A first hasty perusal of Schopenhauer’s brilliant essay on the “Metaphysics of Sexual Love” (in the second volume of his Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) will dispose most readers to agree with DÜhring that the great pessimist “makes war on love.” But a more careful consideration of his profound thoughts shows that this is not the case, notwithstanding his habitual cynical tone.

In the first place, his theory can do no possible harm, because, as he himself admits, no lover will ever believe in it. Secondly, the gist of Schopenhauer’s theory is to show that a lover is the most noble and unselfish martyr in the world, because his usual attitude and fate is self-sacrifice.

LOVE IS AN ILLUSION

The fundamental truth which Schopenhauer claims to have discovered is that love is an illusion—an instinctive belief on the lover’s part that his life’s happiness absolutely depends on his union with his beloved; whereas, in truth, a love-match commonly leads to lifelong conjugal misery. The lover, on reaching the goal so eagerly striven for, finds himself disappointed, and realises, to his consternation, that he has been the dupe of a blind instinct. Quien se casa por amores, ha de vivir con dolores, says a Spanish proverb (“to marry for love is to live in misery”): and this doctrine Schopenhauer re-echoes in a dozen different forms: “It is not only disappointed love-passion that occasionally has a tragic end; successful love likewise leads more commonly to misery than to happiness.” “Marriages based on love commonly end unhappily,” etc.

INDIVIDUALS SACRIFICED TO THE SPECIES

The reason of this curious fact is given in this sentence: “Love-marriages are formed in the interest of the species, not of the individuals. True, the parties concerned imagine that they are providing for their own happiness; but their real [unconscious] aim is something foreign to their own selves—namely, the procreation of an individual whose existence becomes possible only through their marriage.”

What urges a man on to this sacrifice of individual happiness to the welfare of his offspring is, as already intimated, a blind instinct known as Love. The universal Will (Schopenhauer’s fetish, or name for an impersonal deity underlying all phenomena) has implanted this blind instinct in man, for the same reason that it implants so many other instincts in various animals—to induce the parents to undergo any amount of labour, and even danger to life, for the sake of benefiting the offspring, and thus preserving the species. All these animals, like the lovers, are urged on blindly to sacrifice themselves in the belief that they are doing it for their own pleasure and benefit; whereas it is all in the interest of their offspring.

Why was the Will compelled to implant this blind instinct in man? Because man is so selfish wherever guided by reason, that it would have been unwise to entrust so important a matter as the welfare of coming generations to his intellect and prudence. Prudence would tell young people to choose not the most attractive and healthy partners, who would be able to transmit their excellence to the next generation, but the ones who are most liberally supplied with money and useful friends. That is, they would invariably look out first for “Number One,” indifferent to the deluge that might come after them. It was to neutralise this selfishness that the Will created the instinct of Love, which impels a man to marry not the woman who will make him the most happy and comfortable, but whose qualities, combined with his own, will be likely to produce a harmonious, well-made group of children.

Schopenhauer’s Will, it must be understood, is an Æsthetic sort of a chap. He has his hobbies, and one of these hobbies is the desire to preserve the species in its typical purity and beauty. There are a thousand accidents of climate, vice, disease, etc., that tend to vitiate the type of each species; but Love strives for ever to restore a harmonious balance, by producing a mutual infatuation in two beings whose combined (and opposite) defects will neutralise one another in the offspring.

SOURCES OF LOVE

More definitely speaking, there are three ways in which the Will preserves the purity of its types—three ways in which it inspires the Love whose duty it is to achieve this result. Physical Beauty is the first thing desired by the lover, because that is the expression of typical perfection. Secondly, he may be influenced by such Psychic Traits as will blend well with his own; and thirdly, he will be attracted by perfections (or imperfections) which are the opposite of his own. These three sources must be considered briefly in detail.

(1) Physical Beauty.—The most important attribute of Beauty, in the lover’s eye, is Youth. Men prefer the age from eighteen to twenty-eight in a woman; while women give the preference to a man aged from thirty to thirty-five, which represents the acme of his virility. Youth without Beauty may still inspire Love; not so Beauty without Youth.

Health ranks next in importance. Acute disease is only a temporary disadvantage, whereas chronic disease repels the amorous affections, for the reason that it is likely to be transmitted to the next generation.

A fine framework or skeleton is the third desideratum. Besides age and disease, nothing proves so fatal to the chances of inspiring Love as deformity: “The most charming face does not atone for it; on the contrary, even the ugliest face is preferred if allied with a straight growth of the body.”

