It takes a hundred and fifty years to make a beauty--a hundred and
fifty years out-of-doors. Open air, hard manual labour or continuous
exercise, good food, good clothing, some degree of comfort, all of
these, but most especially open air, must play their part for five
generations before a beautiful woman can appear. These conditions can
only be found in the country, and consequently all beautiful women come
from the country. Though the accident of birth may cause their register
to be signed in town, they are always of country extraction.
Let us glance back a hundred and fifty years, say to 1735, and suppose
a yeoman to have a son about that time. That son would be bred upon the
hardest fare, but, though hard, it would be plentiful and of honest
sort. The bread would be home-baked, the beef salted at home, the ale
home-brewed. He would work all day in the fields with the labourers,
but he would have three great advantages over them--in good and
plentiful food, in good clothing, and in home comforts. He would ride,
and join all the athletic sports of the time. Mere manual labour
stiffens the limbs, gymnastic exercises render them supple. Thus he
would obtain immense strength from simple hard work, and agility from
exercise. Here, then, is a sound constitution, a powerful frame, well
knit, hardened--an almost perfect physical existence.
He would marry, if fortunate, at thirty or thirty-five, naturally
choosing the most charming of his acquaintances. She would be equally
healthy and proportionally as strong, for the ladies of those days were
accustomed to work from childhood. By custom soon after marriage she
would work harder than before, notwithstanding her husband's fair store
of guineas in the iron-bound box. The house, the dairy, the
cheese-loft, would keep her arms in training. Even since I recollect,
the work done by ladies in country houses was something astonishing,
ladies by right of well-to-do parents, by right of education and
manners. Really, it seems that there is no work a woman cannot do with
the best results for herself, always provided that it does not throw a
strain upon the loins. Healthy children sprung from such parents, while
continuing the general type, usually tend towards a refinement of the
features. Under such natural and healthy conditions, if the mother have
a good shape, the daughter is finer; if the father be of good height,
the son is taller. These children in their turn go through the same
open-air training. In course of years, the family guineas increasing,
home comforts increase, and manners are polished. Another generation
sees the cast of countenance smoothed of its original ruggedness, while
preserving its good proportion. The hard chin becomes rounded and not
too prominent, the cheek-bones sink, the ears are smaller, a softness
spreads itself over the whole face. That which was only honest now
grows tender. Again another generation, and it is a settled axiom that
the family are handsome. The country-side, as it gossips, agrees that
the family are marked out as good-looking. Like seeks like, as we know;
the handsome intermarry with the handsome. Still, the beauty has not
arrived yet, nor is it possible to tell whether she will appear from
the female or male branches. But in the fifth generation appear she
does, with the original features so moulded and softened by time, so
worked and refined and sweetened, so delicate and yet so rich in blood,
that she seems like a new creation that has suddenly started into
being. No one has watched and recorded the slow process which has thus
finally resulted. No one could do so, because it has spread over a
century and a half. If any one will consider, they will agree that the
sentiment at the sight of a perfect beauty is as much amazement as
admiration. It is so astounding, so outside ordinary experience, that
it wears the aspect of magic.
A stationary home preserves the family intact, so that the influences
already described have time to produce their effect. There is nothing
uncommon in a yeoman's family continuing a hundred and fifty years in
the same homestead. Instances are known of such occupation extending
for over two hundred years; cases of three hundred years may be found:
now and then one is known to exceed that, and there is said to be one
that has not moved for six hundred. Granting the stock in its origin to
have been fairly well proportioned, and to have been subject for such a
lapse of time to favourable conditions, the rise of beauty becomes
intelligible.
Cities labour under every disadvantage. First, families have no
stationary home, but constantly move, so that it is rare to find one
occupying a house fifty years, and will probably become much rarer in
the future. Secondly, the absence of fresh air, and that volatile
essence, as it were, of woods, and fields, and hills, which can be felt
but not fixed. Thirdly, the sedentary employment. Let a family be never
so robust, these must ultimately affect the constitution. If beauty
appears it is too often of the unhealthy order; there is no physique,
no vigour, no richness of blood. Beauty of the highest order is
inseparable from health; it is the outcome of health--centuries of
health--and a really beautiful woman is, in proportion, stronger than a
man. It is astonishing with what persistence a type of beauty once
established in the country will struggle to perpetuate itself against
all the drawbacks of town life after the family has removed thither.
