Part 59

But in regard to the third source of Beauty—Mental Culture—the Germans surely are pre-eminent among nations, it will be claimed. In one sense, no doubt, they are. Almost all Germans can read and write, and no race equals them in special erudition. But erudition is not culture. The German system of education is exceedingly defective, because it cultivates too largely the lowest of the mental faculties—the Memory. The number of scientific, historic, and philological facts a German schoolboy knows by heart is simply astounding; but he has not digested them, and cannot apply them practically. No attempt is made to cultivate his higher faculties—his imagination, originality, or the gift of expressing a thought in elegant language. Were a candidate to show the wit and brilliancy of a Heine or a Shakspere, it would not add one grain to the weight his pedantic professors attach to his work. They will not favour the growth of qualities in which they themselves are so conspicuously deficient. Note, for example, the vast contempt with which the pedants of the University of Berlin look down on “the German Darwin,” Professor Haeckel, because he dares not only to be original, but to write his books in a language clear as crystal, and adorned with wit, satire, and literary polish.

Other nations are proud of their great men _even before they are dead_; not so the Germans. Nor are the Germans really a literary nation, as a whole. Many books are written there, but they rarely come under the head of _literature_; and their circulation, on the average, is not one-tenth that of English, French, and American books. Beer is more popular than books.

No, the pedantic erudition, which alone is officially honoured in Germany, is not synonymous with Mental Culture. It does not vivify the features sufficiently to mould them into plastic shape. Hence the prevalence of the “spongy features” and Teutonic “potato-faces” referred to by a German artist quoted in the chapter on Italian Beauty. “The true national character of the Germans is clumsiness,” says Schopenhauer; and again: “The Germans are distinguished from all other nations by the slovenliness of their style, as of their dress.” And the Swiss Professor, H. F. Amiel, remarks in his _Journal Intime_ that “the notion of ‘bad taste’ seems to have no place in German æsthetics. Their elegance has no grace in it; they cannot understand the enormous difference there is between distinction (which is _gentlemanly_, _ladylike_) and their stiff _Vornehmheit_. Their imagination lacks style, training, education, and knowledge of the world; it has an ill-bred air even in its Sunday dress. The race is poetical and intelligent, but common and ill-mannered.”

It must be admitted, however, that the Germans have made great progress in external refinement and manners since their late war with France, one of the greatest advantages of which to them was that it destroyed the mystic halo which had for many generations surrounded the important Parisian Fashion Fetish. What the Germans need now is a period of Anglomania. They have already ceased to laugh at the Englishman for travelling with his bath-tub, and have found it worth while to provide him with that commodity in the hotels. In course of time bath-tubs in private German houses may be expected to become more common than they are now; and after a generation or two shall have given proper attention to skin-hygiene, freckles and other cutaneous blemishes will be less prevalent than at present. In their houses the Germans are really as tidy as any nation; but their indifference to the appearance of their collars and cuffs often leads one to suspect the contrary.

The next thing the Germans ought to learn of the English is greater gallantry toward the women, who are too apt to be looked upon as household drudges, whom it is not necessary to educate or amuse. Especially ruinous to female Beauty is the hard field labour required of the women who have the misfortune to belong to a nation which has not yet outgrown its condition of mediæval militarism. A German physician, quoted by Dr. Ploss, notes the fact that the beauty and bloom of youth last but a short time with the working classes of North Germany: “The hard labour performed before the body is fully developed too easily destroys the plumpness, which is an essential element of beauty, draws furrows in the face, and makes the figure stiff and angular. Often have I taken a mother who showed me her child for its grandmother.”

The author of _German Home Life_ remarks in a similar vein: “German girls are often charmingly pretty, with dazzling complexions, abundant beautiful hair, and clear lovely eyes; but the splendid matron, the sound, healthy, well-developed woman, who has lost no grain of beauty, and yet gained a certain magnificent maturity such as we in England see daily with daughters who might well be her youngest sisters—of such women the Fatherland has few specimens to show. The ‘pale unripened beauties of the North’ do not ripen, they fade.” And no wonder, for either the girls belong to the poorer classes and lose their beauty prematurely from overwork; or, if they are of the well-to-do classes, they get no Beauty-preserving exercise at all. “German girls,” the Countess Von Bothmer continues, “have no outdoor amusements, if we except skating when the winter proves favourable. Boating, riding, archery, swimming, croquet—all the active, healthy outdoor life which English maidens are allowed to share and to enjoy with their brothers is unknown to them.... Such diversions are looked upon by the girls themselves as bold, coarse, and unfeminine.... It is in vain that you tell them such exercises, far from unsexing them, fit them all the better for the duties of their sex; it is difficult for them to hear you out and not show the scorn they entertain for you.”

