tion of the Church is scarcely needed to prevent a man from marrying his grandmother. Moralists have always borne a special grudge to pretty faces; but as Mr. Herbert Spencer admirably put it (long before the appearance of Darwin's selective theory), "the saying that beauty is but skin-deep is itself but a skin-deep saying." In reality, beauty is one of the very best guides we can possibly have to the desirability, so far as race preservation is concerned, of any man or any woman as a partner in marriage.

What we all fall in love with, then, as a race, is in most cases efficiency and ability. What we each fall in love with individually is, I believe, our moral, mental, and physical complement. Not our like, nor our counterpart, quite the contrary; within healthy limits, our unlike and our opposite. That this is so has long been more or less a commonplace of ordinary conversation; that it is scientifically true, one time with another, when we take an extended range of cases, may, I think, be almost demonstrated by sure and certain warranty of human nature.

In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted that short men, as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men admire little women. Dark pairs by preference with fair; the commonplace often runs after the original. People have long noticed that this attraction toward one's opposite tends to keep true the standard of the race; they have not, perhaps, so generally observed that it also indicates roughly the existence in either individual of a desire for its own natural complement. It is difficult here to give definite examples, but everybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there are involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form with ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek out and discover such qualities,-instinct works far more intuitively than that; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and how trustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliest promptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinest and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.

How very subtle this intuition is, we can only guess in part by the apparent capriciousness and incomprehensibility of its occasional action. We know that some men and women fall in

love easily, while others are only moved to love by some very special and singular combination of peculiarities. We know that one man is readily stirred by every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused by intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't, of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has somewhere on earth his or her exact Affinity, whom we must sooner or later meet, or else die unsatisfied. Almost every healthy normal man and woman has probably fallen in love over and over again in the course of a lifetime (except in case of very early marriage), and could easily find dozens of persons with whom they would be capable of falling in love again if due occasion offered. We are not all created in pairs, like the Exchequer tallies, exactly intended to . fit into one another's minor idiosyncrasies. Men and women as

a rule very sensibly fall in love with one another in the particular places and the particular societies they happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt the world over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-leMonial or at Denver, Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a vast number are purely indifferent to him: only one or two, here and there, strike him in the light of possible. wives, and only one in the last resort (outside Salt Lake City) approves herself to his inmost nature as the actual wife of his final selection.

Now this very indifference to the vast mass of our fellowcountrymen or fellow-countrywomen, this extreme pitch of selective preference in the human species, is just one mark of our extraordinary specialization, one stamp and token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick and choose. Though even there, as Darwin has shown, selection plays a large part (for the very butterflies are coy, and must be wooed and won); it is only in the human race itself that selection descends into such minute, such subtle, such indefinable discriminations. Why should a universal and common impulse have in our case these special limits? Why should we be by nature so fastidious and so diversely affected? Surely for some good and sufficient purpose. No deep-seated want

of our complex life would be so narrowly restricted without a law and a meaning. Sometimes we can in part explain its conditions. Here, we see that beauty plays a great role; there, we recognize the importance of strength, of manner, of grace, of moral qualities. Vivacity, as Mr. Galton justly remarks, is one of the most powerful among human attractions, and often accounts for what might otherwise seem unaccountable preferences. But after all is said and done, there remains a vast mass of instinctive and inexplicable elements: a power deeper and more marvelous in its inscrutable ramifications than human consciousness. "What on earth," we say, "could So-and-so see in So-and-so to fall in love with?" This very inexplicability I take to be the sign and seal of a profound importance. An instinct so conditioned, so curious, so vague, so unfathomable, as we may guess by analogy with all other instincts, must be Nature's guiding voice within us, speaking for the good of the human race in all future generations.

On the other hand, let us suppose for a moment (impossible supposition!) that mankind could conceivably divest itself of "these foolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people," and could hand over the choice of partners for life to a committee of anthropologists, presided over by Sir George Campbell. Would the committee manage things, I wonder, very much better than the Creator has managed them? Where would they obtain that intimate knowledge of individual structures and functions and differences which would enable them to join together in holy matrimony fitting and complementary idiosyncrasies? Is a living man, with all his organs, and powers, and faculties, and dispositions, so simple and easy a problem to read that anybody else can readily undertake to pick out offhand a helpmeet for him? I trow not!

I do not doubt that, as the world goes on, a deeper sense of moral responsibility in the matter of marriage will grow up among us. But it will not take the false direction of ignoring these our profoundest and holiest instincts. Marriage for money may go; marriage for rank may go; marriage for position may go; but marriage for love, I believe and trust, will last forever. Men in the future will probably feel that a union with their cousins or near relations is positively wicked; that a union with those too like them in person or disposition is at least undesirable; that a union based upon considerations of wealth or any

other consideration save considerations of immediate natural impulse, is base and disgraceful. But to the end of time they will continue to feel, in spite of doctrinaires, that the voice of nature is better far than the voice of the Lord Chancellor or the Royal Society; and that the instinctive desire for a particular helpmate is a surer guide for the ultimate happiness, both of the race and of the individual, than any amount of deliberate consultation. It is not the foolish fancies of youth that will have to be got rid of, but the foolish, wicked, and mischievous interference of parents or outsiders.

From an essay in the Fortnight Review.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON

(1779-1843)

NE of the first painters of assured genius developed in the United States, Washington Allston lacks nothing except the quantity of his literary work to give him, as an essayist on art, the same high rank he attained by expressing his intellect with his brush. He is governed by the same reverence for nature, the same belief in its supernatural origin and in the possibility of learning more from it than can be expressed in words, which governed Sir Joshua Reynolds and Ruskin.

He was born near Georgetown, South Carolina, November 5th, 1779. After graduating at Harvard, he sold his estate in South Carolina and went to Europe that he might devote himself wholly to art. He spent nearly eighteen years in London, Paris, and Rome, and, on his return to America, took up his residence in Massachusetts, where he painted many of his best pictures, notably "The Angel Uriel in the Sun" and the unfinished "Belshazzar's Feast." Besides his essays and lectures on art, he published a volume of poems which were included in the collection edited after his death by Richard H. Dana, Junior. He died July 9th, 1843, at Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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HUMAN ART AND INFINITE TRUTH

S TO What some have called "our creative powers,' >>> we take it for granted that no correct thinker has ever applied such expressions literally. Strictly speaking, we can make nothing; we can only construct. But how vast a theatre is here laid open to the constructive powers of the finite creature; where the physical eye is permitted to travel for millions and millions of miles, while that of the mind, swifter than light, may follow out the journey, from star to star, till it falls back on itself with the humbling conviction that the measureless journey is then but begun! It is needless to dwell on the immeasurable mass of materials which a world like this may supply to the Artist.

The very thought of its vastness darkens into wonder. Yet how much deeper the wonder, when the created mind looks into