Part 36

In the animal world we find the same dependence of Beauty upon Health. As Mr. Wallace has shown, “colour and ornament are strictly correlated with health, vigour, and general fitness to survive.” It is the superior vitality, vigour, and vivacity of certain male animals that leads the choicest females to prefer them to others less favoured; and thus it happens that, thanks to the dependence of Beauty on Health, animals have become more and more beautiful. Moreover, it is Love in its primitive form that urges animals to prefer those that are most healthy. And thus we have the three great agents acting and reacting upon one another. Health produces Beauty, and together they inspire Love; while Love selects Health, and thus preserves and multiplies Beauty. But this whole subject has been so fully discussed in the chapter on Love among Animals that it is needless to recapitulate the facts here.

Concerning savages, there is a prevalent notion that, owing to their free and easy life in the forests, they are healthier on the average than civilised mankind. As a matter of fact, however, they are as inferior to us in Health as in Beauty. Their constant exposure and irregular feeding habits, their neglect and ignorance of every hygienic law, in conjunction with their vicious lives, their arbitrary mutilations of various parts, and their selection of inferior forms, prevent their bodies from assuming the regular and delicate proportions which we regard as essential to Beauty. They arrive at maturity at an earlier age, and lose their vitality sooner than we do. “Decrepitude,” says Dr. Topinard, “shows itself sooner in some races than in others. The Australians and Bosjesmans are old men at a period when the European is in the full enjoyment of his faculties, both physical and intellectual. The Japanese the same, according to Dr. Krishaber, physician to the Japanese embassy.”

Women everywhere pay less attention to the laws of Health than men. They have less exercise, less fresh air and sunshine than men. Hence, although the most beautiful women are more beautiful than the handsomest men, yet in probably every country of the world the average man is a more perfect specimen of masculine than the average woman of feminine Beauty. Concerning savages, Mr. Spencer says: “Very generally among the lower races the females are even more unattractive in aspect than the males. It is remarked of the Puttooahs, whose men are diminutive and whose women are still more so, that ‘the men are far from being handsome, but the palm of ugliness must be awarded to the women.’ The latter are _hard-worked_ and apparently _ill-fed_.” Again, of the inhabitants of the Corea Gutzlaff says: “The females are very ugly, whilst the male sex is one of the best formed of Asia.... Women are _treated like beasts of burden_.” Many similar cases are cited by Dr. Ploss in _Das Weib_.

Concerning modern civilised nations a well-known art-critic has given his testimony to the effect that “Possibly owing to the fact that men are freer to follow their normal lives, I have found that in a majority of the countries I have visited there are more handsome men than beautiful women. This is peculiarly the case with the modern Greek, and was, if antique sculpture could be accepted as witness, with the ancient.”

_Greek Beauty._—In the preceding chapters of this work an attempt has been made to show that there is a general connection between the growth of Love and the growth of Beauty throughout the world. To some readers, no doubt, the thought has suggested itself, “How, if this be true, did the loveless Greeks succeed in reaching such uncommon physical beauty—beauty which artists of all times have admired?”

It must be borne in mind, however, that we are very liable to exaggerate in our notions of Greek Beauty, because we are apt to generalise from the fine statues that have come down to us, and to imagine that they represent the common type of Greek Beauty. But it is well known that the Greeks idealised their statues according to certain physiognomic rules; and, moreover, as Winckelmann remarks, “Beauty was not a general quality even among the Greeks, and Cotta in _Cicero_ says that, among the great numbers of young persons at Athens, there were only a few possessing true beauty.”

Besides, it has not been claimed that Love is the _only_ cause of Beauty. Taking into consideration the other sources of Beauty, it is easy enough to account for such physical attractiveness as the Greeks did possess. The intellectual culture which the men enjoyed gave them a great advantage over the women; and equally important, if not more so, was the attention which the men (and in some cases the women too) paid to Health. Their habitual life in the open air, while the women were locked up at home, combined with their daily gymnastic exercises in making their complexion healthy, their eyes sparkling, their limbs supple, vigorous, and graceful.

