Here, again, the question confronts us, How far down among the strata
of human life can we find traces of this ingredient of love? Do we
find it among the Eskimos, for instance? Nansen relates (II., 317),
that
"In the old Greenland days marriage was a simple and
speedy affair. If a man took a fancy to a girl, he
merely went to her home or tent, caught her by the hair
or anything else which offered a hold, and dragged her
off to his dwelling without further ado."
Nay, in some cases, even this unceremonious "courtship" was
perpetrated by proxy! The details regarding the marriage customs of
lower races already cited in this volume, with the hundreds more to be
given in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader that
primitive courtship--where there is any at all--is habitually a
"simple and speedy affair"--not always as simple and speedy as with
Nansen's Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and play
of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains. Fancy the
difference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I.,
161), "thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of
corn," and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the inferno
because a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him so
happy that he would not change places with a king, unless his beloved
were to be queen. Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguish
and rapture, because they have no imagination. It is only when the
imagination comes into play that we can look for the joys and sorrows,
the hopes and fears, that help to make up the sum and substance of
romantic love.