In a matter of taste we cannot expect a decisive verdict, and it is
probable therefore that the discussion which is proceeding in the
Press as to whether we are more handsome than our forefathers will
leave this interesting problem unsettled. "Of course men are growing
more handsome," says Sir William Orpen, the painter. "Of course men
are not growing more handsome," says Professor Geddes, the
sociologist. Between the two views comes that of Professor Keith,
the anthropologist, who says simply that faces are changing, whether
for better or worse he does not venture an opinion.
I have no doubt that Professor Geddes has got his eye on the Greeks.
He usually has. And if we bring the ancient Greeks into the
competition I do not see how the verdict can go against him. The
memorials they have left of the human face and form are still the
accepted standard of beauty. The highest praise that the idolaters
of that young Apollo, Carpentier, can give him is that he is like a
Greek god. And the Romans were handsome fellows, too. Judging from
the most famous and most authentic bust of Cæsar, that great man had
a face of extraordinary intellectual beauty. If you were to put, let
us say, a bust of Mr. Winston Churchill beside that of Cæsar, you
would not be disposed to say that we had achieved much in the way of
growing handsome in the course of two thousand years. There were
ugly fellows then, of course, as there are ugly fellows now. Sulla,
with his blotched and satyr face, was as unpleasant in appearance as
he was in character, and the great Socrates was no thing of beauty.
But in comparing ourselves with the past we must compare best with
best.
And if we leave the ancient world and come down to a time of which we
have authentic records in portraiture, the evidence is still with
Geddes. You would have to stand a long time in the Strand before you
saw coming along its populous pavements a face of such sublimity as
that of Dante, and I fancy that if Beatrice appeared in a ball-room
in Belgravia she would not lack suitors for a dance. Take the men
that Dürer and Holbein painted four hundred years ago. It will be
hard to match the exquisite sensitiveness and enlightenment that live
in the face of Erasmus, or the dignity and noble austerity of
Bellini's portrait of the great Doge Loredano, which you may see in
the National Gallery. Is there a face comparable with it in the
House of Commons to-day? And what of that wonderful face of the
Bishop in the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael which you may also see in
the National Gallery?
And coming down a century or so later, and to another land, have we
much ground for thinking we of to-day are more handsome than
Velasquez' Spaniards? Put Sir William Orpen's portraits of the
modern English into competition with Velasquez' portraits of the
Spaniards of three hundred years ago, and you will feel you have
passed to a lower plane of beauty. You may say that it is unfair to
compare a supreme artist with a merely clever technician; but the
material they have worked on is the faces they have seen about them,
and the faces of Velasquez live in the memory like a sonnet of Keats
and the faces of Orpen leave no impression behind. Where will the
much-praised "Chef" be beside the solemn beauty of Velasquez'
"Menippus" three hundred years hence? Where will it be even beside
the "Tailor" of Moroni, to which it offers so common-place a
challenge?
Or take our own country. While Velasquez was painting the princes
and beggars of Spain, Vandyck was painting the princes and nobles of
our own Court. By comparison with the faces of Velasquez, the faces
of Vandyck are shallow and sentimental; but no one will deny that
they are handsome faces. No one will deny, for example, that Charles
I. was as handsome as any king we have had in the last century. And
I suppose, judging by the records of the young Milton, it would be
difficult to find in all our millions to-day a face of equal beauty
to his.
I am not suggesting by all this that, so far from growing more
handsome, we are growing less handsome. The probability is that the
proportion of handsome faces remains about the same in all
generations. But no doubt time changes the lines both of face and
form. I am told that the armour in the Tower worn by the warriors of
the past would be too tight a fit for the average well-developed man
of to-day, and I suppose our jaws have narrowed, for the skulls of
ancient peoples are remarkable for the evenness of the teeth, while
to-day the bulk of us have more teeth than we have room for, and have
to have some out or carry them sideways. Changes like these are due
to changed conditions--softer foods, more knowledge of the body and
its needs, and so on. Women, for example, are taller than they were
a few generations ago when convention denied them the muscular
exercises of to-day. The coming of the bicycle was their real
emancipation. It abolished the long skirt, gave them the freedom of
their limbs, and in the end the freedom of their minds. They are not
more beautiful than their grandmothers were, but they are different.
Perhaps they are better.