In full-fledged romantic love of the masculine type the admiration of a girl’s personal beauty is no doubt the most entrancing ingredient.  But such love is rare even to-day, while in ordinary love-affairs the sense of beauty does not play nearly so important a role as is commonly supposed.  In woman’s love, as everybody knows, the regard for masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient; and a man’s love, provided sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, affection, and purity enter into it, may be of the genuine romantic type, even though he has no sense of beauty at all.  And this is lucky for the prospects of love, since, even among the most civilized races to-day, the number of men and women who, while otherwise refined and estimable, have no real appreciation of beauty, personal or otherwise, is astonishingly large.

DARWIN’S UNFORTUNATE MISTAKE

This being true of the average man and woman among the most cultured races, we ought to be able to conclude, as a matter of course and without the necessity of argumentation, that the admiration of personal beauty has still less to do with the motives that lead a savage to marry this or that girl, or a savage girl to prefer this or that suitor.  Strange to say, this simple corollary of the doctrine of evolution has been greatly obscured by Darwin himself, by his theory of sexual selection, which goes so far as to attribute the beauty of the male animals to the continued preference by the females of the more showy males, and the consequent hereditary transmission of their colors and other ornaments.  When we bear in mind how unimportant a role the regard for personal beauty plays even among the females of the most advanced human beings, the idea that the females of the lower animals are guided in their pairing by minute subtle differences in the beauty of masculine animals seems positively comic.  It is an idea such as could have emanated only from a mind as unesthetic as Darwin’s was.

So far as animals are concerned, Alfred Russell Wallace completely demolished the theory of sexual selection,[46] after it had created a great deal of confusion in scientific literature.  In regard to the lower races of man this confusion still continues, and I therefore wish to demonstrate here, more conclusively than I did in my first book (60, 61, 327-30), that among primitive men and women, too, the sense of beauty does not play the important role attributed to it in their love-affairs.  “The Influence of Beauty in determining the Marriages of Mankind” is one of the topics discussed in the Descent of Man.  Darwin tries to show that, “especially” during the earlier period of our long history, the races of mankind were modified by the continued selection of men by women and women by men in accordance with their peculiar standards of beauty.  He gives some of the numerous instances showing how savages “ornament” or mutilate their bodies; adding: