Falling in Love

1. Falling in Love

An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir

George Campbell has set his face against the time-honoured practice of

Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their faces

against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only

attacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn the

institution itself on general principles. An old Indian administrator,

however, goes to work in all things on a different pattern. He would

always like to regulate human life generally as a department of the

India Office; and so Sir George Campbell would fain have husbands and

wives selected for one another (perhaps on Dr. Johnson's principle, by

the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future development of the race,

in the process which he not very felicitously or elegantly describes as

'man-breeding.' 'Probably,' he says, as reported in _Nature_, 'we have

enough physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in the

pairing of individuals of the same or allied races if we could only

apply that knowledge to make fitting marriages, instead of giving way to

foolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people, whom we can

hardly trust to choose their own bonnets, much less to choose in a

graver matter in which they are most likely to be influenced by

frivolous prejudices.' He wants us, in other words, to discard the

deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited instinct, and to

substitute for them some calm and dispassionate but artificial

selection of a fitting partner as the father or mother of future

generations.

Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be treated

seriously and reverently. But, it seems to me, Sir George Campbell's

conclusion is exactly the opposite one from the conclusion now being

forced upon men of science by a study of the biological and

psychological elements in this very complex problem of heredity. So far

from considering love as a 'foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests

of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists,

especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it

rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct developed

and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring

just those precise advantages and improvements which Sir George Campbell

thinks he could himself effect by a conscious and deliberate process of

selection. More than that, I believe, for my own part (and I feel sure

most evolutionists would cordially agree with me), that this beneficent

inherited instinct of Falling in Love effects the object it has in view

far more admirably, subtly, and satisfactorily, on the average of

instances, than any clumsy human selective substitute could possibly

effect it.

In short, my doctrine is simply the old-fashioned and confiding belief

that marriages are made in heaven: with the further corollary that

heaven manages them, one time with another, a great deal better than Sir

George Campbell.

Let us first look how Falling in Love affects the standard of human

efficiency; and then let us consider what would be the probable result

of any definite conscious attempt to substitute for it some more

deliberate external agency.

Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing

more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the

human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin

has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the

animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his a*********** around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the

delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of

his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the

eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty

and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom

he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the

admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to

be beautiful is to be efficient; and s****l selection is thus, as it

were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the

fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability,

producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in

the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the

case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the

'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.

In our own species, the selective process is marked by all the features

common to selection throughout the whole animal kingdom; but it is also,

as might be expected, far more specialised, far more individualised, far

more cognisant of personal traits and minor peculiarities. It is

furthermore exerted to a far greater extent upon mental and moral as

well as physical peculiarities in the individual.

We cannot fall in love with everybody alike. Some of us fall in love

with one person, some with another. This instinctive and deep-seated

differential feeling we may regard as the outcome of complementary

features, mental, moral, or physical, in the two persons concerned; and

experience shows us that, in nine cases out of ten, it is a reciprocal

affection, that is to say, in other words, an affection roused in unison

by varying qualities in the respective individuals.

Of its eminently conservative and even upward tendency very little doubt

can be reasonably entertained. We _do_ fall in love, taking us in the

lump, with the young, the beautiful, the strong, and the healthy; we do

_not_ fall in love, taking us in the lump, with the aged, the ugly, the

feeble, and the sickly. The prohibition of the Church is scarcely needed

to prevent a man from marrying his grandmother. Moralists have always

borne a special grudge to pretty faces; but, as Mr. Herbert Spencer

admirably put it (long before the appearance of Darwin's selective

theory), 'the saying that beauty is but skin-deep is itself but a

skin-deep saying.' In reality, beauty is one of the very best guides we

can possibly have to the desirability, so far as race-preservation is

concerned, of any man or any woman as a partner in marriage. A fine

form, a good figure, a beautiful bust, a round arm and neck, a fresh

complexion, a lovely face, are all outward and visible signs of the

physical qualities that on the whole conspire to make up a healthy and

vigorous wife and mother; they imply soundness, fertility, a good

circulation, a good digestion. Conversely, sallowness and paleness are

roughly indicative of dyspepsia and an***; a flat chest is a symptom of

deficient maternity; and what we call a bad figure is really, in one way

or another, an unhealthy departure from the central norma and standard

of the race. Good teeth mean good deglutition; a clear eye means an

active liver; scrubbiness and undersizedness mean feeble virility. Nor

are indications of mental and moral efficiency by any means wanting as

recognised elements in personal beauty. A good-humoured face is in

itself almost pretty. A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive

features. Low, receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid,

half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however regular their

lines and contours. Intelligence and goodness are almost as necessary as

health and vigour in order to make up our perfect ideal of a beautiful

human face and figure. The Apollo Belvedere is no fool; the murderers in

the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's are for the most part no

beauties.

