodies are employed as hieroglyphics, writing, and records, to indicate victories, etc. The designs tattooed on an Indian's face or body distinguish him, he adds, as we do a family by its armorial bearings.
"In James's Long it is reported that the Omahas are often neatly tattooed.... The daughters of chiefs and those of wealthy Indians generally are denoted by a small round spot tattooed on the forehead."
(Mallery, 1888-89, 395.) Bossu says regarding the practice of tattooing by the Osages (in 1756): "It is a kind of knighthood to which they are only entitled by great actions." Blue marks tattooed upon the chin of a Mojave woman indicate that she is married. The Serrano Indians near Los Angeles had, as late as 1843, a custom of having special tattoo marks on themselves which were also made on trees to indicate the corner boundaries of patches of land. (Mallery, 1882-83, 64, 182.) In his book on the California Indians, Powers declares (109) that in the Mattoal tribe the men tattoo themselves; in the others the women alone tattoo. The theory that the women are thus marked in order that the men may be able to recognize them and redeem them from captivity seems plausible for the reasons that these Indians are rent into a great number of divisions and that "the squaws almost never attempt any ornamental tattooing, but adhere closely to the plain regulation mark of the tribe." The Hupâ Indians have discovered another practical use for body-marks. Nearly every man has ten lines tattooed across the inside of his left arm, and these lines serve as a measurement of shell-money.
The same non-esthetic motives for tattooing prevail in South and Central America. In Agassiz's book on Brazil we read (318) concerning the Mundurucu Indians:
"Major Coutinho tells us that the tattooing has nothing to do with individual taste, but that the pattern is appointed for both sexes, and is invariable throughout the tribe. It is connected with their caste, the limits of which are very precise, and with their religion."
The tattooing "is also an indication of aristocracy; a man who neglected this distinction would not be respected in his tribe." Concerning the Indians of Guiana we read in Im Thurn (195-96) that they have small distinctive tribal marks tattooed at the corners of the mouth or on the arms. Nearly all have "indelibly excised lines" which are
"scars originally made for surgical, not ornamental purposes." "Some women specially affect certain little figures, like Chinese characters, which looks as if some meaning were attached to them, but which the Indians are either unable or unwilling to explain."
In Nicaragua, as Squire informs us (III., 341), the natives tattooed themselves to designate by special marks the tribes to which they belonged; and as regards Yucatan, Landa writes (§ XXI.) that as tattooing was accompanied by much pain, they thought themselves the more gallant and strong the more they indulged in it; and that those who omitted it were sneered at--which gives us still another motive for tattooing--the fear of being despised and ridiculed for not being in fashion.
TATTOOING IN JAPAN
Many more similar details might be given regarding the races of various parts of the world, but the limits of space forbid. But I cannot resist the temptation to add a citation from Professor Chamberlain's article on tattooing in his Things Japanese, because it admirably illustrates the diversity of the motives that led to the practice. A Chinese trader, "early in the Christian era," Chamberlain tells us, "wrote that the men all tattoo their faces and ornament their bodies with designs, differences of rank being indicated by the position and size of the patterns." "But from the dawn of regular history," Chamberlain adds,
"far down into the middle ages, tattooing seems to have been confined to criminals. It was used as branding was formerly in Europe, whence probably the contempt still felt for tattooing by the Japanese upper classes. From condemned desperadoes to bravoes at large is but a step. The swashbucklers of feudal times took to tattooing, apparently because some blood and thunder scene of adventure, engraven on their chest and limbs, helped to give them a terrific air when stripped for any reason of their clothes. Other classes whose avocations led them to baring their bodies in public followed--the carpenters, for instance, and running grooms; and the tradition remained of ornamenting almost the entire body and limbs with a hunting, theatrical, or other showy scene."
Shortly after 1808 "the government made tattooing a penal offence."
It will be noticed that in this account the fantastic notion that the custom was ever indulged in for the purpose of beautifying the body in order to attract the other sex is, as in all the other citations I have made, not even hinted at. The same is true in the summary made by Mallery of the seventeen purposes of tattooing he found. No. 13 is, indeed, "to charm the other sex;" but it is "magically," which is a very different thing from esthetically. I append the summary (418):
"1, to distinguish between free and slave, without reference to the tribe of the latter; 2, to distinguish between a high and low status in the same tribe; 3, as a certificate of bravery exhibited by supporting the ordeal of pain; 4, as marks of personal prowess, particularly; 5, as a record of achievements in war; 6, to show religious symbols; 7, as a therapeutic remedy for disease; 8, as a prophylactic against disease; 9, as a brand of disgrace; 10, as a token of a woman's marriage, or, sometimes, 11, of her marriageable condition; 12, identification of the person, not as a tribesman, but as an individual; 13, to charm the other sex magically; 14, to inspire fear in the enemy; 15, to magically render the skin impenetrable to weakness; 16, to bring good fortune, and, 17, as the device of a secret society."
SCARIFICATION
Dark races, like the Africans and Australians, do not practise tattooing, because the marks would not show conspicuously on their black skins. They therefore resort to the process of raising scars by cutting the skin with flint or a shell and then rubbing in earth, or the juice of certain plants, etc. The result is a permanent scar, and these scars are arranged by the different tribes in different patterns, on divers parts of the body. In Queensland the lines, according to Lumholtz (177),
"always denote a certain order of rank, and here it depends upon age. Boys under a certain age are not decorated; but in time they receive a few cross-stripes upon their chests and stomachs. The number of stripes is gradually increased, and when the subjects have grown up, a half-moon-shaped line is cut around each nipple."
The necessity for such distinctive marks on the body is particularly great among the Australians, because they are subdivided in the most complicated ways and have an elaborate code of sexual permissions and prohibitions. Therefore, as Frazer suggests (38),
"a chief object of these initiation ceremonies was to teach the youths with whom they might or might not have connection, and to put them in possession of a visible language, ... by means of which they might be able to communicate their totems to, and to ascertain the totems of, strangers whose language they did not understand."
In Africa, too, as we have seen, the scars are used as tribal names, and for other practical purposes. Holub (7) found that the Koranna of Central South Africa has three cuts on the chest. They confessed to him that they indicated a kind of free-masonry, insuring their being well received by Koranna everywhere. On the Congo, scarifications are made on the back for therapeutic reasons, and on the face as tribal marks. (Mallery, 417; H. Ward, 136.) Bechuana priests make long scars on a warrior's thigh to indicate that he has slain an enemy in battle. (Lichtenstein, II., 331.) According to d'Albertis the people of New Guinea use some scars as a sign that they have travelled (I., 213). And so on, ad infinitum.
ALLEGED TESTIMONY OF NATIVES
In face of this imposing array of facts revealing the non-esthetic character of primitive personal "decorations," what have the advocates of the sexual selection theory to say? Taking Westermarck as their most erudite and persuasive spokesman, we find him placing his reliance on four things: (1) the practical ignoring of the vast multitude of facts contradicting his theory; (2) the alleged testimony of a few savages; (3) the testimony of some of their visitors; (4) the alleged fact that "the desire for self-decoration is strongest at the beginning of the age of puberty," the customs of ornamenting, mutilating, painting, and tattooing being "practised most zealously at that period of life." Concerning (1) nothing more need be said, as the large number of decisive facts I have collected exposes and neutralizes that stratagem. The other three arguments must be briefly considered.
A native of Lukunor being asked by Mertens what was the meaning of tattooing, answered: "It has the same object as your clothes; that is, to please the women," In reply to the question why he wore his ornaments, an Australian answered Bulmer: "In order to look well and make himself agreeable to the women," (Brough Smyth, I., 275.) To one who has studied savages not only anthropologically but psychologically, these stories have an obvious cock-and-bull aspect. A native of the Caroline Islands would have been as incapable of originating that philosophical comparison between the object of our clothes and of his tattooing as he would have been of writing Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. Human beings in his stage of evolution never consciously reflect on the reasons of things, and considerations of comparative psychology or esthetics are as much beyond his mental powers as problems in algebra or trigonometry. That such a sailor's yarn could be accepted seriously in an anthropologic treatise shows that anthropology is still in its cradle. The same is true of that Australian's alleged answer. The Australian is unequal to the mental effort of counting up to ten, and, like other savages, is easily fatigued by the simplest questions[99]. It is quite likely that Bulmer asked that native whether he ornamented himself "in order to look well and make himself agreeable to the women," and that the native answered "yes" merely to gratify him or to get rid of the troublesome question.
The books of missionaries are full of such cases, and no end of confusion has been created in science by such false "facts." The answer given by that native is, moreover, utterly opposed to all the well-attested details I have given in the preceding pages regarding the real motives of Australians in "decorating" themselves; and to those facts I may now add this crushing testimony from Brough Smyth (I., 270):
"The proper arrangement of their apparel, the ornamentation of their persons by painting, and attention to deportment, were important only when death struck down a warrior, when war was made, and when they assembled for a corroboree. In ordinary life little attention was given to the ornamenting of the person."
