Chapter 33

In mediaeval Germany the line was so sharply drawn between the social classes that for a long time slavery, or even death, was the punishment for a mixed marriage. In course of time this barbarous custom fell into disuse, but free choice continued to be discouraged by the law that if a man married a woman beneath him in rank, neither she nor her children were raised to his rank, and in case of his death she had no claim to the usual provisions legally made for widows.

In India the caste prejudices are so strong and varied that they form almost insuperable barriers to free love-choice. "We find castes within castes," says Sir Monier Williams (153), "so that even the Brahmans are broken up and divided into numerous races, which again are subdivided into numerous tribes, families, or sub-castes," and all these, he adds, "do not intermarry." In Japan, until three decades ago, social barriers as to marriage were rigidly enforced, and in China, to this day, slaves, boatmen, actors, policemen, can marry women of their own class only. Nor are these difficulties eliminated at once as we descend the ladder of civilization. In Brazil, Central America, in the Polynesian and other Pacific Islands and elsewhere we find such barriers to free marriage, and among the Malayan Hovas of Madagascar even the slaves are subdivided into three classes, which do not intermarry! It is only among those peoples which are too low to be able to experience sentimental love anyway that this formidable obstacle of class prejudice vanishes, while race and tribal hatred remain in full force.

XV. RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE

Among peoples sufficiently advanced to have dogmas, religion has always proved a strong barrier in the way of the free bestowal of affection. Not only have Mohammedans and Christians hated and shunned each other, but the different Christian sects for a long time detested and tabooed one another as cordially as they did the heathen and the Jews. Tertullian denounced the marriage of a Christian with a heathen as fornication, and Westermarck cites Jacobs's remark that

"the folk-lore of Europe regarded the Jews as something infra-human, and it would require an almost impossible amount of large toleration for a Christian maiden of the Middle Ages to regard union with a Jew as anything other than unnatural."

There are various minor obstacles that might be dwelt on, but enough has been said to make it clear why romantic love was the last of the sentiments to be developed.

Having considered the divers ingredients and different kinds of love and distinguished romantic love from sensual passion and sentimentality, as well as from conjugal affection, we are now in a position to examine intelligently and in some detail a number of races in all parts of the world, by way of further corroborating and emphasizing the conclusions reached.

SPECIMENS OF AFRICAN LOVE

What is the lowest of all human races? The Bushmen of South Africa, say some ethnologists, while others urge the claims of the natives of Australia, the Veddahs of Ceylon, or the Fuegians of South America. As culture cannot be measured with a yardstick, it is impossible to arrive at any definite conclusion. For literary and geographic reasons, which will become apparent later on, I prefer to begin the search for traces of romantic love with the Bushmen of South Africa. And here we are at once confronted by the startling assertion of the explorer James Chapman, that there is "love in all their marriages." If this is true--if there is love in all the marriages of what is one of the lowest human races--then I have been pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp in the preceding pages of this book, and it will be a waste of ink and paper to write another line. But _is_ it true? Let us first see what manner of mortals these Bushmen are, before subjecting Mr. Chapman's special testimony to a cross-examination. The following facts are compiled from the most approved authorities.

BUSHMAN QUALIFICATIONS FOR LOVE

The eminent anatomist Fritsch, in his valuable work on the natives of South Africa (386-407), describes the Bushmen as being even in physical development far below the normal standard. Their limbs are "horribly thin" in both sexes; both women and men are "frightfully ugly," and so much alike that, although they go about almost naked, it is difficult to tell them apart. He thinks they are probably the aboriginal inhabitants of Africa, scattered from the Cape to the Zambesi, and perhaps beyond. They are filthy in their habits, and "washing the body is a proceeding unknown to them." When the French anatomist Cuvier examined a Bushman woman, he was reminded of an ape by her head, her ears, her movements, and her way of pouting the lips. The language of the Bushmen has often been likened to the chattering of monkeys. According to Bleek, who has collected their tales, their language is of the lowest known type. Lichtenstein (II., 42) found the Bushman women like the men, "ugly in the extreme," adding that "they understand each other more by their gestures than by their speaking." "No one has a name peculiar to himself." Others have described them as having protuberant stomachs, prominent posteriors, hollowed-out backs, and "few ideas but those of vengeance and eating." They have only two numerals, everything beyond two being "much," and except in those directions where the struggle for life has sharpened their wits, their intellectual faculties in general are on a level with their mathematics. Their childish ignorance is illustrated by a question which some of them seriously asked Chapman (I., 83) one day--whether his big wagons were not the mothers of the little ones with slender tires.

How well their minds are otherwise adapted for such an intellectualized, refined, and esthetic feeling as love, may also be inferred from the following observations. Lichtenstein points out that while necessity has given them acute sight and hearing,

"they might almost be supposed to have neither taste, smell, nor feeling; no disgust is ever evinced by them at even the most nauseous kind of food, nor do they appear to have any feeling of even the most striking changes in the temperature of the atmosphere."

