One way in which Romantic Love fulfils its mission of increasing the amount of Personal Beauty in the world, is by eliminating ugly and masculine women as Old Maids, and thus preventing them from transmitting their characteristics to the next generation. Were it not for the fact that the average man is quite devoid of Æsthetic taste and incapable of ardent Romantic Love, and that therefore considerations of wealth and social advantages guide him in his choice of a wife, ugly women would rarely be found outside the ranks of Old Maids. As it is, it happens only too often that dowerless beautiful women are condemned to live and die in single blessedness, while the ugly people fill the world with photographic copies of themselves.

Why is it that every refined man feels an instinctive aversion to masculine women? Because a masculine woman is an exception to the laws of nature, a lusus naturÆ, a monstrosity. We find even among the lower animals that the females differ widely, as a rule, in traits and appearance from the males—sometimes so much so that there are instances on record of females and males having been for a time supposed to belong to different species; and the differences grow greater the more the sexual functions are developed and specialised. Yet Amazons occur even among animals. “Characters common to the male,” says Darwin, “are occasionally developed in the female when she grows old or becomes diseased, as, for instance, when the common hen assumes the flowing tail-feathers, hackles, combs, spurs, voice, and even pugnacity of the cock.”

Among the warlike Greeks, who knew only masculine or mono-sexual love, Amazons were naturally esteemed, as they did not clash with their feminine ideal. “How popular a subject the Amazons were for sculptors,” says Grote, “we learn from the statement of Pliny that the most distinguished sculptors executed Amazons, and that this subject was the only one upon which a direct comparison could be made between them.” But the progress of time, as we have seen, has more and more differentiated men and women, in appearance and traits of character; and the modern ideal of woman is exclusively feminine, i.e. devoid of hackles, spurs, cock-a-doodle-doo, and pugnacity. Hence the political Virago movement is an evil which will never make any progress, thanks to the constant elimination of masculine women through that adorable process of Sexual Selection known as Modern Love.

Masculine women are always condemned to bury their unwomanly proclivities with their spinster-selves, unless they are very rich, or unless they can find a correspondingly effeminate man who wishes to neutralise his abnormalities in his children by marrying a spouse whose faults are an excess in the opposite direction. In such a case a virago may possibly even inspire Romantic Love, mirabile dictu!

An ugly woman, on the other hand, need never despair of finding a husband; she has at least eight chances of getting married. In the first place, she may, like a masculine woman, inspire true Love in a man whose faults are the opposite of hers; secondly, she may fall in love with a man of faultless proportions, and while in Love her features will be so transfigured and beautified that he cannot help returning her Love; thirdly, she may meet a man who, from want of Æsthetic taste, prefers a chromo to a Titian; or a fourth, who would rather marry an amiable and useful ugly girl than a spoiled beauty. Wealth and social position supply two more resources. Accident may favour her, through the absence of prettier rivals, giving no opportunities for odious comparisons; and, finally, she may meet an elderly bachelor who has wearied of his single blessedness and longs for double strife.

As for those Old Maids who are neither ugly nor masculine, some of them are quondam coquettes who practised their arts just one season too long and “got left” in consequence; others are girls whom silly methods of chaperonage or ill-luck have prevented from making the acquaintance of men whom they could have respected and loved; so that it is often the most refined and intelligent women who are thus doomed to remain single because they are unwilling to marry beneath their station, socially or intellectually. They form that class of whom De Quincey says, that they “combine more intelligence, cultivation, and thoughtfulness than any other in Europe—the class of unmarried women above twenty-five—an increasing class, women who, from mere dignity of character, have renounced all prospects of conjugal and parental life rather than descend into habits unsuitable to their birth.”

Women who are too ugly to inspire Love may nevertheless feel proud of being a class of Vestal Virgins who serve the cause of Love by abstaining from adding to the number of unattractive people in the world by hereditary transmission. On the other hand, Old Maids who are blessed with beauty, owe it to the cause of Love to make every effort, consistent with feminine modesty, to get married. Not only because their children will be beautiful, but because a woman who never marries can never experience the two emotions which do more than any others to ennoble and mature the feminine mind—conjugal and maternal love.

