Primitive Love and Love-Stories

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Title: Primitive Love and Love-Stories

Author: Henry Theophilus Finck

Release Date: April 7, 2004 [EBook #11934]

Language: English

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PRIMITIVE LOVE AND LOVE-STORIES

BY HENRY T. FINCK

1899

DEDICATED TO ONE WHO TAUGHT THE AUTHOR THAT CONJUGAL AFFECTION IS NOT INFERIOR TO ROMANTIC LOVE

PREFACE

On page 654 of the present volume reference is made to a custom prevalent in northern India of employing the family barber to select the boys and girls to be married, it being considered too trivial and humiliating an act for the parents to attend to. In pronouncing such a custom ludicrous and outrageous we must not forget that not much more than a century ago an English thinker, Samuel Johnson, expressed the opinion that marriages might as well be arranged by the Lord Chancellor without consulting the parties concerned. Schopenhauer had, indeed, reason to claim that it had remained for him to discover the significance and importance of love. His ideas on the relations between love, youth, health, and beauty opened up a new vista of thought; yet it was limited, because the question of heredity was only just beginning to be understood, and the theory of evolution, which has revolutionized all science, had not yet appeared on the horizon.

The new science of anthropology, with its various branches, including sociology, ethnology, and comparative psychology, has within the last two or three decades brought together and discussed an immense number of facts relating to man in his various stages of development—savagery, barbarism, semi-civilization, and civilization. Monographs have appeared in great numbers on various customs and institutions, including marriage, which has been discussed in several exhaustive volumes. Love alone has remained to be specially considered from an evolutionary point of view. My own book, Romantic Love and Personal Beauty, which appeared in 1887, did indeed touch upon this question, but very briefly, inasmuch as its subject, as the title indicates, was modern romantic love. A book on such a subject was naturally and easily written virginibus puerisque; whereas the present volume, being concerned chiefly with the love-affairs of savages and barbarians, could not possibly have been subjected to the same restrictions. Care has been taken, however, to exclude anything that might offend a healthy taste.

If it has been necessary in some chapters to multiply unpleasant facts, the reader must blame the sentimentalists who have so persistently whitewashed the savages that it has become necessary, in the interest of truth, to show them in their real colors. I have indeed been tempted to give my book the sub-title A Vindication of Civilization against the misrepresentations of these sentimentalists who try to create the impression that savages owe all their depravity to contact with whites, having been originally spotless angels. If my pictures of the unadulterated savage may in some cases produce the same painful impression as the sights in a museum's chamber of horrors, they serve, on the other hand, to show us that, bad as we may be, collectively, we are infinitely superior in love-affairs, as in everything else, to those primitive peoples; and thus we are encouraged to hope for further progress in the future in the direction of purity and altruism.

Although I have been obliged under the circumstances to indulge in a considerable amount of controversy, I have taken great pains to state the views of my opponents fairly, and to be strictly impartial in presenting facts with accuracy. Nothing could be more foolish than the ostrich policy, so often indulged in, of hiding facts in the hope that opponents will not see them. Had I found any data inconsistent with my theory I should have modified it in accordance with them. I have also been very careful in regard to my authorities. The chief cause of the great confusion reigning in anthropological literature is that, as a rule, evidence is piled up with a pitchfork. Anyone who has been anywhere and expressed a globe-trotter's opinion is cited as a witness, with deplorable results. I have not only taken most of my multitudinous facts from the original sources, but I have critically examined the witnesses to see what right they have to parade as experts; as in the cases, for instance, of Catlin, Schoolcraft, Chapman, and Stephens, who are responsible for many false facts that have misled philosophers.

In writing a book like this the author's function is comparable to that of an architect who gets his materials from various parts of the world and fashions them into a building of more or less artistic merit. The anthropologist has to gather his facts from a greater variety of sources than any other writer, and from the very nature of his subject he is obliged to quote incessantly. The following pages embody the results of more than twelve years' research in the libraries of America and Europe. In weaving my quotations into a continuous fabric I have adopted a plan which I believe to be ingenious, and which certainly saves space and annoyance. Instead of citing the full titles of books every time they are referred to either in the text or in footnotes, I merely give the author's name and the page number, if only one of his books is referred to; and if there are several books, I give the initials—say Brinton, M.N.W., 130; which means Brinton's Myths of the New World, page 130. The key to the abbreviations will be found at the end of the volume in the bibliography, which also includes an author's index, separate from the index of subjects. This avoids the repetition of titles or of the customary useless "loc. cit.," and spares the reader the annoyance of constant interruption of his reading to glance at the bottom of the page.

Not a few of the critics of my first book, ignoring the difference between a romantic love-story and a story of romantic love, fancied they could refute me by simply referring to some ancient romantic story. To prevent a repetition of that procedure I have adorned these pages with a number of love-stories, adding critical comments wherever called for. These stories, I believe, augment, not only the interest but the scientific value of the monograph. In gathering them I have often wondered why no one anticipated me, though, to be sure, it was not an easy task, as they are scattered in hundreds of books, and in scientific periodicals where few would look for them. At the same time I confess that to me the tracing of the plot of the evolution of love, with its diverse obstacles, is more fascinating than the plot of an individual love-story. At any rate, since we have thousands of such love-stories, I am perhaps not mistaken in assuming that the story of love itself will be welcomed as a pleasant change. H.T.F.

NEW YORK, October 27, 1899.

CONTENTS

HISTORY OF AN IDEA

     Origin of a Book

     Skeptical Critics

     Robert Burton

     Hegel on Greek Love

     Shelley on Greek Love

     Macaulay, Bulwer-Lytton, Gautier

     Goldsmith and Rousseau

     Love a Compound Feeling

     Herbert Spencer's Analysis

     Active Impulses Must be Added

     Sensuality the Antipode of Love

     The Word Romantic

     Animals Higher than Savages

     Love the Last, Not the First, Product of Civilization

     Plan of this Volume

     Greek Sentimentality

     Importance of Love

HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW

     No Love of Romantic Scenery

     No Love in Early Religion

     Murder as a Virtue

     Slaughter of the Innocents

     Honorable Polygamy

     Curiosities of Modesty

     Indifference to Chastity

     Horror of Incest

WHAT IS ROMANTIC LOVE?

Ingredients of Love.

I. INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE

          All Girls Equally Attractive

          Shallow Predilection

          Repression of Preference

          Utility versus Sentiment

          A Story of African Love

          Similarity of Individuals and Sexes

          Primary and Secondary Sexual Characters

          Fastidious Sensuality is not Love

          Two Stories of Indian Love

          Feminine Ideals Superior to Masculine

          Sex in Body and Mind

          True Femininity and its Female Enemies

          Mysteries of Love,—An Oriental Love-Story

II. MONOPOLISM

          Juliet and Nothing but Juliet

          Butterfly Love

          Romantic Stories of Non-Romantic Love

          Obstacles to Monopolism

          Wives and Girls in Common

          Trial Marriages

          Two Roman Lovers

III. JEALOUSY

          Rage at Rivals

          Women as Private Property

          Horrible Punishments

          Essence of True Jealousy

          Absence of Masculine Jealousy

          Persian and Greek Jealousy

          Primitive Feminine Jealousy

          Absence of Feminine Jealousy

          Jealousy Purged of Hate

          A Virtuous Sin

          Abnormal States

          Jealousy in Romantic Love

IV. COYNESS

          Women Who Woo

          Were Hebrew and Greek Women Coy?

          Masculine Coyness

          Shy but not Coy

          Militarism and Mediaeval Women

          What Made Women Coy?

          Capturing Women

          The Comedy of Mock Capture

          Why the Women Resist

          Quaint Customs

          Greek and Roman Mercenary Coyness

          Modesty and Coyness

          Utility of Coyness

          How Women Propose

V. HOPE AND DESPAIR—MIXED MOODS

          Amorous Antitheses

          Courtship and Imagination

          Effects of Sensual Love

VI. HYPERBOLE

          Girls and Flowers

          Eyes and Stars

          Locks and Fragrance

          Poetic Desire for Contact

          Nature's Sympathy with Lovers

          Romantic but not Loving

          The Power of Love

VII. PRIDE

          Comic Side of Love

          A Mystery Explained

          Importance of Pride

          Varieties and Germs

          Natural and Artificial Symptoms of Love

VIII. SYMPATHY

          Egotism, Naked or Masked

          Delight in the Torture of Others

          Indifference to Suffering

          Exposing the Sick and Aged

          Birth of Sympathy

          Women Crueler than Men

          Plato Denounces Sympathy

          Sham Altruism in India

          Evolution of Sympathy

          Amorous Sympathy

IX. ADORATION

          Deification of Persons

          Primitive Contempt for Women

          Homage to Priestesses

          Kinship Through Females Only

          Woman's Domestic Rule

          Woman's Political Rule

          Greek Estimate of Women

          Man-Worship and Christianity

X. UNSELFISH GALLANTRY

          The Gallant Rooster

          Ungallant Lower Races of Men

          Egyptian Love

          Arabian Love

          The Unchivalrous Greeks

          Ovid's Sham Gallantry

          Mediaeval and Modern Gallantry

          An Insult to Woman,

          Summary

          A Sure Test of Love

XI. ALTRUISTIC SELF-SACRIFICE

          The Lady and the Tiger

          A Greek Love-Story

          Persian Love

          Hero and Leander

          The Elephant and the Lotos

          Suicide is Selfish

XII. AFFECTION

          Erotic Assassins

          The Wisdom of Solomon

          Stuff and Nonsense

          Sacrifices of Cannibal Husbands

          Inclinations Mistaken for Affection

          Selfish Liking and Attachment

          Foolish Fondness

          Unselfish Affection

XIII. MENTAL PURITY

          German Testimony

          English Testimony

          Maiden Fancies

          Pathologic Love

          A Modern Sentiment

          Persians, Turks, and Hindoos

          Love Despised in Japan and China

          Greek Scorn for Woman-Love

          Penetrative Virginity

XIV. ADMIRATION OF PERSONAL BEAUTY

          Darwin's Unfortunate Mistake

          Decoration for Protection

          War Decorations,

          Amulets, Charms, Medicines

          Mourning Language

          Indications of Tribe or Rank

          Vain Desire to Attract Attention

          Objects of Tattooing

          Tattooing on Pacific Islands

          Tattooing in America

          Tattooing in Japan

          Scarification

          Alleged Testimony of Natives, Misleading Testimony of

               Visitors

          Decoration at the Age of Puberty

          Decoration as a Test of Courage

          Mutilation, Fashion, and Emulation

          Personal Beauty versus Personal Decoration

          De Gustibus non est Disputandum?

          Indifference to Dirt

          Reasons for Bathing

          Corpulence versus Beauty

          Fattening Girls for the Marriage Market

          Oriental Ideals

          The Concupiscence Theory of Beauty

          Utility is not Beauty

          A New Sense Easily Lost Again

          Moral Ugliness

          Beautifying Intelligence

          The Strange Greek Attitude

A COMPOSITE AND VARIABLE SENTIMENT

          Definition of Love

          Why called Romantic.

SENSUALITY, SENTIMENTALITY, AND SENTIMENT.

     Appetite and Longing

     Wiles of an Oriental Girl

     Rarity of True Love.

MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE

     How Romantic Love is Metamorphosed

     Why Savages Value Wives

     Mourning to Order

     Mourning for Entertainment

     The Truth about Widow-Burning

     Feminine Devotion in Ancient Literature

     Wives Esteemed as Mothers Only

     Why Conjugal Precedes Romantic Love

OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE

        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 Aversions

     XIII. Multiplicity of Languages

      XIV. Social Barriers

       XV. Religious Prejudice

SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE

     Bushman Qualifications for Love

     Love in all Their Marriages,

     False Facts Regarding Hottentots

     Effeminate Men and Masculine Women

     How the Hottentot Woman Rules at Home,

     Regard for Women

     Capacity for Refined Love

     Hottentot Coarseness

     Fat versus Sentiment

     South African Love-Poems

     A Hottentot Flirt

     Kaffir Morals

     Individual Preference for—Cows, Bargaining for Brides

     Amorous Preferences

     Zulu Girls not Coy

     Charms and Poems

     A Kaffir Love-Story

     Lower than Beasts

     Colonies of Free Lovers

     A Lesson in Gallantry

     Not a Particle of Romance

     No Love Among Negroes

     A Queer Story

     Suicides

     Poetic Love on the Congo

     Black Love in Kamerun

     A Slave Coast Love-Story

     The Maiden who Always Refused

     African Story-Books

     The Five Suitors

     Tamba and the Princess

     The Sewing Match

     Baling out the Brook

     Proverbs about Women

     African Amazons

     Where Woman Commands

     No Chance for Romantic Love

     Pastoral Love

     Abyssinian Beauty and Flirtation

     Galla Coarseness

     Somali Love-Affairs

     Arabic Influences

     Touareg Chivalry

     An African Love-Letter

ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN LOVE

     Personal Charms of Australians

     Cruel Treatment of Women

     Were Savages Corrupted by Whites?

