Chapter 16

Crossing the Continent to California we find in Powers (118) a pathetic account of the lack of filial piety, or sympathy with old age, which, he says, is peculiar to Indians in general. After a man has ceased to be useful as a warrior, though he may have been a hero of a hundred battles, he is compelled to go with his sons into the forest and bear home on his poor old shoulders the game they have killed. He totters along behind them "almost crushed to earth beneath a burden which their unencumbered strength is greatly more able to support, but they touch it not with so much as one of their fingers."

EXPOSING THE SICK AND AGED

"The Gallinomeros kill their aged parents in a most coldblooded manner," says Bancroft (I., 390), and this custom, too, prevails on both sides of the Continent. The Canadians, according to Lalemant (_Jesuit Relations_, IV., 199),

"kill their fathers and mothers when they are so old that they can walk no longer, thinking that they are thus doing them a good service; for otherwise they would be compelled to die of hunger, as they have become unable to follow others when they change their location."

Henry Norman, in his book on the Far East, explains (553) why so few deaf, blind, and idiots are found among savages: they are destroyed or left to perish. Sutherland, in studying the custom of killing the aged and diseased, or leaving them to die of exposure, found express testimony to the prevalence of this loveless habit in twenty-eight different races of savages, and found it denied of only one. Lewis and Clarke give a list of Indian tribes by whom the aged were abandoned to starvation (II., Chap. 7), adding:

"Yet in their villages we saw no want of kindness to the aged: on the contrary, probably because in villages the means of more abundant subsistence renders such cruelty unnecessary, old people appeared to be treated with attention."

But it is obvious that kindness which does not go beyond the point where it interferes with our own comfort, is not true altruism. If one of two men who are perishing of thirst in the desert finds a cupful of water and shares it with the other, he shows sympathy; but if he finds a whole spring and shares it with the companion, his action does not deserve that name. It would be superfluous to make this remark were it not that the sentimentalists are constantly pointing to such sharing of abundance as evidence of sympathetic kindness. There is a whole volume of philosophy in Bates's remark (293) concerning Brazilian Indians: "The good-fellowship of our Cucámas seemed to arise, not from warm sympathy, but simply from the absence of eager selfishness in small matters." The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune devotes a whole chapter (V., 229-31) to such good qualities as he could find among the Canadian Indians. He is just to the point of generosity, but he is compelled to end with these words: "And yet I would not dare to assert that I have seen one act of real moral virtue in a savage. They have nothing but their own pleasure and satisfaction in view."

BIRTH OF SYMPATHY

Schoolcraft relates a story of an Indian girl who saved her aged father's life by carrying him on her back to the new camping-place (_Oneota,_ 88). Now Schoolcraft is not a witness on whom one can rely safely, and his case could be accepted as an illustration of an aboriginal trait only if it had been shown that the girl in question had never been subject to missionary influences. Nevertheless, such an act of filial devotion may well have occurred on the part of a woman. It was in a woman's heart that human sympathy was first born --together with her child. The helpless infant could not have survived without her sympathetic care, hence there was an important use for womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow, while man, immersed in wars and selfish struggles, remained hard of heart and knew not tenderness.

Yet in woman, too, the growth of sympathy was painfully slow. The practice of infanticide, for selfish reasons, was, as we shall see in later chapters, horribly prevalent among many of the lower races, and even where the young were tenderly reared, the feeling toward them was hardly what we call affection--a conscious, enduring devotion--but a sort of animal instinct which is shared by tigers and other fierce and cruel animals, and which endures but a short time. In Agassiz's book on Brazil we read (373), that the Indians "are cold in their family affections; and though the mothers are very fond of their babies, they seem comparatively indifferent to them as they grow up." As an illustration of this trait Agassiz mentions a sight he witnessed one day. A child who was to be taken far away to Rio stood on the deck crying, "while the whole family put off in a canoe, talking and laughing gaily, without showing him the least sympathy."

