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.
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