Other causes that tended to keep up an average of healthy bodily development were the refusal to bring up sickly and deformed infants, and the existence of numerous slaves, who did all the drudgery for the Greeks.

It is most characteristic that the author of a very old Greek ode formulates his wishes in this order: First, health; then, beauty; thirdly, wealth honestly got; fourth, the privilege of being gay and merry with his friends.

First, Health; then, Beauty. There lies the secret, for they always go together; and in aiming at one the Greeks got the other too.

There was every reason why Greek parents should have striven eagerly to follow those laws of Health which ensure beautiful children. In ancient Greece Beauty was a possession which led to national fame. Some persons, Winckelmann informs us, were even characterised by a particular name, borrowed from some specially fine feature. Thus Demetrius Poliorketes was named, from the beauty of his eyelids, χαριτοβλέφαρος _i.e._ on whose lids the graces dwell.

“It appears, indeed,” the same writer continues, "to have been a belief that the procreation of beautiful children might be promoted by the distribution of prizes for beauty, as there is reason to infer from the contests of beauty which were instituted in the remotest ages by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, in the time of the Heraclidæ, on the banks of the river Alpheus, in Elis; and also from the fact that at the festival of the Philesian Apollo, a prize for the most exquisite kiss was conferred on the youthful. Its assignment was subject to the decision of a judge, as was probably also the case at Megara, at the tomb of Diocles.

“At Sparta, and at Lesbos, in the temple of Juno, and among the citizens of Parrhasia, the women contended for the prize of beauty. The regard for this quality was so strong that, as Oppian declares, the Spartan women placed in their sleeping-rooms an Apollo, or Bacchus, or Nereus, or Narcissus, or Hyacinthus, or Castor and Pollux, in order that they might bear beautiful children.”

Some hint as to what the Greeks regarded as beautiful is given by the epithets Homer bestows on Helen—"the well-rounded" “the white-armed,” “fair-haired,” “of the beautiful cheeks.”

_Mediæval Ugliness._—This is a topic which might as well be introduced under any of the other Sources of Beauty, for it is difficult to say which of these sources was most completely and deliberately choked up during the Dark Ages.

It is a curious irony of language that makes asceticism almost identical with æstheticism, of which it is the deadly enemy. As diseases are transmitted from generation to generation, so it seems that the fear of Beauty born of mediæval asceticism has not yet died out completely; for it is related that some years ago a pious dame in Boston seriously meditated the duty of having some of her daughter’s sound teeth pulled out, so as to mitigate her sinful Beauty.

If this worthy lady had followed St. Jerome’s injunction—"I entirely forbid a young lady to bathe"; if she had taught her that it is unladylike to have a healthy appetite; if she had locked her up in a house rendered pestilential by defective drainage; allowed her mind to rot in fallow idleness; taught her that to be really saintly and virtuous she must be pale and hysterical; or imitated the lady who was praised by a bishop in the fourth century for “having brought upon herself a swarm of diseases which defied all medical skill to cure,”—if the worthy Boston lady had but followed this mediæval system, she would have succeeded in a short time in overcoming her daughter’s sinful Beauty, and making her “ugly as a mud-fence,” as they say out West.

That Personal Beauty cannot flourish where Health is regarded as a vice and Disease as a virtue is self-evident. And one needs only to look at mediæval pictures to note how coarse and void of refined expression are the men, how hard and masculine the women. The faces of the numerous mediæval women in Planché’s _Cyclopædia of Costume_ have almost all an expression approaching imbecility, and features as if they had been chiselled by a small boy trying his hand at sculpture for the first time. Thackeray does not hesitate to speak even of “those simpering Madonnas of Rafael.” Mr. G. A. Simcox remarks that in manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (like the Harleian Gospels and Maccabees) we meet with “short, thickset figures, mostly with the long, square, horsey face, moving stiffly in small groups, in heavy dresses; and even the daughter of Herodias dances upon her head [_sic_] in a gown that might have stood alone. On the other hand, the faces are more set, more articulate, less flabby, though they are all mean, or almost all, and look askance out of the corners of their eyes” (_Art Journal_, 1874, p. 58).

