11 SEPTEMBER 1886, Page 10

SIR GEORGE CAMPBELL ON SCIENTIFIC MARRIAGE-MAKING.

SIR GEORGE CAMPBELL'S proposal at the British Association to supersede love-making as a preliminary to marriage, and to make marriage instead a great institution for improving the physique and the morale of the human race, would have been somewhat more scientific than it was, if he had been able to suggest any specific, first, for getting rid of the deep-rooted tendency in young people to spoil these beautiful plans by falling in love without paying the least regard to them, and next, for determining what the combinations of character should be through whose union the noblest offspring might be expected. But as he had no recipe either for uprooting the passion of love, that marplot of all the arrangements made by the old for the marriages of the young, or for determining the most effective combining proportions of human quality and character, we fear that his address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association will not advance his reputation for practical wisdom. There is the double diffi- culty in his proposals,—first, that any young man or woman who would avoid falling in love till all the requisite con- ditions of appropriateness for Sir George Campbell's ends were fulfilled, would be a prig whom no one of any sense would ever be disposed to marry ; and next, that even if it were not so, no man, however wise, could judge of the moral suitability of one nature to another at all better than it is determined now by the comparative accident either of a youthful passion or of the parental wishes. Just imagine the effect on any young man or woman possessing any spirit and any healthy instincts, of being addressed by an anthropological papa or mamma in language such as Sir George Campbell might perhaps approve,—thus

for example I am bound to warn you, my dear boy, that your physique, though excellent on the whole, is weak, if at all, in liability to a sluggish liver ; and what, therefore, you must look out for in the first place in a wife, is a girl whose family doctor will assure you that there has never been any weakness of that kind in her family. Besides this, you must be aware that, sweet-tempered as you are, you are a little disposed to levity and too fond of amusement. If, there- fore, you would really improve your species,—and I need not say that I hope that this is your most earnest desire,—and would give to the world children who could justly boast that they are better than their father, you must look out for a wife of earnest and serious disposition, who always postpones amusement to duty, and would stay away from a dance without a murmur to nurse a sick brother. Think, my dear boy, of these things before you permit yourself to fall in love. Be sure that yon know what the constitution of the family is before you allow even admiration to stir your heart. And next to the constitution, and especially the freedom from bilious tendency, be sure of the sense of duty in your proposed wife. If, after securing these great requisites, you like to take sweetness, and temper, and beauty into accoun t, there can be no objection ; but with your own great sweetness of disposition, I think the former is of less importance. You might afford to have a wife of hasty temper; you could not afford to have a wife with any element of frivolity in her, with due regard to your posterity.' A young man who would not be driven by such an address as that into a little scorn for his father, and a positive determination to ignore all such nonsense in satisfying his own heart, would be a poor sort of creature. And the reason is obvious. If young people are to enter into the closest ties of life guided by such considera- tions as these, they must first be in a condition of mind in which it Would be all but certain that they would be utterly iu3isposed to enter on these closest ties at all. It is quite true that there is always risk in forming such ties. Few young people really know each other, or can know each other, before marriage, suffi- ciently to found so close a relation as that of husband and wife on mere knowledge. Nay, without a strong attraction prior to the knowledge, the knowledge would never really come at all. In marriage it is love which brings know- ledge at least ten times as often as knowledge brings love. Conceive a man influenced by the class of considerations to which Sir George Campbell would give prominence, and you conceive a man who would not be in love, and who therefore would probably make infinitely worse blunders in trying to judge of the woman he thought of making his wife, without love, than he would even have made,—and doubtless he might have made many,—by falling in love first and learning the truth about her afterwards. Luckily for us, even the mistakes of love are apt to be more beneficent than the accurate vision of more impartial criticism.

