Primitive Love and Love-Stories

Primitive Love and Love-Stories

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Title: Primitive Love and Love-Stories
Author: Henry Theophilus Finck
Release Date: April 7, 2004 [EBook #11934]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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LOVE AND LOVE-STORIES ***

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PRIMITIVE LOVE AND LOVE-STORIES
BY HENRY T. FINCK
1899
DEDICATED TO ONE WHO TAUGHT THE AUTHOR THAT
CONJUGAL AFFECTION IS NOT INFERIOR TO ROMANTIC LOVE
PREFACE

On page 654 of the present volume reference is made to a custom
prevalent in northern India of employing the family barber to select the
boys and girls to be married, it being considered too trivial and
humiliating an act for the parents to attend to. In pronouncing such a
custom ludicrous and outrageous we must not forget that not much
more than a century ago an English thinker, Samuel Johnson, expressed
the opinion that marriages might as well be arranged by the Lord
Chancellor without consulting the parties concerned. Schopenhauer had,
indeed, reason to claim that it had remained for him to discover the
significance and importance of love. His ideas on the relations between
love, youth, health, and beauty opened up a new vista of thought; yet it
was limited, because the question of heredity was only just beginning
to be understood, and the theory of evolution, which has revolutionized
all science, had not yet appeared on the horizon.
The new science of anthropology, with its various branches, including
sociology, ethnology, and comparative psychology, has within the last
two or three decades brought together and discussed an immense
number of facts relating to man in his various stages of
development--savagery, barbarism, semi-civilization, and civilization.
Monographs have appeared in great numbers on various customs and
institutions, including marriage, which has been discussed in several
exhaustive volumes. Love alone has remained to be specially
considered from an evolutionary point of view. My own book,
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty, which appeared in 1887, did
indeed touch upon this question, but very briefly, inasmuch as its
subject, as the title indicates, was modern romantic love. A book on
such a subject was naturally and easily written _virginibus puerisque_;
whereas the present volume, being concerned chiefly with the
love-affairs of savages and barbarians, could not possibly have been
subjected to the same restrictions. Care has been taken, however, to
exclude anything that might offend a healthy taste.
If it has been necessary in some chapters to multiply unpleasant facts,
the reader must blame the sentimentalists who have so persistently
whitewashed the savages that it has become necessary, in the interest of
truth, to show them in their real colors. I have indeed been tempted to

give my book the sub-title "A Vindication of Civilization" against the
misrepresentations of these sentimentalists who try to create the
impression that savages owe all their depravity to contact with whites,
having been originally spotless angels. If my pictures of the
unadulterated savage may in some cases produce the same painful
impression as the sights in a museum's "chamber of horrors," they serve,
on the other hand, to show us that, bad as we may be, collectively, we
are infinitely superior in love-affairs, as in everything else, to those
primitive peoples; and thus we are encouraged to hope for further
progress in the future in the direction of purity and altruism.
Although I have been obliged under the circumstances to indulge in a
considerable amount of controversy, I have taken great pains to state
the views of my opponents fairly, and to be strictly impartial in
presenting facts with accuracy. Nothing could be more foolish than the
ostrich policy, so often indulged in, of hiding facts in the hope that
opponents will not see them. Had I found any data inconsistent with my
theory I should have modified it in accordance with them. I have also
been very careful in regard to my authorities. The chief cause of the
great confusion reigning in anthropological literature is that, as a rule,
evidence is piled up with a pitchfork. Anyone who has been anywhere
and expressed a globe-trotter's opinion is cited as a witness, with
deplorable results. I have not only taken most of my multitudinous facts
from the original sources, but I have critically examined the witnesses
to see what right they have to parade as experts; as in the cases, for
instance, of Catlin, Schoolcraft, Chapman, and Stephens, who are
responsible