"Affection after marriage would naturally spring up between the parties from association, from habit, and from mutual dependence; but of that marvellous passion which originates in a higher development of the passions of the human heart, and is founded upon a cultivation of the affections between the sexes, they were entirely ignorant. In their temperaments they were below this passion in its simplest forms."
He is no doubt right in declaring that the Indians before marriage were "in their temperaments" below affectionate love "in its simplest forms"; but, that being so, it is difficult to see how they could have acquired real affection after marriage. As a matter of fact we know that they treated their wives with a selfishness which is entirely incompatible with true affection. The Rev. Peter Jones, moreover, an Indian himself, tells us in his book on the Ojibwas:
"I have scarcely ever seen anything like social intercourse between husband and wife, and it is remarkable that the women say little in presence of the men."
Obviously, at the beginning of the passage quoted, Morgan should have used the word attachment in place of affection. Bulmer (by accident, I suspect) uses the right word when he says (Brough Smyth, 77) that Australians, notwithstanding their brutal forms of marriage, often "get much attached to each other." At the same time it is easy to show that, if not among Australians or Indians, at any rate with such a people as the ancient Greeks, conjugal affection may have existed while romantic love was still impossible. The Greeks looked down on their women as inferior beings. Now one can feel affection—conjugal or friendly—toward an inferior, but one cannot feel adoration—and adoration is absolutely essential to romantic love. Before romantic love could be born it was necessary that women should not only be respected as equal to man but worshipped as his superior. This was not done by any of the lower or ancient races; hence romantic love is a peculiarly modern sentiment, later than any other form of human affection.
OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE
When Shakspere wrote that "The course of true love never did run smooth" he had in mind individual cases of courtship. But what is true of individuals also applies to the story of love itself. For many thousands of years savagery and barbarism "proved an unrelenting foe to love," and it was with almost diabolical ingenuity that obstacles to its birth and growth were maintained and multiplied. It was crushed, balked, discountenanced, antagonized, discredited, disheartened so persistently that the wonder is not that there should be so little true love even at the present day, but that there is any at all. A whole volume might be written on the Obstacles to Love; my original plan for this book included a long chapter on this matter; but partly to avoid repetition, partly to save space, I will condense my material to a few pages, considering briefly the following obstacles: I. Ignorance and stupidity. II. Coarseness and obscenity. III. War. IV. Cruelty. V. Masculine selfishness. VI. Contempt for women. VII. Capture and sale of brides. VIII. Infant marriages. IX. Prevention of free choice. X. Separation of the sexes. XI. Sexual taboos. XII. Race aversion. XIII. Multiplicity of languages. XIV. Social barriers. XV. Religious prejudice.
I. IGNORANCE AND STUPIDITY
Intelligence alone does not imply a capacity for romantic love. Dogs are the most intelligent of all animals, but they know nothing of love; the most intelligent nations of antiquity—the Greeks, Romans and Hebrews—were strangers to this feeling; and in our times we have seen that such intelligent persons as Tolstoi, Zola, Groncourt, Flaubert have been confessedly unable to experience real love such as Turgenieff held up to them. On the other hand, there can be no genuine love without intelligence. It is true that maternal love exists among the lowly, but that is an instinct developed by natural selection, because without it the race could not have persisted. Conjugal attachment also was, as we have seen, necessary for the preservation of the race; whereas romantic love is not necessary for the preservation of the race, but is merely a means for its improvement; wherefore it developed slowly, keeping pace with the growth of the intellectual powers of discrimination, the gradual refinement of the emotions, and the removal of diverse obstacles created by selfishness, coarseness, foolish taboos, and prejudices. A savage lives entirely in his senses, hence sensual love is the only kind he can know. His love is as coarse and simple as his music, which is little more than a monotonous rhythmic noise. Just as a man, unless he has musical culture, cannot understand a Schumann symphony, so, unless he has intellectual culture, he cannot love a woman as Schumann loved Clara Wieck.
Stupid persons, men and women with blunt intellects, also have blunt feelings, excepting those of a criminal, vengeful kind. Savages have keener senses than we have, but their intellect and emotions are blunt and untrained. An Australian cannot count above ten, and Galton says (132) that Damaras in counting "puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for units." Spix and Martins (384) found it very difficult to get any information from the Brazilian (Coroado) because "scarcely has one begun to question him about his language when he gets impatient, complains of headache, and shows that he cannot endure this effort"—for he is used to living entirely in and for his senses. Fancy such savages writing or reading a book like The Reveries of a Bachelor and you will understand why stupidity is an obstacle to love, and realize the unspeakable folly of the notion that love is always and everywhere the same. The savage has no imagination, and imagination is the organ of romantic love; without it there can be no sympathy, and without sympathy there can be no love.