More definitely speaking, there are three ways in which the _Will_
preserves the purity of its types—three ways in which it inspires the
Love whose duty it is to achieve this result. Physical Beauty is the
first thing desired by the lover, because that is the expression of
typical perfection. Secondly, he may be influenced by such Psychic
Traits as will blend well with his own; and thirdly, he will be
attracted by perfections (or imperfections) which are the opposite of
his own. These three sources must be considered briefly in detail.
(1) _Physical Beauty._—The most important attribute of Beauty, in the
lover’s eye, is Youth. Men prefer the age from eighteen to twenty-eight
in a woman; while women give the preference to a man aged from thirty to
thirty-five, which represents the acme of his virility. Youth without
Beauty may still inspire Love; not so Beauty without Youth.
Health ranks next in importance. Acute disease is only a temporary
disadvantage, whereas chronic disease repels the amorous affections, for
the reason that it is likely to be transmitted to the next generation.
A fine framework or skeleton is the third desideratum. Besides age and
disease, nothing proves so fatal to the chances of inspiring Love as
deformity: “The most charming face does not atone for it; on the
contrary, even the ugliest face is preferred if allied with a straight
growth of the body.”
A certain plumpness or fulness of flesh is the next thing considered in
sexual selection; for this is an indication of Health, and promises a
sound progeny. Excessive leanness is repulsive, and so is excessive
stoutness, which is often an indication of sterility. “A well-developed
bust has a magic effect on a man.” What attracts women to men is
especially muscular development, because that is a quality in which they
are commonly deficient, and for which the children will accordingly have
to rely on the father. Women may marry an ugly man, but never one who is
unmanly.
Facial beauty ranks last in importance, according to Schopenhauer. Here
too the skeleton is first considered in sexual selection. The mouth must
be small, the chin projecting, “a slight curve of the nose, upwards or
downwards, has decided the fate of innumerable girls; and justly, for
the type of the species is at stake.” The eyes and the forehead,
finally, are closely associated with intellectual qualities.
(2) _Psychic Traits._—What charms women in men is preeminently courage
and energy, besides frankness and amiability. “Stupidity is no
disadvantage with women: indeed, it is more likely that superior
intellectual power, and especially genius, as being an abnormal trait,
may make an unfavourable impression on them. Hence we so often see an
ugly, stupid, and coarse man preferred by women to a refined, clever,
and amiable man.” When women claim to have fallen in love with a man’s
intellect, it is either affectation or vanity. Wedlock is a union of
hearts, not of heads; and its object is not entertaining conversation,
but providing for the next generation. This part of Schopenhauer’s
theory is evidently an outcome of his doctrine that children inherit
their intellectual qualities from the mother, and their character from
the father. Hence the feeling that they are capable of supplying their
children with sufficient intellect is part of the feminine
Love-instinct, and makes women indifferent to the presence or absence of
those qualities in men.
It does not follow from all this that a sensible man may not reflect on
his chosen one’s character, or she on his intellectual abilities, before
marriage. Such reflection leads to marriages of reason, but not to
Love-marriages, which alone are here under consideration.
(3) _Complementary Qualities._—The physical and mental attributes
considered under (1) and (2) are those which commonly inspire Love. But
there are cases where perfect Beauty is less potent to inflame the
passions than deviations from the normal type.
“Ordinarily it is not the regular perfect beauties that inspire the
great passions,” says Schopenhauer; and this seems to be borne out by
the experience of Byron, who says: “I believe there are few men who, in
the course of their observations on life, have not perceived that it is
not the greatest female beauty who forms [inspires] the longest and the
strongest passions.”
How is this to be accounted for? By the anxiety of Nature (or the
_Will_) to neutralise imperfections in one individual by wedding them to
another’s excesses in the opposite direction; as an acid is neutralised
by combining it with an alkali. The greater the shortcoming the more
ardent will be the infatuation if a person is found exactly adapted for
its neutralisation. The weaker a woman is, for example, in her muscular
system, the more apt will she be to fall violently in love with an
athlete. Short men have a decided partiality for tall women, and _vice
versâ_. Blondes almost always desire brunettes; and if the reverse does
not hold true, this is owing to the fact, he says, that the original
colour of the human complexion was not light but dark. A light
complexion has indeed become second nature to us, but less so the other
features; and “in love nature strives to return to dark hair and brown
eyes, as the primitive type.”
Again, persons afflicted with a pug-nose take a special delight in
falcon-noses and parrot-faces; and those who are excessively long and
slim admire those who are abnormally short and even stumpy. So with
temperaments; each one preferring the opposite to his or her own. True,
if a person is quite perfect in any one respect, he does not exactly
prefer the corresponding imperfection in another, but he is more readily
reconciled to it.
