not appreciated or fostered at so early an epoch. Gentleness, modesty, domesticity, girlishness, coyness, kindness, patience, tenderness, benevolence, sympathy, self-sacrifice, demureness, emotionality, sensitiveness, are feminine qualities, some of which, it is true, we expect also in gentlemen; but their absence is not nearly so fatal to a man as it is to a woman. And as men gradually approach women in patience, tenderness, sympathy, self-sacrifice, and gentleness, it behooves women to keep their distance by becoming still more refined and feminine, instead of trying, as so many of them do, to approach the old masculine standard-one of the strangest aberrations recorded in all social history.

Men and women fall in love with what is unlike, not with what is like them. The refined physical and mental traits which I have described in the preceding paragraphs constitute some of the secondary sexual characters by which romantic love is inspired, while sensual love is based on the primary sexual characters. Havelock Ellis (19) has well defined a secondary sexual character as "one which, by more highly differentiating the sexes, helps to make them more attractive to each other," and so to promote marriages. And Professor Weissmann, famed for his studies in heredity, opens up deep vistas of thought when he declares (II., 91) that "all the numerous differences in form and function which characterize sex among the higher animals, all the so-called 'secondary sexual characters,' affecting even the highest mental qualities of mankind, are nothing but adaptations to bring about the union of the hereditary tendencies of two individuals." Nature has been at work on this problem of differentiating the sexes ever since it created the lowest animal organisms, and this fact, which stands firm as a rock, gives us the consoling assurance that the present abnormal attempts to make women masculine by giving them the same education, employments, sports, ideals, and political aspirations as men have, must end in ignominious failure. If the viragoes had their way, men and women would in course of time revert to the condition of the lowest savages, differing only in their organs of generation. How infinitely nobler, higher, more refined and

fascinating, is that ideal which wants women to differ from men by every detail, bodily and mental; to differ from them in the higher qualities of disposition, of character, of beauty, physical and spiritual, which alone make possible the existence of romantic love as distinguished from lust on one side and friendship on the other.

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 capricious

ness, 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.

Robert Burton threw light on the "capriciousness" and accidentality 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:

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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

AN ORIENTAL LOVE-STORY

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different degrees of individualization-an aperçu which this whole chapter confirms. Yet these mere approximations to

real preference embrace the vast majority of so-called loveaffairs. 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

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"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 scraglio, 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.'

ووو

This story was referred to by several critics of my first book as refuting my theory regarding the modernity of true love. They seemed to think, with the Persian poet, that there must be something particularly wonderful and elevated in the feelings of a lover who is indifferent to the usual charms of femininity and prefers ugliness. This, indeed, is the prevalent sentiment on the subject, though the more I

think of it, the more absurd and topsy turvy it seems to me. Do we commend an Eskimo for preferring the flavor of rancid fish oil to the delicate bouquet of the finest French wine? Does it evince a particularly exalted artistic sense to prefer a hideous daub to a Titian or Raphael? Does it betoken a laudable and elevated taste in music to prefer a vulgar tune to one that has the charms of a romantic or classical work of acknowledged beauty? Why, then, should we specially extol Mujnun for admiring a woman who was devoid of all feminine charms? The confusion probably arises from fancying that she must have had mental charms to offset her ugliness, but nothing whatever is said about such a notion, which, in fact, would have been utterly foreign to the Oriental, purely sensual, way of regarding women.

Fix the attention on the man in the story instead of on the woman and the mystery vanishes. Mujnun becomes infatuated with an ugly woman simply because he has no taste, no sense of beauty. There are millions of such men the world over, just as there are millions who cannot appreciate choice wines, good music, and fine pictures. Everywhere the majority of men prefer vulgar tunes, glaring chromos, and coarse women-luckily for the women, because most of them are coarse, too. "Birds of a feather flock together "-there you have the philosophy of preference so far as such love-affairs are concerned. How often do we see a bright, lovely girl, with sweet voice and refined manners, neglected by men who crowd around other women of their own rude and vulgar caste ! Most men still are savages so far as the ability to appreciate the higher secondary sexual qualities in women is concerned. But the exceptions are growing more numerous. Among savages there are no exceptions. Romantic love does not exist among them, both because the women have not the secondary sexual qualities, and because, even if they had them, the men would not appreciate them or be guided by them in their choice of mates.