A certain plumpness or fulness of flesh is the next thing considered in sexual selection; for this is an indication of Health, and promises a sound progeny. Excessive leanness is repulsive, and so is excessive stoutness, which is often an indication of sterility. “A well-developed bust has a magic effect on a man.” What attracts women to men is especially muscular development, because that is a quality in which they are commonly deficient, and for which the children will accordingly have to rely on the father. Women may marry an ugly man, but never one who is unmanly.

Facial beauty ranks last in importance, according to Schopenhauer. Here too the skeleton is first considered in sexual selection. The mouth must be small, the chin projecting, “a slight curve of the nose, upwards or downwards, has decided the fate of innumerable girls; and justly, for the type of the species is at stake.” The eyes and the forehead, finally, are closely associated with intellectual qualities.

(2) Psychic Traits.—What charms women in men is preeminently courage and energy, besides frankness and amiability. “Stupidity is no disadvantage with women: indeed, it is more likely that superior intellectual power, and especially genius, as being an abnormal trait, may make an unfavourable impression on them. Hence we so often see an ugly, stupid, and coarse man preferred by women to a refined, clever, and amiable man.” When women claim to have fallen in love with a man’s intellect, it is either affectation or vanity. Wedlock is a union of hearts, not of heads; and its object is not entertaining conversation, but providing for the next generation. This part of Schopenhauer’s theory is evidently an outcome of his doctrine that children inherit their intellectual qualities from the mother, and their character from the father. Hence the feeling that they are capable of supplying their children with sufficient intellect is part of the feminine Love-instinct, and makes women indifferent to the presence or absence of those qualities in men.

It does not follow from all this that a sensible man may not reflect on his chosen one’s character, or she on his intellectual abilities, before marriage. Such reflection leads to marriages of reason, but not to Love-marriages, which alone are here under consideration.

(3) Complementary Qualities.—The physical and mental attributes considered under (1) and (2) are those which commonly inspire Love. But there are cases where perfect Beauty is less potent to inflame the passions than deviations from the normal type.

“Ordinarily it is not the regular perfect beauties that inspire the great passions,” says Schopenhauer; and this seems to be borne out by the experience of Byron, who says: “I believe there are few men who, in the course of their observations on life, have not perceived that it is not the greatest female beauty who forms [inspires] the longest and the strongest passions.”

How is this to be accounted for? By the anxiety of Nature (or the Will) to neutralise imperfections in one individual by wedding them to another’s excesses in the opposite direction; as an acid is neutralised by combining it with an alkali. The greater the shortcoming the more ardent will be the infatuation if a person is found exactly adapted for its neutralisation. The weaker a woman is, for example, in her muscular system, the more apt will she be to fall violently in love with an athlete. Short men have a decided partiality for tall women, and vice versÂ. Blondes almost always desire brunettes; and if the reverse does not hold true, this is owing to the fact, he says, that the original colour of the human complexion was not light but dark. A light complexion has indeed become second nature to us, but less so the other features; and “in love nature strives to return to dark hair and brown eyes, as the primitive type.”

Again, persons afflicted with a pug-nose take a special delight in falcon-noses and parrot-faces; and those who are excessively long and slim admire those who are abnormally short and even stumpy. So with temperaments; each one preferring the opposite to his or her own. True, if a person is quite perfect in any one respect, he does not exactly prefer the corresponding imperfection in another, but he is more readily reconciled to it.

Throughout his essay, Schopenhauer tacitly assumes that the parental peculiarities are fused or blended equally in the offspring, and that this blending is what the Will aims at. But on this point Mr. Herbert Spencer has some remarks, in his essay on “Personal Beauty,” which directly contradict Schopenhauer, of whose theory, however, he does not seem to have been cognisant:—

“The fact,” he says, "that the forms and qualities of any offspring are not a mean between the forms and qualities of its parents, but a mixture of them, is illustrated in every family. The features and peculiarities of a child are separately referred by observers to father and mother respectively—nose and mouth to this side; colour of the hair and eyes to that; this moral peculiarity to the first; this intellectual one to the second—and so with contour and idiosyncrasies of body. Manifestly, if each organ or faculty in a child was an average of the two developments of such organ or faculty in the parents, it would follow that all brothers and sisters should be alike; or should, at any rate, differ no more than their parents differed from year to year. So far, however, from finding that this is the case, we find not only that great irregularities are produced by intermixture of traits, but that there is no constancy in the mode of intermixture, or the extent of variations produced by it.

