Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/118

REVIEWS OF BOOKS Primitive Love and Love-Stories. By Henry T. Finck. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1899. Pp. xvii, 851.) The present volume may be regarded as a sequel to the author's earlier work, Romantic Love and Personal Beauty. The central thesis of this earlier production was that human love, far from being "always the same, ' ' as the poets and even the psychologists have commonly regarded it, has been subject to the laws of development and change, and that ro- mantic love, which differs from conjugal affection, is an essentially modern experience, of which no trace can be found among primitive peoples, or even among the Greeks and Romans. This position was at- tacked by many of his critics, and it is in defense of it that Mr. Finck has written Primitive Love atid Love-Stories, which is an exhaustive treat- ment of the whole question at issue. It embodies the results of a study of a large body of primitive and classical literature, and of the leading works on ethnology which throw light upon the subject. The book it- self is a valuable contribution to the special subject with which it deals. The first three hundred and fifty pages of the work are devoted mainly to an analysis of romantic love, and to a direct exposition and defense of the author's theory. The remainder is chiefly occupied with an account of the customs and sentiments attending love and marriage among different races, as revealed in their literature. A closing chapter is devoted to "Utility and Future of Love," and excellent indexes are added. A bibliography and index of authors is given, separate from the index of subjects. Mr. Finck prepares the way for an acceptance of his theory by show- ing how other sentiments besides that of love have been transformed in the course of their development. He appeals to the well-known fact that not only do savages the world over stand in mortal terror of certain wild and romantic aspects of nature, which often arouse the profoundest emotions of delight in educated moderns, but the Greeks and Romans also shared the same feeling of dislike and dread, as Humboldt, Fried- laender, and Rhode have shown. He also discusses the change in reli- gious ideas and emotions, which in primitive religions have been as crude and coarse as were the beginnings of the sentiment of love. For other illustrations of the transformation of ideas and their attendant emotions certain moral notions' are chosen — murder, polygamy, incest, chastity, etc., conceptions which have manifestly changed so radically in the moral evolution of the race that they have in some instances been com- pletely inverted. (.08)