     Aboriginal Horrors

     Naked and not Ashamed

     Is Civilization Demoralizing?

     Aboriginal Wantonness

     Lower than Brutes

     Indifference to Chastity

     Useless Precautions

     Survivals of Promiscuity

     Aboriginal Depravity

     The Question of Promiscuity

     Why do Australians Marry?

     Curiosities of Jealousy

     Pugnacious Females

     Wife-Stealing

     Swapping Girls

     The Philosophy of Elopements

     Charming a Woman by Magic

     Other Obstacles to Love

     Marriage Taboos and Incest

     Affection for Women and Dogs

     A Horrible Custom

     Romantic Affliction

     A Lock of Hair

     Two Native Stories

     Barrington's Love-Story

     Risking Life for a Woman

     Gerstaecker's Love-Story

     Local Color in Courtship

     Love-Letters.

ISLAND LOVE ON THE PACIFIC

     Where Women Propose

     Bornean Caged Girls

     Charms of Dyak Women

     Dyak Morals

     Nocturnal Courtship

     Head Hunters A-Wooing

     Fickle and Shallow Passion

     Dyak Love-Songs

     The Girl With the Clean Face

     Fijian Refinements

     How Cannibals Treat Women

     Fijian Modesty and Chastity

     Emotional Curiosities

     Fijian Love-Poems

     Serenades and Proposals

     Suicides and Bachelors

     Samoan Traits

     Courtship Pantomime

     Two Samoan Love-Stories

     Personal Charms of South Sea Islanders

     Tahitians and Their White Visitors

     Heartless Treatment of Women

     Two Stories of Tahitian Infatuation

     Captain Cook on Tahitian Love

     Were the Tongans Civilized?

     Love of Scenery

     A Cannibal Bargain

     The Handsome Chiefs

     Honeymoon in a Cave

     A Hawaiian Cave-Story

     Is this Romantic Love?

     Vagaries of Hawaiian Fondness

     Hawaiian Morals

     The Helen of Hawaii

     Intercepted Love-Letters

     Maoris of New Zealand

     The Maiden of Rotorua

     The Man on the Tree

     Love in a Fortress

     Stratagem of an Elopement

     Maori Love-Poems

     The Wooing-House

     Liberty of Choice and Respect for Women

     Maori Morals and Capacity for Love

HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE

     The Red Lover

     The Foam Woman

     The Humpback Magician

     The Buffalo King

     The Haunted Grove

     The Girl and the Scalp

     A Chippewa Love-Song

     How Indian Stories are Written

     Reality versus Romance

     Deceptive Modesty

     Were Indians Corrupted by Whites?

     The Noble Red Man

     Apparent Exceptions

     Intimidating California Squaws

     Going A-Calumeting

     Squaws and Personal Beauty

     Are North American Indians Gallant?

     South American Gallantry

     How Indians Adore Squaws

     Choosing a Husband

     Compulsory Free Choice

     A British Columbia Story

     The Danger of Coquetry

     The Girl Market

     Other Ways of Thwarting Free Choice

     Central and South American Examples

     Why Indians Elope

     Suicide and Love

     Love-Charms

     Curiosities of Courtship

     Pantomimic Love-Making

     Honeymoon

     Music in Indian Courtship

     Indian Love-Poems

     More Love-Stories

     White Man Too Much Lie

     The Story of Pocahontas

     Verdict: No Romantic Love

     The Unloving Eskimo.

INDIA—WILD TRIBES AND TEMPLE GIRLS.

     Whole Tracts of Feeling Unknown to Them

     Practical Promiscuity

     Marvellously Pretty and Romantic

     Liberty of Choice

     Scalps and Field-Mice

     A Topsy-Turvy Custom

     Pahária Lads and Lasses

     Child-Murder and Child-Marriage

     Monstrous Parental Selfishness

     How Hindoo Girls are Disposed of

     Hindoos Far Below Brutes

     Contempt in Place of Love

     Widows and Their Tormentors

     Hindoo Depravity

     Temple Girls

     An Indian Aspasia

     Symptoms of Feminine Love

     Symptoms of Masculine Love

     Lyrics and Dramas

     I. The Story of Sakuntala

     II. The Story of Urvasi

     III. Malavika and Agnimitra

     IV. The Story of Savitri

     V. Nala and Damayanti

     Artificial Symptoms

     The Hindoo God of Love

     Dying for Love

     What Hindoo Poets Admire in Women

     The Old Story of Selfishness

     Bayadères and Princesses as Heroines

     Voluntary Unions not Respectable

DOES THE BIBLE IGNORE ROMANTIC LOVE?

     The Story of Jacob and Rachel

     The Courting of Rebekah

     How Ruth Courted Boaz

     No Sympathy or Sentiment

     A Masculine Ideal of Womanhood

     Not the Christian Ideal of Love

     Unchivalrous Slaughter of Women

     Four More Bible Stories

     Abishag the Shunammite

     The Song of Songs

GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS.

     Champions of Greek Love

     Gladstone on the Women of Homer

     Achilles as a Lover

     Odysseus, Libertine and Ruffian

     Was Penelope a Model Wife?

