Windows of Love

FALLING IN LOVE WITH OTHER ESSAYS ON MORE EXACT BRANCHES OF SCIENCE

Some people complain that science is dry. That is, of course, a matterof taste. For my own part, I like my science and my champagne as dry asI can get them. But the public thinks otherwise. So I have ventured tosweeten accompanying samples as far as possible to suit the demand, andtrust they will meet with the approbation of consumers.

Of the specimens here selected for exhibition, my title piece originallyappeared in the _Fortnightly Review_: ‘Honey Dew’ and ‘The First Potter’were contributions to _Longman’s Magazine_: and all the rest foundfriendly shelter between the familiar yellow covers of the good old_Cornhill_. My thanks are due to the proprietors and editors of thosevarious periodicals for kind permission to reproduce them here.

FALLING IN LOVE

An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing danger. SirGeorge Campbell has set his face against the time-honoured practice ofFalling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their facesagainst it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they onlyattacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn theinstitution itself on general principles. An old Indian administrator,however, goes to work in all things on a different pattern. He wouldalways like to regulate human life generally as a department of theIndia Office; and so Sir George Campbell would fain have husbands andwives selected for one another (perhaps on Dr. Johnson’s principle, bythe 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 haveenough physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in thepairing of individuals of the same or allied races if we could onlyapply that knowledge to make fitting marriages, instead of giving way tofoolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people, whom we canhardly trust to choose their own bonnets, much less to choose in agraver matter in which they are most likely to be influenced byfrivolous prejudices.’ He wants us, in other words, to discard thedeep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited instinct, and tosubstitute for them some calm and dispassionate but artificialselection of a fitting partner as the father or mother of futuregenerations.

Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be treatedseriously and reverently. But, it seems to me, Sir George Campbell’s