Grant Allen - Falling in Love

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FALLING IN LOVE

_WITH OTHER ESSAYS ON MORE EXACT BRANCHES OF SCIENCE_

BY

GRANT ALLEN

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1889

[_All rights reserved_]

PREFACE

Some people complain that science is dry. That is, of course, a matter
of taste. For my own part, I like my science and my champagne as dry as
I can get them. But the public thinks otherwise. So I have ventured to
sweeten accompanying samples as far as possible to suit the demand, and
trust they will meet with the approbation of consumers.

Of the specimens here selected for exhibition, my title piece originally
appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_: 'Honey Dew' and 'The First Potter'
were contributions to _Longman's Magazine_: and all the rest found
friendly shelter between the familiar yellow covers of the good old
_Cornhill_. My thanks are due to the proprietors and editors of those
various periodicals for kind permission to reproduce them here.

G.A.

THE NOOK, DORKING:

_September_, 1889.

CONTENTS

PAGE

FALLING IN LOVE 1
RIGHT AND LEFT 18
EVOLUTION 31
STRICTLY INCOG. 50
SEVEN-YEAR SLEEPERS 72
A FOSSIL CONTINENT 88
A VERY OLD MASTER 106
BRITISH AND FOREIGN 123
THUNDERBOLTS 137
HONEY-DEW 159
THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 176
FOOD AND FEEDING 193
DE BANANA 216
GO TO THE ANT 233
BIG ANIMALS 251
FOSSIL FOOD 271
OGBURY BARROWS 287
FISH OUT OF WATER 302
THE FIRST POTTER 316
THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 328
DESERT SANDS 341

FALLING IN LOVE

An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir
George Campbell has set his face against the time-honoured practice of
Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their faces
against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only
attacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn the
institution itself on general principles. An old Indian administrator,
however, goes to work in all things on a different pattern. He would
always like to regulate human life generally as a department of the
India Office; and so Sir George Campbell would fain have husbands and
wives selected for one another (perhaps on Dr. Johnson's principle, by
the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future development of the race,
in the process which he not very felicitously or elegantly describes as
'man-breeding.' 'Probably,' he says, as reported in _Nature_, 'we have
enough physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in the
pairing of individuals of the same or allied races if we could only
apply that knowledge to make fitting marriages, instead of giving way to
foolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people, whom we can
hardly trust to choose their own bonnets, much less to choose in a
graver matter in which they are most likely to be influenced by
frivolous prejudices.' He wants us, in other words, to discard the
deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited instinct, and to
substitute for them some calm and dispassionate but artificial
selection of a fitting partner as the father or mother of future
generations.

Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be treated
seriously and reverently. But, it seems to me, Sir George Campbell's
conclusion is exactly the opposite one from the conclusion now being
forced upon men of science by a study of the biological and
psychological elements in this very complex problem of heredity. So far
from considering love as a 'foolish idea,' opposed to the best interests
of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists,
especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it
rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct developed
and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring
just those precise advantages and improvements which Sir George Campbell
thinks he could himself effect by a conscious and deliberate process of
selection. More than that, I believe, for my own part (and I feel sure
most evolutionists would cordially agree with me), that this beneficent
inherited instinct of Falling in Love effects the object it has in view
far more admirably, subtly, and satisfactorily, on the average of
instances, than any clumsy human selective substitute could possibly
effect it.

In short, my doctrine is simply the old-fashioned and confiding belief
that marriages are made in heaven: with the further corollary that
heaven manages them, one time with another, a great deal better than Sir
George Campbell.

Let us first look how Falling in Love affects the standard of human
efficiency; and then let us consider what would be the probable result
of any definite conscious attempt to substitute for it some more
deliberate external agency.

Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing
more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the
human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin
has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the
animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aerial
dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the
delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of
his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the
eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty
and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom
he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the
admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to
be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it
were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the
fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability,
producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in
the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the
case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the
'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.

In our own species, the selective process is marked by all the features
common to selection throughout the whole animal kingdom; but it is also,
as might be expected, far more specialised, far more individualised, far
more cognisant of personal traits and minor peculiarities. It is
furthermore exerted to a far greater extent upon mental and moral as
well as physical peculiarities in the individual.

We cannot fall in love with everybody alike. Some of us fall in love
with one person, some with another. This instinctive and deep-seated
differential feeling we may regard as the outcome of complementary
features, mental, moral, or physical, in the two persons concerned; and
experience shows us that, in nine cases out of ten, it is a reciprocal
affection, that is to say, in other words, an affection roused in unison
by varying qualities in the respective individuals.