     Hector and Andromache

     Barbarous Treatment of Greek Women

     Love in Sappho's Poems

     Masculine Minds in Female Bodies

     Anacreon and Others

     Woman and Love in Aeschylus

     Woman and Love in Sophocles

     Woman and Love in Euripides

     Romantic Love, Greek Style

     Platonic Love of Women

     Spartan Opportunities for Love

     Amazonian Ideal of Greek Womanhood

     Athenian Orientalism

     Literature and Life

     Greek Love in Africa

     Alexandrian Chivalry

     The New Comedy

     Theocritus and Callimachus

     Medea and Jason

     Poets and Hetairai

     Short Stories

     Greek Romances

     Daphnis and Chloe

     Hero and Leander

     Cupid and Psyche

UTILITY AND FUTURE OF LOVE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX OF AUTHORS

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

PRIMITIVE LOVE

AND

LOVE-STORIES

HISTORY OF AN IDEA

Love is always the same. As Sappho loved, fifty years ago, so did people love ages before her; so will they love thousands of years hence.

These words, placed by Professor Ebers in the mouth of one of the characters in his historic novel, An Egyptian Princess, express the prevalent opinion on this subject, an opinion which I, too, shared fifteen years ago. Though an ardent champion of the theory of evolution, I believed that there was one thing in the world to which modern scientific ideas of gradual development did not apply—that love was too much part and parcel of human nature to have ever been different from what it is to-day.

ORIGIN OF A BOOK

It so happened that I began to collect notes for a paper on How to Cure Love. It was at first intended merely as a personal experiment in emotional psychology. Afterward it occurred to me that such a sketch might be shaped into a readable magazine article. This, again, suggested a complementary article on How to Win Love—a sort of modern Ovid in prose; and then suddenly came the thought,

Why not write a book on love? There is none in the English language—strange anomaly—though love is supposed to be the most fascinating and influential thing in the world. It will surely be received with delight, especially if I associate with it some chapters on personal beauty, the chief inspirer of love. I shall begin by showing that the ancient Greeks and Romans and Hebrews loved precisely as we love.

Forthwith I took down from my shelves the classical authors that I had not touched since leaving college, and eagerly searched for all references to women, marriage, and love. To my growing surprise and amazement I found that not only did those ancient authors look upon women as inferior beings while I worshipped them, but in their descriptions of the symptoms of love I looked in vain for mention of those supersensual emotions and self-sacrificing impulses which overcame me when I was in love. Can it be, I whispered to myself, that, notwithstanding the universal opinion to the contrary, love is, after all, subject to the laws of development?

This hypothesis threw me into a fever of excitement, without the stimulus of which I do not believe I should have had the courage and patience to collect, classify, and weave into one fabric the enormous number of facts and opinions contained within the covers of Romantic Love and Personal Beauty. I believed that at last something new under the sun had been found, and I was so much afraid that the discovery might leak out prematurely, that for two years I kept the first half of my title a secret, telling inquisitive friends merely that I was writing a book on Personal Beauty. And no one but an author who is in love with his theme and whose theme is love can quite realize what a supreme delight it was—with occasional moments of anxious suspense—to go through thousands of books in the libraries of America, England, France, and Germany and find that all discoverable facts, properly interpreted, bore out my seemingly paradoxical and reckless theory.

SKEPTICAL CRITICS

When the book appeared some of the critics accepted my conclusions, but a larger number pooh-poohed them. Here are a few specimen comments:

His great theses are, first, that romantic love is an entirely modern invention; and, secondly, that romantic love and conjugal love are two things essentially different…. Now both these theses are luckily false.

He is wrong when he says there was no such thing as pre-matrimonial love known to the ancients.

I don't believe in his theory at all, and … no one is likely to believe in it after candid examination.

A ridiculous theory.

It was a misfortune when Mr. Finck ran afoul of this theory.

Mr. Finck will not need to live many years in order to be ashamed of it.

His thesis is not worth writing about.

It is true that he has uttered a profoundly original thought, but, unfortunately, the depth of its originality is surpassed by its fathomless stupidity.

If in the light of these and a million other facts, we should undertake to explain why nobody had anticipated Mr. Finck's theory that love is a modern sentiment, we should say it might be because nobody who felt inspired to write about it was ever so extensively unacquainted with the literature of the human passions.

Romantic love has always existed, in every clime and age, since man left simian society; and the records of travellers show that it is to be found even among the lowest savages.

ROBERT BURTON

While not a few of the commentators thus rejected or ridiculed my thesis, others hinted that I had been anticipated. Several suggested that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy had been my model. As a matter of fact, although one of the critics referred to my book as a marvel of epitomized research, I must confess, to my shame, that I was not aware that Burton had devoted two hundred pages to what he calls Love-Melancholy, until I had finished the first sketch of my manuscript and commenced to rewrite it. My experience thus furnished a striking verification of the witty epitaph which Burton wrote for himself and his book: Known to few, unknown to fewer still. However, after reading Burton, I was surprised that any reader of Burton should have found anything in common between his book and mine, for he treated love as an appetite, I as a sentiment; my subject was pure, supersensual affection, while his subject is frankly indicated in the following sentences:

I come at last to that heroical love, which is proper to men and women … and deserves much rather to be called burning lust than by such an honorable title. This burning lust … begets rapes, incests, murders. "It rages with all sorts and conditions of men, yet is most evident among such as are young and lusty, in the flower of their years, nobly descended, high fed, such as live idly, at ease, and for that cause (which our divines call burning lust) this mad and beastly passion … is named by our physicians heroical love, and a more honorable title put upon it, Amor nobilis, as Savonarola styles it, because noble men and women make a common practice of it, and are so ordinarily affected with it. Carolus à Lorme … makes a doubt whether this heroical love be a disease…. Tully … defines it a furious disease of the mind; Plato madness itself."

     "Gordonius calls this disease the proper passion of

     nobility."

     "This heroical passion or rather brutish burning lust

     of which we treat."

The only honorable love Burton knows is that between husband and wife, while of such a thing as the evolution of love he had, of course, not the remotest conception, as his book appeared in 1621, or two hundred and thirty-eight years before Darwin's Origin of Species.

HEGEL ON GREEK LOVE

In a review of my book which appeared in the now defunct New York Star, the late George Parsons Lathrop wrote that the author

says that romantic love is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old. This idea, I rather think, he derived from Hegel, although he does not credit that philosopher with it.

