Beauty, like Love, has its national peculiarities, based on climate, customs, traditions, mental and physical. As the description of all these differences between the various peoples in the world would require several volumes the size of this, it cannot, of course, be attempted here even roughly. Nor is this necessary, for most of these national peculiarities are variations which have more ethnologic than æsthetic interest. Many of them have been considered in the preceding pages to illustrate the Evolution of Personal Beauty; and something has been said episodically regarding Greek, Hebrew, Georgian, and Mediæval Beauty. Polish women are famous for their beauty, but as I have never been in Poland nor in Russia, I do not feel competent to pronounce judgment on the common verdict, and will therefore limit my observations to the six nations whose Love-customs I have endeavoured to describe. And even in these cases I cannot claim that the following remarks have any greater value than such as attaches to mere casual jottings. In most European countries the nations are as wildly mixed as in the United States, though less recently; and it is therefore extremely difficult to draw any general conclusions, as is shown by the conflicting opinions of tourists. Moreover, each nation is variously subdivided, so that some things are, e.g. true of North Germany which are not true of South Germany, and so in other countries. Yet there are a few points on which travellers commonly agree, and these will be briefly considered here. The highest beauty is pretty much the same the world over—in Japan as in France; and even among the savages of Africa young girls are to be found who, but for their colour, would be pronounced beauties in Europe. Most nations are on their way towards this highest type of Beauty, and they occupy different stages of evolution according to their attitude and advantages regarding the four principal sources of Personal Beauty—Hygienic Habits, Mixture of Nationalities, Romantic Love, and Mental Refinement.
Widely as tourists commonly differ in their opinions as to the prevalence of Beauty in various countries, on one point there seems to be a universal agreement—viz. that nowhere in Europe is it so rare as in France. Thackeray notes that nature has “rather stinted the bodies and limbs of the French nation.” Walker, in his work on Beauty, remarks that “the women of France are among the ugliest in the world”; and Sir Lepel Griffin puts the truth pointedly in these words: “National“National vanity, where inordinately developed, may take the form of asserting that black is white, as in France, where the average of good looks, among both men and women, is perhaps lower than elsewhere in Europe. If a pretty woman be seen in the streets of Paris, she is almost certainly English or American; yet if a foreigner were to form an estimate of French beauty from the rapturous descriptions of contemporary French novels, or from the sketches of La Vie Parisienne, he must conclude that the Frenchwoman was the purest and loveliest type in the world in face and figure. The fiction in this case disguises itself in no semblance of the truth.”
Yet there have been French writers who felt the shortcomings of their nation in regard to Personal Beauty. One of them says that you find in the Frenchman “the love of the graceful rather than the beautiful”; and in the following characterisation of his countrywomen, by M. Figuier, it is easy to see that he lays much more emphasis on their grace and the expressiveness of their features than on their Beauty proper: “There is in her face much that is most pleasing, although we can assign her physiognomy to no determinate type. Her features, frequently irregular, seem to be borrowed from different races; they do not possess that unity which springs from calm and majesty, but are in the highest degree expressive, and marvellously contrived for conveying every shade of feeling. In them we see a smile though it be shaded by tears; a caress though they threaten us; and an appeal when yet they command. Amid the irregularity of this physiognomy the soul displays its workings. As a rule the Frenchwoman is short of stature, but in every proportion of her form combines grace and delicacy. Her extremities and joints are fine and elegant, of perfect model and distinct form, without a suspicion of coarseness. With her, moreover, art is brought wonderfully to assist nature” (The Races of Man).
It appears, indeed, as if Frenchwomen, who are naturally bright and quickwitted, endeavoured to make up in grace what they lack in beauty. Hence nothing is more common than Frenchwomen who are so fascinating with their graceful little ways and movements that one almost or quite forgets their homeliness. No French girl ever needs to be taught how to use her eyes to best advantage; and, as a clever newspaper writer has remarked, French girls “can say more with their shoulders than most girls can with their eyes; and when they talk with eyes, hands, shoulders, and tongue at once, it takes a man of talent to keep up.”
Of course it would be absurd to say that no specimens of supreme Beauty are to be found in France; but they are scarce as strawberries in December. The general tendency of women to become either too stout or too lean after they have got out of their teens, is apparently more pronounced in France than elsewhere in Europe. And as for the men, they can be recognised anywhere, either by their almost simian hairiness or their puny appearance. What a difference in stature and general manly aspect between a regiment of French and one of English or German soldiers! And the superiority of the English soldiers to the French in vigour and beauty is more than “skin-deep”; it appears to extend to the very chemical composition of their tissues; for Professor Topinard remarks in his Anthropologie that he enunciated more than twenty years ago “a fact which was more or less confirmed by others, namely, that the mortality after capital operations in English hospitals was less by one-half than in the French. We attributed it to a better diet, to their better sanitary arrangements, and to their superior management. There was but one serious objection offered to our statement. M. Velapeau, with his wonderful acumen, made reply, at the Academy of Medicine, that the flesh of the English and of the French differed; in other words, that the reaction after operations was not the same in both races. It is, in effect, an anthropological character.”
Thus the “wonderful acumen” of two French scientists has established the fact that French deterioration is shown not only in a surprisingly low birth-rate, but in the general inferiority of the French constitution: for the ability to resist the effects of wounds or illness is evidence of a sound constitution.
That the chief cause of French ugliness, degeneration, and infertility lies in their contemptuous treatment of Romantic Love, must be apparent to any one after reading the preceding chapter on French Love. French parents may point triumphantly to cases of genuine Conjugal attachment in their sons and daughters, whose marriages were based on social or pecuniary considerations. But they forget the grandchildren. It is they who suffer from these ill-assorted, fortuitous unions. Only the children of Love are beautiful and destined to multiply.