MISLEADING TESTIMONY OF VISITORS
"The Australians throughout the continent scar their persons, as Mr. Curr assures us, only as a means of decoration," writes Westermarck (169), and in the pages preceding and following he cites other evidence of the same sort, such as Carver's assertion that the Naudowessies paint their faces red and black, "which they esteem as greatly ornamental;" Tuckey's assumption that the natives of the Congo file their teeth and raise scars on the skin for purposes of ornament and principally "with the idea of rendering themselves agreeable to the women;" Kiedel's assertion, that in the Tenimber group the lads decorate their locks with leaves, flowers, and feathers, "only in order to please the women;" Taylor's statement that in New Zealand it was the great ambition of the young to have fine tattooed faces, "both to render themselves attractive to the ladies, and conspicuous in war," etc.
Beginning with Curr, it must be conceded that he is one of the leading authorities on Australia, the author of a four-volume treatise on that country and its natives. Yet his testimony on the point in question happens to be as worthless as that of the most hasty globe-trotter, partly because he had evidently paid little attention to it, and partly also, I fancy, because of the fatal tendency of men of science to blunder as soon as they touch the domain of esthetics. What he really wrote (II., 275) is that Chatfield had informed him that scars were made by the natives on the right thigh "for the purpose of denoting the particular class to which they belong." This Curr doubts, "without further evidence," because it would conflict with the custom prevalent throughout the continent, "as far as known, which is to make these marks for ornament only." Now this is a pure assumption of Curr's, based on a preconceived notion, and contradicted by the specific evidence of a number of explorers who, as even Grosse is obliged to admit (75), "unanimously account for a part at least of the scars as tribal marks."[100]
If so eminent an authority as Curr can err so grievously, it is obvious that the testimony of other writers and casual observers must be accepted with extreme caution. Europeans and Americans are so accustomed to regard personal decorations as attempts to beautify the appearance that when they see them in savages there is a natural disposition to attribute them to the same motive. They do not realize that they are dealing with a most subtle psychological question. The chief source of confusion lies in their failure to distinguish between what is admired as a thing of beauty as such and what pleases them for other reasons. As Professor Sully has pointed out in his Handbook of Psychology (337):
"At the beginning of life there is no clear separation of what is beautiful from what is simply pleasing to the individual. As in the history of the race, so in that of the individual, the sense of beauty slowly extricates itself from pleasurable consciousness in general, and differentiates itself from the sense of what is personally useful and agreeable."
Bearing in mind this very important distinction between what is beautiful and what is merely pleasing because of its being useful and agreeable, we see at once that the words "decorative," "ornamental," "attractive," "handsome," etc., are constantly used by writers on this subject in a misleading and question-begging way. We can hardly blame a man like Barrington for writing (11) that among the natives of Botany Bay "scars are, by both sexes, deemed highly ornamental"; but a scientific author who quotes such a sentence ought to be aware that the evidence did not justify Barrington in using any word but pleasing in place of "ornamental," because the latter implies and takes for granted the esthetic sense, the existence of which is the very thing to be proved. This remark applies generally to the evidence of this kind which Westermarck has so industriously collected, and which, on account of this undiscriminating, question-begging character, is entirely worthless. In all these cases the fact is overlooked that the "decorations" of one sex may be agreeable to the other for reasons that have nothing to do with the sense of beauty.
Briefly summed up, Westermarck's theory is that in painting, tattooing, and otherwise decorating his person, primitive man's original and conscious object was to beautify himself for the sake of gaining an advantage in courtship; whereas my theory is that all these decorations originally subserved useful purposes alone, and that even where they subsequently may have served in some instances as means to please the women, this was not as things of beauty but indirectly and unintentionally through their association with rank, wealth, distinction in war, prowess, and manly qualities in general. When Dobrizhoffer says (II., 12) that the Abipones, "more ambitious to be dreaded by their enemies than to be loved, to terrify than attract beholders, think the more they are scarred and sunburnt, the handsomer they are," he illustrates glaringly the slovenly and question-begging use of terms to which I have just referred; for, as his own reference to being loved and to attracting beholders shows, he does not use the word "handsome" in an esthetic sense, but as a synonyme for what is pleasing or worthy of approval on other grounds. If the scars of these Indians do please the women it is not because they are considered beautiful, but because they are tokens of martial prowess. To a savage woman nothing is so useful as manly valor, and therefore nothing so agreeable as the signs of it. In that respect the average woman's nature has not changed. The German high-school girl admires the scars in the face of a "corps-student," not, certainly, because she considers them beautiful, but because they stand for a daredevil, masculine spirit which pleases her.
When the Rev. R. Taylor wrote (321) that among the New Zealanders "to have fine tattooed faces was the great ambition of the young, both to render themselves attractive to the ladies and conspicuous in war," he would have shown himself a better philosopher if he had written that by making themselves conspicuous in war with their tattooing they also make themselves attractive to the "ladies." That the sense of beauty is not concerned here becomes obvious when we include Robley's testimony (28, 15) that a Maori chief's great object was to excite fear among enemies, for which purpose in the older days he "rendered his countenance as terrible as possible with charcoal and red ochre"; while in more recent times,
"not only to become more terrible in war, when fighting was carried on at close quarters, but to appear more distinguished and attractive to the opposite sex, must certainly be included"
among the objects of tattooing. It is hardly necessary to point out that if we accept the sexual selection theory this expert testimony lands us in insuperable difficulty; for it is clearly impossible that on the same island, and in the same race, the painting and tattooing of the face should have the effect of terrifying the men and of appearing beautiful to the women. But if we discard the beauty theory and follow my suggestion, we have no difficulty whatever. Then we may grant that the facial daubs or skin mutilations may seem terrible or hideous to an enemy and yet please the women, because the women do not regard them as things of beauty, but as distinguishing marks of valiant warriors.
By way of illustrating his maxim that "in every country, in every race, beauty stimulates passion," Westermarck cites (257) part of a sentence by Lumholtz (213) to the effect that Australian women take much notice of a man's face, particularly of the part about the eyes. He does not cite the rest of the sentence--"and they like to see a frank and open, or perhaps, more correctly, a wild expression of countenance," which makes it clear to the reader that what stimulates the passion of these women is not the lines of beauty in the [never-washed] faces of these men, but the unbeautiful aspect peculiar to a wild hunter, ferocious warrior, and intrepid defender of his home. Their admiration, in other words, is not esthetic, but instinctively utilitarian.
"DECORATION" AT THE AGE OF PUBERTY
We come now to the principal argument of Westermarck--the alleged fact that in all parts of the world the desire for self-decoration is strongest at the beginning of the age of puberty, the customs of ornamenting, painting, mutilating, and tattooing the person being practised most zealously at that period. This argument is as futile as the others, for several reasons. In the first place, it is not true that in all parts of the world self-decoration is practised most zealously at that period. More frequently, perhaps, it is begun some years earlier, before any idea of courtship can have entered the heads of these children. The Congo cannibals begin the process of scarring the face at the age of four.[101] Dyak girls are tattooed at five.[102] The Botocudos begin the mutilating of children's lips at the age of seven.[103] Eskimo girls are tattooed in their eighth year,[104] and on the Andaman Islands few children are allowed to pass their eighth year without scarification.[105] The Damaras chip the teeth with a flint "when the children are young."[106] The female Oraons are "all tattooed in childhood."[107] The Tahitians began tattooing at eight.[108] The Chukchis of Siberia tattoo girls at nine;[109] and so on in various parts of the world. In the second place, of the divers personal "decorations" indulged in by the lower races it is only those that are intended to be of a permanent character (tattooing, scarring, mutilating) that are made chiefly, though by no means exclusively[110] about or before the age of puberty.
All the other methods of "decorating" described in the preceding pages as being connected with the rites of war, superstition, mourning, etc., are practised throughout life; and that they constitute by far the greater proportion of "ornamentations" is evidenced by the citation I have already made, from Brough Smyth, that the ornamentation of their persons was considered important by Australians only in connection with such ceremonies, and that "in ordinary life little attention was given to the ornamenting of the person"; to which much similar testimony might be added regarding other races; such as Kane's (184), regarding the Chinooks: "Painting the face is not much practised among them, except on extraordinary occasions, such as the death of a relative, some solemn feast, or going on a war-party;" or Morgan's (263), that the feather and war dances were "the chief occasions" when the Iroquois warrior "was desirous to appear in his best attire," etc.
Again, even if it were true that "the desire for self-decoration is strongest at the beginning of the age of puberty," it does not by any means follow that this must be due to the desire to make one's self attractive to the opposite sex. Whatever their desire may be, the children have no choice in the matter. As Curr remarks regarding Australians (11., 51),
"The male must commonly submit, without hope of escape, to have one or more of his teeth knocked out, to have the septum of his nose pierced, to have certain painful cuttings made in his skin, ...before he is allowed the rights of manhood."
