Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 7

Whenever she speaks, my ravished ear No other voice but hers can hear, No other wit but hers approve: Tell me, my heart, if this be love?

--_Lyttleton_.

Every lover of nature must have noticed how the sun monopolizes the attention of flowers and leaves. Twist and turn them whichever way you please, on returning afterward you will find them all facing the beloved sun again with their bright corollas and glossy surface.

Romantic love exacts a similar monopoly of its devotees. Be their feelings as various, their thoughts as numerous, as the flowers in a garden, the leaves in a forest, they will always be turned toward the beloved one.

JULIET AND NOTHING BUT JULIET

A man may have several intimate friends, and a mother may dote on a dozen or more children with equal affection; but romantic love is a monopolist, absolutely exclusive of all partic.i.p.ation and rivalry. A genuine Romeo wants Juliet, the whole of Juliet, and nothing but Juliet. She monopolizes his thoughts by day, his dreams at night; her image blends with everything he sees, her voice with everything he hears. His imagination is a lens which gathers together all the light and heat of a giant world and focuses them on one brunette or blonde.

He is a miser, who begrudges every smile, every look she bestows on others, and if he had his own way he would sail with her to-day to a desert island and change their names to Mr. and Mrs. Robinson Crusoe.

This is not fanciful hyperbole, but a plain statement in prose of a psychological truth. The poets did not exaggerate when they penned such sentiments as these:

She was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts, Which terminated all.

--_Byron_.

Thou art my life, my love, my heart, The very eyes of me, And hast command of every part, To live and die for thee.

--_Herrick_.

Give me but what that ribband bound, Take all the rest the world goes round.

--_Waller_.

But I am tied to very thee By every thought I have; Thy face I only care to see Thy heart I only crave.

--_Sedley_.

I see her in the dewy flowers, Sae lovely sweet and fair: I hear her voice in ilka bird, Wi' music charm the air: There's not a bonnie flower that springs By fountain, shaw, or green; There's not a bonny bird that sings, But minds me o' my Jean.

--_Burns_.

For nothing this wide universe I call Save thou, my rose: in it thou art my all.

--_Shakspere_.

Like Alexander I will reign, And I will reign alone, My thoughts shall evermore disdain A rival on my throne.

--_James Graham_.

Love, well thou know'st no partners.h.i.+ps allows.

Cupid averse, rejects divided vows.

--_Prior_.

O that the desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race And, hating no one, love but only her.

--_Byron_.

b.u.t.tERFLY LOVE

The imperative desire for an absolute monopoly of one chosen girl, body and soul--_and one only_--is an essential, invariable ingredient of romantic love. Sensual love, on the contrary, aims rather at a monopoly of all attractive women--or at least as many as possible.

Sensual love is not an exclusive pa.s.sion for one; it is a fickle feeling which, like a giddy b.u.t.terfly, flits from flower to flower, forgetting the fragrance of the lily it left a moment ago in the sweet honey of the clover it enjoys at this moment. The Persian poet Sadi, says (_Bustan_, 12), "Choose a fresh wife every spring or New Year's Day; for the almanack of last year is good for nothing." Anacreon interprets Greek love for us when he sings:

"Can'st count the leaves in a forest, the waves in the sea?

Then tell me how oft I have loved. Twenty girls in Athens, and fifteen more besides; add to these whole bevies in Corinth, and from Lesbos to Ionia, from Caria and from Rhodos, two thousand sweethearts more.... Two thousand did I say? That includes not those from Syros, from Kan.o.bus, from Creta's cities, where Eros rules alone, nor those from Gadeira, from Bactria, from India--girls for whom I burn."

