POLYGAMY.—ITS CAUSE.
Presto maturo, presto marcio.—_Italian Proverb._
The traveller is struck with the various ways in which the relation of
the sexes, that obtains throughout the East, has modified the manners,
and customs, and the whole life, of the people. Female society is
impossible. Women are not seen in the Mosks at times of prayer; and, we
are told, are seldom known to pray at home, never having been taught the
ceremonies requisite for prayer. One may walk through a crowded street
and not see a woman among the passers by. A woman cannot, in the regular
order of things, see the man who is to be her husband, or hold any
converse with him, till the marriage contract is executed, and she has
entered his house. Nor after marriage can she, with the exception of her
father and brothers, have any social intercourse with men. One cannot but
ask what it is that has given rise to manners, and customs, so opposite
to all we deem wise and desirable in this matter. We see at a glance that
they are the offspring of distrust and jealousy, and of a distrust and
jealousy, which, though unfelt by ourselves, exist in a high degree among
Orientals. What, then, is it that gives rise in them to these unpleasant
feelings? It must be some fact which not only has the power of producing
all this distrust and jealousy, drawing after them consequences of
sufficient reach to determine the whole character of the relations of the
sexes to each other, but it must also be something that is peculiarly
their own. Now, all these conditions are fulfilled by polygamy, and by
nothing else.
The fact that a man may possess a plurality of wives, and as many
odalisques as he can afford, and may wish to have in his establishment,
is the one element in oriental life to which everything else must
accommodate itself. Reverse the case, and, setting aside exceptional
instances, consider what, on the ordinary principles of human conduct,
would be the general working of the reverse of the practice. What
would be the state of things, and the customs and manners, which would
naturally arise, if the wife had to retain the affection of a plurality
of husbands? Would not, in that case, each woman, supposing they had the
power of establishing, and enforcing, what regulations they pleased, take
very good care that their husbands should have as little as possible to
do with other women? Would the singular wife allow the plural husbands to
see, or converse with, any woman but herself? Would she not confine them
in the men’s apartments? Would she allow them to go abroad unveiled? The
distrust and jealousy the women, under such arrangements, would feel,
have, under existing arrangements, been felt by the men. They have acted
on these feelings, and hence have been derived the manners and customs of
the East in this matter.
There is nothing in the objection that all do not practise polygamy. All
may practise it, and that is the condition to which the general manners
and customs must adjust themselves. What all recognize as right and
proper, and what all may act upon, is what has to be provided for.
But we have not yet got to the bottom of the matter. Certain manners
and customs may be seen clearly to be the consequences of a certain
practice: the subject, however, is not fully understood till we have
gone one step further, and discovered what gave rise to the practice.
The attempt is often made to dispose of this question offhand, by an
assumption that passion burns with a fiercer flame in the East than in
the West. This is what a man means when you hear him talking of the cold
European, and of the fiery Arab; the supposed excessive warmth of the
constitution of the latter being credited to the fervour of the Eastern
sun. There is, however, no evidence of this in the facts of the case, nor
does it account for them. If this is the true explanation, we ought to
find polyandry practised as well as polygamy. But there is no evidence
that this flame burns with a fiercer heat in Asia than in Europe. The
probability is that it is what may be called a constant quantity.
In investigating this, just as any other matter, what we have to do is
to ascertain the facts of the case, and then to see what can be fairly
inferred from them. Now, undoubtedly, the main fact here is that there is
a certain polygamic area. It is sufficiently well defined. It embraces
North Africa, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Persia. I do not mean that
polygamy has never been practised elsewhere. Like all other customs it
may have been carried beyond its proper boundaries: we know that it has
been. What I mean is that the area indicated is, and ever has been, its
true and natural home. The monogamic area of Europe is equally distinct.
Asia Minor is an intermediate, indeterminate region, which, though it is
an outlying peninsula of Asia by situation, approximates more closely to
Europe in its general features.
Now this polygamic area has one pervading, predominant, physical
characteristic: it is a region of dry sandy deserts; or, rather, it
is one vast sandy desert, interspersed with habitable districts.
This renders its climate not only exceptionally dry, but also, from
its comparative cloudlessness, exceptionally bright, which is not an
immaterial point, and, too, exceptionally scorching. An excess, then,
of aridity, light, and heat, is its distinguishing peculiarity. These
influences are all at their maximum in Arabia, which is in every way
its true heart and centre; and, in particular, the seed-bed and nursery
of the race best adapted to the region, and which, at last, flooded
the whole of it with its blood, its customs, and its laws. These are
all thoroughly indigenous, and racy of the soil—as much its own proper
product and fruit as the date is of the palm, or the palm itself of the
region in which it is found.