There are, however, plenty of reasons why he should desire to be initiated. What Turner writes regarding the Samoans has a general application:
"Until a young man was tattooed, he was considered in his minority. He could not think of marriage, and he was constantly exposed to taunts and ridicule, as being poor and of low birth, and as having no right to speak in the society of men. But as soon as he was tattooed he passed into his majority, and considered himself entitled to the respect and privileges of mature years. When a youth, therefore, reached the age of sixteen, he and his friends were all anxiety that he should be tattooed."[111]
No one can read the accounts of the initiatory ceremonies of Australian and Indian boys (convenient summaries of which may be found in the sixth volume of Waitz-Gerland and in Southey's Brazil III., 387-88) without becoming convinced that with them, as with the Samoans, etc., there was no thought of women or courtship. Indeed the very idea of such a thing involves an absurdity, for, since all the boys in each tribe were tattooed alike, what advantage could their marks have secured them? If all men were equally rich, would any woman ever marry for money? Westermarck accepts (174) seriously the assertion of one writer that the reason why Australians knock out some of the teeth of the boys at puberty is because they know "that otherwise they would run the risk of being refused on account of ugliness." Now, apart from the childish supposition that Australian women could allow their amorous inclinations to depend on the presence or absence of two front teeth, this assertion involves the assumption that these females can exercise the liberty of choice in the selection of a mate--an assumption which is contrary to the truth, since all the authorities on Australia agree on at least one point, which is that women have absolutely no choice in the selection of a husband, but have to submit in all cases to the dispositions made by their male relatives. These Australian women, moreover, perversely act in a manner utterly inconsistent with the theory of sexual selection. Since they do not choose, but are chosen, one would naturally expect, in accordance with that theory, that they would decorate themselves in order to "stimulate the passion" of the desirable men; but they do no such thing.
While the men are apt to dress their hair carefully, the women "let their black locks grow as irregular and tangled as do the Fuegians" (Grosse, 87); and Buhner says they "did little to improve their appearance;" while such ornaments as they had "were not much regarded by the men." (Brough Smyth, I, 275.)[112]
"DECORATION" AS A TEST OF COURAGE
One of the most important reasons why young savages approaching puberty are eager to receive their "decorations" remains to be considered. Tattooing, scarring, and mutilating are usually very painful processes. Now, as all who are familiar with the life of savages know, there is nothing they admire so much as courage in enduring torture of any kind. By showing fortitude in bearing the pain connected with tattooing, etc., these young folks are thus able to win admiration, gratify their vanity, and show that they are worthy to be received in the ranks of adults. The Sea Dyaks are proud of their scars, writes Brooke Low.
"The women often prove the courage and endurance of the youngsters by placing a lighted ball of tinder in the arm and letting it burn into the skin. The marks ... are much valued by the young men as so many proofs of their power of endurance."
(Roth, II., 80.) Here we have an illustration which explains in the most simple way why scars please both the men and the women, without making necessary the grotesque assumption that either sex admires them as things of beauty. To take another case, equally eloquent: Bossu says of the Osage Indians that they suffer the pain of tattooing with pleasure in order to pass for men of courage. If one of them should have himself marked without having previously distinguished himself in battle, he would be degraded and looked upon as a coward, unworthy of such an honor. (Mallery, 1889-90, 394.)
Grosse is inclined to think (78) that it is in the male only that courage is expected and admired, but he is mistaken, as we may see, e.g., in the account given by Dobrizhoffer (II., 21) of the tattooing customs of the Abipones, whom he studied so carefully. The women, he says,
"have their face, breast, and arms covered with black figures of various shapes, so that they present the appearance of a Turkish carpet." "This savage ornament is purchased with blood and many groans."
The thorns used to puncture the skin are poisonous, and after the operation the girl has her eyes, cheeks, and lips so horribly swelled that she "looks like a Stygian fury." If she groans while undergoing the torture, or shows signs of pain in her face, the old woman who operates on her exclaims, in a rage: "You will die single, be assured. Which of our heroes would think so cowardly a girl worthy to be his wife?" Such courage, Dobrizhoffer explains further, is admired in a girl because it makes her "prepared to bear the pains of parturition in time." In some cases vanity supplies an additional motive why the girls should submit to the painful operation with fortitude; for those of them who "are most pricked and painted you may know to be of high rank."
Here again we see clearly that the tattooing is admired for other than esthetic reasons, and we realize how foolish it is to philosophize about the peculiar "taste" of these Indians in admiring a girl who looks like "a Turkish carpet" or "a Stygian fury." If they had even the rudiments of a sense of beauty they would not indulge in such disgusting disfigurements.
MUTILATION, FASHION, AND EMULATION
Grosse declares (80) that "we know definitely at least, that tattooing is regarded by the Eskimo as an embellishment." He bases this inference on Cranz's assertion that Eskimo mothers tattoo their daughters in early youth "for fear that otherwise they would not get a husband." Had Grosse allowed his imagination to paint a particular instance, he would have seen how grotesque his inference is. A favorite way among the Eskimo of securing a bride is, we are told, to drag her from her tent by the hair. This young woman, moreover, has never washed her face, nor does any man object to her filth. Yet we are asked to believe that an Eskimo could be so enamoured of the beauty of a few simple lines tattooed on a girl's dirty face that he would refuse to marry her unless she had them! Like other champions of the sexual selection theory, Grosse searches in the clouds for a comically impossible motive when the real reason lies right before his eyes. That reason is fashion. The tattoo marks are tribal signs (Bancroft, I., 48) which every girl must submit to have in obedience to inexorable custom, unless she is prepared to be an object of scorn and ridicule all her life.
The tyranny of fashion in prescribing disfigurements and mutilations is not confined to savages. The most amazing illustration of it is to be found in China, where the girls of the upper classes are obliged to this day to submit to the most agonizing process of crippling their feet, which finally, as Professor Flower remarks in his book on Fashion and Deformity, assume "the appearance of the hoof of some animal rather than a human foot." There is a popular delusion that the Chinese approve of such deformed small feet because they consider them beautiful--a delusion which Westermarck shares (200). Since the Chinese consider small feet "the chief charm of women," it might be supposed, he says, that the women would at least have the pleasure of fascinating men by a "beauty" to acquire which they have to undergo such horrible torture;
"but Dr. Strieker assures us that in China a woman is considered immodest if she shows her artificially distorted feet to a man. It is even improper to speak of a woman's foot, and in decent pictures this part is always concealed under the dress."
To explain this apparent anomaly Westermarck assumes that the object of the concealment "is to excite through the unknown!" To such fantastic nonsense does the doctrine of sexual selection lead. In reality there is no reason for supposing that the Chinese consider crippled feet--looking like "the hoof of an animal"--beautiful any more than mutilations of other parts of the body. In all probability the origin of the custom of crippling women's feet must be traced to the jealousy of the men, who devised this procedure as an effective way of preventing their wives from leaving their homes and indulging in amorous intrigues; other practices with the same purpose being common in Oriental countries. In course of time the foot-binding became an inexorable fashion which the foolishly conservative women were more eager to continue than the men. All accounts agree that the anti-foot-binding movement finds its most violent and stubborn opponents in the women themselves. The Missionary Review for July, 1899, contains an article summing up a report of the Tien Tsu Hui, or "Natural Foot Society," which throws a bright light on the whole question and from which I quote as follows:
"The male members of a family may be opposed to the maiming of their female relatives by the senseless custom, but the women will support it. One Chinese even promised his daughter a dollar a day to keep her natural feet, and another, having failed with his older girls, arranged that his youngest should be under his personal supervision night and day. The one natural-footed girl was sought in marriage for the dollars that had been faithfully laid by for her. But at her new home she was so ridiculed by the hundreds who came to see her--and her feet--that she lost her reason. The other girl also became insane as a result of the persecutions which she had to endure."
Thus we see that what keeps up this hideous custom is not the women's desire to arouse the esthetic admiration and amorous passion of the men by a hoof of beauty, but the fear of ridicule and persecution by the other women, slaves of fashion all. These same motives are the source of most of the ugly fashions prevalent even in civilized Europe and America. Théophile Gautier believed that most women had no sense of beauty, but only a sense of fashion; and if explorers and missionaries had borne in mind the fundamental difference between fashion and esthetics, anthropological literature would be the poorer by hundreds of "false facts" and ludicrous inferences.[113]
The ravages of fashion are aggravated by emulation, which has its sources in vanity and envy. This accounts for the extremes to which mutilations and fashions often go among both, civilized and uncivilized races, and of which a startling instance will be described in detail in the next paragraph. Few of our rich women wear their jewels because of their intrinsic beauty. They wear them for the same reason that Polynesian or African belles wear all the beads they can get. In Mariner's book on the Tongans (Chap. XV.) there is an amusing story of a chiefs daughter who was very anxious to go to Europe. Being asked why, she replied that her great desire was to amass a large quantity of beads and then return to Tonga, "because in England beads are so common that no one would admire me for wearing them, and I should not have the pleasure of being envied." Bancroft (I., 128) says of the Kutchin Indians: "Beads are their wealth, used in the place of money, and the rich among them literally load themselves with necklaces and strings of various patterns." Referring to the tin ornaments worn by Dyaks, Carl Bock says he has "counted as many as sixteen rings in a single ear, each of them the size of a dollar"; while of the Ghonds Forsyth tells us (148) that they "deck themselves with an inordinate amount of what they consider ornaments. Quantity rather than quality is aimed at."