WOMEN CRUELER THAN MEN

Apart from instinctive maternal love, sympathy appears to be as far to seek in the savage women as in the men. Authorities agree that in respect of cruelty the squaws even surpass the warriors. Thus Le Jeune attests (_Jes. Rel._, VI., 245), that among the Canadians the women were crueler toward captives than the men. In another place (V., 29), he writes that when prisoners were tortured the women and girls "blew and drove the flames over in their direction to burn them." In every Huron town, says Parkman (_Jes. in N.A._, XXXIV.), there were old squaws who "in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the men." The same is asserted of the Comanche women, who "delight in torturing the male prisoners." Concerning Chippewa war captives, Keating says (I., 173): "The marriageable women are reduced to servitude and are treated with great cruelty by the squaws." Among the Creeks the women even used to pay a premium of tobacco for the privilege of whipping prisoners of war (Schoolcraft, V., 280). These are typical instances. In Patagonia, writes Falkner (97), the Indian women follow their husbands, armed with clubs, sometimes and swords, and ravage and plunder the houses of everything they can find. Powers relates that when California Indians get too old to fight they have to assist the women in their drudgery. Thereupon the women, instead of setting them a good example by showing sympathy for their weakness, take their revenge and make them feel their humiliation keenly. Obviously among these savages, cruelty and ferocity have no sex, wherefore it would be as useless in one sex as in the other to seek for that sympathy which is an ingredient and a condition of romantic love.

PLATO DENOUNCES SYMPATHY

From a Canadian Indian to a Greek philosopher it seems a far cry; yet the transition is easy and natural. To the Indian, as Parkman points out, "pity was a cowardly weakness," to be sternly repressed as unworthy of a man. Plato, for his part, wanted to banish poetry from his ideal republic because it overwhelms our feelings and makes us give way to sympathies which in real life our pride causes us to repress and which are "deemed the part of a woman" (_Repub._, X., 665). As for the special form of sympathy which enters into the nobler phases of the love between men and women--fusing their hearts and blending their souls--Plato's inability to appreciate such a thing may be inferred from the fact that in this same ideal republic he wanted to abolish the marriage even of individual bodies. Of the marriage of souls he, like the other Greeks, knew nothing. To him, as to his countrymen in general, love between man and woman was mere animal passion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, or friendship, or to filial, parental, or brotherly love.

From the point of view of sympathy, the difference between ancient passion and modern love is admirably revealed in Wagner's _Tannhäuser_. As I have summed it up elsewhere[23]:

"Venus shares only the joys of Tannhäuser, while Elizabeth is ready to suffer with him. Venus is carnal and selfish, Elizabeth affectionate and self-sacrificing. Venus degrades, Elizabeth ennobles; the depth of her love atones for the shallow, sinful infatuation of Tannhäuser. The abandoned Venus threatens revenge, the forsaken Elizabeth dies of grief."

There are stories of wifely devotion in Greek literature, but, like Oriental stories of the same kind (especially in India) they have a suspicious appearance of having been invented as object-lessons for wives, to render them more subservient to the selfish wishes of the husbands. Plutarch counsels a wife to share her husband's joys and sorrows, laugh when he laughs, weep when he weeps; but he fails to suggest the virtue of reciprocal sympathy on the husband's part; yet Plutarch had much higher notions regarding conjugal life than most of the Greeks. An approximation to the modern ideal is found only when we consider the curious Greek adoration of boys. Callicratides, in Lucian's [Greek: Erotes], after expressing his contempt for women and their ways, contrasts with them the manners of a well-bred youth who spends his time associating with poets and philosophers, or taking gymnastic and military exercises. "Who would not like," he continues,

"to sit opposite such a boy, hear him talk, share his labors, walk with him, nurse him in illness, go to sea with him, share darkness and chains with him if necessary? Those who hated him should be my enemies, those who loved him my friends. When he dies, I too should wish to die, and one grave should cover us."

Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism. Callicratides does not say he will die _for_ the other, or that the other's pleasures are to him more important than his own.[24]

SHAM ALTRUISM IN INDIA

India is generally credited with having known and practised altruism long before Christ came to preach it. Kalidasa anticipates a modern idea when he remarks, in _Sakuntala_, that "Among persons who are very fond of each other, grief shared is grief halved." India, too, is famed for its monks or penitents, who were bidden to be compassionate to all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless those that cursed them (Mann, VI., 48). But in reality the penitents were actuated by the most selfish of motives; they believed that by obeying those precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they would get such power that even the gods would dread them; and the Sanscrit dramas are full of illustrations of the detestably selfish use they made of the power thus acquired. In _Sakuntala_ we read how a poor girl's whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one of these "saints," for the trivial reason that, being absorbed in thoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to his personal comforts at once; while _Kausika's Rage_ illustrates the diabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes a king and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations. It is possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest and having no other companions, learned to love the animals that came to see them; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos in general is merely a matter of superstition and not an outcome of sympathy. He has not even a fellow-feeling for suffering human beings. How far he was from realizing Christ's "blessed are the merciful," may be inferred from what the Abbé Dubois says:

"The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his heart. He will see an unhappy being perish on the road, or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste; and will not stir to help him to a drop of water, though it were to save his life."

"To kill a cow," says the same writer (I., 176), "is a crime which the Hindoo laws punish with death;" and these same Hindoos treat women, especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd to suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be actuated by sympathy in their devout attitude toward some animals. Superstition is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person who kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive. In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally. What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such superstitions:

"The enraged multitude did not wait for the slow process of law, but put the offender to death with their own hands." At the same time some animals "which were deemed divinities in one home, were treated as nuisances and destroyed in others." (Kendrick, II., I-21.)

EVOLUTION OF SYMPATHY

If we study the evolution of human sympathy we find that it begins, not in reference to animals but to human beings. The first stage is a mother's feeling going out to her child. Next, the family as a whole is included, and then the tribe. An Australian kills, as a matter of course, everyone he comes across in the wilderness not belonging to his tribe. To the present day race hatred, jingoism, and religious differences obstruct the growth of cosmopolitan sympathy such as Christ demanded. His religion has done much, however, to widen the circle of sympathy and to make known its ravishing delights. The doctrine that it is more blessed to give than to receive is literally true for those who are of a sympathetic disposition. Parents enjoy the pleasures of their children as they never did their own egotistic delights. In various ways sympathy has continued to grow, and at the present day the most refined and tender men and women include animals within the range of their pity and affection. We organize societies for their protection, and we protest against the slaughter of birds that live on islands, thousands of miles away. Our imagination has become so sensitive and vivid that it gives us a keen pang to think of the happy lives of these birds as being ruthlessly cut short and their young left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation. If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom Burton wrote in his _Two Trips to Gorilla Land_, that "Cruelty seems to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death"--we need no other argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic love, because that implies a capacity for the tenderest and subtlest sympathy. I would sooner believe a tiger capable of such love than a savage, for the tiger practises cruelty unconsciously and accidentally while in quest of food, whereas the primitive man indulges in cruelty for cruelty's sake, and for the delight it gives him. We have here one more illustration of the change and growth of sentiments. Man's emotions develop as well as his reasoning powers, and one might as well expect an Australian, who cannot count five, to solve a problem in trigonometry as to love a woman as we love her.

AMOROUS SYMPATHY

In romantic love altruism reaches its climax. Turgenieff did not exaggerate when he said that "it is in a man really in love as if his personality were eliminated." Genuine love makes a man shed egoism as a snake sheds its skin. His one thought is: "How can I make her happy and save her from grief" at whatever cost to his own comfort. Amorous sympathy implies a complete self-surrender, an exchange of personalities:

My true love hath my heart, and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given. --_Sidney_.

It is the secret sympathy, The silver link, the silken tie, Which heart to heart, and mind to mind, In body and in soul can bind. --_Scott_.