There may be Oriental countries where woman is kept more closely under lock and key than she was in Europe during the Dark Ages; but nowhere else has man so well succeeded in reducing the pursuit of unhappiness to a science, in snubbing, scorning, abusing, maltreating woman. How all this must have tended to increase Personal Beauty is well brought out in the following advice given by Mr. Ruskin: “Do not think you can make a girl lovely if you do not make her happy. There is not one restraint you put on a good girl’s nature—there is not one check you give to her instincts of affection or of effort—which will not be indelibly written on her features, with a hardness which is all the more painful because it takes away the brightness from the eyes of innocence, and the charm from the brow of virtue.”

_Modern Hygiene._—Disease is Beauty’s deadliest enemy. Yet for the sake of gratifying a silly vanity—for the sake of being distinguished from ordinary mortals—a certain pallor and _blasé_ languor have long been considered in certain influential circles as more _distingué_ than ruddy cheeks and robust health. Yet even if pale cheeks were more beautiful than rosy cheeks, would it be worth while to purchase them at the cost of premature decay—of the certainty that a _few_ years of pale cheeks will be followed by _many_ years of sallow cheeks and lack-lustre eyes, deeply sunk into their orbits?

Though beauty is still of lamentably rare occurrence in every country, there is infinitely more of it than during the Middle Ages; and certainly not the least cause of this is the increased attention paid to Hygiene—public and personal. The difference in this respect between us and our ancestors is well brought out by the statistics regarding the average length of life. In ancient Rome, it is stated, "the average longevity among the most favoured classes was but thirty years, whereas to-day the average longevity among the corresponding class of people is fifty years. In the sixteenth century the average longevity in Geneva was 21·21 years. Between 1814 and 1833 it was 40·68, and as large a proportion now live to seventy as lived to forty-three three hundred years ago." Dr. Corfield, comparing the statistics of 1842 with those of 1884, states that the mean duration of life in London has increased from twenty-nine to thirty-eight years. “In the reign of Queen Elizabeth the death-rate of the metropolis as it then was amounted to 40 per thousand. In the reign of Queen Victoria, almost entirely by the reduction of mortality by means of improved drainage, ventilation, and water, it has often touched 15 and 14, and even fallen as low as 13 in the thousand,” while “in many of the suburban districts, and in the fashionable region about Hyde Park it ranges from 11 to 12.”

In France, according to M. Topinard, the mean duration of life, which was twenty-nine at the close of the eighteenth century, and thirty-nine from 1817 to 1831, increased to forty from 1840 to 1859, thanks to the progress of sanitary science and civilisation.

As Hygiene is receiving more and more attention every year, it is possible that in course of time Dr. W. B. Richardson’s ideal will be realised—a town ideally perfect in sanitary matters, having a death-rate of 9 per 1000, and 105 years the duration of a man’s life.

As decrepitude and premature old age means a premature loss of Beauty, personal attractiveness would be correspondingly prolonged and increased with life itself.

Even at the present time not one house in a thousand is so constructed that every room has good ventilation. Architects are, however, less to blame than the people who will persist in their absurd old superstition that draughts and night air are injurious. Professor Reclam, the distinguished hygienist, not long ago opened a crusade against the horror of night air and draughts which is especially prevalent among his countrymen. “Sleeping with open windows,” he says, “is most unjustly decried among the people, as well as night air in general. But night air is injurious only in swampy regions, whereas on dry soil, in the mountains, and everywhere in the upper stories of a house it is _more salubrious than day air_.... Draughts are not injurious unless we are in a glow. To healthy persons they _cannot possibly do so much harm as the stagnant air in a close room_. The fear of draughts is entirely groundless, though it affects most people in a manner which is simply ludicrous.”