Lucian vies with Anacreon when he makes Theomestus (_Dial. Amor._) exclaim: "Sooner can'st thou number the waves of the sea and the snowflakes falling from the sky than my loves. One succeeds another, and the new one comes on before the old is off." We call such a thing libertinism, not love. The Greeks had not the name of Don Juan, yet Don Juan was their ideal both for men and for the G.o.ds they made in the image of man. Homer makes the king of G.o.ds tell his own spouse (who listens without offence) of his diverse love-affairs (_Iliad_, xiv., 317-327). Thirteen centuries after Homer the Greek poet Nonnus gives ([Greek: Dionusiaka], vii.) a catalogue of twelve of Zeus's amours; and we know from other sources (_e.g., Hygin, fab._, 155) that these accounts are far from exhaustive. A complete list would match that yard-long doc.u.ment made for Don Juan by Leporello in Mozart's opera. A French writer has aptly called Jupiter the "Olympian Don Juan;" yet Apollo and most of the other G.o.ds might lay claim to the same t.i.tle, for they are represented as equally amorous, sensual, and fickle; seeing no more wrong in deserting a woman they have made love to, than a bee sees in leaving a flower whose honey it has stolen.

Temporarily, of course, both men and G.o.ds focus their interest on one woman--maybe quite ardently--and fiercely resent interference, as an angry bee is apt to sting when kept from the flower it has accidentally chosen; but that is a different thing from the monopolism of true love.

ROMANTIC STORIES OF NON-ROMANTIC LOVE

The romantic lover's dream is to marry one particular woman and her alone; the sensual lover's dream embraces several women, or many. The unromantic ideal of the ancient Hindoo is romantically ill.u.s.trated in a story told in the _Hitopadesa_ of a Brahman named Wedasarman. One evening someone made him a present of a dish of barley-meal. He carried it to the market hall and lay down in a corner near where a potter had stored his wares. Before going to sleep, the Brahman indulged in these pleasant reveries:

"If I sell this dish of meal I shall probably get ten farthings for it. For that I can buy some of these pots, which I can sell again at a profit; thus my money will increase. Then I shall begin to trade in betel-nuts, dress-goods and other things, and thus I may bring my wealth up to a hundred thousand. With that I shall be able to marry _four wives_, and to the youngest and prettiest of them I shall give my tenderest love. How the others will be tortured by jealousy! But just let them dare to quarrel. They shall know my wrath and feel my club!"

With these words he laid about him with his club, and of course broke his own dish besides many of the potter's wares. The potter hearing the crash, ran to see what was the matter, and the Brahman was ignominiously thrown out of the hall.

The polygamous imagination of the Hindoos runs riot in many of their stories. To give another instance: _The Kathakoca, or Treasury of Stories_ (translated by C.H. Tawney, 34), includes an account of the adventures of King Kanchanapura, who had five hundred wives; and of Sanatk.u.mara who beheld eight daughters of Manavega and married them.

Shortly afterward he married a beautiful lady and her sister. Then he conquered Vajravega and married one hundred maidens.

Hindoo books a.s.sure us that women, unless restrained, are no better than men. We read in the same _Hitopadesa_ that they are like cows--always searching for new herbs in the meadows to graze on. In polyandrous communities the women make good use of their opportunities. Dalton, in his book on the wild tribes of Bengal, tells this quaint story (36):

"A very pretty Dophla girl once came into the station of Luckimpur, threw herself at my feet and in most poetical language asked me to give her protection. She was the daughter of a chief and was sought in marriage and promised to a peer of her father who had many other wives. She would not submit to be one of many, and besides she loved and she eloped with her beloved. This was interesting and romantic. She was at the time in a very coa.r.s.e travelling dress, but a.s.sured of protection she took fresh apparel and ornament from her basket and proceeded to array herself, and very pretty she looked as she combed and plaited her long hair and completed her toilette. In the meantime I had sent for the 'beloved,' who had kept in the background, and alas!

how the romance was dispelled when a _dual_ appeared!

_She had eloped with two men!_"

Every reader will laugh at this denouement, and that laugh is eloquent proof that in saying there can be no real love without absolute monopolism of one heart by another I simply formulated and emphasized a truth which we all feel instinctively. Dalton's tale also brings out very clearly the world-wide difference between a romantic love-story and a story of romantic love.