German men, as a rule, are much handsomer than their sisters, and they owe this superiority partly to the fact that their minds are not so vacant, and partly to the prolonged physical training which is the one redeeming feature of their military system. Nevertheless, especially in South Germany, the men too often lose their fine manly proportions in an enormous _embonpoint_, the penalty of drinking too much beer. Nor is the acquisition of a turnip shape the only bad result of the German habit of spending every evening in a tavern. The air in these beer-houses is so filthy, so soaked with vile tobacco smoke and nicotine, that after sitting in it for an hour the odour haunts one’s clothes for a week, and poisons the lungs for a month. It is this foul atmosphere, combined with the stupefying effect of the beer, that accounts for German heaviness and clumsiness in appearance, attitude, gait, and literary style.

These disadvantages might be to some extent neutralised if, on returning to his bedroom, the German would spend the rest of the night, at least, in fresh air. But no! He dreads the balmy night air as he would a dragon’s breath, although Professor Reclam and other great authorities on Hygiene have told him a million and sixty times that night air is more salubrious than day air, except in swampy regions.

Tourists in Switzerland often wonder why it is that the natives, notwithstanding their glorious Alpine air, are, with rare exceptions, so utterly devoid of Beauty. Partly this is due to the hard labour and scanty food to which most of them are condemned; but the main reason is that they enjoy their health-laden air only in the daytime and in summer. At night and in winter they close their windows hermetically, and in the morning the atmosphere in such a room is something which no one who has ever breathed it will ever forget.

When the Germans visit Switzerland they carefully imitate the example of these ignorant peasants, thus depriving themselves of all the benefits of an Alpine tour. An eye-witness last summer told me of the following encounter in a Swiss hotel between an English lady and a German. The dining-room being hot to suffocation, the English lady opened a window, whereupon the German immediately got up and closed it. The English lady opened it again, and again it was closed; whereupon she pushed her elbow through the glass, and thenceforth enjoyed the fresh, fragrant air, to the horror and indignation of the assembled Teutons.

All these remarks of course apply to the Germans only in a very general way. Among all classes in Germany specimens of Beauty may be found that could hardly be surpassed anywhere else. Pretty faces are more frequent than elegant figures, which commonly are too robust and masculine. German girls are the most domestic and amiable in the world, and it is their amiability and depth of feeling that gives their mouth such a sweet expression and refined outlines. When German girls are educated, as often they are in America, their faces beam in irresistible beauty. The most beautiful non-Spanish eyes I have ever seen belonged to a girl in Baden; and the most roguish blue eyes I have ever seen, to a Würtemberg girl. Regular Italian features are not uncommon in Bavaria, although snub-noses are most frequent there. The Bavarian complexion, though somewhat too pale, is beautifully clear; and I have almost come to the conclusion that this is in some way connected with the national habit of drinking beer three times a day. It might be worth while to inquire whether there is a beautifying ingredient in beer which might be obtained without its stupefying effects.

The Germans commonly consider the maidens along the Rhine their most favourable and abundant specimens of Beauty; but Robert Schumann, who had a fine eye for feminine Beauty, emphasized the amiability rather than the beauty of these maidens in the following passage from one of his private letters: “What characteristic faces among the lowest classes! On the west shore of the Rhine the girls have very delicate features, indicating amiability rather than intelligence; the noses are mostly Greek, the face very oval and artistically symmetrical, the hair brown. I did not see a single blonde. The complexion is soft, delicate, with more white than red; melancholy rather than sanguine. The Frankfort girls, on the other hand, have in common a sisterly trait—the character of German, manly, sad earnestness which we often find in our quondam free cities, and which toward the east gradually merges into a gentle softness. Characteristic are the faces of all the Frankfort girls: intellectual or beautiful few of them; the noses mostly Greek, often snub-noses; the dialect I did not like.”