Those Old Maids, however, who have not yet passed their thirtieth year, may even claim that they represent the most perfect and advanced type of maidenhood, and look down on girls who marry before twenty-five as little better than savages. For it is well known that the age of marriage advances with civilisation. Among Australians and other savages girls marry at eleven, ten, or even nine years; among semi-civilised Egyptians, Hindoos, etc., the age is from twelve to fourteen; southern European peoples marry their girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen; while with those nations who lead modern civilisation, the average age of marriage for a woman is now twenty-one, with a tendency to rise. Does it not follow from this, by inexorable logic, that girls who remain single at twenty-five or twenty-nine are forerunners of a still higher type of civilisation? and that the only trouble with them is that they are so far in advance of their age and civilisation? True, ungrateful man does not look upon them in that light; but herein they share the fate of all true greatness. There is one difference, however, between undervalued men of genius and Old Maids: the men of genius admit they are in advance of their age, and are proud of it; the Old Maids never, at least, hardly ever.

In one of his most fascinating essays on The Main Currents of Modern Literature, the Danish critic, Dr. Georg Brandes, discusses the proper age of feminine Love in a manner which Old Maids will especially appreciate. He points out that Eleonore, the heroine of Benjamin Constant’s novel Adolphe, is the first specimen of a modern type subsequently made fashionable by Balzac and George Sand, namely, the woman of thirty in Love. Formerly, as Jules Janin remarks, the woman between thirty and forty years of age was lost for passion, for romance, and the drama; now she rules alone. The girl of sixteen, as adored by Racine, Shakspere, MoliÈre, Voltaire, Ariosto, Byron, Lesage, Scott, is no more to be found. And Mme. Emile de Girardin thus attempts to defend Balzac: “Is it Balzac’s fault that the age of thirty to-day is the age of love? Balzac is compelled to depict passion where he finds it, and at this day it is not to be found in the heart of a girl of sixteen.”

So far as these remarks are true they afford a new confirmation of my assertions that true Romantic Love is dependent on a certain amount of intellectual power and maturity, and that in consequence man loves more deeply than woman at the age preceding marriage. In England and America novelists still persist in making women love at any age from eighteen, and they have a right to do so, because in these two countries women are well enough educated and experienced in life at eighteen to be able to love. In France girls receive such a superficial education that they are ordinarily quite impervious to any deep emotions before they are either Old Maids or married. But in most cases they are married before twenty without regard to their own wishes. And then happens what is indicated in Fuller’s aphorism: “It is to be feared that they who marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry.” And hence it is that the only love depicted by French novelists and playwrights is the adulterous love of a faithless wife. Could anything more vividly illustrate the criminal absurdities of French education and the French system of chaperonage?

In France a girl is not even allowed to cross the street alone until she is willing to assume the name and with it the comparative freedom of an Old Maid. In Spain, the author of Cosas de EspaÑa tells us, Old Maids are rare because a girl generally accepts her first offer; and there are probably not many girls who do not receive at least one offer in their life—masculine women always excepted. In Russia, where women, according to Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, enjoy almost as much liberty as in America, a curious custom prevails by which a girl of uncertain age may escape the appellation of Old Maid. She may leave home and become lost for two or three years in Paris, London, or some other howling wilderness of humanity. Then she may return to her friends neither as maid nor wife, but as a widow. And it is “good form” in Russian society to accept this myth without asking for details.

Finally the important question remains: “What is an Old Maid?” That depends very much on individuals and the care they take of their Health and Beauty. Some women are Old Maids at twenty, the majority at thirty, and some not before forty; while those girls who will read the chapters on Personal Beauty in the last part of this treatise, and follow all the advice there given, will never become Old Maids at all, but will be gobbled up before twenty-three by eager bachelors previously considered hopeless cases of celibacy.

Even if it were possible to name a definite age as that when a girl begins to be an Old Maid, it would be a bit of useless information, because nobody ever knows how old a woman is. Often it is easier to tell a woman’s age by her conversation than by her looks: some incipient Old Maids constantly hint at their former numerous flirtations, which they never did while they really had them.