Intelligence alone does not imply a capacity for romantic love.  Dogs are the most intelligent of all animals, but they know nothing of love; the most intelligent nations of antiquity—­the Greeks, Romans and Hebrews—­were strangers to this feeling; and in our times we have seen that such intelligent persons as Tolstoi, Zola, Groncourt, Flaubert have been confessedly unable to experience real love such as Turgenieff held up to them.  On the other hand, there can be no genuine love without intelligence.  It is true that maternal love exists among the lowly, but that is an instinct developed by natural selection, because without it the race could not have persisted.  Conjugal attachment also was, as we have seen, necessary for the preservation of the race; whereas romantic love is not necessary for the preservation of the race, but is merely a means for its improvement; wherefore it developed slowly, keeping pace with the growth of the intellectual powers of discrimination, the gradual refinement of the emotions, and the removal of diverse obstacles created by selfishness, coarseness, foolish taboos, and prejudices.  A savage lives entirely in his senses, hence sensual love is the only kind he can know.  His love is as coarse and simple as his music, which is little more than a monotonous rhythmic noise.  Just as a man, unless he has musical culture, cannot understand a Schumann symphony, so, unless he has intellectual culture, he cannot love a woman as Schumann loved Clara Wieck.

Stupid persons, men and women with blunt intellects, also have blunt feelings, excepting those of a criminal, vengeful kind.  Savages have keener senses than we have, but their intellect and emotions are blunt and untrained.  An Australian cannot count above ten, and Galton says (132) that Damaras in counting “puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for units.”  Spix and Martins (384) found it very difficult to get any information from the Brazilian (Coroado) because “scarcely has one begun to question him about his language when he gets impatient, complains of headache, and shows that he cannot endure this effort”—­for he is used to living entirely in and for his senses.  Fancy such savages writing or reading a book like The Reveries of a Bachelor and you will understand why stupidity is an obstacle to love, and realize the unspeakable folly of the notion that love is always and everywhere the same.  The savage has no imagination, and imagination is the organ of romantic love; without it there can be no sympathy, and without sympathy there can be no love.

II.  COARSENESS AND OBSCENITY