Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/15



sexual life of savages has long awaited its natural historian. Owing to sex taboos, that weigh at least as much on the civilized as on the savage mind, this subject has always been veiled in mystery. The mystery has been fascinating or sombre according to the general attitude to savagery that happened to prevail. In the eighteenth century it was fascinating. That century, especially in its French mode, virtually discovered what is loosely and incorrectly termed "Primitive Man," and found his finest embodiment in the new and Paradisiacal world of America and Oceania. These French voyagers and missionaries (though there were some notable but more sober-minded English and other sailors among them) were delighted and intoxicated as these strange manners and customs, often so gracious and fantastic, opened out before their astonished vision. They were incapable of understanding them, and they had no time to penetrate below the surface, but the enthusiastic impressions they honestly set down seemed a revelation to the Parisian world with its own widely unlike artificialities and conventions. Then was developed the conception of the "noble" savage of whom Tacitus had caught a glimpse in primeval German forests living in "a state of Nature." The nineteenth century grew contemptuous of what seemed to it

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