Beauty of form and feature should not be, as it is now, exceptional.
It should be the rule. And there will come a time when parents will be
held as much responsible for an ill-favored, ungainly child, as they
are beginning to be for their dishonest or vicious children.
The English nobility are celebrated the world over for personal beauty
and elegant manners. What cause or causes lie back of this significant
fact?
So far as manners are concerned, we know that they are the result of
generations of culture, confirmed by generations of use. They suppose
leisure and good manners for company, as Emerson has suggested. The
bustle and hurry of the work-a-day-world afford no room for polished
manners, and only when co-operation shall have taken the place of our
present wasteful and cruel competition, shall we have time for graceful
living. Hard labor and worry will in time wear out the most charming
and inbred politeness.
With regard to the personal beauty of the class alluded to, let us
turn to its past--the past of this hereditary nobility. The blood
which held courage, self-respect, and the ability to control others,
deserved in a sense the deference and admiration it commanded. Then, as
these qualities, in themselves and their retroactive effects, favored
the production of the more masculine and striking forms of beauty,
that type was repeated through successive generations until in the
later times it has been modified by the increasing deference to human
rights, and refined by intellectual and moral culture. The hereditary
transmission of superior personal traits was the more certain because
the wife of the lord was a lady, and the wife of the duke a duchess,
and as lady and duchess, they believed that the very marrow in their
bones excelled in worth that of every man and woman ranking below
them in the social scale. And this saved them from the belittling
consciousness so debasing to their children, that, as _women_, they
were inferior to men.
We have learned in these days that blood runs out as well as in (on the
very principle I am seeking to prove), and the nobleman and woman of
genius appear quite as often outside the charmed circle of hereditary
distinction as within it. Still, the law is inflexible, and never
evaded. Beauty is not born of cowardice, subserviency, or grief. The
more culture, the more the blood is worked over, the finer the types,
provided we grow more related to humanity, and less to a class.
Pure, unselfish love is in very fact the mother of beauty, as happiness
is the mother of song. And what can awaken gladness in a wife so
certainly as the ever-watchful kindness of her husband?