FullReads

There is a kind of scientific selection in the intermarriage of persons of quality, which is at the bottom of their supposed superciliousness and disdain of trade, though blood does not infallibly produce breeding. There is the same tribal instinct in the aversion of Jews from exogamy, and it is this sort of scientific selection which is subconsciously going on when parents and guardians, sisters, cousins, and aunts, interfere with the “elective affinities.” Money, too, is really a security for the due rearing of offspring. It is to be hoped there is a tear beneath the sneers of Sudermann’s comedy, “Die Schmetterlingschlacht,” for the sorrows of moneyless mothers with unmarriageable girls.

Doaen’t thou marry for munny, but goae wheer munny is,

said Tennyson’s Northern Farmer–a sentiment which was anticipated or plagiarised by Wendell Holmes as “Don’t marry for money, but take care the girl you love has money.” Few people may marry directly for money, or even for position, but few marriages are uncomplicated by considerations of money and position. Little wonder if

Love, light as air, at sight of human ties
Spreads his light wings and in a moment flies.

Lovers may thrust such thoughts into the background, but is not this wilful blindness as much “The Comedy of Sentiment” as that which supplies the theme of Nordau’s novel? It weighed upon Walter Bagehot that “immortal souls” should have to think of tare and tret and the price of butter; but “sich is life”–prose and poetry intertangled. The cloud may have a silver lining, but clouds are not all silver. Wherefore Nordau’s glorification of the love-match is curiously unscientific; it belongs to silver-cloudland; it might work among the birds of [Greek: Nephelo-kokkugia]. Loveless marriages may beget happiness, if not ecstacy; and love-matches may be neither for the interest of the individuals nor of the race. They serve, however, to feed Art, and one real love-match will justify a hundred novels and plays, just as one good ghost will supply a hundred ghost-stories. Considering how many dead people there are, the percentage of those permitted to play ghost is so infinitesimal as to be incredible a priori; nevertheless, how we snatch at the possibility of ghosts! Even so we like to connect love and marriage, two things naturally divorced, and to fancy that wedding bells are rung by Cupid. But, after all, what is love? In lawn-tennis it counts for nothing. In the dictionary it figures, inter alia, as “a kind of light silken stuff.” And, as Dumas fils sagely sums it up in “Le Demi-Monde”: “Dans le mariage, quand l’amour existe, l’habitude le tue, et quand il n’existe pas elle le fait naitre.”