French indifference to the claims of Love also explains why another leading source of Beauty—the mixture of races—is inoperative in their country. The French are a very mixed nation. In the North, says Dr. Topinard, “we find the descendants of the Belgæ, the Walloons, and other Kymri; in the East, those of Germans and Burgundians; in the West, Normans; in the centre, Celts, who at the same epoch at which their name took its origin consisted of foreigners of various origins and of the aborigines; in the South, ancient Aquitanians and Basques; without mentioning a host of settlers like the Saracens, who are found here and there, Tectosages, who have left at Toulouse the custom of cranial deformities, and the traders who passed through the Phocæan town of Marseilles.” But the advantages which might result to Personal Beauty from such a mixture of peoples are neutralised through the universality of money-marriages, notwithstanding that these must in some cases bring together the descendants of different races. For a mixture of races is not necessarily and always an advantage, but only when it enables a lover to profit by the greater physiognomic variety in finding a mate whose qualities will blend harmoniously with his own.
In the case of a third primal source of Beauty—Mental Culture—we find again that its action is impeded through the anomalous position of Love in France. Inasmuch as adulterous love-making is the only kind of Love-making sanctioned by French custom and described in French literature, it is necessary to withhold most books and periodicals from the young of both sexes, who are thus compelled to grow up in ignorance. “The burden of ignorance presses sorely upon her,” says M. Figuier of the Frenchwoman: “It is a rare thing for a woman of the people to read, as only those of the higher classes have leisure, during their girlhood, to cultivate their minds. And yet even they must not give themselves up too much to study, nor aspire to honour or distinction. The epithet bas bleu (‘blue-stocking’) would soon bring them back to the common crowd—an ignorant and frivolous feminine mass.”
Note that this is the confession of a patriotic Frenchman. The fact that there have been a few brilliant Frenchwomen, famous for their salons, has created the impression that most Frenchwomen are brilliant, whereas the majority appear to be utterly without intellectual interests or ambition. Nor could this possibly be otherwise, considering the extremely superficial education which even the most favoured receive in the nuns’ schools. And not a few of them bring home from these schools something worse than ignorance, viz. the constitution and habits of an invalid. Not only the girls, even the boys in French schools are never allowed to play without supervision. Healthy romping is considered undignified in young girls, and when they get a little older the high-heeled, pointed shoes prescribed by Fashion take away any desire they may feel to indulge in beautifying exercise. Uncomfortable shoes and clothing, combined with the necessity of having a chaperon, even to simply cross the street, prevent French girls from indulging in those long walks to which English girls owe their fine physique. Nor do the French show such a devotion to the bath-tub and other details of Personal Hygiene as their neighbours across the channel.
Thus we see that the French, thanks to their conservative, Oriental customs, are placed at a disadvantage as regards every one of the four main sources of Beauty—Romantic Love, Mixture of Races, Mental Culture, and Hygiene. And it is not only Personal Beauty that suffers. A writer in La Réforme Sociale complains that “family feeling is dying out, the moral sense is growing weaker ... the country is falling into a state of anæmia.” And another writer in the same periodical, after noting the alarming fact that although France has gained eight million inhabitants since 1805, the number of births is no larger than it was then, calls upon those interested in these symptoms of national decay to investigate the local causes of it.
But it is needless to look for “local causes.” The disease is a national one, and calls for constitutional treatment. Let the French, in the first place, instead of locking up their girls till they are ready to be sold to a rich roué, initiate them into the arts of Anglo-American Courtship, and then allow Romantic Love to take the place of money as a matchmaker. That the effect of such a change would be miraculous may be inferred from the fact that the products of a few generations of American love-making—French girls in Canada and the United States—are vastly superior in Beauty and Health to their transatlantic cousins.
In the second place, the French must give up the notion that disease is aristocratic. “In almost all countries,” says M. About, “there exists a class distinguished from the masses as the aristocracy. In this social miscellany the women have small white hands, because they wear gloves and do not work; a pale complexion, because they are never exposed to the sun; a sickly appearance and thin features, because they spend the four months of the winter at balls. Hence it follows that ‘distinction’ consists in a faded complexion, sickly appearance, a pair of white hands, and thin features. The Madonnas of Raphael are not ‘distingué,’ and the Venus of Milo also is very deficient in that quality.”
After they have ceased to ridicule Love and to worship Disease, it will be in order for the French to cultivate their æsthetic Taste. That of all European men Frenchmen show the worst taste in dressing is commonly admitted; but the preposterous superstition that Frenchwomen have a special instinct for dressing tastefully is so firmly rooted in the mind of women elsewhere, that nothing short of a miracle would be able to eradicate it. The reason why the roots of this superstition are so deep is this: Frenchwomen rarely have any great beauty of figure or features. Hence they devote all their time to devising means for hiding their formal defects and distracting the attention of men by some novelty or eccentricity of apparel. In America and Germany, where the majority of the women are also ugly, these tricks are eagerly copied; and the pretty girls are compelled to yield to the tyranny of the majority, as has been fully explained in the chapter on the Fashion Fetish.
Englishwomen have, to a large extent, emancipated themselves from Parisian Fashion Tyranny, aided by the protests of the men against self-inflicted ugliness. And it is one of the healthiest signs of the times that in America, too, the men are beginning to break the ice of gallant timidity, and telling the women plainly what they think of their hideous Parisian fashions. Not long ago an intelligent woman wrote to the Boston Transcript, asking: “Why will not the press, instead of growling and snarling at the poor women who cannot help themselves,” ask the theatre managers to compel the women to take off their high hats, which, she admits, ninety-nine in a hundred women consider a nuisance? Yet they “cannot help themselves!” The poor women! What a terrible slavery! the pretty women of America compelled to adopt the fashions originated by the ugliest women of Europe in order to hide their defects!
If American women must have models, let them go to Spain or Italy for them, especially in the matter of headdresses. Of the Spanish mantilla, which can be adapted to the style of every face, Prosper Mérimée says that “it makes ugly women pretty, and pretty ones enchanting.” And a German lady on her way to Spain bought on her way, as a matter of course, the latest Parisian hat. “But when I arrived in Madrid,” she writes, “my genuine Parisian hat seemed of such apelike ugliness that I felt actually ashamed to wear it. For my taste had been corrected and improved at sight of the first mantilla I saw; and I am convinced that a large majority of German women and girls possess quite as much sense of beauty as I, and will therefore prefer the Spanish mantilla to any hat made by the most noted modiste in Europe.”