PERSONAL BEAUTY VERSUS PERSONAL DECORATION
Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced so far in this long chapter, assume that savages and barbarians have no esthetic sense at all, not even a germ of it? Not necessarily. I believe that the germ of a sense of visible beauty may exist even among savages as well as the germ of a musical sense; but that it is little more than a childish pleasure in bright and lustrous shells and other objects of various colors, especially red and yellow, everything beyond that being usually found to belong to the region of utility (language of signs, desire to attract attention, etc.) and not to esthetics--that is, the love of beauty for its own sake. Such a germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants years before they have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty; and this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it, I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration of personal beauty is not one of the motives which induce a savage to marry a particular girl or man; for most of the "decorations" described in the preceding pages are not elements of personal beauty at all, but are either external appendages to that beauty, or mutilations of it. I have shown by a superabundance of facts that these "decorations" do not serve the purpose of exciting the amorous passion and preference of the opposite sex, except non-esthetically and indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as marks of rank, wealth, distinction in war, etc. I shall now proceed to show, much more briefly, that still less does personal beauty proper serve among the lower races as a stimulant of sexual passion. This we should expect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure in bright baubles must long precede the pleasure in beautiful faces or figures. Every one who has been among Indians or other savages knows that nature produces among them fine figures and sometimes even pretty faces; but these are not appreciated. Galton told Darwin that he saw in one South African tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls, but they were not attractive to the natives. Zöller saw at least one beautiful negress; Wallace describes the superb figures of some of the Brazilian Indians and the Aru Islanders in the Malay Archipelago (354); and Barrow says that some of the Hottentot girls have beautiful figures when young--every joint and limb well turned. But as we shall see presently, the criterion of personal charm among Hottentots, as among savages in general, is fat, not what we call beauty. Ugliness, whether natural or inflicted by fashion, does not among these races act as a bar to marriage. "Beauty is of no estimation in either sex," we read regarding the Creeks in Schoolcraft (V., 272): "It is strength or agility that recommends the young man to his mistress; and to be a skilful or swift hunter is the highest merit with the woman he may choose for a wife." Belden found that the squaws were valued "only for their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever is taken of their personal beauty," etc., etc. Nor can the fact that savages kill deformed children be taken as an indication of a regard for personal beauty. Such children are put out of the way for the simple reason that they may not become a burden to the family or the tribe.
Advocates of the sexual selection theory make much ado over the fact that in all countries the natives prefer their own peculiar color and features--black, red, or yellow, flat noses, high cheek bones, thick lips, etc.--and dislike what we consider beautiful. But the likes of these races regarding personal appearance have no more to do with a sense of beauty than their dislikes. It is merely a question of habit. They like their own faces because they are used to them, and dislike ours because they are strange. In their aversion to our faces they are actuated by the same motive that makes a European child cry out and run away in terror at sight of a negro--not because he is ugly, for he may be good-looking, but because he is strange.
Far from admiring such beauty as nature may have given them, the lower races exercise an almost diabolical ingenuity in obliterating or mutilating it. Hundreds of their visitors have written of certain tribes that they would not be bad looking if they would only leave nature alone. Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeballs, has escaped the uglifying process. "Nothing is too absurd or hideous to please them," writes Cameron. The Eskimos afford a striking illustration of the fact that a germ of taste for ornamentation in general is an earlier manifestation of the esthetic faculty than the appreciation of personal beauty; for while displaying considerable skill and ingenuity in the decorations of their clothes, canoes, and weapons, they mutilate their persons in various ways and allow them to be foul and malodorous with the filth of years. One of the most disgusting mutilations on record is that practised by the Indians of British Columbia, who insert a piece of bone in the lower lip, which, gradually enlarged, makes it at last project three inches. Bancroft (I., 98) devotes three pages to the lip mutilation indulged in by the Thlinkeet females. When the operation is completed and the block is withdrawn "the lip drops down upon the chin like a piece of leather, displaying the teeth, and presenting altogether a ghastly spectacle." The lower teeth and gum, says one witness, are left quite naked; another says that the plug "distorts every feature in the lower part of the face"; a third that an old woman, the wife of a chief, had a lip "ornament" so large "that by a peculiar motion of her under-lip she could almost conceal her whole face with it"; and a fourth gives a description of this "abominably revolting spectacle," which is too nauseating to quote.
DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM (?)
"Abominably revolting," "hideous," "filthy," "disgusting," "atrocious"--such are usually the words of observers in describing these shocking mutilations. Nevertheless they always apply the word "ornamentation" to them, with the implication that the savages look upon them as beautiful, although all that the observers had a right to say was that they pleased the savages and were approved by fashion. What is worse, the philosophers fell into the pitfall thus dug for them. Darwin thinks that the mutilations indulged in by savages show "how different is the standard of taste"; Humboldt (III., 236) reflects on the strange fact that nations "attach the idea of beauty" to whatever configuration nature has given them; and Ploss (I., 48) declares bluntly that there is no such thing as an absolute standard of beauty and that savages have "just as much right" to their ideas on the subject as we have to admire a madonna of Raphael. This view, indeed, is generally held; it is expressed in the old saw, De gustibus non est disputandum. Now it is true that it is unwise to dispute about tastes conversationally; but scientifically speaking, that old saw has not a sound tooth in it.
If a peasant who has never had an opportunity to cultivate his musical sense insisted that a certain piano was exquisitely in tune and had as beautiful a tone as any other piano, whereas an expert musician declared that it had a shrill tone and was terribly out of tune, would anybody be so foolish as to say that the peasant had as much right to his opinion as the musician? Or if an Irish toper declared that a bottle of Chambertin, over which French epicures smacked their lips, was insipid and not half as fine as the fusel-oil on which he daily got drunk, would not everybody agree that the Irishman was no judge of liquors, and that the reason why he preferred his cheap whiskey to the Burgundy was that his nerves of taste were too coarse to detect the subtle and exquisite bouquet of the French wine? In both these examples we are concerned only with simple questions of sense perception; yet in the matter of personal beauty, which involves not only the senses, but the imagination, the intellect, and the subtlest feelings, we are asked to believe that any savage who has never seen a woman but those of his own race has as much right to his opinion as a Ruskin or a Titian, who have given their whole life to the study of beauty!
If an astronomer--to take another illustration--were told that de astronomia non est disputandum, and that the Namaquas, who believe that the moon is made of bacon, or the Brazilian tribes who think that an eclipse consists in an attempt on the part of a monstrous jaguar to swallow the sun--have as much right to their opinion as he has, he would consider the person who advanced such an argument either a wag or a fool. Only a wag or a fool, again, would argue that a Fijian has just as much right as we have to his opinions on medical matters, or on the morality of polygamy, infanticide, and cannibalism. Yet when we come across a dirty, malodorous savage, so stupid that he cannot count ten, who mutilates every part of his body till he has lost nearly all semblance to a human being, we are soberly asked to look upon this as merely a "difference in the standard of esthetic taste," and to admit that the savage has "as much right to his taste," as we have. The more I think of it, the more I am amazed at this unjust and idiotic discrimination against the esthetic faculty--a discrimination for which I can find no other explanation than the fact already referred to, that most men of science know so much less about matters of beauty than about everything else in the world. They labor under the delusion that the sense of beauty is one of the earliest products of mental evolution, whereas their own attitude in the matter affords painful proof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day that a steatopygous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because an African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlot is beautiful because she pleases a drunken libertine.
What makes the traditional attitude of scientific men in this matter the less pardonable is that--as we have seen--there is always a simple, practical explanation for the predilections of these savages, so that there is no necessity whatever for assuming the existence of so paradoxical and impossible a thing as an esthetic admiration of these hideous deformities. Thus, in regard to the nauseating lip "ornaments" of the Thlinkeets just referred to, the testimony collected by Bancroft indicates unmistakably that they are approved of, perpetuated, and aggravated for two reasons--both non-esthetic--namely, as indications of rank, and from the necessity of conforming to fashion. Ladies of distinction, we read, increase the size of their lip plug. Langsdorff even saw women "of very high rank" with this "ornament" full five inches long and three broad; Dixon says the mutilation is always in proportion to the person's wealth; and Mayne relates, in his book on the British Columbia Indians, that "a woman's rank among women is settled according to the size of her wooden lip."
INDIFFERENCE TO DIRT
That savages can have no sense of personal beauty is further proved by their habitual indifference to personal cleanliness, the most elementary and imperative of esthetic requirements. When we read in McLean (II., 153) that some Eskimo girls "might pass as pretty if divested of their filth;" or in Cranz (I., 134) that "it is almost sickening to view their hands and faces smeared with grease ... and their filthy clothes swarming with vermin;" and when we further read in Kotzebue (II., 56) regarding the Kalush that his "filthy countrywomen with their lip-trough ... often awaken in him the most vehement passion," we realize vividly that that passion is a coarse appetite which exists quite apart from, and independently of, anything that might be considered beautiful or ugly.
