Kissing and other caresses are, as we have seen, practices unknown to savages. Their nerves being too coarse to appreciate even the more refined forms of sensualism, it follows of necessity that they are too coarse to experience the subtle manifestations of imaginative sentimental love. Their national addiction to obscene practices and conversation proves an insuperable obstacle to the growth of refined sexual feelings. Details given in later chapters will show that what Turner says of the Samoans, "From their childhood their ears are familiar with the most obscene conversation;" and what the Rev. George Taplan writes of the "immodest and lewd" dances of the Australians, applies to the lower races in general. The history of love is, indeed, epitomized in the evolution of the dance from its aboriginal obscenity and licentiousness to its present function as chiefly a means of bringing young people together and providing innocent opportunities for courtship; two extremes differing as widely as the coarse drum accompaniment of a primitive dance from the sentimental melodies, soulful harmonies, and exquisite orchestral colors of a Strauss waltz. A remark made by Taine on Burns suggests how even acquired coarseness in a mind naturally refined may crush the capacity for true love:
"He had enjoyed too much…. Debauch had all but spoiled his fine imagination, which had before been 'the chief source of his happiness'; and he confessed that, instead of tender reveries, he had now nothing but sensual desires."
The poets have done much to confuse the public mind in this matter by their fanciful and impossible pastoral lovers. The remark made in my first book, that "only an educated mind can feel romantic love," led one of its reviewers to remark, half indignantly, half mournfully, "There goes the pastoral poetry of the world at a single stroke of the pen." Well, let it go. I am quite sure that if these poetic dreamers had ever come across a shepherdess in real life—dirty, unkempt, ignorant, coarse, immoral—they would themselves have made haste to disavow their heroines and seek less malodorous "maidens" for embodiments of their exalted fancies of love[128]. Richard Wagner was promptly disillusioned when he came across some of those modern shepherdesses, the Swiss dairy-maids. "There are magnificent women here in the Oberland," he wrote to a friend, "but only so to the eye; they are all tainted with rabid vulgarity."
III. WAR
Herbert Spencer has devoted some eloquent pages[129] to showing that along with chronic militancy there goes a brutal treatment of women, whereas industrial tribes are likely to treat their wives and daughters well. To militancy is due the disregard of women's claims shown in stealing or buying them, the inequality of status between the sexes entailed by polygamy; the use of women as laboring slaves, the life-and-death power over wife and child. To which we may add that war proves an obstacle to love, by fostering cruelty and smothering sympathy, and all the other tender feelings; by giving the coarsest masculine qualities of aggressiveness and brute prowess the aspect of cardinal virtues and causing the feminine virtues of gentleness, mercy, kindness, to be despised, and women themselves to be esteemed only in so far as they appropriate masculine qualities; and by fostering rape and licentiousness in general. When Plutarch wrote that "the most warlike nations are the most addicted to love," he meant, of course, lust. In wars of the past no incentive to brutal courage proved so powerful as the promise that the soldiers might have the women of captured cities. "Plunder if you succeed, and paradise if you fall. Female captives in the one case, celestial houris in the other"—such was, according to Burckhardt, the promise to their men given by Wahabi chiefs on the eve of battle.
IV. CRUELTY
Love depends on sympathy, and sympathy is incompatible with cruelty. It has been maintained that the notorious cruelty of the lower and war-like races is manifested only toward enemies; but this is an error. Some of the instances cited under "Sentimental Murder" and "Sympathy" show how often superstitious and utilitarian considerations smother all the family feelings. Three or four more illustrations may be added here. Burton says of the East Africans, that "when childhood is past, the father and son become natural enemies, after the manner of wild beasts." The Bedouins are not compelled by law or custom to support their aged parents, and Burckhardt (156) came across such men whom their sons would have allowed to perish. Among the Somals it frequently occurs that an old father is simply driven away and exposed to distress and starvation. Nay, incredible cases are related of fathers being sold as slaves, or killed. The African missionary, Moffat, one day came across an old woman who had been left to die within an enclosure. He asked her why she had been thus deserted, and she replied:
"I am old, you see, and no longer able to serve them [her grown children]. When they kill game, I am too feeble to aid in carrying home the flesh; I am incapable of gathering wood to make fire, and I cannot carry their children on my back as I used to do."
V. MASCULINE SELFISHNESS
The South American Chiquitos, as Dobrizhoffer informs us (II., 264), used to kill the wife of a sick man, believing her to be the cause of his illness, and fancying that his recovery would follow her disappearance. Fijians have been known to kill and eat their wives, when they had no other use for them. Carl Bock (275) says of the Malays of Sumatra, that the men are extremely indolent and make the women their beasts of burden (as the lower races do in general).