Romantic Love and Personal Beauty. Henry T. Finck

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СКАЧАТЬ before poultry or even pigs. All naturalists who have closely attended to the habits of birds, whether in a state of nature or under confinement, are unanimously of opinion that the males take delight in displaying their beauty.”beauty.” And, once more, “with birds of Paradise a dozen or more full-plumaged males congregate in a tree to hold a dancing-party, as it is called by the natives; and here they fly about, raise their wings, elevate their exquisite plumes, and make them vibrate; and the whole tree seems, as Mr. Wallace remarks, to be filled with waving plumes.”

      But if it be the unanimous opinion of naturalists who have closely studied the habits of birds, “that the males take delight in displaying their beauty,” why should not the females also take pleasure in witnessing this display? Perhaps they do, sometimes; for even Mr. Wallace admits that “the display of the various ornamental appendages of the male during courtship may be attractive” to the female. But there is a world-wide difference between this assertion and the doctrine that the females are so greatly and so constantly influenced by their æsthetic taste that they always prefer among males those that are slightly more beautiful than the others, thus increasing their personal beauty by transmission. This is an assumption unsupported by facts, and rendered unnecessary because Natural Selection accounts for all the phenomena in question.

      Admiration of Personal Beauty does not appear, therefore, to enter noticeably into animal love, except in so far as a slight amount of æsthetic taste may be admitted in birds. This taste may be strengthened by the sight of the brilliant masculine ornaments during the season of love being associated with the remembered pleasures of courtship.

      Indirectly, however, female animals promote the cause of beauty by preferring the more healthy and vigorous individuals, who are commonly also the most beautiful ones. And is not the same true of females of the human persuasion, who likewise are much less influenced in their choice by the beauty than by the boldness, energy, vivacity, and “manliness” of their suitors? It seems to hold true throughout nature that the female’s Love is weak in the æsthetic element, her taste being little developed and too often neutralised by unconscious utilitarian considerations.

      LOVE AMONG SAVAGES

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STRANGERS TO LOVE

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      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. LetourneauLetourneau, 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.

PRIMITIVE COURTSHIP

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      In his anxiety to find cases of Romantic Love among North American and other primitive peoples, Waitz is obliged to fall back on legends of Lovers’ Leaps and Maiden Rocks, and on a poem about a South American maiden who committed suicide on her lover’s grave to avoid falling into the hands of the Spaniards. Legends and poems, unfortunately, do not count for much as scientific evidence. At the same time, it would doubtless be incorrect to assert on the strength of some of the authorities just quoted that Love does not exist at all among savages, and therefore to make the chapter on Love among Savages as brief as that chapter on Snakes СКАЧАТЬ