FALLING IN LOVE 15 



mentalists and the rebels who are always in the right in 

 this matter. If the common moral maxims of society could 

 have had their way if we had all chosen our wives and 

 our husbands, not for their beauty or their manliness, not 

 for their eyes or their moustaches, not for their attractiveness 

 or their vivacity, but for their ' sterling qualities of mind and 

 character,' we should now doubtless be a miserable race of 

 prigs and bookworms, of martinets and puritans, of nervous 

 invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our young men 

 and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apoph- 

 thegms of shallow sophistry because they often prefer 

 Romeo and Juliet to the ' Whole Duty of Man,' and a 

 beautiful face to a round balance at Coutts's that we still 

 preserve some vitality and some individual features, in spite 

 of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The men who 

 marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out, 

 leaving" none to represent them : the men who marry 

 women they have been weak enough and silly enough to 

 fall in love with, recruit the race with fine and vigorous 

 and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of the 

 complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted 

 and mutually reinforcing individualities. 



I have spoken throughout, for argument's sake, as 

 though the only interest to be considered in the married 

 relation were the interests of the offspring, and so ultimately 

 of the race at large, rather than of the persons themselves 

 who enter into it. But I do not quite see why each genera- 

 tion should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of the genera- 

 tions that afterwards succeed it. Now it is one of the 

 strongest points in favour of the system of falling in love 

 that it does, by common experience in the vast majority of 

 instances, assort together persons who subsequently prove 

 themselves thoroughly congenial and helpful to one another. 

 And this result I look upon as one great proof of the real 



