Emotional Curiosities

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_ When Williams adds to the last sentence that "fear prevents unfaithfulness more than affection, though I believe that instances of the latter are numerous," we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by a word. Fijian "affection" is a thing quite different from the altruistic feeling we mean by the word. It may in a wife assume the form of a blind attachment, like that of a dog to a cruel master, but is not likely to go beyond that, since even the most primitive love between parents and children is confessedly shallow, transient, or entirely absent. Williams "noticed cases beyond number where natural affection was wanting on both sides;" two-thirds of the offspring are killed, "such children as are allowed to live are treated with a foolish fondness"--and fondness is, as we have seen, not an altruistic but an egoistic feeling. In writing about Fijian friendships our author says:

"The high attainments which constitute friendship are
known to very few.... Full-grown men, it is true, will
walk about together, hand in hand, with boyish kindliness,
or meet with hugs and embraces; but their love, though
specious, is hardly real."

Obviously the keen-eyed missionary here had in mind the distinction between sentimentality and sentiment. Sentimentality of a most extraordinary kind is also found in the attitude of sons toward parents. A Fijian considered it a mark of affection to club an aged parent, and Williams has seen the breast of a ferocious savage heave and swell with strong emotion on bidding a temporary farewell to his aged father, whom he afterward strangled. Such are the emotions of barbarians--shallow, fickle, capricious--as different from our affection as a brook which dries up after every shower is from the deep and steady current of a river which dispenses its beneficent waters even in a drought. _

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