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.”