Windows of Love

domestic breeds generally threatened with dangers to life and limbunknown to their wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes todeal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man, what hopewould there be of our improving the breed by deliberate selection? If wedeveloped the intellect, we would probably stunt the physique or themoral 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 organicequilibrium. How delicate we now know from thousands of examples, fromthe correlations of seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spreadeffects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like theTasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different fromthose with which their ancestors were familiar. What folly to interferewith a marvellous instinct which now preserves this balance intact, infavour of an untried artificial system which would probably wreck it ashelplessly as the modern system of higher education for women iswrecking the maternal powers of the best class in our English community!

Indeed, within the race itself, as it now exists, free choice, aided bynatural selection, is actually improving every good point, and is forever 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 regime of falling in love, whoseaverage results I believe to be so highly beneficial. How is this? Well,one has to take into consideration two points in seeking for thesolution of that obvious problem.

In the first place, no instinct is absolutely perfect. All of themnecessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good, theyare sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have tostart in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourablecircumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world tosupplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the bestwoman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently farfrom perfect; all I claim is that it would be as bad or a good dealworse if somebody else made the choice for him, or if he made the choicehimself on abstract biological and ‘eugenic’ principles. And, indeed,the very existence of better and worse in the world is a conditionprecedent of all upward evolution. Without an overstocked world, withindividual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could beno natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chiefbesetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a verygreat man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fullycarried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and theworld would be peopled in a few generations by the hereditarily recklessand dissolute and imprudent. Even so, if eugenic principles wereuniversally adopted, the chance of exceptional and elevated natureswould be largely reduced, and natural selection would be in so muchinterfered with or sensibly retarded.

In the second place, again, it must not be forgotten that falling inlove has never yet, among civilised men at least, had a fair field andno favour. Many marriages are arranged on very differentgrounds–grounds of convenience, grounds of cupidity, grounds ofreligion, grounds of snobbishness. In many cases it is clearlydemonstrable that such marriages are productive in the highest degree ofevil consequences. Take the case of heiresses. An heiress is almost bynecessity the one last feeble and flickering relic of a moribundstock–often of a stock reduced by the sordid pursuit of ill-gottenwealth almost to the very verge of actual insanity. But let her be everso ugly, ever so unhealthy, ever so hysterical, ever so mad, somebody orother will be ready and eager to marry her on any terms. Considerationsof this sort have helped to stock the world with many feeble andunhealthy persons. Among the middle and upper classes it may be safelysaid only a very small percentage of marriages is ever due to lovealone; in other words, to instinctive feeling. The remainder have beeninfluenced by various side advantages, and nature has taken hervengeance accordingly on the unhappy offspring. Parents and moralistsare ever ready to drown her voice, and to counsel marriage within one’sown class, among nice people, with a really religious girl, and so forth_ad infinitum_. By many well-meaning young people these deadlyinterferences with natural impulse are accepted as part of a higher andnobler law of conduct. The wretched belief that one should subordinatethe promptings of one’s own soul to the dictates of a miscalculating andmisdirecting prudence has been instilled into the minds of girlsespecially, until at last many of them have almost come to look upontheir natural instincts as wrong, and the immoral, race-destructivecounsels of their seniors or advisers as the truest and purest earthlywisdom. Among certain small religious sects, again, such as the Quakers,the duty of ‘marrying in’ has been strenuously inculcated, and only thestronger-minded and more individualistic members have had courage andinitiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the internaldivine monitor, as against the externally-imposed law of theirparticular community. Even among wider bodies it is commonly held thatCatholics must not marry Protestants; and the admirable results obtainedby the mixture of Jewish with European blood have almost all beenreached by male Jews having the temerity to marry ‘Christian’ women inthe face of opposition and persecution from their co-nationalists. It isvery rarely indeed that a Jewess will accept a European for a husband.In so many ways, and on so many grounds, does convention interfere withthe plain and evident dictates of nature.

Against all such evil parental promptings, however, a great safeguard isafforded to society by the wholesome and essentially philosophicalteaching of romance and poetry. I do not approve of novels. They are forthe most part a futile and unprofitable form of literature; and it mayprofoundly be regretted that the mere blind laws of supply and demandshould have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds inEngland, France, and America, from more serious subjects to the

