England and America—which of these two countries has the most beautiful
women, and which the largest number of them? Few questions of
international diplomacy have been more frequently discussed than these
problems in comparative æsthetics. But as in most cases patriotism has
taken the place of æsthetic judgment in forming a verdict, few tangible
results have been reached. There is too much exaggeration. Many English
tourists have denied that there is any remarkable Beauty at all in the
United States, and Americans have said the same of England.
If these sceptical Englishmen had only spent an hour on either side of
the New York and Brooklyn Bridge at 6 P.M., they would have seen Beauty
enough to bewilder all their senses; and if the American sceptics, next
time they go to London, will spend a shilling in buying penny stamps at
a dozen of those small post-offices so profusely scattered all over the
city, they will see enough feminine Beauty in an hour to make them wish
to stay in London the rest of their life,—especially if they remember
that an advertisement for eleven girls to fill these postal clerkships
has been answered by as many as 2000,—the majority of whom, presumably,
were as good-looking as those who got the places, since postal clerks
are not selected for their Beauty, but for their intelligence and
efficiency.
A few specimens of the sweeping generalisations of tourists may here be
cited. According to Richard Grant White, “The belief, formerly
prevalent, that ‘American’ women had in their youth pretty doll faces,
but at no period of life womanly beauty of figure, is passing away
before a knowledge of the truth, and I have heard it scouted here by
Englishmen, who, pointing to the charming evidence to the contrary
before their eyes, have expressed surprise that the travelling
bookwriters ... could have so misrepresented the truth.” Yet the same
author indulges in the following absurdly extravagant statement: “Beauty
is very much commoner among women of the English race than among those
of any other with which I am acquainted; and among that race it is
commoner in America than in England. I saw more beauty of face and
figure at the first two receptions which I attended after my return than
I had found among the hundreds of thousands of women whom I had seen in
England.”
The late Dr. G. M. Beard, though an acute observer, allowed his
patriotism a still more ludicrous sway over his imagination: “It is not
possible,” he says, “to go to an opera in any of our large cities
without seeing more of the representatives of the highest type of female
beauty than can be found in months of travel in any part of Europe!”
Possibly Sir Lepel Griffin had read these lines when he was moved to pen
the following counter-extravagances: “More pretty faces are to be seen
in a day in London than in a month in the States. The average of beauty
is far higher in Canada, and the American town in which most pretty
women are noticeable is Detroit, on the Canadian border, and containing
many Canadian residents. In the Western States beauty is conspicuous by
its absence, and in the Eastern towns, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New
York, and Boston, it is to be chiefly found. In New York, in August, I
hardly saw a face which could be called pretty.... In November New York
presented a different appearance, and many pretty women were to be seen,
although the number was comparatively small; and at the Metropolitan
Opera House even American friends were unable to point out any lady whom
they could call beautiful. A distinguished artist told me that when he
first visited America he scarcely saw in the streets of New York a
single face which he could select as a model, though he could find
twenty such in the London street in which his studio was situated.”
Volumes might be filled with similar unscientific generalisations, but
it would be a waste of space. My own general impression is that there
are more pretty girls In America, and more beautiful women in England;
that the average Englishwoman has a finer, healthier figure and colour,
the American greater mobility and finer chiselling of the features. If
English hands and feet are often somewhat large, American hands are just
as often too small,—the greater blemish of the two, because it usually
goes with too thin limbs. Irish girls of the best classes appear to be
intermediate. Some of the finest figures and faces in the world belong
to them; an Andalusian could hardly be more plump and graceful than many
Irish and Irish-American girls. The Scotch, in the opinion of Hawthorne,
“are a better-looking people than the English (and this is true of all
classes), more intelligent of aspect, with more regular features. I
looked for the high cheek-bones, which have been attributed, as a
characteristic feature, to the Scotch, but could not find them. What
most distinguishes them from the English is the regularity of the nose,
which is straight, and sometimes a little curved inward; whereas the
English nose has no law whatever, but disports itself in all manner of
irregularity. I very soon learned to recognise the Scotch face, and when
not too Scotch, it is a handsome one.”
