Romantic Love and Personal Beauty Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issue...

PAGE EVOLUTION OF ROMANTIC LOVE 1 COSMIC ATTRACTION AND CHEMICAL AFFINITIES 3 FLOWER LOVE AND BEAUTY 7 IMPERSONAL AFFECTION 11 PERSONAL AFFECTIONS 16 I. Love for Animals 16 II....

Only a few months ago one of the leading German writers of the period, Ernst Eckstein, wrote an essay in which he endeavoured to prove that not only was Love as felt by the anci...

(2) That the superior Beauty of one flower over another is due to its superior vitality or Health, which, again, is promoted by cross-fertilisation or intermarriage—the choosing...

The mother herself is of course unconscious of the complex nature of her feeling and its origin; especially in the first days, when the new feeling dawns upon her like a revelat...

First of all it is necessary to get rid of the prevalent illusion that Love is a single emotion. It is, on the contrary, a most complex and ever-varying _group_ of emotions. Lov...

Several of them no doubt are habitually absent. Animals have not sufficient imagination to meditate consciously on their probable success or failure in Courtship; and this lack...

(1) _Protective Colours._—These “are exceedingly prevalent in nature, comprising those of all the white arctic animals, the sandy-coloured desert forms, and the green birds and...

(1) _Capture._—One of the most curious features of savage life is the widely-prevalent custom called by M‘Lennan Exogamy, or marrying out. This custom compels a man who wishes a...

As for the remaining characters of Romantic Love, which require a vivid imagination and persistent emotions for their realisation, it would be useless to look for them in Savage...

“The types of female excellence which are contained in the Greek poems, while they are among the earliest, are also among the most perfect in the literature of mankind. The conj...

In course of time poetic fancy added to the image of Cupid other attributes that naturally suggested themselves: the wings to symbolise fickleness; a bandage to indicate blindne...

What difference is there between these civilised savages and the Australian who eats his wife when he gets tired of her? Let those who are fond of seeking needles in haystacks s...

Abstractness, however, is not a desirable quality in poetry, the very essence of which is concrete imagery. Accordingly we find that with few exceptions the German Minnesingers...

No doubt this instinctive modern prejudice in favour of Romantic Love will ultimately throw a halo of sacredness around it, which will raise Cupid’s will to the dignity of an El...

A Coquette seeks to fascinate for the sake of fascinating. Like a miser, she mistakes the means for the end, and feeds on one-sided passion and admiration, until one morning she...

In modern love Retrospective Jealousy is often very strong, especially in men who, though they do not hesitate to marry a girl who has been engaged before, would not care to dwe...

Inasmuch as in moments of elation over success of any kind a man feels as if nothing were beyond his power, an accepted lover is as proud (I suppose) as if he had conquered not...

According to a statement in _Nature_, 30,000 ruby and topaz humming-birds were sold in London some years ago in the course of one afternoon, “and the number of West Indian and B...

“I was the laziest creature, The most unprofitable sign of nothing, The veriest drone, and slept away my life Beyond the dormouse, till I was in love! And now I can outwake the...

After all, Schopenhauer was right in saying that when we have no great sorrows the imagination invents small ones which torment us quite as much as the others. When one sees the...

In regard to masculine Beauty a change likewise has come over the feminine mind. Fashionable young ladies appear, indeed, to be as exacting in the matter of what they consider P...

Advocates of so-called “wisdom” marriages are fond of pointing out cases of unhappy married life, based originally on free Choice. But free Choice by no means always implies Lov...

Therefore a Bachelor who has been unsuccessful in his first or second Love has never enjoyed the highest bliss a human soul can attain, and is bound to try again. Nor need he ev...

Goethe, in his old days, fell in Love with Minna Herzlieb, a bookseller’s daughter. “In the sonnets addressed to her,” says Lewes, “and in the novel of _Elective Affinities_, ma...

In 1327 Petrarch “made the acquaintance of Laura, the wife of Hugo de Sade, who has become famous through him, and whom during twenty-one years he continued to love, or at least...

Concerning human beings Darwin remarks: “A strong desire to touch the beloved person is commonly felt; and love is expressed by this means more plainly than by any other. Hence...

The happiest moment in the life of the happiest man is that when he is allowed for the first time to “steal immortal blessing” from the lips of her who has just promised to be h...

Indeed, the art of successful flattery, especially with modern self-conscious girls, consists in the ability of giving “a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of playful railler...

It is useless to quote to a rejected lover Rosalind’s philosophy: “Our poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own pe...

Romantic love—commonly considered immutable—not only displays countless individual variations in regard to duration and degrees of intensity, but has a sort of “local colour” in...

