"most persons form marriage connections without due
regard to what is best for procreation of children."
"They seek after wealth and power, which in matrimony
are objects not worthy even of serious censure."
But his remedy for this evil was, as we have seen (775), quite as bad
as the evil itself, since it involved promiscuity and the elimination
of chastity and family life. Love accomplishes the results that Plato
and Lycurgus aimed at, so far as healthy offspring is concerned,
without making the same sacrifices and reducing human marriage to the
level of the cattle-breeder. It accomplishes, moreover, the same
result that natural selection secures, and without its cruelty, by
simply excluding from marriage the criminal, vicious, crippled,
imbecile, incurably diseased and all who do not come up to its
standard of health, vigor, and beauty.
While claiming that love is an instinct developed by nature as a
defence against the short-sighted selfishness of parents who would
sacrifice the future of the race to their own advantage or that of
their children, I do not forget that in the past it has often secured
its results in an illegitimate way. That, however, was no fault of its
own, being due to the artificial and foolish obstacles placed in its
way. Laws of nature cannot be altered by man, and if the safety valve
is tied down the boiler is bound to explode. In countries where
marriages are habitually arranged by the parents with reference to
rank or money alone, in defiance of love, the only "love-children" are
necessarily illegitimate. This has given rise to the notion that
illegitimate children are apt to be more beautiful, healthy, and
vigorous than the issue of regular marriages: and, under the
circumstances, it was true. But for this topsy-turvyness, this folly,
this immorality, we must not blame love, but those who persistently
thwarted love--or tried to thwart it. As soon as love was allowed a
voice in the arrangement of marriages illegitimacy decreased rapidly.
Had the rights of love been recognized sooner, it would have proved a
useful ally of morality instead its craftiest enemy.[335]
The utility of love from a moral point of view can be shown in other
ways. Many tendencies--such as club life, the greater ease of securing
divorces, the growing independence of women and their disinclination
to domesticity--are undermining that family life which civilization
has so slowly and laboriously built up, and fostering celibacy. Now
celibacy is not only unnatural and detrimental to health and
longevity, but it is the main root of immorality. Its antidote is
love, the most persuasive champion and promoter of marriage. No reader
of the present volume can fail to see that man has generally managed
to have a good time at the expense of woman and it is she who benefits
particularly by the modern phases of love and marriage. Yet in recent
years the notion that family life is not good enough for women, and
that they should be brought up in a spirit of manly independence, has
come over society like a noxious epidemic. It is quite proper that
there should be avenues of employment for women who have no one to
support them; but it is a grievous error to extend this to women in
general, to give them the education, tastes, habits, sports, and
politics of the men. It antagonizes that sexual differentiation of the
more refined sort on which romantic love depends and tempts men to
seek amusement in ephemeral, shallow amours. In plain English, while
there are many charming exceptions, the growing masculinity of girls
is the main reason why so many of them remain unmarried; thus
fulfilling the prediction: "Could we make her as the man, sweet love
were slain." Let girls return to their domestic sphere, make
themselves as delightfully feminine as possible, not trying to be
gnarled oaks but lovely vines clinging around them, and the sturdy
oaks will joyously extend their love and protection to them amid all
the storms of life. In love lies the remedy for many of the economic
problems of the day.
There is not one of the fourteen ingredients of romantic love which
cannot be shown to be useful in some way. Of individual preference and
its importance in securing a happy blend of qualities for the next
generation I have just spoken, and I have devoted nearly a page (131)
to the utility of coyness. Jealousy has helped to develop chastity,
woman's cardinal virtue and the condition of all refinement in love
and society. Monopolism has been the most powerful enemy of those two
colossal evils of savagery and barbarism--promiscuity and polygamy;
and it will in future prove as fatal an enemy to all attempts to bring
back promiscuity under the absurd name of "free love," which would
reduce all women to the level of prostitutes and make men desert them
after their charms have faded. Two other ingredients of love--purity
and the admiration of personal beauty--are of great value to the cause
of morality as conquerors of lust, which they antagonize and suppress
by favoring the higher (mental) sexual qualities; while the sense of
beauty also co-operates with the instinct which makes for the health
of future generations; beauty being simply the flower of health, and
inheritable.
At first sight it may seem difficult to assign any use to the pride,
the hyperbole, and the mixed moods which are component elements of
love; but they are of value inasmuch as they exalt the mind, and give
to the beloved such prominence and importance that the way is paved
for the altruistic ingredients of romantic love, the utility of which
is so obvious that it hardly needs to be hinted at. If love were
nothing more than a lesson in altruism--with many the first and only
lesson in their lives--it would be second in importance to no other
factor of civilization. Sympathy lifts the lover out of the deep
groove of selfishness, teaching him the miracle of feeling another's
pains and pleasures more keenly than his own. Man's adoration of woman
as a superior being--which she really is, as the distinctively
feminine virtues are more truly Christian and have a higher ethical
value than the masculine virtues--creates an ideal which has improved
women by making them ambitious to live up to it. No one, again, who
has read the preceding pages relating to the treatment of women before
romantic love existed, and compares it with their treatment at
present, can fail to recognize the wonderful transformation brought
about by gallantry and self-sacrifice--altruistic habits which have
changed men from ruffians to gentlemen. I do not say that love alone
is responsible for this improvement, but it has been one of the most
potent factors. Finally, there is affection, which, in conjunction
with the other altruistic ingredients of love, has changed it from an
appetite like that of a fly for sugar to a self-oblivious devotion
like a mother's for her child, thus raising it to the highest ethical
rank as an agency of culture.