Comparative Æsthetics is still in its infancy, and many years will
doubtless elapse before it will become an exact science, in place of a
collection of individual opinions based on vague impressions. The
statistics which have lately been collected regarding the proportion of
Blondes and Brunettes in various countries, may be regarded as the
beginning of such a science. The next step should be the collection of a
series of national composite portraits after the manner in which Mr.
Galton has formed typical faces of criminals, etc. If in each country a
number of individuals of pronounced national aspect were photographed on
the same plate, the result would be a picture which would emphasise the
typical national traits, and enable one to judge how far they deviate in
each case from regular Beauty.
In most European countries it would be comparatively easy to obtain
characteristic composite portraits of this kind. But in America the
difficulties would perhaps be insurmountable. For there the mixture of
nationalities is too great and too recent to have produced any national
type. The women of Baltimore, New York, Boston, and San Francisco—what
have they in common with one another any more than with their cousins in
London? Almost one-third of the inhabitants of New York are
foreign-born, including about half a million Irish and Germans. A fusion
of these has been going on for generations, while others have retained
their national traits; and to look, therefore, for a special type of New
York Beauty would be absurd. Thanks to this large number of
foreigners—not always of the most desirable classes—there is less Beauty
in New York in proportion to the number of inhabitants than in most
other cities of the United States. When people imagine they can tell
from what American city a given woman comes, they are hardly ever
influenced in their judgment by physiognomy or figure, but by
peculiarities of dress, speech, or manner.
Dr. Weir Mitchell says that in America you may see “many very charming
faces, the like of which the world cannot match—figures somewhat too
spare of flesh, and, especially south of Rhode Island, a marvellous
littleness of hand and foot. But look farther, and especially among New
England young girls; you will be struck with a certain hardness of line
in form and feature, which should not be seen between thirteen and
eighteen at least. And if you have an eye which rejoices in the tints of
health, you will miss them on a multitude of the cheeks which we are now
so daringly criticising.” The notion that there is too much angularity
of outline in New England faces and forms is a wide-spread one, and to
some extent founded on truth; yet many of the plumpest, rosiest, and
most charming American women come from Boston—as if to make amends for
their antipodes, whom Mr. R. G. White describes as “certain women, too
common in America, who seem to be composed in equal parts of mind and
leather, the elements of body and soul being left out, so far as is
compatible with existence in human form.”
Concerning the multitudinous mixture of nationalities in the United
States one thing may be asserted confidently: that the finest ingredient
in it is the English. Yet it has long been held that the English blood
deteriorates in the United States; that the descendants of the English,
like those of the Germans and other nations and their mixtures,
gradually lose the sound constitution of their ancestors. Hawthorne, in
his _Scarlet Letter_, was probably one of the first to give expression
to this belief. Speaking of the New England women who two centuries ago
waited for the appearance of Hester, he says: “Morally, as well as
materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old
English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated
from them by a series of six or seven generations; for throughout that
chain of ancestry every successive mother has transmitted to her child a
fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter
physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her
own.... The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and
well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in
the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the
atmosphere of New England.”
Yet in his _English Note-Books_, written after the _Scarlet Letter_, he
relates that he had a conversation with Jenny Lind: “She talked about
America, and of our unwholesome modes of life, as to eating and
exercise, and of the ill-health especially of our women; but I opposed
this view as far as I could with any truth, insinuating my opinion that
we were about as healthy as other people, and affirming for a certainty
that we live longer.... This charge of ill-health is almost universally
brought forward against us nowadays,—and, taking the whole country
together, I do not believe the statistics will bear it out.” But why
does he in another place speak of English rural people as “wholesome and
well-to-do,—not specimens of hard, dry, sunburnt muscle, like our
yeoman”? and on still another page: “In America, what squeamishness,
what delicacy, what stomachic apprehension, would there not be among
three stomachs of sixty or seventy years’ experience! I think this
failure of American stomachs is partly owing to our ill-usage of our
digestive powers, partly to our want of faith in them.”
