Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
Inasmuch as there are not a few men whose æsthetic taste is so weak that
they would rather marry a useful, companionable girl and imagine her
beautiful, than take a beauty and imagine her useful; and inasmuch as
there are a great many more amiable and vivacious girls in the world
than pretty ones, it happens that in a large number of cases Love is
inspired by the physiognomic interpretation of sympathetic traits of
character just referred to. Hence plain girls need never despair of
finding husbands. There is even a current notion that the deepest
passions are commonly inspired by plain women who are otherwise
attractive. But what inspires the Love in these cases is not so much the
woman’s amiability—and certainly not her plainness—as the fact that the
style of her homeliness is of an opposite kind from the faults of the
lover, and promises to neutralise them in the offspring.
Plain and homely, moreover, are terms often applied to women whose faces
only are so, while their figures are sometimes superb. But a fine figure
is quite as essential a part of Personal Beauty as a fine face, and is,
in the opinion of Schopenhauer, even more potent as a love-inspirer. If
the figure is disregarded in favour of the face, Romantic Love is apt to
become hyper-romantic, as in the days of Dante.
Perhaps the largest number of cases of Love at First Sight, so called,
are inspired by mere _beauté du diable_—a female “bud” whose sole charm
apparent is sparkling health and fragrant, dew-bejewelled freshness.
That this kind of Love at sight, which consists in being dazzled for the
moment by a set of regular features and a pair of bright eyes, is often
of brief duration, does not militate against the statement that the
deepest Love is also born of such a flash of æsthetic admiration. An
incipient passion may be crushed by the discovery of some disagreeable
trait in the person who inspired it; but when, owing to want of early
opportunity to discover unsympathetic traits, Love has been allowed to
make some progress, the subsequent discovery of a flaw is not nearly so
serious a matter, for then Master Cupid simply puts a daub of whitewash
on it and calls it a beauty-spot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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