Throughout his essay, Schopenhauer tacitly assumes that the parental
peculiarities are fused or blended equally in the offspring, and that
this blending is what the _Will_ aims at. But on this point Mr. Herbert
Spencer has some remarks, in his essay on “Personal Beauty,” which
directly contradict Schopenhauer, of whose theory, however, he does not
seem to have been cognisant:—
“The fact,” he says, "that the forms and qualities of any offspring are
not a mean between the forms and qualities of its parents, but a mixture
of them, is illustrated in every family. The features and peculiarities
of a child are separately referred by observers to father and mother
respectively—nose and mouth to this side; colour of the hair and eyes to
that; this moral peculiarity to the first; this intellectual one to the
second—and so with contour and idiosyncrasies of body. Manifestly, if
each organ or faculty in a child was an average of the two developments
of such organ or faculty in the parents, it would follow that all
brothers and sisters should be alike; or should, at any rate, differ no
more than their parents differed from year to year. So far, however,
from finding that this is the case, we find not only that great
irregularities are produced by intermixture of traits, but that there is
no constancy in the mode of intermixture, or the extent of variations
produced by it.
“This imperfect union of parental constitutions in the constitution of
offspring is yet more clearly illustrated by the reappearance of
peculiarities traceable to bygone generations. Forms, dispositions, and
diseases, possessed by distant progenitors, habitually come out from
time to time in descendants. Some single feature, or some solitary
tendency, will again and again show itself after being apparently lost.
It is notoriously thus with gout, scrofula, and insanity.”
Again, unite a pure race “with another equally pure, but adapted to
different conditions and having a correspondingly different physique,
face, and morale, and there will occur in the descendants not a
homogeneous mean between the two constitutions, but a seemingly
irregular combination of characteristics of the one with characteristics
of the other—one feature traceable to this race, a second to that, and a
third uniting the attributes of both; while in disposition and intellect
there will be found a like medley of the two originals.”
The fact that the more remote ancestry must be taken into account
besides the parents, in considering the traits of the offspring, is one
which Mr. Galton has done much to emphasise, and which Schopenhauer
completely ignores. It tells against the metaphysical part of his
theory; for all the efforts of the _Will_ to merge opposite characters
into homogeneous traits must prove futile if a blue-eyed man, for
instance, who marries a black-eyed girl, finds that their children have
neither the father’s blue nor the mother’s black, but the grandmother’s
gray eyes.
Yet in the long run diverse traits of figure and physiognomy do tend to
a harmonious fusion. Though a man with a prominent nose, which he
inherited from his father, is likely to transmit it to his son, though
his wife may have a snub-nose, yet there will be a slight modification
even in the son’s organ; and if the son keeps up the tradition of
marrying a snub-nosed girl, and his children follow his example, the
chances are that in a few generations the nose of that family will be a
feature of moderate size and classic proportions. The very fact
emphasised by Mr. Galton that all the ancestral influences count, will
here aid the ultimate fusion. Conspicuous instances of the
long-continued prevalence of a particular nose—or other feature—may be
accounted for by the fact that other kinds of that organ were rare in
the vicinity, or that marriage was decided by so many other
considerations that the dimensions of one organ could not come into
consideration, much as the bride or groom might have preferred an
improvement in that respect.
So far as Schopenhauer’s theory concerns only the fact that Love is apt
to be based on complementary qualities, he is doubtless correct; but it
needs no erratic metaphysical fetish, as a _deus ex machina_, to account
for that fact. A simple application of psychologic principles explains
the whole mystery.
In the first place, nothing could be more remote from the truth than the
cynical notion that every woman considers herself a Venus. She may, on
the whole, consider herself equal to the average of Beauty; but if she
has any special fault—a mouth too large or too small, an upper lip too
high, a nose too flat or too prominent, too much or too little flesh,
excessive height or shortness—she is not only conscious of the defect,
but morbidly conscious of it, and uses every possible device to conceal
it. Thus constantly brooding over her misfortune her mind, by a natural
reaction, will conceive a special admiration for an organ that exceeds
the line of Beauty in the opposite direction. Every day one hears a
_petite_ girl admiring a specially tall woman; and this admiration will
prompt her, other things being equal, to fall in love with a tall man.
Secondly, familiarity breeds indifference to one’s own charms, and a
disposition to admire what we lack ourselves.
Novelty comes into play. A Northern blonde among a nation of brunettes
cannot fail to slay hearts by the hundred, while the mystic flashes of a
Spanish woman’s black eyes are fatal to every Northern visitor.
Nations, like individuals, admire and desire what they lack. The Germans
and the English are deficient in grace—hence that quality is what
chiefly charms them in the French, who have much more of it than of
Beauty, and in the Spanish. Byron was so much smitten with the
sun-mellowed complexions and the graceful proportions and gait of the
Spanish maidens, that he became quite unjust to his own lovely
countrywomen—
“Who round the North for paler dames would seek?
How poor their forms appear! How languid, wan, and weak!”
Were savages susceptible to Love, it might be suggested that their
practice of exogamy, or marrying a woman from another tribe, had
something to do with their admiration of novelty and complementary
qualities; but we know that they do not admire such qualities, but only
such typical traits as prevail among their own women, and these,
moreover, in an exaggerated form. This is one reason why savages are so
ugly. They have no Romantic Love to improve their Personal Beauty by
fusing heterogeneous defects into homogeneous perfections.