What we all fall in love with, then, as a race, is in most cases

efficiency and ability. What we each fall in love with individually is,

I believe, our moral, mental, and physical complement. Not our like, not

our counterpart; quite the contrary; within healthy limits, our unlike

and our opposite. That this is so has long been more or less a

commonplace of ordinary conversation; that it is scientifically true,

one time with another, when we take an extended range of cases, may, I

think, be almost demonstrated by sure and certain warranty of human

nature.

Brothers and sisters have more in common, mentally and physically, than

any other members of the same race can possibly have with one another.

But nobody falls in love with his sister. A profound instinct has taught

even the lower races of men (for the most part) to avoid such union of

the all-but-identical. In the higher races the idea never so much as

occurs to us. Even cousins seldom fall in love--seldom, that is to say,

in comparison with the frequent opportunities of intercourse they enjoy,

relatively to the remainder of general society. When they do, and when

they carry out their perilous choice effectively by marriage, natural

selection soon avenges Nature upon the offspring by cutting off the

idiots, the consumptives, the weaklings, and the cripples, who often

result from such consanguineous marriages. In narrow communities, where

breeding in-and-in becomes almost inevitable, natural selection has

similarly to exert itself upon a crowd of _cr****_ and other hapless

incapables. But in wide and open champaign countries, where individual

choice has free room for exercise, men and women as a rule (if not

constrained by parents and moralists) marry for love, and marry on the

whole their natural complements. They prefer outsiders, fresh blood,

somebody who comes from beyond the community, to the people of their own

immediate surroundings. In many men the dislike to marrying among the

folk with whom they have been brought up amounts almost to a positive

instinct; they feel it as impossible to fall in love with a

fellow-townswoman as to fall in love with their own first cousins. Among

exogamous tribes such an instinct (aided, of course, by other extraneous

causes) has hardened into custom; and there is reason to believe (from

the universal traces among the higher civilisations of marriage by

capture) that all the leading races of the world are ultimately derived

from exogamous ancestors, possessing this healthy and excellent

sentiment.

In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted that short men,

as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men admire little women. Dark

pairs by preference with fair; the commonplace often runs after the

original. People have long noticed that this attraction towards one's

opposite tends to keep true the standard of the race; they have not,

perhaps, so generally observed that it also indicates roughly the

existence in either individual of a desire for its own natural

complement. It is difficult here to give definite examples, but

everybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there

are involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which

strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form with

ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek out

and discover such qualities; instinct works far more intuitively than

that; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and how

trustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do

so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliest

promptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinest

and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.

How very subtle this intuition is, we can only guess in part by the

apparent capriciousness and incomprehensibility of its occasional

action. We know that some men and women fall in love easily, while

others are only moved to love by some very special and singular

combination of peculiarities. We know that one man is readily stirred by

every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused by

intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we

meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for

some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love

with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't,

of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and

women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has

somewhere on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must sooner or

later meet or else die unsatisfied. Almost every healthy normal man or

woman has probably fallen in love over and over again in the course of a

lifetime (except in case of very early marriage), and could easily find

dozens of persons with whom they would be capable of falling in love

again if due occasion offered. We are not all created in pairs, like the

Exchequer tallies, exactly intended to fit into one another's minor

idiosyncrasies. Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love with

one another in the particular places and the particular societies they

happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt the

world over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-le-Monial or at

Denver, Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a vast number

are purely indifferent to him; only one or two, here and there, strike

him in the light of possible wives, and only one in the last resort

(outside Salt Lake City) approves herself to his inmost nature as the

actual wife of his final selection.

