Part 37

More extraordinary are the following cases cited by Topinard: “Sometimes the child possesses altogether the character of one or other parent: for example, the child of a European father and a Chinese mother, Dr. Scherzer says, is altogether a European or altogether a Chinese. A Berber with blue eyes and with the lobule of the ear absent, married to a dark Arab woman with a well-formed ear, had two children, one like himself, the other like his wife. An English officer, fair, with blue eyes and florid complexion, had several children by an Indian negress. Some were the image of the father, others exactly like the mother.... A decided negro, having had a white among his ancestors, has unexpectedly a child with a white skin by a negress.”

Yet all these are exceptional cases, which, like the winning number in a lottery, get a disproportionate amount of attention. Moreover, this “mechanical” form of assimilation seems to occur chiefly where very unrelated races are fused, and then especially in the first generation. In subsequent generations the union doubtless tends to become more and more chemical—no longer a negro character floating on a white one, like oil on water, but a mixture, as of wine and water.

Take the American quadroons, for instance, famous for their beauty of form and features. They are mongrels of the third generation, having one-eighth black, seven-eighths white blood in their veins. Surely these characters are not “mechanically” mixed in such a woman, but “chemically.” That is, you do not find her with the eyes and nose of a negro, the lips and ears of a white, one part of her skin dark the other light: but in everything there is a fusion of the ancestral elements. Her nose is not flat like that of her ancestress, nor her lips swollen, but both are intermediate between those of her white and black ancestors. Her lip is still thicker than that of the whites, and that gives her a sensuous aspect, kiss-inviting. Her eyes, again, have lost the fierce glare and opaque blackness of the negro-grandmother, and assumed a more crystalline, tender lustre; while their form and surroundings have become more refined and expressive. All this is homogeneous fusion, not “heterogeneous mixture.”

Finally, it is hardly correct to state dogmatically that a certain person resembles this or that ancestor. In nothing else do opinions vary so constantly and so ludicrously. No one who has ever been “trotted around” among his relatives in the “old country,” can have failed to be amused at the countless resemblances to this and that uncle, aunt, or grand-parent discovered in him, until he came to the conclusion that he must be a veritable epitome of the whole genealogy. A man who at home is supposed to be absolutely unlike his brother, is elsewhere mistaken for him and addressed as such; while another man finds a friend who knew his father in his youth, and declares he is exactly like him; though a second friend who knew only the mother, claims a similar hereditary influence for her. All of which tends to show that there is more of both parents in each person than is commonly supposed; and that the reason why opinions differ so, is because the fusion is chemical rather than mechanical, which makes it difficult to put the finger on distinct points of resemblance.

It is in the more closely allied races, like the English and German, or Italian and Spanish, that “chemical” fusion is most readily attained, and Beauty most rapidly evolved. Such are the unions which take place on such a large scale in the United States and Canada; and this may account for the fact that there is more Beauty in North America than in South America, where the races that intermingle are less related. There is a golden mean here as in everything else.

III.—ROMANTIC LOVE

What Crossing does on a national scale, Love continues with individuals, by fusing dissonant, but complementary, parental qualities into a harmonious progeny. How this is done is sufficiently shown in the chapter on Schopenhauer.

This, however, is only one of the ways in which Love increases the amount of Beauty in the world. There are several others.

The second is that—apart from complementary considerations—Romantic Love always urges the choice of a mate who approaches nearest to the ideal type of Beauty. As Beauty is hereditary, and as a beautiful father and mother may have six or more beautiful children, this predilection for Beauty shown by Love necessarily preserves and multiplies it—

“From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby Beauty’s rose might never die,”

says Shakspere, anticipating the modern theory of heredity.

On this particular topic nothing more need be said here, because all the remainder of this book will be taken up with a consideration of those features of Personal Beauty for which the æsthetic taste which forms part of Romantic Love shows a decided preference.

The third way in which Love promotes the cause of Beauty is by the great attention it pays to Health in its choice. For though Health is not always synonymous with Beauty, it is the soil on which alone Beauty can germinate and flourish.

The fourth way is through the elimination of ugliness. Love, says Plato, is devotion to Beauty: “with the ugly Eros has no concern.”

From the æsthetic point of view, ugliness is disease. Now there is a cast-iron Lykurgean law prevailing throughout Nature which eliminates the diseased and the ugly. It is a cruel agency, called Natural Selection, and has not the slightest regard for individuals, but provides only for the weal of the species, as Schopenhauer erroneously says is the case with Love. In a bed of plants, if there are more than can find sustenance, the stronger crowd out the weaker. Among animals, wherever there is competition, the best-developed, handsomest lion survives in combat, and the most fleet-footed, and consequently most graceful, deer escapes, while the clumsy, the ugly, and diseased perish miserably, inexorably. Savages leave the old and feeble to die, and weak or deformed children are either deliberately put out of the way or perish from want of proper care. Nor among the ancient civilised nations were such methods unknown. Plato and Aristotle, says Mr. Grote, agree in this point: “Both of them command that no child born crippled or deformed shall be brought up—a practice actually adopted at Sparta under the Lykurgean Institutions, and even carried further, since no child was allowed to be brought up until it had been inspected and approved by the public nurses.” The Romans, too, were legally permitted to expose deformed children.

