MYSTERIES OF LOVE

If these secondary sexual characters could be destroyed by the extraordinary—­one might almost say criminal—­efforts of unsexed termagants to make all women ape men and become like them, romantic love, which was so slow in coming, would disappear again, leaving only sensual appetite, which may be (selfishly) fastidious and intense, but has no depth, duration, or altruistic nobility, and which, when satiated, cares no more for the object for which it had temporarily hungered.  It is these secondary sexual characters, with their subtle and endless variations, that have given individual preference such a wide field of choice that every lover can find a girl after his heart and taste.  A savage is like a gardener who has only one kind of flowers to choose between—­all of one color too; whereas we, with our diverse secondary characters, our various intermixtures of nationalities, our endless shades of blonde and brunette, and differences in manners and education can have our choice among the lilies, roses, violets, pansies, daisies, and thousands of other flowers—­or the girls named after them.  Samuel Baker says there are no broken hearts in Africa.  Why should there be when individuals are so similar that if a man loses his girl he can easily find another just like her in color, face, rotundity, and grossness?  A civilized lover would mourn the loss of his bride—­though he were offered his choice of the beauties of Baltimore—­because it would be absolutely impossible to duplicate her.

In that last line lies the explanation of one of the mysteries of modern love—­its stubborn fidelity to the beloved after the choice has been made.  But there is another mystery of individual preference that calls for an explanation—­its capriciousness, apparent or real, in making a choice—­that quality which has made the poets declare so often that “love is blind.”  On this point much confusion of ideas prevails.

Matters are simplified if we first dispose of those numerous cases in which the individual preference is only approximate.  If a girl of eighteen has the choice between a man of sixty and a youth of twenty, she will, if she exercises a personal preference, take the youth, as a matter of course, though he may be far from her ideal.  Such preference is generic rather than individual.  Again, in most cases of first love, as I have remarked elsewhere (R.L.P.B., 139) “man falls in love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or woman.”  Young men and women inherit, from a long series of ancestors, a disposition to love which at puberty reveals itself in vague longings and dreams.  The “bump of amativeness,” as a phrenologist might say, is like a powder magazine, ready to explode at a touch, and it makes no great difference what kind of a match is applied.  In later love affairs the match is a matter of more importance.