production of such very frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works ofart. But the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good toset against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings of romanticliterature–that it always appeals to the true internal promptings ofinherited instinct, and opposes the foolish and selfish suggestions ofinterested outsiders. It is the perpetual protest of poor banished humannature against the expelling pitchfork of calculating expediency in thematrimonial market. While parents and moralists are for ever saying,’Don’t marry for beauty; don’t marry for inclination; don’t marry forlove: marry for money, marry for social position, marry for advancement,marry for our convenience, not for your own,’ the romance-writer is forever urging, on the other hand, ‘Marry for love, and for love only.’ Hisgreat theme in all ages has been the opposition between parental orother external wishes and the true promptings of the young andunsophisticated human heart. He has been the chief ally of sentiment andof nature. He has filled the heads of all our girls with what Sir GeorgeCampbell describes off-hand as ‘foolish ideas about love.’ He haspreserved us from the hateful conventions of civilisation. He hasexalted the claims of personal attraction, of the mysterious nativeyearning of heart for heart, of the indefinite and indescribable elementof mutual selection; and, in so doing, he has unconsciously provedhimself the best friend of human improvement and the deadliest enemy ofall those hideous ’social lies which warp us from the living truth.’ Hismission is to deliver the world from Dr. Johnson and Sir GeorgeCampbell.

For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires who arealways in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists and the rebels who arealways in the right in this matter. If the common moral maxims ofsociety could have had their way–if we had all chosen our wives and ourhusbands, not for their beauty or their manliness, not for their eyes ortheir moustaches, not for their attractiveness or their vivacity, butfor their ’sterling qualities of mind and character,’ we should nowdoubtless be a miserable race of prigs and bookworms, of martinets andpuritans, of nervous invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our youngmen and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apophthegms ofshallow sophistry–because they often prefer _Romeo and Juliet_ to the’Whole Duty of Man,’ and a beautiful face to a round balance atCoutts’s–that we still preserve some vitality and some individualfeatures, in spite of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The menwho marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out, leavingnone to represent them: the men who marry women they have been weakenough and silly enough to fall in love with, recruit the race with fineand vigorous and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of thecomplementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted and mutuallyreinforcing individualities.

I have spoken throughout, for argument’s sake, as though the onlyinterest to be considered in the married relation were the interests ofthe 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 whyeach generation should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of thegenerations that afterwards succeed it. Now it is one of the strongestpoints in favour of the system of falling in love that it does, bycommon experience in the vast majority of instances, assort togetherpersons who subsequently prove themselves thoroughly congenial andhelpful to one another. And this result I look upon as one great proofof the real value and importance of the instinct. Most men and womenselect for themselves partners for life at an age when they know butlittle of the world, when they judge but superficially of characters andmotives, when they still make many mistakes in the conduct of life andin the estimation of chances. Yet most of them find in after days thatthey have really chosen out of all the world one of the persons bestadapted by native idiosyncrasy to make their joint lives enjoyable anduseful. I make every allowance for the effects of habit, for the growthof sentiment, for the gradual approximation of tastes and sympathies;but surely, even so, it is a common consciousness with every one of uswho has been long married, that we could hardly conceivably have madeourselves happy with any of the partners whom others have chosen; andthat we have actually made ourselves so with the partners we chose forourselves under the guidance of an almost unerring native instinct. Yetadaptation between husband and wife, so far as their own happiness isconcerned, can have had comparatively little to do with the evolution ofthe instinct, as compared with adaptation for the joint production ofvigorous and successful offspring. Natural selection lays almost all thestress 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 minormatter, for which it has not specially been fashioned, how far moretrustworthy and valuable must it probably prove in the greatermatter–greater, I mean, as regards the interests of the race–for whichit has been mainly or almost solely developed!

I do not doubt that, as the world goes on, a deeper sense of moralresponsibility in the matter of marriage will grow up among us. But itwill not take the false direction of ignoring these our profoundest andholiest instincts. Marriage for money may go; marriage for rank may go;marriage for position may go; but marriage for love, I believe andtrust, will last for ever. Men in the future will probably feel that aunion with their cousins or near relations is positively wicked; that aunion with those too like them in person or disposition is at leastundesirable; that a union based upon considerations of wealth or anyother consideration save considerations of immediate natural impulse, isbase 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 thanthe voice of the Lord Chancellor or the Royal Society; and that theinstinctive desire for a particular helpmate is a surer guide for theultimate happiness, both of the race and of the individual, than anyamount of deliberate consultation. It is not the foolish fancies ofyouth that will have to be got rid of, but the foolish, wicked, andmischievous interference of parents or outsiders.

RIGHT AND LEFT

Adult man is the only animal who, in the familiar scriptural phrase,’knoweth the right hand from the left.’ This fact in his economy goesclosely together with the other facts, that he is the only animal onthis sublunary planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulatelanguage, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the musical glasses.His right-handedness, in short, is part cause and part effect of hisuniversal supremacy in animated nature. He is what he is, to a greatextent, ‘by his own right hand;’ and his own right hand, we may shrewdlysuspect, would never have differed at all from his left were it not forthe manifold arts and trades and activities he practises.