"No meat," says Chapman (I., 57), "in whatever state of decomposition, is ever discarded by Bushmen." They dispute carrion with wolves and vultures. Rabbits they eat skins and all, and their menu is varied by all sorts of loathsome reptiles and insects.

No other savages, says Lichtenstein, betray "so high a degree of brutal ferocity" as the Bushmen. They "kill their own children without remorse." The missionary Moffat says (57) that "when a mother dies whose infant is not able to shift for itself, it is, without any ceremony, buried alive with the corpse of its mother." Kicherer, another missionary, says

"there are instances of parents throwing their tender offspring to the hungry lion, who stands roaring before their cavern, refusing to depart till some peace-offering be made to him."

He adds that after a quarrel between husband and wife the one beaten is apt to take revenge by killing their child; and that, on various occasions, parents smother their children, cast them away in the desert, or bury them alive without remorse. Murder is an amusement, and is considered a praiseworthy act. Livingstone (_M.T._, 159) tells of a Bushman who thought his god would consider him a "clever fellow" because he had murdered a man, two women, and two children. When fathers and mothers become too old to be of any use, or to take care of themselves, they are abandoned in the desert to be devoured alive by wild beasts. "I have often reasoned with the natives on this cruel practice," says the missionary Moffat (99); "in reply to which, they would only laugh." "It appears an awful exhibition of human depravity," he adds, "when children compel their parents to perish for want, or to be devoured by beasts of prey in a desert, _from no other motive but sheer laziness._" Kicherer says there are a few cases of "natural affection" sufficient to raise these creatures to "a level with the brute creation," Moffat, too, refers to exceptional cases of kindness, but the only instance he gives (112) describes their terror on finding he had drunk some water poisoned by them, and their gladness when he escaped--which terror and gladness were, however, very probably inspired not by sympathy but by the idea of punishment at causing the death of a white man. Chapman himself, the chosen champion of the Bushmen, relates (I., 67) how, having heard of Bushmen rescuing and carrying home some Makalolos whom they had found dying of thirst in the desert, he believed it at first; but he adds:

"Had I at that time possessed a sufficient knowledge of native character, I should not have been so credulous as to have listened to this report, for the idea of Bushmen carrying human beings whom they had found half dead out of a desert implies an act of charity quite inconsistent with their natural disposition and habits."

Barrow declares (269) that if Bushmen come across a Hottentot guarding his master's cattle,

"not contented with putting him to immediate death, they torture him by every means of cruelty that their invention can frame, as drawing out his bowels, tearing off his nails, scalping, and other acts equally savage."

They sometimes bury a victim up to the neck in the ground and thus leave him to be pecked to death by crows.

"LOVE IN ALL THEIR MARRIAGES"

And yet--I say it once more--we are asked to believe there is "love in all the marriages" of these fiendish creatures--beings who, as Kicherer says, live in holes or caves, where they "lie close together like pigs in a sty" and of whom Moffat declares that with the exception of Pliny's Troglodites "no tribe or people are surely more brutish, ignorant, and miserable." Our amazement at Chapman's assertion increases when we examine his argument more closely. Here it is (I., 258-59):

"Although they have a plurality of wives, which they also obtain by purchase, there is still love in all their marriages, and courtship among them is a very formal and, in some respects, a rather punctilious affair. When a young Bushman falls in love, he sends his sister to ask permission to pay his addresses; with becoming modesty the girl holds off in a playful, yet not scornful or repulsive manner if she likes him. The young man next sends his sister with a spear, or some other trifling article, which she leaves at the door of the girl's home. If this be not returned within the three or four days allowed for consideration, the Bushman takes it for granted that he is accepted, and gathering a number of his friends, he makes a grand hunt, generally killing an elephant or some other large animal and bringing the whole of the flesh to his intended father-in-law. The family now riot in an abundant supply.... After this the couple are proclaimed husband and wife, and the man goes to live with his father-in-law for a couple of winters, killing game, and always laying the produce of the chase at his feet as a mark of respect, duty, and gratitude."

