The choice of a mate.

  • Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario), 1882-1971.
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The choice of a mate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CHRISTIANITY large extent sacrifices the sound and desirable, and prevents them from multiplying, in order to keep and support, in asylums, and palatial homes for mental defectives, incurables, and cripples, a mass of human rubbish, it is because of these values. Furthermore, if modern people tend to undervalue fundamental desiderata in their fellows or mates—good natural teeth, good eyesight, 1 sweet breath, sexual vigour and constitutional stamina and savouriness—in favour of alleged precious mental gifts, such as cleverness, a sense of humour, broadmindedness, or whatever fashion extols ; if they are not shocked by ugliness or asymmetry, but, like the lovers in Lord Lytton’s novel, Pilgrims on the Rhine, or Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, are able to love the morbid and deformed, and to despise a creature like Alda in Charlotte Yonge’s Pillars of the House, who takes a sound attitude of dislike towards her idiot brother, Theodore, 1 2 it is wholly and exclusively due to these values. Turning to sex, if modern people are fanatically convinced that botanical sexuality is more beautiful and above all more mentionable than human sexuality ; if every middle-class matron to-day would execrate Rodin for challenging this one-sided concentration on botanical sexuality in his “ Iris ”, and condemn the Greeks for having allowed their unspoiled virgins (the Canephorae ) openly to carry an effigy of the male organ of genera tion at certain festivals, while she will bury her nose self- righteously in a rose—if these sentiments seem natural and inevitable to-day, it is wholly and demonstrably due to these values. And many other examples could be given. Whence do these values hail ? Although they are not wholly Christian, Christianity has been their chief purveyor and inculcator. By zealously garnering most of the morbid, foetid and decrepit elements in antiquity, Chris tianity has been a sort of cold-storage depot for almost every decomposed vestige of the ancient world, and has thus doled out from its refrigerators to every generation the worst by-products of Pagan decay. It seems not to be widely enough known that every essential 1 Thus the manager of one big stores told a newspaper correspondent that “ horn-rimmed glasses often enhance a girl’s appearance ” (Daily Press, 1.8.27). 2 Charlotte Yonge means Alda to be condemned for this attitude. (See Chaps. XVI and XIX especially), and, in a boat accident, Felix, the eldest brother and mainstay of the family, devotes his first efforts at rescue to Theodore, the idiot, and Cherry, the lame sister.