This, however, is only one of the ways in which Love increases the amount of Beauty in the world. There are several others.
The second is that—apart from complementary considerations—Romantic Love always urges the choice of a mate who approaches nearest to the ideal type of Beauty. As Beauty is hereditary, and as a beautiful father and mother may have six or more beautiful children, this predilection for Beauty shown by Love necessarily preserves and multiplies it—
“From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby Beauty’s rose might never die,”
says Shakspere, anticipating the modern theory of heredity.
On this particular topic nothing more need be said here, because all the remainder of this book will be taken up with a consideration of those features of Personal Beauty for which the æsthetic taste which forms part of Romantic Love shows a decided preference.
The third way in which Love promotes the cause of Beauty is by the great attention it pays to Health in its choice. For though Health is not always synonymous with Beauty, it is the soil on which alone Beauty can germinate and flourish.
The fourth way is through the elimination of ugliness. Love, says Plato, is devotion to Beauty: “with[“with] the ugly Eros has no concern.”
From the æsthetic point of view, ugliness is disease. Now there is a cast-iron Lykurgean law prevailing throughout Nature which eliminates the diseased and the ugly. It is a cruel agency, called Natural Selection, and has not the slightest regard for individuals, but provides only for the weal of the species, as Schopenhauer erroneously says is the case with Love. In a bed of plants, if there are more than can find sustenance, the stronger crowd out the weaker. Among animals, wherever there is competition, the best-developed, handsomest lion survives in combat, and the most fleet-footed, and consequently most graceful, deer escapes, while the clumsy, the ugly, and diseased perish miserably, inexorably. Savages leave the old and feeble to die, and weak or deformed children are either deliberately put out of the way or perish from want of proper care. Nor among the ancient civilised nations were such methods unknown. Plato and Aristotle, says Mr. Grote, agree in this point: “Both of them command that no child born crippled or deformed shall be brought up—a practice actually adopted at Sparta under the Lykurgean Institutions, and even carried further, since no child was allowed to be brought up until it had been inspected and approved by the public nurses.” The Romans, too, were legally permitted to expose deformed children.
Christianity, the religion of pity and charity, abhors such practices. Christianity is antagonistic to Natural Selection. One of its chief functions is the building of hospitals in which the cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, are gratuitously and tenderly cared for, instead of being allowed to perish, as they would under the sway of Natural Selection.