Christianity, the religion of pity and charity, abhors such practices. Christianity is antagonistic to Natural Selection. One of its chief functions is the building of hospitals in which the cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, are gratuitously and tenderly cared for, instead of being allowed to perish, as they would under the sway of Natural Selection.

This artificial preservation of disease and deformity, in and out of hospitals, due to Christian charity, might in the long run prove injurious to the welfare of the human race, were it not for the stepping in of Modern Love as a preserver of Health and Beauty. What formerly was left to the agency of Natural Selection is now done by Love, through Sexual Selection, on a vast scale.

From a moral point of view, the substitution of Sexual for Natural Selection is a great gain, in harmony with the spirit of Christianity. For Cupid does not _kill_ those who do not come up to his standard of Health and Beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of single-blessedness.

IV.—MENTAL REFINEMENT

“After all,” says Washington Irving, speaking of Spanish women, “it is the divinity _within_ which makes the divinity _without_; and I have been more fascinated by a woman of talent and intelligence, though deficient in personal charms, than I have been by the most regular beauty.”

It is one of the commonest commonplaces of conversation that in moments of intellectual or emotional excitement the features of plain people assume an aspect of exquisite beauty. Love transfuses a homely girl’s countenance with a glow of angelic loveliness; and biographies are full of statements concerning the countenances of men of genius, which, ordinarily unattractive, assumed an expression of unearthly beauty while their minds were active and electrified the facial muscles.

“There is not any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a new fairness upon the features,” says Mr. Ruskin; and again, he speaks of “the operation of the intellectual powers upon the features, in the fine cutting and chiselling of them, and removal from them of signs of sensuality and sloth, by which they are blunted and deadened, and substitution of energy and intensity for vacancy and insipidity (by which wants alone the faces of many fair women are utterly spoiled and rendered valueless); and by the keenness given to the eye and fine moulding and development to the brow, of which effects Sir Charles Bell has well noted the desirableness and opposition to brutal types.”

An English clergyman, the Rev. F. P. Lawson, diocesan inspector for Northamptonshire, issued a report not long ago concerning the results of his observations in 325 urban and rural schools during several years, regarding the effects of good education in improving the appearance of the children. “A school, thoroughly well taught, seldom failed to exhibit a considerable number of interesting little faces, and a striking absence of such faces might invariably be associated with poverty of tone and superficial instruction. Nothing struck him more forcibly in a school that has been suddenly lifted out of the mire by a firstrate teacher than the bright and thoughtful look which the children soon acquire.”

Negative evidence to the same effect might also be cited by the volume, but one case may suffice. “It is unhappily a fact,” says Mr. Galton, “that fairly distinct types of criminals _breeding true to their kind_ have become established, and are one of the saddest disfigurements of modern civilisation.”

The connection between culture and a superior type of Beauty is strikingly revealed in the following remarks on the far-famed Georgian women of the Caucasus, made by a great connoisseur of feminine beauty, the poet Bodenstedt: "In Europe the notion prevails that a Georgian woman is a tall, graceful being, of luscious form, clothed in wide, rich garments, with dense black hair, long enough to enchain all masculine hearts, an open, noble forehead, and a pair of eyes which contain within their dark, mysterious, magic circle all the secrets of human delight that come through the soul or the senses. Her gait is rapture. Joy precedes, and admiration follows her.... With such notions in their heads, strangers generally arrive in Georgia, and find themselves wofully disappointed. The tourists who come with such great expectations to visit this country, invested with the atmosphere of a fairyland by history and legend, either adhere stubbornly to their preconceived notions, or else they instantly go over to the opposite extreme, and find everything dirty, ugly, disgusting, dreadful.

"The truth lies between these extremes. The Georgians are, all in all, one of the handsomest nations on the earth. But although I am a great admirer of women, I am compelled in this case to award the prize to the men instead of the women. This opinion is endorsed by all educated inhabitants of Georgia who have eyes, taste, and an impartial judgment.

