Love at First Sight may be inspired by this instinctive perception of beauty of character, i.e. amiability; or by the sight of mere physical beauty; or, thirdly, by Personal Beauty in the highest sense of the word, uniting intellectual fascination with bodily charms.
Inasmuch as there are not a few men whose æsthetic taste is so weak that they would rather marry a useful, companionable girl and imagine her beautiful, than take a beauty and imagine her useful; and inasmuch as there are a great many more amiable and vivacious girls in the world than pretty ones, it happens that in a large number of cases Love is inspired by the physiognomic interpretation of sympathetic traits of character just referred to. Hence plain girls need never despair of finding husbands. There is even a current notion that the deepest passions are commonly inspired by plain women who are otherwise attractive. But what inspires the Love in these cases is not so much the woman’s amiability—and certainly not her plainness—as the fact that the style of her homeliness is of an opposite kind from the faults of the lover, and promises to neutralise them in the offspring.
Plain and homely, moreover, are terms often applied to women whose faces only are so, while their figures are sometimes superb. But a fine figure is quite as essential a part of Personal Beauty as a fine face, and is, in the opinion of Schopenhauer, even more potent as a love-inspirer. If the figure is disregarded in favour of the face, Romantic Love is apt to become hyper-romantic, as in the days of Dante.
Perhaps the largest number of cases of Love at First Sight, so called, are inspired by mere beauté du diable—a female “bud” whose sole charm apparent is sparkling health and fragrant, dew-bejewelled freshness. That this kind of Love at sight, which consists in being dazzled for the moment by a set of regular features and a pair of bright eyes, is often of brief duration, does not militate against the statement that the deepest Love is also born of such a flash of æsthetic admiration. An incipient passion may be crushed by the discovery of some disagreeable trait in the person who inspired it; but when, owing to want of early opportunity to discover unsympathetic traits, Love has been allowed to make some progress, the subsequent discovery of a flaw is not nearly so serious a matter, for then Master Cupid simply puts a daub of whitewash on it and calls it a beauty-spot.
Intellect and Love.—But, after all, the deepest Love at Sight, and that which gives promise of greatest permanence, is that inspired by a handsome woman in whose face Intellect has written its autograph. Goethe, indeed, has remarked that “intellect cannot warm us, or inspire us with passion;” but the view he takes here of the relations between intellect and passion is obviously very crude and superficial. No man, of course, would ever fall in Love with a woman who showed her intellectuality—as not a few do—by a parrotlike repetition of encyclopædic reading or magazine epitomes of knowledge. This gives evidence of only one form of intellect, the lowest, namely, Memory. It is the higher forms—imagination, wit, clever reasoning, that constitute the essence of intellectual culture; and though woman may never quite equal man in this sphere, such cases as Mme. de Staël, George Sand, and George Eliot show how much she can accomplish by means of application.
Now this higher kind of intellectual culture is able to influence the amorous feelings in two ways: first, by refining and vivifying the features; secondly, by enabling a woman to appreciate her lover’s ambitions and afford him sympathetic assistance, thereby awakening a responsive echo in his grateful mind.
Look at Miss Marbleface in yonder corner, surrounded by a group of admirers. Everybody wonders why she, whose features might inspire a sculptor, remains unmarried at twenty-six. Her friends, indeed, whisper that she never even got an offer. Yet all the men to whom she is introduced admire her immensely—the first evening; but strange to say, after they have seen her a few times, they are not a bit jealous to leave her to a new group of admirers; who, in turn, cede her to another. Her beauty, in truth, is but skin-deep, literally; the muscles under the skin are never vivified by an electric flash of wit from the brain; there is nothing but marble features and a stereotyped smile; no animation, no change of expression, no Intellect. Were her intellect as carefully cultivated as her features are chiselled, she would inspire Love, not mere momentary admiration; and she would have been married six years ago to a man chosen at will from the whole circle of her acquaintances.
It is easy to explain how the absurd and fatal notion that intellectual application mars women’s peculiar beauty and lessens the feminine graces in general must have arisen. The inference seems to follow logically from the two undeniable premises that pretty girls very often are insipid, and intellectual women commonly are plain. But this is only another case of putting the cart before the horse. Pretty girls, on the one hand, are so rare that they are almost sure to be spoiled by flattery. They receive so much attention that they have no time for study; and ambitious mothers take them into society prematurely, where they get married before their intellectual capacities—which sometimes are excellent—have had time to unfold. Ugly girls, on the other hand, being neglected by the men, have to while away their time with books, music, art, etc., and thus they become bright and entertaining. Therefore it is not the intellect that makes them ugly, but the ugliness that makes them intellectual.
The culture that can be compressed into a single lifetime unfortunately does not suffice to modify the bony and cartilaginous parts of the human face sufficiently to change homeliness into beauty; but the muscles can be mobilised, the expression quickened and beautified by an individual’s efforts at culture; hence some of these reputed plain intellectual women, in moments when they are excited, become more truly fascinating, with all their badly-chiselled features, than any number of cold marble faces. If men only knew it!—but they are afraid of them—the average men are—because they do not constantly wish to be reminded of their own mental shortcomings in a tournament of wit, pleasantry, or erudition.
Even Schopenhauer, who was convinced that women are too stupid to appreciate a man’s intellect, if abnormal, held that women, on the contrary, gain an advantage in Love by cultivating their minds; adding that it is owing to the appreciation of this fact that mothers teach their daughters music, languages, etc.; thus artificially padding out their minds, as on occasion they do parts of the body.