“This imperfect union of parental constitutions in the constitution of offspring is yet more clearly illustrated by the reappearance of peculiarities traceable to bygone generations. Forms, dispositions, and diseases, possessed by distant progenitors, habitually come out from time to time in descendants. Some single feature, or some solitary tendency, will again and again show itself after being apparently lost. It is notoriously thus with gout, scrofula, and insanity.”

Again, unite a pure race “with another equally pure, but adapted to different conditions and having a correspondingly different physique, face, and morale, and there will occur in the descendants not a homogeneous mean between the two constitutions, but a seemingly irregular combination of characteristics of the one with characteristics of the other—one feature traceable to this race, a second to that, and a third uniting the attributes of both; while in disposition and intellect there will be found a like medley of the two originals.”

The fact that the more remote ancestry must be taken into account besides the parents, in considering the traits of the offspring, is one which Mr. Galton has done much to emphasise, and which Schopenhauer completely ignores. It tells against the metaphysical part of his theory; for all the efforts of the Will to merge opposite characters into homogeneous traits must prove futile if a blue-eyed man, for instance, who marries a black-eyed girl, finds that their children have neither the father’s blue nor the mother’s black, but the grandmother’s gray eyes.

Yet in the long run diverse traits of figure and physiognomy do tend to a harmonious fusion. Though a man with a prominent nose, which he inherited from his father, is likely to transmit it to his son, though his wife may have a snub-nose, yet there will be a slight modification even in the son’s organ; and if the son keeps up the tradition of marrying a snub-nosed girl, and his children follow his example, the chances are that in a few generations the nose of that family will be a feature of moderate size and classic proportions. The very fact emphasised by Mr. Galton that all the ancestral influences count, will here aid the ultimate fusion. Conspicuous instances of the long-continued prevalence of a particular nose—or other feature—may be accounted for by the fact that other kinds of that organ were rare in the vicinity, or that marriage was decided by so many other considerations that the dimensions of one organ could not come into consideration, much as the bride or groom might have preferred an improvement in that respect.

So far as Schopenhauer’s theory concerns only the fact that Love is apt to be based on complementary qualities, he is doubtless correct; but it needs no erratic metaphysical fetish, as a deus ex machina, to account for that fact. A simple application of psychologic principles explains the whole mystery.

In the first place, nothing could be more remote from the truth than the cynical notion that every woman considers herself a Venus. She may, on the whole, consider herself equal to the average of Beauty; but if she has any special fault—a mouth too large or too small, an upper lip too high, a nose too flat or too prominent, too much or too little flesh, excessive height or shortness—she is not only conscious of the defect, but morbidly conscious of it, and uses every possible device to conceal it. Thus constantly brooding over her misfortune her mind, by a natural reaction, will conceive a special admiration for an organ that exceeds the line of Beauty in the opposite direction. Every day one hears a petite girl admiring a specially tall woman; and this admiration will prompt her, other things being equal, to fall in love with a tall man.

Secondly, familiarity breeds indifference to one’s own charms, and a disposition to admire what we lack ourselves.

Novelty comes into play. A Northern blonde among a nation of brunettes cannot fail to slay hearts by the hundred, while the mystic flashes of a Spanish woman’s black eyes are fatal to every Northern visitor.

Nations, like individuals, admire and desire what they lack. The Germans and the English are deficient in grace—hence that quality is what chiefly charms them in the French, who have much more of it than of Beauty, and in the Spanish. Byron was so much smitten with the sun-mellowed complexions and the graceful proportions and gait of the Spanish maidens, that he became quite unjust to his own lovely countrywomen—

Were savages susceptible to Love, it might be suggested that their practice of exogamy, or marrying a woman from another tribe, had something to do with their admiration of novelty and complementary qualities; but we know that they do not admire such qualities, but only such typical traits as prevail among their own women, and these, moreover, in an exaggerated form. This is one reason why savages are so ugly. They have no Romantic Love to improve their Personal Beauty by fusing heterogeneous defects into homogeneous perfections.

Thus we may freely endorse Schopenhauer’s doctrine regarding the benefits derived by the offspring (ultimately, in several generations) from marriages based on complementary Love, without bowing down before his fetish—a fetish which appears doubly objectionable because it is old-fashioned; i.e. it strives to “maintain the type of the species in its primitive purity,” whereas modern science teaches that this “primitive type” of human beauty had a very simian aspect.