Concerning the peasant women of Saxony, Mr. Julian Hawthorne remarks in his _Saxon Studies_: “Massive are their legs as the banyan root; their hips are as the bows of a three-decker. Backs have they like derricks: rough hands like pile-drivers.” And again: “Handsome and pretty women are certainly no rarity in Saxony, although few of them can lay claim to an unadulterated Saxon pedigree.” “We see lovely Austrians, and fascinating Poles and Russians, who delicately smoke cigars in the concert gardens. But it is hard for the peasant type to rise higher than comeliness; and it is distressingly apt to be coarse of feature as well as of hand, clumsy of ankle, and more or less wedded to grease and dirt. Good blood shows in the profile; and these young girls, whose faces are often pleasant and even attractive, have seldom an eloquent contour of nose and mouth. There is sometimes great softness and sweetness of eye, a clear complexion, a pretty roundness of chin and throat. Indeed, I have found scattered through half a dozen different villages all the features of the true Gretchen; and once, in an obscure hamlet whose name I have forgotten, I came unexpectedly upon what seemed a near approach to the mythic being.”

One thing must be admitted. The Germans are the most systematic and persevering nation in the world. They took music, for instance, from her Italian cradle, and reared her till she developed into the most fascinating of the modern muses. They lead the world in scientific research; and within a few years they have terrified the English monopolists by a sudden outburst of thorough-going Teutonic industrial activity and world-competition. Let but the Germans once make up their mind that they want Personal Beauty, and lo! they will have it in superabundance. The Professorships of Hygiene, which are now being established at the Universities, will doubtless bear rich fruit. If Bismarck discovered the full significance of Anglo-American Courtship, he would forthwith order an hour of it to be added to the daily academic curriculum; and if he realised the importance of racial mixture, he would order shiploads of South American and Andalusian brunettes to be distributed among his officers as wives. Nor would female education be any longer neglected, were it fully understood how essential it is to Personal Beauty and true Romantic Love, the basis of happy conjugal life.

What _can_ be done with German stock if it is duly mixed with Brunette ingredients, is shown at Vienna, which, by the apparently unanimous consent of tourists, boasts more beautiful women than any other city in the world. Austria has about ten per cent more of the pure Brunette and fourteen per cent more of the mixed types than Germany. The dark blood of Italians, Hungarians, Czechs, flows in Viennese veins, and there is also a piquant suspicion of Oriental beauty. The Viennese woman combines Andalusian plumpness of figure and grace of movement, with American delicacy of features and purity of complexion. The bust is almost always finely developed and rarely too luxuriant; and the joints are the admiration of all tourists and natives. Speaking of England, Mr. Richard Grant White says that “Plump arms are not uncommon, but really fine arms are rare; and fine wrists are still rarer. Such wrists as the Viennese women have ... are almost unknown among women of English race in either country.” And the Countess von Bothmer thus describes the neighbours of Germany:—

"Polish, Hungarian, and Austrian women, whom we, in a general, inconclusive way, are apt to class as Germans, are ‘beautiful exceedingly’; but here we come upon another race, or rather such a fusion of other races as may help to contribute to the charming result. Polish ladies have a special, vivid, delicate, spirited, haunting loveliness, with grace, distinction, and elegance in their limbs and features that is all their own; you cannot call them fragile, but they are of so fine a fibre and so delicate a colouring that they only just escape that apprehension. Of Polish and Hungarian _pur sang_ there is little to be found; women of the latter race are of a more robust and substantial build, with dark hair and complexion, fine flashing eyes, and pronounced type; and who that remembers the women of Linz and Vienna will refuse them a first prize? They possess a special beauty of their own, a beauty which is rare in even the loveliest Englishwomen; rare, indeed, and exceptional everywhere else; a beauty that the artist eye appreciates with a feeling of delight. They have the most delicately articulated joints of any women in the world. The juncture of the hand and wrist, of foot and ankle, of the _nuque_ with the back and shoulders, is what our neighbours would call ‘adorable.’

“But alas that it should be so! The full gracious figures—types at once of strength and elegance—the supple, slender waists, the dainty little wrists and hands, become all too soon hopelessly fat, from the persistent idleness and luxury of the nerveless, unoccupied lives of these graceful ladies.”

ENGLISH BEAUTY

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_—

“I have more cause to hate him than to love him; For what had he to do to chide at me? He said mine eyes were black and my hair black, And, now I am remember’d, scorned at me.”

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.”