Of its eminently conservative and even upward tendency very little doubt
can be reasonably entertained. We _do_ fall in love, taking us in the
lump, with the young, the beautiful, the strong, and the healthy; we do
_not_ fall in love, taking us in the lump, with the aged, the ugly, the
feeble, and the sickly. The prohibition of the Church is scarcely needed
to prevent a man from marrying his grandmother. Moralists have always
borne a special grudge to pretty faces; but, as Mr. Herbert Spencer
admirably put it (long before the appearance of Darwin's selective
theory), 'the saying that beauty is but skin-deep is itself but a
skin-deep saying.' In reality, beauty is one of the very best guides we
can possibly have to the desirability, so far as race-preservation is
concerned, of any man or any woman as a partner in marriage. A fine
form, a good figure, a beautiful bust, a round arm and neck, a fresh
complexion, a lovely face, are all outward and visible signs of the
physical qualities that on the whole conspire to make up a healthy and
vigorous wife and mother; they imply soundness, fertility, a good
circulation, a good digestion. Conversely, sallowness and paleness are
roughly indicative of dyspepsia and anaemia; a flat chest is a symptom of
deficient maternity; and what we call a bad figure is really, in one way
or another, an unhealthy departure from the central norma and standard
of the race. Good teeth mean good deglutition; a clear eye means an
active liver; scrubbiness and undersizedness mean feeble virility. Nor
are indications of mental and moral efficiency by any means wanting as
recognised elements in personal beauty. A good-humoured face is in
itself almost pretty. A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive
features. Low, receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid,
half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however regular their
lines and contours. Intelligence and goodness are almost as necessary as
health and vigour in order to make up our perfect ideal of a beautiful
human face and figure. The Apollo Belvedere is no fool; the murderers in
the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's are for the most part no
beauties.

What we all fall in love with, then, as a race, is in most cases
efficiency and ability. What we each fall in love with individually is,
I believe, our moral, mental, and physical complement. Not our like, not
our counterpart; quite the contrary; within healthy limits, our unlike
and our opposite. That this is so has long been more or less a
commonplace of ordinary conversation; that it is scientifically true,
one time with another, when we take an extended range of cases, may, I
think, be almost demonstrated by sure and certain warranty of human
nature.

Brothers and sisters have more in common, mentally and physically, than
any other members of the same race can possibly have with one another.
But nobody falls in love with his sister. A profound instinct has taught
even the lower races of men (for the most part) to avoid such union of
the all-but-identical. In the higher races the idea never so much as
occurs to us. Even cousins seldom fall in love--seldom, that is to say,
in comparison with the frequent opportunities of intercourse they enjoy,
relatively to the remainder of general society. When they do, and when
they carry out their perilous choice effectively by marriage, natural
selection soon avenges Nature upon the offspring by cutting off the
idiots, the consumptives, the weaklings, and the cripples, who often
result from such consanguineous marriages. In narrow communities, where
breeding in-and-in becomes almost inevitable, natural selection has
similarly to exert itself upon a crowd of _cretins_ and other hapless
incapables. But in wide and open champaign countries, where individual
choice has free room for exercise, men and women as a rule (if not
constrained by parents and moralists) marry for love, and marry on the
whole their natural complements. They prefer outsiders, fresh blood,
somebody who comes from beyond the community, to the people of their own
immediate surroundings. In many men the dislike to marrying among the
folk with whom they have been brought up amounts almost to a positive
instinct; they feel it as impossible to fall in love with a
fellow-townswoman as to fall in love with their own first cousins. Among
exogamous tribes such an instinct (aided, of course, by other extraneous
causes) has hardened into custom; and there is reason to believe (from
the universal traces among the higher civilisations of marriage by
capture) that all the leading races of the world are ultimately derived
from exogamous ancestors, possessing this healthy and excellent
sentiment.

In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted that short men,
as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men admire little women. Dark
pairs by preference with fair; the commonplace often runs after the
original. People have long noticed that this attraction towards one's
opposite tends to keep true the standard of the race; they have not,
perhaps, so generally observed that it also indicates roughly the
existence in either individual of a desire for its own natural
complement. It is difficult here to give definite examples, but
everybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there
are involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which
strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form with
ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek out
and discover such qualities; instinct works far more intuitively than
that; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and how
trustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do
so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliest
promptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinest
and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.