But then, it will be said that this is the English view, but that it is not the view taken by the greater portion of mankind, whose marriages are determined for them by authority, and not by mutual choice. That is probably true, and we are far from denying either that mutual choice is often an insufficient guide, or that authority may be a good guide. Doubtless mar- riages of free choice are not seldom unhappy ; and, on the other hand, marriages determined by parental or other authority are not seldom happy. But the truth is, that either the one method or the other,—either free choice or parental authority,—carries with it more of that sense of inevitability out of which all the most sacred ties of life arise, than the scientific method which our seeming-wise anthropologists recommend. No man can choose for himself the home in which he is born ; and yet it is in that home that ninety-nine men out of a hundred gather up their richest store of happy memories and brightest hopes. The mere fact that marriage, like birth, has been deter- mined by causes which you cannot control, but which have con- trolled you, whether they be due to the authority of others or to the destiny of passion, has a great tendency to inspire deference and acquiescence. In the one case, mutual choice seems to have so little of arbitrary will or caprice in it, that it exercises a quite mysterious influence ; in the other case, respect for the power which determines the deepest and closest tie of life, as it determined the earliest, appeases or charms away a great deal of the self-will of individual restlessness. But if the sort of critical considerations which the anthropologist suggests were to take the place of these influences, if a man felt that his father, in choosing a wife for him, were, to use one of Sir George Campbell's illustrations, choosing on the same principles on which a person of good taste would choose a bonnet for his daughter, all this sense of deference to a power above and beyond us would vanish away. If the young man knew that his father had inquired of the family doctor con- cerning the livers of the bride's family ; that he had insisted on having for his son a wife of a temper likely to supply that son's deficiencies; that he had, in fact, determined his choice by one or two superficial aspects of physique and temperament, con- cerning which it would be as easy as possible for him to go astray,—then all the reverence for authority would vanish with the knowledge of the secret causes determining the father's choice. Probably, indeed, in no country in which mutual choice has been recognised as the highest guarantee for the happiness of marriage, could parental authority ever again take its place ; but still less could it take its place if the parental authority chose to ground itself avowedly on anthropological principles, and to apply such quack tests of suitability as we have described. After all, as the rebellions youth would say, even chemical affinities would never have been discovered by the chemist's inspection of the separate elements. No chemist could ever have discovered in what proportions, or under what conditions, hydrogen and oxygen would combine, by

merely inspecting them. It was by their actual combina- tion, and by that alone, that the stability or instability of their union became a thing that could be tested. And what is true of chemical affinity must be infinitely truer of the much deeper and more subtle affinities in human nature. No previous inspection by critical anthropologists will determine what are the real affinities between them. The attractions between mind and mind are infinitely less easy to gauge or estimate, than the attractions between atom and atom. It may easily happen that the attractions which first show them- selves do not turn out to be all that was hoped, or do turn out to be of no real stability or worth ; but at least they open the way naturally and favourably for the development of mach closer affinities, while the anthropologist's notion that the sentiment of love should be dispensed with, till the sanction of sober criticism has been obtained for it, would be very apt to engender an initial mutual repulsion, instead of that great wave of attraction which sweeps away at least the first reticences and reserves, and makes mutual knowledge easy and possible. The great weakness of the many ambitious sciences of modern days is that their devotees are so eager to substitute the feeble lights they elicit, for those great instincts of Nature which, though not founded on theoretic knowledge at all, are full of that unconscious guidance of which both our bodily and our mental life is in very large proportion made up. Would a child ever learn to walk, if he had to follow accurately the directions of the teachers of statics and dynamics before he could learn to balance and to propel himself P Would ho ever fall into the discipline of civilised society. if he had to guide himself by the philosophy of that society,—a philosophy which is so far behind the social art which it tries to explain. It is just the same with these empirical teachers of the true principles by which marriage may be made to subserve the improvement of the species. They recommend principles which are simply impossible, because if they could be really followed, hardly one marriage in ten would take place at all ; and because if they were followed, ten mistake s would be made for every one which is made now, and probably mistakes ten times as serious as well as ten times as numerous. If the Anthropological Section of the British Association oan get no more modest and cautious representative than Sir George Campbell, we should think it would do well to dissolve itself as quickly as it can.