I say chiefly, because I am convinced that conjugal love was known
sooner than romantic love, and for a very simple reason. Among those
of the lower races where the sexes were not separated in youth, a
license prevailed which led to shallow, premature, temporary alliances
that precluded all idea of genuine affection, even had these folk been
capable of such a sentiment; while among those tribes and peoples that
practised the custom of separating the boys and girls from the
earliest age, and not allowing them to become acquainted till after
marriage, the growth of real, prematrimonial affection was, of course,
equally impossible. In married life this was different. Living
together for years, having a common interest in their children,
sharing the same joys and sorrows, husband and wife would learn the
rudiments of sympathy, and in happy cases there would be an
opportunity for the growth of liking, attachment, fondness, or even,
in exceptional instances, of affection. I cannot sufficiently
emphasize the fact that my theory is psychological or cultural, not
chronological. The fact that a man lives in the year 1900 makes it no
more self-evident that he should be capable of sexual affection than
the fact that a man lived seven centuries before Christ makes it
self-evident that he could not love affectionately. Hector and
Andromache existed only in the brain of Homer, who was in many
respects thousands of years ahead of his contemporaries. Whether such
a couple could really have existed at that time among the Trojans, or
the Greeks, we do not know, but in any case it would have been an
exception, proving the rule by the painful contrast of the surrounding
barbarism.
Exceptions may possibly occur among the lower races, through happy
combinations of circumstances. C.C. Jones describes (69) a picture of
conjugal devotion among Cherokee Indians:
"By the side of the aged Mico Tomo-chi-chi, as, thin
and weak, he lies upon his blanket, hourly expecting
the summons of the pale-king, we see the sorrowing form
of his old wife, Scenauki, bending over and fanning him
with a bunch of feathers."
In his work on the Indians of California (271), Powers writes:
"An aged Achomauri lost his wife, to whom he had been
married probably half a century, and he tarred his face
in mourning for her as though he were a woman--_an act
totally unprecedented_, and regarded by the Indians as
evincing an _extraordinary_ affection."
St. John relates the following incident in his book on Borneo:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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