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe exclaims that “the race of strong, hardy,
cheerful girls ... is daily lessening; and, in their stead, come the
fragile, easy-fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in
book-learning, ignorant of common things.” Dr. E. H. Clarke writes in
his _Sex and Education_, which should be read by all parents: “‘I never
saw before so many pretty girls together,’ said Lady Amberley to the
writer, after a visit to the public schools of Boston; and then added,
‘They all looked sick.’ Circumstances have repeatedly carried me to
Europe, where I am always surprised by the red blood that fills and
colours the faces of ladies and peasant girls, reminding one of the
canvas of Rubens and Murillo; and I am always equally surprised on my
return by crowds of pale, bloodless, female faces, that suggest
consumption, scrofula, anæmia, and neuralgia.”
Dr. S. Weir Mitchell remarks that “To-day the American woman is, to
speak plainly, physically unfit for her duties as woman.” Dr. Allen,
quoted by Sir Lepel Griffin, remarks that a majority of American women
“have a predominance of nerve tissue, with _weak muscles_ and digestive
organs”; and Mr. William Blaikie says that “scarcely one girl in three
ventures to wear a jersey, mainly because she knows too well that this
tell-tale jacket only becomes a good figure.”
Dr. Clarke relates that when travelling in the East he was summoned as a
physician into a harem where he had the privilege of seeing nearly a
dozen Syrian girls: “As I looked upon their well-developed forms, their
brown skins, rich with the blood and sun of the East, and their
unintelligent sensuous faces, I thought that if it were possible to
marry the Oriental care of woman’s organisation to the Western liberty
and culture of her brain, there would be a new birth and loftier type of
womanly grace and form.”
There is, doubtless, much truth in these assertions. It is distressing
to see the thin limbs of so many American children, and the anæmic
complexions and frail, willowy forms of so many maidens. What the
American girl chiefly needs is more muscle, more exercise, more fresh
air. A large proportion of girls, it is true, become invalids because
their employers in the shops never allow them to sit down and rest; and
standing, as physiologists tell us, and as has been proved in the case
of armies, is twice as fatiguing as walking. As if to restore the
balance, therefore, the average well-to-do American girl never walks a
hundred yards if a street car or ’bus is convenient; and the men, too,
are not much better as a rule. One of the most disgusting sights to be
seen in New York on a fine day is a procession of street cars going up
Broadway, crowded to suffocation by young men who have plenty of time to
walk home. In the case of the women, the cramping French fashions, which
impede exercise, are largely to blame.
Fresh-air starvation, again, is almost as epidemic in America as in
Germany. Although night air is less dreaded, draughts are quite as much;
and people imagine that they owe their constant “colds” to the _cold_
air with which they come into contact, whereas it is the excessively
_hot_ air in their rooms that makes them morbidly sensitive to a
salubrious atmosphere. If young ladies knew that the hothouse air of
their parlours has the same effect on them as on a bunch of flowers,
making them wither prematurely, they would shun it as they would the
sulphurous fumes of a volcano. Why should they deliberately hasten the
conversion of the plump, smooth grape into a dull, wrinkled raisin?
It is through their morbid fondness for hothouse air and their indolence
that American women so often neutralise their natural advantages: thanks
to the fusion of nationalities and the unimpeded sway of Romantic Love,
they are born more beautiful than the women of any other nation; but the
beauty does not last.
It must be admitted, however, that a vast improvement has been effected
within the last two generations. Beyond all doubt the young girls of
fifteen are to-day healthier and better-looking than were their mothers
at the same age. It is no longer fashionable to be pale and frail.
Anglomania has done some good in introducing a love of walking, tennis,
etc., as well as the habit of spending a large part of the year in the
country.
Mr. Higginson, Mr. R. G. White, and many others, have insisted on this
gradual improvement in the health and physique of Americans; and Dr.
Beard remarks in his work on _American Nervousness_: “During the last
two decades the well-to-do classes of America have been visibly growing
stronger, fuller, healthier. We weigh more than our fathers; the women
in all our great centres of population are yearly becoming more plump
and more beautiful.... On all sides there is a visible reversion to the
better physical appearance of our English and German ancestors.... The
one need for the perfection of the beauty of the American women—increase
of fat—is now supplied.” Yet the one cosmetic which 20 per cent of
American women still need above all others is the ability to eat food
which they scorn as “greasy,” but which is only greasy when badly
prepared. It is to such food that Italian and Spanish women owe their
luscious fulness of figure.
Dr. Clarke’s work on _Sex and Education_ made a great sensation because
he pointed out that the ill-health of American women is largely due to
the brain-work imposed on them at school. Now the superior beauty of
American women is admittedly largely due to the intelligent animation of
their features, to the early training of their mental faculties. Is this
advantage to be sacrificed? Dr. Clarke’s argument does not point to any
such conclusion. He simply contended that the methods of female
education were injurious. “The law has, or had, a maxim that a man and
his wife are one, and that the one is the man. Modern American education
has a maxim, that boys’ schools and girls’ schools are one, and that the
one is the boys’ school.” Girls need different studies from boys to fit
them for _their_ sphere in life; and above all they need careful
hygienic supervision and periods of rest.—Dr. Clarke’s book affords many
irrefutable arguments in favour of one of the main theses of the present
treatise: that the tendency of civilisation is to differentiate the
sexes, mentally and physically. It is on this differentiation that the
ardour and the cosmetic power of Romantic Love depend. Hence the
hopelessness of the Virago Woman’s Rights Cause, especially in America,
where the women are more thoroughly feminine than elsewhere. It is said
that when the first female presidential candidate announced a lecture in
a western town, _not a single auditor_ appeared on the scene. American
women, evidently, are in no immediate danger of becoming masculine and
ceasing to inspire Love.
Women, however, must be educated and thoroughly, for it has been
abundantly shown in the preceding pages that only an educated mind can
feel true Romantic Love. But their education should be feminine. They
need no algebra, Greek, and chemistry. What they need is first of all a
thorough knowledge of Physiology and Hygiene, so that they may be able
to take care of the Health and Beauty of their children. Then they
should be well versed in literature, so as to be able to shine in
conversation. Their artistic eye should be trained, to enable them to
teach their children to go through the world with their eyes open. Most
of us are half blind; we cannot describe accurately a single person or
thing we see. Music should be taught to all women, as an aid in making
home pleasant and refined, and as an antidote to care. Natural history
is another useful feminine study which enlarges the sympathies by
showing, for example, that birds love and marry almost as we do,
wherefore it is barbarous to wear their stuffed bodies on one’s hat.
Education, Intermarriage, Hygiene, and Romantic Love will ultimately
remove the last traces of the ape and the savage from the human
countenance and figure. Climate will perhaps always continue to modify
different races sufficiently to afford the advantages of
cross-fertilisation or intermarriage. The remarkable fineness of the
American complexion, for instance, has been ascribed to climatic
influences, and with justice it seems, for, according to Schoolcraft,
the skin of the native Indians is not only smoother, but more delicate
and regularly furrowed than that of Europeans. The notion, however, that
the climate is tending to make the American like the Indian in feature
and form is nonsensical. The typical “Yankee” owes his high cheek-bones
and lankness to his indigestible food; his thin colourless lips to his
Puritan ancestry and lack of æsthetic culture.
Even if climate did possess the power to modify the forms of our
features, it would not be allowed to have its own way where these
modifications conflicted with the laws of Beauty. Science is daily
making us more and more independent of crude and cruel Natural
Selection, and of the advantages of physical conformity to our
surroundings. Hence Sexual Selection has freer scope to modify the human
race into harmony with æsthetic demands. Perhaps the time will come when
the average man will have as refined a taste and as deep feelings as a
few favoured individuals have at present; that epoch will be known as
the age of Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.