Although differences in form, complexion, and physiognomy are to be noted in different parts of France, they are less pronounced than in Italy, concerning which it is therefore more difficult to make general statements. “The barbarian invasions in the north, and the contact with Greeks and Africans in the south,” says M. Figuier, “have wrought much alteration in the primitive type of the inhabitants of Italy. Except in Rome and the Roman Campagna, the true type of the primitive Latin population is hardly to be found. The Grecian type exists in the South, and upon the eastern slope of the Apennines, while in the North the great majority of faces are Gallic. In Tuscany and the neighbouring regions are found the descendants of the ancient Etruscans.... The mixture of African blood has changed the organic type of the Southern Italian to such an extent as to render him entirely distinct from his Northern compatriots, the exciting influence which the climate has over the senses imparting to his whole conduct a peculiar exuberance.”
In their estimate of Italian Beauty tourists differ widely. The raptures and ecstasies of some writers are explained by others as due to the æsthetic intoxication produced by sudden contact with a new type; and they claim that a few years’ residence suffices to dispel these illusions. On the judgment of the Italians themselves it is not safe to rely, for that is tinged too much by local patriotism, the Milanese claiming the pre-eminence in Beauty for themselves, while the Venetians, Florentines, Romans, and Neapolitans blow their own horns respectively. Professor Mantegazza thinks that the men are handsomer in Italy than the women, of whom he allows only about ten per cent to have any claims to real Beauty. Sir Charles Bell notes that “Raphael, in painting the head of Galatea, found no beauty deserving to be his model; he is reported to have said that there is nothing so rare as perfect beauty in woman; and that he substituted for nature a certain idea inspired by his fancy.” Montaigne, who travelled in Italy in the latter part of the sixteenth century, expressed his surprise at the rarity of beauty in women and girls, who at that time were kept in more than French seclusion. A German author, Dr. J. Volkmann, wrote in 1770 that “there are few beautiful women in Rome, especially among the higher classes; in Venice and Naples more are to be seen. The Italian himself has a proverb which says that Roman women are not beautiful” (quoted by Ploss).
Byron, in one of his letters, gives a glowing description of an Italian beauty of the Oriental type whom he met, and then adds: “Whether being in love with her has steeled me or not, I do not know; but I have not seen many other women who seem pretty. The nobility, in particular, are a sad-looking race—the gentry rather better.” In another place he writes that “the general race of women appear to be handsome; but in Italy, as on almost all the Continent, the highest orders are by no means a well-looking generation.”
Yet was it not Byron who wrote of Italy that it is “the garden of the world,” and that its “very weeds are beautiful”? And does not this apply to the race as well as the soil? It is because they constantly live in a garden, in the balmy air and mellowing sunshine, that Italians can to a certain extent defy the laws of personal Hygiene, and flourish under conditions which would torture us to death. Miss Margaret Collier remarks, in Our Home by the Adriatic, that in the rural communities, even among the well-to-do, to ask for a bath is to create alarm as to the state of your health. And Berlioz speaks somewhere of Italian peasant-girls “carrying heavy copper vessels and faggots on their heads; but all so wretched, go miserable, so tattered, so filthily dirty, that, in spite of the beauty of the race and the picturesqueness of their costume, all other feelings are swallowed up in one of utter compassion.”
Could the cosmetic value of fresh air and sunshine be more strikingly attested than by the fact that Berlioz could speak of “the beauty of the race,” notwithstanding the national indifference to the laws of cleanliness?
In regard to Romantic Love as a source of Beauty, the Italians also occupy a somewhat anomalous position. In the rural districts French matrimonial methods seem to be largely followed. Miss Collier mentions a young lady who visited her to receive her congratulations on her approaching marriage, and who, on being asked the name of her future husband, replied naïvely, “Oh, I don’t know; papa has not yet told me that.” The peasantry, however, are free to choose their own mates, and it is among them that Italian Beauty is accordingly most prevalent. In the cities the method of love-making is “operatic,” as we saw in the chapter on Italian Love; but the main point is that Individual Choice is not made impossible as in France, and that the Italians worship Love as a law instead of looking on it with contemptuous cynicism and ridicule.
The way in which the Mixture of Races affects Italian Beauty affords a fresh illustration of the superiority of the Brunette type. In Germany, by general consent, Beauty is much more frequent in the South, where brunettes abound, than in the North, where they are scarce. Hence we may conclude that the Blonde type is improved by the intermixture of the Brunette type. But is the Brunette type of Northern Italy improved to the same degree by the admixture of Northern Blondes? Not in my judgment. Venice and Milan and Bologna, it is true, boast many beautiful women; but has any tourist in writing about these cities ever expressed much admiration for Italian Blondes? And are not Naples and Capri, the paradise of Brunettes, commonly regarded as the region where Italian Beauty is seen at its best? Here it is chiefly dark races that have intermingled, hence the eyes are sure to be of a deep brown colour; whereas in Northern Italy the introduction of blonde blood produces the lighter, less decided tints of the iris which we do not admire. This disadvantage, it is true, is also encountered in South Germany, but it is neutralised by the gain of dark eyebrows, and long black lashes, and the more supple and rounded limbs of the South.
That mental culture adds much to Italian beauty cannot be said, for Italian women of all classes are noted for their intellectual indolence. But atonement is largely made for this by their extreme emotional susceptibility. Blue skies, rank vegetation, pretty scenery, and a natural love of music have softened and trained their feelings; and though the Italian climate does not favour profound artistic culture it warms the blood and incites the features to give expression to every passing mood. It is this habit of emotional expression that has given a unique charm and the power of graceful modulation to Italian features. As a German artist, Herr Otto Knille, remarks of the Italians, “They pose unintentionally. Their features, especially among the lower classes, have been moulded through mimic expression practised for thousands of years. Gesture-language has shaped the hands of many into models of anatomic clearness. They have a complete language of signs and gestures, which each one understands, as, for instance, in the ballet. Add to this the innate grace of this race ... and we see that the Italian artist has an abundance of material for copying, as compared with which the German artist must admit his extreme poverty. Whoever has lived in Italy is in a position to appreciate these advantages.... Think of the neck, the nape, and the bust of Italian woman, the fine joints and the elastic gait of both men and women. Nor are we much better endowed as regards the physiognomy. The German potato-face is not a mere fancy—the mirror which A. de Neuville has held up to us, though clouded with prejudice, shows us an image not entirely untrue to life. We artists know how rarely a head, especially one which lacks the enchanting charm of youth, can be used as a model for anything but flat realism. Most German faces, instead of becoming more clearly chiselled and elaborated with age, appear more spongy, vague, and unmeaning.”
