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:—