Like the Viennese, the English afford an illustration of what can be done with Teutonic stock by a judicious admixture of dark blood. Although the mysteries of English ethnology have not been completely unravelled, the original inhabitants of the British Islands appear to have been “composed of the long-headed dark races of the Mediterranean stock, possibly mingled with fragments of still more ancient races, Mongoliform or Allophylian” (Dr. Beddoe). In the later history of the race Romans, Germans, Danes, and Normans added their blood to this mixture. The Celtic-speaking people who in the time of the Roman Conquest inhabited South Britain, partook, according to Dr. Beddoe, “more of the tall blond stock of Northern Europe than of the thickset, broad-headed, dark stock which Broca has called Celts.” But the true Blonde invasion of Britain did not occur till towards the beginning of the fifth century, when the Low-Dutch tribes, the Angles and Saxons, came over from the river Elbe and the coast region, and drove the Britons to the west of the island, where they were called the Welsh, which is an old German appellation for foreigners.

The inference naturally suggests itself that the predilection for Blondes shown in English literature up to a recent date (as noted in the chapter on Blondes and Brunettes) may be traced to this fact that the conquering race was fair, and that consequently dark hair and eyes stigmatised their possessor as belonging to the conquered race. This condemnation of the Brunette type (on non-æsthetic grounds, be it noted) is forcibly illustrated by the following lines of the shepherdess Phebe in As You Like It—

But when this temporary aristocratic ground of preferring the Blond type was neutralised through the lapse of time, and Romantic Love, that potent awakener of the æsthetic sense, appeared on the scene and opened men’s eyes to the inferior beauty of that type, then began the reaction in favour of Brunettes, which has been going on ever since. This view is strikingly confirmed by the following remarks of Mr. Charles Roberts in Nature, January 7, 1885:—

“American statistics show that the blonde type is more subject to all the diseases, except one (chronic rheumatism), which disqualify men for military service, and this must obviously place blondes at a great disadvantage in the battle of life, while the popular saying, ‘A pair of black eyes is the delight of a pair of blue ones,’ shows that sexual selection does not allow them to escape from it. It is more than probable, therefore, from all these considerations, that the darker portion of our population is gaining on the blond, and this surmise is borne out by Dr. Beddoe’s remark that the proportion of English and Scotch blood in Ireland is probably not less than a third, and that the Gaelic and Iberian races of the West, mostly dark-haired, are tending to swamp the blond Teutonic of England by a reflex migration.”

Obviously, the ideal Englishwoman of the future will be a Brunette. Thackeray had a prophetic vision of her when he described Beatrix Esmond: “She was a brown beauty: that is, her eyes, hair, and eyebrows and eyelashes were dark; her hair curling with rich undulations, and waving over her shoulders” [note that]; “but her complexion was as dazzling white as snow in sunshine; except her cheeks, which were a bright red, and her lips, which were of a still deeper crimson ... a woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice was the sweetest love-song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, health, decision, activity, whose foot as it planted itself on the ground was firm but flexible, and whose motion, whether rapid or slow, was always perfect grace,—agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen—now melting; now imperious, now sarcastic—there was no single movement of hers but was beautiful. As he thinks of her, he who writes feels young again and remembers a paragon.”

Sexual Selection, however, has not limited its efforts to the improvement of the colour of the hair, eyes, and complexion; the form of the features and figure has also been gradually altered and refined. An examination of the portraits in the National Gallery showed to Mr. Galton “what appear to be indisputable signs of one predominant type of face supplanting another. For instance, the features of the men painted by and about the time of Holbein have unusually high cheek-bones, long upper lips, thin eyebrows, and lank dark [?] hair. It would be impossible, I think, for the majority of modern Englishmen so to dress themselves, and clip and arrange their hair, as to look like the majority of these portraits.” And again: “If we may believe caricaturists, the fleshiness and obesity of many English men and women in the earlier years of this century must have been prodigious. It testifies to the grosser conditions of life in those days, and makes it improbable that the types best adapted to prevail then would be the best adapted to prevail now.”