I read this criticism with mingled emotions. If it was true that Hegel had anticipated me, my claims to priority of discovery would vanish, even though the idea had come to me spontaneously; but, on the other hand, the disappointment at this thought was neutralized by the reflection that I should gain the support of one of the most famous philosophers, and share with him the sneers and the ridicule bestowed upon my theory. I wrote to Mr. Lathrop, begging him to refer me to the volume and page of Hegel's numerous works where I could find the passage in question. He promptly replied that I should find it in the second volume of the Aesthetik (178-182). No doubt I ought to have known that Hegel had written on this subject; but the fact that of more than two hundred American, English, and German reviewers of my book whose notices I have seen, only one knew what had thus escaped my research, consoled me somewhat. Hegel, indeed, might well have copied Burton's epitaph. His Aesthetik is an abstruse, unindexed, three-volume work of 1,575 pages, which has not been reprinted since 1843, and is practically forgotten. Few know it, though all know of it.

After perusing Hegel's pages on this topic I found, however, that Mr. Lathrop had imputed to him a theory—my theory—which that philosopher would have doubtless repudiated emphatically. What Hegel does is simply to call attention to the fact that in the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans love is depicted only as a transient gratification of the senses, or a consuming heat of the blood, and not as a romantic, sentimental affection of the soul. He does not generalize, says nothing about other ancient nations,[1] and certainly never dreamt of such a thing as asserting that love had been gradually and slowly developed from the coarse and selfish passions of our savage ancestors to the refined and altruistic feelings of modern civilized men and women. He lived long before the days of scientific anthropology and Darwinism, and never thought of such a thing as looking upon the emotions and morals of primitive men as the raw material out of which our own superior minds have been fashioned. Nay, Hegel does not even say that sentimental love did not exist in the life of the Greeks and Romans; he simply asserts that it is not to be found in their literature. The two things are by no means identical.

Professor Rohde, an authority on the erotic writings of the Greeks, expresses the opinion repeatedly that, whatever their literature may indicate, they themselves were capable of feeling strong and pure love; and the eminent American psychologist, Professor William James, put forth the same opinion in a review of my book.[2] Indeed, this view was broached more than a hundred years ago by a German author, Basil von Ramdohr, who wrote four volumes on love and its history, entitled Venus Urania. His first two volumes are almost unreadably garrulous and dull, but the third and fourth contain an interesting account of various phases through which love has passed in literature. Yet he declares (Preface, vol. iii.) that "the nature [Wesen] of love is unchangeable, but the ideas we entertain in regard to it and the effects we ascribe to it, are subject to alteration."

SHELLEY ON GREEK LOVE

It is possible that Hegel may have read this book, for it appeared in 1798, while the first manuscript sketches of his lectures on esthetics bear the date of 1818. He may have also read Robert Wood's book entitled An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, dated 1775, in which this sentence occurs:

"Is it not very remarkable, that Homer, so great a master of the tender and pathetic, who has exhibited human nature in almost every shape, and under every view, has not given a single instance of the powers and effects of love, distinct from sensual enjoyment, in the Iliad?"

This is as far as I have been able to trace back this notion in modern literature. But in the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century I have come across several adumbrations of the truth regarding the Greeks,[3] by Shelley, Lord Lytton, Lord Macaulay, and Théophile Gautier. Shelley's ideas are confused and contradictory, but interesting as showing the conflict between traditional opinion and poetic intuition. In his fragmentary discourse on The Manners of the Ancients Relating to the Subject of Love, which was intended to serve as an introduction to Plato's Symposium, he remarks that the women of the ancient Greeks, with rare exceptions, possessed

the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably not extremely beautiful, at least there was no such disproportion in the attractions of the external form between the female and male sex among the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans. They were certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment animates, as with another life of overpowering grace, the lineaments and the gestures of every form which they inhabit. Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths. Having painted this life-like picture of the Greek female mind, Shelley goes on to say perversely:

Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of its legitimate object, that they were incapable of sentimental love, and that this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern times.

He tries to justify this assertion by adding that

Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain degree of civilization and refinement ever produces the want of sympathies still more intimate and complete; and the gratification of the senses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connection. It soon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love, which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative, and sensitive.

Here Shelley contradicts himself flatly by saying, in two consecutive sentences, that Greek women were certainly devoid of the moral and intellectual loveliness which inspires sentimental love, but that the men nevertheless could feel such love. His mind was evidently hazy on the subject, and that is probably the reason why his essay remained a fragment.

MACAULAY, BULWER-LYTTON, GAUTIER

Macaulay, with deeper insight than Shelley showed, realized that the passion of love may undergo changes. In his essay on Petrarch he notes that in the days of that poet love had become a new passion, and he clearly realizes the obstacles to love presented by Greek institutions. Of the two classes of women in Greece, the respectable and the hetairai, he says:

The matrons and their daughters, confined in the harem—insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but the mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were married—could rarely excite interest; while their brilliant rivals, half graces, half harpies, elegant and refined, but fickle and rapacious, could never inspire respect.

Lord Lytton wrote an essay on The Influence of Love upon Literature and Real Life, in which he stated that

"with Euripides commences the important distinction in the analysis of which all the most refined and intellectual of modern erotic literature consists, viz., the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment…. He is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us intellectually in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes."

Théophile Gautier clearly realized one of the differences between ancient passion and modern love. In Mademoiselle de Maupin, he makes this comment on the ancient love-poems:

Through all the subtleties and veiled expressions one hears the abrupt and harsh voice of the master who endeavors to soften his manner in speaking to a slave. It is not, as in the love-poems written since the Christian era, a soul demanding love of another soul because it loves…. 'Make haste, Cynthia; the smallest wrinkle may prove the grave of the most violent passion.' It is in this brutal formula that all ancient elegy is summed up.

GOLDSMITH AND ROUSSEAU

In Romantic Love and Personal Beauty I intimated (116) that Oliver Goldsmith was the first author who had a suspicion of the fact that love is not the same everywhere and at all times. My surmise was apparently correct; it is not refuted by any of the references to love by the several authors just quoted, since all of these were written from about a half a century to a century later than Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (published in 1764), which contains his dialogue on Whether Love be a Natural or a Fictitious Passion. His assertion therein that love existed only in early Rome, in chivalrous mediaeval Europe, and in China, all the rest of the world being, and having ever been, utter strangers to its delights and advantages, is, of course a mere bubble of his poetic fancy, not intended to be taken too seriously, and, is, moreover, at variance with facts. It is odd that he overlooks the Greeks, whereas the other writers cited confine themselves to the Greeks and their Roman imitators.

