Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
One other point, however, may be referred to here, namely, that although
the æsthetic overtone of Love—the Admiration of Personal Beauty—may
enter into a savage’s amorous feelings, it is only the sensuous aspect
of it that affects him, the intellectual and moral sides being unknown
to him. His admiration is purely physical. He marries his chosen bride
when she is a mere child, and before the slightest spark of mental charm
can illumine her features and impart to them a superior beauty; and
subsequently, when experience has somewhat sharpened her intellectual
powers, hard labour has already destroyed all traces of her physical
beauty so that the combination of physical and mental charms which alone
can inspire the highest form of Love is never to be found in primitive
woman.
JEALOUSY AND POLYGAMY
The moral mission of Jealousy, as stated on a preceding page, is, by
means of watchfulness and the inspiring of fear, to ensure fidelity and
chastity. Darwin says that from the strength of the feeling of jealousy
all through the animal kingdom, as well as from the analogy of the lower
animals, especially those which come nearest to man, he “cannot believe
that absolutely promiscuous intercourse prevailed in times past, shortly
before man attained to his present rank in the zoological scale.” This
may be true, yet it is astonishing to find how many of the lower tribes
are utterly unconcerned regarding the morals both of married and
unmarried women. A vast number of cases illustrating this absence of
jealousy are collected in Waitz’s _Anthropology_, Spencer’s _Sociology_,
the works of Lubbock, and especially in Ploss’s _Das Weib_, i. 205-214.
In some cases girls are allowed to do as they please until after
marriage, when they are jealously guarded; in other cases the reverse is
true. In some parts of Africa a breach of faith on the wife’s part is
regarded as an attack not on the husband’s honour but on his property;
hence a pecuniary compensation is all that is required. Lubbock
enumerates a large number of races among whom the lending of a wife or
daughter is a common and obligatory form of hospitality. And the
Chibchas of South America went so far in their indifference to virginity
that they considered a virgin bride to be unfortunate, “as she had not
inspired affection in men.”
Jealousy for the possession of a woman, however, was much sooner
developed than jealous regard for her conduct. The statement of Sir John
Lubbock about the men of an Indian tribe, that they “fight for the
possession of the women, just like stags,” and similar statements
regarding other savages, imply that, just like stags, these men feel the
pangs of primitive Jealousy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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