Although the Germans of to-day are by no means a pure and distinct race,
they are less thoroughly and variously mixed than most other European
nations; and this is one of the main reasons why Personal Beauty is
comparatively rare in the Fatherland. It is rarest in the northern and
central regions, where the original Blonde type is best preserved, and
becomes more frequent the nearer we approach the Brunette neighbours of
Germany—Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Poland—whose women have been aptly
called “the Spaniards of the north.” France forms an exception. There,
thanks to the imprisonment of Cupid, ugliness is so rampant that
intermarriage only intensifies the natural homeliness,—a fact of which
any one may convince himself by spending a few days in the borderland
between France and Germany.
Partly owing to this lack of variety in the national composition of the
Germans, partly to the custom of chaperonage, Romantic Love has not as
wide a scope of selective action as elsewhere; and as if these
impediments to the increase of Beauty were not sufficient, they are
augmented in a wholesale fashion by the parental illusion that the
Love-instinct is a less trustworthy guide to a happy marriage than
“Reason,” _i.e._ the consideration that the bride has a few thousand
marks and belongs to the same social clique as the bridegroom. Like
their French neighbours, the Germans in these cases forget the claims of
the _grandchildren_ to Health and Beauty—_i.e._ the harmonious fusion of
the complementary parental qualities by which Love is inspired.
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.”