“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—