Part 57

Moreover, there is no reason why physiologists should not ere long discover the secret of changing the tint of the skin, hair, and iris to suit one’s taste. All children are born with light eyes, but a great many exchange them for dark eyes as soon as they realise their mistake. We also know that ill-health temporarily changes the colour of the hair. According to the _Popular Science Monthly_, “Prentiss records a case of a patient to whom muriate of pilocarpine was administered hypodermically, and whose hair was changed from light blond to nearly jet black, and his eyes from light blue to dark blue.” The eating of sorghum is also said to favour the evolution of a brunette colour. But it is to the electricians that we must look for a harmless and efficient method of stimulating the secretion of pigmentary matter in the iris, skin, and hair. The man who first discovers how to change blondes to brunettes will acquire a fame as great as Newton’s or Shakspere’s, and when he dies Cupid will appoint him his private secretary.

“John,” we can hear a woman say to her husband twenty years hence—"John, Laura is now five years old. Don’t you think it is time to send her over to Dr. Electrode? I don’t object to her yellow hair, but I do think her complexion, iris, and eyelashes should be made several shades darker. She will then stand a better chance in the marriage-market when she gets older."

NATIONALITY AND BEAUTY

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.

FRENCH BEAUTY

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 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 French_women_ 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.”

ITALIAN BEAUTY

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.