Windows of Love

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