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 grinding and crushing civilisation. The men
who marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out, leaving
none to represent them: the men who marry women they have been weak
enough and silly enough to fall in love with, recruit the race with fine
and vigorous and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of the
complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted and mutually
reinforcing individualities.

I have spoken throughout, for argument's sake, as though the only
interest to be considered in the married relation were the interests of
the offspring, and so ultimately of the race at large, rather than of
the persons themselves who enter into it. But I do not quite see why
each generation should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of the
generations that afterwards succeed it. Now it is one of the strongest
points in favour of the system of falling in love that it does, by
common experience in the vast majority of instances, assort together
persons who subsequently prove themselves thoroughly congenial and