But of the woman of this region. It is an obvious result of the aridity
of the air, its almost constant heat, and of the floods of light with
which everything living is ceaselessly bathed, and stimulated, that
she is, in comparison with the woman of Europe, forced into precocious
development, and maturity, and consequently, which is the main point,
and, indeed, the governing element in the matter, into premature decline
and decay. To signalize one particular that is external and visible, this
climate appears to expand, to dry, to wither, to wrinkle the skin with
a rapidity, and to a degree, unknown in our more humid and temperate
regions. A woman, under these trying influences, is soon old. Between
nine and ten is the age of womanhood. Marriage even often takes place at
this age, or soon after. She is quite at her best at fifteen; decay is
visible at twenty; there are signs of age at twenty-five.
Men, too, from reasons easily explained, marry much younger there than is
customary—I might say than is possible—with us. Our civilization is based
on intellect far more than theirs; and it takes with us a long time for
a youth to acquire the knowledge he will find requisite in life. School
claims him, with those who can afford the time, till he is eighteen;
and with many the _status pupillaris_ is continued at the university
for three years longer: and no one would think that even then the age
for marriage had arrived. And here, again, much more is required for
supporting life through all ranks of society. This is another prohibition
against a young man’s marrying early. He must first work himself into
a position, in which he will have the means of maintaining a family in
the way required here, or wait till he has a fair prospect of being able
to do so. All this requires time; but in the East, where wants are few,
and not much knowledge is needed, a youth may marry very early. I saw at
Jerusalem the son of the Sheik of the Great Mosk of Omar, who was then,
though only a lad of sixteen years of age, already married to two wives.
And so it follows that, in this region, before men have attained to even
the prime of life, their wives are getting old. A necessary consequence
of this must be that polygamy will come to be as natural as marriage
itself. It has, at all events, been so hitherto.
The facilities for divorce which law and custom provide in these
countries (all that is needed is a writing of divorcement) are a result
of the same causes: they are, in fact, a corollary to the practice
of polygamy. They enable both the man and the woman to escape from
what, under the system of polygamy, must often become an insupportable
situation, and have the practical effect of making marriage only a
temporary arrangement. Indeed, sometimes even before the marriage
contract is entered into, the law of divorcement is discounted in this
way by the mutual agreement of both parties.
That ‘age cannot wither her’ is, then, precisely the opposite of being a
characteristic of the Arab, or even of the oriental, woman. Had it been
otherwise with them, polygamy would never have been the practice over
this large portion of the earth’s surface.
In our cold, humid, dull climate opposite conditions have produced
opposite effects. Here the woman arrives slowly at maturity; and, which
is the great point, fights a good fight against the inroads of age. Man
has no advantage over her in this respect. And when she is marriageable,
she is, not a child of ten years of age, but a woman of twenty, with
sufficient knowledge, and firmness of character to secure her own rights.
The consequence, therefore, here is that men have felt no necessity for
maintaining a plurality of wives; and if they had wished for it, the
women would not have allowed them to have it. _Voilà tout._
Nature it is that has made us monogamists. No religion that has ever been
accepted in Europe has legislated in favour of the opposite practice,
because it was obvious, and all men were agreed on the point, that
monogamy was most suitable to, and the best arrangement for, us. The
exceptional existence of the Arabic custom in European Turkey is one of
those exceptions which prove a rule.
Suppose that, in the evolution of those ups and downs to which our
earth’s surface is subject, it is destined that the waves of the ocean
shall again roll over the vast expanse of the Sahara, which, as things
now are, is one of Nature’s greatest factories for desiccated air. Then
every wind that will blow from the west, or the south-west, over the
present polygamic area, will be charged with moisture, and will bring
clouds that will not only give rain, but will also very much diminish the
amount of light which is now poured down upon it. Suppose, too, something
of the same kind to have been brought about with respect to the great
Syro-Arabian desert. Northerly and easterly winds will then also have
the same effect. What now withers will have become humid. There will be
no more tent life. Better houses will be required, more clothing, more
food, more fuel. Men will not marry so early. Women will not get old so
soon. Polygamy will die out of the region. Religion will be so modified
as to accept, to hallow, and to legislate for the new ideas, which the
new conditions and necessities will have engendered. Religion will then
forbid polygamy.