Her exuberant health makes an Italian woman naturally prone to Love; but though she falls in love most readily, the passion is apt to be fugitive and superficial. She rarely lov...

“What woman’s natural instincts demand is self-abandonment to a man; she desires this abandonment not for her own sake, but for the man’s sake; she gives herself to him, for him...

The London _Standard_ doubtless exaggerates the difference between English and American girls and their attitude toward men in the course of an article, part of which may, never...

The reason of this curious fact is given in this sentence: “Love-marriages are formed in the interest of the species, not of the individuals. True, the parties concerned imagine...

In the animal world we find the same dependence of Beauty upon Health. As Mr. Wallace has shown, “colour and ornament are strictly correlated with health, vigour, and general fi...

More extraordinary are the following cases cited by Topinard: “Sometimes the child possesses altogether the character of one or other parent: for example, the child of a Europea...

Mr. Ruskin takes a similar view regarding differences of taste when he says that “respecting what has been asserted of negro nations looking with disgust on the white face, no i...

“Gradation is so inseparable a quality of all natural shade and colour that the eye refuses in art to understand anything as either which appears without it; while, on the other...

Form without colour is form without expression. But form without expression soon ceases to fascinate, for we constantly crave novelty and variety; and form is one, while express...

I have italicised the word “clumsily” because it touches the vital point of the question. Man owes his intellectual superiority largely to the fact that he does not need his han...

To-day our fashion and society papers are eternally complaining of the fact that the young men—especially the _desirable_ young men—seem to have lost all interest in dancing. Bu...

In their abhorrence of the crinoline men do not stand alone. There are several refined women to-day who would absolutely refuse to submit to the tyranny of Fashion if it should...

The plea that corsets are needed to hold up the heavy clothing is of no moment. Women, like men, should wear their clothing suspended from the shoulder, which is a great deal mo...

Savages and Orientals, being deficient in æsthetic taste, admire an excessively-developed bust. Europeans, on the other hand, long ago recognised the connection between such a b...

So many books have been written on calisthenics that it is needless to repeat here minute directions for training the muscles of the arm or any other part of the body. One bit o...

“As a dimple—by the Greeks termed νύμφη—is an isolated and somewhat accidental adjunct to the chin, it was not,” says Winckelmann, “regarded by the Greek artists as an attribute...

That sound teeth, though they should never be seen except in glimpses, are an extremely important element in facial beauty, may be seen by the fact that the loss of a few front...

The lobule of the human ear has been presumably developed through the agency of Sexual Selection, as it is an ornament the absence of which is at once felt. And there are other...

The admission which I have just made that there may be a sort of æsthetic selection independent of real Romantic Love, does not militate against the general thesis of this book:...

That the intellectual powers are to a large extent independent of the particular conformation of the skull is shown further by the circumstance that so many savage tribes have f...

Coming to more recent times, we find men still protesting in vain against the feminine fashion of bedaubing the face with vulgar paint. More than two centuries ago La Bruyère in...

This view regarding the function of the pigment is strikingly supported by the anomalous case of Albinos. “The pink of their eyes (as of white rabbits) is caused by the absence...

Still another way in which the eyeball itself can express emotion is by the varying amount on it of the lachrymal fluid, to which, in my opinion, its lustre is chiefly owing. Th...

But if it can be shown that the nakedness of his skin _is_ in some way of advantage to man, this argument falls to the ground. There are sufficient reasons, I think, for believi...

Concerning the arrangement of the hair two more points may be noted. Is it not about time to do away with the venerable absurdity of parting the hair? If entire baldness is vote...

Moreover, there is no reason why physiologists should not ere long discover the secret of changing the tint of the skin, hair, and iris to suit one’s taste. All children are bor...

That mental culture adds much to Italian beauty cannot be said, for Italian women of all classes are noted for their intellectual indolence. But atonement is largely made for th...

But in regard to the third source of Beauty—Mental Culture—the Germans surely are pre-eminent among nations, it will be claimed. In one sense, no doubt, they are. Almost all Ger...

Personal Beauty in England diminishes in quality and frequency, not only as we go from the upper to the lower classes, but also if we leave London and go to other cities. How fa...

It must be admitted, however, that a vast improvement has been effected within the last two generations. Beyond all doubt the young girls of fifteen are to-day healthier and bet...

Face, the, 411, 448, 490 Factories: unhealthy, 400; whistles, 434 Fashion: the Handmaid of Ugliness, 328; a disease, 352; mutilates the feet, 352, 360; frustrates advantages of...

Paradoxes of Love, 166-173, 210 Parasols, 463 Pascal: self-conscious lovers, 220 Paternal love, 20; animals, 34, 107, 183 Pepys: Spanish wooing, 278 Perfume: personal, 446; cosm...