" exclaimed
Dryden; and Romeo asks:

Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.

In full-fledged romantic love of the masculine type the admiration of
a girl's personal beauty is no doubt the most entrancing ingredient.
But such love is rare even to-day, while in ordinary love-affairs the
sense of beauty does not play nearly so important a role as is
commonly supposed. In woman's love, as everybody knows, the regard for
masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient; and a man's
love, provided sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice,
affection, and purity enter into it, may be of the genuine romantic
type, even though he has no sense of beauty at all. And this is lucky
for the prospects of love, since, even among the most civilized races
to-day, the number of men and women who, while otherwise refined and
estimable, have no real appreciation of beauty, personal or otherwise,
is astonishingly large.

DARWIN'S UNFORTUNATE MISTAKE

This being true of the average man and woman among the most cultured
races, we ought to be able to conclude, as a matter of course and
without the necessity of argumentation, that the admiration of
personal beauty has still less to do with the motives that lead a
savage to marry this or that girl, or a savage girl to prefer this or
that suitor. Strange to say, this simple corollary of the doctrine of
evolution has been greatly obscured by Darwin himself, by his theory
of sexual selection, which goes so far as to attribute the beauty of
the male _animals_ to the continued preference by the females of the
more showy males, and the consequent hereditary transmission of their
colors and other ornaments. When we bear in mind how unimportant a
role the regard for personal beauty plays even among the females of
the most advanced human beings, the idea that the females of the lower
animals are guided in their pairing by minute subtle differences in
the beauty of masculine animals seems positively comic. It is an idea
such as could have emanated only from a mind as unesthetic as Darwin's
was.

So far as animals are concerned, Alfred Russell Wallace completely
demolished the theory of sexual selection,[46] after it had created a
great deal of confusion in scientific literature. In regard to the
lower races of man this confusion still continues, and I therefore
wish to demonstrate here, more conclusively than I did in my