Winklemann’s remarks on Italian Beauty are in the same vein: “We seldom find in the fairest portions of Italy the features of the face unfinished, vague, and inexpressive, as is frequently the case on the other side of the Alps; but they have partly an air of nobleness, partly of acuteness and intelligence; and the form of the face is generally large and full, and the parts of it in harmony with each other. The superiority of conformation is so manifest that the head of the humblest man among the people might be introduced in the most dignified historical painting, especially one in which aged men are to be represented. And among the women of this class, even in places of the least importance, it would not be difficult to find a Juno. The lower portion of Italy, which enjoys a softer climate than any other part of it, brings forth men of superb and vigorously-designed forms, which appear to have been made, as it were, for the purposes of sculpture.”
In confirmation of my statement that in Northern as in Southern Italy it is the Brunette type that chiefly excites the admiration of the tourist, I may finally cite Heine’s remarks on the women of Trent. For, although Trent is a town of the Austrian Tyrol, it yet is practically an Italian community. Had not business called him southwards, Heine relates in his Journey from Munich to Genoa, he would have felt tempted to remain in this town where “beautiful girls were moving about in bevies. I do not know,” he adds, “whether other tourists will approve of the adjective ‘beautiful’ in this case; but I liked the women of Trent exceptionally well. They were just of the kind I admire—and I do love these pale, elegiac faces with the large black eyes that gaze at you so love-sick; I love also the dusky tint of those proud necks which Phœbus already has loved and browned with his kisses; ... but above all things do I love that graceful gait, that dumb music of the body, those limbs with their exquisitely rhythmic movements, luxurious, supple, divinely careless, mortally languid, anon æthereal, majestic, and always highly poetic. I love such things as I love poetry itself; and these figures with their melodious movements, this wondrous concert of femininity which delighted my senses, found an echo in my heart, and awoke in it sympathetic strains.”
In Spain, as in Italy, Germany, France, and the United States, we find more Personal Beauty in the Southern than in the Northern regions. This coincidence cannot be accidental, but attests the great cosmetic value of sunshine and plenty of fresh air. Perhaps no other portion of the globe has such a paradisiacal climate as Andalusia, where the inhabitants practically pass all their time in the open air,—on verandahs and in their cosy little galleries, and fragrant orange groves, in whose shade they can spend the hot part of the day, while the nights are cooled by balmy mountain or sea breezes. To these natural hygienic advantages add the unusually happy mixture of nationalities, and the fact that Romantic Love is much less impeded in its sway than in France or Italy, and we see at a glance to what the young Andalusian owes the undulating lines and luscious plumpness of her figure, her ravishing facial beauty, and her graceful gait, or “melodious movements,” as Heine would say.
Surely the goddess of Beauty herself mixed the national colours that make up the Spanish type. When Spain was added to the Roman dominion she was, as Mr. E. A. Freeman remarks, “the only one of the great countries of Europe where the mass of the people were not of the Aryan stock. The greater part of the land was still held by the Iberians, as a small part is even now by their descendants the Basques. But in the central part of the peninsulapeninsula Celtic tribes had pressed in, and ... there were some Phœnician colonies in the south, and some Greek colonies on the east coast. In the time between the first and second Punic Wars, Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, and Hannibal had won all Spain as far as the Ebro for Carthage.” Among the other nations which successively overran the country were the Goths, Vandals, Suevi, and Moors; to whom must be added large numbers of Jews and Gypsies, of which latter race Spain still possesses about 50,000.
Most of these nations had some favourable physical traits which Sexual Selection had the opportunity to fix upon and perpetuate; while sundry incongruities must have been neutralised and obliterated by the intermingling of races. And another important consideration is, that this intermingling of nations was effected so many centuries ago that it is now no longer a heterogeneous physical mixture, but a true “chemical,” or physiological, fusion, in which dissonances and incongruities are less likely to occur than in countries where the mixture is more recent.
That the addition of Greek and Roman blood, redolent of ancient civilisation, to the original Spanish stock was an advantage is obvious. The Goth brought his manly vigour; the Gypsy his concentrated essence of Brunetteism; the Arab his oval face, dusky complexion, the straight line connecting nose and forehead, the small mouth and white teeth, the dark and glossy hair, the delicate extremities and gracefully-arched foot, and above all, the black eyes and long black eyelashes. If Shakspere is right in saying that there is no author in the world “teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye,” then Andalusia easily leads the world in Personal Beauty. The prosiest tourist becomes poetic in describing the Andalusian’s “black eye that mocks her coal-black veil.” Large and round are these eyes, like those of Oriental Houris; long and dense their black lashes, which yet cannot smother the mysterious fire and sparkle which their iris appears to have borrowed of the Gypsies. In many cases there is a vague, piquant indication of the almond-shaped palpebral aperture—one of the Semitic traits derived from the Phœnicians, Jews, and Saracens. And then, what woman can make such irresistibly fascinating use of her eyes as the Spanish brunette?
M. Figuier thus sums up the physical characteristics of the Spanish woman: “She is generally brunette, although the blonde type occurs much more frequently than is usually supposed. The Spanish woman is almost always small of stature. Who has not observed the large eyes, veiled by thick lashes, her delicate nose, and well-formed nostrils? Her form is always undulating and graceful; her limbs are round and beautifully moulded, and her extremities of incomparable delicacy. She is a charming mixture of vigour, languor, and grace.”