It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage ran. Man wasonce, in his childhood on earth, what Charles Reade wanted him again tobe in his maturer centuries, ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers ofthis volume–in the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoterportions of the Australian bush, whither the culture of Girton and thefamiliar knowledge of the Latin language have not yet penetrated–shouldcomplain that I speak with unknown tongues, I will further explain fortheir special benefit that ambidextrous means equally-handed, using theright and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang remarksin immortal verse, ‘was the manner of Primitive Man.’ He never mindedtwopence which hand he used, as long as he got the fruit or the scalp hewanted. How could he when twopence wasn’t yet invented? His mamma neversaid to him in early youth, ‘Why-why,’ or ‘Tomtom,’ as the case mightbe, ‘that’s the wrong hand to hold your flint-scraper in.’ He grew up toman’s estate in happy ignorance of such minute and invidiousdistinctions between his anterior extremities. Enough for him that hishands could grasp the forest boughs or chip the stone into shapelyarrows; and he never even thought in his innocent soul which particularhand he did it with.

How can I make this confident assertion, you ask, about a gentleman whomI never personally saw, and whose habits the intervention of fivehundred centuries has precluded me from studying at close quarters? Atfirst sight, you would suppose the evidence on such a point must bepurely negative. The reconstructive historian must surely be inventing_a priori_ facts, evolved, _more Germanico_, from his innerconsciousness. Not so. See how clever modern archaeology has become! Ibase my assertion upon solid evidence. I know that Primitive Man wasambidextrous, because he wrote and painted just as often with his leftas with his right, and just as successfully.

This seems once more a hazardous statement to make about a remote

ancestor, in the age before the great glacial epoch had furrowed themountains of Northern Europe; but, nevertheless, it is strictly true andstrictly demonstrable. Just try, as you read, to draw with theforefinger and thumb of your right hand an imaginary human profile onthe page on which these words are printed. Do you observe that (unlessyou are an artist, and therefore sophisticated) you naturally andinstinctively draw it with the face turned towards your left shoulder?Try now to draw it with the profile to the right, and you will find itrequires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers. The hand movesof its own accord from without inward, not from within outward. Then,again, draw with your left thumb and forefinger another imaginaryprofile, and you will find, for the same reason, that the face in thiscase looks rightward. Existing savages, and our own young children,whenever they draw a figure in profile, be it of man or beast, withtheir right hand, draw it almost always with the face or head turned tothe left, in accordance with this natural human instinct. Their doing sois a test of their perfect right-handedness.

But Primitive Man, or at any rate the most primitive men we knowpersonally, the carvers of the figures from the French bone-caves, drewmen and beasts, on bone or mammoth-tusk, turned either wayindiscriminately. The inference is obvious. They must have beenambidextrous. Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day; andindeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp flint on a piece ofbone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, even for a practised hand, becomparatively difficult.

I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with this one veryclear historical datum, because it is interesting to be able to say withtolerable certainty that there really was a period in our life as aspecies when man in the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he becomeotherwise? This question is not only of importance in itself, as helpingto explain the origin and source of man’s supremacy in nature–histool-using faculty–but it is also of interest from the light it castson that fallacy of poor Charles Reade’s already alluded to–that weought all of us in this respect to hark back to the condition ofsavages. I think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised mannow right-handed, we shall also see why it would be highly undesirablefor him to return, after so many ages of practice, to the condition ofhis undeveloped stone-age ancestors.

The very beginning of our modern right-handedness goes back, indeed, tothe most primitive savagery. Why did one hand ever come to be differentin use and function from another? The answer is, because man, in spiteof all appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally,indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn’t show: but it showsinternally. We all of us know, in spite of Sganarelle’s assertion to thecontrary, that the apex of the heart inclines to the left side, and thatthe liver and other internal organs show a generous disregard for strictand formal symmetry. In this irregular distribution of those human

organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get the clue to theirregularity of right and left in the human arm, and finally even theparticular direction of the printed letters now before you.

For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His manners werestrikingly deficient in that repose which stamps the caste of Vere deVere. When primitive man felt the tender passion steal over his soul, helay in wait in the hush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms hadinspired his heart with young desire; and when she passed hishiding-place, in maiden meditation, fancy free, he felled her with aclub, caught her tight by the hair of her head, and dragged her off intriumph to his cave or his rock-shelter. (Marriage by capture, thelearned call this simple mode of primeval courtship.) When he found someStrephon or Damoetas rival him in the affections of the dusky sex, heand that rival fought the matter out like two bulls in a field; and thevictor and his Phyllis supped that evening off the roasted remains ofthe vanquished suitor. I don’t say these habits and manners were pretty;but they were the custom of the time, and there’s no good denying them.

