“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.”