It would take considerable ingenuity to condense into an equal number of lines a greater amount of ignorance and naïveté than this passage includes. And yet a number of anthropologists have accepted this passage serenely as expert evidence that there is love in all the marriages of the lowest of African races. Peschel was misled by it; Westermarck triumphantly puts it at the head of his cases intended to prove that "even very rude savages may have conjugal affection;" Moll meekly accepts it as a fact (_Lib. Sex._, Bd. I., Pt. 2, 403); and it seems to have made an impression on Katzel, and even on Fritsch. If these writers had taken the trouble to examine Chapman's qualifications for serving as a witness in anthropological questions, they would have saved themselves the humiliation of being thus duped. His very assertion that there is love in _all_ Bushman marriages ought to have shown them what an untrustworthy witness he is; for a more reckless and absurd statement surely was never penned by any globe-trotter. There is not now, and there never has been, a people among whom love could be found in all marriages, or half the marriages. In another place (I., 43) Chapman gives still more striking evidence of his unfitness to serve as a witness. Speaking of the family of a Bamanwato chief, he says:

"I was not aware of this practice of early marriages until the wife of an old man I had engaged here to accompany us, a child of about eight years of age, was pointed out to me, and in my ignorance I laughed outright, until my interpreter explained the matrimonial usages of their people."

Chapman's own editor was tempted by this exhibition of ignorance to write the following footnote: "The author seems not to have been aware that such early marriages are common among the Hindoos." He might have added "and among most of the lower races."

The ignorance which made Chapman "laugh outright" when he was confronted by one of the most elementary facts of anthropology, is responsible for his reckless assertions in the paragraph above quoted. It is an ignorant assumption on his part that it is the feelings of "respect, duty, and gratitude" that make a Bushman provide his bride's father with game for a couple of winters. Such feelings are unknown to the Bushman's soul. Working for the bride's father is simply his way (if he has no property to give) of paying for his wife--an illustration of the widespread custom of service. If polygamy and the custom of purchasing wives do not, as Chapman intimates, prevent love from entering into all Bushman marriages, then these aborigines must be constructed on an entirely different plan from other human beings, among whom we know that polygamy crushes monopoly of affection, while a marriage by purchase is a purse-affair, not a heart-affair--the girl going nearly always to the highest bidder.

But Chapman's most serious error--the one on which he founded his theory that there is love in all Bushman marriages--lies in his assumption that the ceremony of sham capture indicates modesty and love, whereas, as we saw in the chapter on Coyness, it is a mere survival of capture, the most ruffianly way of securing a bride, in which her choice or feelings are absolutely disregarded, and which tells us nothing except that a man covets a woman and that she feigns resistance because custom, as taught by her parents, compels her to do so. Inasmuch as she _must_ resist whether she likes the man or not, how could such sham "coyness" be a symptom of love? Moreover, it appears that even this sham coyness is exceptional, since, as Burchell informs us (II., 59), it is only when a girl grows up to womanhood without having been betrothed--"which, however, seldom happens"--that the female receives the man's attentions with such an "affectation of great alarm and disinclination on her part."

Burchell also informs us that a Bushman will take a second wife when the first one has become old, "not in years but in constitution;" and Barrow discovered the same thing (I., 276): "It appeared that it was customary for the elderly men to have two wives, one old and past child-bearing, the other young." Chapman, too, relates that a Bushman will often cast off his early wife and take a younger one, and as that does not prevent him from finding affection in their conjugal unions, we are enabled from this to infer that "love" means to him not enduring sympathy or altruistic capacity and eagerness for self-sacrifice, but a selfish, transient fondness continuing only as long as a woman is young and can gratify a man's sexual appetite. That kind of love doubtless does exist in all Bushman marriages.

Chapman further declares (II., 75) that these people lead "comparatively" chaste lives. I had supposed that, as an egg is either good or bad, so a man or woman is either chaste or unchaste. Other writers, who had no desire to whitewash savages, tell us not only "comparatively" but positively what Bushman morals are. A Bushman told Theophilus Halm (_Globus_, XVIII., 122) that quarrels for the possession of women often lead to murder; "nevertheless, the lascivious fellow assured me it was a fine thing to appropriate the wives of others." Wake (I., 205) says they lend their wives to strangers, and Lichtenstein tells us (II., 48) that "the wife is not indissolubly united to the husband; but when he gives her permission, she may go whither she will and associate with any other man." And again (42):

"Infidelity to the marriage compact is not considered a crime, it is scarcely regarded by the offended person.... They seem to have no idea of the distinction of girl, maiden, and wife; they are all expressed by one word alone. I leave every reader to draw from this single circumstance his own inference with regard to the nature of love and every kind of moral feeling among them."[137]

That this is not too severe a criticism is obvious from the fact that Lichtenstein, in judging savages, was rather apt to err on the side of leniency. The equally generous and amiable missionary Moffat (174-75) censures him, for instance, for his favorable view of the Bechuanas, saying that he was not with them long enough to know their real character. Had he dwelt among them, accompanied them on journeys, and known them as he (Moffat) did, "he would not have attempted to revive the fabled delights and bliss of ignorance reported to exist in the abodes of heathenism."