“The appearance of a Spanish woman,” says Bogumil Goltz, “is the expression of her character. Her fine figure, her majestic gait, her sonorous voice, her black, flashing eye, the liveliness of her gesticulations, in a word, her whole external personality indicates her character.”
It is to be noted that whereas French Beauty appears to be visible to French eyes only, and regarding Italian Beauty opinions differ, all nations unite in singing the praises of “Spain’s dark-glancing daughters.” To the French and German testimony just cited may now be added a few Italian, English, and American witnesses.
Signor E. de Amicis, in his interesting work on Spain, says of the women of Madrid that “they are still the same little women so besung for their great eyes, small hands, and tiny feet, with their very black hair, but skin rather white than dark, so well-formed, erect, lithe, and vivacious.” But, like all other tourists, he reserves most of his remarks on Spanish women for his chapters on Andalusia, although this is the part of Spain which also offers the richest material for description in its architecture and scenery. Concerning the women and girls of Seville, as seen in the large tobacco factory which employs 5000 females, he says: “There are some very beautiful faces, and even those that are not absolutely beautiful, have something about them which attracts the eye and remains impressed upon the memory—the colouring, eyes, brows, and smile, for instance. Many, especially the so-called gitane, are dark brown, like mulattoes, and have protruding lips: others have such large eyes that a faithful likeness of them would seem an exaggeration. The majority are small, well-made, and all wear a rose, pink, or a bunch of field-flowers among their braids.... On coming out of the factory, you seem to see on every side for a time, black pupils which look at you with a thousand different expressions of curiosity, ennui, sympathy, sadness, and drowsiness.”
The same writer found that “The feminine type of Cadiz was not less attractive than that celebrated one at Seville. The women are a little taller, a trifle stouter, and rather darker. Some fine observer has asserted that they are of the Greek type; but I cannot see where. I saw nothing, with the exception of their stature, but the Andalusian type; and this sufficed to make me heave sighs deep enough to have blown along a boat and obliged me to return as soon as possible to my ship, as a place of peace and refuge.”
Mr. G. P. Lathrop’s description (in Spanish Vistas) of the girls in the Seville factory is pitched in a somewhat lower key than Signor de Amicis’s: “Some of them,” he writes, “had a spendthrift, common sort of beauty, which, owing to their southern vivacity and fine physique, had the air of being more than it really was.... There were some appalling old crones.... Others, on the contrary, looked blooming and coquettish. Many were in startling deshabille, resorted to on account of the intense (July) heat, and hastened to draw pretty pañuelos of variegated dye over their bare shoulders when they saw us coming.... The beauty of these Carmens has certainly been exaggerated. It may be remarked here that, as an offset to occasional disappointment arising from such exaggerations, all Spanish women walk with astonishing gracefulness, and natural and elastic step; and that is their chief advantage over women of other nations.”
A writer in Macmillan’s Magazine (1874), after referring to “the stately upright walk of the Spanish ladies, and the graceful carriage of the head,” notes that a mother will not allow her daughter to carry a basket, so as not to destroy her “queenly walk”; and “her dull eye too will grow moist with a tear, and her worn face will kindle with absolute softness and sweetness, if an English señor expresses his admiration of her child’s magnificent hair or flashing black eyes.”
The description given by the same writer of a scene he witnessed along the Guadalquiver, suggests one reason of the healthy physique and vitality of Spanish women: “An old mill-house, with its clumsy wheel and a couple of pomegranates, shaded one corner of this part of the river; and under their shade, sitting up to their shoulders in the water, on the huge round boulders of which the bottom of the river is composed, were groups of Spanish ladies. Truly it was a pretty sight! They sat as though on chairs, clothed to the neck in bathing-gowns of the gaudiest colours—red, gray, yellow, and blue; and, holding in one hand their umbrellas, and with the other fanning themselves, they formed a most picturesque group.”
Washington Irving, in a private letter, paints this picture of a Spanish beauty whom he saw on a coast steamer: “A young married lady, of about four or five and twenty, middle-sized, finely-modelled, a Grecian outline of face, a complexion sallow yet healthful, raven black hair, eyes dark, large, and beaming, softened by long eyelashes, lips full and rosy red, yet finely chiselled, and teeth of dazzling whiteness. Her hand ... is small, exquisitely formed, with taper fingers, and blue veins. I never saw a female hand more exquisite.” The husband of this young lady, noticing that Mr. Irving was apparently sketching her, questioned him on the matter. Mr. Irving read his sketch to the man, who was greatly pleased with it; and this led to a delightful though brief acquaintance.
in another letter, Washington Irving writes to a friend: “There are beautiful women in Seville as ... there are in all other great cities; but do not, my worthy and inquiring friend, expect a perfect beauty to be staring you in the face at every turn, or you will be awfully disappointed. Andalusia, generally speaking, derives its renown for the beauty of its women and the beauty of its landscape, from the rare and captivating charms of individuals. The generality of its female faces are as sunburnt and void of bloom and freshness as its plains. I am convinced, the great fascination of Spanish women arises from their natural talent, their fire and soul, which beam through their dark and flashing eyes, and kindle up their whole countenance in the course of an interesting conversation. As I have had but few opportunities of judging them in this way, I can only criticise them with the eye of a sauntering observer. It is like judging of a fountain when it is not in play, or a fire when it lies dormant and neither flames nor sparkles.”
Byron, in Childe Harold, waxes enthusiastic over the Spanish woman’s “fairy form, with more than female grace”—
But in a letter from Cadiz Byron notes the weak as well as the strong points of Spanish women. “With all national prejudice, I must confess, the women of Cadiz are as far superior to the English women in beauty, as the Spaniards are inferior to the English in every quality that dignifies the name of man.... The Spanish women are all alike, their education the same.... Certainly they are fascinating; but their minds have only one idea, and the business of their lives is intrigue.... Long black hair, dark languishing eyes, clear olive complexions, and forms more graceful in motion than can be conceived by an Englishman used to the drowsy, listless air of his countrywomen, added to the most becoming dress, and, at the same time, the most decent in the world, render a Spanish beauty irresistible.”
“Their minds have only one idea,” is an exaggeration, for the Andalusian women are famed for a considerable amount of innate wit, rivalling the brightness of their eyes. Yet of deeper intellectual interests there are none. Of the total population of Spain only a quarter can read and write; for although schools exist in abundance, they are very generally neglected; and the estimation in which teachers are held is seen from the fact that out of 15,000 one half receive an annual salary of less than twenty pounds sterling.
Mental Culture avenges itself bitterly on the women of Spain, as of other Southern countries, for this neglect of its claims. While the freshness of youthful Beauty remains, all is well, for then the sensuous charms are so great that intellectual claims can be ignored. But when this freshness fades, then it is that the features begin to show a lack of mental training. Intellectual apathy masks the face, and gives it an expression of vacuity; exercise is neglected, and indolence, combined with excessive indulgence in fattening food, soon destroy the lovely contours of the figure and the fairy-like gait. “A Spanish woman of forty appears twice as old,” says Goltz.
Thus we see that for perfect and permanent Beauty all its sources must be kept open and utilised.
Attention must finally be called to one feature of Andalusian Beauty which all tourists emphasise, namely, the small stature of the women, to which they largely owe their exceptional grace of gait. And there are reasons for believing that the perfected woman of the millennium will resemble the Andalusian Brunette, not only in complexion, hair, eyes, gait, and tapering plumpness of figure, but also in stature. In other words, it seems that Sexual Selection is evolving the petite Brunette as the ideal of womanhood.
Among the ancient Greeks who were not swayed by Romantic Love, Amazons were greatly admired, as previously noted; and Mr. Gladstone remarks that “stature was a great element of beauty in the view of the ancients, for women as well as for men; and their admiration of tallness, even in women, is hardly restrained by a limit.”
From this Greek predilection modern æsthetico-amorous Taste differs, for several weighty reasons. The first is that a very tall and bulky woman, though she may be stately and majestic, cannot be very graceful; and Grace, as we know, is as potent a source of Love as formal Beauty. Again, there is something incongruous and almost comic in the thought of a very large woman submitting to Love’s caresses; and le ridicule tue. Thirdly, great stature is rarely associated with delicate joints and extremities. But the principal reason why the modern lover disapproves of Amazonian women, mental and physical, is because they are quasi-masculine. Romantic Love tends to differentiate the sexes in stature as in everything else. True, Mr. Galton, after making observations on 205 married couples, came to the conclusion that “marriage selection takes little or no account of shortness and tallness. There are undoubtedly sexual preferences for moderate contrasts in height; but the marriage choice appears to be guided by so many and more important considerations that questions of stature exert no perceptible influence upon it.... Men and women of contrasted heights, short and tall or tall and short, married just about as frequently as men and women of similar heights, both tall or both short; there were 32 cases of one to 27 of the other.”
But Mr. Galton’s argument is rather weak. He admits that “there are undoubtedly sexual preferences for moderate contrast in height”; and his own figures show 32 to 27 in favour of mixed-stature marriages, in most of which the women must have been shorter, owing to the prevalent feminine inferiority in size. And in course of time the elimination of non-amorous motives of marriage will assist the law of sexual differentiation in suppressing Amazons.
The modern masculine preference for petite female stature is, furthermore, attested by an irrefutable philological argument which will be found in the following citation from Crabb’s English Synonymes: “Prettiness is always coupled with simplicity; it is incompatible with that which is large; a tall woman with masculine features cannot be pretty. Beauty is peculiarly a female perfection; in the male sex it is rather a defect; a man can scarcely be beautiful without losing his manly characteristics, boldness and energy of mind, strength and robustness of limb; but though a man may not be beautiful or pretty, he may be fine or handsome.” “A woman“A woman is fine who with a striking figure unites shape and symmetry; a woman is handsome who has good features, and pretty if with symmetry of feature be united delicacy.”
Burke believed that it is possible to fall in love with a very small person, but not with a giant. There is, indeed, a natural prejudice in the modern mind against very tall statue even in men. Thus, we read in Fuller’s Andronicus: “Often the cockloft is empty in those whom Nature hath built many stories high”; and Bacon is reported to have said that “Nature“Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.” An apparent scientific confirmation of this belief is found in Professor Hermann’s Nervensystem (ii. 195), where we read that “when the body becomes abnormally large, the brain begins to decrease again, relatively, as Langer found in measuring giant skeletons.” And, another sign of regression is found in the fact that tall men are apt to have relatively too have jaws.
Although the Germans of to-day are by no means a pure and distinct race, they are less thoroughly and variously mixed than most other European nations; and this is one of the main reasons why Personal Beauty is comparatively rare in the Fatherland. It is rarest in the northern and central regions, where the original Blonde type is best preserved, and becomes more frequent the nearer we approach the Brunette neighbours of Germany—Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Poland—whose women have been aptly called “the Spaniards of the north.” France forms an exception. There, thanks to the imprisonment of Cupid, ugliness is so rampant that intermarriage only intensifies the natural homeliness,—a fact of which any one may convince himself by spending a few days in the borderland between France and Germany.
Partly owing to this lack of variety in the national composition of the Germans, partly to the custom of chaperonage, Romantic Love has not as wide a scope of selective action as elsewhere; and as if these impediments to the increase of Beauty were not sufficient, they are augmented in a wholesale fashion by the parental illusion that the Love-instinct is a less trustworthy guide to a happy marriage than “Reason,” i.e. the consideration that the bride has a few thousand marks and belongs to the same social clique as the bridegroom. Like their French neighbours, the Germans in these cases forget the claims of the grandchildren to Health and Beauty—i.e. the harmonious fusion of the complementary parental qualities by which Love is inspired.
But in regard to the third source of Beauty—Mental Culture—the Germans surely are pre-eminent among nations, it will be claimed. In one sense, no doubt, they are. Almost all Germans can read and write, and no race equals them in special erudition. But erudition is not culture. The German system of education is exceedingly defective, because it cultivates too largely the lowest of the mental faculties—the Memory. The number of scientific, historic, and philological facts a German schoolboy knows by heart is simply astounding; but he has not digested them, and cannot apply them practically. No attempt is made to cultivate his higher faculties—his imagination, originality, or the gift of expressing a thought in elegant language. Were a candidate to show the wit and brilliancy of a Heine or a Shakspere, it would not add one grain to the weight his pedantic professors attach to his work. They will not favour the growth of qualities in which they themselves are so conspicuously deficient. Note, for example, the vast contempt with which the pedants of the University of Berlin look down on “the German Darwin,” Professor Haeckel, because he dares not only to be original, but to write his books in a language clear as crystal, and adorned with wit, satire, and literary polish.
Other nations are proud of their great men even before they are dead; not so the Germans. Nor are the Germans really a literary nation, as a whole. Many books are written there, but they rarely come under the head of literature; and their circulation, on the average, is not one-tenth that of English, French, and American books. Beer is more popular than books.
No, the pedantic erudition, which alone is officially honoured in Germany, is not synonymous with Mental Culture. It does not vivify the features sufficiently to mould them into plastic shape. Hence the prevalence of the “spongy features” and Teutonic “potato-faces” referred to by a German artist quoted in the chapter on Italian Beauty. “The true national character of the Germans is clumsiness,” says Schopenhauer; and again: “The Germans are distinguished from all other nations by the slovenliness of their style, as of their dress.” And the Swiss Professor, H. F. Amiel, remarks in his Journal Intime that “the notion of ‘bad taste’ seems to have no place in German æsthetics. Their elegance has no grace in it; they cannot understand the enormous difference there is between distinction (which is gentlemanly, ladylike) and their stiff Vornehmheit. Their imagination lacks style, training, education, and knowledge of the world; it has an ill-bred air even in its Sunday dress. The race is poetical and intelligent, but common and ill-mannered.”
It must be admitted, however, that the Germans have made great progress in external refinement and manners since their late war with France, one of the greatest advantages of which to them was that it destroyed the mystic halo which had for many generations surrounded the important Parisian Fashion Fetish. What the Germans need now is a period of Anglomania. They have already ceased to laugh at the Englishman for travelling with his bath-tub, and have found it worth while to provide him with that commodity in the hotels. In course of time bath-tubs in private German houses may be expected to become more common than they are now; and after a generation or two shall have given proper attention to skin-hygiene, freckles and other cutaneous blemishes will be less prevalent than at present. In their houses the Germans are really as tidy as any nation; but their indifference to the appearance of their collars and cuffs often leads one to suspect the contrary.
The next thing the Germans ought to learn of the English is greater gallantry toward the women, who are too apt to be looked upon as household drudges, whom it is not necessary to educate or amuse. Especially ruinous to female Beauty is the hard field labour required of the women who have the misfortune to belong to a nation which has not yet outgrown its condition of mediæval militarism. A German physician, quoted by Dr. Ploss, notes the fact that the beauty and bloom of youth last but a short time with the working classes of North Germany: “The hard labour performed before the body is fully developed too easily destroys the plumpness, which is an essential element of beauty, draws furrows in the face, and makes the figure stiff and angular. Often have I taken a mother who showed me her child for its grandmother.”
The author of German Home Life remarks in a similar vein: “German girls are often charmingly pretty, with dazzling complexions, abundant beautiful hair, and clear lovely eyes; but the splendid matron, the sound, healthy, well-developed woman, who has lost no grain of beauty, and yet gained a certain magnificent maturity such as we in England see daily with daughters who might well be her youngest sisters—of such women the Fatherland has few specimens to show. The ‘pale unripened beauties of the North’ do not ripen, they fade.” And no wonder, for either the girls belong to the poorer classes and lose their beauty prematurely from overwork; or, if they are of the well-to-do classes, they get no Beauty-preserving exercise at all. “German girls,” the Countess Von Bothmer continues, “have no outdoor amusements, if we except skating when the winter proves favourable. Boating, riding, archery, swimming, croquet—all the active, healthy outdoor life which English maidens are allowed to share and to enjoy with their brothers is unknown to them.... Such diversions are looked upon by the girls themselves as bold, coarse, and unfeminine.... It is in vain that you tell them such exercises, far from unsexing them, fit them all the better for the duties of their sex; it is difficult for them to hear you out and not show the scorn they entertain for you.”
German men, as a rule, are much handsomer than their sisters, and they owe this superiority partly to the fact that their minds are not so vacant, and partly to the prolonged physical training which is the one redeeming feature of their military system. Nevertheless, especially in South Germany, the men too often lose their fine manly proportions in an enormous embonpoint, the penalty of drinking too much beer. Nor is the acquisition of a turnip shape the only bad result of the German habit of spending every evening in a tavern. The air in these beer-houses is so filthy, so soaked with vile tobacco smoke and nicotine, that after sitting in it for an hour the odour haunts one’s clothes for a week, and poisons the lungs for a month. It is this foul atmosphere, combined with the stupefying effect of the beer, that accounts for German heaviness and clumsiness in appearance, attitude, gait, and literary style.
These disadvantages might be to some extent neutralised if, on returning to his bedroom, the German would spend the rest of the night, at least, in fresh air. But no! He dreads the balmy night air as he would a dragon’s breath, although Professor Reclam and other great authorities on Hygiene have told him a million and sixty times that night air is more salubrious than day air, except in swampy regions.
Tourists in Switzerland often wonder why it is that the natives, notwithstanding their glorious Alpine air, are, with rare exceptions, so utterly devoid of Beauty. Partly this is due to the hard labour and scanty food to which most of them are condemned; but the main reason is that they enjoy their health-laden air only in the daytime and in summer. At night and in winter they close their windows hermetically, and in the morning the atmosphere in such a room is something which no one who has ever breathed it will ever forget.
When the Germans visit Switzerland they carefully imitate the example of these ignorant peasants, thus depriving themselves of all the benefits of an Alpine tour. An eye-witness last summer told me of the following encounter in a Swiss hotel between an English lady and a German. The dining-room being hot to suffocation, the English lady opened a window, whereupon the German immediately got up and closed it. The English lady opened it again, and again it was closed; whereupon she pushed her elbow through the glass, and thenceforth enjoyed the fresh, fragrant air, to the horror and indignation of the assembled Teutons.
All these remarks of course apply to the Germans only in a very general way. Among all classes in Germany specimens of Beauty may be found that could hardly be surpassed anywhere else. Pretty faces are more frequent than elegant figures, which commonly are too robust and masculine. German girls are the most domestic and amiable in the world, and it is their amiability and depth of feeling that gives their mouth such a sweet expression and refined outlines. When German girls are educated, as often they are in America, their faces beam in irresistible beauty. The most beautiful non-Spanish eyes I have ever seen belonged to a girl in Baden; and the most roguish blue eyes I have ever seen, to a Würtemberg girl. Regular Italian features are not uncommon in Bavaria, although snub-noses are most frequent there. The Bavarian complexion, though somewhat too pale, is beautifully clear; and I have almost come to the conclusion that this is in some way connected with the national habit of drinking beer three times a day. It might be worth while to inquire whether there is a beautifying ingredient in beer which might be obtained without its stupefying effects.
The Germans commonly consider the maidens along the Rhine their most favourable and abundant specimens of Beauty; but Robert Schumann, who had a fine eye for feminine Beauty, emphasized the amiability rather than the beauty of these maidens in the following passage from one of his private letters: “What characteristic faces among the lowest classes! On the west shore of the Rhine the girls have very delicate features, indicating amiability rather than intelligence; the noses are mostly Greek, the face very oval and artistically symmetrical, the hair brown. I did not see a single blonde. The complexion is soft, delicate, with more white than red; melancholy rather than sanguine. The Frankfort girls, on the other hand, have in common a sisterly trait—the character of German, manly, sad earnestness which we often find in our quondam free cities, and which toward the east gradually merges into a gentle softness. Characteristic are the faces of all the Frankfort girls: intellectual or beautiful few of them; the noses mostly Greek, often snub-noses; the dialect I did not like.”
Concerning the peasant women of Saxony, Mr. Julian Hawthorne remarks in his Saxon Studies: “Massive are their legs as the banyan root; their hips are as the bows of a three-decker. Backs have they like derricks: rough hands like pile-drivers.” And again: “Handsome and pretty women are certainly no rarity in Saxony, although few of them can lay claim to an unadulterated Saxon pedigree.” “We see lovely Austrians, and fascinating Poles and Russians, who delicately smoke cigars in the concert gardens. But it is hard for the peasant type to rise higher than comeliness; and it is distressingly apt to be coarse of feature as well as of hand, clumsy of ankle, and more or less wedded to grease and dirt. Good blood shows in the profile; and these young girls, whose faces are often pleasant and even attractive, have seldom an eloquent contour of nose and mouth. There is sometimes great softness and sweetness of eye, a clear complexion, a pretty roundness of chin and throat. Indeed, I have found scattered through half a dozen different villages all the features of the true Gretchen; and once, in an obscure hamlet whose name I have forgotten, I came unexpectedly upon what seemed a near approach to the mythic being.”
One thing must be admitted. The Germans are the most systematic and persevering nation in the world. They took music, for instance, from her Italian cradle, and reared her till she developed into the most fascinating of the modern muses. They lead the world in scientific research; and within a few years they have terrified the English monopolists by a sudden outburst of thorough-going Teutonic industrial activity and world-competition. Let but the Germans once make up their mind that they want Personal Beauty, and lo! they will have it in superabundance. The Professorships of Hygiene, which are now being established at the Universities, will doubtless bear rich fruit. If Bismarck discovered the full significance of Anglo-American Courtship, he would forthwith order an hour of it to be added to the daily academic curriculum; and if he realised the importance of racial mixture, he would order shiploads of South American and Andalusian brunettes to be distributed among his officers as wives. Nor would female education be any longer neglected, were it fully understood how essential it is to Personal Beauty and true Romantic Love, the basis of happy conjugal life.
What can be done with German stock if it is duly mixed with Brunette ingredients, is shown at Vienna, which, by the apparently unanimous consent of tourists, boasts more beautiful women than any other city in the world. Austria has about ten per cent more of the pure Brunette and fourteen per cent more of the mixed types than Germany. The dark blood of Italians, Hungarians, Czechs, flows in Viennese veins, and there is also a piquant suspicion of Oriental beauty. The Viennese woman combines Andalusian plumpness of figure and grace of movement, with American delicacy of features and purity of complexion. The bust is almost always finely developed and rarely too luxuriant; and the joints are the admiration of all tourists and natives. Speaking of England, Mr. Richard Grant White says that “Plump arms are not uncommon, but really fine arms are rare; and fine wrists are still rarer. Such wrists as the Viennese women have ... are almost unknown among women of English race in either country.” And the Countess von Bothmer thus describes the neighbours of Germany:—
"Polish, Hungarian, and Austrian women, whom we, in a general, inconclusive way, are apt to class as Germans, are ‘beautiful exceedingly’; but here we come upon another race, or rather such a fusion of other races as may help to contribute to the charming result. Polish ladies have a special, vivid, delicate, spirited, haunting loveliness, with grace, distinction, and elegance in their limbs and features that is all their own; you cannot call them fragile, but they are of so fine a fibre and so delicate a colouring that they only just escape that apprehension. Of Polish and Hungarian pur sang there is little to be found; women of the latter race are of a more robust and substantial build, with dark hair and complexion, fine flashing eyes, and pronounced type; and who that remembers the women of Linz and Vienna will refuse them a first prize? They possess a special beauty of their own, a beauty which is rare in even the loveliest Englishwomen; rare, indeed, and exceptional everywhere else; a beauty that the artist eye appreciates with a feeling of delight. They have the most delicately articulated joints of any women in the world. The juncture of the hand and wrist, of foot and ankle, of the nuque with the back and shoulders, is what our neighbours would call ‘adorable.’
“But alas that it should be so! The full gracious figures—types at once of strength and elegance—the supple, slender waists, the dainty little wrists and hands, become all too soon hopelessly fat, from the persistent idleness and luxury of the nerveless, unoccupied lives of these graceful ladies.”