Turning from the Old World to the New we find stories ill.u.s.trating the same amusing disregard of amorous monopolism. Rink, in his book of Eskimo tales and traditions, cites a song which voices the reveries of a Greenland bachelor:

"I am going to leave the country--in a large s.h.i.+p--for that sweet little woman. I'll try to get some beads--of those that look like boiled ones. Then when I've gone abroad--I shall return again. My nasty little relatives--I'll call them all to me--and give them a good thras.h.i.+ng--with a big rope's end. Then I'll go to marry--_taking two at once_. That darling little creature--shall only wear clothes of the spotted seal-skins, and the other little pet shall have clothes of the young hooded seals."

Powers (227) tells a tragic tale of the California Indians, which in some respects reminds one of the man who jumped into a bramble-bush and scratched out both his eyes.

"There was once a man who loved two women and wished to marry them. Now these two women were magpies, but they loved him not, and laughed his wooing to scorn. Then he fell into a rage and cursed these two women, and went far away to the North. There he set the world on fire, then made for himself a tule boat, wherein he escaped to sea, and was never seen more."

Belden, who spent twelve years among the Sioux and other Indians, writes (302):

"I once knew a young man who had about a dozen horses he had captured at different times from the enemy, and who fell desperately in love with a girl of nineteen.

_She loved him in return_, but said she could not bear to leave her tribe, and go to a Santee village, unless her two sisters, aged respectively fifteen and seventeen, went with her. Determined to have his sweetheart, the next time the warrior visited the Yankton village he took several ponies with him, and bought all three of the girls from their parents, giving five ponies for them."

OBSTACLES TO MONOPOLISM

Heriot, during his sojourn among Canadian Indians, became convinced from what he saw that love does not admit of divided affections, and can hardly coexist with polygamy (324). Schoolcraft notes the "curious fact" concerning the Indian that after a war "one of the first things he thought of as a proper reward for his bravery was to take another wife." In the chapter ent.i.tled "Honorable Polygamy" we saw how, in polygamous communities the world over, monogamy was despised as the "poor man's marriage," and was practised, not from choice, but from necessity. Every man who was able to do so bought or stole several women, and joined the honorable guild of polygamists. Such a custom, enforced by a strong public opinion, created a sentiment which greatly r.e.t.a.r.ded the development of monopolism in s.e.xual love. A young Indian might dream of marrying a certain girl, not, however, with a view to giving her his whole heart, but only as a beginning. The woman, it is true, was expected to give herself to one husband, but he seldom hesitated to lend her to a friend as an act of hospitality, and in many cases, would hire her out to a stranger in return for gifts.

In not a few communities of Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Australia, Africa, and America polyandry prevailed; that is, the woman was expected to bestow her caresses in turn on two or more men, to the destruction of the desire for exclusive possession which is an imperative trait of love. Rowney describes (154) what we might call syndicate marriage which has prevailed among the Meeris of India:

"All the girls have their prices, the largest price for the best-looking girl varying from twenty to thirty pigs, and, if one man cannot give so many, he has no objection to take partners to make up the number."

According to Julius Caesar, it was customary among the ancient Britons for brothers, and sometimes for father and sons, to have their wives in common, and Tacitus found evidence of a similar custom among the ancient Germans; while in some parts of Media it was the ambition of the women to have two or more husbands, and Strabo relates that those who succeeded looked down with pride on their less fortunate sisters.

When the Spaniards first arrived at Lanzarote, in South America, they found the women married to several husbands, who lived with their common spouse in turn each a month. The Tibetans, according to Samuel Turner, look on marriage as a disagreeable duty which the members of a family must try to alleviate by sharing its burdens. The Nair woman in India may have up to ten or twelve husbands, with each of whom she lives ten days at a time. Among some Himalayan tribes, when the oldest brother marries, he generally shares his wife with his younger brothers.