eness," as a phrenologist
might say, is like a powder magazine, ready to explode at a touch, and
it makes no great difference what kind of a match is applied. In later
love affairs the match is a matter of more importance.

Robert Burton threw light on the "capriciousness" and accidentally of
this kind of (apparent) amorous preference when he wrote that "it is
impossible, almost, for two young folks equal in years to live
together and not be in love;" and further he says, sagaciously:

"Many a serving man, by reason of this opportunity and
importunity, inveigles his master's daughter, many a
gallant loves a dowdy, many a gentleman runs after his
wife's maids; many ladies dote upon their men, as the
queen in Aristo did upon the dwarf, many matches are so
made in haste and they are compelled, as it were by
necessity, so to love, which had they been free, come
in company with others, seen that variety which many
places afford, or compared them to a third, would never
have looked upon one another."

Such passions are merely pent-up emotions seeking to escape one way or
another. They do not indicate real, intense preference, but at best an
approach to it; for they are not properly individualized, and, as
Schopenhauer pointed out, the differences in the intensity of
love-cases depend on their different degrees of individualization--an
_apercu_ which this whole chapter confirms. Yet these mere
approximations to real preference embrace the vast majority of
so-called love-affairs. Genuine preference of the highest type finds
its explanation in special phases of sympathy and personal beauty
which will be discussed later on.

What is usually considered the greatest mystery of the amorous passion
is the disposition of a lover to "see Helen's beauty in a brow of
Egypt." "What can Jack have seen in Jill to become infatuated with
her, or she in him?" The trouble with those who so often ask this
question is that they fix the attention on the beloved instead of on
the lover, whose lack of taste explains everything. The error is of
long standing, as the following story related by the Persian poet
Saadi (of the thirteenth century) will show (346):

AN ORIENTAL LOVE-STORY

"A king of Arabia was told that Mujnun, maddened by
love, had turned his face toward the desert and assumed
the manners of a brute. The king ordered him to be
brought in his presence and he