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."