How very subtle this intuition is, we can only guess in part by the
apparent capriciousness and incomprehensibility of its occasional
action. We know that some men and women fall in love easily, while
others are only moved to love by some very special and singular
combination of peculiarities. We know that one man is readily stirred by
every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused by
intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we
meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for
some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love
with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't,
of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and
women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has
somewhere on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must sooner or
later meet or else die unsatisfied. Almost every healthy normal man or
woman has probably fallen in love over and over again in the course of a
lifetime (except in case of very early marriage), and could easily find
dozens of persons with whom they would be capable of falling in love
again if due occasion offered. We are not all created in pairs, like the
Exchequer tallies, exactly intended to fit into one another's minor
idiosyncrasies. Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love with
one another in the particular places and the particular societies they
happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt the
world over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-le-Monial or at
Denver, Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a vast number
are purely indifferent to him; only one or two, here and there, strike
him in the light of possible wives, and only one in the last resort
(outside Salt Lake City) approves herself to his inmost nature as the
actual wife of his final selection.

Now this very indifference to the vast mass of our fellow-countrymen or
fellow-countrywomen, this extreme pitch of selective preference in the
human species, is just one mark of our extraordinary specialisation, one
stamp and token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick and
choose, though even there, as Darwin has shown, selection plays a large
part (for the very butterflies are coy, and must be wooed and won). It
is only in the human race itself that selection descends into such
minute, such subtle, such indefinable discriminations. Why should a
universal and common impulse have in our case these special limits? Why
should we be by nature so fastidious and so diversely affected? Surely
for some good and sufficient purpose. No deep-seated want of our complex
life would be so narrowly restricted without a law and a meaning.
Sometimes we can in part explain its conditions. Here, we see that
beauty plays a great _role_; there, we recognise the importance of
strength, of manner, of grace, of moral qualities. Vivacity, as Mr.
Galton justly remarks, is one of the most powerful among human
attractions, and often accounts for what might otherwise seem
unaccountable preferences. But after all is said and done, there remains
a vast mass of instinctive and inexplicable elements: a power deeper and
more marvellous in its inscrutable ramifications than human
consciousness. 'What on earth,' we say, 'could So-and-so see in
So-and-so to fall in love with?' This very inexplicability I take to be
the sign and seal of a profound importance. An instinct so conditioned,
so curious, so vague, so unfathomable, as we may guess by analogy with
all other instincts, must be Nature's guiding voice within us, speaking
for the good of the human race in all future generations.

On the other hand, let us suppose for a moment (impossible supposition!)
that mankind could conceivably divest itself of 'these foolish ideas
about love and the tastes of young people,' and could hand over the
choice of partners for life to a committee of anthropologists, presided
over by Sir George Campbell. Would the committee manage things, I
wonder, very much better than the Creator has managed them? Where would
they obtain that intimate knowledge of individual structures and
functions and differences which would enable them to join together in
holy matrimony fitting and complementary idiosyncrasies? Is a living
man, with all his organs, and powers, and faculties, and dispositions,
so simple and easy a problem to read that anybody else can readily
undertake to pick out off-hand a help meet for him? I trow not! A man is
not a horse or a terrier. You cannot discern his 'points' by simple
inspection. You cannot see _a priori_ why a Hanoverian bandsman and his
heavy, ignorant, uncultured wife, should conspire to produce a Sir
William Herschel. If you tried to improve the breed artificially, either
by choice from outside, or by the creation of an independent moral
sentiment, irrespective of that instinctive preference which we call
Falling in Love, I believe that so far from improving man, you would
only do one of two things--either spoil his constitution, or produce a
tame stereotyped pattern of amiable imbecility. You would crush out all
initiative, all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality; you would
get an animated moral code instead of living men and women.

Look at the analogy of domestic animals. That is the analogy to which
breeding reformers always point with special pride: but what does it
really teach us? That you can't improve the efficiency of animals in any
one point to any high degree, without upsetting the general balance of
their constitution. The race-horse can run a mile on a particular day at
a particular place, bar accidents, with wonderful speed: but that is
about all he is good for. His health as a whole is so surprisingly
feeble that he has to be treated with as much care as a delicate exotic.
'In regard to animals and plants,' says Sir George Campbell, 'we have
very largely mastered the principles of heredity and culture, and the
modes by which good qualities may be maximised, bad qualities
minimised.' True, so far as concerns a few points prized by ourselves
for our own purposes. But in doing this, we have so lowered the general
constitutional vigour of the plants or animals that our vines fall an
easy prey to oidium and phylloxera, our potatoes to the potato disease
and the Colorado beetle; our sheep are stupid, our rabbits idiotic, our
domestic breeds generally threatened with dangers to life and limb
unknown to their wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes to
deal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man, what hope
would there be of our improving the breed by deliberate selection? If we
developed the intellect, we would probably stunt the physique or the
moral nature; if we aimed at a general culture of all faculties alike,
we would probably end by a Chinese uniformity of mediocre dead level.