Yet this improvement in the British figure and physiognomy is far from universal. The English are beyond all dispute the finest race in the world, physically and mentally; but the favourable action of the four Sources of Beauty, to which they owe this supremacy, does not extend to all classes. The lowest-class Englishman or Irishman is the most hideous and brutal ruffian in the world. Of Mental or Moral Culture not a trace; and whereas “the Spaniard, however ignorant, has naturally the manners and the refined feelings of a gentleman” (Macmillan’s Magazine, 1874), as well as a love of the beautiful forms and colours of nature; the Englishman of the corresponding class has nerves and senses so coarse that he is absolutely impervious to any impressions which do not come under the head of mere brutal excitement. In this class there is no Mixture of Races, but a worse than barbarian promiscuity; Romantic Love is of course miles beyond the conception of imaginations so filthy and sluggish; and Hygienic neglect here finds its most hideous examples in the Western World.

In his English Note-Books Hawthorne speaks as follows of “a countless multitude of little girls” taken from the workhouses and educated at a charity school at Liverpool: “I should not have conceived it possible that so many children could have been collected together, without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much as one individual; such mean, coarse, vulgar features and figures betraying unmistakably a low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, animal, and soulless. It must require many generations of better life to wake the soul in them. All America could not show the like.”

“Climate,” he says in another place, “no doubt has most to do with diffusing a slender elegance over American young women; but something, perhaps, is also due to the circumstance of classes not being kept apart there as they are here: they interfuse amid the continual ups and downs of our social life; and so, in the lowest stations of life, you may see the refining influence of gentle blood.”

Taine, in his Notes on England, thus sketches the lowest of the Englishmen: “Apoplectical and swollen faces, whereof the scarlet hue turns almost to black, worn-out, bloodshot eyes like raw lobsters; the brute brutalised. Lessen the quantity of blood and fat, while retaining the same bone and structure, and increasing the countrified look; large and wild beard and moustache, tangled hair, rolling eyes, truculent muzzle, big, knotted hands; this is the primitive Teuton issuing from his woods; after the portly animal, after the overfed animal, comes the fierce animal, the English bull.” “The lower-class women of London,” says another French writer, Mr. Max O’Rell, “are thin-faced or bloated-looking. They are horribly pale; there is no colour to be seen except on the tips of their noses.”

Personal Beauty in England diminishes in quality and frequency, not only as we go from the upper to the lower classes, but also if we leave London and go to other cities. How far sanitary and educational differences account for this state of affairs, and how much is due to a habitual and natural immigration of Beauty to a place where it is most sure of appreciation, it is not easy to say. Hawthorne thus records the impression made on his artistic eyes by an excursion party of Liverpool manufacturing people: “They were paler, smaller, less wholesome-looking, and less intelligent, and, I think, less noisy than so many Yankees would have been.... As to their persons,” the women “generally looked better developed and healthier than the men; but there was a woeful lack of beauty and grace,—not a pretty girl among them, all coarse and vulgar. Their bodies, it seems to me, are apt to be very long in proportion to their limbs—in truth, this kind of make is rather characteristic of both sexes in England.”

A French writer, quoted by Figuier, Dr. Clavel, makes a similar statement: “The level plains, which are as a rule met with in England, are not favourable to the development of the lower extremities, and it is a fact that the power of the English lies, not so much in their legs, as in the arms, shoulders, and loins.... The barely-marked nape of his neck and the oval form of his cranium indicate that Finn blood flows in his veins; his maxillary power and the size of his teeth evidence a preference for an animal diet. He has the high forehead of the thinker, but not the long eyes of the artist.... In dealing craftily with his antagonist, he is well able to guard himself against the weaknesses of feeling. His face rarely betrays his convictions, and his features are devoid of the mobility which would prove disadvantageous.”

