Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/34

Rh INTRODUCTION can it entice the unripe interest of the young. For pruriency consists in oblique day-dreaming and not in simple and direct statement. The reader will find that the natives treat sex in the long run not only as a source of pleasure, but, indeed, as a thing serious and even sacred. Nor do their customs and ideas eliminate from sex its power to transform crude material fact into wonderful spiritual experience, to throw the romantic glamour of love over the technicalities of love-making. The institutions of the Trobriand community allow mere brutal passion to ripen into life-long love, to be shot through with personal affinities, to be strengthened by the manifold bonds and attachments created through the advent of children, by the mutual anxieties and hopes, by the common aims and interests of family life.

It is perhaps in the blending of the directly sensual with the romantic and in the wide and weighty sociological consequences of what to start with is the most personal event — it is in this richness and multiplicity of love that lies its philosophic mystery, its charm for the poet and its interest for the anthropologist. This many-sidedness of love exists among the Trobrianders as well as with us, and it brings nearer to us even that which to most might at first appear crude and uncontrolled.

To ignore this latter aspect, however, to shirk treating the material foundations of love would in a scientific work mean completely to stultify all results. It would be to commit the unpardonable sin of evading the real issue. Anyone who does not wish to be concerned with sex need not acquire or read this book; and those who approach the subject in a non-scientific spirit may be warned from Rh