Now, Primitive Man, being thus by nature a fighting animal, fought forthe most part at first with his great canine teeth, his nails, and hisfists; till in process of time he added to these early and naturalweapons the further persuasions of a club or shillelagh. He also fought,as Darwin has very conclusively shown, in the main for the possession ofthe ladies of his kind, against other members of his own sex andspecies. And if you fight, you soon learn to protect the most exposedand vulnerable portion of your body; or, if you don’t, natural selectionmanages it for you, by killing you off as an immediate consequence. Tothe boxer, wrestler, or hand-to-hand combatant, that most vulnerableportion is undoubtedly the heart. A hard blow, well delivered on theleft breast, will easily kill, or at any rate stun, even a very strongman. Hence, from a very early period, men have used the right hand tofight with, and have employed the left arm chiefly to cover the heartand to parry a blow aimed at that specially vulnerable region. And whenweapons of offence and defence supersede mere fists and teeth, it is theright hand that grasps the spear or sword, while the left holds over theheart for defence the shield or buckler.

From this simple origin, then, the whole vast difference of right andleft in civilised life takes its beginning. At first, no doubt, thesuperiority of the right hand was only felt in the matter of fighting.But that alone gave it a distinct pull, and paved the way, at last, forits supremacy elsewhere. For when weapons came into use, the habitualemployment of the right hand to grasp the spear, sword, or knife madethe nerves and muscles of the right side far more obedient to thecontrol of the will than those of the left. The dexterity thus acquiredby the right–see how the very word ‘dexterity’ implies this fact–madeit more natural for the early hunter and artificer to employ the samehand preferentially in the manufacture of flint hatchets, bows andarrows, and in all the other manifold activities of savage life. It was

the hand with which he grasped his weapon; it was therefore the handwith which he chipped it. To the very end, however, the right handremains especially ‘the hand in which you hold your knife;’ and that isexactly how our own children to this day decide the question which iswhich, when they begin to know their right hand from their left forpractical purposes.

A difference like this, once set up, implies thereafter innumerableother differences which naturally flow from it. Some of them areextremely remote and derivative. Take, for example, the case of writingand printing. Why do these run from left to right? At first sight such apractice seems clearly contrary to the instinctive tendency I noticedabove–the tendency to draw from right to left, in accordance with thenatural sweep of the hand and arm. And, indeed, it is a fact that allearly writing habitually took the opposite direction from that which isnow universal in western countries. Every schoolboy knows, for instance(or at least he would if he came up to the proper Macaulay standard),that Hebrew is written from right to left, and that each book begins atthe wrong cover. The reason is that words, and letters, andhieroglyphics were originally carved, scratched, or incised, instead ofbeing written with coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to followits natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in naive drawing, with afree curve from the right leftward.

Nevertheless, the very same fact–that we use the right hand alone inwriting–made the letters run the opposite way in the end; and thechange was due to the use of ink and other pigments for stainingpapyrus, parchment, or paper. If the hand in this case moved from rightto left it would of course smear what it had already written; and toprevent such untidy smudging of the words, the order of writing wasreversed from left rightward. The use of wax tablets also, no doubt,helped forward the revolution, for in this case, too, the hand wouldcover and rub out the words written.

The strict dependence of writing, indeed, upon the material employed isnowhere better shown than in the case of the Assyrian cuneiforminscriptions. The ordinary substitute for cream-laid note in theEuphrates valley in its palmy days was a clay or terra-cotta tablet, onwhich the words to be recorded–usually a deed of sale or something ofthe sort–were impressed while it was wet and then baked in, solid. Andthe method of impressing them was very simple; the workman merelypressed the end of his graver or wedge into the moist clay, thus givingrise to triangular marks which were arranged in the shapes of variousletters. When alabaster, or any other hard material, was substituted forclay, the sculptor imitated these natural dabs or triangular imprints;and that was the origin of those mysterious and very learned-lookingcuneiforms. This, I admit, is a palpable digression; but inasmuch as itthrows an indirect light on the simple reasons which sometimes bringabout great results, I hold it not wholly alien to the present seriousphilosophical inquiry.

Printing, in turn, necessarily follows the rule of writing, so that infact the order of letters and words on this page depends ultimately uponthe remote fact that primitive man had to use his right hand to delivera blow, and his left to parry, or to guard his heart.

