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.
FOUR SOURCES OF BEAUTY
I.—HEALTH
Plants, Animals, Savages.—In two of the most exquisite passages, not only in his own works, but in all English literature, Mr. Ruskin has emphasised the dependence of physical beauty in plants on their healthy appearance, and the independence of this beauty on any idea of direct utility to man.
“It is a matter of easy demonstration,” he says, “that, setting the characters of typical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by every organic form is in proportion to its appearance of healthy vital energy; as in a rose-bush, setting aside all considerations of gradated flushing of colour and fair folding of line, which it shares with the cloud or the snow-wreath, we find in and through all this certain signs pleasant and acceptable as signs of life and enjoyment in the particular individual plant itself. Every leaf and stalk is seen to have a function, to be constantly exercising that function, and, as it seems, solely for the good and enjoyment of the plant. It is true that reflection will show us that the plant is not living for itself alone, that its life is one of benefaction, that it gives as well as receives, but no sense of this whatever mingles with our perception of physical beauty in its forms. Those forms which appear to be necessary to its health, the symmetry of its leaflets, the smoothness of its stalks, the vivid green of its shoots, are looked upon by us as signs of the plant’s own happiness and perfection; they are useless to us, except as they give us pleasure in our sympathising with that of the plant, and if we see a leaf withered or shrunk or worm-eaten, we say it is ugly, and feel it to be most painful, not because it hurts us, but because it seems to hurt the plant, and conveys to us an idea of pain and disease and failure of life in it.”