The subject is not a pleasant one; but as it is one of my strongest arguments, I must be pardoned for giving some more unsavory details. Among some of the British Columbia Indians "pretty women may be seen; nearly all have good eyes and hair, but the state of filth in which they live generally neutralizes any natural charms they may possess." (Mayne, 277.) Lewis and Clarke write (439) regarding the Chinook Indians:
"Their broad, flat foreheads, their falling breasts, their ill-shaped limbs, the awkwardness of their positions, and the filth which intrudes through their finery--all these render a Chinook or Clatsop beauty in full attire one of the most disgusting objects in nature."
Muir says of the Mono Indians of the California Mountains (93): "The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified, and seemed so ancient and so undisturbed it might also possess a geological significance." Navajo girls "usually evince a catlike aversion to water." (Schoolcraft, IV., 214.) Cozzens relates (128) how, among the Apaches, "the sight of a man washing his face and hands almost convulsed them with laughter." He adds that their personal appearance explained their surprise. Burton (80) found among the Sioux a dislike to cleanliness "which nothing but the fear of the rod will subdue." "In an Indian village," writes Neill (79), "all is filth and litter.... Water, except in very warm weather, seldom touches their bodies."
The Comanches are "disgustingly filthy in their persons." (Schoolcraft, I., 235.) The South American Waraus "are exceedingly dirty and disgusting in their habits, and their children are so much neglected that their fingers and toes are frequently destroyed by vermin." (Bernau, 35.) The Patagonians "are excessively filthy in their personal habits." (Bourne, 56.) The Mundrukus "are very dirty" (Markham, 172), etc.
Of the Damara negroes, Anderson says (N., 50): "Dirt often accumulates to such a degree on their persons as to make the color of their skins totally undistinguishable;" and Galton (92) "could find no pleasure in associating or trying to chat with these Damaras, they were so filthy and disgusting in every way." Thunberg writes of the Hottentots (73) that they "find a peculiar pleasure in filth and stench;" wherein they resemble Africans in general. Griffith declares that the hill tribes of India are "the dirtier the farther we advance;" elsewhere[114] we read:
"Both males and females, as a class, are very dirty and filthy in both person and habits. They appear to have an antipathy to bathing, and to make matters worse, they have a habit of anointing their bodies with ghee (melted butter);"
and of another of these tribes:
"The Karens are a dirty people. They never use soap, and their skins are enamelled with dirt. When water is thrown on them, it rolls off their backs like globules of quicksilver on a marble slab. To them bathing has a cooling, but no cleansing effect."
The Mishinis are "disgustingly dirty." By the Kirgliez "uncleanliness is elevated into a virtue hallowed by tradition." The Kalmucks are described as filthy, the Kamtschadales as exceedingly so, etc.
REASONS FOR BATHING
Among the inhabitants of the islands of the Pacific we meet with apparent exceptions. These natives are practically amphibious, spending half their time in the ocean, and are therefore of necessity clean. So are certain coast negroes and Indian tribes living along river-banks. But Ellis (Pol. Res., I., 110) was shrewd enough to see that the habit of frequent bathing indulged in by the South Sea Islanders was a luxury--a result of the hot climate--and not an indication of the virtue of cleanliness. In this respect Captain Cook showed less acumen, for he remarks (II., 148) that "nothing appears to give them greater pleasure than personal cleanliness, to produce which they frequently bathe in ponds." His confusion of ideas is made apparent in the very next sentence, where he adds that the water in most of these ponds "stinks intolerably." That it is merely the desire for comfort and sport that induces the Polynesians to bathe so much is proved further by the attitude of the New Zealanders. Hawksworth declares (III., 451) that they "stink like Hottentots;" and the reason lies in the colder climate which makes bathing less of a luxury to them. The Micronesians also spend much of their time in the water, for comfort, not for cleanliness. Gerland cites grewsome details of their nastiness. (Waitz, V., Pt. II., 81, 188.) The Kaffirs, says Gardiner (101), "although far from cleanly," are fond of bathing. In some other cases the water is sought for its warmth instead of its coolness. In Brazil the morning air is much colder than the water, wherefore the natives take to the river for comfort, as the Japanese do in winter to their hot tubs. All Indians, says Bancroft (I., 83), "attach great importance to their sweatbaths," not for cleanliness--for they are "extremely filthy in their persons and habits"--but "as a remedial measure."
Unless they happen to indulge in bathing for comfort, the lowest of savages are also the dirtiest. Leigh writes (147) that in South Australia many of the women, including the wives of chiefs, had "sore eyes from the smoke, the filth, and their abominable want of cleanliness." Sturt (II., 53) refers to the Australian women as "disgusting objects." At funerals, "the women besmear themselves with the most disgusting filth." The naked boys in Taplin's school "had no notion of cleanliness." The youths from the age of ten to sixteen or seventeen were compelled by custom to let their hair grow, the result being "a revolting mass of tangled locks and filth." (Woods, 20, 85.) Sturt sums up his impressions by declaring (II., 126): "Really, the loathsome condition and hideous countenances of the women would, I should imagine, have been a complete antidote to the sexual passion."
CORPULENCE VERSUS BEAUTY
An instructive instance of the loose reasoning which prevails in the esthetic sphere is provided by the Rev. H.N. Hutchinson, in his Marriage Customs in Many Lands. After describing some of the customs of the Australians, he goes on to say:
"One would think that such degraded creatures as these men are would be quite incapable of appreciating female beauty, but that is not the case. Good-looking girls are much admired and consequently frequently stolen away."
As a matter of fact, beauty has nothing to do with the stealing of the women. The real motive is revealed in the following passage from Brough Smyth (79):
"A very fat woman presents such an attractive appearance to the eyes of the blacks that she is always liable to be stolen. However old and ugly she way be, she will be courted and petted and sought for by the warriors, who seldom hesitate to risk their lives if there is a chance for obtaining so great a prize."
An Australian Shakspere obviously would have written "Fat provoketh thieves sooner than gold," instead of "beauty provoketh thieves." And the amended maxim applies to savages in general, as well as to barbarians and Orientals. In his Savage Life in Polynesia, the Rev. W.W. Gill remarks:
"The great requisites for a Polynesian beauty are to be fat and as fair as their dusky skins will permit. To insure this, favorite children, whether boys or girls, were regularly fattened and imprisoned till nightfall when a little gentle exercise was permitted. If refractory, the guardian would whip the culprit for not eating more."[115]
American Indians do not differ in this respect from Australians and Polynesians. The horrible obesity of the squaws on the Pacific Coast used to inspire me with disgust, as a boy, and I could not understand how anyone could marry such fat abominations. Concerning the South American tribes, Humboldt says (Trav., I., 301): "In several languages of these countries, to express the beauty of a woman, they say that she is fat, and has a narrow forehead."
FATTENING GIRLS FOR THE MARRIAGE MARKET
The population of Africa comprises hundreds of different peoples and tribes, the vast majority of whom make bulk and weight the chief criterion of a woman's charms. The hideous deformity known as steatopyga, or hypertrophy of the buttocks, occurs among South African Bushman, Koranna, and Hottentot women. Darwin says that Sir Andrew Smith
"once saw a woman who was considered a beauty, and she was so immensely developed behind that when seated on level ground she could not rise, and had to push herself along until she came to a slope. Some of the women in various negro tribes have the same peculiarity; and according to Burton, the Somal men, 'are said to choose their wives by ranging them in a line and by picking her out who projects farthest a tergo. Nothing can be more hateful to a negro than the opposite form.'"[116]
The notions of the Yoruba negroes regarding female perfection consist, according to Lander, in "the bulk, plumpness, and rotundity of the object."
Among the Karagué, women were exempted from hard labor because the men were anxious to have them as fat as possible. To please the men, they ate enormous quantities of bananas and drank milk by the gallon. Three of Rumanika's wives were so fat that they could not go through an ordinary door, and when they walked they needed two men each to support them.
Speke measured one of the much-admired African wonders of obesity, who was unable to stand except on all fours. Result: around the arms, 1 foot 11 inches; chest, 4 feet 4 inches; thigh, 2 feet 7 inches; calf, 1 foot 8 inches; height, 5 feet 8 inches.
"Meanwhile, the daughter, a lass of sixteen, sat stark-naked before us, sucking at a milk-pot, on which her father kept her at work by holding a rod in his hand; for as fattening is the first duty of fashionable female life, it must be duly enforced by the rod if necessary. I got up a bit of flirtation with missy, and induced her to rise and shake hands with me. Her features were lovely, but her body was round as a ball."
Speke also tells (370) of a girl who, a mere child when the king died, was such a favorite of his, that he left her twenty cows, in order that she might fatten upon milk after her native fashion.
ORIENTAL IDEALS
Mungo Park declared that the Moorish women
"seem to be brought up for no other purpose than that of ministering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious masters. Voluptuousness is therefore considered as their chief accomplishment.... The Moors have singular ideas of feminine perfection. The gracefulness of figure and motion, and a countenance enlivened by expression, are by no means essential points in their standard: With them corpulence and beauty seem to be terms nearly synonymous: A woman of even moderate pretensions must be one who cannot walk without a slave under each arm, to support her; and a perfect beauty is a load for a camel.... Many of the young girls are compelled, by their mothers, to devour a great quantity of kouskous, and drink a large bowl of camel's milk every morning.... I have seen a poor girl sit crying, with the bowl at her lips, for more than an hour; and her mother, with a stick in her hand watching her all the while, and using the stick without mercy, whenever she observed that her daughter was not swallowing."
