Falling in Love | Page 6

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.
Against all such evil parental promptings, however, a great safeguard is afforded to society by the wholesome and essentially philosophical teaching of romance and poetry. I do not approve of novels. They are for the most part a futile and unprofitable form of literature; and it may profoundly be regretted that the mere blind laws of supply and demand should have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds in England, France, and America, from more serious subjects to the production of such very frivolous and, on the whole, ephemeral works of art. But the novel has this one great counterpoise of undoubted good to set against all the manifold disadvantages and shortcomings of romantic literature--that it always appeals to the true internal promptings of inherited instinct, and opposes the foolish and selfish suggestions of interested outsiders. It is the perpetual protest of poor banished human nature against the expelling pitchfork of calculating expediency in the matrimonial market. While parents and moralists are for ever saying, 'Don't marry for beauty; don't marry for inclination; don't marry for love: marry for money, marry for social position, marry for advancement, marry for our convenience, not for your own,' the romance-writer is for ever urging, on the other hand, 'Marry for love, and for love only.' His great theme in all ages has been the opposition between parental or other external wishes and the true promptings of the young and unsophisticated human heart. He has been the chief ally of sentiment and of nature. He has filled the heads of all our girls with what Sir George Campbell describes off-hand as 'foolish ideas about love.' He has preserved us from the hateful conventions of civilisation. He has exalted the claims of personal attraction, of the mysterious native yearning of heart for heart, of the indefinite and indescribable element of mutual selection; and, in so doing, he has unconsciously proved himself the best friend of human improvement and the deadliest enemy of all those hideous 'social lies which warp us from the living truth.' His mission is to deliver the world from Dr. Johnson and Sir George Campbell.
For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires who are always in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists 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 apophthegms 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