Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 18

Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism.

Callicratides does not say he will die _for_ the other, or that the other's pleasures are to him more important than his own.[24]

SHAM ALTRUISM IN INDIA

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

How far he was from realizing Christ's "blessed are the merciful," may be inferred from what the Abbe Dubois says:

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

"To kill a cow," says the same writer (I., 176), "is a crime which the Hindoo laws punish with death;" and these same Hindoos treat women, especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd to suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be actuated by sympathy in their devout att.i.tude toward some animals.

Superst.i.tion is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person who kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive.

In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally.

What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such superst.i.tions:

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

EVOLUTION OF SYMPATHY

If we study the evolution of human sympathy we find that it begins, not in reference to animals but to human beings. The first stage is a mother's feeling going out to her child. Next, the family as a whole is included, and then the tribe. An Australian kills, as a matter of course, everyone he comes across in the wilderness not belonging to his tribe. To the present day race hatred, jingoism, and religious differences obstruct the growth of cosmopolitan sympathy such as Christ demanded. His religion has done much, however, to widen the circle of sympathy and to make known its ravis.h.i.+ng delights. The doctrine that it is more blessed to give than to receive is literally true for those who are of a sympathetic disposition. Parents enjoy the pleasures of their children as they never did their own egotistic delights. In various ways sympathy has continued to grow, and at the present day the most refined and tender men and women include animals within the range of their pity and affection. We organize societies for their protection, and we protest against the slaughter of birds that live on islands, thousands of miles away. Our imagination has become so sensitive and vivid that it gives us a keen pang to think of the happy lives of these birds as being ruthlessly cut short and their young left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation.

If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom Burton wrote in his _Two Trips to Gorilla Land_, that "Cruelty seems to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death"--we need no other argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic love, because that implies a capacity for the tenderest and subtlest sympathy. I would sooner believe a tiger capable of such love than a savage, for the tiger practises cruelty unconsciously and accidentally while in quest of food, whereas the primitive man indulges in cruelty for cruelty's sake, and for the delight it gives him. We have here one more ill.u.s.tration of the change and growth of sentiments. Man's emotions develop as well as his reasoning powers, and one might as well expect an Australian, who cannot count five, to solve a problem in trigonometry as to love a woman as we love her.

AMOROUS SYMPATHY

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

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

--_Sidney_.

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

--_Scott_.

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

IX. ADORATION

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

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

DEIFICATION OF PERSONS

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

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

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

Ouida speaks of "the graceful hypocrisies of courts.h.i.+p," and no doubt there are many such; but in romantic love there is no hypocrisy; its devotion and adoration are absolutely sincere.

The romantic lover adores not only the girl herself but everything a.s.sociated with her. This phase of love is poetically delineated in Goethe's _Werther_:

"To-day," Werther writes to his friend, "I could not go to see Lotta, being unavoidably detained by company.

What was there to do? I sent my valet to her, merely in order to have someone about me who had been near her.

With what impatience I expected him, with what joy I saw him return! I should have liked to seize him by the hand and kiss him, had I not been ashamed.

"There is a legend of a Bononian stone which being placed in the sun absorbs his rays and emits them at night. In such a light I saw that valet. The knowledge that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, the b.u.t.tons and the collar of his coat, made all these things valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand dollars, so happy was I in his presence. G.o.d forbid that you should laugh at this. William, are these things phantasms if they make us happy?"

Fielding wrote a poem on a half-penny which a young lady had given to a beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half-crown. Sir Richard Steele wrote to Miss Scurlock:

"You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have worn, or I cannot live; otherwise you must expect that I'll kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your handkerchief."

Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fair s.e.x. The lover wors.h.i.+ps the very ground she trod on, and is enraptured at the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her.

To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, in perpetual hyperbole:

It's a year almost that I have not seen her; Oh! last summer green things were greener, Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer.

--_C.G. Rossetti_.

PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN

The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being universal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345): "Among ourselves woman-wors.h.i.+p nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost, if not entirely, absent among the peasantry." Still less would we expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor wors.h.i.+p, which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--or rather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.

A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt for women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by the lower races in all parts of the world. But as the att.i.tude of Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be fully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to a few sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss, II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to and fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored. If an Indian refuses to quarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains (VI., 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of a warrior, as she is too far beneath him. In Tahiti the head of a husband or father was sacred from a woman's touch. Offerings to the G.o.ds would have been polluted if touched by a woman. In Siam the wife had to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband's, to remind her of her inferiority. No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maori chief. Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in any corner of the tent except her own; after pitching the tent she was obliged to fumigate it before the men would enter. The Zulus regard their women "with haughty contempt." Among Mohammedans a woman has a definite value only in so far as she is related to a husband; unmarried she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her.

(Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls by elders and priests is the insulting

"Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive thee." "On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that she is an unwelcome guest in the family." (Ramabai Saravasti, 13.)

William Jameson Reid, who visited some of the unexplored regions of Northeastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness and misery of woman's lot among the Pa-Urgs:

"Although, owing to the scarcity, a woman is a valuable commodity, she is treated with the utmost contempt, and her existence is infinitely worse than the very animals of her lord and master. Polyandry is generally practised, increasing the horror of her position, for she is required to be a slave to a number of masters, who treat her with the most rigorous harshness and brutality. From the day of her birth until her death (few Pa-Urg women live to be fifty) her life is one protracted period of degradation. She is called upon to perform the most menial and degrading of services and the entire manual labor of the community, it being considered base of a male to engage in other labor than that of warfare and the chase....

"When a child is to be born the mother is driven from the village in which she lives, and is compelled to take up her abode in some roadside hut or cave in the open country, a scanty supply of food, furnished by her husbands, being brought to her by the other women of the tribe. When the child is born the mother remains with it for one or two months, and then leaving it in a cave, returns to the village and informs her eldest husband of its birth and the place where she has left it. If the child is a male, some consideration is shown to her; should it be a female, however, her lot is frightful, for aside from the severe beating to which she is subjected by her husband, she suffers the scorn and contumely of the rest of the tribe. If a male child, the husband goes to the cave and brings it back to the village; if it is of the opposite s.e.x he is left to his own volition; sometimes he returns with the female infant; as often he ignores it entirely and allows it to perish, or may dispose of it to some other man as a prospective wife."[26]

In Corea women are so little esteemed that they do not even receive separate names, and a husband considers it an act of condescension to speak to his wife. When a young man of the ruling cla.s.ses marries, he spends three or four days with his bride, then returns to his concubine, "in order to prove that he does not care much for the bride." (Ploss, II., 434.) "The condition of Chinese women is most pitiable," writes the Abbe Hue:

"Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and accompany her to the tomb. Her birth is commonly regarded as a humiliation and a disgrace to the family--an evident sign of the malediction of heaven.

If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is regarded and treated as a creature radically despicable, and scarcely belonging to the human race."

He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for the bride is to commit suicide. Even the j.a.panese, so highly civilized in some respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likening themselves to heaven and the women to earth. There are ten stations on the way up the sacred mount Fuji. Formerly no woman was allowed to climb above the eighth. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of the University of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his _Things j.a.panese_ (274) in which he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the _Kojiki_ he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women in ancient as in modern j.a.pan. Some years afterward six of the chief literati of the old school translated this introduction into j.a.panese.

They patted the author on the head for many things, but when they reached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrath exploded:

"The subordination of women to men," so ran their commentary, "is an extremely correct custom. To think the contrary is to harbor European prejudice.... For the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand law of heaven and earth. To ignore this, and to talk of the contrary as barbarous, is absurd."

The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated by the men, Chamberlain says on another page,