A Somali love-song says: "You are beautiful and your limbs are fat; but if you would drink camel's milk you would be still more beautiful." Nubian girls are especially fattened for their marriage by rubbing grease over them and stuffing them with polenta and goat milk. When the process is completed they are poetically likened to a hippopotamus. In Egypt and India, where the climate naturally tends to make women thin, the fat ones are, as in Australia, the ideals of beauty, as their poets would make plain to us if it were not known otherwise. A Sanscrit poet declares proudly that his beloved is so borne down by the weight of her thighs and breasts that she cannot walk fast; and in the songs of Halâ there are numerous "sentiments" like that. The Arabian poet Amru declares rapturously that his favorite beauty has thighs so delightfully exuberant that she can scarcely enter the tent door. Another Arabian poet apostrophizes "the maid of Okaib, who has haunches like sand-hills, whence her body rises like a palm-tree." And regarding the references to personal appearance in the writings of the ancient Hebrews, Rossbach remarks:
"In all these descriptions human beauty is recognized in the luxurious fulness of parts, not in their harmony and proportion. Spiritual expression in the sensual form is not adverted to" (238).
Thus, from the Australian and the Indian to the Hebrew, the Arab, and the Hindoo, what pleases the men in women is not their beauty, but their voluptuous rotundity; they care only for those sensual aspects which emphasize the difference between the sexes. The object of the modern wasp waist (in the minds of the class of females who, strange to say, are allowed by respectable women to set the fashion for them) is to grossly exaggerate the bust and the hips, and it is for the same reason that barbarian and Oriental girls are fattened for the marriage market. The appeal is to the appetite, not to the esthetic sense.
THE CONCUPISCENCE THEORY OF BEAUTY
In writing this I do not ignore the fact that many authors have held that personal beauty and sensuality are practically identical or indissolubly associated. The sober philosopher, Bain, gravely advances the opinion that, on the whole, personal beauty turns, 1, upon qualities and appearances that heighten the expression of favor or good-will; and, 2, upon qualities and appearances that suggest the endearing embrace. Eckstein expresses the same idea more coarsely by saying that "finding a thing beautiful is simply another way of expressing the manifestation of the sexual appetite." But it remained for Mantegazza to give this view the most cynical expression:
"We look at woman through the prism of desire, and she looks at us in the same way; her beauty appears to us the more perfect the more it arouses our sexual desires--that is, the more voluptuous enjoyment the possession of her promises us."
He adds that for this reason a man of twenty finds nearly all women beautiful.
Thus the beauty of a woman, in the opinion of these writers, consists in those physical qualities which arouse a man's concupiscence. I admit that this theory applies to savages and to Orientals; the details given in the preceding pages prove that. It applies also, I must confess, to the majority of Europeans and Americans. I have paid special attention to this point in various countries and have noticed that a girl with a voluptuous though coarse figure and a plain face will attract much more masculine attention than a girl whose figure and face are artistically beautiful without being voluptuous. But this only helps to prove my main thesis--that the sense of personal beauty is one of the latest products of civilization, rare even at the present day. What I deny most emphatically is that the theory advocated by Bain, Eckstein, and Mantegazza applies to those persons who are so lucky as to have a sense of beauty. These fortunate individuals can admire the charms of a living beauty without any more concupiscence or thought of an endearing embrace than accompanies their contemplation of the Venus de Milo or a Madonna painted by Murillo; and if they are in love with a particular girl their admiration of her beauty is superlatively free from carnal ingredients, as we saw in the section on Mental Purity. Since in such a question personal evidence is of importance, I will add that, fortunately, I have been deeply in love several times in my life and can therefore testify that each time my admiration of the girl's beauty was as purely esthetic as if she had been a flower. In each case the mischief was begun by a pair of brown eyes.
Eyes, it is true, can be as wanton and as voluptuous as a plump figure. Powers notes (20) that some California Indian girls are pretty and have "large, voluptuous eyes." Such eyes are common among the lower races and Orientals; but they are not the eyes which inspire romantic love. Lips, too, it might be said, invite kisses; but a lover would consider it sacrilege to touch his idol's lips unchastely. Savages are strangers to kissing for the exactly opposite reason--that it is too refined a detail of sensuality to appeal to their coarse nerves. How far they are from being able to appreciate lips esthetically appears from the way in which they so often deform them. The mouth is peculiarly the index of mental and moral refinement, and a refined pair of lips can inspire as pure a love as the celestial beauty of innocent eyes. As for the other features, what is there to suggest lascivious thoughts in a clear complexion, an oval chin, ivory teeth, rosy cheeks, or in curved eyebrows, long, dark lashes, or flowing tresses? Our admiration of these, and of a graceful gait, is as pure and esthetic--as purely esthetic--as our admiration of a sunset, a flower, a humming-bird, a lovely child. It has been truly said that a girl's marriage chances have been made or marred by the size or shape of her nose. What has the size or shape of a girl's nose to do with the "endearing embrace?" This question alone reduces the concupiscence theory ad absurdum.
UTILITY IS NOT BEAUTY
Almost as repulsive as the view which identifies the sense of personal beauty with concupiscence is that which would reduce it to a matter of coarse utility. Thus Eckstein, misled by Schopenhauer, holds that healthy teeth are beautiful for the reason that they guarantee the proper mastication of the food; while small breasts are ugly because they do not promise sufficient nourishment to the child that is to be born.
This argument is refuted by the simple statement that our teeth, if they looked like rusty nails, might be even more useful than now, but could no longer be beautiful. As for women's breasts, if utility were the criterion, the most beautiful would be those of the African mothers who can throw them over their shoulders to suckle the infants on their backs without impeding their work. As a matter of fact, the loveliest breast is the virginal, which serves no use while it remains so. A dray horse is infinitely more useful to us than an Arab racer, but is he as beautiful? Tigers and snakes are anything but useful to the human race, but we consider their skins beautiful.
A NEW SENSE EASILY LOST AGAIN
No, the sense of personal beauty is neither a synonyme for libidinous desires nor is it based on utilitarian considerations. It is practically a new sense, born of mental refinement and imagination. It by no means scorns a slight touch of the voluptuous, so far as it does not exceed the limits of artistic taste and moral refinement--a well-rounded figure and "a face voluptuous, yet pure"--but it is an entirely different thing from the predilection for fat and other coarse exaggerations of sexuality which inspire lust instead of love. This new sense is still, as I have said, rare everywhere; and, like the other results of high and recent culture, it is easily obliterated. In his treatise on insanity Professor Krafft-Ebing shows that in degeneration of the brain the esthetic and moral qualities are among the first to disappear. It is the same with normal man when he descends into a lower sphere. Zoller relates (III., 68) that when Europeans arrive in Africa they find the women so ugly they can hardly look at them without a feeling of repulsion. Gradually they become habituated to their sight, and finally they are glad to accept them as companions. Stanley has an eloquent passage on the same topic (II. I. F.L., 265):
"The eye that at first despised the unclassic face of the black woman of Africa soon loses its regard for fine lines and mellow pale color; it finds itself ere long lingering wantonly over the inharmonious and heavy curves of a negroid form, and looking lovingly on the broad, unintellectual face, and into jet eyes that never flash with the dazzling love-light that makes poor humanity beautiful."
The word I have italicized explains it all. The sense of personal beauty is displaced again by the concupiscence which had held its place in the early history of mankind.
MORAL UGLINESS
To realize fully what such a relapse may mean, read what Galton says (123) of the Hottentots. They have
"that peculiar set of features which is so characteristic of bad characters in England, and so general among prisoners that it is usually, I believe, known by the name of the 'felon-face;' I mean that they have prominent cheek-bones, bullet-shaped head, cowering but restless eyes, and heavy sensual lips, and added to this a shackling dress and manner."
Of the Damaras Galton says (99) that "their features are often beautifully chiselled, though the expression in them is always coarse and disagreeable." And to quote Mungo Park on the Moors once more (158):
"I fancied that I discovered in the features of most of them a disposition toward cruelty and low cunning.... From the staring wildness of their eyes, a stranger would immediately set them down as a nation of lunatics. The treachery and malevolence of their character are manifested in their plundering excursions against the negro villages."
BEAUTIFYING INTELLIGENCE
Galton's reference to the Damaras illustrates the well-known fact that, even where nature makes an effort at chiselling beautiful features the result is a failure if there is no moral and intellectual culture to inspire them, and this puts the grave-stone on the Concupiscence Theory--for what have moral and intellectual culture to do with carnal desires? A noble soul even possesses the magic power of transforming a plain face into a radiant vision of beauty, the emotion changing not only the expression but the lines of the face. Goethe (Eckermann, 1824) and others have indeed maintained that intellect in a woman does not help a man to fall in love with her. This is true in so far as brains in a woman will not make a man fall in love with her if she is otherwise unattractive or unfeminine. But Goethe forgot that there is such a thing as hereditary intellectual culture incarnated in the face. This, I maintain, makes up more than half of the personal beauty which makes a man fall in love. A girl with good features is twice as beautiful if she is morally pure and has a bright mind. Sometimes a face is accidentally moulded, into such a regular beauty of form that it seems to mirror mental beauty too. A man may fall in love with such a face, but as soon as he finds out that it is inhabited by a stupid or coarse mind he will make haste to fall out again, unless his love was predominantly sensual. I remember once falling in love with a country girl at first sight; her face and figure seemed to me extremely beautiful, except that hard work had enlarged and hardened her hands. But when I found that her intellect was as coarse as her hands, my ardor cooled at once.
