“Who round the North for paler dames would seek?
How poor their forms appear! How languid, wan, and weak!”
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?