The Englishwoman, according to the same writer, “is tall, fair, and strongly built. Her skin is of dazzling freshness; her features are small and elegantly formed; the oval of her face is marked, but it is somewhat heavy toward the lower portion; her hair is fine, silky, and charming; and her long and graceful neck imparts to the movements of her head a character of grace and pride. So far all about her is essentially feminine; but upon analysing her bust and limbs we find that the large bones, peculiar to her race, interfere with the delicacy of her form, enlarge her extremities, and lessen the elegance of her postures and the harmony of her movements.... She lacks a thousand feminine instincts, and this lack is revealed in her toilette, the posture she assumes, and in her actions and movements.”

M. Taine also was convinced of the frequent lack of taste in dress and bearing in Englishwomen. Yet it is noticeable, and cannot be too much emphasised, that he goes to Spain and not to France for a comparison: “Compared with the supple, easy, silent, serpentine undulation of the Spanish dress and bearing, the movement here (in England), is energetic, discordant, jerking, like a piece of mechanism.” Nor does Taine in other respects venture to hold up his own countrywomen as models. He repeatedly refers to the superior beauty of the English complexion: “Many ladies have their hair decked with diamonds, and their shoulders, much exposed, have the incomparable whiteness of which I have just spoken, the petals of a lily, the gloss of satin do not come near to it.” And though he thinks that ugliness is more ugly in England than in France, he confesses that “generally an Englishwoman is more thoroughly beautiful and healthy than a Frenchwoman.” “Out of every ten young girls one is admirable, and upon five or six a naturalist painter would look with pleasure.” “Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who came to see the Court of the Regent in France, severely rallied our slim, painted, affected beauties, and proudly held up as a contrast ‘the natural charms and the lively colours of the unsullied complexions’ of Englishwomen.” “The physiognomy remains youthful here much later than amongst us, especially than at Paris, where it withers so quickly; sometimes it remains open even in old age; I recall at this moment two old ladies with white hair whose cheeks were smooth and softly rosy; after an hour’s conversation I discovered that their minds were as fresh as their complexions. Even when the physiognomy and the form are commonplace, the whole satisfies the mind; a solid bony structure, and upon it healthy flesh, constitute what is essential in a living creature.”

That is it precisely. The Englishman is the finest animal in the world; and it is because other nations so often forget that one must be a fine animal before one can be a fine man, that the English have outstripped them in colonising the world, and imposing on it their special form of culture and manners. As Emerson remarks, in his Essay on Beauty, “It is the soundness of the bones that ultimates itself in the peach-bloom complexion; health of constitution that makes the sparkle and the power of the eye.” “We are all entitled to beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the laws,—as every lily and every rose is well.”

The London Times characteristically speaks of “that worst of sins in English eyes—uncleanliness”; and it is in England alone of all European countries that cleanliness is esteemed next to godliness. The Frenchman’s paradoxical exclamation, “What a dirty nation the English must be that they have to bathe so often!” is not so funny as it seems. The English, as can be seen in the uneducated classes, would be the dirtiest people in the world, thanks to their fogs and smoke, if they were not the most cleanly. It is the magic of tub and towel that has compelled M. Figuier to admit that although the Englishwomen “do not offer the noble appearance and luxurious figure of the Greek and Roman women,” yet “their skins surpass in transparency and brilliancy those of the female inhabitants of all other European countries.”

It is needless to dilate on the other hygienic habits to which the English owe their Health, notwithstanding their often depressing climate,—the passion for walking and riding, for tennis, boating, and other sports, which, moreover, have the advantage of bringing the sexes together, and enabling every Romeo to find his Juliet. One cannot help admiring the independence and common sense of the respectable London girls who go home on the top of the ’bus, enjoying the fresh air and varied sights, instead of being locked up in the foul-aired interior. They know very well, these clever girls, that their cheeks will be all the rosier, their smiles more bewitching, their eyes more sparkling after such a ride. In countries where there are fewer gentlemen such a thing would be considered as improper for a girl as it is for a man to give a girl a chance to choose her own husband. Do the French agree with the Turks that women have no souls, since, in Taine’s words, a Frenchman “would consider it indelicate to utter a single clear or vague phrase to the young girl before having spoken to her parents”? Taine imparts to his countrymen the curious information that in England men and women marry for Love, but he does not appear to realise how much of their superior Beauty—which he acknowledges—they owe to the habitual privilege of choosing their own wives for their personal charms, instead of having them selected by their parents for their money value. He does, however, realise the effect this system of courtship has on conjugal life; for in his History of English Literature he refers to the Englishwoman’s extreme “sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection,—a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially; a woman here gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing and pretending only to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has freely and for ever chosen.”