If intellect, as revealed in the face, in words, and in actions, did not assist in inspiring the amorous sentiment, it would be as easy to fall in love with a doll-faced, silly girl as with a woman of culture; it would even be possible to fall in love with a statue or with a demented person. Let us imagine a belle who is thrown from a horse and has become insane from the shock. For a time her features will remain as regular, her figure as plump, as before; but the mind will be gone, and with it everything that could make a man fall in love with her. Who has ever heard of a beautiful idiot, of anyone falling in love with an imbecile? The vacant stare, the absence of intellect, make beauty and love alike impossible in such a case.
THE STRANGE GREEK ATTITUDE
The important corollary follows, from all this, that in countries where women receive no education sensual love is the only kind men can feel toward them. Oriental women are of that kind, and so were the ancient Greeks. The Greeks are indeed renowned for their statuary, yet their attitude toward personal beauty was of a very peculiar kind. Their highest ideal was not the feminine but the masculine type, and accordingly we find that it was toward men only that they professed to feel a noble passion. The beauty of the women was regarded merely from a sensual point of view. Their respectable women were deliberately left without education, wherefore their charms can have been at best of a bodily kind and capable of inspiring love of body only. There is a prevalent superstition that the Greeks of the day of Perikles had a class of intelligent women known as hetairai, who were capable of being true companions and inspirers of men; but I shall show, in a later chapter, that the mentality of these women has been ludicrously exaggerated; they were coarse and obscene in their wit and conversation, and their morals were such that no man could have respected them, much less loved them with a pure affection; while the men whom they are supposed to have inspired were in most cases voluptuaries of the most dissolute sort.
A COMPOSITE AND VARIABLE SENTIMENT
Our attempt to answer the question "What is romantic love," has taken up no fewer than two hundred and thirty-five pages, and even this answer is a mere preliminary sketch, the details of which will be supplied in the following chapters, chiefly, it is true, in a negative way, by showing what is not romantic love; for the subject of this book is Primitive Love.
DEFINITION OF LOVE
Can love be defined in one sentence? The Century Dictionary's definition, which is as good as any, is: "Intimate personal affection between individuals of opposite sex capable of intermarriage; the emotional incentive to and normal basis of conjugal union." This is correct enough as far as it goes; but how little it tells us of the nature of love! I have tried repeatedly to condense the essential traits of romantic love into one brief definition, but have not succeeded. Perhaps the following will serve as an approximation. Love is an intense longing for the reciprocal affection and jealously exclusive possession of a particular individual of the opposite sex; a chaste, proud, ecstatic adoration of one who appears a paragon of personal beauty and otherwise immeasurably superior to all other persons; an emotional state constantly hovering between doubt and hope, aggravated in the female heart by the fear of revealing her feelings too soon; a self-forgetful impulse to share the tastes and feelings of the beloved, and to go so far in affectionate and gallant devotion as to eagerly sacrifice, for the other's good, all comfort and life itself if necessary.
These are the essential traits. But romantic love is altogether too complex and variable to be defined in one sentence; and it is this complexity and variability that I wish to emphasize particularly. Eckermann once suggested to Goethe that no two cases of love are quite alike, and the poet agreed with him. They did not, however, explain their seeming paradox, so diametrically opposed to the current notion that love is everywhere and always the same, in individuals as in nations; nor could they have explained it unless they had analyzed love into its component elements as I have done in this volume. With the aid of this analysis it is easy to show how and why love has changed and grown, like other sentiments; to explain how and why the love of a civilized white man must differ from that of an Australian or African savage, just as their faces differ. Since no two races look alike, and no two individuals in the same race, why should their loves be alike? Is not love the heart of the soul and the face merely its mirror? Love is varied through a thousand climatic, racial, family, and cultural peculiarities. It is varied through individual tastes and proclivities. In one case of love admiration of personal beauty may be the strongest ingredient, in another jealous monopoly, in a third self-sacrificing affection, and so on. The permutations and combinations are countless, and hence it is that love-stories are always fresh, since they can be endlessly varied. A lover's varied feelings in relation to the beloved become gradually blended into a sentiment which is a composite photograph of all the emotions she has ever aroused in him. This has given rise to the delusion that love is a simple feeling.[117]
WHY CALLED ROMANTIC
In the introductory chapter of this book I alluded briefly to my reasons for calling pure prematrimonial infatuation romantic love, giving some historic precedents for such a use of the word. We are now in a position to appreciate the peculiar appropriateness of the term. What is the dictionary definition of "romantic"?
"Pertaining to or resembling romance, or an ideal state of things; partaking of the heroic, the marvellous, the supernatural, or the imaginative; chimerical, fanciful, extravagantly enthusiastic."
Every one of these terms applies to love in the sense in which I use the word. Love is ideal, heroic, marvellous, imaginative, chimerical, fanciful, extravagantly enthusiastic; its hyperbolic adoration even gives it a supernatural tinge, for the adored girl seems more like an angel or a fairy than a common mortal. The lover's heroine is as fictitious as any heroine of romance; he considers her the most beautiful and lovable person in the world, though to others she may seem ugly and ill-tempered. Thus love is called romantic, because it is so great a romancer, attributing to the beloved all sorts of perfections which exist only in the lover's fancy. What could be more fantastic than a lover's stubborn preference for a particular individual and his conviction that no one ever loved so frantically as he does? What more extravagant and unreasonable than his imperious desire to completely monopolize her affection, sometimes guarding her jealously even from her girl friends or her nearest relatives? What more romantic than the tortures and tragedies, the mixed emotions, that doubt or jealousy gives rise to? Does not a willing but coyly reserved maiden romance about her feelings? What could be more fanciful and romantic than her shy reserve and coldness when she is longing to throw herself into the lover's arms? Is not her proud belief that her lover--probably as commonplace and foolish a fellow as ever lived--is a hero or a genius a romantic exaggeration? Is not the lover's purity of imagination, though real as a feeling, a romantic illusion, since he craves ultimate possession of her and would be the unhappiest of mortals if she went to a nunnery, though she promised to love him always? What could be more marvellous, more chimerical, than this temporary suppression of a strong appetite at the time when it would be supposed to manifest itself most irresistibly--this distilling of the finer emotions, leaving all the gross, material elements behind? Can you imagine anything more absurdly romantic than the gallant attentions of a man on his knees before a girl whom, with his stronger muscles, he could command as a slave? Who but a romantic lover would obliterate his selfish ego in sympathetic devotion to another, trying to feel her feelings, forgetting his own? Who but a romantic lover would sacrifice his life in the effort to save or please another? A mother would indeed do the same for her child; but the child is of her own flesh and blood, whereas the beloved may have been a stranger until an hour ago. How romantic!
The appropriateness of the word romantic is still further emphasized by the consideration that, just as romantic art, romantic literature, and romantic music are a revolt against artificial rules and barriers to the free expression of feeling, so romantic love is a revolt against the obstacles to free matrimonial choice imposed by parental and social tyranny.
Indeed, I can see only one objection to the use of the word--its frequent application to any strange or exciting incidents, whence some confusion may ensue. But the trouble is obviated by simply bearing in mind the distinction between romantic incidents and romantic feelings which I have summed up in the maxim that a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love. Nearly all the tales brought together in this volume are romantic love-stories, but not one of them is a story of romantic love. In the end the antithesis will aid us in remembering the distinction.
In place of "romantic" I might have used the word "sentimental"; but in the first place that word fails to indicate the essentially romantic nature of love, on which I have just dwelt; and secondly, it also is liable to be misunderstood, because of its unfortunate association with the word sentimentality, which is a very different thing from sentiment. The differences between sentiment, sentimentality, and sensuality are indeed important enough to merit a brief chapter of elucidation.
SENSUALITY, SENTIMENTALITY, AND SENTIMENT
From beginnings not yet understood--though Haeckel and others have speculated plausibly on the subject--there has been developed in animals and human beings an appetite which insures the perpetuation of the species as the appetite for food does that of the individual. Both these appetites pass through various degrees of development, from the utmost grossness to a high degree of refinement, from which, however, relapses occur in many individuals. We read of Indians tearing out the liver from living animals and devouring it raw and bloody; of Eskimos eating the contents of a reindeer's stomach as a vegetable dish; and the books of explorers describe many scenes like the following from Baker's Ismailia (275) relating to the antics of negroes after killing a buffalo:
"There was now an extraordinary scene over the carcass; four hundred men scrambling over a mass of blood and entrails, fighting and tearing with each other and cutting off pieces of flesh with their lance-heads, with which they escaped as dogs may retreat with a bone."