Some curious and hardly noticeable results flow once more from thisorder of writing from left to right. You will find, if you watchyourself closely, that in examining a landscape, or the view from ahill-top, your eye naturally ranges from left to right; and that youbegin your survey, as you would begin reading a page of print, from theleft-hand corner. Apparently, the now almost instinctive act of reading(for Dogberry was right after all, for the civilised infant) hasaccustomed our eyes to this particular movement, and has made itespecially natural when we are trying to ‘read’ or take in at a glancethe meaning of any complex and varied total.

In the matter of pictures, I notice, the correlation has even gone astep farther. Not only do we usually take in the episodes of a paintingfrom left to right, but the painter definitely and deliberately intendsus so to take them in. For wherever two or three distinct episodes insuccession are represented on a single plane in the same picture–ashappens often in early art–they are invariably represented in theprecise order of the words on a written or printed page, beginning atthe upper left-hand corner, and ending at the lower right-hand angle. Ifirst noticed this curious extension of the common principle in themediaeval frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and I have since verifiedit by observations on many other pictures elsewhere, both ancient andmodern. The Campo Santo, however, forms an exceptionally good museum ofsuch story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every pictureconsists of several successive episodes. The famous Benozzo Gozzoli, forexample, of Noah’s Vineyard represents on a single plane all the stagesin that earliest drama of intoxication, from the first act of gatheringthe grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the _vergognosa diPisa_, who covers her face with her hands in shocked horror at thepatriarch’s disgrace in the lower right-hand corner.

Observe, too, that the very conditions of _technique_ demand this orderalmost as rigorously in painting as in writing. For the painter willnaturally so work as not to smudge over what he has already painted: andhe will also naturally begin with the earliest episode in the story heunfolds, proceeding to the others in due succession. From which twoprinciples it necessarily results that he will begin at the upper left,and end at the lower right-hand corner.

I have skipped lightly, I admit, over a considerable interval betweenprimitive man and Benozzo Gozzoli. But consider further that during allthat time the uses of the right and left hand were becoming by gradualdegrees each day still further differentiated and specialised.Innumerable trades, occupations, and habits imply ever-widening

differences in the way we use them. It is not the right hand alone thathas undergone an education in this respect: the left, too, thoughsubordinate, has still its own special functions to perform. If thesavage chips his flints with a blow of the right, he holds the core, ormain mass of stone from which he strikes it, firmly with his left. Ifone hand is specially devoted to the knife, the other grasps the fork tomake up for it. In almost every act we do with both hands, each has aseparate office to which it is best fitted. Take, for example, so simplea matter as buttoning one’s coat, where a curious distinction betweenthe habits of the sexes enables us to test the principle with ease andcertainty. Men’s clothes are always made with the buttons on the rightside and the button-holes on the left. Women’s, on the contrary, arealways made with the buttons on the left side, and the button-holes onthe right. (The occult reason for this curious distinction, which haslong engaged the attention of philosophers, has never yet beendiscovered, but it is probably to be accounted for by the perversity ofwomen.) Well, if a man tries to put on a woman’s waterproof, or a womanto put on a man’s ulster, each will find that neither hand is readilyable to perform the part of the other. A man, in buttoning, grasps thebutton in his right hand, pushes it through with his right thumb, holdsthe button-hole open with his left, and pulls all straight with hisright forefinger. Reverse the sides, and both hands at once seemequally helpless.

It is curious to note how many little peculiarities of dress ormanufacture are equally necessitated by this prime distinction of rightand left. Here are a very few of them, which the reader can indefinitelyincrease for himself. (I leave out of consideration obvious cases likeboots and gloves: to insult that proverbially intelligent person’sintelligence with those were surely unpardonable.) A scarf habituallytied in a sailor’s knot acquires one long side, left, and one short one,right, from the way it is manipulated by the right hand; if it were tiedby the left, the relations would be reversed. The spiral of corkscrewsand of ordinary screws turned by hand goes in accordance with thenatural twist of the right hand: try to drive in an imaginary corkscrewwith the right hand, the opposite way, and you will see how utterlyawkward and clumsy is the motion. The strap of the flap that covers thekeyhole in trunks and portmanteaus always has its fixed side over to theright, and its buckle to the left; in this way only can it beconveniently buckled by a right-handed person. The hands of watches andthe numbers of dial-faced barometers run from left to right: this is apeculiarity dependent upon the left to right system of writing. Aservant offers you dishes from the left side: you can’t so readily helpyourself from the right, unless left-handed. Schopenhauer despaired ofthe German race, because it could never be taught like the English tokeep to the right side of the pavement in walking. A sword is worn atthe left hip: a handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at theside; in the left, if in the coat-tails: in either case for the righthand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in the leftbreast; a pocket for railway tickets half-way down the right side. Try to