Ten years before Goldsmith thus launched the idea that most nations were and had ever been strangers to the delights and advantages of love, Jean Jacques Rousseau published a treatise, Discours sur l'inégalité (1754), in which he asserted that savages are strangers to jealousy, know no domesticity, and evince no preferences, being as well pleased with one woman as with another. Although, as we shall see later, many savages do have a crude sort of jealousy, domesticity, and individual preference, Rousseau, nevertheless, hints prophetically at a great truth—the fact that some, at any rate, of the phenomena of love are not to be found in the life of savages. Such a thought, naturally, was too novel to be accepted at once. Ramdohr, for instance, declares (III. 17) that he cannot convince himself that Rousseau is right. Yet, on the preceding page he himself had written that it is unreasonable to speak of love between the sexes among peoples that have not yet advanced so far as to grant women humane consideration.

LOVE A COMPOUND FEELING

All these things are of extreme interest as showing the blind struggles of a great idea to emerge from the mist into daylight. The greatest obstacle to the recognition of the fact that love has a history, and is subject to the laws of evolution lay in the habit of looking upon it as a simple feeling.

When I wrote my first book on love, I believed that Herbert Spencer was the first thinker who grasped the idea that love is a composite state of mind. I now see, however, that Silvius, in Shakspere's As You Like It (V. 2), gave a broad hint of the truth, three hundred years ago. Phoebe asks him to tell what 't is to love, and he replies:

     It is to be all made of sighs and tears….

     It is to be all made of faith and service….

     It is to be all made of fantasy,

     All made of passion, and all made of wishes,

     All adoration, duty, and observance,

     All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,

     All purity, all trial, all obedience.

Coleridge also vaguely recognized the composite nature of love in the first stanza of his famous poem:

     All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

     Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

     All are but ministers of love,

       And feed his sacred flame.

And Swift adds, in Cadenus and Vanessa:

     Love, why do we one passion call,

     When 'tis a compound of them all?

The eminent Danish critic, George Brandes, though a special student of English literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one of his lectures on literary history (1872), that the book in which love is for the first time looked on as something composite and an attempt made to analyze it into its elements, is Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (which appeared in 1816). "In Adolphe," he says,

"and in all the literature associated with that book, we are informed accurately how many parts, how many grains, of friendship, devotion, vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual attraction, illusion, fancy, deception, hate, satiety, enthusiasm, reasoning calculation, etc., are contained in the mixtum compositum which the enamoured persons call love."

This list, moreover, does not accurately name a single one of the essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated phenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states of mind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love—gallant service, adoration, and purity—while patience and impatience may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixed moods of hope and despair.

HERBERT SPENCER'S ANALYSIS

Nevertheless the first thinker who treated love as a compound feeling and consciously attempted a philosophical analysis of it was Herbert Spencer. In 1855 he published his Principles of Psychology, and in 1870 appeared a greatly enlarged edition, paragraph 215 of which contains the following exposition of his views:

"The passion which unites the sexes is habitually spoken of as though it were a simple feeling; whereas it is the most compound, and therefore the most powerful, of all the feelings. Added to the purely physical elements of it are first to be noticed those highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty; around which are aggregated a variety of pleasurable ideas, not in themselves amatory, but which have an organized relation to the amatory feeling. With this there is united the complex sentiment which we term affection—a sentiment which, as it exists between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an independent sentiment, but one which is here greatly exalted. Then there is the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence—in itself one of considerable power, and which in this relation becomes in a high degree active. There comes next the feeling called love of approbation. To be preferred above all the world, and that by one admired beyond all others, is to have the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous experience: especially as there is added that indirect gratification of it which results from the preference being witnessed by unconcerned persons. Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment from, and sway over, another, is a proof of power which cannot fail agreeably to excite the amour propre. Yet again the proprietary feeling has its share in the general activity: there is the pleasure of possession—the two belong to each other. Once more, the relation allows of an extended liberty of action. Toward other persons a restrained behavior is requisite. Round each there is a subtle boundary that may not be crossed—an individuality on which none may trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is gratified. Finally, there is an exaltation of the sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by another's sympathetic participation; and the pleasures of another are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling forming the nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation, of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. These, all greatly exalted, and severally tending to reflect their excitements on one another, unite to form the mental state we call love. And as each of them is itself comprehensive of multitudinous states of consciousness, we may say that this passion fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary excitations of which we are capable; and that hence results its irresistible power."

Ribot has copied this analysis of love in his Psychologie des Sentiments (p. 249), with the comment that it is the best known to him (1896) and that he sees nothing to add or to take away from it. Inasmuch as it forms merely an episodic illustration in course of a general argument, it certainly bears witness to the keenness of Spencer's intellect. Yet I cannot agree with Ribot that it is a complete analysis of love. It aided me in conceiving the plan for my first book, but I soon found that it covered only a small part of the ground. Of the ingredients as suggested by him I accepted only two—Sympathy, and the feelings associated with Personal Beauty. What he called love of approbation, self-esteem, and pleasure of possession I subsummed under the name of Pride of Conquest and Possession. Further reflection has convinced me that it would have been wiser if, instead of treating Romantic Love as a phase of affection (which, of course, was in itself quite correct), I had followed Spencer's example and made affection one of the ingredients of the amorous passion. In the present volume I have made the change and added also Adoration, which includes what Spencer calls the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence, while calling attention to the superlative phase of these sentiments which is so characteristic of the lover, who does not say, I respect you, but I adore you. I may therefore credit Spencer with having suggested three or four only of the fourteen essential ingredients which I find in love.

ACTIVE IMPULSES MUST BE ADDED

The most important distinction between Spencer's analysis of love and mine is that he treats it merely as a composite feeling, or a group of emotions, whereas I treat it as a complex state of mind including not only diverse feelings or sentiments—sympathy, admiration of beauty, jealousy, affection—but the active, altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacrifice, which are really more essential to an understanding of the essence of love, and a better test of it, than the sentiments named by Spencer. He ignores also the absolutely essential traits of individual preference and monopolism, besides coyness, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair, and purity, with the diverse emotions accompanying them. An effort to trace the evolution of the ingredients of love was first made in my book, though in a fragmentary way, in which respect the present volume will be found a great improvement. Apart from the completion of the analysis of love, my most important contribution to the study of this subject lies in the recognition of the fact that, love being so vague and comprehensive a term, the only satisfactory way of studying its evolution is to trace the evolution of each of its ingredients separately, as I do in the present volume in the long chapter entitled What Is Romantic Love?

In Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (180) I wrote that perhaps the main reason why no one had anticipated me in the theory that love is an exclusively modern sentiment was that no distinction had commonly been made between romantic love and conjugal affection, noble examples of the latter being recorded in countries where romantic love was not possible owing to the absence of opportunities for courtship. I still hold that conjugal love antedated the romantic variety, but further study has convinced me that (as will be shown in the chapters on Conjugal Love and on India, and Greece) much of what has been taken as evidence of wifely devotion is really only a proof of man's tyrannic selfishness which compelled the woman always to subordinate herself to her cruel master. The idea on which I placed so much emphasis, that opportunity for prolonged courtship is essential to the growth of romantic love, was some years later set forth by Dr. Drummond in his Ascent of Man where he comments eloquently on the fact that affection needs time to grow.

SENSUALITY THE ANTIPODE OF LOVE

The keynote of my first book lies of course in the distinction between sensual love and romantic love. This distinction seemed to me so self-evident that I did not dwell on it at length, but applied myself chiefly to the task of proving that savages and ancient nations knew only one kind, being strangers to romantic or pure love. When I wrote (76) No one, of course, would deny that sensual passion prevailed in Athens; but sensuality is the very antipode of love, I never dreamed that anyone would object to this distinction in itself. Great, therefore, was my amazement when, on reading the London Saturday Review's comments on my book, I came across the following:

and when we find Mr. Finck marking off Romantic Love not merely from Conjugal Love, but from what he is pleased to call 'sensuality,' we begin to suspect that he really does not know what he is talking about.

This criticism, with several others similar to it, was of great use to me, as it led to a series of studies, which convinced me that even at the present day the nature of romantic love is not understood by the vast majority of Europeans and Americans, many of them very estimable and intelligent individuals.

THE WORD ROMANTIC

Another London paper, the Academy, took me to task for using the word romantic in the sense I applied to it. But in this case, too, further research has shown that I was justified in using that word to designate pure prematrimonial love. There is a passage in Steele's Lover (dated 1714) which proves that it must have been in common use in a similar sense two centuries ago. The passage refers to the reign of the amorous Charles the Second, and declares that

the licenses of that court did not only make the Love which the Vulgar call Romantick, the object of Jest and Ridicule, but even common Decency and Modesty were almost abandoned as formal and unnatural.

Here there is an obvious antithesis between romantic and sensual. The same antithesis was used by Hegel in contrasting the sensual love of the ancient Greeks and Romans with what he calls modern romantic love. Waitz-Gerland, too, in the six volumes of their Anthropologie der Naturvölker, repeatedly refer to (alleged) cases of romantic love among savages and barbarians, having in all probability adopted the term from Hegel. The peculiar appropriateness of the word romantic to designate imaginative love will be set forth later in the chapter entitled Sensuality, Sentimentality, and Sentiment. Here I will only add an important truth which I shall have occasion to repeat often—that a romantic love-story is not necessarily a story of romantic love; for it is obvious, for instance, that an elopement prompted by the most frivolous sensual passion, without a trace of real love, may lead to the most romantic incidents.

In the chapters on affection, gallantry, and self-sacrifice, I shall make it clear even to a Saturday Reviewer that the gross sensual infatuation which leads a man to shoot a girl who refuses him, or a tramp to assault a woman on a lonely road and afterward to cut her throat in order to hide his crime, is absolutely antipodal to the refined, ardent, affectionate Romantic Love which impels a man to sacrifice his own life rather than let any harm or dishonor come to the beloved.

ANIMALS HIGHER THAN SAVAGES

Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin, in his second treatise on sexual anomalies,[4] takes occasion to express his disbelief in my view that love before marriage is a sentiment peculiar to modern man. He declares that traits of such love occur even in the courtship of animals, particularly birds, and implies that this upsets my theory. On the same ground a reviewer in a New York evening paper accused me of being illogical. Such criticisms illustrate the vague ideas regarding evolution that are still current. It is assumed that all the faculties are developed step by step simultaneously as we proceed from lower to higher animals, which is as illogical as it would be to assume that since birds have such beautiful and convenient things as wings, and dogs belong to a higher genus of animals, therefore dogs ought to have better wings than birds. Most animals are cleaner than savages; why should not some of them be more romantic in their love-affairs? I shall take occasion repeatedly to emphasize this point in the present volume, though I alluded to it already in my first book (55) in the following passage, which my critics evidently overlooked:

In passing from animals to human beings we find at first not only no advance in the sexual relations, but a decided retrogression. Among some species of birds, courtship and marriage are infinitely more refined and noble than among the lowest savages, and it is especially in their treatment of females, both before and after mating, that not only birds but all animals show an immense superiority over primitive man; for male animals fight only among themselves and never maltreat the females.

LOVE THE LAST, NOT THE FIRST, PRODUCT OF CIVILIZATION

Notwithstanding this striking and important fact, there is a large number of sentimental writers who make the extraordinary claim that the lower races, however savage they may be in everything else, are like ourselves in their amorous relations; that they love and admire personal beauty just as we do. The main object of the present volume is to demolish this doctrine; to prove that sexual refinement and the sense of personal beauty are not the earliest but the latest products of civilization. I have shown elsewhere[5] that Japanese civilization is in many important respects far superior to ours; yet in their treatment of women and estimate of love, this race has not yet risen above the barbarous stage; and it will be shown in this volume that if we were to judge the ancient Greeks and the Hindoos from this point of view, we should have to deny them the epithet of civilized. Morgan found that the most advanced of American Indians, the Iroquois, had no capacity for love. His testimony in detail will be found in its proper place in this volume, together with that of competent observers regarding other tribes and races. Some of this evidence was known to the founders of the modern science of sociology. It led Spencer to write en passant (Pr. Soc., I., § 337, §339) that absence of the tender emotion … habitually characterizes men of low types; and that the higher sentiments accompanying union of the sexes … do not exist among primitive men. It led Sir John Lubbock to write (50) regarding the lowest races that love is almost unknown among them; and marriage, in its lowest phases, is by no means a matter of affection and companionship.

