What Crossing does on a national scale, Love continues with individuals,
by fusing dissonant, but complementary, parental qualities into a
harmonious progeny. How this is done is sufficiently shown in the
chapter on Schopenhauer.
This, however, is only one of the ways in which Love increases the
amount of Beauty in the world. There are several others.
The second is that—apart from complementary considerations—Romantic Love
always urges the choice of a mate who approaches nearest to the ideal
type of Beauty. As Beauty is hereditary, and as a beautiful father and
mother may have six or more beautiful children, this predilection for
Beauty shown by Love necessarily preserves and multiplies it—
“From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby Beauty’s rose might never die,”
says Shakspere, anticipating the modern theory of heredity.
On this particular topic nothing more need be said here, because all the
remainder of this book will be taken up with a consideration of those
features of Personal Beauty for which the æsthetic taste which forms
part of Romantic Love shows a decided preference.
The third way in which Love promotes the cause of Beauty is by the great
attention it pays to Health in its choice. For though Health is not
always synonymous with Beauty, it is the soil on which alone Beauty can
germinate and flourish.
The fourth way is through the elimination of ugliness. Love, says Plato,
is devotion to Beauty: “with the ugly Eros has no concern.”
From the æsthetic point of view, ugliness is disease. Now there is a
cast-iron Lykurgean law prevailing throughout Nature which eliminates
the diseased and the ugly. It is a cruel agency, called Natural
Selection, and has not the slightest regard for individuals, but
provides only for the weal of the species, as Schopenhauer erroneously
says is the case with Love. In a bed of plants, if there are more than
can find sustenance, the stronger crowd out the weaker. Among animals,
wherever there is competition, the best-developed, handsomest lion
survives in combat, and the most fleet-footed, and consequently most
graceful, deer escapes, while the clumsy, the ugly, and diseased perish
miserably, inexorably. Savages leave the old and feeble to die, and weak
or deformed children are either deliberately put out of the way or
perish from want of proper care. Nor among the ancient civilised nations
were such methods unknown. Plato and Aristotle, says Mr. Grote, agree in
this point: “Both of them command that no child born crippled or
deformed shall be brought up—a practice actually adopted at Sparta under
the Lykurgean Institutions, and even carried further, since no child was
allowed to be brought up until it had been inspected and approved by the
public nurses.” The Romans, too, were legally permitted to expose
deformed children.
Christianity, the religion of pity and charity, abhors such practices.
Christianity is antagonistic to Natural Selection. One of its chief
functions is the building of hospitals in which the cripples, the
insane, the incurably diseased, are gratuitously and tenderly cared for,
instead of being allowed to perish, as they would under the sway of
Natural Selection.
This artificial preservation of disease and deformity, in and out of
hospitals, due to Christian charity, might in the long run prove
injurious to the welfare of the human race, were it not for the stepping
in of Modern Love as a preserver of Health and Beauty. What formerly was
left to the agency of Natural Selection is now done by Love, through
Sexual Selection, on a vast scale.
From a moral point of view, the substitution of Sexual for Natural
Selection is a great gain, in harmony with the spirit of Christianity.
For Cupid does not _kill_ those who do not come up to his standard of
Health and Beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of
single-blessedness.