The conclusion to be drawn from the testimony collected in this
chapter is that genuine conjugal love--the affection for a wife _for
her own sake_--is, like romantic love, a product chiefly of modern
civilization.
I say chiefly, because I am convinced that conjugal love was known
sooner than romantic love, and for a very simple reason. Among those
of the lower races where the sexes were not separated in youth, a
license prevailed which led to shallow, premature, temporary alliances
that precluded all idea of genuine affection, even had these folk been
capable of such a sentiment; while among those tribes and peoples that
practised the custom of separating the boys and girls from the
earliest age, and not allowing them to become acquainted till after
marriage, the growth of real, prematrimonial affection was, of course,
equally impossible. In married life this was different. Living
together for years, having a common interest in their children,
sharing the same joys and sorrows, husband and wife would learn the
rudiments of sympathy, and in happy cases there would be an
opportunity for the growth of liking, attachment, fondness, or even,
in exceptional instances, of affection. I cannot sufficiently
emphasize the fact that my theory is psychological or cultural, not
chronological. The fact that a man lives in the year 1900 makes it no
more self-evident that he should be capable of sexual affection than
the fact that a man lived seven centuries before Christ makes it
self-evident that he could not love affectionately. Hector and
Andromache existed only in the brain of Homer, who was in many
respects thousands of years ahead of his contemporaries. Whether such
a couple could really have existed at that time among the Trojans, or
the Greeks, we do not know, but in any case it would have been an
exception, proving the rule by the painful contrast of the surrounding
barbarism.
Exceptions may possibly occur among the lower races, through happy
combinations of circumstances. C.C. Jones describes (69) a picture of
conjugal devotion among Cherokee Indians:
"By the side of the aged Mico Tomo-chi-chi, as, thin
and weak, he lies upon his blanket, hourly expecting
the summons of the pale-king, we see the sorrowing form
of his old wife, Scenauki, bending over and fanning him
with a bunch of feathers."
In his work on the Indians of California (271), Powers writes:
"An aged Achomauri lost his wife, to whom he had been
married probably half a century, and he tarred his face
in mourning for her as though he were a woman--_an act
totally unprecedented_, and regarded by the Indians as
evincing an _extraordinary_ affection."
St. John relates the following incident in his book on Borneo:
"Ijan, a Balau chief, was bathing with his wife in the
Lingga River, a place notorious for man-eating
alligators, when Indra Lela, passing in a boat,
remarked, 'I have just seen a very large animal
swimming up the stream.' Upon hearing this, Ijan told
his wife to go up the steps and he would follow. She
got safely up, but he, stopping to wash his feet, was
seized by the alligator, dragged into the middle of the
stream, and disappeared from view. His wife, hearing a
cry, turned round, and seeing her husband's fate,
sprang into the river, shrieking 'Take me also,' and
dived down at the spot where she had seen the alligator
sink with his prey. No persuasion could induce her to
come out of the water; she swam about, diving in all
the places most dreaded from being a resort of
ferocious reptiles, seeking to die with her husband; at
last her friends came down and forcibly removed her to
their house."
These stories certainly imply conjugal attachment, but is there any
indication in them of affection? The Cherokee squaw mourns the
impending death of her husband, which is a selfish feeling. The
Californian, similarly, laments the loss of his spouse. The only thing
he does is to "tar his face in mourning," and even this is regarded by
the other Indians as "extraordinary" and "unprecedented." As for the
woman in the third story, it is to be noted that her act is one of
selfish despair, not of self-sacrifice for her husband's sake. We
shall see in later chapters that women of her grade abandon themselves
to suicidal impulses, not only where there is occasion for real
distress, but often on the most trivial pretexts. A few days later, in
all probability, that same woman would have been ready to marry
another man. There is no evidence of altruistic action--action for
another's benefit--in any of these incidents, and altruism is the only
test of genuine affection as distinguished from mere liking,
attachment, and fondness, which, as was explained in the chapter on
Affection, are the products of selfishness, more or less disguised. If
this distinction had been borne in mind a vast amount of confusion
could have been avoided in works of exploration and the
anthropological treatises based on them. Westermarck, for instance,
cites on page 357 a number of authors who asserted that sexual
affection, or even the appearance of it, was unknown to the Hovas of
Madagascar, the Gold Coast, and Winnabah natives, the Kabyles, the
Beni-Amer, the Chittagong Hill Tribes, the Ponape islanders, the
Eskimo, the Kutchin, the Iroquois, and North American Indians in
general; while on the next pages he cites approvingly authors who
fancied they had discovered sexual affection among tribes some of whom
(Australians, Andamanese, Bushmans) are far below the peoples just
mentioned. The cause of this discrepancy lies not in these races
themselves, but in the inaccurate use of words, and the different
standards of the writers, some accepting the rubbing of noses or other
sexual caresses as evidence of "affection," while others take any acts
indicating fondness, attachment, or a suicidal impulse as signs of it.
In a recent work by Tyrrell (165), I find it stated that the Eskimo
marriage is "purely a love union;" and in reading on I discover that
the author's idea of a "love union" is the absence of a marriage
ceremony! Yet I have no doubt that Tyrrell will be cited hereafter as
evidence that love unions are common among the Eskimos. So, again,
when Lumholtz writes (213) that an Australian woman
"may happen to change husbands many times in her life, but
sometimes, despite the fact that her consent is not asked,
she gets the one she loves--for a black woman can love too"
--we are left entirely in the dark as to what kind of "love" is
meant--sensual or sentimental, liking, attachment, fondness, or real
affection. Surely it is time to put an end to such confusion, at least
in scientific treatises, and to acquire in psychological discussions
the precision which we always employ in describing the simplest weeds
or insects.
Morgan, the great authority on the Iroquois--the most intelligent of
North American Indians--lived long enough among them to realize
vaguely that there must be a difference between sexual attachment
before and after marriage, and that the latter is an earlier
phenomenon in human evolution. After declaring that among the Indians
"marriage was not founded on the affections ... but was regulated
exclusively as a matter of physical necessity," he goes on to say:
"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.