“I must add that of that higher beauty where heart and intellect and soul are mirrored in the eye, I found few traces in the whole Caucasus, either among men or women. I have seen the greater number of the beauties which Georgia boasts, but not one face have I seen that satisfied me completely, though the picturesque native costume does much to heighten the charms of the women. The face entirely lacks that refined mental expression which makes a beautiful European woman such a unique enchantress. Such a woman may still inspire love and win hearts long after the time of her bloom; whereas in a Georgian _everything_ fades with youth. The eyes, which, notwithstanding their apparent fire, never expressed anything but calm and voluptuous indolence, lose their lustre; the nose, which even in its normal relations exceeds the limits of beauty, assumes, in consequence of the premature hollowness of the cheeks, such abnormal dimensions that many people imagine that it actually continues to grow; and the bosom, which the national costume makes no effort to conceal, prematurely loses its natural firmness—all of which phenomena are observed in European women much less frequently, and in a less exaggerated form. If you add to this the habit, so prevalent among Georgians, young and old, of using white and red cosmetics, you will understand that such rude and inartistic arts of the toilet can only add to the observer’s sense of dissatisfaction.”

America affords many illustrations of the manner in which refinement of mind and manners increases Beauty in a single generation. There are in every city thousands of parents who began life as ordinary labourers, but soon got rich through industry or good luck. They bring up their children in houses where every attention is paid to sanitary rules; they send them to school and college; and when they come back you would hardly believe that those coarse-featured, clumsy-limbed, ungraceful persons could be their father and mother. The discrepancy is sometimes so great that when the young folks invite people of “their set” to their house, the old birds keep out of the way discreetly, either of their own accord or by filial dictation, which in America appears to be displacing parental authority.

But if there is such an intimate connection between culture and Beauty, how is it that we so often find plain features joined with a noble mind and fine features with a mean mind? Mr. Spencer has endeavoured to explain this apparent discrepancy by assuming that in such cases plain features are inherited severally and separately from ancestors of diverse physiognomies, which being merely mechanically mixed, not fused, fail to harmonise. There may be something in this, but a simpler explanation is at hand.

Noble minds are often the result of individual effort, and persistence in it. Many men of genius have had humble parents not specially gifted. From these parents and their ancestors they inherited their plain faces. Now individual effort, in the short period of a lifetime, is insufficient to alter the _proportions_ of a face, which depend on its bony parts; but it does suffice to alter the _expression_, which depends on the movements of the soft, muscular parts. Hence every person, however plain-featured, may acquire a beautiful expression by cultivating his mind and refining his manners and temper. Whenever, therefore, we meet a man or woman whose features are less attractive at rest than when moved to expression of emotion, we may feel sure that they owe their mental refinement more to individual effort than to inherited capacity.

The children of such persons will be more beautiful than they are themselves, because they will inherit the parents’ habit of expressive muscular action of the features. And owing to the fact that all the bony parts of the body are modified in accordance with the action of the muscles attached to them, the bony parts, the proportions, of the face will also be gradually modified and moulded into nobler shapes, through the continuance of refined emotional expression.

It is in this manner that intellectual growth and emotional refinement have gradually differentiated our features from those of our savage ancestors. Our lips have become more delicate, our mouths smaller, our jaws less gigantic, ponderous, and projecting, because civilisation has taught us to use the hands in preparing food, and to cut it instead of tearing it off the bone with the teeth, as savages and other wild animals do.

Use increases, disuse diminishes the size of an organ. Hence for the same reason that our jaws have become less projecting and heavy, our forehead has lost its backward slope and become straight and noble, owing to the growth of the brain. And similarly with other peculiarities of the face, indicating the connection between mental refinement and physical beauty. “Thus is it,” says Mr. Spencer, “with depression of the bridge of the nose, which is a characteristic both of barbarians and of our babes, possessed by them in common with our higher quadrumana. Thus, also, is it with that forward opening of the nostrils, which renders them conspicuous in a front view of the face,—a trait alike of infants, savages, and apes. And the same may be said of widespread alæ to the nose, of great width between the eyes, of long mouth, of large mouth—indeed of all those leading peculiarities of feature which are by general consent called ugly.”

EVOLUTION OF TASTE

SAVAGE NOTIONS OF BEAUTY

In all the preceding remarks concerning the connection between mental and physical beauty, the assumption has been made tacitly that what _we_ consider beautiful is so in reality; and that our taste is a safe guide to follow. Yet this assumption may be challenged, and has, indeed, been often challenged. Every nation, every savage tribe, has its own standard of Beauty; what right, therefore, have _we_ to claim dogmatically that we are infallible judges?

Ask the devil, says Voltaire, what is the meaning of το καλὸν—the Beautiful—and he will tell you “Le beau est une paire de comes, quatre griffes, et une queue”—a couple of horns, four claws, and a tail. Ask a North American Indian, says Hearne, what is Beauty, he will answer: “A broad, flat face, small eyes, high cheek-bones, three or four broad black lines across each cheek, a low forehead, a large, broad chin, a clumsy hook-nose, a tawny hide, and breasts hanging down to the belt.” In the Chinese empire “those women are preferred who have ... a broad face, high cheek-bones, very broad noses, and enormous ears.” “One of the titles of the Zulu king,” says Darwin (who gives many other instances _à propos_ in chapter xix. of the _Descent of Man_), “is ‘You who are black.’ Mr. Galton, in speaking to me about the natives of South Africa, remarked that their ideas of beauty seem very different from ours; for in one tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls were not admired by the natives.”