We are still very far from the final stage in the evolution of love.
There is no reason to doubt that it will continue to develop, as in
the past, in the direction of the esthetic, supersensual, and
altruistic. As a physician's eye becomes trained for the subtle
diagnosis of disease, a clergyman's for the diagnosis of moral evil,
so will the love-instinct become more and more expert, critical, and
refined, rejecting those who are vicious or diseased. Compare the
lustrous eyes of a consumptive girl with the sparkling eyes of a
healthy maiden in buoyant spirits. Both are beautiful, but to a
doctor, or to anyone else who knows the deadliness and horrors of
tuberculosis, the beauty of the consumptive girl's eyes will seem
uncanny, like the charm of a snake, and it will inspire pity, which in
this case is not akin to love, but fatal to it. Thus may superior
knowledge influence our sense of beauty and liability to fall in love.
I know a man who was in love with a girl and had made up his mind to
propose. He went to call on her, and as he approached the door he
heard her abusing her mother in the most heartless manner. He did not
ring the bell, and never called again. His love was of the highest
type, but he suppressed his feelings.
More important than the further improvement of romantic love is the
task of increasing the proportion of men and women who will be capable
of experiencing it as now known to us. The vast majority are still
strangers to anything beyond primitive love. The analysis made in the
present volume will enable all persons who fancy themselves in love to
see whether their passion is merely self-love in a roundabout way or
true romantic affection for another. They can see whether it is mere
selfish liking, attachment, or fondness, or else unselfish affection.
If adoration, purity, sympathy, and the altruistic impulses of
gallantry and self-sacrifice are lacking, they can be cultivated by
deliberate exercise:
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this.
The affections can be trained as well as the muscles; and thus the
lesson taught in this book may help to bring about a new era of
unselfish devotion and true love. No man, surely, can read the
foregoing disclosures regarding man's primitive coarseness and
heartlessness without feeling ashamed for his sex and resolving to be
an unselfish lover and husband to the end of his life.
A great mistake was made by the Greeks when they distinguished
celestial from earthly love. The distinction itself was all right, but
their application of it was all wrong. Had they known romantic love as
we know it, they could not have made the grievous blunder of calling
the love between men and women worldly, reserving the word celestial
for the friendship between men. Equally mistaken were those mediaeval
sages who taught that the celestial sexual virtues are celibacy and
virginity--a doctrine which, if adopted, would involve the suicide of
the human race, and thus stands self-condemned. No, _celestial love is
not asceticism; it is altruism_. Romantic love is celestial, for it is
altruistic, yet it does not preach contempt of the body, and its goal
is marriage, the chief pillar of civilization. The admiration of a
beautiful, well-rounded, healthy body is as legitimate and laudable an
ingredient of romantic love as the admiration of that mental beauty
which distinguishes it from sensual love. It is not only that the
lovers themselves are entitled to partners with healthy, attractive
bodies; it is a duty they owe to the next generation not to marry
anyone who is likely to transmit bodily or mental infirmities to the
next generation. It is quite as reprehensible to marry for spiritual
reasons alone as to be guided only by physical charms.
Love is nature's radical remedy for disease, whereas marriage, as
practised in the past, and too often in the present, is little more
than a legalized crime. "One of the last things that occur to a
marrying couple is whether they are fit to be represented in
posterity," writes Dr. Harry Campbell (_Lancet_, 1898).
"Theft and murder are considered the blackest of crimes, but
neither the law nor the church has raised its voice against
the marriage of the unfit, for neither has realized that
worse than theft and well-nigh as bad as murder is the
bringing into the world, through disregard of parental
fitness, of individuals full of disease-tendencies."
On this point the public conscience needs a thorough rousing. If a
mother deliberately gave her daughter a draught which made her a
cripple, or an invalid, or an imbecile, or tuberculous, everybody
would cry out with horror, and she would become a social outcast. But
if she inflicts these injuries on her granddaughter, by marrying her
daughter to a drunkard, in the hope of reforming him, or to a wealthy
degenerate, or an imbecile baron, no one says a word, provided the
marriage law has been complied with.
It is owing to these persistent crimes against grandchildren that the
human race as a whole is still such a miserable rabble, and that
recruiting offices and insurances companies tell such startling tales
of degeneracy. Love would cure this, if there were more of the right
kind. Until there is, much good may be done by accepting it as a
guide, and building up a sentiment in favor of its instinctive object
and ideal. I have described in one chapter the obstacles which
retarded the growth of love, and in another I have shown how
sentiments change and grow. Most of those obstacles are being
gradually removed, and public opinion is slowly but surely changing in
favor of love. Building up a new sentiment is a slow process. At first
it may be a mere hut for a hermit thinker, but gradually it becomes
larger and larger as thousands add their mite to the building fund,
until at last it stands as a sublime cathedral admonishing all to do
their duty. When the Cathedral of Love is finished the horror of
disease and vice will have become as absolute a bar to marriage as the
horror of incest is now; and it will be acknowledged that the only
true marriage of reason is a marriage of love.