Robert Burton threw light on the “capriciousness” and accidentally of this kind of (apparent) amorous preference when he wrote that “it is impossible, almost, for two young folks equal in years to live together and not be in love;” and further he says, sagaciously: 

“Many a serving man, by reason of this opportunity and importunity, inveigles his master’s daughter, many a gallant loves a dowdy, many a gentleman runs after his wife’s maids; many ladies dote upon their men, as the queen in Aristo did upon the dwarf, many matches are so made in haste and they are compelled, as it were by necessity, so to love, which had they been free, come in company with others, seen that variety which many places afford, or compared them to a third, would never have looked upon one another.”

Such passions are merely pent-up emotions seeking to escape one way or another.  They do not indicate real, intense preference, but at best an approach to it; for they are not properly individualized, and, as Schopenhauer pointed out, the differences in the intensity of love-cases depend on their different degrees of individualization—­an apercu which this whole chapter confirms.  Yet these mere approximations to real preference embrace the vast majority of so-called love-affairs.  Genuine preference of the highest type finds its explanation in special phases of sympathy and personal beauty which will be discussed later on.

What is usually considered the greatest mystery of the amorous passion is the disposition of a lover to “see Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.”  “What can Jack have seen in Jill to become infatuated with her, or she in him?” The trouble with those who so often ask this question is that they fix the attention on the beloved instead of on the lover, whose lack of taste explains everything.  The error is of long standing, as the following story related by the Persian poet Saadi (of the thirteenth century) will show (346): 

AN ORIENTAL LOVE-STORY

“A king of Arabia was told that Mujnun, maddened by love, had turned his face toward the desert and assumed the manners of a brute.  The king ordered him to be brought in his presence and he wept and said:  ’Many of my friends reproach me for my love of her, namely Laila; alas! that they could one day see her, that my excuse might be manifest for me.’  The king sent for her and beheld a person of tawny complexion, and feeble frame of body.  She appeared to him in a contemptible light, inasmuch as the lowest menial in his harem, or seraglio, surpassed her in beauty and excelled her in elegance.  Mujnun, in his sagacity, penetrated what was passing in the king’s mind and said:  ’It would behove you, O King, to contemplate the charms of Laila through the wicket of a Mujnun’s eye, in order that the miracle of such a spectacle might be illustrated to you.’”

This story was referred to by several critics of my