The balance of organs and faculties in a race is a very delicate organic
equilibrium. How delicate we now know from thousands of examples, from
the correlations of seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spread
effects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the
Tasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different from
those with which their ancestors were familiar. What folly to interfere
with a marvellous instinct which now preserves this balance intact, in
favour of an untried artificial system which would probably wreck it as
helplessly as the modern system of higher education for women is
wrecking the maternal powers of the best class in our English community!

Indeed, within the race itself, as it now exists, free choice, aided by
natural selection, is actually improving every good point, and is for
ever weeding out all the occasional failures and shortcomings of nature.
For weakly children, feeble children, stupid children, heavy children,
are undoubtedly born under this very regime of falling in love, whose
average results I believe to be so highly beneficial. How is this? Well,
one has to take into consideration two points in seeking for the
solution of that obvious problem.

In the first place, no instinct is absolutely perfect. All of them
necessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good, they
are sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have to
start in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourable
circumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world to
supplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the best
woman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently far
from perfect; all I claim is that it would be as bad or a good deal
worse if somebody else made the choice for him, or if he made the choice
himself on abstract biological and 'eugenic' principles. And, indeed,
the very existence of better and worse in the world is a condition
precedent of all upward evolution. Without an overstocked world, with
individual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could be
no natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chief
besetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a very
great man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fully
carried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and the
world would be peopled in a few generations by the hereditarily reckless
and dissolute and imprudent. Even so, if eugenic principles were
universally adopted, the chance of exceptional and elevated natures
would be largely reduced, and natural selection would be in so much
interfered with or sensibly retarded.

In the second place, again, it must not be forgotten that falling in
love has never yet, among civilised men at least, had a fair field and
no favour. Many marriages are arranged on very different
grounds--grounds of convenience, grounds of cupidity, grounds of
religion, grounds of snobbishness. In many cases it is clearly
demonstrable that such marriages are productive in the highest degree of
evil consequences. Take the case of heiresses. An heiress is almost by
necessity the one last feeble and flickering relic of a moribund
stock--often of a stock reduced by the sordid pursuit of ill-gotten
wealth almost to the very verge of actual insanity. But let her be ever
so ugly, ever so unhealthy, ever so hysterical, ever so mad, somebody or
other will be ready and eager to marry her on any terms. Considerations
of this sort have helped to stock the world with many feeble and
unhealthy persons. Among the middle and upper classes it may be safely
said only a very small percentage of marriages is ever due to love
alone; in other words, to instinctive feeling. The remainder have been
influenced by various side advantages, and nature has taken her
vengeance accordingly on the unhappy offspring. Parents and moralists
are ever ready to drown her voice, and to counsel marriage within one's
own class, among nice people, with a really religious girl, and so forth
_ad infinitum_. By many well-meaning young people these deadly
interferences with natural impulse are accepted as part of a higher and
nobler law of conduct. The wretched belief that one should subordinate
the promptings of one's own soul to the dictates of a miscalculating and
misdirecting prudence has been instilled into the minds of girls
especially, until at last many of them have almost come to look upon
their natural instincts as wrong, and the immoral, race-destructive
counsels of their seniors or advisers as the truest and purest earthly
wisdom. Among certain small religious sects, again, such as the Quakers,
the duty of 'marrying in' has been strenuously inculcated, and only the
stronger-minded and more individualistic members have had courage and
initiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the internal
divine monitor, as against the externally-imposed law of their
particular community. Even among wider bodies it is commonly held that
Catholics must not marry Protestants; and the admirable results obtained
by the mixture of Jewish with European blood have almost all been
reached by male Jews having the temerity to marry 'Christian' women in
the face of opposition and persecution from their co-nationalists. It is
very rarely indeed that a Jewess will accept a European for a husband.
In so many ways, and on so many grounds, does convention interfere with
the plain and evident dictates of nature.

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