Electricity, no doubt, will in less than a decade abolish horses from our cities, and with them the dust, foul odours, and sleep-murdering noise. The gain to Health, and through it to Beauty, from this alone, will be enormous. Doubtless one of the reasons why there is so much Beauty, so many fresh and sparkling eyes, in Venice, is because there are no horses in that city, and the inhabitants are not roused and half-roused from sleep every fifteen minutes during the night by a waggon rattling down the street.

It is not sufficiently known that street-noise may injure the Health even of those whom it does not entirely wake up. The restorative value of sleep lies in its depth and the absence of dreams. A noisy waggon interferes with the depth of sleep and starts a current of dreams, thus depriving it of half its potency.

“_Beauty sleep_” is an expression which rests on a real physiological truth. Sleep before midnight really is more health-giving and beautifying than after midnight, for the reason that in all towns and cities there is less noise in the early hours of the night than after four in the morning, wherefore sleep is deeper between ten and twelve than between six and eight o’clock. The reason why so many more proposals (by city folks) are made in the country than in the city is not only because there are more frequent opportunities of meeting at a summer hotel, but because the young folks retire early, and appear in the morning with an exuberance of Health, born of fresh air and sound sleep, which cannot fail to inspire Love.

Other matters of Hygiene will be discussed in connection with the organs which they specially concern.

II.—CROSSING

Darwin has proved experimentally that in the vegetable kingdom “cross-fertilisation is generally beneficial, and self-fertilisation injurious. This is shown by the difference in height, weight, constitutional vigour, and fertility of the offspring from crossed and self-fertilised flowers, and in the number of seeds produced by the parent plants.” He also showed that “the benefit from cross-fertilisation depends on the plants which are crossed having been subjected during previous generations to somewhat different conditions.”

Similarly, concerning animals, we read in Topinard, that “breeders who select their subjects with a definite object to breed _in and in_, that is to say, between near relations, rapidly obtain excellent results. They know, however, that fertility then diminishes, and that it will cease altogether if they do not have recourse from time to time to crossing, in order to _strengthen the race_.”

But both in the vegetable and the animal kingdom, as we have seen, superior Health also implies superior Beauty.

The inference is natural that the human race also must be benefited by marriages of individuals of different races, or of the same race, but brought up under different conditions of life. And the facts are entirely in favour of this supposition, as are the best authorities in Anthropology. Dr. Topinard gives the following instances among many others: “Immigration into the United States, which has taken so considerable a flight during the last thirty years, has already been enormous. Every variety of cross has been going on between English, Irish, Germans, Italians, French, etc., with the greatest possible success. We may also mention numberless Spaniards from the Peninsula, among whom are found the features of the Saracen invaders of the ninth century; then that population on the Barbary coast, called Moors, and which is a medley of races of every description, the Arab and Berber blood predominating. On tracing back the yellow races, we also discover a perfect eugenesis.... De Mas speaks in the highest terms of mixed breeds of Chinese and Mongolians, and MM. Mondières and Morice of those of Chinese and Annamites under the name of Minuongs. Dr. Bowring describes a race in the Philippine Islands, intermediate between the Malays and Chinese, as the principal agent of civilisation in these latitudes.”

On the other hand, “it is undeniable that in Africa the Negro races do not cross to any great extent.” Nor has any one ever accused the Negroes of an excessive amount of Beauty. Whereas in Lima, which has the finest women in South America, “there are twenty-three different names to designate the varieties of mixed breeds of Spaniards, Peruvians, and Negroes.” “The number of mongrels on the face of the globe has been estimated at twelve millions, of whom no fewer than eleven millions are in South America.” South American women are already famous for their Beauty, and there is reason to believe that when the fusion of all these elements is complete the race will be one of the finest in the world. What Beauty it has now seems to be owing chiefly to the magic of Crossing; for attention to Health there is little but what comes from life in the open air; while Romantic Love is perhaps as rare as Mental Refinement, inasmuch as Courtship is not so free and easy a matter as in North America. All the more honour to the potency of Crossing.