Now this very indifference to the vast mass of our fellow-countrymen or

fellow-countrywomen, this extreme pitch of selective preference in the

human species, is just one mark of our extraordinary specialisation, one

stamp and token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick and

choose, though even there, as Darwin has shown, selection plays a large

part (for the very butterflies are coy, and must be wooed and won). It

is only in the human race itself that selection descends into such

minute, such subtle, such indefinable discriminations. Why should a

universal and common impulse have in our case these special limits? Why

should we be by nature so fastidious and so diversely affected? Surely

for some good and sufficient purpose. No deep-seated want of our complex

life would be so narrowly restricted without a law and a meaning.

Sometimes we can in part explain its conditions. Here, we see that

beauty plays a great _r**_; there, we recognise the importance of

strength, of manner, of grace, of moral qualities. Vivacity, as Mr.

Galton justly remarks, is one of the most powerful among human

attractions, and often accounts for what might otherwise seem

unaccountable preferences. But after all is said and done, there remains

a vast mass of instinctive and inexplicable elements: a power deeper and

more marvellous in its inscrutable ramifications than human

consciousness. 'What on earth,' we say, 'could So-and-so see in

So-and-so to fall in love with?' This very inexplicability I take to be

the sign and seal of a profound importance. An instinct so conditioned,

so curious, so vague, so unfathomable, as we may guess by analogy with

all other instincts, must be Nature's guiding voice within us, speaking

for the good of the human race in all future generations.

On the other hand, let us suppose for a moment (impossible supposition!)

that mankind could conceivably divest itself of 'these foolish ideas

about love and the tastes of young people,' and could hand over the

choice of partners for life to a committee of anthropologists, presided

over by Sir George Campbell. Would the committee manage things, I

wonder, very much better than the Creator has managed them? Where would

they obtain that intimate knowledge of individual structures and

functions and differences which would enable them to join together in

holy matrimony fitting and complementary idiosyncrasies? Is a living

man, with all his organs, and powers, and faculties, and dispositions,

so simple and easy a problem to read that anybody else can readily

undertake to pick out off-hand a help meet for him? I trow not! A man is

not a horse or a terrier. You cannot discern his 'points' by simple

inspection. You cannot see _ priori_ why a Hanoverian bandsman and his

heavy, ignorant, uncultured wife, should conspire to produce a Sir

William Herschel. If you tried to improve the breed artificially, either

by choice from outside, or by the creation of an independent moral

sentiment, irrespective of that instinctive preference which we call

Falling in Love, I believe that so far from improving man, you would

only do one of two things--either spoil his constitution, or produce a

tame stereotyped pattern of amiable imbecility. You would crush out all

initiative, all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality; you would

get an animated moral code instead of living men and women.

Look at the analogy of domestic animals. That is the analogy to which

breeding reformers always point with special pride: but what does it

really teach us? That you can't improve the efficiency of animals in any

one point to any high degree, without upsetting the general balance of

their constitution. The race-horse can run a mile on a particular day at

a particular place, bar accidents, with wonderful speed: but that is

about all he is good for. His health as a whole is so surprisingly

feeble that he has to be treated with as much care as a delicate exotic.

'In regard to animals and plants,' says Sir George Campbell, 'we have

very largely mastered the principles of heredity and culture, and the

modes by which good qualities may be maximised, bad qualities

minimised.' True, so far as concerns a few points prized by ourselves

for our own purposes. But in doing this, we have so lowered the general

constitutional vigour of the plants or animals that our vines fall an

easy prey to oidium and phylloxera, our potatoes to the potato disease

and the Colorado beetle; our sheep are stupid, our rabbits idiotic, our

domestic breeds generally threatened with dangers to life and limb

unknown to their wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes to

deal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man, what hope

would there be of our improving the breed by deliberate selection? If we

developed the intellect, we would probably stunt the physique or the

moral nature; if we aimed at a general culture of all faculties alike,

we would probably end by a Chinese uniformity of mediocre dead level.

The balance of organs and faculties in a race is a very delicate organic

equilibrium. How delicate we now know from thousands of examples, from

the correlations of seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spread

effects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the

Tasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different from

those with which their ancestors were familiar. What folly to interfere

with a marvellous instinct which now preserves this balance intact, in

favour of an untried artificial system which would probably wreck it as

helplessly as the modern system of higher education for women is

wrecking the maternal powers of the best class in our English community!