PLAN OF THIS VOLUME

These are casual adumbrations of a great truth that applies not only to the lowest races (savages) but to the more advanced barbarians as well as to ancient civilized nations, as the present volume will attempt to demonstrate. To make my argument more impressive and conclusive, I present it in a twofold form. First I take the fourteen ingredients of love separately, showing how they developed gradually, whence it follows necessarily that love as a whole developed gradually. Then I take the Africans, Australians, American Indians, etc., separately, describing their diverse amorous customs and pointing out everywhere the absence of the altruistic, supersensual traits which constitute the essence of romantic love as distinguished from sensual passion. All this will be preceded by a chapter on How Sentiments Change and Grow, which will weaken the bias against the notion that so elemental a feeling as sexual love should have undergone so great a change, by pointing out that other seemingly instinctive and unalterable feelings have changed and developed.

GREEK SENTIMENTALITY

The inclusion of the civilized Greeks in a treatise on Primitive Love will naturally cause surprise; but I cannot attribute a capacity for anything more than primitive sensual love to a nation which, in its prematrimonial customs, manifested none of the essential altruistic traits of Romantic Love—sympathy, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, adoration, and purity. As a matter of course, the sensualism of a Greek or Roman is a much less coarse thing than an Australian's, which does not even include kisses or other caresses. While Greek love is not a sentiment, it may be sentimental, that is, an affectation of sentiment, differing from real sentiment as adulation does from adoration, as gallantry or the risking of life to secure favors do from genuine gallantry of the heart and self-sacrifice for the benefit of another. This important point which I here superadd to my theory, was overlooked by Benecke when he attributed a capacity for real love to the later Greeks of the Alexandrian period.

IMPORTANCE OF LOVE

One of the most important theses advanced in Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (323, 424, etc.), was that love, far from being merely a passing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the reign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to perish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals and saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, and hand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediator between these two agencies, love comes in; for Cupid, as I have said, does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of health and beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of single-blessedness; which in these days is not such a hardship as it used to be. This thought will be enlarged in the last chapter of the present volume, on the Utility and Future of Love, which will indicate how the amorous sense is becoming more and more fastidious and beneficial. In the same chapter attention will be called, for the first time, to the three great strata in the evolution of parental love and morality. In the first, represented by savages, parents think chiefly of their own comfort, and children get the minimum of attention consistent with their preservation. In the second, which includes most of the modern Europeans and Americans, parents exercise care that their children shall make an advantageous marriage—that is a marriage which shall secure them wealth or comfort; but the frequency with which girls are married off to old, infirm, or unworthy men, shows how few parents as yet have a thought of their grandchildren. In the next stage of moral evolution, which we are now entering, the grandchildren's welfare also will be considered. In consequence of the persistent failure to consider the grandchildren, the human race is now anything but a model of physical, intellectual, and moral perfection. Luckily love, even in its sensual stages, has counteracted this parental selfishness and myopia by inducing young folks to marry for health, youth, and beauty, and creating an aversion to old age, disease, and deformity. As love becomes more and more fastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moral beauty—that is becomes Romantic Love—its sway becomes greater and greater, and the time will come when questions relating to it will form the most important chapters in treatises on moral philosophy, which now usually ignore them altogether.

HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW

In conversation with friends I have found that the current belief that love must have been always and everywhere the same, because it is such a strong and elemental passion, is most easily shaken in this a priori position by pointing out that there are other strong feelings in our minds which were lacking among earlier and lower races. The love of grand, wild scenery, for instance—what we call romantic scenery—is as modern as the romantic love of men and women. Ruskin tells us that in his youth he derived a pleasure from such scenery comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near a noble and kind mistress.

NO LOVE OF ROMANTIC SCENERY

Savages, on the other hand, are prevented from appreciating snow mountains, avalanches, roaring torrents, ocean storms, deep glens, jungles, and solitudes, not only by their lack of refinement, but by their fears of wild animals, human enemies, and evil spirits. In the Australian bush, writes Tylor (P.C., II., 203), demons whistle in the branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the trunks to seize the wayfarer; and Powers (88) writes in regard to California Indians that they listen to night noises with unspeakable horror:

It is difficult for us to conceive of the speechless terrors which these poor wretches suffer from the screeching of owls, the shrieking of night-hawks, the rustling of the trees … all of which are only channels of poison wherewith the demons would smite them.

To the primitive mind, the world over, a high mountain is the horror of horrors, the abode of evil spirits, and an attempt to climb it certain death. So strong is this superstition that explorers have often experienced the greatest difficulty in getting natives to serve as porters of provisions in their ascents of peaks.[6] Even the Greeks and Romans cared for landscape only in so far as it was humanized (parks and gardens) and habitable. Their souls, says Rohde (511),

could never have been touched by the sublime thrills we feel in the presence of the dark surges of the sea, the gloom of a primeval forest, the solitude and silence of sunlit mountain summits.

And Humboldt, who first noted the absence in Greek and Roman writings of the admiration of romantic scenery, remarked (24):

Of the eternal snow of the Alps, glowing in the rosy light of the morning or evening sun, of the loveliness of the blue glacier ice, of the stupendous grandeur of Swiss landscape, no description has come down to us from them; yet there was a constant procession over these Alps, from Helvetia to Gallia, of statesmen and generals with literary men in their train. All these travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical treatise 'De Analogia.'

A sceptical reader might retort that the love of romantic scenery is so subtle a sentiment, and so far from being universal even now, that it would be rash to argue from its absence among savages, Greeks, and Romans, that love, a sentiment so much stronger and more prevalent, could have been in the same predicament. Let us therefore take another sentiment, the religious, the vast power and wide prevalence of which no one will deny.

NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION

To a modern Christian, God is a deity who is all-wise, all-powerful, infinite, holy, the personification of all the highest virtues. To accuse this Deity of the slightest moral flaw would be blasphemy. Now, without going so far down as the lowest savages, let us see what conception such barbarians as the Polynesians have of their gods. The moral habits of some of them are indicated by their names—The Rioter, The Adulterer, Ndauthina, who steals women of rank or beauty by night or by torchlight, The Human-brain Eater, The Murderer. Others of their gods are "proud, envious, covetous, revengeful, and the