Windows of Love

more cognisant of personal traits and minor peculiarities. It isfurthermore exerted to a far greater extent upon mental and moral aswell as physical peculiarities in the individual.

We cannot fall in love with everybody alike. Some of us fall in lovewith one person, some with another. This instinctive and deep-seateddifferential feeling we may regard as the outcome of complementaryfeatures, mental, moral, or physical, in the two persons concerned; andexperience shows us that, in nine cases out of ten, it is a reciprocalaffection, that is to say, in other words, an affection roused in unisonby varying qualities in the respective individuals.

Of its eminently conservative and even upward tendency very little doubtcan be reasonably entertained. We _do_ fall in love, taking us in thelump, 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, thefeeble, and the sickly. The prohibition of the Church is scarcely neededto prevent a man from marrying his grandmother. Moralists have alwaysborne a special grudge to pretty faces; but, as Mr. Herbert Spenceradmirably put it (long before the appearance of Darwin’s selectivetheory), ‘the saying that beauty is but skin-deep is itself but askin-deep saying.’ In reality, beauty is one of the very best guides wecan possibly have to the desirability, so far as race-preservation isconcerned, of any man or any woman as a partner in marriage. A fineform, a good figure, a beautiful bust, a round arm and neck, a freshcomplexion, a lovely face, are all outward and visible signs of thephysical qualities that on the whole conspire to make up a healthy andvigorous wife and mother; they imply soundness, fertility, a goodcirculation, a good digestion. Conversely, sallowness and paleness areroughly indicative of dyspepsia and anaemia; a flat chest is a symptom ofdeficient maternity; and what we call a bad figure is really, in one wayor another, an unhealthy departure from the central norma and standardof the race. Good teeth mean good deglutition; a clear eye means anactive liver; scrubbiness and undersizedness mean feeble virility. Norare indications of mental and moral efficiency by any means wanting asrecognised elements in personal beauty. A good-humoured face is initself almost pretty. A pleasant smile half redeems unattractivefeatures. Low, receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid,half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however regular theirlines and contours. Intelligence and goodness are almost as necessary ashealth and vigour in order to make up our perfect ideal of a beautifulhuman face and figure. The Apollo Belvedere is no fool; the murderers inthe Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s are for the most part nobeauties.

What we all fall in love with, then, as a race, is in most casesefficiency and ability. What we each fall in love with individually is,I believe, our moral, mental, and physical complement. Not our like, notour counterpart; quite the contrary; within healthy limits, our unlikeand our opposite. That this is so has long been more or less a