Indeed, within the race itself, as it now exists, free choice, aided by

natural selection, is actually improving every good point, and is for

ever weeding out all the occasional failures and shortcomings of nature.

For weakly children, feeble children, stupid children, heavy children,

are undoubtedly born under this very r**** of falling in love, whose

average results I believe to be so highly beneficial. How is this? Well,

one has to take into consideration two points in seeking for the

solution of that obvious problem.

In the first place, no instinct is absolutely perfect. All of them

necessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good, they

are sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have to

start in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourable

circumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world to

supplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the best

woman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently far

from perfect; all I claim is that it would be as bad or a good deal

worse if somebody else made the choice for him, or if he made the choice

himself on abstract biological and 'eugenic' principles. And, indeed,

the very existence of better and worse in the world is a condition

precedent of all upward evolution. Without an overstocked world, with

individual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could be

no natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chief

besetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a very

great man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fully

carried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and the

world would be peopled in a few generations by the hereditarily reckless

and dissolute and imprudent. Even so, if eugenic principles were

universally adopted, the chance of exceptional and elevated natures

would be largely reduced, and natural selection would be in so much

interfered with or sensibly retarded.

In the second place, again, it must not be forgotten that falling in

love has never yet, among civilised men at least, had a fair field and

no favour. Many marriages are arranged on very different

grounds--grounds of convenience, grounds of cupidity, grounds of

religion, grounds of snobbishness. In many cases it is clearly

demonstrable that such marriages are productive in the highest degree of

evil consequences. Take the case of heiresses. An heiress is almost by

necessity the one last feeble and flickering relic of a moribund

stock--often of a stock reduced by the sordid pursuit of ill-gotten

wealth almost to the very verge of actual insanity. But let her be ever

so ugly, ever so unhealthy, ever so hysterical, ever so mad, somebody or

other will be ready and eager to marry her on any terms. Considerations

of this sort have helped to stock the world with many feeble and

unhealthy persons. Among the middle and upper classes it may be safely

said only a very small percentage of marriages is ever due to love

alone; in other words, to instinctive feeling. The remainder have been

influenced by various side advantages, and nature has taken her

vengeance accordingly on the unhappy offspring. Parents and moralists

are ever ready to drown her voice, and to counsel marriage within one's

own class, among nice people, with a really religious girl, and so forth

_ad infinitum_. By many well-meaning young people these deadly

interferences with natural impulse are accepted as part of a higher and

nobler law of conduct. The wretched belief that one should subordinate

the promptings of one's own soul to the dictates of a miscalculating and

misdirecting prudence has been instilled into the minds of girls

especially, until at last many of them have almost come to look upon

their natural instincts as wrong, and the immoral, race-destructive

counsels of their seniors or advisers as the truest and purest earthly

wisdom. Among certain small religious sects, again, such as the Quakers,

the duty of 'marrying in' has been strenuously inculcated, and only the

stronger-minded and more individualistic members have had courage and

initiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the internal

divine monitor, as against the externally-imposed law of their

particular community. Even among wider bodies it is commonly held that

Catholics must not marry Protestants; and the admirable results obtained

by the mixture of Jewish with European blood have almost all been

reached by male Jews having the temerity to marry 'Christian' women in

the face of opposition and persecution from their co-nationalists. It is

very rarely indeed that a Jewess will accept a European for a husband.

In so many ways, and on so many grounds, does convention interfere with

the plain and evident dictates of nature.

Against all such evil parental promptings, however, a great safeguard is

afforded to society by the wholesome and essentially philosophical

teaching of romance and poetry. I do not approve of novels. They are for

the most part a futile and unprofitable form of literature; and it may

profoundly be regretted that the mere blind laws of supply and demand

should have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds in

England, France, and America, from more serious subjects to the

production of such very frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works of

