Windows of Love

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