Take a few more cases. The African Negroes, as just stated, do not mix much, and are an ugly type. Among the Polynesians, on the other hand, there are many very fine types of human beauty; and it is therefore not surprising to read that to-day in Polynesia, “mixed breeds are so numerous that it would be difficult to find among them any individuals of pure race.”

Again, concerning the Magyars or Hungarians, Schweiger-Lerchenfeld remarks that “they are a splendid race, physically and intellectually.... The girls and young women are of most piquant charm, models of health in mind and body.” But these Magyars, when they first came to Europe, were, as Waitz states, “of a repulsive ugliness in the eyes of all their neighbours.” That they have mixed with the Indo-Germanic type is shown by their appearance, as well as by peculiarities of their language. “Where they have probably remained less mixed,” Waitz continues, “and at the same time less cultivated, in some remote regions, especially in the mountains, the ugly primitive type may be found to the present day; in the plains may be found every transitional form from this to the nobler type; at Szegedin both are found face to face.”

The Magyars, in turn, have, like the Slavo-Italians, Czechs, etc., assisted the Austrians in evolving a superior type of Beauty by fusing with them. That there is very much more Beauty in Vienna than in any purely German city is an almost proverbial commonplace; and the reason why may be found in the statistics: in Germany 31·80 per cent are blond, 14·05 brunet, 54·15 mixed; in Austria 19·59 per cent are blond, 23·17 brunet, and 68·04 mixed.

The European Turks have much nobler forms of the head and features than their Asiatic relatives; and the inference seems inevitable that they owe these improvements to intermarriage with Circassian women.

A negative instance, showing the disadvantages of abstaining from Crossing, is given by the Jews. There are handsome Jews and, up to a certain age, very beautiful Jewesses. But the typical Jew is certainly not a thing of beauty. The disadvantages of Jewish separatism are shown not only in the long, thick, crooked nose, the bloated lips, almost suggesting a negro, and the heavy lower eyelid, but in the fact that the Jews “have proportionately more insane, deaf mutes, blind, and colour-blind” than other Europeans. From an intellectual and industrial point of view, the Jews are one of the finest races in the world, and their absorption by the natives of the countries in which they have settled could not but benefit both parties concerned. From this point of view there may be something said even in favour of the money-marriages, which are now so frequent between extravagant German officers and Jewish heiresses. Unfortunately, the Jews have kept apart so long from the rest of the world that they do not readily mix with non-Jews. Contrary to the general rule, mixed marriages of Jews and Christians are less fertile than pure Jewish unions.

The precise manner in which a mixture of races improves physical appearance is a question still open to debate. Professor Kollmann (_Plastische Anatomie_) thinks “the result of the crossing of two forms is comparable, not to a chemical, but to a mechanical mixture”; and this agrees with the view of Mr. Herbert Spencer, who endeavours to trace to this fact the frequent want of correspondence between intellectual and physical beauty. He believes, however, the time will come “when the present causes of incongruity will have worked themselves out,” and intellectual beauty emerge in harmony with physical, in all details, as it no doubt exists in general.

There is no lack of facts supporting the view that sexual fusion is a mere mechanical mixture. The “Bourbon nose” seems to defy mitigating circumstances for generations; and “M. de Quatrefages knew a great-grandson of the bailiff of Suffren who was a striking likeness of his ancestor after four generations, and who, nevertheless, bore no resemblance either to his father or his mother.” A child may resemble its father, mother, aunt, uncle, grand-parents, or several of them at once; and the resemblance may vary at different ages.