And there is another English custom the value of which Taine realises and acknowledges: “In France we believe too readily,” he says, “that if a woman ceases to be a doll she ceases to be a woman.” True, it is only a decade or two since the superstition that a higher education would “destroy all the feminine graces” has been successfully combated even in England; but there has always been a vast amount of home education, and the girls have profited immensely by the unimpeded opportunity of meeting the young men and talking with them, and by the fact that the purity of tone which pervades English literature has made all of it accessible to them. Hence the charming intellectual lines which may be traced in an English woman’s face.

What the English still need is gastronomic and æsthetic training. After a few generations of sense-refinement the lower part of the English face will become as perfect as the upper part is now. Cultivation of the fine arts and freer facial expression of the emotions are the two great cosmetics which will put the finishing touch on English Beauty.

England and America—which of these two countries has the most beautiful women, and which the largest number of them? Few questions of international diplomacy have been more frequently discussed than these problems in comparative æsthetics. But as in most cases patriotism has taken the place of æsthetic judgment in forming a verdict, few tangible results have been reached. There is too much exaggeration. Many English tourists have denied that there is any remarkable Beauty at all in the United States, and Americans have said the same of England.

If these sceptical Englishmen had only spent an hour on either side of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge at 6 P.M., they would have seen Beauty enough to bewilder all their senses; and if the American sceptics, next time they go to London, will spend a shilling in buying penny stamps at a dozen of those small post-offices so profusely scattered all over the city, they will see enough feminine Beauty in an hour to make them wish to stay in London the rest of their life,—especially if they remember that an advertisement for eleven girls to fill these postal clerkships has been answered by as many as 2000,—the majority of whom, presumably, were as good-looking as those who got the places, since postal clerks are not selected for their Beauty, but for their intelligence and efficiency.

A few specimens of the sweeping generalisations of tourists may here be cited. According to Richard Grant White, “The belief, formerly prevalent, that ‘American’ women had in their youth pretty doll faces, but at no period of life womanly beauty of figure, is passing away before a knowledge of the truth, and I have heard it scouted here by Englishmen, who, pointing to the charming evidence to the contrary before their eyes, have expressed surprise that the travelling bookwriters ... could have so misrepresented the truth.” Yet the same author indulges in the following absurdly extravagant statement: “Beauty is very much commoner among women of the English race than among those of any other with which I am acquainted; and among that race it is commoner in America than in England. I saw more beauty of face and figure at the first two receptions which I attended after my return than I had found among the hundreds of thousands of women whom I had seen in England.”

The late Dr. G. M. Beard, though an acute observer, allowed his patriotism a still more ludicrous sway over his imagination: “It is not possible,” he says, “to go to an opera in any of our large cities without seeing more of the representatives of the highest type of female beauty than can be found in months of travel in any part of Europe!”

Possibly Sir Lepel Griffin had read these lines when he was moved to pen the following counter-extravagances: “More pretty faces are to be seen in a day in London than in a month in the States. The average of beauty is far higher in Canada, and the American town in which most pretty women are noticeable is Detroit, on the Canadian border, and containing many Canadian residents. In the Western States beauty is conspicuous by its absence, and in the Eastern towns, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, it is to be chiefly found. In New York, in August, I hardly saw a face which could be called pretty.... In November New York presented a different appearance, and many pretty women were to be seen, although the number was comparatively small; and at the Metropolitan Opera House even American friends were unable to point out any lady whom they could call beautiful. A distinguished artist told me that when he first visited America he scarcely saw in the streets of New York a single face which he could select as a model, though he could find twenty such in the London street in which his studio was situated.”