Darwin himself appears to have been staggered and puzzled by this diversity of taste, and to have partly inclined to the theory that Beauty is relative to the human mind (though elsewhere he repudiates it)—a theory which Jeffrey has so boldly formulated in the assertion that “All tastes are equally just and true, in as far as concerns the individual whose taste is in question; and what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful _is beautiful_ to him, whatever other people may think of it.”

Fiddlesticks! The Alison-Jeffrey school of Scotch æstheticians, having been among the first in the field, have done more to confuse the English mind on the subject of Beauty than several generations of other clever writers will be able to clear up again.

There are about half a dozen sound, square, solid, scientific reasons why we have a better right to our opinion concerning the nature of Beauty than a Hottentot or a North American Indian.

NON-ÆSTHETIC ORNAMENTATION

One of the things most commonly forgotten by those who wonder at the strange “taste” of savages is that many of their customs have nothing whatever to do with the sense of beauty. The habit of putting on “war-paint” originated not in a desire for ornamentation, but in the wish to make themselves frightful in appearance to the enemy. For the same reason heads are mutilated. As Waitz notes in speaking of Tahiti: “A very ugly mutilation is that to which most of the boys had to subject themselves. Immediately after birth their mothers compressed their forehead and the back of the head, so that the former became narrow and high, the latter flat; this was done to make their aspect more terrible, and thus turn them into more formidable warriors.” Tattooing, likewise, was originally intended to be an easy sign of recognition, or of social or religious distinction, rather than an ornament of the body. And when we consider how prone the mind of our own fashionable ladies is to violate every canon of good taste in their wild effort to surpass one another in some novel extravagance just from Paris; when we note that if a Fifth Avenue lady wears a gull on her hat, her coloured cook will invest in a turkey or ostrich for hers, we understand at once that many of the mutilations approved by savages are the outcome of vanity and emulation, not of æsthetic taste.

PERSONAL BEAUTY AS A FINE ART

Yet there are undoubtedly a number of physiognomic and other peculiarities which savages admire while we consider them ugly; and some, again, which we admire and they dislike. Have we a right to consider them inferior to us in taste because they fail to admire what we adore?

Certainly; beyond the shadow of a doubt. It takes genius to fully appreciate genius; it takes a refined taste to appreciate refined beauty. This is what the savage lacks.

Look at any one of the fine arts. Why does the savage prefer his monotonous drumming and ear-piercing war-songs to a soft, beautiful, dreamy Chopin nocturne? Because he _cannot understand_ the nocturne.

Why does he prefer his painted, clumsy, coarse-featured squaw to a civilised woman with delicate contours, refined features, graceful gait? Because he _does not understand_ the beauty of the latter. It is too subtle for his coarse nerves, his feeble imagination. The smiles and manifold expressions that chase one another across her lovely features, like the subtly-interwoven melodies in a symphonic poem, are the visible signs of thoughts and emotions which he has never experienced, and therefore cannot understand. It is like giving him a page of Sanskrit to read.

It is for this reason that a negro never falls in love with a white woman, and that a peasant prefers his plump, crude country-girl to the fair, delicate city visitor. He requires more vigorous arms, broader features, than the city girl possesses, to make an impression on his callous nerves of touch and sight. And it is fortunate for the peasant girl that her lover does lack taste, else she would soon find him a fickle deserter.

The savage, in a word, prefers his style of “beauty” to ours for the same reason that he prefers a piece of raw liver and a glass of oil to the subtle flavours of French cookery and French wines. His senses are too coarse, his mind too vulgar, to perceive the poetry of refined features. Everything must be loud and exaggerated to make an impression on him—loud music, loud and glaring red and yellow colours, loud and coarse features.

This doctrine that differences of taste are merely due to differences in the degree of æsthetic culture, and that there is such a thing as an absolute standard of human beauty, derives further support from the facts (1) that the ideal of beauty set up by the æsthetic Greeks two thousand years ago corresponds so remarkably with that of modern artistic minds; (2) that _e.g._ a Japanese student in the United States soon learns to prefer American female beauty to the Japanese variety; (3) that an English, Italian, or American audience who at first admire _Norma_ and find _Lohengrin_ tiresome, can in a few seasons be so educated as to prefer _Lohengrin_ and actually scorn _Norma_; but not _vice versâ_, in either case (2) or (3).