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 only fight among themselves, and never maltreat the females.
This anomaly is easily explained. The intellectual power and emotional
horizon of animals are limited; but in those directions in which Natural
Selection has made them _specialists_, they reach a high degree of
development, because inherited experience tends to give to their actions
an instinctive or quasi-instinctive precision and certainty. Among
primitive men, on the other hand, reason begins to encroach more on
instinct, but yet in such a feeble way as to make constant blunders
inevitable: thus proving that strong instincts, combined with a limited
intellectual plasticity, are a safer guide in life than a more plastic
but weak intellect minus the assistance of stereotyped instincts.
If neither intellect nor instinct guide the primitive man to
well-regulated marital relations, such as we find among many animals, so
again his emotional life is too crude and limited to allow any scope for
the domestic affections. Inasmuch as, according to Sir John Lubbock,
gratitude, mercy, pity, chastity, forgiveness, humility, are ideas or
feelings unknown to many or most savage tribes, we should naturally
expect that such a highly-compounded and ethereal feeling as Romantic
Love could not exist among them. How could Love dwell in the heart of a
savage who baits a fish-hook with the flesh of a child; who eats his
wife when she has lost her beauty and the muscular power which enabled
her to do all his hard work; who abandons his aged parents, or kills
them, and whose greatest delight in life is to kill an enemy slowly amid
the most diabolic tortures?
Or how could a primitive girl love a man whose courtship consists in
knocking her on the head and carrying her forcibly from her own to his
tribe? A man who, after a very brief period of caresses, neglects her,
takes perhaps another and younger wife, and reduces the first one to the
condition of a slave, refusing to let her eat at his table, throwing her
bones and remains, as to a dog, or even driving her away and killing
her, if she displeases him? These are extreme cases, but they are not
rare; and in a slightly modified form they are found throughout
savagedom.
That Love is a sentiment unknown to savages has been frequently noted in
the works of anthropologists and tourists. When Ploss remarks that the
lowest savages “know as little of marriage relations as animals; still
less do they know the feeling we call Love,” he does a great injustice
to animals, as those who have read the preceding chapter must admit.
Letourneau, in his _Sociologie_, remarks: “Among the Cafres Cousas,
according to Lichtenstein, the sentiment of love does not constitute a
part of marriage. ‘The idea of love, as we understand it,’ says Du
Chaillu, in speaking of a tribe of the Gabon, ‘appears to be unknown to
this tribe.’” Monteiro, speaking of the polygamous tribes of Africa,
says: “The negro knows not love, affection, or jealousy.... In all the
long years I have been in Africa I have never seen a negro manifest the
least tenderness for or to a negress.... I have never seen a negro put
his arm round a woman’s waist, or give or receive any caress whatever
that would indicate the slightest loving regard or affection on either
side. They have no words or expressions in their language indicative of
affection or love.”
Mr. Spencer, in commenting on this passage, remarks that “This testimony
harmonises with testimonies cited by Sir John Lubbock, to the effect
that the Hottentots ‘are so cold and indifferent to one another that you
would think there was no such thing as love between them’; that among
the Koussa Kaffirs there is ‘no feeling of love in marriage’; and that
in Yariba, ‘a man thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear
of corn—affection is altogether out of the question.’”
Mr. Winwood Reade, on the other hand, informed Darwin that the West
Africans “are quite capable of falling in love, and of forming tender,
passionate, and faithful attachments.” And the anthropologist Waitz,
speaking of Polynesia, says that “examples of real passionate love are
not rare, and on the Fiji Islands it has happened that individuals
married against their will have committed suicide; although this has
only happened in the higher classes.” Unfortunately in these cases we
are left in doubt as to whether the reference is to Conjugal or to
Romantic Love; conjugal attachment, being of earlier growth than
Romantic Love, because the development of the latter was retarded by the
limited opportunities for prolonged Courtship and free Choice.