Kissing and other caresses are, as we have seen, practices unknown to savages.  Their nerves being too coarse to appreciate even the more refined forms of sensualism, it follows of necessity that they are too coarse to experience the subtle manifestations of imaginative sentimental love.  Their national addiction to obscene practices and conversation proves an insuperable obstacle to the growth of refined sexual feelings.  Details given in later chapters will show that what Turner says of the Samoans, “From their childhood their ears are familiar with the most obscene conversation;” and what the Rev. George Taplan writes of the “immodest and lewd” dances of the Australians, applies to the lower races in general.  The history of love is, indeed, epitomized in the evolution of the dance from its aboriginal obscenity and licentiousness to its present function as chiefly a means of bringing young people together and providing innocent opportunities for courtship; two extremes differing as widely as the coarse drum accompaniment of a primitive dance from the sentimental melodies, soulful harmonies, and exquisite orchestral colors of a Strauss waltz.  A remark made by Taine on Burns suggests how even acquired coarseness in a mind naturally refined may crush the capacity for true love: 

“He had enjoyed too much....  Debauch had all but spoiled his fine imagination, which had before been ‘the chief source of his happiness’; and he confessed that, instead of tender reveries, he had now nothing but sensual desires.”

The poets have done much to confuse the public mind in this matter by their fanciful and impossible pastoral lovers.  The remark made in my first book, that “only an educated mind can feel romantic love,” led one of its reviewers to remark, half indignantly, half mournfully, “There goes the pastoral poetry of the world at a single stroke of the pen.”  Well, let it go.  I am quite sure that if these poetic dreamers had ever come across a shepherdess in real life—­dirty, unkempt, ignorant, coarse, immoral—­they would themselves have made haste to disavow their heroines and seek less malodorous “maidens” for embodiments of their exalted fancies of love[128].  Richard Wagner was promptly disillusioned when he came across some of those modern shepherdesses, the Swiss dairy-maids.  “There are magnificent women here in the Oberland,” he wrote to a friend, “but only so to the eye; they are all tainted with rabid vulgarity.”

III.  WAR

Herbert Spencer has devoted some eloquent pages[129] to showing that along with chronic militancy there goes a brutal treatment of women, whereas industrial tribes are likely to treat their wives and daughters well.  To militancy is due the disregard of women’s claims shown in stealing or buying them, the inequality of status between the sexes entailed by polygamy; the use of women as laboring slaves, the life-and-death