If these secondary sexual characters could be destroyed by the
extraordinary--one might almost say criminal--efforts of unsexed
termagants to make all women ape men and become like them, romantic
love, which was so slow in coming, would disappear again, leaving only
sensual appetite, which may be (selfishly) fastidious and intense, but
has no depth, duration, or altruistic nobility, and which, when
satiated, cares no more for the object for which it had temporarily
hungered. It is these secondary sexual characters, with their subtle
and endless variations, that have given individual preference such a
wide field of choice that every lover can find a girl after his heart
and taste. A savage is like a gardener who has only one kind of
flowers to choose between--all of one color too; whereas we, with our
diverse secondary characters, our various intermixtures of
nationalities, our endless shades of blonde and brunette, and
differences in manners and education can have our choice among the
lilies, roses, violets, pansies, daisies, and thousands of other
flowers--or the girls named after them. Samuel Baker says there are no
broken hearts in Africa. Why should there be when individuals are so
similar that if a man loses his girl he can easily find another just
like her in color, face, rotundity, and grossness? A civilized lover
would mourn the loss of his bride--though he were offered his choice
of the beauties of Baltimore--because it would be _absolutely
impossible to duplicate her_.
In that last line lies the explanation of one of the mysteries of
modern love--its stubborn fidelity to the beloved after the choice has
been made. But there is another mystery of individual preference that
calls for an explanation--its capriciousness, apparent or real, in
making a choice--that quality which has made the poets declare so
often that "love is blind." On this point much confusion of ideas
prevails.
Matters are simplified if we first dispose of those numerous cases in
which the individual preference is only approximate. If a girl of
eighteen has the choice between a man of sixty and a youth of twenty,
she will, if she exercises a _personal_ preference, take the youth, as
a matter of course, though he may be far from her ideal. Such
preference is generic rather than individual. Again, in most cases of
first love, as I have remarked elsewhere (_R.L.P.B_., 139) "man falls
in love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or
woman." Young men and women inherit, from a long series of ancestors,
a disposition to love which at puberty reveals itself in vague
longings and dreams. The "bump of amativeness," as a phrenologist
might say, is like a powder magazine, ready to explode at a touch, and
it makes no great difference what kind of a match is applied. In later
love affairs the match is a matter of more importance.
Robert Burton threw light on the "capriciousness" and accidentally of
this kind of (apparent) amorous preference when he wrote that "it is
impossible, almost, for two young folks equal in years to live
together and not be in love;" and further he says, sagaciously:
"Many a serving man, by reason of this opportunity and
importunity, inveigles his master's daughter, many a
gallant loves a dowdy, many a gentleman runs after his
wife's maids; many ladies dote upon their men, as the
queen in Aristo did upon the dwarf, many matches are so
made in haste and they are compelled, as it were by
necessity, so to love, which had they been free, come
in company with others, seen that variety which many
places afford, or compared them to a third, would never
have looked upon one another."
Such passions are merely pent-up emotions seeking to escape one way or
another. They do not indicate real, intense preference, but at best an
approach to it; for they are not properly individualized, and, as
Schopenhauer pointed out, the differences in the intensity of
love-cases depend on their different degrees of individualization--an
_aperçu_ which this whole chapter confirms. Yet these mere
approximations to real preference embrace the vast majority of
so-called love-affairs. Genuine preference of the highest type finds
its explanation in special phases of sympathy and personal beauty
which will be discussed later on.
What is usually considered the greatest mystery of the amorous passion
is the disposition of a lover to "see Helen's beauty in a brow of
Egypt." "What can Jack have seen in Jill to become infatuated with
her, or she in him?" The trouble with those who so often ask this
question is that they fix the attention on the beloved instead of on
the lover, whose lack of taste explains everything. The error is of
long standing, as the following story related by the Persian poet
Saadi (of the thirteenth century) will show (346):