Thus we may freely endorse Schopenhauer’s doctrine regarding the
benefits derived by the offspring (ultimately, in several generations)
from marriages based on complementary Love, without bowing down before
his fetish—a fetish which appears doubly objectionable because it is
old-fashioned; _i.e._ it strives to “maintain the type of the species in
its primitive purity,” whereas modern science teaches that this
“primitive type” of human beauty had a very simian aspect.
Nor need we at all accept the pessimistic aspect of his theory—the
notion that Love is an illusion, and that Love-marriages commonly end
unhappily, the lover sacrificing himself for his progeny.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his _Sociology_, elaborates an idea which so
curiously leads up to this phase of Schopenhauer’s doctrine that it must
be briefly referred to for its evolutionary suggestiveness.
Among the lowest animals—the microscopic protozoa—the individual, as he
remarks, is sacrificed after a few hours of life, by breaking up into
two new individuals, or into a number of germs which produce a new
generation. The parents are here entirely sacrificed to the interests of
the young and the species. As we ascend in the scale of life this
sacrifice of parents to the young and the species becomes less and less
prevalent. Among birds, for instance, “The lives of the parents are but
partially subordinated at times when the young are being reared. And
then there are long intervals between breeding-seasons, during which the
lives of parents are carried on for their own sakes.... In proportion as
organisms become higher in their structures and powers, they are
individually less sacrificed to the maintenance of the species; and the
implication is that in the highest type of man this sacrifice is reduced
to a minimum.”
Here is the point where Schopenhauer, had he been an evolutionist, might
have dovetailed his theory with Spencer’s, by saying that in man it is
no longer the life of the individual, or most of his time, that is
sacrificed, but merely his conjugal happiness, which the Love-instinct
induces him unconsciously to barter for the superior physical and mental
beauty of his offspring.
Unfortunately, Schopenhauer did not take any pains to verify his theory
by testing it by vulgar facts. There are plenty of unhappy marriages,
but no one who will search his memory can fail to come to the conclusion
that the vast majority of them are cases where money or rank and not
Love supplied the motive of an unsympathetic union. Though Conjugal
Affection consists of a different group of emotions from Romantic Love,
yet there is an affinity between them; and it is not likely that
Conjugal Love will ever supervene where before marriage there was an
entire absence of sympathy and adoration. Even an imprudent Love-match
which leads to poverty—is it not preferable to a _mariage de
convenance_, which leads to lifelong indifference and _ennui_? Is it not
better to have one month of ecstatic bliss in life than to live and die
without ever knowing life’s highest rapture?
Again, the French marry for money and social convenience, and their
children are ugly; the Americans marry for Love, and have the most
beautiful children in the world. Is it not more conducive to conjugal
happiness to know that one has lovely children and that the race is
increasing, than to have ugly children and to know that the race is
dying out?
Love-matches would never end unhappily if the lovers would take proper
care of their own happiness by transfusing the habits of Courtship into
conjugal life, as elsewhere explained in this book.
Schopenhauer’s whole argument is vitiated by the fact that it is chiefly
the physical complementary qualities that inspire Love, not the
mental—the latter, in fact, being barely noticed by him. Mental
divergence might indeed occasionally lead to an unhappy marriage, but
physical divergence—the fact that he is large and blond, she small and a
brunette—cannot possibly lead to matrimonial discord. This knocks the
whole bottom out of Schopenhauer’s erotic pessimism. The only sense in
which Love is an illusion is in its Hyperbolic phase—the notion that the
beloved is superior to all other mortals; and that is a very harmless
illusion.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism, it should be added, is greatly mitigated by
the poetic halo of martyrdom with which he invests the lover’s head.
Society and public opinion, he points out, applaud him for instinctively
preferring the welfare of the next generation to his own comfort. “For
is not the exact determination of the individualities of the next
generation a much higher and nobler object than those ecstatic feelings
of the lovers, and their super-sensual soap-bubbles?” It is this that
invests Love with its poetic character. There is one thing only that
justifies tears in a man, and that is the loss of his Love, for in that
he bewails not his own loss but the loss of the species.
Apart from the suggestive details of his essay, Schopenhauer’s merit and
originality lies, first, in his having pointed out that Love becomes
more intense the more it is individualised; secondly, in emphasising the
fact that in match-making it is not the happiness of the to-be-married
couple that should be chiefly consulted, but the consequences of their
union to the offspring; thirdly, in dwelling on the important truth that
Love is a cause of Beauty, because its aim always is either to
perpetuate existing Beauty through hereditary transmission, or to create
new Beauty by fusing two imperfect individuals into a being in whom
their short-comings mutually neutralise one another.
Love, however, is only one source of Personal Beauty. Personal Beauty
has four sources; and these must now be considered in succession, in the
order which roughly indicates their successive evolution—Health,
Crossing, Love, and Mental Refinement.
The remainder of this work will be devoted exclusively to the subject of
Personal Beauty, as it influences and is influenced by Romantic Love.
And here, as in the preceding pages, I shall always cite the _ipsissima
verba_ of the greatest specialists who have written on any particular
branch of this subject.