Volumes might be filled with similar unscientific generalisations, but it would be a waste of space. My own general impression is that there are more pretty girls In America, and more beautiful women in England; that the average Englishwoman has a finer, healthier figure and colour, the American greater mobility and finer chiselling of the features. If English hands and feet are often somewhat large, American hands are just as often too small,—the greater blemish of the two, because it usually goes with too thin limbs. Irish girls of the best classes appear to be intermediate. Some of the finest figures and faces in the world belong to them; an Andalusian could hardly be more plump and graceful than many Irish and Irish-American girls. The Scotch, in the opinion of Hawthorne, “are a better-looking people than the English (and this is true of all classes), more intelligent of aspect, with more regular features. I looked for the high cheek-bones, which have been attributed, as a characteristic feature, to the Scotch, but could not find them. What most distinguishes them from the English is the regularity of the nose, which is straight, and sometimes a little curved inward; whereas the English nose has no law whatever, but disports itself in all manner of irregularity. I very soon learned to recognise the Scotch face, and when not too Scotch, it is a handsome one.”

Comparative Æsthetics is still in its infancy, and many years will doubtless elapse before it will become an exact science, in place of a collection of individual opinions based on vague impressions. The statistics which have lately been collected regarding the proportion of Blondes and Brunettes in various countries, may be regarded as the beginning of such a science. The next step should be the collection of a series of national composite portraits after the manner in which Mr. Galton has formed typical faces of criminals, etc. If in each country a number of individuals of pronounced national aspect were photographed on the same plate, the result would be a picture which would emphasise the typical national traits, and enable one to judge how far they deviate in each case from regular Beauty.

In most European countries it would be comparatively easy to obtain characteristic composite portraits of this kind. But in America the difficulties would perhaps be insurmountable. For there the mixture of nationalities is too great and too recent to have produced any national type. The women of Baltimore, New York, Boston, and San Francisco—what have they in common with one another any more than with their cousins in London? Almost one-third of the inhabitants of New York are foreign-born, including about half a million Irish and Germans. A fusion of these has been going on for generations, while others have retained their national traits; and to look, therefore, for a special type of New York Beauty would be absurd. Thanks to this large number of foreigners—not always of the most desirable classes—there is less Beauty in New York in proportion to the number of inhabitants than in most other cities of the United States. When people imagine they can tell from what American city a given woman comes, they are hardly ever influenced in their judgment by physiognomy or figure, but by peculiarities of dress, speech, or manner.

Dr. Weir Mitchell says that in America you may see “many very charming faces, the like of which the world cannot match—figures somewhat too spare of flesh, and, especially south of Rhode Island, a marvellous littleness of hand and foot. But look farther, and especially among New England young girls; you will be struck with a certain hardness of line in form and feature, which should not be seen between thirteen and eighteen at least. And if you have an eye which rejoices in the tints of health, you will miss them on a multitude of the cheeks which we are now so daringly criticising.” The notion that there is too much angularity of outline in New England faces and forms is a wide-spread one, and to some extent founded on truth; yet many of the plumpest, rosiest, and most charming American women come from Boston—as if to make amends for their antipodes, whom Mr. R. G. White describes as “certain women, too common in America, who seem to be composed in equal parts of mind and leather, the elements of body and soul being left out, so far as is compatible with existence in human form.”

Concerning the multitudinous mixture of nationalities in the United States one thing may be asserted confidently: that the finest ingredient in it is the English. Yet it has long been held that the English blood deteriorates in the United States; that the descendants of the English, like those of the Germans and other nations and their mixtures, gradually lose the sound constitution of their ancestors. Hawthorne, in his Scarlet Letter, was probably one of the first to give expression to this belief. Speaking of the New England women who two centuries ago waited for the appearance of Hester, he says: “Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for throughout that chain of ancestry every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own.... The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England.”England.”

Yet in his English Note-Books, written after the Scarlet Letter, he relates that he had a conversation with Jenny Lind: “She talked about America, and of our unwholesome modes of life, as to eating and exercise, and of the ill-health especially of our women; but I opposed this view as far as I could with any truth, insinuating my opinion that we were about as healthy as other people, and affirming for a certainty that we live longer.... This charge of ill-health is almost universally brought forward against us nowadays,—and, taking the whole country together, I do not believe the statistics will bear it out.” But why does he in another place speak of English rural people as “wholesome and well-to-do,—not specimens of hard, dry, sunburnt muscle, like our yeoman”? and on still another page: “In America, what squeamishness, what delicacy, what stomachic apprehension, would there not be among three stomachs of sixty or seventy years’ experience! I think this failure of American stomachs is partly owing to our ill-usage of our digestive powers, partly to our want of faith in them.”

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe exclaims that “the race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls ... is daily lessening; and, in their stead, come the fragile, easy-fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common things.” Dr. E. H. Clarke writes in his Sex and Education, which should be read by all parents: “‘I never saw before so many pretty girls together,’ said Lady Amberley to the writer, after a visit to the public schools of Boston; and then added, ‘They all looked sick.’ Circumstances have repeatedly carried me to Europe, where I am always surprised by the red blood that fills and colours the faces of ladies and peasant girls, reminding one of the canvas of Rubens and Murillo; and I am always equally surprised on my return by crowds of pale, bloodless, female faces, that suggest consumption, scrofula, anæmia, and neuralgia.”

Dr. S. Weir Mitchell remarks that “To-day the American woman is, to speak plainly, physically unfit for her duties as woman.” Dr. Allen, quoted by Sir Lepel Griffin, remarks that a majority of American women “have a predominance of nerve tissue, with weak muscles and digestive organs”; and Mr. William Blaikie says that “scarcely one girl in three ventures to wear a jersey, mainly because she knows too well that this tell-tale jacket only becomes a good figure.”

Dr. Clarke relates that when travelling in the East he was summoned as a physician into a harem where he had the privilege of seeing nearly a dozen Syrian girls: “As I looked upon their well-developed forms, their brown skins, rich with the blood and sun of the East, and their unintelligent sensuous faces, I thought that if it were possible to marry the Oriental care of woman’s organisation to the Western liberty and culture of her brain, there would be a new birth and loftier type of womanly grace and form.”

There is, doubtless, much truth in these assertions. It is distressing to see the thin limbs of so many American children, and the anæmic complexions and frail, willowy forms of so many maidens. What the American girl chiefly needs is more muscle, more exercise, more fresh air. A large proportion of girls, it is true, become invalids because their employers in the shops never allow them to sit down and rest; and standing, as physiologists tell us, and as has been proved in the case of armies, is twice as fatiguing as walking. As if to restore the balance, therefore, the average well-to-do American girl never walks a hundred yards if a street car or ’bus is convenient; and the men, too, are not much better as a rule. One of the most disgusting sights to be seen in New York on a fine day is a procession of street cars going up Broadway, crowded to suffocation by young men who have plenty of time to walk home. In the case of the women, the cramping French fashions, which impede exercise, are largely to blame.

Fresh-air starvation, again, is almost as epidemic in America as in Germany. Although night air is less dreaded, draughts are quite as much; and people imagine that they owe their constant “colds” to the cold air with which they come into contact, whereas it is the excessively hot air in their rooms that makes them morbidly sensitive to a salubrious atmosphere. If young ladies knew that the hothouse air of their parlours has the same effect on them as on a bunch of flowers, making them wither prematurely, they would shun it as they would the sulphurous fumes of a volcano. Why should they deliberately hasten the conversion of the plump, smooth grape into a dull, wrinkled raisin?

It is through their morbid fondness for hothouse air and their indolence that American women so often neutralise their natural advantages: thanks to the fusion of nationalities and the unimpeded sway of Romantic Love, they are born more beautiful than the women of any other nation; but the beauty does not last.

It must be admitted, however, that a vast improvement has been effected within the last two generations. Beyond all doubt the young girls of fifteen are to-day healthier and better-looking than were their mothers at the same age. It is no longer fashionable to be pale and frail. Anglomania has done some good in introducing a love of walking, tennis, etc., as well as the habit of spending a large part of the year in the country.