It is in comparison with these Bechuanas that Chapman calls the Bushmen moral, obviously confounding morality with licentiousness. Without having any moral principles at all, it is quite likely that the Bushmen are less licentious than their neighbors for the simple reason that they are less well-fed; for as old Burton remarks, for the most part those are "aptest to love that are young and lusty, live at ease, stall-fed, free from cares, like cattle in a rank pasture"--whereas the Bushmen are nearly always thin, half-starved denizens of the African deserts, enervated by constant fears, and so unmanly that "a single musket shot," says Lichtenstein, "will put a hundred to flight, and whoever rushes upon them with only a good stick in his hand has no reason to fear any resistance from ever so large a number."

Such men are not apt to be heroes among women in any sense. Indeed, Galton says (_T.S.A._, 178), "I am sure that Bushmen are, generally speaking, henpecked. They always consult their wives. The Damaras do not." Chapman himself, with unconscious humor, gives us (I., 391) a sample of the "love" which he found in "all Bushman marriages;" his remarks confirming at the same time the truth I dwelt on in the chapter on Individual Preference, that among savages the sexes are less individualized than with us, the men being more effeminate, the women viragoes:

"The passive and _effeminate_ disposition of the men, of which we have had frequent reason to complain in the course of this narrative, was illustrated in the revel which accompanied the parting feast, when the men allowed themselves to be beaten by the women, who, I am told, are in the constant habit of belaboring their devoted husbands, in order to keep them in proper subjection. On this occasion the men got broken heads at the hands of their gentle partners; one had his nose, another his ear, nearly bitten off."

Notwithstanding this affectionate "constant habit" of breaking their husbands' heads, the Bushman women have not succeeded in teaching them even the rudiments of gallantry. "The woman is a beast of burden," says Hahn; "at the same time she is subjected to ill-treatment which not seldom leads to death." When camp is moved, the gallant husband carries his spear and quiver, the wife "does the rest," carrying the baby, the mat, the earthen cooking-pot, the ostrich shells, and a bundle of skins. If it happens, as it often does, that there is not enough to eat, the wife has to go hungry. In revenge she usually prepares her own food only, leaving him to do his own cooking. If a wife falls ill on the way to a new camping-place, she is left behind to perish. (Ratzel, I., 7.)

In conclusion, and as a climax to my argument, I will quote the testimony of three missionaries who did not simply make a flying visit or two to the country of the Bushmen, as Chapman did, but lived among them. The Rev. R. Moffat (49) cites the missionary Kicherer, "whose circumstances while living among them afforded abundant opportunities of becoming intimately acquainted with their real condition," and who wrote that the Bushmen "are total strangers to domestic happiness. The men have several wives, but conjugal affection is little known." This opinion is thus endorsed by Moffat, and a third missionary, the Rev. F. Fleming, wrote (167) that among Bushmen "conjugal affection seems totally unknown," and pre-matrimonial love is of course out of question in a region where girls are married as infants. The wife always has to work harder than the husband. If she becomes weak or ill she is unceremoniously left behind to starve. (Ratzel, I., 72.)

FALSE FACTS REGARDING HOTTENTOTS

Darwin has well observed that a false argument is comparatively harmless because subsequent discussion is sure to demolish it, whereas a false fact may perplex speculation for ages. Chapman's assertion that there is love in all Bushman marriages is one of these false facts, as our cross-examination has shown. In passing now to the neighbors of the Bushmen, the Hottentots, let us bear in mind the lesson taught. They called themselves Khoi-Khoin, "men of men," while Van Riebeck's followers referred to them as "black stinking hounds." There is a prevalent impression that nearly all Africans are negroes. But the Hottentots are not negroes any more than are the Bushmen, or the Kaffirs, whom we shall consider next. Ethnologists are not agreed as to the relationship that exists between Bushmen and Hottentots, but it is certain that the latter represent a somewhat higher level of civilization. Yet, here again we must guard carefully against "false facts," especially in reference to the topic that interests us--the relations of the sexes. As late as 1896 the eminent American anthropologist, Dr. Brinton, had an article in _Science_ (October 16th), in which he remarked that "one trait which we admire in Hottentots is their regard for women," He was led into making this assertion by an article entitled "Woman in Hottentot Poetry," which appeared in the German periodical _Globus_ (Vol. 70, pp. 173-77). It was written by Dr. L. Jakobowski, and is quite as misleading as Chapman's book. Its logic is most peculiar. The writer first shows (to his own satisfaction) that the Hottentots treat their women somewhat better than other South Africans do, and from this "fact" he goes on to infer that they must have love-songs! He admits, indeed, that (with a few exceptions, to be presently considered) we know nothing of these songs, but it "seems certain" that they must be sung at the erotic dances of the natives; these, however, carefully conceal them from the missionaries, and as Jakobowski naïvely adds, to heed the missionaries "would be tantamount to giving up their old sensual dances."

What facts does Jakobowski adduce in support of his assertion that Hottentots have a high regard for their women? He says: