_Plants, Animals, Savages._—In two of the most exquisite passages, not
only in his own works, but in all English literature, Mr. Ruskin has
emphasised the dependence of physical beauty in plants on their healthy
appearance, and the independence of this beauty on any idea of direct
utility to man.
“It is a matter of easy demonstration,” he says, “that, setting the
characters of typical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by every
organic form is in proportion to its appearance of healthy vital energy;
as in a rose-bush, setting aside all considerations of gradated flushing
of colour and fair folding of line, which it shares with the cloud or
the snow-wreath, we find in and through all this certain signs pleasant
and acceptable as signs of life and enjoyment in the particular
individual plant itself. Every leaf and stalk is seen to have a
function, to be constantly exercising that function, and, as it seems,
_solely_ for the good and enjoyment of the plant. It is true that
reflection will show us that the plant is not living for itself alone,
that its life is one of benefaction, that it gives as well as receives,
but no sense of this whatever mingles with our perception of physical
beauty in its forms. Those forms which appear to be necessary to its
health, the symmetry of its leaflets, the smoothness of its stalks, the
vivid green of its shoots, are looked upon by us as signs of the plant’s
own happiness and perfection; they are useless to us, except as they
give us pleasure in our sympathising with that of the plant, and if we
see a leaf withered or shrunk or worm-eaten, we say it is ugly, and feel
it to be most painful, not because it hurts _us_, but because it seems
to hurt the plant, and conveys to us an idea of pain and disease and
failure of life in _it_.”
“The bending tree, waving to and fro in the wind above the waterfall, is
beautiful because it is happy, though it is perfectly useless to us. The
same trunk, hewn down and thrown across the stream, has lost its beauty.
It serves as a bridge,—it has become useful; it lives not for itself,
and its beauty is gone, or what it retains is purely typical, dependent
on its lines and colours, not its functions. Saw it into planks, and
though now adapted to become permanently useful, its whole beauty is
lost for ever, or to be regained only in part when decay and ruin shall
have withdrawn it again from use, and left it to receive from the hand
of Nature the velvet moss and varied lichen, which may again suggest
ideas of inherent happiness, and tint its mouldering sides with hues of
life.”
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.