Mr. Spencer, in commenting on this passage, remarks that “This testimony harmonises with testimonies cited by Sir John Lubbock, to the effect that the Hottentots ‘are so cold and indifferent to one another that you would think there was no such thing as love between them’; that among the Koussa Kaffirs there is ‘no feeling of love in marriage’; and that in Yariba, ‘a man thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn—affection is altogether out of the question.’”
Mr. Winwood Reade, on the other hand, informed Darwin that the West Africans “are quite capable of falling in love, and of forming tender, passionate, and faithful attachments.” And the anthropologist Waitz, speaking of Polynesia, says that “examples of real passionate love are not rare, and on the Fiji Islands it has happened that individuals married against their will have committed suicide; although this has only happened in the higher classes.” Unfortunately in these cases we are left in doubt as to whether the reference is to Conjugal or to Romantic Love; conjugal attachment, being of earlier growth than Romantic Love, because the development of the latter was retarded by the limited opportunities for prolonged Courtship and free Choice.
PRIMITIVE COURTSHIP
In his anxiety to find cases of Romantic Love among North American and other primitive peoples, Waitz is obliged to fall back on legends of Lovers’ Leaps and Maiden Rocks, and on a poem about a South American maiden who committed suicide on her lover’s grave to avoid falling into the hands of the Spaniards. Legends and poems, unfortunately, do not count for much as scientific evidence. At the same time, it would doubtless be incorrect to assert on the strength of some of the authorities just quoted that Love does not exist at all among savages, and therefore to make the chapter on Love among Savages as brief as that chapter on Snakes in Ireland. We shall find, on the contrary, that several of Love’s “overtones” are occasionally present; and that though full-fledged cupids may never appear with their poisoned arrows, mischievous amourettes sometimes do flit across the field of vision. For the goddess of Love is ever watchful of an opportunity for one of her emissaries to bag some game.
Romantic Love is dependent on opportunities for Courtship. Among savages and semi-civilised nations we find three grades of Courtship—Capture, Purchase, and Service. These must be briefly examined in turn.
(1) Capture.—One of the most curious features of savage life is the widely-prevalent custom called by M‘Lennan Exogamy, or marrying out. This custom compels a man who wishes a wife of his own to steal or purchase her of another tribe, private marriage within his own tribe being considered criminal and even punishable with death. To this rule of Exogamy Sir John Lubbock traces the origin of Monogamy. In his view women were at first, like other kinds of property, held in common by the tribe, any man being any woman’s husband ad libitum. No man could therefore claim a woman for himself without infringing on the rights of others. But if he stole a woman from another tribe, she became his exclusive property, which he had a right to guard jealously, and to look upon with the Pride of Conquest—a pride, however, quite distinct from that which intoxicates a civilised lover when he finds, or fondly imagines, that his goddess has chosen him among all his rivals. The primitive man’s pride is more like that of the warrior who wears a large number of scalps in his belt; and as in his case marriage immediately follows Capture, this feeling, moreover, belongs more properly to the sphere of conjugal sentiment than to that of Love.
This primitive form of courtship, it is obvious, is very much ruder than that which prevails in the animal kingdom, where the males alone maltreat one another, while in this early human courtship the woman, if she resists, is simply knocked on the head, and her senseless body carried off to the captor’s tent. Diefenbach relates concerning the Polynesians that “if a girl was courted by two suitors, each of them grasped one arm of the beloved and pulled her toward him; the stronger one got her, but in some cases not before her limbs had been pulled out of joint.” And Waitz says that “the girls were commonly abducted by force, which led frequently to most violent fights, in which the girl herself was occasionally wounded, or even killed, to prevent her from falling into the hands of the enemy.”
Mr. E. B. Tylor, after stating that marriage by Capture may be seen at the present day among the fierce forest tribes of Brazil, continues: “Ancient tradition knows this practice well, as where the men of Benjamin carry off the daughters of Shiloh dancing at the feast, and in the famous Roman tale of the rape of the Sabines, a legend putting in historical form the wife-capture which in Roman custom remained as a ceremony. What most clearly shows what a recognised old-world custom it was, is its being thus kept up as a formality where milder manners really prevailed. It had passed into this state among the Spartans, when Plutarch says that though the marriage was really by friendly settlement between the families, the bridegroom’s friends went through the pretence of carrying off the bride by violence. Within a few generations the same old habit was kept up in Wales, where the bridegroom and his friends, mounted and armed as for war, carried off the bride; and in Ireland they used even to hurl spears at the bride’s people, though at such a distance that no one was hurt, except now and then by accident, as happened when one Lord Howth lost an eye, which mischance seems to have put an end to this curious relic of antiquity.”
Moreover, we are told that “in our own marriages the ‘best man’ seems originally to have been the chief abettor of the bridegroom in the act of capture.”
In a modified form “wife-capture” cannot be said to be extinct even in this advanced age. Elopement is the modern name for it When the parents dissent and the couple are very young, this climax of courtship doubtless is often reprehensible. But in those cases where the consent of all parties has been obtained, it ought to be universally adopted. Sudden flight and an impromptu marriage would add much to the romance of the honeymoon, and would enable the bridal couple to avoid the terrors and stupid formalities of the wedding-day, the anticipation of which is doubtless responsible for the ever-increasing number of cowardly bachelors in the world.