To a woman who wishes to be loved truly and permanently, a sympathetic disposition is as essential as modesty, and more essential than beauty. The author of _Love Affairs of Some Famous Men_ has wittily remarked that "Love at first sight is easy enough; what a girl wants is a man who can love her when he sees her every day." That, he might have added, is impossible unless she can enter into another's joys and sorrows. Many a spark of love kindled at sight of a pretty face and bright eyes is extinguished after a short acquaintance which reveals a cold and selfish character. A man feels instinctively that a girl who is not a sympathetic sweetheart will not be a sympathetic wife and mother, so he turns his attention elsewhere. Selfishness in a man is perhaps a degree less offensive, because competition and the struggle for existence necessarily foster it; yet a man who does not merge his personality in that of his chosen girl is not truly in love, however much he may be infatuated. There can be sympathy without love, but no love without sympathy. It is an essential ingredient, an absolute test, of romantic love.

IX. ADORATION

Silvius, in _As You Like It_, says that love is "all adoration," and in _Twelfth Night_, when Olivia asks: "How does he love me?" Viola answers: "With adorations." Romeo asks: "What shall I swear by?" and Juliet replies:

Do not swear at all; Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, Which is the god of my idolatry, And I'll believe thee.

DEIFICATION OF PERSONS

Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the "deification of persons," and that women adore as well as men. Helena, in _All's Well that Ends Well_, says of her love for Bertram:

Thus, Indian-like Religious in mine error, I adore The sun that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more.

"Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modern lover is like a sculptor who takes an ordinary block of marble and carves a goddess out of it. His belief that his idol is a living goddess is, of course, an illusion, but the _feeling_ is real, however fantastic and romantic it may seem. He is so thoroughly convinced of the incomparable superiority of his chosen divinity that "it is marvellous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is in a panic when he thinks of it," as Charles Dudley Warner puts it. Ouida speaks of "the graceful hypocrisies of courtship," and no doubt there are many such; but in romantic love there is no hypocrisy; its devotion and adoration are absolutely sincere.

The romantic lover adores not only the girl herself but everything associated with her. This phase of love is poetically delineated in Goethe's _Werther_:

"To-day," Werther writes to his friend, "I could not go to see Lotta, being unavoidably detained by company. What was there to do? I sent my valet to her, merely in order to have someone about me who had been near her. With what impatience I expected him, with what joy I saw him return! I should have liked to seize him by the hand and kiss him, had I not been ashamed.

"There is a legend of a Bononian stone which being placed in the sun absorbs his rays and emits them at night. In such a light I saw that valet. The knowledge that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, the buttons and the collar of his coat, made all these things valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand dollars, so happy was I in his presence. God forbid that you should laugh at this. William, are these things phantasms if they make us happy?"

Fielding wrote a poem on a half-penny which a young lady had given to a beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half-crown. Sir Richard Steele wrote to Miss Scurlock:

"You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have worn, or I cannot live; otherwise you must expect that I'll kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your handkerchief."

Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fair sex. The lover worships the very ground she trod on, and is enraptured at the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her. To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, in perpetual hyperbole:

It's a year almost that I have not seen her; Oh! last summer green things were greener, Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer. --_C.G. Rossetti_.

PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN

The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being universal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345): "Among ourselves woman-worship nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost, if not entirely, absent among the peasantry." Still less would we expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor worship, which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--or rather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.

A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt for women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by the lower races in all parts of the world. But as the attitude of Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be fully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to a few sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss, II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to and fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored. If an Indian refuses to quarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains (VI., 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of a warrior, as she is too far beneath him. In Tahiti the head of a husband or father was sacred from a woman's touch. Offerings to the gods would have been polluted if touched by a woman. In Siam the wife had to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband's, to remind her of her inferiority. No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maori chief. Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in any corner of the tent except her own; after pitching the tent she was obliged to fumigate it before the men would enter. The Zulus regard their women "with haughty contempt." Among Mohammedans a woman has a definite value only in so far as she is related to a husband; unmarried she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her. (Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls by elders and priests is the insulting

"Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive thee." "On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that she is an unwelcome guest in the family." (Ramabai Saravasti, 13.)

William Jameson Reid, who visited some of the unexplored regions of Northeastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness and misery of woman's lot among the Pa-Urgs: