Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Project Manager; Keith M. Eckrich,
Post-Proofer; Online Distributed Proofreaders Team
1899
On page 654 of the present volume reference is made to a customprevalent in northern India of employing the family barber to selectthe boys and girls to be married, it being considered too trivial andhumiliating an act for the parents to attend to. In pronouncing such acustom ludicrous and outrageous we must not forget that not much morethan a century ago an English thinker, Samuel Johnson, expressed theopinion that marriages might as well be arranged by the LordChancellor without consulting the parties concerned. Schopenhauer had,indeed, reason to claim that it had remained for him to discover thesignificance and importance of love. His ideas on the relationsbetween love, youth, health, and beauty opened up a new vista ofthought; yet it was limited, because the question of heredity was onlyjust beginning to be understood, and the theory of evolution, whichhas revolutionized all science, had not yet appeared on the horizon.
The new science of anthropology, with its various branches, includingsociology, ethnology, and comparative psychology, has within the lasttwo or three decades brought together and discussed an immense numberof facts relating to man in his various stages ofdevelopment—savagery, barbarism, semi-civilization, and civilization.Monographs have appeared in great numbers on various customs andinstitutions, including marriage, which has been discussed in severalexhaustive volumes. Love alone has remained to be specially consideredfrom an evolutionary point of view. My own book, Romantic Love andPersonal Beauty, which appeared in 1887, did indeed touch upon thisquestion, but very briefly, inasmuch as its subject, as the titleindicates, was modern romantic love. A book on such a subject wasnaturally and easily written virginibus puerisque; whereas thepresent volume, being concerned chiefly with the love-affairs ofsavages and barbarians, could not possibly have been subjected to thesame restrictions. Care has been taken, however, to exclude anythingthat might offend a healthy taste.
If it has been necessary in some chapters to multiply unpleasantfacts, the reader must blame the sentimentalists who have sopersistently whitewashed the savages that it has become necessary, inthe interest of truth, to show them in their real colors. I haveindeed been tempted to give my book the sub-title "A Vindication ofCivilization" against the misrepresentations of these sentimentalistswho try to create the impression that savages owe all their depravityto contact with whites, having been originally spotless angels. If mypictures of the unadulterated savage may in some cases produce thesame painful impression as the sights in a museum's "chamber ofhorrors," they serve, on the other hand, to show us that, bad as wemay be, collectively, we are infinitely superior in love-affairs, asin everything else, to those primitive peoples; and thus we areencouraged to hope for further progress in the future in the directionof purity and altruism.
Although I have been obliged under the circumstances to indulge in aconsiderable amount of controversy, I have taken great pains to statethe views of my opponents fairly, and to be strictly impartial inpresenting facts with accuracy