When such results are produced under favourable conditions at the
yeoman's homestead, no difficulty arises in explaining why loveliness
so frequently appears in the houses of landed proprietors. Entailed
estates fix the family in one spot, and tend, by inter-marriage, to
deepen any original physical excellence. Constant out-of-door exercise,
riding, hunting, shooting, takes the place of manual labour. All the
refinements that money can purchase, travel, education, are here at
work. That the culture of the mind can alter the expression of the
individual is certain; if continued for many generations, possibly it
may leave its mark upon the actual bodily frame. Selection exerts a
most powerful influence in these cases. The rich and titled have so
wide a range to choose from. Consider these things working through
centuries, perhaps in a more or less direct manner, since the Norman
Conquest. The fame of some such families for handsome features and
well-proportioned frames is widely spread, so much so that a descendant
not handsome is hardly regarded by the outside world as legitimate. But
even with all these advantages beauty in the fullest sense does not
appear regularly. Few indeed are those families that can boast of more
than one. It is the best of all boasts; it is almost as if the
Immortals had especially favoured their house. Beauty has no period; it
comes at intervals, unexpected! it cannot be fixed. No wonder the earth
is at its feet.
The fisherman's daughter ere now has reached very high in the scale of
beauty. Hardihood is the fisherman's talent by which he wins his living
from the sea. Tribal in his ways, his settlements are almost exclusive,
and his descent pure. The wind washed by the sea enriches his blood,
and of labour he has enough. Here are the same constant factors; the
stationary home keeping the family intact, the out-door life, the air,
the sea, the sun. Refinement is absent, but these alone are so powerful
that now and then beauty appears. The lovely Irish girls, again: their
forefathers have dwelt on the mountainside since the days of Fingal,
and all the hardships of their lot cannot destroy the natural tendency
to shape and enchanting feature. Without those constant factors beauty
cannot be, but yet they will not alone produce it. There must be
something in the blood which these influences gradually ripen. If it is
not there centuries are in vain; but if it is there then it needs these
conditions. Erratic, meteor-like beauty! for how many thousand years
has man been your slave! Let me repeat, the sentiment at the sight of a
perfect beauty is as much amazement as admiration. It so draws the
heart out of itself as to seem like magic.
She walks, and the very earth smiles beneath her feet. Something comes
with her that is more than mortal; witness the yearning welcome that
stretches towards her from all. As the sunshine lights up the aspect of
things, so her presence sweetens the very flowers like dew. But the
yearning welcome is, I think, the most remarkable of the evidence that
may be accumulated about it. So deep, so earnest, so forgetful of the
rest the passion of beauty is almost sad in its intense abstraction. It
is a passion, this yearning. She walks in the glory of young life; she
is really centuries old.
A hundred and fifty years at the least--more probably twice that--have
passed away, while from all enchanted things of earth and air this
preciousness has been drawn. From the south wind that breathed a
century and a half ago over the green wheat. From the perfume of the
growing grasses waving over honey-laden clover and laughing veronica,
hiding the greenfinches, baffling the bee. From rose-loved hedges,
woodbine, and cornflower azure-blue, where yellowing wheat-stalks crowd
up under the shadow of green firs. All the devious brooklet's sweetness
where the iris stays the sunlight; all the wild woods hold the beauty;
all the broad hill's thyme and freedom: thrice a hundred years
repeated. A hundred years of cowslips, blue-bells, violets; purple
spring and golden autumn; sunshine, shower, and dewy mornings; the
night immortal; all the rhythm of Time unrolling. A chronicle unwritten
and past all power of writing: who shall preserve a record of the
petals that fell from the roses a century ago? The swallows to the
housetops three hundred times--think a moment of that. Thence she
sprang, and the world yearns towards her beauty as to flowers that are
past. The loveliness of seventeen is centuries old. Is this why passion
is almost sad?