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
_Intellect and Love._—But, after all, the deepest Love at Sight, and
that which gives promise of greatest permanence, is that inspired by a
handsome woman in whose face Intellect has written its autograph.
Goethe, indeed, has remarked that “intellect cannot warm us, or inspire
us with passion;” but the view he takes here of the relations between
intellect and passion is obviously very crude and superficial. No man,
of course, would ever fall in Love with a woman who showed her
intellectuality—as not a few do—by a parrotlike repetition of
encyclopædic reading or magazine epitomes of knowledge. This gives
evidence of only one form of intellect, the lowest, namely, Memory. It
is the higher forms—imagination, wit, clever reasoning, that constitute
the essence of intellectual culture; and though woman may never quite
equal man in this sphere, such cases as Mme. de Staël, George Sand, and
George Eliot show how much she _can_ accomplish by means of application.
Now this higher kind of intellectual culture is able to influence the
amorous feelings in two ways: first, by refining and vivifying the
features; secondly, by enabling a woman to appreciate her lover’s
ambitions and afford him sympathetic assistance, thereby awakening a
responsive echo in his grateful mind.
Look at Miss Marbleface in yonder corner, surrounded by a group of
admirers. Everybody wonders why she, whose features might inspire a
sculptor, remains unmarried at twenty-six. Her friends, indeed, whisper
that she never even got an offer. Yet all the men to whom she is
introduced admire her immensely—the first evening; but strange to say,
after they have seen her a few times, they are not a bit jealous to
leave her to a new group of admirers; who, in turn, cede her to another.
Her beauty, in truth, is but skin-deep, _literally_; the muscles under
the skin are never vivified by an electric flash of wit from the brain;
there is nothing but marble features and a stereotyped smile; no
animation, no change of expression, no Intellect. Were her intellect as
carefully cultivated as her features are chiselled, she would inspire
_Love_, not mere momentary admiration; and she would have been married
six years ago to a man chosen at will from the whole circle of her
acquaintances.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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