Mr. Higginson, Mr. R. G. White, and many others, have insisted on this gradual improvement in the health and physique of Americans; and Dr. Beard remarks in his work on American Nervousness: “During the last two decades the well-to-do classes of America have been visibly growing stronger, fuller, healthier. We weigh more than our fathers; the women in all our great centres of population are yearly becoming more plump and more beautiful.... On all sides there is a visible reversion to the better physical appearance of our English and German ancestors.... The one need for the perfection of the beauty of the American women—increase of fat—is now supplied.” Yet the one cosmetic which 20 per cent of American women still need above all others is the ability to eat food which they scorn as “greasy,” but which is only greasy when badly prepared. It is to such food that Italian and Spanish women owe their luscious fulness of figure.

Dr. Clarke’s work on Sex and Education made a great sensation because he pointed out that the ill-health of American women is largely due to the brain-work imposed on them at school. Now the superior beauty of American women is admittedly largely due to the intelligent animation of their features, to the early training of their mental faculties. Is this advantage to be sacrificed? Dr. Clarke’s argument does not point to any such conclusion. He simply contended that the methods of female education were injurious. “The law has, or had, a maxim that a man and his wife are one, and that the one is the man. Modern American education has a maxim, that boys’ schools and girls’ schools are one, and that the one is the boys’ school.” Girls need different studies from boys to fit them for their sphere in life; and above all they need careful hygienic supervision and periods of rest.—Dr. Clarke’s book affords many irrefutable arguments in favour of one of the main theses of the present treatise: that the tendency of civilisation is to differentiate the sexes, mentally and physically. It is on this differentiation that the ardour and the cosmetic power of Romantic Love depend. Hence the hopelessness of the Virago Woman’s Rights Cause, especially in America, where the women are more thoroughly feminine than elsewhere. It is said that when the first female presidential candidate announced a lecture in a western town, not a single auditor appeared on the scene. American women, evidently, are in no immediate danger of becoming masculine and ceasing to inspire Love.

Women, however, must be educated and thoroughly, for it has been abundantly shown in the preceding pages that only an educated mind can feel true Romantic Love. But their education should be feminine. They need no algebra, Greek, and chemistry. What they need is first of all a thorough knowledge of Physiology and Hygiene, so that they may be able to take care of the Health and Beauty of their children. Then they should be well versed in literature, so as to be able to shine in conversation. Their artistic eye should be trained, to enable them to teach their children to go through the world with their eyes open. Most of us are half blind; we cannot describe accurately a single person or thing we see. Music should be taught to all women, as an aid in making home pleasant and refined, and as an antidote to care. Natural history is another useful feminine study which enlarges the sympathies by showing, for example, that birds love and marry almost as we do, wherefore it is barbarous to wear their stuffed bodies on one’s hat.

Education, Intermarriage, Hygiene, and Romantic Love will ultimately remove the last traces of the ape and the savage from the human countenance and figure. Climate will perhaps always continue to modify different races sufficiently to afford the advantages of cross-fertilisation or intermarriage. The remarkable fineness of the American complexion, for instance, has been ascribed to climatic influences, and with justice it seems, for, according to Schoolcraft, the skin of the native Indians is not only smoother, but more delicate and regularly furrowed than that of Europeans. The notion, however, that the climate is tending to make the American like the Indian in feature and form is nonsensical. The typical “Yankee” owes his high cheek-bones and lankness to his indigestible food; his thin colourless lips to his Puritan ancestry and lack of æsthetic culture.

Even if climate did possess the power to modify the forms of our features, it would not be allowed to have its own way where these modifications conflicted with the laws of Beauty. Science is daily making us more and more independent of crude and cruel Natural Selection, and of the advantages of physical conformity to our surroundings. Hence Sexual Selection has freer scope to modify the human race into harmony with æsthetic demands. Perhaps the time will come when the average man will have as refined a taste and as deep feelings as a few favoured individuals have at present; that epoch will be known as the age of Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.