To offer a woman to a visitor to whom one would do honour was, for that matter, a simple act of courtesy in Polynesia, and the same courtesy prescribed the immediate acceptance of the offer, coram populo (Bougainville). It was frequently his own wife that the husband thus gave up to his guest, and the case of Porter, which I have just quoted, had nothing exceptional in it. A similar thing happened to Captain Beechey,[129] and to many other travellers. This conjugal liberality was one of the customs of the country; the friend, or tayo, acquired conjugal rights over the wife or wives of his friend. Between brothers and relations the exchange of wives was frequent,[130] to such a degree that at Toubouai, etc., Moerenhout tells us the women were nearly held in common, and that in the Marquesas a woman had sometimes as many as twenty lovers.[131]
For the Polynesians the pleasures of sensual love were the chief business of life; they neither saw evil nor practised restraint in them. The women were trained with a view to amorous sports;[132] they were fattened on a soup of bread fruit, and from earliest infancy taught by their mothers to dance the timorodie, a very lewd dance, accompanied by appropriate words.[133] The conversation also was in keeping with the morals. “One thing which particularly struck me,” says Moerenhout, “as soon as I began to understand their language, was the extreme licence in conversation—a licence pushed to the limit of most shameless cynicism, and which is the same even with the women; for these people think and talk of nothing but sensual pleasure, and speak openly of everything, having no idea of the euphemisms of our civilised societies, where we use double meanings and veiled words, or terms that are permitted in mentioning things which would appear revolting and cause scandal if plainly expressed; but these islanders could not understand this, and the missionaries have never been able to make them do so.”[134]
Lastly, the existence of the religious and aristocratic society of the Areoïs, in Tahiti and other archipelagoes, finishes the picture of the mental condition of the Polynesians as regards morals. Without describing afresh this curious association, I shall only remind my readers that it had for its object an unrestrained and public abandonment to amorous pleasures, and that, for this reason, the community of women and the obligation of infanticide were decreed.
During the last century sentimentality invaded the brains of thinkers and writers like an epidemic, and gave rise to the belief that primitive man, or “man in a state of nature,” as the phrase went, was the model of all virtues. But we must discount much of this. As we might naturally expect, the uncultivated man is a mammal of the grossest kind. We have already seen that his sexual morality is extremely loose, and necessarily so; we are, however, surprised to find him addicted to certain aberrations from nature which the chroniclers of the Greco-Latin world have accustomed us to regard as the result of a refined and depraved civilisation,—an opinion which is quite erroneous, as comparative ethnography irrefutably proves. Nothing is more common among primitive races than what is called Socratic love, and on this point I will briefly quote a few facts, without pausing longer on them than my subject requires. In the vast sociological investigation which I am undertaking, moral bestiality must not discourage scientific analysis any more than putrefaction arrests the scalpel of the anatomist; it does not therefore follow that we take delight in it.
As a matter of fact, many human races have practised, from the first, vices contrary to nature. The Kanaks of New Caledonia frequently assemble at night in a cabin to give themselves up to this kind of debauchery.[135] The New Zealanders practised it even among their women.[136] It was also a widely-spread custom throughout Polynesia, and even a special deity presided over it. In the whole of America, from north to south, similar customs have existed or still exist. We have previously seen that the Esquimaux reared young boys for this purpose. The Southern Californians did the same, and the Spanish missionaries, on their arrival in the country, found men dressed as women and assuming their part. They were trained to this from youth, and often publicly married to the chiefs.[137] Nero was evidently a mere plagiarist. The existence of analogous customs has been proved amongst the Guyacurus of La Plata, the natives of the Isthmus of Darien, the tribes of Louisiana, and the ancient Illinois, etc.[138]
The two chief forms of sexual excess of which I have been speaking, unnatural vice and the debauchery of girls or free women, are habitual in savage countries; and later, when civilisation and morality have evolved, the same inveterate inclinations still persist for a long time, in spite of public opinion and even of legal repression.
The Incas, according to the chronicler Garcilaso, were merciless in regard to these sexual aberrations, and the Mexican law was equally severe, but all without much effect, if we may believe the accounts of Garcilaso himself, Gomara, Bernal Diaz, etc. I have elsewhere related how the ancient legislations of the great Asiatic states repressed these base aberrations of the procreative sense, and nevertheless, at the present day, the Arabs frequently give way to them, even in the holy Mosque at Mecca;[139] and other Eastern peoples, Hindoos, Persians, and Chinese, are also very imperfectly reformed on this point.
When we remember that morality is essentially relative, and that ancestral impressions are extremely tenacious in the human brain, we shall not be much surprised to see these low tendencies persist as survivals in the midst of civilisations already far advanced. Nevertheless, the theoretic morality of all the great nations of the East has for centuries condemned these repugnant excesses, which our European ancestors, both Celts and Teutons, have early reproved and repressed. It is all the more singular to find the most intelligent race of antiquity, the ancient Greeks, practising the greatest tolerance on this subject, so much so that the names of Socrates and Plato, those fathers of ethereal spiritualism, are attached to amours the mere thought of which now excites disgust in a civilised European.
A very slight acquaintance with Greco-Roman literature furnishes abundant information on this matter. I have no need, therefore, to dwell on it, but I must quote a curious passage of Strabo, from which we learn that the ancient Cretans associated with so-called Socratic amours the ceremonial of marriage by capture, of which I shall soon have to speak. This strange passage is as follows:—“It is not by persuasion, but by capture, that they obtain possession of the beloved object. Three days or more in advance the erastes apprises the friends of the young boy of his project of abduction. It would be considered the greatest disgrace for them to conceal the child, or prevent him from passing by the road indicated. By so doing they would appear to confess that he did not merit the favours of such a distinguished erastes. What do they do therefore? They meet together, and if the ravisher is equal or superior in rank and all other respects to the family of the child, they are content in their pursuit to comply with the idea of the law, and to make a semblance of attack only, allowing the child to be carried off, and even testifying their satisfaction; but if, on the contrary, the ravisher should be of greatly inferior rank, they invariably rescue the child from his hands. In any case the pursuit comes to an end when the child has crossed the threshold of the andrion of his captor.” We may doubtless presume, from this passage, that the ancient Cretans were no longer in the state of bestial coarseness of the New Caledonians. With them the capture was a symbol or comedy. It was a mark of esteem, paid less to the beauty of the child than to his valour and propriety of manners. In fact, the boy had the legal right to revenge himself, if he had suffered any violence in his capture; and in restoring him to liberty his ravisher loaded him with presents, some of which were obligatory and legal, namely, a warrior’s cloak, an ox, and a goblet; it was a kind of initiation in virility, and it was considered a disgrace for a young boy not to obtain an erastes.[140]
But even if we admit that all the ceremonial of this singular platonic marriage among the Cretans was perfectly innocent, it arose, none the less, from a moral laxity, plainly showing that ancient morals were gross in the extreme.