art. But the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good to

set against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings of romantic

literature--that it always appeals to the true internal promptings of

inherited instinct, and opposes the foolish and selfish suggestions of

interested outsiders. It is the perpetual protest of poor banished human

nature against the expelling pitchfork of calculating expediency in the

matrimonial market. While parents and moralists are for ever saying,

'Don't marry for beauty; don't marry for inclination; don't marry for

love: marry for money, marry for social position, marry for advancement,

marry for our convenience, not for your own,' the romance-writer is for

ever urging, on the other hand, 'Marry for love, and for love only.' His

great theme in all ages has been the opposition between parental or

other external wishes and the true promptings of the young and

unsophisticated human heart. He has been the chief ally of sentiment and

of nature. He has filled the heads of all our girls with what Sir George

Campbell describes off-hand as 'foolish ideas about love.' He has

preserved us from the hateful conventions of civilisation. He has

exalted the claims of personal attraction, of the mysterious native

yearning of heart for heart, of the indefinite and indescribable element

of mutual selection; and, in so doing, he has unconsciously proved

himself the best friend of human improvement and the deadliest enemy of

all those hideous 'social lies which warp us from the living truth.' His

mission is to deliver the world from Dr. Johnson and Sir George

Campbell.

For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires who are

always in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists and the rebels who are

always in the right in this matter. If the common moral maxims of

society could have had their way--if we had all chosen our wives and our

husbands, not for their beauty or their manliness, not for their eyes or

their moustaches, not for their attractiveness or their vivacity, but

for their 'sterling qualities of mind and character,' we should now

doubtless be a miserable race of prigs and bookworms, of martinets and

puritans, of nervous invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our young

men and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apophthegms of

shallow sophistry--because they often prefer _Romeo and Juliet_ to the

'Whole Duty of Man,' and a beautiful face to a round balance at

Coutts's--that we still preserve some vitality and some individual

features, in spite of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The men

who marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out, leaving

none to represent them: the men who marry women they have been weak

enough and silly enough to fall in love with, recruit the race with fine

and vigorous and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of the

complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted and mutually

reinforcing individualities.

I have spoken throughout, for argument's sake, as though the only

interest to be considered in the married relation were the interests of

the offspring, and so ultimately of the race at large, rather than of

the persons themselves who enter into it. But I do not quite see why

each generation should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of the

generations that afterwards succeed it. Now it is one of the strongest

points in favour of the system of falling in love that it does, by

common experience in the vast majority of instances, assort together

persons who subsequently prove themselves thoroughly congenial and

helpful to one another. And this result I look upon as one great proof

of the real value and importance of the instinct. Most men and women

select for themselves partners for life at an age when they know but

little of the world, when they judge but superficially of characters and

motives, when they still make many mistakes in the conduct of life and

in the estimation of chances. Yet most of them find in after days that

they have really chosen out of all the world one of the persons best

adapted by native idiosyncrasy to make their joint lives enjoyable and

useful. I make every allowance for the effects of habit, for the growth

of sentiment, for the gradual approximation of tastes and sympathies;

but surely, even so, it is a common consciousness with every one of us

who has been long married, that we could hardly conceivably have made

ourselves happy with any of the partners whom others have chosen; and

that we have actually made ourselves so with the partners we chose for

ourselves under the guidance of an almost unerring native instinct. Yet

adaptation between husband and wife, so far as their own happiness is

concerned, can have had comparatively little to do with the evolution of

the instinct, as compared with adaptation for the joint production of

vigorous and successful offspring. Natural selection lays almost all the

stress on the last point, and hardly any at all upon the first one. If,

then, the instinct is found on the whole so trustworthy in the minor

matter, for which it has not specially been fashioned, how far more

trustworthy and valuable must it probably prove in the greater

matter--greater, I mean, as regards the interests of the race--for which

it has been mainly or almost solely developed!

I do not doubt that, as the world goes on, a deeper sense of moral

responsibility in the matter of marriage will grow up among us. But it

will not take the false direction of ignoring these our profoundest and

holiest instincts. Marriage for money may go; marriage for rank may go;

marriage for position may go; but marriage for love, I believe and

trust, will last for ever. Men in the future will probably feel that a

union with their cousins or near relations is positively wicked; that a

union with those too like them in person or disposition is at least

undesirable; that a union based upon considerations of wealth or any

other consideration save considerations of immediate natural impulse, is

base and disgraceful. But to the end of time they will continue to feel,

in spite of doctrinaires, that the voice of nature is better far than

the voice of the Lord Chancellor or the Royal Society; and that the

instinctive desire for a particular helpmate is a surer guide for the

ultimate happiness, both of the race and of the individual, than any

amount of deliberate consultation. It is not the foolish fancies of

youth that will have to be got rid of, but the foolish, wicked, and

mischievous interference of parents or outsiders.