Nor need we at all accept the pessimistic aspect of his theory—the notion that Love is an illusion, and that Love-marriages commonly end unhappily, the lover sacrificing himself for his progeny.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his Sociology, elaborates an idea which so curiously leads up to this phase of Schopenhauer’s doctrine that it must be briefly referred to for its evolutionary suggestiveness.

Among the lowest animals—the microscopic protozoa—the individual, as he remarks, is sacrificed after a few hours of life, by breaking up into two new individuals, or into a number of germs which produce a new generation. The parents are here entirely sacrificed to the interests of the young and the species. As we ascend in the scale of life this sacrifice of parents to the young and the species becomes less and less prevalent. Among birds, for instance, “The lives of the parents are but partially subordinated at times when the young are being reared. And then there are long intervals between breeding-seasons, during which the lives of parents are carried on for their own sakes.... In proportion as organisms become higher in their structures and powers, they are individually less sacrificed to the maintenance of the species; and the implication is that in the highest type of man this sacrifice is reduced to a minimum.”

Here is the point where Schopenhauer, had he been an evolutionist, might have dovetailed his theory with Spencer’s, by saying that in man it is no longer the life of the individual, or most of his time, that is sacrificed, but merely his conjugal happiness, which the Love-instinct induces him unconsciously to barter for the superior physical and mental beauty of his offspring.

Unfortunately, Schopenhauer did not take any pains to verify his theory by testing it by vulgar facts. There are plenty of unhappy marriages, but no one who will search his memory can fail to come to the conclusion that the vast majority of them are cases where money or rank and not Love supplied the motive of an unsympathetic union. Though Conjugal Affection consists of a different group of emotions from Romantic Love, yet there is an affinity between them; and it is not likely that Conjugal Love will ever supervene where before marriage there was an entire absence of sympathy and adoration. Even an imprudent Love-match which leads to poverty—is it not preferable to a mariage de convenance, which leads to lifelong indifference and ennui? Is it not better to have one month of ecstatic bliss in life than to live and die without ever knowing life’s highest rapture?

Again, the French marry for money and social convenience, and their children are ugly; the Americans marry for Love, and have the most beautiful children in the world. Is it not more conducive to conjugal happiness to know that one has lovely children and that the race is increasing, than to have ugly children and to know that the race is dying out?

Love-matches would never end unhappily if the lovers would take proper care of their own happiness by transfusing the habits of Courtship into conjugal life, as elsewhere explained in this book.

Schopenhauer’s whole argument is vitiated by the fact that it is chiefly the physical complementary qualities that inspire Love, not the mental—the latter, in fact, being barely noticed by him. Mental divergence might indeed occasionally lead to an unhappy marriage, but physical divergence—the fact that he is large and blond, she small and a brunette—cannot possibly lead to matrimonial discord. This knocks the whole bottom out of Schopenhauer’s erotic pessimism. The only sense in which Love is an illusion is in its Hyperbolic phase—the notion that the beloved is superior to all other mortals; and that is a very harmless illusion.

Schopenhauer’s pessimism, it should be added, is greatly mitigated by the poetic halo of martyrdom with which he invests the lover’s head. Society and public opinion, he points out, applaud him for instinctively preferring the welfare of the next generation to his own comfort. “For is not the exact determination of the individualities of the next generation a much higher and nobler object than those ecstatic feelings of the lovers, and their super-sensual soap-bubbles?” It is this that invests Love with its poetic character. There is one thing only that justifies tears in a man, and that is the loss of his Love, for in that he bewails not his own loss but the loss of the species.

Apart from the suggestive details of his essay, Schopenhauer’s merit and originality lies, first, in his having pointed out that Love becomes more intense the more it is individualised; secondly, in emphasising the fact that in match-making it is not the happiness of the to-be-married couple that should be chiefly consulted, but the consequences of their union to the offspring; thirdly, in dwelling on the important truth that Love is a cause of Beauty, because its aim always is either to perpetuate existing Beauty through hereditary transmission, or to create new Beauty by fusing two imperfect individuals into a being in whom their short-comings mutually neutralise one another.

Love, however, is only one source of Personal Beauty. Personal Beauty has four sources; and these must now be considered in succession, in the order which roughly indicates their successive evolution—Health, Crossing, Love, and Mental Refinement.

The remainder of this work will be devoted exclusively to the subject of Personal Beauty, as it influences and is influenced by Romantic Love. And here, as in the preceding pages, I shall always cite the ipsissima verba of the greatest specialists who have written on any particular branch of this subject.