APPETITE AND LONGING
What aeons of culture lie between such a scene and a dinner party in Europe or America, with its refined, well-behaved guests, its table etiquette, its varied menu, its choice viands, skilfully cooked and blended so as to bring out the most diverse and delicate flavors, its esthetic features--fine linen and porcelains, silver and cut glass, flowers, lights--its bright conversation, and flow of wit. Yet there are writers who would have us believe that these Indians, Eskimos, and Africans, who manifest their appetite for food in so disgustingly coarse a way, are in their love-affairs as sentimental and aesthetic as we are! In truth they are as gross, gluttonous, and selfish in the gratification of one appetite as in that of the other. To a savage a woman is not an object of chaste adoration and gallant devotion, but a mere bait for wanton lust; and when his lust hath dined he kicks her away like a mangy dog till he is hungry again. In Ploss-Bartels[118] may be found an abundance of facts culled from various sources in all parts of the world, showing that the bestiality of many savages is not even restrained by the presence of spectators. At the phallic and bacchanalian festivals of ancient and Oriental nations all distinctions of rank and all family ties were forgotten in a carnival of lust. Licentious orgies are indeed carried on to this day in our own large cities; but their participants are the criminal classes, and occasionally some foolish young men who would be very much ashamed to have their doings known; whereas the orgies and phallic festivals of savages and barbarians are national or tribal institutions, approved by custom, sanctioned by religion, and indulged in openly by every man and woman in the community; often regardless even of incest.
More shockingly still are the grossness and diabolical selfishness of the savage's carnal appetite revealed by his habit of sacrificing young girls to it years before they have reached the age of puberty. Some details will be found in the chapters on Australia, Africa, and India. Here it may be noted--to indicate the wide prevalence of a custom which it would be unjust to animals to call bestial, because beasts never sink so low--that Borneans, as Schwaner notes, marry off girls from three to five; that in Egypt child-wives of seven or eight can be seen; that Javanese girls may be married at seven; that North American Indians often took brides of ten or eleven, while in Southern Australia girls were appropriated as early as seven. Hottentot girls were not spared after the age of seven, nor were Bushman girls, though they did not become mothers till ten or twelve years old; while Kaffir girls married at eight, Somals at six to eight. The cause of these early marriages is not climatic, as some fancy, but simply, as Roberton has pointed out, the coarseness of the men. The list might be extended indefinitely. In Old Calabar sometimes, we read in Ploss,
"a man who has already several wives may be seen with an infant of two or three weeks on his lap, caressing and kissing it as his wife. Wives of four to six years we found occasionally (in China, Guzuate, Ceylon, and Brazil); from seven to nine years on they are no longer rare, and the years from ten to twelve are a widely prevalent marriage age."
The amorous savage betrays his inferiority to animals not only in his cruel maltreatment of girls before they have reached the age of puberty,[119] but in his ignorance, in most cases, of the simplest caresses and kisses for which we often find corresponding acts in birds and other animals. The nerves of primitive men are too coarse for such a delicate sensation as labial contact, and an embrace would leave them cold. An African approximation to a kiss is described by Baker (Ismailia, 472). He had liberated a number of female slaves, and presently, he says, "I found myself in the arms of a naked beauty, who kissed me almost to suffocation, and, with a most unpleasant embrace, licked both my eyes with her tongue." If we may venture an inference from Mr. A.H. Savage Landor's experience[120] among the aboriginal Ainos of Yezo (Japan), one of the lowest of human races, we may conclude that, in the course of evolution, biting preceded kissing. He had made the acquaintance of an Ainu maiden, the most lovely Ainu girl he had ever come across. They strolled together into the woods, and he sketched her picture. She clutched his hand tightly, and pressed it to her chest:
"I would not have mentioned this small episode if her ways of flirting had not been so extraordinary and funny. Loving and biting went together with her.... As we sat on a stone in the semi-darkness she began by gently biting my fingers without hurting me, as affectionate dogs often do their masters; she then bit my arm, then my shoulder, and when she had worked herself up into a passion she put her arms round my neck and bit my cheeks. It was undoubtedly a curious way of making love, and when I had been bitten all over, and was pretty tired of the new sensation, we retired to our respective homes."
Sensuality has had its own evolution quite apart and distinct from that of love. The ancient Greeks and Romans, and the Orientals, especially the Hindoos, were familiar, thousands of years ago, with refinements and variations of lust beyond which the human imagination cannot go. According to Burton,
"Kornemannus in his book de linea amoris, makes five degrees of lust, out of Lucian belike, which he handles in five chapters, Visus, Colloquium, Convictus, Oscula, Tactus--sight, conference, association, kisses, touch."
All these degrees are abundantly illustrated in Burton, often in a way that would not bear quotation in a modern book intended for general reading.
It is interesting to observe, furthermore, that among the higher barbarians and civilized races, lust has become to a certain extent mentalized through hereditary memory and association. Aristotle made a marvellous anticipation of modern scientific thought when he suggested that what made birds sing in spring was the memory of former seasons of love. In men as in animals, the pleasant experiences of love and marriage become gradually ingrained in the brain, and when a youth reaches the age for love-making the memory of ancestral amorous experiences courses through his nerves vaguely but strongly. He longs for something, he knows not what, and this mental longing is one of the earliest and strongest symptoms of love. But it characterizes all sorts of love; it may accompany pure fancies of the sentimental lover, but it may also be a result of the lascivious imaginings and anticipations of sensualism. It does not, therefore, in itself prove the presence of romantic love; a point on which I must place great emphasis, because certain primitive poems expressing a longing for an absent girl or man have been quoted as positive evidence of romantic love, when as a matter of fact there is nothing to prove that they may not have been inspired by mere sensual desires. I shall cite and comment on these poems in later chapters.
Loss of sleep, loss of appetite, leanness, hollow eyes, groans, griefs, sadness, sighing, sobbing, alternating blushes and pallor, feverish or unequal pulse, suicidal impulses, are other symptoms occurring among such advanced nations as the Greeks and Hindoos and often accepted as evidence of true love; but since, like longing, they also accompany lust and other strong passions or violent emotions, they cannot be accepted as reliable symptoms of romantic love. The only certain criteria of love are to be found in the manifestation of the altruistic factors--sympathy, gallantry, and self-sacrificing affection. Romantic love is, as I have remarked before, not merely an emotional phenomenon, but an active impulse. The true lover does not, like the sensualist and the sentimentalist, ululate his time away in dismal wailing about his bodily aches and tremors, woes and pallors, but lets his feelings expend themselves in multitudinous acts revealing his eagerness to immolate his personal pleasures on the altar of his idol.
It must not be supposed that sensual love is necessarily coarse and obscene. An antique love-scene may in itself be proper and exquisitely poetic without rising to the sphere of romantic love; as when Theocritus declares: "I ask not for the land of Pelops nor for talents of gold. But under this rock will I sing, holding you in my arms, looking at the flocks feeding together toward the Sicilian Sea." A pretty picture; but what evidence is there in it of affection? It is pleasant for a man to hold a girl in his arms while gazing at the Sicilian Sea, even though he does not love her any more than a thousand other girls.
Even in Oriental literature, usually so gross and licentious, one may come across a charmingly poetic yet entirely sensual picture like the following from the Persian Gulistan (339). On a very hot day, when he was a young man, Saadi found the hot wind drying up the moisture of his mouth and melting the marrow of his bones. Looking for a refuge and refreshment, he beheld a moon-faced damsel of supreme loveliness in the shaded portico of a mansion:
"She held in her hand a goblet of snow-cold water, into which she dropt some sugar, and tempered it with spirit of wine; but I know not whether she scented it with attar, or sprinkled it with a few blossoms from her own rosy cheek. In short, I received the beverage from her idol-fair hand: and having drunk it off, found myself restored to new life."
Ward writes (115) that the following account of Sharuda, the daughter of Brumha, translated from the Shiva Purana, may serve as a just description of a perfect Hindoo beauty. This girl was of a yellow color; had a nose like the flower of a secamum; her legs were taper, like the plantain-tree; her eyes large, like the principal leaf of the lotos; her eyebrows extended to her ears; her lips were red, like the young leaves of the mango-tree; her face was like the full moon; her voice like the sound of the cuckoo; her throat was like that of a pigeon; her loins narrow, like those of a lion; her hair hung in curls down to her feet; her teeth were like the seeds of the pomegranate; and her gait like that of a drunken elephant or a goose.
There is nothing coarse in this description, yet every detail is purely sensual, and so it is with the thousands of amorous rhapsodies of Hindoo, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other Eastern poets. Concerning the Persians, Dr. Polak remarks (I., 206) that the word Ischk (love) is always associated with the idea of carnality (Was'l). Of the Arabs, Burckardt says that "the passion of love is indeed much talked of by the inhabitants of the towns; but I doubt whether anything is meant by them more than the grossest animal desire." In his letters from the East the keen-eyed Count von Moltke notes that the Turk "passes over all the preliminary rigmarole of falling in love, paying court, languishing, revelling in ecstatic joy, as so much faux frais, and goes straight to the point."